Asking yourself the right questions can have a clarifying impact that will unblock your writer’s block fast.
One of the most important questions to answer is who are you writing for? Once you have the audience in mind things become much simpler and you’ll know what you want to say to them. Another good question is ask is “what do I want to say?”.
Allow yourself to write badly, don’t let yourself mix editing with writing. A useful app to help with breakthrough your writer’s block is the Most Dangerous Writing App.
Tools to Help with Writer’s Block
Transcribing an interview can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. You could have hours of recorded interviews and all you need is a golden quote or two. If you’re struggling to transcribe your recorded interview give Happy Scribe a try. It’s one of the best transcription engines and lowest cost transcription services out there. It also comes with a 30-minute free trial so you can test it out.
Next time you experience writer’s block look at this chart which contains a summary of the guiding principles of journalism. Hopefully one of these ideas will help you unblock that mental barrier in your mind.
If you’re still stuck, try mind-mapping using some of the questions, structure and guiding principles above. You can use a whiteboard, a sheet of paper, or index cards to brainstorm your ideas.
One of the benefits of using index cards is that you can lay them out and reorganize them until you feel confident in your stories structure.
Plan your writing with the POWER technique. Prepare yourself with a mind mapping session. Select the most relevant topics from your mind map and begin to organize them.
A great tool to organize and outline is Omni Outliner which help you draft and move your outline around easily. It’s a lot like using paper index cards only it’s digital and can be synced across all your Apple devices. It’s fast, lightweight, flexible and easy to use.
We hope these quick and practical tips help you unblock your writer’s block fast.
Let us know what works for you in the comments below.