How to tackle a lengthy piece of writing

Pic by Star Dust

Apart from the enormity of the work, two things stop us from starting an article.

One is lack of ideas and the other is innumerable ideas flowing, making us know that it would be a really huge article.

Sometimes I would be in lack of inspiration before starting and sometimes I generate ideas so quickly that I feel exhausted even before starting.

Generally, when I write a long post for this blog, I follow this method.

Don’t visualize the finished work but rather think hard in case of lack of ideas for just putting your entire work in a few worded pointers, so that the point would cover the idea in one complete paragraph.

Framing words to cover the outline of your work is easier than framing sentences.

If you have lot of ideas flowing, this becomes easy.

Now take up those words which has little content against them and frame them into paragraphs. If the ideas that you have for those words get exhausted, stop there. Don’t strain. When ideas flow you could come back there.

From there move up the ladder to more elaborate paragraphs and complete all the words that you have listed.

If you feel that some words are not of much use or not needed, be bold enough to delete them or atleast move them down the document, so that you could review them after you have completed your work. If they are not needed even then, you could delete them.

Similarly, if some ideas flow, add them to the list of words, because you might forget them while framing other ideas into sentences.

While working on lengthy documents, it is better to work in Rich Text Format in applications like MS Word in Windows or similar word processors having formatting options.

After finishing every paragraph attend to the formatting of the paragraph.

In case of writing for a blog, write your post in RTF and at the end of the article replace the formatting with markups if you need your content in html format.

Sometimes, pictures, graphs etc., might be needed for your doc. Work on the picture and graphs before starting the article only if you need to create them on your own.

In case you can get them from somewhere else, don’t search for them initially, as that in itself could make you procrastinate your writing work.

As and when you write, realign sentences in the paragraphs to form meaningful idea flow.

Once you feel that all initially jotted words are exhausted, try to make your document unique and standout in terms of ideas and content. Can you give something different.

Once you are satisfied, now is the time to nit-pick your own article, look for contradictory ideas, wrong justification, grammatical mistakes, wrong tone and rectify them.

Look at your document as if it should be rejected. See for any flaw. This step is very crucial.

That’s it, you have completed your work and you have done a good work without procrastinating and breaking the block from writing that piece of work you had put off for later. It is done.

Author’s Note:
I was about to start writing this article and put to use this article for writing this article, though the post is not lengthy. So, here are the words that I jotted down as I started penning this article.

• Work
• Long
• Words
• Easy first
• Hyperlinks –blogs
• Formatting last
• Rich text better
• Pics needed – create means first
• Find –last
• unique
• Flaw
• Rearrange
• Formatting
• Delete
• Realign

Hope this helps you in writing better. Do you follow any methods for writing long blog posts/manuals/documents/books? Share it with us in comments section.