If you are like me, a person who always puts his thoughts on paper, then you would be very familiar with the term “Blank Page Phobia”. You wish to write something, but the blank page looks overwhelmingly daunting. You think, and think but nothing comes in your head, you procrastinate, you fiddle with few words trying to make some sense. You pretty much do everything except what you should – that is, writing.
What can we do? The blank page sometimes just happens to be really scary, so scary that we end up giving up on writing for a while. That’s not what we want, right!
We want to write. we want to jot down our feelings, our thoughts. Here’s how I trick myself to beat the blank page phobia.
Done is always better than perfect.
Use A Mini Notebook
Sometimes the blank page stresses you out and puts a mental block for you to think of something. Look for a small piece of paper or a mini-notebook that we mostly use to plan our day out.
Your goal is to fill one page of that mini notebook or that piece of paper with a structure of what you want to write. It doesn’t need to be perfect, nor to look good. All you need to do is pen down your random thoughts about what you wish to write. I know it will look messy, the handwriting would be crappy too, but you accomplished a major thing here. Now you have a rough structure, points, and thoughts that you can use to form the story, the essay, the piece of content you want to write. That same blank page won’t look that daunting anymore, because you have fuel for your brain now.
Write Fast
You don’t need to write a perfect piece of content in just one attempt.
No one has written a masterpiece in one attempt.
Just write fast, write everything that comes into your head on that blank page, don’t leave anything behind. Look at those points, thoughts you wrote, and write everything, write it fast. The aim here is to get all your thoughts on that blank paper without any restraint.
Once you have written every point you can think of, then you can chisel away the parts you don’t want, you can perfect the structure, you can correct the grammar and make it look like a perfect piece of art.
That Needed Break
You have a good piece of content with you, so what’s next.
You take a break.
You let it rest for a while and immerse yourself into something else. You need to get your mind off from that piece of content. After a while, you will have a completely fresh perspective on it. The new perceptive will help you refine your work, even more, to make it better.
Read, Read, And You’re Done
You’re close to finishing your perfect copy! There’s only one last thing left to do.
Read your own work, and read it slowly. Try to understand the meaning, the feeling each sentence of your content communicates to the reader. If you get the feeling that you want your readers to get then you’re done. If you don’t then make some minor changes here and there to get the feeling you desire from your piece, it won’t take a long, but it will make your content really good.
Done reading. You have your content ready with you.
Don’t stare at the blank page, if it looks hard to get words out, find an alternative, find a way to get your creative juice flow again, because remember staring won’t help you to have a perfect piece of content, but you writing things here and there will.
Done is always better than perfect.
