I'm blogging at a reasonable speed. The thoughts are coming down the blogging pike blissfully. I'm making point after point, like a basketball player. I'm in the zone. I should be in the Blogger 500 on Blogger TV.
Then I go and ruin all. I stop to read what I wrote. Blogger TV, yeah. The horror channel, maybe. I could play the character with a schizoform discorder and the severe ADD.
The problem is that the words I wrote so well and so quickly, for some reason they all don't belong in the same piece. What kind of mess have I made here? It looks like the Blogger 500 has had a horrible 3-blog-post wreck.
I have four sentences there that work perfectly well. Three sentences there that make a beautiful point with clarity. Those two sentences next are genuinely clever. Each set of thoughts just belongs on its own.
How did this happen? It happens quite often when I write without deciding first what I'm writing about.
It sounds simple, doesn't it? Know my point. Know my message. Know what I want to say, before I hit the keys.
It works for everybody that way. It's the same as "If you don't know where you're going, you won't get there."
When I trained writers, it was a usual thing. About once a month, a writer would come to my office, plop in a chair, and throw his or her hands in the air, saying, "I'm sorry I tried for days and I can't write this piece."
My answer would always be, "What do you want to say?"
Then we'd talk to find the point the writer wanted to make. The piece would be done within the next hour.
Ah, that's the point I want to make here.
It's easier to write, faster to blog, simpler to get a message across, if we take time before we start, to figure out that one thing we want to say.
Liz Strauss
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