How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
Practice.
In all honesty, recording your thoughts and opinions is a discipline that you must work to make into a routine. My writing has evolved into a mix of planned content, spontaneous thoughts, and ideas that I capture and come back to.
For planning, at the beginning of the year, I typically build a content calendar to talk about things I think are important. Here’s the process I use: How to set a killer content strategy for the entire year in just 1 day.
For the spontaneous thoughts, I get the bug to write about something, and sit down, write my headline, write my headings and just start writing.
For the ideas that I come back to later, I use technology to make it a little easier. Here are some of the systems I use:
- I use Evernote to capture blog ideas. I have a notebook that I use to catalog blog headlines / ideas for posts. Then in the body of the note, I’ll add more details.
- For this blog and my food blog, I’ll often use the WordPress iPhone app to setup drafts with pictures or ideas that I will later come back to and flesh out.
- Sometimes I’ll bring up Siri and tell her “Remember [insert blog post idea]. This causes Siri to simply create a reminder with no due date that I can revisit later on.
Essentially, I’m use a variation of the GTD methodology, starting with the capture of all ideas in a system I trust. I primarily use Evernote to capture the raw idea, and then come back to it later when it’s time to write. As for the writing part, and being able to formulate and communicate ideas clearly, it’s simply a matter of practice. If you want to become a good writer…write.