How to get ‘Blooming Content’ on those ‘Gloomy Days’?

There’s no doubt, in my cou­ple years of blog­ging – there were def­i­nitely days when I couldn’t write. No mat­ter how much I tried or how much I forced myself either the con­tent I pro­duced was not good enough or I couldn’t pro­duce any­thing at all.

Then about a year ago, I came across an arti­cle that sug­gested you keep a “Jour­nal” to help spark your imag­i­na­tion when in doubt or “writ­ing despair”. I mean I had noth­ing to lose, maybe except 10 min­utes a day or so, and I knew what the arti­cle was talk­ing about because I could per­son­ally relate to it.

I would just like to take the time now and be thank­ful for that arti­cle. Ever since I’ve started using my Writ­ing Jour­nal which by the way no-one is allowed to read – I’ve been writ­ing con­tent that I think is above-par. It has really been one of the bet­ter things I’ve done for my blog­ging and I want to share it with you.

Your writ­ing jour­nal can be on an online pri­vate server or even a diary hid­den under your pil­low – it doesn’t really mat­ter, but I wouldn’t rec­om­mend the online idea because you want to keep these find­ings, ram­blings and thoughts to just your­self… at least till you blog about it!

You most likely say­ing “Well, Janith that’s a great idea but what the hell do I put in there?” I believe that’s a fair ques­tion, so here’s a quick break­down of both pri­mary and sec­ondary sources that make up my writ­ing journal;

Keep­ing a writ­ten AND pic­to­r­ial scrap­book; past­ing in arti­cles you read any­where and your thoughts about what you have read. If you’re going to take the online method, you can always scan use­ful pieces of information.

Jot down notes on what you see and hear; this has been one of the biggest point­ers for me, I wrote down pretty much every­thing I heard and saw that I redeemed use­ful and it had its ben­e­fits later on.

Cut out illus­tra­tions, prints and car­toons of things that you like; Make sure you anno­tate these pic­tures with some notes that indi­cate what you liked about each pic­ture and any ran­dom note you would like to keep with it. Many of the pic­tures I’ve used so far in this blog have been from those cut-outs.

Increase your vocab­u­lary by build­ing a word banks that relates to the theme or niche of your arti­cles. It has really helped me expand the words I use from the Eng­lish language.

Build up ref­er­ences and thoughts around the cen­tral niche or theme you are work­ing on as it will be extremely use­ful in the future. Try to sep­a­rate fact from opin­ion and place them in dif­fer­ent section.

Just write – It doesn’t mat­ter some­times how you write or what you write – just keep going for 15-30mins a day, that’s all that is needed. What-ever comes to mind just write it down and if the ball starts rolling, just keep at it till you think you have accom­plished enough for one day. Some­times you’ll find you have struck gold when you least expected it.

I find it some­times just enjoy­ing the expe­ri­ence of get­ting your ideas down on paper is more than moti­va­tional on many levels.

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