Recently, I had the great pleasure of chatting with notable Colorado author Mark Stevens, host of The Rocky Mountain Writer podcast. We chatted about writing and publishing, and I read an excerpt from my upcoming book, A Kiss Before Doomsday. Listen to the RMFW podcast here.
As I’m sure you know, I love sharing writing tips and productivity tips that anyone can use. In the podcast, I got the chance to talk about an acronym I use to help me write absolutely anything from a blog post to a novel. It’s CODE:
C = Collect
O = Organize
D = Draft
E = Edit
First, COLLECT all of your materials. Do your research, take notes, brainstorm ideas, and anything else you need to do to gather your raw materials and ideas.
Then ORGANIZE those ideas. Use an outline if you want. Or just put your ideas into sequential order, group them by topic, or use an inverted pyramid (most important to least important). Whatever works for you.
Write a DRAFT as quickly as you can. Keep going until you reach the end. Don’t worry about getting it right. Focus on getting it written down.
Finally, EDIT what you wrote. Polish it until it shines.
It helps if you can do each of these steps on separate days. On short projects (such as blog posts), you can probably knock everything out in one sitting. But the bigger the project, the more important is to break it up into separate baby steps.
I talked about all sorts of other useful, funny and strange stuff right here on the RMFW podcast. Thanks for listening!