Brain Fog

[cgardener]

Does anyone ever get on a roll, crank out a few very nice articles, then suddenly and unexpectedly get in a brain fog and not be able to do anymore writing that day? This was my best day yet for submitting articles, but around 4:00, I just dried up. I had done all I could do for the requests I was interested in, and I could not think of a topic for the life of me.

I went through all the recently sold material, even went over to Hubpages looking for requests to see if anything struck me, but nope.

I really wanted to do at least 8 articles today. I'm trying to work up to 10.

[DSWaltenburg]

Clearly, I do not work at the same rate of speed as everyone else!!! I'm lucky to get one GOOD one out per day.....realizing that I will NEVER make any money at this if I keep going at this speed.


For me, I kinda just right whatever pops in my head at the moment (on eHow), it's like my writing exercise for the day now, since it's too cold to sit outside in the mornings :( . Then, on the backside of eHow, their format and guidelines are so freakin' stupid and rigid and almost imbocilic, that when I write for THOSE assignments, I spend the majority of my time worrying about whether I'm doing something wrong.

Do you journal? (Besides the public blogs?), I mean, like actual handwriting in a notebook? Maybe just sit down every morning and start writing one word topics that run through your brain, then if you dry up later in the day, just go back and reread your journal entry for the day. Just freeform brain dump whatever's left over in your head after a night's sleep....stuff from your dreams, or whatever....I've got this book called Caffeine for the Creative Mind, it's full of ideas for jumpstarting creativity and flow for artists and writers. Maybe you can find a copy for cheapies on half.com or something? I would send you mine, but I'm not done with it yet :P

Or hey, go turn on the news, or public television. It might spark something.

[cgardener]

I don't have a t.v., but the journaling idea is good. I'm trying to do mostly requests right now, since I need the money, and there's a better chance at selling those.

I wrote a couple of Halloween articles, and one sold, but I think the other two are not lighthearted enough. We'll see if they disappear before the actual day. :)

I'm thinking of starting on Thanksgiving and Christmas now, because before you know it, they'll be here!

I was so full of ideas when I first got here, but none of those articles sold, and I need to concentrate on saleable material right now.

I must say that Ed has been whizzing along today with the approvals!

[Celeste Stewart]

Congrats on working toward a daily writing goal. That's an excellent way to become successful here. A couple things come to mind. First - give yourself the freedom to know when enough is enough for the day. If you did 8 good articles and you're stumped, exhausted, or otherwise not in the mood, let the day's work be over. You'll feel better and more inspired tomorrow.

As far as generating ideas, as writers I believe we're all naturally curious. What's striking your curiousity at the moment? For example, a moment ago I was thinking about my cat and how she started out as a feral beast and is now quite tame (after 8 years). Right there, there's at least one article idea - feral cats in the suburbs. You know how your mind jumps around, right? I also briefly thought about how my dog is named Elvis and my cat, Priscilla. Hmmn, maybe an article about choosing names for pets? Or what your pet's name says about you? Just five second nano-flashes that generated a couple of article ideas.

However, if you're serious about doing ten articles per day, then you need a more specific plan. That's 50 articles per week. Sure, you could jump around and rely on what strikes you at the moment but I think you'd be better served to sit down and brainstorm. Pick five general topics per week and set aside one hour each week to brainstorm. Let's say you want to cover pets, construction materials, gardening, computers, and personal finance on week one. That's one topic for each work day such as Monday - pets, Tuesday - construction materials, Wednesday - computers, and so on. (continued....)

[Celeste Stewart]

... (and grrrr, can I register my frustration with the forum's word limit and "you cannot make another post so soon after your last post" thing?)

Can you come up with ten topics for each category? Sure you can. In fact, you may find that you don't have enough days in the week to cover it all! Take pets for example:
1. How to trim a dog's toenails
2. Dental hygiene for dogs
3. Is it safe to dock a dog's tail?
4. Is it necessary to dock a dog's tail?
5. Cosmetic choices for dogs
6. Floppy or Perky - Should I Clip my Dog's Ears?
7. Home Flea Prevention Strategies
8. How to Give a Cat a Bath and Live to Tell about it.
9. Help! My dog has bad breath!
10. How to choose a veterinarian for your high strung dog

Those are completely off the top of my head and a bit rough, but you get the idea. Take some time, find a topic, and give yourself the freedom to put a bunch of ideas out there. Some may be lame but they provide you with other ideas that may be brilliant. Write down everything that comes to mind on your particular topic and then later pick out the ones that capture your imagination or feel marketable.

Hmmn, I believe there's a request for article ideas. Maybe I should send these :) Seriously, ideas are in your head just waiting for you to find them. Give yourself an hour and a blank piece of paper. I guarantee that you'll have more than enough ideas to roll with.

[Ed]

I suggest subscribing to a newspaper. Not your local one (sorry, local publications), but a national one. I somewhow get the WSJ for free, and while this one is expensive, I feel it would probably be worth it to pay for it. The ideas it's generated (that I haven't acted on), have been interesting. When reading an article, a certain point, reference to an expert/writer/entertainer, or an unanswered question makes me want to find out more.

Ex: An article by Margaret Atwood centered around debt, but made the point that the word "mortgage" is actually "death-pledge." A great article would explore similar words with loaded original meanings.

[Ed]

For those who set a daily writing goal, please allow yourself a separate submission goal. Articles should not be submitted the minute after writing. I suspect many writers do this, which means the articles haven't been proofread or polished. In addition, if a writer is hard-pressed to come up with another article, laziness can become apparent. We all *feel* lazy with writing sometimes, but what's easy most often isn't a best practice.

[melissan]

Floppy or Perky: Should I Clip My Dog's Ears?

I always feel so much better after reading the forums. I am told that I "think too much" and show signs of ADHD in that my thinking can fly at that rapid pace of writing down twenty ideas in five minutes. I am not saying that my ideas are all good and noteworthy, but just reading about the process some writers go through makes me smile. I never thought this hyper mind was a detriment and for writers, I guess it's not.

I don't have a dog, so I can't consider clipping his ears.

What Pets are Best for the Hyper-Allergic?
Can my ADD Son Handle a Puppy?
Alternatives for Children to Medication for ADHD.
Medication and the Elderly: Are they Overmedicated?
The Elderly and the High Cost of Medication: Options to Ensure Medication is Paid For.
Ensure: A Healthy Nutritional Alternative?
Alternative Medicine: The Use of Accupuncture to Treat Anxiety and Depression.
Is the Weather Making You Depressed? Seasonal Affective Disorder and Ways to Combat the Disease.
'Tis the Season: Great Party Ideas to Host a Happy Thanksgiving.
A Meal Without Nuts: Cooking for a Group While Keeping in Mind Food Allergies
....and then back to the top.

Five minutes. Not bragging, just showing how my mind works. What I lack is follow through. I can come up with an abundance of ideas but then get me to sit down and write them - Hah! (Ok, so that's the hyper part). Maybe we should start a post for article ideas that others can use at will?

Melissa

[DSWaltenburg]

Having ADD is fun :D Challenging......but still fun! We're good at spontaneous thought, the problem is in REMEMBERING it 5 seconds later! :)

In regards to Ed's suggestion about newspapers, you can sign up online for major metro newspapers like the New York Times, LA Times, etc.....usually for free (archives may include a fee). I get NYT and Mercury News (in Cali...). Also, if you're on a financial/investing bent, look into www.fool.com. Motley Fool. Financial Times is free to join, but you can only view 30 articles a month for free. There are SO many resources available for us, all you have to do is decide what topics you want to focus on.

Clipping ears and docking tails and ripping out dew claws is akin to medieval torture. Seriously. Should we clip off human ears just to make them appear more "Stately". Grr.

Sorry, my .0001 cents worth on that particular subject :D

[Celeste Stewart]

Another approach is to take your main topic, pets in this case, and apply it to different demographics. Pets and seniors, pets and babies, pets and toddlers, pets and teenagers, pets and the workaholic. You could come up with 30+ topics right there without much effort.

1. Great Pets for the Elderly
2. Pets to Avoid During the Toddler Years
3. Who will care for Fido when Junior goes to College?
4. Tips for Picking the Best Petsitter
5. Doggy Daycare
6. Hamsters, Rats, and Mynah Birds - Which Pets are Best for your Young Family?

Take it even further by creating a basic outline for each topic. If you plan on writing about different dog types, you might start with a list of types (small dogs, sporting dogs, big dogs, mutts) or breeds and then break it down:

Dog Type
1. Characteristics of [Dog Type]
2. Common problems with [dog type]
3. Rewards of owning [dog type]
4. Training your [dog type]
5. [dog type] rescue groups
6. Grooming tips for [dog type]
7. Nutrition tips for [dog type]

See how that works? Depending on your preferences, you could take a similar approach for every dog breed in existence. Shoot, if you started with just poodles, St. Bernards, and Rottweilers, you'd have 21 article ideas right there - and that's just for starters. I don't recommend making it a cookie cutter template - but use something like this to jumpstart your brainstorming session if it helps.

Keep an open mind and you'll find these ideas may generate other ideas - go with those too. You might like the "Tips for Choosing a Petsitter" topic and then tackle "How to Find a Daycare Provider for your Elderly Mother." You might like the article about who takes care of Fido when Junior goes to college and then tackle articles covering the transistions that college-bound kids and their families must make. It all spiders out..... So, a blend of structure plus free-form stream of consciousness brainstorming can get you jumpstarted.

[Celeste Stewart]

Here I am again. The benefit of spidering is that you can carve a niche but also not get stuck in it. For example, as you're writing about dog types and also spidering out based on some of your ideas that relate elsewhere, you are also exposing yourself to a wider potential audience. Your dog articles may be doing okay but all of a sudden, you may become the go-to writer for articles addressing college issues. Who knows? That's what makes it so much fun! Go for it!

[MediaMaven]

Sometimes I hit a wall where I just can't seem to form a decent sentence anymore, but I'm never stuck for new ideas! I keep several text files in the root of my "Articles" directory full of ideas. If I have a large niche that I write a lot for it gets a file of its own (ex: diet-and-weight-loss-ideas.txt), otherwise it goes in "misc-article-ideas.txt". I do find that the idea inspirations come and go, and that's why it's important to write down the article ideas when you're on a roll.

I get a lot of my article ideas while I'm surfing around and participating in forums on the topics that interest me. Only a writer can spend hours surfing the web and call it market research! Forums are particularly good because they are full of people looking for information, and offering information is exactly what an article does.

Even better than forums, I'll share my top-secret goldmine for topic ideas: Yahoo Answers. It's the same concept as the forums; people have problems or questions and are looking for information. You can get a lot of different angles on the same topic there. An example from my own favorite niche is the "flat stomach". One person will just want to know what exercises to do to get a flat stomach, another person will want a flat stomach after pregnancy, and yet another person will want to know the fastest way to flatten her stomach because she has a hot date this weekend.

I hope that helps pull you out of your fog, good luck on your goals!

[cgardener]

Wow! Great ideas, one and all! Since my best topic is gardening, and it's getting to be winter in most of the country, I'm trying to think of things you can do in the winter in your garden. I wrote two articles on winterizing your garden, and put them on my blog, and listed for usage here.

I don't subscribe to any online newspapers, but I do read the news on CNN every morning. I was looking for a free program to do something the other day, and ran across some great freeware stuff, so I started writing articles on freeware. I was aggravated, because I didn't know anything about computers, and those articles sell so well, but I DO know about freeware, because it's all I use.

I also agree with what you say about not writing when you're tired. I always tend to write long, meaningless sentences when I do that, that make no sense to anyone but me. But sometimes, I swear, when I try to revise, I can't think of any clear way to put them. When that happens, I just put it aside for a few days. I have a bad habit of not letting something sit for a day or two before I submit it. I need to start doing that. My friend who writes calls it "marinating". Hey, if it works for steak, it could work for articles!

I'm nowhere near my goals for today. I just am not in the writing mood, so I'm doing research on different topics. Since I do this full time, I can pick any day to do my articles, and sometimes writing one or two on my "off" days is better for me.

[HayleyWriter]

Hi

I also keep a list handy on my USB drive. It's a simple word document entitled writing ideas for constant content. Whenever I get a brainwave but don't have time to write about it, I add it to my list. Then whenever I do experience brain fog I open the document and scan the two or so pages of title ideas I've come up with. I also give myself at least ten minutes of brainstorming at the start of a writing session (when my brain is fresh) each week to come up with a few ideas to add in to the list. I find it sometimes handy to visit a newsagency and browse through magazines of different types to see what they are writing about too.

I do agree with ed, that submitting straight after writing is a bad idea. I'm giving myself a day at least between writing and proofreading and submitting each article now. It is definitely working because the rejections have stopped and my articles are getting better. I'm selling more articles and best of all, I am selling them at higher prices too.

Last hint: whenever I have brain fog and I still want to write more articles, I get my butt out of my computer chair and go for a walk for at least 20 minutes. That way I clear my head, get some exercise and come back refreshed. I find I am often more productive in my writing after a good walk!

[MediaMaven]

From a fellow gardening enthusiast, here's a braindump of some winter gardening topics:
- cleaning up the garden
- planting fall bulbs
- planting garlic for over-winter
- growing into the winter season (kale, carrots, parsley)
- cleaning, oiling, and organizing tools for next year
- bringing outdoor plants inside (personally I bring in my peppers before the frost and they keep producing in my sunporch for at least a month)
- extending the season with coldframes
- it's not too late to journal your garden (which helps you plan for next year)
- winter is the time to order seed catalogs and plan ahead for next year
- what do you do with a compost bin in the winter?

Wow, ten ideas... Maybe I should start thinking about the gardening niche?