All my good ideas come in bed. Blueprints for inventions, existential questions, and visions for the future all flood in while I stare at the ceiling, waiting for my brain to shut down and drift to sleep.
If I wait for longer than an hour in bed, I boot up my computer, squint at the bright screen, open up a new document to record my thoughts, and consequently ruin my sleep.
“This idea is legendary! I gotta write it down so I don’t forget,” I tell myself at 2 am. But to my surprise, I can’t write more than a sentence. I voluntarily lose both my thought and my sleep.
Not being able to express what’s in my head in the form of words is a common struggle for me, but implementing a couple strategies has certainly made my struggles easier, these strategies aiding me in my line of reasoning as a blogger and in self expression.
Outline the Sequence of Your Thoughts Before Writing
Our thoughts naturally mimic any old recipe. We have steps to follow to get to the final product, but each step can involve sub-steps, such as mincing green onions before adding them to the broth.
Sidetracking into the sub-steps could be a reason you may lose an idea. All the details get in the way, and you end up forgetting the base. If that’s the case, then create an overall outline of your idea before you fill in the details. Add headings for each transition in thought. Once the outline is clear, fill in the details and refine from there.
Use a Small Notepad to Jot Down Ideas
A blank page is overwhelming. It presents too much space to fill up.
I sometimes write on lined sticky notes to combat the overwhelm. Sticky notes are compact and have less space to record ideas. By the time I reach the end of the sticky note, I am usually mid-sentence and whip out a new sticky note to continue. Eventually, I end up with a good number of completed sticky notes and a well-versed description of my idea.
Even if you can’t proceed past a single line every time you record your thoughts, you could still conglomerate all the single sticky notes into an archive of ideas to choose from when you can write more than a sentence.
Speech to Text Tool on Google Docs
We write slower than we think. The physical movement of our hands occurs simultaneously with our thoughts, so our hands race our brain and always fall behind.
When we speak however, we need time to complete our thought before we move on to the next one. It’s easier to stay coherent while speaking than typing/writing as our speech acts as a natural pacer of thoughts.
To stay coherent in thought and speed up my blog post writing, I use a speech to text tool on google docs. Under the tools section is a voice typing tool, which can also be retrieved through Ctrl+Shift+S (Command+Shift+S for mac).
Using Brute Force
I consider this tactic the last yet most important resort.
Maybe the 2 am thing isn’t the key. A wheel rolls off your train of thought and the train swerves off the track.
But what if you rebuilt it? What if you got a mechanic to hammer on the wheel again, and set the train back on the track? I mean… I ‘m not an expert on trains, yet I would attempt to spend hours repairing the train if the destination was worth it.
If the idea was worth my time and effort to be recorded, then I would work as hard as possible to get that train of thought chugging again, but not at the expense of my sleep. I will forcefully hold the idea in my memory until the morning, plop in my chair, and wait until it pours onto the page.
That’s right. I will wait for countless hours until my creative juices flow again and I can record my thoughts. Sometimes brute force is the key, persisting long enough to get something done.
Conclusion
If you wanna proceed further than just a single line, remind yourself that it’s a battle with your brain, but you are your brain. It is ultimately up to you and your own self control to stay focused and record your thoughts.