Just as with painting and decorating, it’s all in the preparation. I’m not referring to the kind of preparation that is really displacement activity: tidy desk, sharpen pencils, defrag the computer, have a quick shower…., but what I suppose one might call pre-writing activities, the sort you can while doing other things, like shopping. This is my method of writing articles fairly quickly:
Think about the questions I’d like to answer in the article, or the problem I wish to solve.
Make a mental note of research phrases to plug into a search engine.
Once I know enough about the topic, or have updated my knowledge of it (such as by finding the most recent statistics relating to it), I start to formulate “sentence hooks”, as I call them. For example, one such hook might be “Can you live on writing income alone?”
Next, I think of the branches emanating from the sentence hook. Taking the example above, these branches might be:
It depends on what sort of writing you do.
It depends on what standard of living you’d be happy to settle for.
What do the statistic say?
Passive income from writing.
Writing-related activities you can make money from, such as coaching.
I write the article, ignoring spelling and other errors.
I fill in gaps, move paragraphs around, hone it down if it’s gone over the word limit.
Finally, do the proofreading, correcting typos etc.
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