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There are probably as many secrets to effective writing as there are Days in the Year or Blogs on the Blogosphere. But a few key elements stand out and I would like to share a couple with you in this post.

First and foremost, since it’s difficult for most of us to even start to write anything at all then it’s essential that when you are in second gear and accelerating that you don’t pull into the nearest lay by for a coffee and a sandwich. Basically what you should do once underway is to keep going and forget the spell check, the punctuation, the grammar and paragraphs.

If you are going to be stopping and checking email every few minutes which some of us do when at the computer (coz it’s fun and you never know who will be writing to you) you sure ain’t going to get anything worthwhile completed.

Completion that is the key to any success in life; a half finished project is pretty much worthless, in fact it can give you nightmares for months. So no matter what the distractions you must finish your project and this type of laser focus will bear fruit.

Ok so you have kept writing and ideas keep flowing and flowing and flowing. The page looks a mess but you have the outline. Going for a spell check or even a visit to the bathroom can interrupt the flow and then when the phone or doorbell rings you will be sinking without a trace. How do I know this to be true? Well I wrote the book on the subject but never got round to publishing it! so there!

If like me your typing skills are a little last century, then the ideas will be coming faster than you can type so it’s vital to keep going at the keyboard. An alternative would be to record you r thoughts and then transcribe but for me the thought of having to clear the desk and get those microphone thingies all set up just creeps me out. Yes I wrote the book on being Technically Challenged but couldn’t fathom out either PDF or FTP (this is being looked at as I write!)

The first hurdle is achieved if you have 500 -750 words and garbled paragraphs on the page because now you have something to work with. As you format and spell check you will inevitably come up with new ideas which will be useful in the same or other articles so that writer’s block will never be a problem… I like to read out loud as I type and also when doing my sentence and grammatical structure

When you have done your first draft you’ll then have a much better idea of what is working and what needs modifying for your reader .You do have readers don’t you? After all this is the whole point of the exercise!

So that’s a quick how do you get started and how you prepare to finish what you have started. We’ll talk more about dealing with the second draft in the next post sometime somewhere but don’t wait up you’ll be disappointed!