A new post I wrote for work went up on the Brain Traffic blog yesterday. Continues the series on ecosystem mapping. I knocked this one out quickly, albeit late (sorry Bailey), but only after a lot of hemming and hawing. Sometimes I forget my own advice and just stare stubbornly at a blank screen, then get distracted by social media and forget that I’d even been trying to write. No good.
But I did get it done, thanks to my longtime thinking companion MindNode. Dumped some ideas there, quick, so I could see where I was trying to go. I’m more effective as a writer when I have a reference point. I think the habit started in school, when I didn’t really know anything about writing and would improve my papers by printing them out and then just rewriting them from the beginning as I looked at the original.
If I don’t have anything to reference, I’ll look at nothing. Really. If I’m just writing a journal entry or something, or doing some warm-up writing, I’ll stare off into space as I type. (This gets me odd looks at the coffee shop.) Looking at the keyboard trips me up, and watching what I type makes me want to edit it instead of continuing, so I just don’t even look at it.
The mindmap I made bears only a vague resemblance to the finished piece, but that’s not really the point. It was the just grease to unstick the wheel.