When I get stuck while writing
Writing is not a faucet from where words start pouring out the moment you turn the contrivance on. It’s like a feral mountain stream, with its own bent of mind. It twists and twirls, it flows with great gushes, and sometimes, sadly, it vanishes. As a professional writer I simply cannot afford to let this stream vanish. No matter what it has to flow. I cannot depend on the streaks of creativity when the client has paid an advance and is waiting for his or her document.
Jonathan at Copyblogger metaphorically asks, are you a spineless blogger? Quite an interesting thought and I would like to implement this metaphor to regular professional copywriting too. He says in order to write prolifically you need to have a creative spine, for, spine is the most important part of our body — it practically supports our body and without a spine there is nothing much we can do. The same applies to writing too; without “spine” writing is not possible especially when you’re feeling “the block”. Developing a spine is not as hard as it may seem if you look at it casually. It is about organizing your thoughts in a logical manner and then expressing them.
But what if you have lots of things to say but there are no words coming forward? A good trick that I follow is randomly start writing words. It doesn’t have to make any sense. Just write with great speed whatever comes to your mind. You don’t even have to complete your sentences. Eventually you see a pattern emerging. Sometimes you just have to add a few words here and a few words there and you are done. You may say, well easier said than done, and I totally agree.
Jonathan talks about writing in the list format — you simply start creating a bulleted list of your thoughts. If you’re creating a copy for a corporate website this would involve creating a list of benefits offered by the product or the service being promoted by the company. You may also create a list of steps to be taken in order to acquire the product or subscribe to the service.
What if you had to explain, compellingly, the features of product you are not much aware of? Ask questions to the client because he or she is the best person to give you the needed feedback. You can create a list of questions and ask the client to provide the answers. Then simply rewrite the answers in your own copywriter sort of way. And what if the client doesn’t give you any information? Then plagiarize from other websites. No, not in the criminal manner; just do some research and see what you can find and then present a rehashed version to the client. This time the client responds with what all he or she does not want. Surely, this requires more work. let your client no about the extra effort you had to put in and then charge accordingly.
Getting stuck while writing I think is just a state of mind. When you know that you have to write then you write. It is a matter of life and death to be frank. If you don’t write you don’t earn money and if you don’t earn money you cannot pay the bills and if it cannot pay the bills… well, you get my point.