ProBlogger: 3 Places Your Best Ideas Are Hiding In Your First Drafts

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3 Places Your Best Ideas Are Hiding In Your First Drafts Posted: 03 May 2015 07:00 AM PDT Many bloggers write drafts and then ‘edit’ their writing – but ‘revising’ is a little different and is definitely a good exercise. Today I came across a great short video by Beth Dunn from Hubspot that was recorded earlier in the year at the Inbound conference. In the video Beth talks about ‘fixing your writing’ by learning to ‘revise’ your work. There’s lots of take home points in this video but what resonated with me most were the three points Beth makes about the places in your first drafts that your best ideas often hide (at around the 9.30 mark). These best ideas (or the ‘screws’ or the ‘points’ as Beth calls them) are often the things that you need to pay particular attention to and that you should make the centre pieces of your revised drafts. These points regularly can be found: The Change The place in our writing where we hit a fork in the road and it changes course in some way. Some writers call this the pivot. For me in my writing I find myself regularly feeling tempted to take a tangent in my writing halfway through a post and have trained myself to take note while I writing of these moments because they are often golden moments that can trigger me to completely change what I’m writing or that lead to followup posts. The Laugh The moment while you’re writing when while you’re writing something just ‘lurches out onto the page’ and you laugh out loud and wonder where it came from. This reminds me of a post I wrote back in 2011 about ‘Listening to Your Inner Crazy Voice‘ where I identified that I’ve noticed that many times my best ideas have made me either laugh or gasp when I’ve had them. As I wrote back then: In each case, the reaction I had straight after having the idea was to either laugh or gasp. In most cases, the reaction was the same when I told those around me. I'm learning that the laugh and gasp reactions are good. They tell you that you've thought of something a little out of the box—something that will, at the very least, get noticed. The End The vast majority of your great ideas will be found at the end of your first draft. This resonated with me very strongly. I regularly find that after banging out a post that the crux of what I say is in my conclusion. This is logical in many ways – we spend a lot of time exploring an idea in our writing and after all that grappling with the topic we refine our idea to the point where they’re a lot better when we’ve finished than when we started. In some ways the first draft becomes the opportunity for us to think out loud to help us get to ‘the point’ or the idea. The mistake at this point is simply to publish what we’ve written. Rather – treat your first draft as the raw material for what comes next. Take that idea that you’ve refined and make it the centrepiece of your writing. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger 3 Places Your Best Ideas Are Hiding In Your First Drafts

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