2 February 2012

Thanks to the readers who responded to my question last week:

Do you have any tips to share with us on ways to make sure you spend enough thinking time when you write?

I’d like to share them with you today.

Reflection time

Vani wrote, ‘Writing a reflection is a way to keep an audit trail.’ By writing your thoughts and looking at them later, you can process it further and perhaps discard some of it.

I really appreciate how Vani compared writing your thoughts to an ‘audit trail’. This underscores the idea that our reflections are important enough to record. And whatever you do with those thoughts – refine, reprocess or discard them – our readers deserve that we account for every word that ends up in the final draft. This, of course, requires time.

Email thinking time

Scott gave two practical tips on how to build in thinking time for emails:

1.    When working over important emails, I don't put anybody in the "to" line. Then if I accidentally hit "send" too soon, it doesn't go anywhere.

2.    With particularly important emails, I email them to myself on a time delay, perhaps a few hours or a day later.  I see it then with fresher eyes.

Both these methods force you to look again (revise) your emails before you send them.

Although I often put emails I’m working on into the ‘drafts’ folder, I usually type in the recipient’s name. Now I’ll follow Scott’s advice and keep that field blank until I’m ready to send.

I didn’t even know that you could send yourself emails on a time delay. I’ll have to look into that to make sure I don’t forget to finish email drafts (which I’ve done once or twice!).

Brainstorming time

Another tip that Scott sent was on how he brainstorms and drafts:

I brainstorm on paper and sometimes draft, too.  There's more freedom on a physical page to insert ideas wherever I want, use colors, and generally make a mess. On the screen, you're locked into the linear.

I couldn’t agree more. Even though computers make many things more efficient, anything that ‘locks you into the linear’ impedes creativity. A computer screen simply doesn’t allow the free flow of thoughts in the same way that a piece of paper (or a whiteboard) and coloured pens do. On top of that, if you stand up to do the writing, the physical movement sends more oxygen to your brain and helps you think more clearly.

Even if you ‘free write’ (brainstorm) on a computer screen, it’s harder to see patterns among all the words – and more cumbersome to write the text in various colours.

I like to use a large sheet of paper to brainstorm/mind-map. Then I let it rest for a day or two. After that, I look at the mind-map and try to find the main points and the details that support them. I then put single ideas that I’m going to use from the first brainstorm onto post-its so it’s easy to move them around on a second large sheet.  

More ideas?

Only if you give enough thinking time to writing can you refine your thoughts and make them more valuable to readers.

Do you have other tips you can share? Please drop a line in the comments or send me an email. Thanks!