Use what you know - write - Angela Booth's Fab Freelance Writing Blog

A few years ago I coached a “blocked” writer.

She put it this way: “Something’s stopping me writing.”

So, being rather more naive then than I am now, I spent a week exchanging emails with her.

After every email message I sent, she’d send a longer message. Since my messages were taking me 20 minutes to write, I knew hers were taking half an hour or longer, so at the rate of three email messages a day, she was writing for 90 minutes a day. At least.

It made me grin – she was BLOCKED, was she? 🙂

The thrust of each message she sent in response to suggestions I made was, “Yes, but I already know that, and _________” Off she’d go, on a long explanation of how she knew whatever, and it wouldn’t work for her, because she was BLOCKED.

You don’t know until you know

Finally I lost all patience and called her on what she “knew.”

I told her that until she used what she knew, it wasn’t knowledge, it was information. You may know how to drive a car when you’re 15, because you’ve been watching others do it for years, but until you get behind the wheel and drive, you don’t KNOW at all.

I asked her to complete this sentence, “I know I am blocked, because…” and send me an 800 word essay on what “writer’s block” meant to her.

Don’t get caught in the information trap

There’s a huge amount of information on writing on the Web. However, unless you’re using what you know, you’re wasting precious time.

You can spend hours a day reading and thinking, and writing very little, because there’s always something else you need to “know”, before you can write. However, remember that you won’t know until you know – until you put information to work, so that it becomes knowledge.

You can only put information to work by writing… so write. 🙂

And the blocked writer? She wrote the essay, and from then on, kept writing. She’s now working on her third novel, and has just signed a contract for a nonfiction book. All she needed was someone to nudge her in the right direction.

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[tags]writing,write more,writing process,writing tips,writing skills,creativity,ideas,writer’s block[/tags]

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Angela Booth

Angela Booth is a copywriter, author published by major publishers, and writing teacher. She offers many guides, courses and classes to help writers to enhance their skills at her online store. She also provides inspiration and motivation for writers on her writing blogs. Angela has been writing successfully since the late 1970s, and was online in the 1980s, long before the birth of the Web. Her novels and business books have been widely published.