This is not a writing hack
No, really. It’s not.
I write for a living. Sort of. Well, it’s part of my job. I write grants and solicitation letters and thank you notes. I tell stories with words and numbers and pictures.
Even now, a decade into doing this work, I often find myself stuck. I tell the same story a lot — to different people or on different platforms. Year after year after year. It starts to feel stale to me because I’ve read it so often.
But my readers — our funders, patrons, students, artists, etc. — they maybe haven’t heard it before. So I get hung up on whether I’m not telling it well enough for them or well enough for myself.
I stare at a blank computer screen or my notebook, and I begin again in the same place I began before.
And I get stuck.
So then I just start writing.
Something.
Anything.
A wildly effusive description of the view from my office window.
A list of probably inappropriate tag lines for one of our giving programs.
A way-too-honest version of what I’m actually writing.
And then, eventually, once the words are flowing, I can write what I need to write. It starts to make sense.
So this isn’t a hack.
It’s more of a practical exercise for getting something on the page when the rights words aren’t quite there yet.
Oh, and when the right words show up, I delete the other stuff.
Or save it for another day. Maybe those will be the right words then.
If this was useful to you, I hope you’ll consider following me for occasional future ramblings.
