Stick With It

Writing can be a love/hate relationship.

Sometimes you love it...and other times it becomes your master, you dream about it, you have nightmares about it, you discover you have written pages and pages of material that has absolutely nothing to do with your current project. These moments can be discouraging because you really are working hard, you've got your butt in the chair, you're producing material, and yet it isn't what you want.

What do you do then?

Put the material that you feel has nothing to do with your current project and stick it in a file folder, label it, and put it away for a week or more.  This will accomplish two things:

1. It will acknowledge to yourself that you value what you have done and your mind will be at rest.
2. You will now have material that may be good for another project at some point in the future.  

You see, I don't believe that ANY writing is worthless.  Your brain comes up with material for its own reasons.  Sometimes it creates material because you've told it to do so...other times it comes up with things all on its own and you may not understand why you wrote it.  No matter. Put it away.  Keep it. Go back later and look through it.  You'll often discover that the writing isn't half bad, in fact, it might even be really good material.

Unfortunately, that doesn't handle the problem that what you're writing on now still needs to move forward.  Refocus.  Start asking yourself some questions.  What does your reader need to know right now?  Rather than being egocentric and writing only to please yourself, try getting into your reader's head.  What does he/she want/need to know?  How can you move them along in the process?

This is where you jump back into your project and move ahead.

By getting into your readers' heads, you'll become a much better writer overall. I don't care if you write for magazines, if you're a copywriter, or if you specialize in web copy...by understanding the purpose of your writing and knowing your audience, you're going to become a much better writer.

Trust me on this...stick with it. Writing comes easily at times and at other times it is work.

Most of the time, when it's work...it's because you haven't gotten into the head of your reader.

Go on, you know what to do now...WRITE!

To your writing success,

Kathleen