If a blank document and a blinking cursor make you a little nauseous, you’re not alone.
Not all of us find our way to marketing through a comms degree and a love for language, but most generalists will have to help out with content—sometimes at scale—to keep up.
Try these 5 writing tips to get further down the page:
#1 Read.
Have you ever met a musician that didn’t listen to music? Probably not.
Curate a daily information diet for yourself. Exposure to the rhythm and cadence of writers working across genres—including peers, competitors, and creatives from other industries—will improve your own flow. Start by adding some writers to your social media streams.
#2 Don’t edit.
Yet. Attention to narrative, grammar, and structure can be stifling to an organic burst of creativity.
Plus, it’s much easier to refine and shape your ideas if you have a wealth of raw material to work with.
Try to quiet the critical voice in your head and approach that first draft with radical openness.
After all, what appears to be a tangent might be where your real insight lives.
#3 Talk it out.
If you’re having trouble translating from brain to page, you might be a verbal or auditory processor.
Sometimes you don’t know how you think or feel about something until you chat it through over a coffee. This, too, is part of the writing process.
Brainstorm your ideas with colleagues, or try monologuing on a voice memo.
#4 Ask AI.
Generative AI chatbots aren’t great writers, but they’re excellent collaborators.
With a little input, they can provide you with a list of topics, subtopics, and bullet points for you to tease out and rework.
You can ask for puns, idioms, title suggestions, and keywords. Chatbots can even give you an objective assessment of your tone or proofread your draft for substantive edits.
#5 Follow your flow.
It’s okay to reverse engineer your process so that it works for you, not against you.
If you have a clear vision for your conclusion, start there. On the other hand, you might use a well-crafted title as your guiding star.
And sometimes, you’ll find yourself in the middle of things and have to work outward.
You and your style guide make the rules.
Just get back in the chair.
Maybe it’s counterintuitive, but doing the thing you’d rather avoid with some regularity is truly the best medicine.
Adding some discipline and a fresh approach to your writing practice will keep writer’s block at bay. Soon, you’ll develop a voice, an awareness of audience, and a musicality all your own.
You might even enjoy it.
