Writers: Here’s How to turn on your content engine!
One of the most significant challenges people will discuss concerning writing is the fear of getting writer's block. This happens when creativity, ideas, and words seem to dry up, but I’ve discovered some strategies that eliminate the block and unlock your creative content engine. You can move beyond just someone who comes up with one or two good ideas to someone who steps into a flow of creating so much content that you’ll have endless potential for new books and other content to serve your audience.
The Buckets Strategy
Years ago, when I finally realized that I enjoyed writing, I decided to intentionally grow and develop my writing craft and stumbled on this “buckets” strategy. I decided to commit to writing and consistently posting a thought Monday through Friday that would serve, equip, or inspire people. I started by identifying five key areas that I felt like I had something of value to write and speak about. Not that I had to be an official expert on the topic, but one that I had enough competence and experience to speak authentically and with authority. These areas became what I call my 5 Buckets. Each of us is going to have different buckets or primary focuses in our writing, but here are mine original:
Ministry Leadership
Discipleship/Christian basics
Marriage
Preaching
Leadership
Here’s how to use the buckets.
First, I took those key categories and created a separate note for each in my Evernote app. You can use whatever notes program you want to make these notes. Then, whenever a fresh idea, thought, revelation, experience, Bible verse, song, or article came to me about one of those topics, I’d quickly jot them in the corresponding note. The ideas came from daily Bible reading, friends, bosses, the news, social media, current events, random thoughts, etc. I call them buckets because I treated them like topic buckets I’d chuck ideas into. Don’t worry about an entirely written-out thought; what you’re creating are starter ideas that you can write about later. Then, once a week, I used a social media scheduling app called Buffer to schedule a daily thought, one from each bucket. To strengthen my ability to say important things in fewer words, I forced myself to write my thoughts within the 140-character Twitter length. It's not always easy, but it helps clarify your writing.
At first, it was a struggle to collect a legit thought on each topic each week, but once I started consistently developing content, more words came to me easily. It was like I had turned on the content-creating engine, which hasn’t turned off since. Eventually, I got to the spot where I had turned my engine of content development up so high that I overflowed to posting seven days a week. Sometimes twice a day. With the buckets idea, don’t worry about how great the quote is. Not all quotes you write will be as impactful, but keep posting. Just write and post it. Learn to say something of value concisely.
The more words you speak, the less they mean.
Ecclesiastes 6:11(NLT)
