The blinking cursor on the blank, white document doesn’t move. You’ve been staring at it for what feels like hours. Your mind is blank. You have no clue what to write. Maybe your paper is due in a couple of days, or a couple of hours (if you really pushed it). Maybe you have a story idea but just can’t figure out how to start. Whatever the situation is, the problem is the same: writing is daunting.
The fact of the matter, however, is that you can’t avoid writing. Even if it seems small, any tip could help make the process a little easier. Some of these tips are probably ones you’ve heard a thousand times, but there’s nothing wrong with a bit of a refresher.
Create an outline.
Never underestimate the power of an outline. For one, when you’re working out the outline, you can snowball any ideas you might have, even if those ideas don’t end up making the cut when you actually write. It’s a good opportunity to let your creativity flow. It also helps keep you on track and give you a direction if you find yourself stalling on what to write. With academic writing, an outline can help speed up the overall process since it’s a good place to put all your research together. With creative writing, it helps avoid plot holes.
Change up the layout.
Looking at the same thing for hours can be tiring and discouraging. Break up the monotony – change the background color, change the font, the font size, the font color. You could even change the margins. It might make pushing out that paper a little more bearable. That being said, if you’re writing for a class, don’t forget to fix your format before you submit it!
Pro Tip: Feeling blocked? Try changing the font to Comic Sans. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but somehow, it unblocks something, and the words just flow out. It sounds ridiculous, but it works for me.
Maintain your flow.
When you’re writing your first draft, do your best not to interrupt your flow. Don’t edit while you’re writing. Don’t go back and read over the sentence you just wrote. Don’t focus too hard on finding the exact word you want. Don’t focus on the word count. Just keep writing. You can go back and make changes after you’ve finished. Not only does editing as you go ruin your flow, but seeing mistakes or getting stuck on wording can discourage you and make you lose motivation. Also, “keeping flow” does not mean you have to write everything in order. If you get motivation for a part that comes on much later in your paper or story, go ahead and write it! Capitalize on that motivation while you have it. You can always go back and add the parts you skipped.
Self revise.
THIS is when you get to go back and edit everything. And then look over everything again. And then one more time. Check the basics like spelling and grammar, but also check for things like clarity, staying on topic, and making sure you’re getting the intended meaning across. If you’re in a place where you feel comfortable doing so, try reading your paper out loud. It makes it easier to catch any mishaps, and if you find yourself stumbling over a sentence, it might mean it needs some rephrasing. On top of that, don’t just revise immediately after you write and call it a day. Give yourself some leeway so you can return to it a couple days later. You might have more ideas to add, and you might find some mistakes you missed.
Peer revise.
Letting someone else – a friend, a teacher, a parent, the campus writing center, anyone – read what you wrote helps so much. After reading something a bunch of times, you start to desensitize to it. You skim over parts, or your mind automatically brushes over mistakes. Additionally, with every word you write, you already know what you’re trying to say, and that can skew your judgment on whether you got your message across coherently. Other people won’t know what you had in mind, and it’ll be easier for them to point out anything that’s unclear or confusing. For academic writing, you could also ask them to summarize the main points of your paper to make sure you made the points you wanted to.
Find your voice.
Making sure your writing has a unique voice – your voice – really ups the quality and intrigue of your paper or story. A lot of people over-complicate this step, but at the risk of sounding vague, your voice should just come naturally. For some, it mirrors the way they talk. For others, it’s a mix-and-match of various techniques and styles they’ve picked up from other writers. For others, their voice relies on the feelings and thoughts they want to evoke. If you write without breaking your flow, just whatever thoughts come to your mind, you should find your voice without even realizing.
Learn how to properly paraphrase.
This should seem obvious, but a lot of people don’t actually know how to correctly paraphrase. Not only does properly paraphrasing lower the risk of unintentionally plagiarising, but it also often bulks up your word count. It takes some practice, but it really pays off.
Read.
I cannot stress this enough – reading more will always improve your writing. You naturally start to pick up on the way others write, on the bits and pieces that you like, and you analyze how and why specific parts evoke something in you. You can pick out the intricacies in a scene that make it seem real. For academic writing, reading other academic papers will help you pick up on the language, the lingo, and the quality expected in your writing. It also helps iron out formatting.
Watch videos, movies, TV shows, etc.
In a similar vein, watching movies and other things can help you figure out how story-telling works in other mediums, and you could try to use similar techniques in your own writing. For example, let’s say you’re stuck on how to write a fight scene. You could try watching a fight scene in a movie and dissect what makes it work. What kind of shots did they use? If they were short and punchy, try writing short and punchy sentences. What details did they focus on? Try focusing on similar ones. What senses did they try to evoke? Smell? Sound? Touch? Try writing in the same ones. Picking apart how different scenes are portrayed in visual media could help you convey the same thing in writing.
Remember your audience.
I think a lot of people lose touch with this. For a lot of academic writing, people focus on using big and complicated words to make it sound like they know what they’re talking about. A lot of this time, this alienates a wider audience. You want to use language that your specific audience can comprehend without trouble. If you’re writing for people who work in the same field as you, go ahead and use jargon; be specific! But if you’re writing for, perhaps, a bunch of high school students, write at a level that they can read. When you’re revising, keep your audience in mind. With all that said, keep in mind that part of the audience is also yourself. No one else will read that paper as much as you – no one else will hold the same intimate connection with it that you do. If you don’t write something you love, no amount of praise will change that. At the end of the day, it’s your name on that paper or story. Write something you’re proud of.