Writing for nervous writers

Some people find writing easy, but most people don't. Sometimes it feels like a chore. For a few people, it's intimidating at best - sometimes genuinely terrifying. 

If you need to write something as part of your job, here are some practical tips to help make the task easier:

Start writing without typing 

Lots of people struggle to start typing words into an empty document. If you're one of those people, try another way. 

Write by going for a walk with a notebook. Think about what you want to say. Jot down good ideas as they pop into your head.

Write by scribbling thoughts on stickies and putting them on the wall. Or on the window of the train you're sitting on. Re-arrange the stickies to help the words make more sense.  

Write by taking a shower, and talking into thin air. 

Write by talking to someone you know well - a good friend, a family member, even a pet. Or use a voice recording app on your phone, and talk into that. After a while, you'll find yourself saying things that sound like they make sense.

All of these techniques help you get words out of your brain, and into a first draft. It might not be a very good first draft, but that doesn't matter. It's a start. 

Work in drafts

Writing can be as iterative as service design. What you write in one draft doesn't have to be the same as what you write in the next. 

Drafts are playgrounds for ideas and experiments. It doesn't matter what you write in a draft - only you, and maybe a tiny handful of colleagues, will ever see it.

All the most famous and successful writers and novelists you've ever heard of work this way. They start with a bad draft, and make it better by chipping away at it over and over again, to turn it into a good draft. 

This is why all bad drafts are good drafts. 

Even a bad draft is a starting point. It gives your brain something to respond to later on. 

Talking of which:

Time is the best editor you can get for free

Once you've got a first draft - even if it's pretty bad - try to forget it. 

Forget it for at least an hour. Overnight is better. A day or more is better still. The longer you can leave it, the better. 

When you come back to this draft later, all the things that are wrong with it will leap out at you. Your brain will instantly try to re-write it. 

Before you know it, you'll be on the second draft.

Time is a writer's friend, and it's the best editor you can get for free. Try to allow time between drafts, so your words can marinade in it.