Tried And Tested Tips to Get Rid of the Writer’s Block – Part 2

Note – If you missed part one of this 3-part series, then you can click this link to access the previous post.

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Did you take the time to implement the tips that I shared on the previous post? If you didn’t, then I urge you to give them a try right now, before you even start reading this second installment of our series.

However, if you feel like the tips that I shared previously aren’t resonating with you, allow me to continue with these second set of tips.

Let’s carry on from where we left off…

Table of content

5.The story telling approach.

6.The Skyscraper method.

7.Do the next right thing.

What’s next?

5. The story telling approach.

While there are several different stages (or phases) that you can use to write a story, I use the 5 different phases that I found at Changeminds.org. These stages were described by Gustav Freytag as:

• Exposition: Setting the scene.
• Rising action: Building the tension.
• Climax: The exciting bit.
• Falling action: Tidying up loose ends.
• Resolution: Ending the story.

Regardless of what topic you’re writing about, you can almost always create a story-type write-up where you’ll follow the pattern above.

If you’ve had your fair share of reading blog posts on the internet, I’m sure you’ve read somewhere how storytelling is a powerful tool that businesses or marketers can use to keep their audience from clicking away.

True enough. It is.

The thing with storytelling is, the readers tend to get drawn in the world that the writer has created. They almost always end up asking the question, “What’s next?” after reading every line since they want to know how the story will unfold.

Having said that, the storytelling approach is also an effective strategy that you can use to reduce your website’s bounce rate.

6. The Skyscraper method.

Great. You have a topic in mind that you know your audience will love.

When you Googled the topic, however, you realized that there are already several articles written about it.

Now here’s a question for you? Would you…

1. give up and look for another topic to write about?

2. still write about the same topic with half of your efforts, since you know that your article will become “just another article” about the topic?

Or…

3. gather all the information that you can find about the topic, then put together one massive — let alone value-packed — guide that will blow your audience’s minds!

Choose the latter option. Choose the Skyscraper method!

At this point, I hope you’ve already figured out why the technique is called as such. Because your content will tower over all the other content online, your article becomes a “skyscraper article”.

You can read Brian Dean’s blog post about the Skyscraper method to learn more about it.

What makes writing easier when using this method is you don’t have to formulate your ideas from scratch — or at least most of it.

All you need to do is gather the ideas that are shared by others, put them all together in one massive article, add your own wisdom bombs into the mix, and voila! Your epic content is created.

As you can probably imagine, writing using the Skyscraper method is a lot easier since the ideas are already out there, you just have to rephrase them, and add your own twist to the ideas.

Note – DO NOT copy and paste content from other websites. What you need to do is to learn the concept behind the ideas that they are sharing, and share it to your audience using your own voice and understanding.

7. Do the next right thing.

One of the reasons why people experience the writer’s block is they tend to get overwhelmed by how huge or challenging their writing project is.

Imagine having to write a 20,000 word guide.

When you put together your first few sentences, there’s a good chance you’ll experience the writer’s block because you’ll feel a sense of overwhelm. And you feel that way because you are comparing where you are at right now — where you’ve written very little to no words — to how the end product looks like (which is 20,000 words). When you see the huge gap, you tend to get overwhelmed and stressed, which leads to you experiencing the writer’s block.

The solution? “Do the next right thing.”

I learned this from having listened to one of Michael Hyatt’s podcasts.

He mentioned how we should stop thinking constantly about the stage where we’re at on completing the project, as compared to how the completed project looks like, since it can cause us to be overwhelmed.

Of course, before you even do any kind of work, you need to plan accordingly and set up your roadmap to reaching your goal.

This ensures that all of your actions (or your written content) won’t stray away from what your main objective is for writing the article.

Once you’re done with the planning stage, you can now follow the, “Do the next right thing” advice that Michael Hyatt shared.

When  using this strategy, you first need to figure out what your “next right thing” is. In my case, when I have a huge writing project that I need to deal with, I think of my “next right thing” as completing 1 thousand words (maybe 2 – 3 thousand words, even).  Or I can say that my “next right thing” is completing 1 chapter.

With this kind of mindset, I am not constantly thinking about completing a 20,000 word guide (which is overwhelming), my mind is only focused on finishing a 2 thousand word write-up which is really simple to do.

What’s next?

Alrighty! Now we’re done with the second installment of our 3-part series on how to get rid of the writer’s block.

At this point, I hope you’ve found some very helpful tips that you can use to speed up your writing, all without compromising the quality of your work.

Can you share your thoughts on the list of tips that I mentioned? Has any of them worked for you? Better yet, can you share your own tips for getting rid of the writer’s block? Please share your ideas in the comments section below.

Important Note – I will be publishing my 3rd and last post this Monday. Please stay tuned. I’ll add the link here once my last post goes live. Cheers!