Welcome! Wishing everyone a good day/night, depending on your location’s latitude and longitude. One of the best sides to blogging is that there are lots of different people out there who are doing it just for the sake of doing it and they are kind enough to share their experiences with you. With differences in backgrounds, age, gender, and whatnot come various personal experiences that you can draw interesting ideas from.
I’m not someone who can give writing or blogging advice as I’m still trying to find what works for me. What’s more, there are other bloggers out there who have already talked about a wide variety of aspects of blogging; from finding ideas to maintaining a schedule, mingling with other bloggers to how to handle burnout.
What I wanted to talk about today is, again, a very personal way of coping with my low attention span, procrastinating ass, and my rather perfectionist mindset. These things tend to slow me down a lot, especially when I have ideas that I want to expand and write more in-depth. However, I’m mostly left with my ideas as they are and the additional readings I did without a finalized/released post.
When I’m faced with an empty page, the first idea that pops into my head is to write a greeting and an introduction. Because that’s how you always start a post, right? But that introduction never comes. Or, although I have one aspect of what I’m going to write in mind, I don’t know what else I’m going to say and those parts technically should come before the ideas that already formed in my mind.
It took me a long while to accept that I… don’t have to start from the very top when I’m writing or have to progress in a certain order. Don’t laugh at me! During my thesis writing years, I struggled a lot! I’d literally try to write a summary or add the table of symbols… After realizing the stress I induced on myself, I tried to adopt a style that I call “the torrent style”. I know this is nothing revolutionary, or bet that some of you already do this when you’re churning those posts. What can I say, I’m slow on the uptake.
What I mean by this torrent style is that, let’s say I want to write a manga review but I only have certain points that I didn’t like in mind. Of course, I have to write the summary or its redeeming points as well, but for that, I have to do some rereading and at least check what the characters’ names were and I don’t have the time or the attention span to do that. Instead of waiting for such a time to come like I used to, I try to write those details that didn’t work. Sometimes sitting down to write helps me to find motivation and I continue, or I leave it at that. This way, I at least have a portion of the post down and the idea behind the post doesn’t escape me.
I use Grammarly’s website to write. The interface is simple, easy on the eyes with a Dark Mode extension, which helps me notice small grammatical mistakes I made, and the best of all is that it acts as a backup for my posts. It does get annoying with its suggestions sometimes, but overall I’m happy with it. Another way I started to use it is like an idea notebook. I want to make a top 5 list but have to check out certain links? I write the title and add links there. A paragraph came to mind? I type it down. I don’t need to leave the house nowadays but for the ones who commute daily, having online cloud storage for texts might be helpful. Considering you don’t already use Drive for that. I don’t, due to its white background.
To conclude, for some of you it might be easy to type down whatever comes to you, but I struggle with my inner expectations of jotting the perfect sentence down right from the get-go or having the smoothest flow on my first try, which is absurd. I was the dumb kid, even up until my Master’s years, who wouldn’t turn in the assignments if they weren’t happy with the effort they’ve put in it. How the fudge does that make sense???
The moral of the story is: don’t be like me, because even one paragraph is better than having zero paragraphs. It’s a step, no matter how small, towards a completed blog post. Hope this rambling will be of help in some way and it’ll be a reminder, especially to me, to keep in mind that not every post has to be spotless and letting one’s expectations to loosen up a little can help one go a long way.
Are there any other tips you use yourself to get your gears working when you’re just start writing a post? How do you keep your incoming ideas organized? Let me know in the comments so both the readers and me can benefit from them! If not, thanks again for stopping by and see you tomorrow.
If it’s your first time visiting my blog, you can click on the image below to find ways on how to connect with me ~
IT'S YOUR FAULT THAT I'M NOT POPULAR! 
I agree with all your suggestions as a lot of them are similar to the ways I organize my writing. I’ve also learned to just stop expecting myself to be able to write a paragraph from beginning to end and just start writing whatever is already coming to me naturally at the time, whether it’s the end of a story or the middle or whatever. It’s helpful to remember that you can always go back and rearrange, edit, and totally get rid of things when the time comes! I also use the notes app on my phone a lot to record random ideas I have at any point since I always have my phone with me.
For me, the main thing that helps is writing a separate outline before I start. Just a simple tiered list with headers and brief descriptions of the parts helps me organize my ideas ahead of writing and keeps me on track, especially if I start writing out of order. This way I can always refer back to it if I start feeling lost and lose sight of what I’m even trying to say in the first place lol
Like you, I also prefer to write in dark settings which helps me avoid burnout just from my eyes hurting. For anyone who uses Word, there are functions to change the page color and create document templates. I write on a dark blue background with white text. Whenever I open the program I can choose the dark template to start writing immediately on the dark background. You can also change page color in Google Docs!
A lot of my techniques come from writing fiction, but I think they still translate well to nonfiction and other kinds of writing!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Writing whatever comes to your mind first is such a simple and effective way of doing it but focusing too much on the polished end product has made it very hard to implement for a long time xD But better late than never! It’s really helpful to have these tools that makes it much easier to get stuff done.
I do detailed outlines for fiction as well, but didn’t feel the need for my blog posts apart from noting down the details I want to mention, but it’s a really good method! Good thing that you mentioned it.
I remember playing around with Docs but Grammarly won me over, although it’s beneficial to know if I ever decide to switch over. We already stare at the screen a lot to watch or read things, less additional straining is always welcome.
Thank you so much for the detailed and well-thought comment!
LikeLike