Last night at my local California Writer’s Club branch we had a speaker who addressed the issue of writer’s block and how to move through it. A lot of writers, even famous ones, suffer from this malady.
As I listened to him speak about the problem and his remedies, it struck me that blogging a book provides a great way to move through writer’s block that occurs when writing a book or starting a book project. Why? Because blog posts are short and can be written quickly.
Many people struggle with writer’s block because they feel their writing projects–such as book projects–are large, time consuming, hard, or taxing on their brain and life. They feel overwhelmed. This stops them in their tracks, hands posed over the keyboard. One of the speakers suggestions was to write in short time increments or to chunk down work into smaller, more easily-handled portions.
“Ah, ha!” I thought. “Blog posts.”
Blogging provides the solution to writer’s block because when you blog, typically you write short posts–anywhere from 250-500 words in length–chunk-sized bits. A 700- or 1,000-word post is long for most blogs. Therefore, if a you suffer from writer’s block for the aforementioned reasons you could blog your book. If you did so, you would find yourself writing in short burst of time and energy and producing short amounts of copy.
Of course, you could do this without blogging; you can simply decide to sit down and write for 15 or 20 minutes and produce just 250-500 words. You can do this every day in very little time and with much less effort than producing, say, four pages (1,000 words) or a whole book chapter in one day. By writing blog posts, or just short amounts of copy, your writing sessions won’t feel hard or taxing on your brain. It’s down and dirty, quick and easy. It won’t feel hard on your schedule.
I wrote this post in about 20 minutes (with two revisions). It’s 375 words in length.
Next time, in Part 2, I’ll offer you one more reason why blogging provides a solution to writer’s block.
oh man tell me about it! You know what’s funny, as a blogger I assumed I could still have writer blog, but I guess in fact I don’t we have bloggers block. Or is it still called writers block? Either way there’s days where I simply don’t know what to write about.
Bloggers do get writer’s block or blogger’s block. Why not cruise through old posts and look for comments you can address or even topics you have covered that you didn’t write about in quite as much depth as you might have? Revisit them. Or ask yourself what problems you could be solving for clients or readers? Then solve them. Come up with 10 common questions you get asked and answer them; that’s 10 posts.