Writing Steps Every Writer Needs

I recently read that to be successful as an article writer you need to produce over one thousand articles. From my article writing income on Hubpages I would say that’s probably correct. Wow, that seems like such an insurmountable task. I keep looking at the successful people on Hubpages and very few have written 1000 or more articles. That got me to thinking about what I need to do to develop a decent part time income from article writing. I did some research and read over 20 articles on the subject. Almost all of the articles have some common themes and I thought I’d share what I’d learned from reading.

• If you want to write a lot of articles you should start with your knowledge base. In each of our lives we have developed knowledge about different things whether it is work knowledge or cooking knowledge or knowledge that comes from a longstanding hobby, we all have something we know a lot about. Topics that you have a lot of knowledge about makes writing about that subject much easier and often words will flow much quicker than if you needed to learn more about the topic. The less time it takes to get your head around the subject the better.

• Research is good as long as you are careful not to plagiarize. My suggestion would be to gather several articles on one topic and formulate your own opinions and knowledge. Once you have a good handle on the subject you want to write on, right from your memory and not from reading your research work. Then check your writing against your research and make sure there’s no duplication.
• It’s also advisable to set up a specific time of day in a specific place for you to write. For me early in the morning seems to work best. Regardless of when or where you work have a pleasant and distraction free area.
• Wire framing, also called outlining an article will help keep you on track. The process of outlining can be done anywhere with or without a computer. You could conceivably go a park and sit on a bench with a note pad and gather your thoughts for an outline. If you ever have a writer’s block or feel like you’ve hit the wall when writing use an outline break through those problems.
• Editing slows you down. Once you start writing your article keep writing until you’re finished without editing. I read in my research that it would even be advisable to shut off your computer screen to avoid distraction of corrections while you’re writing.
• If you are critical of yourself while you are writing you will slow yourself down. If you feel you want to change a sentence just add to the sentence for now. Keep writing and don’t delete anything. After you’re through, gather all of those sentences that you thought about deleting and see if there are any gems that you want to keep.
• It almost goes without saying that goal setting forms an important part of getting a lot of writing done. Set goals and following specific plans to achieve your goals with reasonable time limits to get them done.
• When writing the work can feel overwhelming so just write to finish your work on one paragraph at a time. Psychologically smaller chunks or more manageable so if you have a complex topic you’re trying to explain take it in little bites. Go back to your wire frame as a reference.
• And lastly, but if you’re typing skills are lacking consider getting a good headset and built into windows accessibility features is the ability to turn speech into text. Just let the conversation flow and edit it all at the end.

So in conclusion everyone who writes gets bogged down, has writer’s block, or needs to get work done for a deadline. When writing and using research from the Internet be careful to get credible sources. There are lots of ways to recompose combine and rework ideas to avoid plagiarism. When working as an article writer you need every advantage that you can get. Remember that article writing is low paying at first and income comes from long term efforts. Keep working - you can do it.

The end.

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