The simple tip that cured my writer’s block forever

I’ve spent the past several months now posting five times a week here, and I’ve recently started extending that practice to a few other ventures, both blogs and email newsletters.  All told, I probably write between 3000 and 5000 words a week on various topics, which I guess would work out to a decent book’s worth of writing a year (minus the need to edit etc.)

And I do it all effortlessly; I just sit down at the keyboard and away I go.  Zero writer’s block. Sure, I spend part of the day planning topics in the back of my mind, but overall it comes pretty easy to me and I don’t get stuck.  Here’s why:

A few months back I was studying the work of an internet marketer who mails his list twice a day, a commitment that I’m not nearly ready to embrace, and it’s a frequency that I don’t think my markets are ready for anyway.  (I’m pretty sure it was John Alanis, but one trick to keeping throughput up is to avoid extensive research.)

So, (probably) John put it something like this: how many emails do you send a day?

And that opened the door, through which I kicked my writer’s block, never to return.  Forget about emails received; I easily send 20 to 60 emails every day, averaging a paragraph or so each.  And somehow, they always just flow out of me.  Yes, they’re often replies, so they’re in response to a stimulus of some kind, usually a question.  But how hard is it to come up with a question or topic?

Once I had that mindset locked down, writer’s block became a thing of the past.  All I need now is a headline, and I can put 300-450 words together no problem.  Then I find a picture to go with them (I haven’t found one yet for this post, but I’m thinking a hammer smashing a block, because hey, literal much?) off of Flickr (I have a Creative Commons search bookmarked,) and I’m done for the night (these posts are usually done the night before, then postdated to some time in the morning.)

So there you have it – blog posts are just like emails, which I already know how to do. Writer’s block cured.

What do you do every day that’s similar to something you want to start?

Photo by razvan.orendovici