Article Creation – Tips to overcome writer’s block

Have you ever started to write an article or Blog post but ended up staring at a blank screen, fingers hovering over the keyboard, waiting for the words to flow from your brain to your fingers, but nothing seems to appear? Sometimes a few words manage to make it onto the page, quickly followed by the backspace key because they didn’t look right?

Some people are able to sit at a computer, and words just seem to flow out of them and onto the page so naturally. For others, like me, there is some sort of mental freeze that makes all the words in my mind disappear.

Well, take comfort in the fact that you are not alone.

Here are a few tips that I’ve used, that might help you overcome that mental block and get those creative articles in your head into written form.

When confronted with the “blank screen paralysis”, I get up and walk around the house and just verbalize the article out loud, sort of like telling a story to myself (and if your family gives you a strange look, don’t worry about it, they’ll get used to it). This helped to clarify the article layout, what main points that were going to be presented, how it was going to start, how it was going to end, etc.

Then when I got back to my computer and opened up the Word document, BOOM! Everything in my mind just disappeared. It was as if looking at that Word document just wiped my brain clean.

Now, never being one to give up easily, I purchased one of those little hand held recorders, like a little dictation machine, and I when I went on my article verbalization rampage, I would just record it all, and when I got back to my computer I could just replay the story and the words seemed to magically appear on the Word Document.

You can take this recorder with you when you go out (or if your family throws you out), I personally keep it with me all the time, because you never know when the creative juices start to flow and you don’t want to miss a good article or Blog post.

One last thing, recently I have been trying out “speech to text” software that allows me to dictate the article to my computer instead of keying it in (don’t you love technology?), so when I return from my article “walkabout”, I can replay my recorder to refresh my memory, repeat the story to my computer, and there is my article (a little editing may be required).

Now, wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could just plug my little recorder into my computer and let it transcribe what I had recorded…well, guess what… you can! There is a speech recognition software program that will do just that, with 97% accuracy (see below for links), now there are no excuses left not to write that wonderful article or Blog post.

If you use Windows Vista (good luck!) or Windows 7, speech recognition software is supplied FREE.

See this link for information about the free and paid speech recognition software.

http://www.consumersearch.com/voice-recognition-software (this is NOT an affiliate link, it’s just free information).

Good luck and happy article creation.