Leahey.org

I do not like to toot my own horn, or claim to have an edge over anybody else. One trait I do have that I am rather proud of, however, is my ability to generate massive amounts of content in a very small amount of time. I thought I might share a few of my tips:

A) Write furiously, think little. The best part about typing an article vs. handwriting it on paper is the ease of editing. You can go back hours or days later and clean up something you hastily wrote. I like to use this to my advantage. I write what I’m thinking, very quickly and without regard for grammar or typos. It doesn’t matter if it wouldn’t make sense to another soul, it only has to make sense to me. When I’m done, or I feel like I’ve more or less said what I wanted to say, I can go back and rearrange sentences, paragraphs and headers, to make it all coherent. Then I publish.

B) Write all in one. Don’t write your articles in seperate documents. Write them all together in one file. Often times I’ll write what I think should be two seperate articles, and realize midway through I can piece them together to make one longer, more in-depth piece. Nine out of ten times when I start what I think is a new article I have already, at some point, written a few lines or a paragraph on it. Sometimes its a thought or an idea I never would have re-thought of for inclusion.

C) Use lightweight software. For my initial first-drafts, I like to use Notepad or Wordpad. The lack of tools keeps me from being tempted to make page-setup and layout changes to my piece before its completed.

D) “Let it marinate”. It’s not my term, I picked it up from Lifedev. My interpretation of this is I like to save my document, close it, and wait at least an hour before reopening it and rereading it. 100% of the time I find changes I want to make, edits I think improve the article. It never fails. Your readers will wait a few more hours, don’t be impatient.

E) Stay focused. Some people can work with the TV on, dogs barking, headphones blaring…I am not one of those people. I find that if I have any distractions, I will spend about 75% of my time paying attention to them. The work suffers. Turn off everything, including extra applications on your computer. If you have a laptop, consider driving to a park where there is no internet connection, parking, and writing there. Use your laptop’s battery as a timer. I like to work until mine is almost-depleted, but then again I have a Dell, so that’s considerably less time for me.

F) Don’t be afraid to trail off. That’s why we aren’t publishing immediately. Don’t be afraid to trail off on to other subjects, you might wind up writing one full article and several snippets for others. My best ideas have been products of off-topic sentences in other articles.

In conclusion; these tips work for me. You may have varying degrees of success with them, but if you find yourself having trouble producing content, you might consider giving one, or all of them, a try.