Hitting walls, plowing through
Sometimes, despite my best efforts, I hit a wall with work. I’m not unique in that regard; it happens to everyone. While I can’t say that a majority of projects have gone without a snag, I don’t often hit the wall like I have recently.
The problem? I’ve been juggling a bunch of tasks and ideas. As I learned, I was spending more time juggling that writing. Which means that I haven’t been putting fingers to keyboard as much as I want or need to. Nothing deadline breaking, but enough to be frustrating.
The funny thing about this situation is that it has nothing to do with writer’s block. The ideas, words, and sentences are in my head — fully formed. I just wasn’t getting them out as quickly or as fluidly as I wanted to.
I’ve been making headway, though. How? By simply not thinking about anything except the task at hand and plowing through. In this case, it worked better than my old method of just writing and paring down what came out. I found that I was throwing away more than I was keeping.
Instead, I listened to my own advice and added a twist to it. I took my outlines and condensed them down into a list of to do items. For example:
- Write introduction
- Get down main point for section 1
- Expand on the main point
- Write transition to section 2
- Write section 2
And so on, until I got to the final two points:
- Write the conclusion
- Find/create images to go with the piece
I wrote each item on a piece of paper and got to work. As I completed a task, I crossed it out. The tough part was resisting the urge to jump around — work on item 4, say, before doing item 2.
Taking that route enabled me to get a lot of writing done in less time than I thought it would take. It wasn’t easy, but it worked.
Photo from http://sxc.hu
Related posts:
