Emotions, notes, and bathroom ideas: My writing process
Dear reader of this article…
> No, this is not good.
In one of my recent articles…
> No, come on, come up with something better.
Hello and welco-
> AAAAHH! WHY IS IT SO HARD TO START AN ARTICLE!!!
Me and writing — a love-hate relationship
In my childhood, I always loved to write. At some point as a little kid, I even wrote my own “book”. It was only about 15 pages long and basically a wild mixture of every fantasy movie I had seen up to this point, but the spirit was definitely there. German lessons and thus essays were my highlight of the school week.
At some point, however, this will was lost to me. I dread writing just to write something, to do tasks, and to meet deadlines, as I am doing right now. If a topic doesn’t interest me, or a piece of writing isn’t important to me, it will only become average.
However, I have noticed something interesting about my writing style: I get the best ideas when I associate strong emotions with my topic and I’m desperate to get them down on paper (or into a blog, for that matter).
I tend to cope with humor, irony, and sarcasm, which I also like to incorporate into everything I write: Texts for social media, memes, blog posts, or essays — you name it.
I discovered that in the year of my high school graduation, where I had to write an article for the graduation yearbook. Each student has been assigned a teacher to drop a few lines about. The teacher I got was an … uhm … let’s just say he was not very well-liked. The article I wrote was well-crafted and dripped with sarcasm. It entertained the whole class and was a lot of fun to write.
Working my way to the winning idea
By the way, the basic idea for this article came from the notes on my smartphone while I was getting ready to brush my teeth and go to sleep. This is quite normal for me.
I rarely come up with ideas worth pursuing in front of a PC monitor. The pinnacle of creative outlets for me are bathrooms, kitchens, subways, and any other place where people don’t normally work.
My notes on my smartphone look as if a five-year-old had been given the task of designing a theme park entirely according to his own imagination.
A lot of confusion, interesting concepts that are difficult to implement, and one or two surprisingly good ideas, hidden under a questionable structure.
In the depths of my Google Notes you’ll find: Book titles, comedy-bits, tattoo ideas, plans for satirical texts to cope with everything that’s wrong with this planet and its inhabitants, jumbled strings of words that made sense at 3 a.m. when I was half asleep, and maybe the one or the other million-dollar business idea that I’ll never realize.
Even while writing, my thoughts still often flip over. Sometimes I write several sentences at the same time because I absolutely have to write out the next thought and get it all out.
Writing itself is very fast for me. I can turn article concepts into reality very quickly. However, in order to reach the full potential of these texts, some time to reflect and adapt is needed. On the best pieces I’ve written, I’ve spent hours swapping out individual words and condensing the message to a (nearly) flawless core.
How great texts evolve
Truly good texts of mine develop over a long period of time, largely in my head and on notes, and then just need to be fleshed out.
In the Writing class from my Content Strategy studies, the recommended writing process by Teodora Petkova stuck with me the most. She thinks highly of what she calls an “ugly draft”. A version of a text that is simply written down without much thought and formulation and only then gradually perfected.
I try to use this method for my process as well.
For me it mostly looks like this:
1) Research phase & taking notes
2) Rough plan of subtopics I could write about
3) “Ugly draft” — writing down what comes to my mind
4) Proofreading and improving the choice of words
For more ideas on great writing processes and reflections, you should absolutely take a look at the articles of my fellow students in the Content Strategy Master’s program!
