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:

1. Think about the questions I’d like to answer in the article, or the problem I wish to solve.

2. Make a mental note of research phrases to plug into a search engine.

3. 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?”

4. 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.

5. I write the article, ignoring spelling and other errors.

6. I fill in gaps, move paragraphs around, hone it down if it’s gone over the word limit.

7. Finally, do the proofreading, correcting typos etc.