It is interesting how excited I was to launch my blog. Now after three weeks with my “de-facto” deadline looming, I am struggling for a topic that I needed to write about. And then it hit me, even in my infancy of, dare I say it, blogging, I am not new to deadlines, albeit self-imposed deadlines.

To be honest, no one has even read my blog yet, and I don’t know if anyone will read this posting either. But I will still write. Because what most don’t know, is that there is so much in me—that it has to come out. And that is, whether I teach it, preach it, sing it or write it…as long as I get it out of me—I am good.

Step 1: How Important is Your Blog–to you?

The simple answer is that I am busy preparing for a major workshop that I will facilitate out of town on Saturday—the same day that my blog is scheduled to post. But then throw in a devotional for another ministry on Friday morning—and Bible Study on Wednesday, and you can begin to see my struggle.

The struggle is as always, establishing priorities. That means that the first thing that I have to do—and it is the same for any writer, is set which of my priorities is first.

Of course then, it is just a process of systematically ticking down the rest of the list. Of course, then you have to be comfortable in accepting where your blog post falls in the list.

So here I am Thursday afternoon and I began to write—and then the thought came to write about my challenges to produce this blog…which is kind of circular, right?

Step 2: What’s Your Motivation?

Fortunately for me, blogging is not my first attempt at writing. In fact, since 2003, I have been actively writing a men’s devotional series. My writing began as a response to a call from God to write. And given my relationship with the Lord—if the Lord says write—then I would write!

And so I began writing—so much so, that by February 2006, I left my job at a Fortune 500 company to focus on my writing. Sounds crazy—but again, it’s about my relationship with the Lord. Even crazier was the fact that my degree in college is engineering—not writing…so how was I going to make this happen?

As I began to quantify the scope of writing a twelve volume devotional series for men, it almost became overwhelming. To that point, each volume contained thirty days of devotionals—which meant I was going to need to write 360 devotionals. Pretty good motivation if you think about it.

Step 3: Visualize Your Destination

What has always helped me in writing is to visualize the final destination. That is, what will the final product, book or article to look like? Once that concept is established, create the layout that you will need to make your book, magazine or even blog look like what you expect.

In fact, perhaps that’s where many writers struggle. They start out with the yellow legal pad and begin writing, consumed, frustrated and even let down by their many pages of words. With no visual cues that direct them, the life of writing can be one of isolation, let alone daunting.

 

But if you have already created a framework or outline that resembles your final product—personally, it reduces some of the daily trepidation to write. To write without a framework is almost like building a house without pouring the foundation and framing the house first.

Step 4: Structure, Structure, Structure!

Perhaps as a result of my engineering degree, I was very focused on structure in my writing. Now that I had my framework in place, that had space holders for each day and chapter, I just needed to be able to track my progress.

That is, because of the scope of work, I knew I needed structure or I would become bogged down in the process. I knew that I was absolutely in need of structure!

Even more than that, I needed a method to track my daily success. (Note: I didn’t say progress—I said success, more about that later!)

To help visualize the tool I used, I included an image of annotating my daily writing success. Using this category chart (and another that tracked the thirty days of each ‘Chapter’ (which later became books)).

So each time I would start a new devotional—or complete an old one, I checked it off appropriately and whether each devotional had a title or not.

While this is of course may seem overly complex for a blog, think about what happens when you develop your blog voice and them and begin to write “in advance” of your scheduled publish date!

Step 5: Be Your Own Fan!

The real measure of our internal success in writing is are we getting the results we want. That is, do we feel that we are being successful in our writing project?

To create a greater sense of success, (and utilize the data that I had from tracking of my success), I created on more chart to help see my progress.

Completion Summary

In fact, since writing was more-or-less my new occupation, the tools I developed were good for sharing with my family my progress and daily successes.

So, each week I would proudly show my family and encourage myself that I was getting closer to my goal!

And if things felt like they were progressing too slowly—I could look at the previous week’s Chart to prove that I was getting closer to my goal.

So even if you are committing to a certain number of words a week, track your success to remind yourself that are getting closer to achieving your goals.

As mentioned before, the isolation of writing is what deters many writers.  And we all begin the same way: you and the keyboard.

And unless you outsource the task of blogging, you alone are charged with keeping your blog fresh and worth reading. But hopefully now, this discussion will help you discover ways to encourage yourself. What I did, worked for me!

Step 6: Get a Good Start; Have Good Exchanges; Finish Strong!

Perhaps as a result of being an athlete for years in my youth, I developed a keen sense of my internal conversations, that is, the conversations that I spoke to myself.

That way, whether it was in swimming, track or football—and no matter what the intensity of the moment, I was calmly encouraging myself in preparation to compete.

In fact, running the 4×400 in college meant that it was always the last event. And while I was in the midst of my internal discourse, there would always be “that guy” on our team, who would run over to us to remind us of the intensity of the moment.

He would say something like, “We are only a couple of points out of first place as a team, so you guys “have to win!”” Of course, this was the last kind of pressure that we wanted to have.

Fortunately, as a relay team, we each were effective at psyching our own selves up in a way that minimized the pressure—but focused on the goal of running the best race we could.

That meant, get a good start; make sure that you have good exchanges; and finish strong. Hey, that’s just like writing!

So that’s it for this week…let me know if this post helped you in any way! And remember, get a good start; create great exchanges; and have a great finish. Be blessed!

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