: Re: How to invoke my creative side without investing too much time? I suck at writing. There, I admitted it. More often than not, I find my self staring at a blank moleskine page, or the

@LarsenBagley300

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Your main problem/complaint seems to be that your thoughts don't automatically organize themselves. Take comfort. You are normal. Try the following (in order):

1) First, just get ideas down. I like to use FreeMind for this phase, and also a spiral-bound notebook that has no purpose except to jot down ideas. Note that "jotting down an idea" can run on for a while, several pages sometimes, but it is still very rough. This is the research and ideating phase.

2) Turn your FreeMind diagram and your jotted-down ideas into an outline. It is VERY important to outline in the proper manner. You do NOT write I, then A, then 1., then a., then 1), etc. Nooooo! You write I, II, III, IV, etc. Only then do you go back and put in A, B, C, etc. for your main points. And so on as you get more and more detailed. You do NOT try to flesh out the skeleton until you've got the whole skeleton. Otherwise, you lose the forest for the trees (sorry, mixing my metaphors here) and you get bogged down in a slough of despond (literary allusion, Google it). This is the organizing phase.

3) After you've got a nice detailed outline, then start writing sentences for each sub-point. You can also start pulling in paragraphs you may have in your "jotting-down" notebook. You might also want to talk against your outline, using a speech-to-text program. Don't stop to fix any mistakes in the machine transcription. Don't even look at it. Just keep talking. This is the "crappy first draft" stage.

4) Go back and do a first edit of what you've go so far. At this point, you're just trying to make it coherent. Don't worry about the perfect word or turn of phrase.

5) Go away from what you just wrote. Do something else.

6) Come back and do a final edit.

7) Post it; mail it; turn it in to the teacher. You'll never make it perfect.

One last note: Obviously, depending on the length and importance of your final written whatever, you can speed through some of these steps. But this should be your standard operating procedure.

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