How I Tackle a Big Writing Project

Writing something big is one of the things people tend to procrastinate on the most.

It doesn’t matter what the writing project might be: writing a novel, a non-fiction book, a long article, a thesis paper, a bunch of pages for a website. Whatever it is, the writer will find a way to procrastinate.

I count myself among those happy procrastinators. But in the last 7 years, I’ve managed to write a couple thousand of blog posts, a print book, about 10 ebooks, and numerous online courses, not to mention a couple of novel attempts totaling 200K words. I’ve figured out a thing or two that works.

To help my fellow procrastinators writers, I thought I’d share how I tackled an ebook I decided to write last week about Letting Go (I’m releasing it for free next week on my birthday, as a gift to you guys).

I wrote the book in two days last week, and edited it in another day this week.

Here’s what I did.

First, I defined and thought through my problem. I’ve been working through a process of letting go that actually helps with pretty much any problem, if you’re willing to do it. This is what I wanted to share with you guys, to help you through difficulties in your life, small and large. So I imagined my typical reader, and what his or her life might be like. I walked through a typical day, from waking up to work to socializing and taking care of responsibilities. What problems might someone like that face?

I tried to visualize how I’d deal with those problems, using the letting go method that’s been working for me. What steps would I take? What doubts and concerns would I have about the process? What would stop me from doing it? What would be helpful to know?

Then I started jotting down notes. After visualizing all of that, I had some ideas. Not organized, just random stuff. So I jotted notes down on paper, in a notebook, and also on a text document. No order, just get things down. I can organize later.

I kept thinking through all of this, for a few days. In the shower, while I was walking, while I meditated, during workouts, as I ate. It was foremost on my mind, and as I thought of ideas and problems, I’d jot them down.

Big step: I committed. I told an ebook designer that I’d have the manuscript to him by Wednesday, so that he’d have enough time to have it done by the end of the month. In my mind, I was now fully committed, instead of just thinking about doing it. This is a huge step, one of the most important. You have to watch your mind trying to get out of being committed, and don’t let it run.

Now that I was committed, I set aside big blocks of time to work on the book. I knew that I’d never get it done unless I made the time, so I canceled appointments, said no to meetings, did a bunch of work so my work schedule was clear. Marked off the writing blocks on my calendar.

Next I chunked out the writing. There’s no way to write 10,000 words at once. You can only write them one at a time, one sentence at a time, one paragraph at a time. And yet our minds think of the work as one big thing, one scary thing, and so we procrastinate. Writing a paragraph isn’t hard, but writing a book seems terrifying. So I try not to think of the entire project — there’s no way for me to actually tackle the project. A short chapter, or a section of that chapter — I can do that in one small chunk of work.

So I decided to keep the chapters very short (they’re more readable that way) and work on one short chapter at a time. Not think about the entire thing, just the one piece of work in front of me. Something doable, not scary. That seems obvious, but you’d be surprised how often we procrastinate because we’re thinking of the entire project.

Then I procrastinated. No, I’m not immune to procrastination. It happens to me, inevitably. I put off the writing by working on other, more comfortable tasks. But I found several things that worked this time (and many other times):

I told a friend that I was procrastinating, and committed to getting to work on the book. I texted him later, as I successfully wrote the book, and that felt great.I reminded myself of why I was writing it. It wasn’t for my vainglory, but to help people. I pictured the people I was trying to help, and visualized their pain, felt it in my chest. I could feel anger, frustration, sadness, grief. I knew this was something I wanted to help with, if at all possible. And so this was my intention in writing: to help people in pain. And this is a huge motivator.I examined my fears. My fears were about failing, about not getting the book done, about not doing it well, about people not liking it. These were all rooted in ideals, fantasies. This is a process I was actually writing about in the book, so I used it on myself, and it worked. I let go of the ideals, and worked without expectations, trying to be in the moment as I wrote, being grateful for that moment.I would watch my mind try to run. Fear still came up — fear of discomfort, of doing something hard. My mind wanted to go check social media or Hacker News or blogs I like to read. I saw my mind trying to run, but I didn’t let it. I stayed with the writing.

Once I got the ball rolling, it got much easier. I just had to write a single sentence. That’s all. That’s easy as hell. So I did, and once I did, the second sentence was tremendously easier. Then the third, even easier. The first chapter started to come, then other chapters came one after the other.

I worked in little bits, took breaks, worked again. I would sit down to write, and do it for 10-15 minutes. Maybe a bit longer if I was on a roll. Then get up, stretch, get some water, maybe clean or take care of some other household task. This allowed my mind to take a break. It got my blood circulating again, which is good for the brain. Then I’d sit down to write again. Repeat, over and over.

I worked for about five hours that first day, once I got the ball rolling, then 3-4 hours the next day, and wrote 10K words in that time.

It felt amazing.

I sent the draft to some friends. I asked them to read it over if they had time, and if they had any suggestions or found any typos, to let me know. If you send it to 10 friends, about 3-4 will get back to you with changes. That’s a good number.

I spent a day editing and revising, and wrote a new chapter based on the suggestion of one friend. I tend to put off the editing but I had a deadline of Wednesday, so that pushed me to get on top of it. I edited, revised, edited.

And sent the manuscript, triumphantly, to my ebook designer.

I can’t wait to share it with all of you next week.

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8 Common Novel Writing Mistakes Even Good Writers May Make

Let’s look at some common novel writing mistakes which any writer can make, no matter how many novels you’ve written. When I wrote my first novel, way back in the 1970s, a publisher bought it, and I thought I had it made. I knew how to write novels! That joy soon turned to horror when I discovered that writing one novel hardly made me an expert. Over the years, I’ve made many mistakes.

Vital tip: there’s really just ONE mistake you can make when writing a novel: you fail to finish it. All of your mistakes can be fixed, except that one.

Let’s look at some common mistakes so you can avoid them, or fix them.

Whether this is your first novel or your fiftieth, your head’s packed with rules when you write. Do this; don’t do that. All those rules will cripple your writing. When you write, just write. Leave the rules for later, during the editing process.

If you try to edit while you write, not only will you stifle your creativity, you’ll end up with writer’s block. Yes, some writers can edit while they’re writing. They’ll write a scene, and will edit it immediately. Perhaps this is your writing process. If that’s so, you’ll know it, because you’re energized by it. On the other hand, if you start doubting yourself while you edit, complete the first draft, and then edit.

Tolstoy started Anna Karenina with the sentence: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

He didn’t write about happy people. Happy people, no matter how wonderful they are in real life, are boring in fiction. If everyone in your novel is happy, your readers won’t be–they have no reason to read. By all means, have a happy ending, but make sure that your characters suffer along the way; make them work for their happy ending.

Tip: no one gets along in your novel. Just as in real life, we may love people, but we nevertheless dislike them occasionally. Think about your relationship with your partner, or your siblings. How often do you agree with everything they do or say?

Make sure you have conflict on every page of your novel.

Read in your genre. Currently in romance fiction, billionaires are hot. If you want to write a romance featuring a hero who’s a billionaire, by all means do so. However, remember that readers who read these stories read a lot of them. They know what the tropes are. Even though you need to meet your reader’s expectations for their genre, you also need to surprise them.

Read novels’ descriptions and reader reviews on Amazon. The reviews will tell you what readers enjoy, and what they don’t. Avoid making your novel too similar to others, so that you can avoid being predictable.

Every genre of fiction has its cliches. Avoid them, if you can. Sometimes they’re unavoidable. What would historical romance be without the rake who’s transformed by love? Shady ladies who have hearts of gold are staples in many genres too.

If you must use a cliche character like the rebel with or without a cause, give the cliche a twist.

If your heroine is a whiner, the reader will toss your book against the wall, or will delete it from her Kindle. Your leads need to be likable–people who deserve their happy ending. They need big problems, and the strength to win out when everything seems against them. They need to be admirable–even your villains need one admirable trait; otherwise, they’re cartoons.

If you’re bored with your book, your readers will be, too.

Raymond Chandler’s advice was: “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”

If your carefully plotted novel puts you to sleep, bring on the man with the gun.

It’s tempting to jump onto the currently hot genre, whatever it may be. If you can’t read paranormal novels (vampires make you feel ill, and you think shape shifters are ridiculous) you won’t write a readable paranormal novel.

Write in genres which you read with enjoyment.

In your first draft, your only job is to write through to the end of your novel. In your second draft, it’s time to think about your characters, and ensure that each character acts and speaks like himself.

Writing a novel is a huge, but very rewarding, undertaking. It’s easy to make novel writing mistakes. As soon as you become aware of them, do your best to correct them.

Before we launch into this article, let’s take a moment to remember that no piece of writing will ever be perfect. Common Writing Mistakes and How to Amend Them

Angela Booth is a copywriter, author and writing teacher. She’s the author of many books, including Making the Internet Work For Your Business, and shares insights on her Creativity Factory Blog. Angela writes advertising copy, and ghostwrites both fiction and nonfiction for clients. Thousands of writers benefit from Angela’s writing blogs and free ezine of writing tips which she publishes each week.

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3 Ways to Harness the Mental Power of Writing

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Are You Making Dumbass Writing Mistakes? Here’s How to Avoid Them

There are some fabulous articles here on Lifehack that can help you improve as a writer, with tips and tricks ranging from ensuring that you write something every single day, to keeping a notebook handy for random inspirational thoughts. These are great suggestions and will undoubtedly assist you in building confidence with regard to your writing, but they won’t be of significant help if you haven’t mastered the essentials.

Basically, you can decorate a house as prettily as you like, but if the foundation is weak and the walls have been made of pool noodles and saltines, you’re in trouble.

This was the #1 tip in Leo B.’s article, and I’m going to reiterate it most heartily.

I grant that there are some fabulous pieces floating about on the web that you can read, but anyone with access to a keyboard can post an article; whether they can differentiate between homonyms is a different story entirely.

Published books tend to go through a rather vigorous proofreading/editing process, which generally ensures that the work is quite polished by the time it’s sucked into your retinas. Writers and their editors work together to create cohesive works of often staggering genius, and the more you immerse yourself in good writing, the more your own work will end up improving as a result. We often emulate that which we admire (even subconsciously), and it’s not unusual to see parallels between one author’s work and another’s.

Kurt Vonnegut took cues from Mark Twain, Amy Tan has admitted that she’s been influenced by Isabel Allende, and J.K. Rowling’s work has echoes of Jane Austen. My own influences are drawn from Bill Bryson, Anais Nin, A.S. Byatt, and Terry Pratchett, but I’m a bit deranged like that.

Most of us haven’t delved into the basics of writing composition since well before high school, and for some of us, that was a very long time ago.

Education has changed a great deal over the years, and the average person today would just look at you blankly if you asked them to define a misplaced modifier or define the subject and predicate in a sentence. The use of proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling isn’t as rigidly enforced as it was in the past, and many people manage to reach high levels of education and employment without ever sorting out “your” VS “you’re”. Hell, I’ve seen PhD candidates commit some of the most flagrant acts of apostrophe abuse you can imagine, and these were College professors.

In addition to revisiting these building blocks, it’s also a good idea to touch upon tips on how to structure both full articles, and the paragraphs therein. If you feel the inclination to touch up your skills in this regard, consider checking out some of these books to help you along:

I can honestly say that the daily tips I’ve received from this website have helped my writing and editing work exponentially. With lighthearted examples and fun quizzes, each email prods at your brain-meat to flesh out areas where you might have difficulty, and helps to sharpen your existing skills.

Daily Writing Tips

SEE ALSO: 12 Tips for Better Business Writing

This is a great way to ensure that your work flows well, and to check for any awkward sentences and spelling errors. By reading a piece aloud, you can see where pauses are needed so you can tuck in some commas, and you’ll notice if your sentences are halting because they’re too short, or if you’re rambling and need to do some restructuring.

Here’s a tip: if you find that there are issues with your writing that keep popping up—whether this is discovered through your own editing or because it’s been pointed out to you by another—write that issue on a large sheet of paper and tack it up above your desk. Since it will be in your line of sight, you’ll be reminded every time you glance upwards so you can to avoid it in future.

We’re all on a journey as we plod through life, and as we learn various lessons and sharpen our skills, we’ll undoubtedly improve in our chosen fields.  It’s important to recognize that by leaving room to make mistakes, we’re also leaving room to grow.

Every single one of us will cock up eventually (often, I would think, especially in my case), but rather than beating ourselves up over errors, we can see these screw-ups as learning opportunities.

As mentioned, there isn’t a single writer out there who couldn’t improve on some level—including me.  Muphry’s Law  (deliberate misspelling) dictates that I will have inevitably screwed something up in this article, and I certainly have a long way to go before I consider my work to be as flawless as I’d like, but both self-awareness and the ability to analyse one’s own work critically are of vital importance for any writer, every step of the way. Keep in mind that there’s always room for growth, treat that ever-evolving learning process with humour and humility, and keep writing.

SEE ALSO: The Ultimate Writing Productivity Resource

Featured photo credit: Pen and paper - IS011-054 via Shutterstock Lana Winter-Hébert has been writing professionally for over a decade, and now divides her time between writing, editing, and doing collaborative projects with Winter-Hébert: the design studio she runs with her husband. Best described as "endearingly eccentric", she spends any spare moments wrestling with knitting projects, and devouring novels by obscure Czech writers. A Toronto native, she now resides in rural Quebec with her Sir and their animal companions.

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Top Writing and Blogging Tips from Lifehack Experts

You want to start blogging, and that’s great! So, where do you start?  Do you really need a blog?  What topic are you going to write about? Where are you going to get ideas? How you are going to get it all done?

I have gathered a few great tips from Lifehack.org blogging experts to get you started. There are a great many amazing bloggers who have created their best lifestyles on the foundation of blogging, so these questions should form the foundation of the blog you’re planning.

“Blogging is the new poetry of our time!” -  Author Unknown

Why am I advocating adding another thing to your daily task list? Why am I telling you why you need a blog?

More importantly, it’s not something that should be seen as adding to what you’re doing—on the contrary, blogging (if done well), can be the most productive thing you do all day, and can even take the place of many of your daily “to-do”s. You might need to step out of your comfort zone, but trust me—it’s worth it.

From 10 Reasons Why You Need A Blog

What keeps most bloggers motivated and productive is the reminder of why they are doing what they are doing. Most of us started out with a mission: a vision to share our skills, knowledge or experiences with the world in the hope that they can make a difference in the lives of others. Reconnect with that passion daily, hang a quote about it over your desk if necessary, and when you realize you have gone off track, look up and get back to writing that good content that will make you not just the most productive, but the best blogger on the block.

From How to Become the Most Productive Blogger on the Block by Ciara Conlon.

Just as there are days when you struggle to come up with something to blog about, there are also days when you have so many ideas that you can’t possibly cover them all.  When these days come around, make sure you write down all your ideas, either down on paper or in a file saved on your computer.  When you aren’t motivated or can’t think of something “good” to blog about, consult your list—you might find yourself inspired again.

From How to Work Through Blog Burn Out

This is what a “normal” day could look like for me:

Wake up at 6. Try to get two or three blog posts finished.Go to work at 8.Work until lunch. Try to write 1,000 words (on anything: blogs, books, etc.)Work until 5. On the way home, brainstorm and plan the evening’s writing goals.Write until 8 or 9 pm (I like to do this in Starbucks, because everyone loves to make fun of writers in Starbucks).Go to bed.

From How to Maintain a Blog AND a Full-Time Job

When you have all the time in the world for work, you end up using all that time to work. If you resign yourself to the fact you have the entire day to finish your workload, it will literally take the entire day to finish. It just happens to work that way.

I can speak from personal experience—I work better with time constraints, and you probably do too. If I limit my working time to 4 hours, I’m betting I’ll get all the work done. I’ll find a way to.

From Freelance Blogging: Why You Should Schedule

Now, with a great foundation and some helpful tips like these, you too will soon be on your way to being a awesome blogger!   Find your passion, find your rhythm, and share your most epic stories.

Featured photo credit:  A young main pointing at a computer screen via Shutterstock

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Great moments in letter writing

A letter — be it handwritten or typed — feels like an unpremeditated revelation, a glimpse into the writer’s subconscious. Letters are, also, often rooted to the place where they were written: a cozy armchair, a backyard hammock, the corner desk of a classroom, a train. It’s this physical and temporal presence that enables a special kind of opening-up, even when the recipient is a stranger.

Hannah Brencher knows the letter’s power. Her organization, The World Needs More Love Letters, facilitates letter-writing between strangers. In today’s heartfelt talk, given during the New York leg of the TED Talent Search, Brencher explains how she found this unique calling. Because her family has always communicated by letter, when she found herself depressed after college, she did the only thing she could think of — she penned pages and left them in libraries and cafes where strangers could chance upon them. The idea snowballed into a global exchange.

“Most of these letters have been written by people who have never known themselves loved on a piece of paper,” says Brencher in her talk. “They’re the ones from my generation. We have grown up in a world that is paperless, and where some of our best conversations have happened upon a screen. We have learned to diary our pain onto Facebook and we speak swiftly in 140 characters or less. But what if it’s not about efficiency?”

Brencher’s talk deeply resonated when we posted it on the TED Talent Search website. One commenter declared, “Hannah is an anachronism, a much-needed reminder of our need to slow down and pay attention. Outstanding! I wonder if she needs a Nana…”

Before Twitter, before Facebook, before Gmail and AIM, there were ink and paper. There were people who dedicated time to writing correspondences, and then waited for a reply. After the jump, excerpts from five of the most delightful, beautiful or simply intimate letters we’ve come across.

1. William James, a psychologist and philosopher (and brother to the writer Henry James), penned a letter to his wife, Alice James, from Vienna on September 24, 1882:

Dear, perhaps the deepest impression I’ve got since I’ve been in Germany is that made on me by the indefatigable beavers of old wrinkled peasant women, striding like men through the streets, dragging their carts or lugging their baskets, minding their business, seeming to notice nothing, in the stream of luxury and vice, but belonging far away, to something better and purer. Their poor, old, ravaged and stiffened faces, their poor old bodies dried up with ceaseless toil, their patient souls make me weep.[…]All the mystery of womanhood seems incarnated in their ugly being—the Mothers! the Mothers! Ye are all one! Yes, Alice dear, what I love in you is only what these blessed old creatures have.

2. In 2009, after Barack Obama was elected for the first time, Bill Adler published a book of kids’ letters to their president. So much of the writing in this book is moving (or hilarious); one example comes from Kiana, a 12-year-old from Anderson, South Carolina.

As a Black female, I’m going to try to be the first woman president, and the first Black woman president at that—that is, if no one beats me to it.

3. In an 1897 editorial in New York’s Sun, journalist Francis Pharcellus Church (anonymously) replied to a concerned eight-year-old, who had written to ask whether Santa Claus exists. This letter has rightly become famous—and inescapable during the holidays, when it’s printed and posted every year.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished. […]The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. […]Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

4. In 1882, several years before they married, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, from Vienna:

If only I knew what you are doing now. Standing in the garden and gazing out into the deserted street? Ah, I am no longer passing by to press your hand, the magic carpet that carried me to you is town, the winged horses which gracious fairies used to send, even the fairies themselves, no longer arrive, magic hoods are no longer obtainable, the whole world is so prosaic, all it asks is: “What is it you want, my child? You shall have it in time.” “Patience” is its only magic word. And in saying so forgets how things get lost when we cannot have them then and there, when we have to pay for them with our own youth.

5. On a book tour in 1942, the writer Vladimir Nabokov wrote letters to his wife, Vera Nabokov. In November, on a stop in St. Paul, Minnesota, he wrote:

Yesterday after the trip into the country I went, having got awfully bored, to the cinema and came back on foot—I walked for more than an hour and went to bed around eight. On the way a lightning bolt of undefined inspiration ran right through me—a passionate desire to write, and to write in Russian. And yet I can’t. I don’t think anyone who hasn’t experienced this feeling can really understand its torment, its tragedy. English in this sense is an illusion and an ersatz. In my usual condition, i.e. busy with butterflies, translations, or academic writing, I myself don’t fully register the whole grief and bitterness of my situation.

I am healthy, eating plenty, taking my vitamins, and read the newspapers more than usual now that the news is getting rosier. St. Paul is a stupefyingly boring city, only owls at the hotel, a bar girl who looks like Dasha; but my apartment is charming.

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The 5 Best Writing Apps for the iPad

So you’ve decided to start writing on your iPad, be it the original model or the shiny new iPad. You’ve made the call to use it not just as a consumption device, but as a creative device. You begin to look for the usual suspcets, but Word doesn’t exist for the iPad and Apple’s Pages is something you could probably avoid if you’re willing to look around a little bit.

Or…you could just take a look below and get a taste of what I consider to the 5 best writing apps for the iPad.

Write without distraction. That’s the whole idea behind iA Writer, which first appeared on the Mac and has since made its way to both the iPad (and very recently, the iPhone). If you’re looking for a writing app that has very little in the way of customization, then this is the app for you. It’s pleasant on the eyes and keeps you focused on the task at hand – writing. And it syncs across platforms using eitehr Dropbox or iCloud, so you can write on whatever platforms you have ia Writer installed on. That’s pretty darn seamless.

Simplenote is a fantastic app that will allow you to do the same in terms of syncing that iA Writer does. But Simplenote is generally viewed as an app used for notetaking more than writing. Still, with its ubiquitous nature and cross-platform capabilities, Simplenote is among the best at letting you get the words out of your head and onto the screen. Any screen.

Writing Kit may not look as pretty as iA Writer, but it has a ton of bells and whistles built right in. The app has a browser integrated right within the app, allowing for research and quick linking where needed. It also allows for export into a variety of apps, including Things and OmniFocus – a great boon for the writers out there who happen to be right into productivity as well (ahem). The fact that Writing Kit allows writers to use Markdown syntax (as does ia Writer – and Simplenote when you bring something like nvALT into the mix), syncs to Dropbox and features a plethora of options for users puts it as a bit of a dark horse on this list. But a very worthy addition all the same.

4. PlainText

If you’re looking for something clean and simple, PlainText has got you covered. It’s not as feature-rich or as pretty to look at as some of the others on this list, but it does what it is supposed to do: help you get writing done. The team behind it also developed the very populat WriteRoom (Hog Bay Software), so they’ve got experience in this realm. It does allow for syncing via Dropbox and is perhaps the most frictionless app on this list because of its stripped-down nature.

The new kid on the iOS block, Byword has been around on the Mac for some time. Now available for both the iPhone and iPad, it brings much of what the Mac app had to the mobile platform. Featuring Markdown support, syncing in the cloud, and an interface that balances feature set, focus and function, Byword already makes this list based on my limited time with it. Those using Byword on the Mac should jump into using it on the iPad to create a continuum in their writing workflow, and the consistency across all platforms is what makes this one a winner in my books during my brief look at it for the iPad.

There are others to consider (Notesy immediately comes to mind), but hopefully with this guide you’ll be able to find the writing app for your iPad that best suits you. Because there’s nothing worse than playing around with writing tools rather than actually writing with them

(Photo credit: Contemporary Digital Tablet… via Shutterstock)

Mike Vardy is a writer, speaker, and "productivityist". You can read more of his writing and learn more about him at Vardy.me, and he can be found on Twitter as @mikevardy.

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Tried, Tested and True: 3 Ways to Get Writing Done

If you’re a writer, then becoming disciplined with your writing is one of your biggest challenges. It’s not something that you tackle once and then never have to worry about again. It’s an ongoing battle. and you have have to have a ton of weapons at the ready in order to take it on each and every day.

That said, if you’re not a writer by trade and simply want to use writing as means to express yourself (online or off), then discipline is something you’ll need to have to keep it up. As someone who has trasitioned from writing as a hobby to a career, I’ve had my struggles with this in both realms. And I’ve conquered them over and over again because I’ve had the willpower and determination to make it through.

How have I done this?

While I’ve tried several tactics to combat a lack of discipline and find a way to get writing done, I’ve found that there are really 3 ways to get your writing done that can either work in tandem or independently. I’ve used all of these consistently throughout my time spent writing — both as a hobby and as a career — and the results have been the same: I get writing done.

When I first started to become more serious about my writing, I dismissed the notion of setting aside specific time for writing. I thought that if I wrote as the ideas came to me then I’d have a much better success rate in terms of creating great written work. I was way off base on that.

While it’s important to capture your ideas as they come to you – I’ve captured ideas using a variety of methods during my writing career – you can’t just pick up and write whenever. You need to block out time to write. It doesn’t matter if you do it early in the morning or in the wee hours of the evening – but you need to set out specific times to flesh out your ideas and get the writing done.

I’ve discussed my current writing schedule before, but as a writing hobbyist my schedule was set up as follows:

Wake up/Daily Routine: 7 am to 8 amWork: 8:30 am to 5:30 pm (including commute)Dinner: 6 pm to 7 pmTime with kids before bed: 7 pm to 8 pmTime with wife before we did our own things: 8 pm to 9 pmWriting: 9:30 pm to 11:30 pm (never less than this amount of time, often more)Bed: No later than 1 am

On weekends, I’d spend one day doing absolutely no writing (we called this Family Day) and the other doing more than my 2 hours – often I’d get in about 4 hours on that day. As a result of putting a system like this in place, I built up a great portfolio of work that landed me more and more writing work that not only paid, but were in my areas of interest. And now I’m a full time writer. Making time for your words not only will instill self-discipline like nothing else, it can lead you to a writing career if that’s what you want.

There’s no right time of day to do this, but you’d better set aside a “write time of day” or you’ll have a much harder time getting the words out of you. I cannot stress this enough.

Scheduling your writing is crucial, but you need to have a place to go when that time arrives. Having a place to do your writing is like having a touchstone for your work; it’s a sacred place you go to where the words flow out of you. It doesn’t have to be serene, it doesn’t have to be in the home, it doesn’t have to be a huge setup. But it does have to be there.

I’ve tried a ton of different places, an entirely separate “pseudo-office” in the basement, a standing desk in our large walk-in closet and a larger area in the main part of the house. None of them were necessarily right for me, but I found that the further removed I was from the rest of the house the less friction I had in getting my writing done. My standing desk was ideal for podcasting or talking out my ideas, but not so much for the act of writing. The basement setup felt as if I’d been banished to dungeon to do my work, so I didn’t enjoy going down there. That had an impact on my writing.

Now I’ve got a very comfortable writing chair and a Levenger lap desk in the master bedroom that suits me best as my “write place” – and it works best for a number of reasons:

It has a door, giving me privacy when I need it.It is bright, with a sliding door out to our back deck.It doesn’t “feel” like an office, yet it acts like one during the day.It is in the back of the house, furthest from the reaches of noise.It’s easily accessible.

Create a place for you to do your writing. Work within the limits you have for now and then adjust as needed. But remember that adjusting your writing space isn’t actually getting the writing done, so don’t get caught up in the “where” over the “why” and “what” because they are the most important factors.

This is where you can really get caught up in fiddling. Don’t fall victim to that.

Don’t experiment or tinker too much once you’ve got the right tools in place. Chances are you’ve already been writing using some sort of tools, so stick with those until you get in the habit of scheduling your time to write. Outside of that scheduled time, look for tools that will improve how you get the words out without barriers that keep you from that. Again, the “why” and “what” are far more important.

I use different tools for different forms of writing. On my MacBook Air, I use Byword for weblog writing, Scrivener for longer form writing. On my iPad, it’s Writing Kit. I use index cards to capture ideas, along with my iPhone and Evernote. All of these tools help me get my writing done more effectively and efficiently.

I can’t tell you what tools are right for you. But what I can say is that the real “write tool” is you. Writers have been writing well before computers, typewriters and even paper came to be, so keep that in mind when picking out tools that will help you become a better writer. Because no tool can do that.

Think of it this way: These tools are the drill bits. You’re the drill.

All of these have a way of leading you to The Write Mind, and that’s where you need to be to put out the best words to paper or screen that you possibly can on an ongoing basis.

Do right by you and your writing with these 3 foolproof methods, and you’ll create better and better written work each and every time. Keep at it and calling on self-discipline will happen easier over time.

And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

(Photo credit: Once Upon a Time via Shutterstock)

Mike Vardy is a writer, speaker, and "productivityist". You can follow him on Twitter, listen to him regularly on his podcast, ProductiVardy, and read more from him at MikeVardy.com and at Vardy.me.

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The Art of Nurturing Your Writing Ideas

Photo credit: J. Paxon Reyes (CC BY-NC 2.0)

In my previous post at Lifehack, I wrote about the different means of finding writing ideas. But what if you already have a lot of great ideas? How will you nurture these ideas so that they will blossom into a fantastic blog post or great content?

The key here is you need to know how to organize disparate ideas to write useful and well-written pieces.

There are so many ways to gather ideas – books, blog posts, newsletters, suggestions from friends. With so many ideas swirling around, you need to find a way to file them and classify them based on categories and themes.

I highly recommend tools such as Evernote where you can store all your ideas and put tags on them for reference and/or inspiration for writing.

Some writers don’t recommend this method as it is too linear – which doesn’t reflect how the human brain works.

That said, as a journalist who needs to beat the daily deadlines, I have to write quick and to the point. Hence, I draft an outline as a guide. I usually start with a thesis statement – the lead – to sum up the most important point of my story. I will then write down sub-leads – statements that will support the thesis and gather evidence (data, research papers and interviews with analysts) to put some meat in the sub-leads.

Our ideas don’t usually come in a sequential patterns. Sometimes as we get insights they may or may not be related to the topic at hand. To see connections of what seem to be diverse collections of ideas, try using a mind map.

Get a paper and pencil and draw a box at the center of the page. This box will serve as a starting point. Write down any idea inside this box and then link the “center” to other ideas come to mind. You will gradually see a pattern emerging, allowing you to see the connections clearly.

Or yellow sticky notes if you prefer. I recommend this method for longer writing projects like books which have several chapters and can be overwhelming to write. Just remember to have a clean floor so you can out lay out all your index cards and re-arrange them to fit your theme.

Write down your ideas on your card. Keep them short – just one to two sentences per card. After that lay them down and analyze the connections -can you string then together to form a coherent whole? Are they arranged in sequence or do you need to rearrange them? This is a great way to put order to your to a longer writing piece.

Unless you are writing in your journal, you are writing something to address a particular audience. So what do you want your readers to do after reading your article post or book? Do you want them to buy your product or book a consultation with you? Do you want them to click through a link or donate to your favorite charity?

Whatever it is, be sure to ask for it. You don’t even need to put the call to action at the end of your post. You can put it in your introduction or write your post to revolve around a specific call to action.

And in the case of this blog post, this is my call to action: apply one tip that you got from this post in developing a writing idea. Afterwards, contribute comments below on how that tip helped you in writing a post or book.

About the author: Prime Sarmiento is a long time journalist and content marketing strategist for online tutorial company Ahead Interactive - provider of live, real-time, video-powered tutorials. You can follow her writing tips in twitter.

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How To: Use Git to Version Your Writing

If you are a writer you may have ran into this problem. You are writing like mad, moving things, changing the way something flows. As you are getting into it, you realize.

Hey! This isn’t what I want to say at all! I need to go back.

You feverishly tap CTRL + z (or Command + z for you Mac aficionados) and come to find that your favorite “no frills” text editor has lost your undo history or you aren’t quite sure where you want to go back to.

Git is a piece of software that allows the user to control the versions of files in a directory. It allows the user to ‘commit’ a snapshot of any directory to a ‘repository’ that tracks all of the changes between versions of the files.

Git is awesome for development. But, what I have found is that it is awesome for writing as well.

Git allows me to commit my writing every so often so I can get back to where I want to be. It also allows me to ‘branch’ my writing so I can separate it from everything else.

Let’s take a look at how you can use git to control your writing versions.

I will be covering Windows and Mac here. For you Linux geeks; you should already know how to use git!

To install git do the following:

For Windows:

Go to git-scm.com, click on the Windows link to the right and download the latest version. Install via the executable and choose the most standard settings. When you get to the Adjusting your PATH environment screen, select the first option, Use Git Bash only and hit next. When at the Configuring the line ending conversions, select the third option, Checkout as-is, commit as-is and hit next. After the install completes click “Finish”.

For Mac:

Go to git-scm.com, click on the Mac OS X link to the right and then click the latest .DMG file in the list to download. Launch the DMG from your Downloads directory and double-click the git PKG. Follow the on-screen instructions and enter your user credentials. Close the installer when it is complete.

OK, now that you have git installed we are going to get geeky and use a terminal in both Windows and Mac.

To get to the git terminal in Windows go to the Start button and search for ‘git’. Click on ‘Git Bash’ to get to your git command line interface.

For Mac just open a terminal by going to Applications > Utilities > Terminal.

Here is where the fun begins. Let’s say you have a folder where you store a bunch of writing. For me that is in my Dropbox/writing folder. If I want to start tracking that directory I can change to that directory via command line then initialize a git repository.

This will be close to the same on both platforms. To change to a certain directory use the command:

cd [path-to-your-writing-directory]

Of course fill in your own directory. My command looks like this in Windows:

The backslash after ‘My’ is used to tell the terminal that the space after the word ‘My’ is there. You can autocomplete your paths by starting to type a directory and then hitting the ‘Tab’ key.

And this on my Mac:

Once you are at the directory you have all of your writing in you can issue the command git init which initializes a blank “repository” for your directory. This puts a .git directory that is initialized. Once your repository is initialized you can add the files to the repository by typing

git add .

or

git add [some-name-of-a-file]

to add only one file.

After that you can commit your files to the repository by typing

git commit -m “This is my first commit (or some other message)”

‘-m’ is used to tell git that you want to put a message with your commit. Now you have made your first commit to your new git repository! Congrats, you geek.

OK, I know that was a little technical, but you are over the hump now. If you want to learn more about git though in your free time, check out Pro Git. It’s free and it is the best tutorial on the inner workings of git.

So, what committing does is take a “snapshot” of the directory structure or whatever files you told your git repository to watch. If you make a change to a sentence in one of the files that your repository is watching after you just committed and type ‘git status’ you will be presented with the changes that have been made to the watched files. This lets you know that you have “uncommitted” changes to your watched files. You can then easily commit them by issuing the git commit command.

Another neat feature of git is branching. Branching is the idea of making a totally separate branch of your repository. You can create a new branch by typing:

git checkout -b this-is-a-new-branch

You can then make changes to your tracked files totally separate from your “master” branch. This allows you to take different paths with your writing without screwing up something else that was committed.

To switch back to your “master” branch, type:

git checkout master

Also, remember to commit any changes before creating and changing to new branches. If you don’t you may run into issues down the line where some changes get dropped.

Let us know if you think that this is helpful or want to learn more about using git to track files leave some messages in the comments.

Git is a super application; one that I use everyday. I can’t praise it enough. But, remember, it doesn’t have to be just used by geeks and hackers, writers can use it to keep track of their work and to feel free to explore other writing avenues without losing valuable work they have already created.

Chris is a developer, writer, tech enthusiast, and husband. He holds a degree in MIS and CMPSC from Penn State Behrend. Chris is also interested in personal productivity and creativity and how to utilize technology to get more things done. Check out his tech writing at androinica.com where he writes about Android.

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11 Books to Inspire, Encourage, and Cleanup Your Writing

I’d like to call myself a writer. But I have found that it is hard to do. Mostly because of fear of the craft and how I sometimes don’t think that I can “stack up” to other, better writers.

What I have found is that my notion of me being terrible at writing isn’t anything unique. Not in the slightest. The best writers in the world all struggle with this notion on a daily basis. It’s hard for me to believe that writers like Steven King and Natalie Goldberg don’t believe that they are awesome at writing all the time, but it’s true.

So, instead of being hard on myself I decided to read what other writers had to say as well as learn some writing technique in the process. Below are 11 books that can help you inspire, encourage and clean up your writing.

On Writing Well

This book is a classic and one of the first that I read when I got into writing. Zinsser writes in a very approachable style and reminds you that writing isn’t always fun; that it is a real job and that you have to write through blood, sweat, procrastination, and tears to be considered a writer.

He is the one that helped me understand that writing less is more.

It would be hard to not include a book about writing from one of the best selling authors of all time; Stephen King. This book dives into King as a person and also provides the reader with how he stays motivated and how he goes about the writing process. There is some excellent stuff in this book and definitely worth reading a few times to glean.

Anyone that listens to Metallica while writing horror and mystery is my kind of human.

Ah, what can I say about Natalie Goldberg? That she is one of the greatest writing enthusiasts and teachers I have come across.

In Writing Down the Bones, Goldberg reminds us that we can’t beat ourselves up as writers and no matter what we will. She shows us how to get out of our “monkey mind” and how to write without the inner critic stopping your from putting down your ideas.

If you are a writer or even know a writer, Writing Down the Bones can “inspire” you and move you to keep your ideas and pen moving.

Several months ago I heard about the idea of writing 750 words a day to get out of myself and to keep the flame of writing alive. It helps you by making a guarantee with yourself; no matter what, no matter how tired or apathetic I am, I will write 750 words a day.

That idea came from the Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Cameron suggests writing “Morning Pages” every day. The idea is to write 3 pages of long hand writing and no matter what don’t stop while you are writing. It is supposed to liven the writer in you as well as work through some cruft so you can be more creative.

And it works.

Bird by Bird is a book by the infamous Anne Lamot. I have yet to read it but from the endless awesome reviews at Amazon, it seems to be a truly great book about writing.

Lamott is known for speaking her mind and isn’t afraid to tell you the truth about writing. She has written around a dozen books

The Courage to Write is what it says; a short book to help writers not be afraid of the keyboard or pen and help to get them writing more. Raplh Keyes is a well known writing teacher and in this book tries to help us get over the fear of putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboards).

Keyes writes about the reasons why we become fearful of writing and it’s no surprise that the fear is something in ourselves rather than something external.

This is a fun book and isn’t truly a writing technique book like most of the others. What the Pocket Muse is intended to do is give writers a spark to write and be creative. There are many sayings and prompts throughout the book with different types of visuals to get a writer’s mind going.

It’s a nice little book to have by your side, especially if you want to find something for a little boost to get started writing.

The Daily Writer is another book that isn’t completely about writing technique. What the Daily Writer provides is 366 prompts and writing exercises that you can use everyday. Every good writer that I have encountered over the years has kept a journal or has written every single day without fail. So, something like the daily writer coupled with the above mentioned Morning Pages can kickstart your writing habit and your creative process.

I’ve used the Daily Writer for almost 7 months now and it is definitely worth the time and money to check out.

I tend to not write fiction but have been thinking about trying some more and more. Especially when a friend recommended “Immediate Fiction” to me. Once again, I don’t have first hand knowledge of this book, but according to my friend and reviewers on Amazon, this is one of the best books for help with writing fiction.

Ah, the classic. I remember sitting in my first semester of college writing with this weirdly colored and amazingly short book as our text. I in no way recognized the importance of Mr. Strunk’s book then. It took several years and a revisit to college to understand its impact on my writing.

The 11 rules of Usage and Composition are extremely valuable and something that every potential writer should take note of.

Don Murray is sort of the “black horse of writing”. Not too many people outside of the field know about him as he doesn’t have the grand allure of authors like Steven King. But Don Murray may have been one of the best writers and writing coaches in the West.

The Essential Don Murray is a collection of all of Murray’s scattered works and provides the reader with many strategies and tips for writing. But, what this book truly shows us is how much Murray loved writing and tries to help the reader love it too.

Chris is a developer, writer, tech enthusiast, and husband. He holds a degree in MIS and CMPSC from Penn State Behrend. Chris is also interested in personal productivity and creativity and how to utilize technology to get more things done. Check out his tech writing at androinica.com where he writes about Android.

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7 Tools For Writing On Your iPhone

Now some will argue that you just need a plain ol’ text editor and the gumption to write every day to make your way as a writer, but finding a handful of tools that can help you along the way can’t hurt.

I write a lot on my iPhone. It seems strange to some people, but I have found that I can type super-fast on the touchscreen keyboard. And because of that I do a lot of outlining, writing, and editing on my iPhone. Below are 10 tools for writing on your iPhone.

If you thought that text expansion on your desktop was cool, it makes typing on your mobile device a dream come true. If you don’t know, TextExpander Touch is an app that allows you to program short snippets of text as ways to expand to anything you want.

Say you want to program your address. You can make a snippet like “addr” expand to your entire address, even with line breaks. TextExpander can definitely help speed up your writing and it also works with around 50 other iOS apps.

This is a simple plain-text editor for iOS that syncs your text files to Dropbox. Elements has auto-saving, word-count, line-count, a scratchpad, TextExpander Touch support, ability to view, create, and edit Markdown files, and much more.

This is an excellent app if you are a plain-text file nerd like me and has some great features that will keep you interested in using it.

Yet another plain-text editor that syncs to Dropbox. Some of the extra things that I like about Notesy is that it has the option to preview Markdown files with your own custom CSS, enhanced search, subfolders, and option to view links, like phone numbers, pages, etc.

In general I like the overall look and feel of Notesy as well and feel that this is my favorite plain-text editor on the iPhone as of late.

The last of the plain-text editors that I will mention today. Nebulous is nice for theming your writing with different fonts, font-color and backgrounds. Something that is unique to Nebulous is that it has a nifty “scrollable bar” on top of the standard keyboard that you can place different characters and macros on like tabs, asterisks, date functions, etc.

If you want to type something up fast, coupling the programmable functions of Nebulous and coupling it with TextExpander is an awesome way to go.

You’ve got to have a way to outline your ideas before you start writing and one of the easiest ways to do it on iPhone is with CarbonFin Outliner. Outliner gives you a nice interface to make parent and children items, search your entire outline, move items with drag and drop, gives notes to outline items, and much more.

Syncing is sort of a pain as you have to use CarbonFin’s website rather than a simpler Dropbox sync. But, for outlining on your iPhone there isn’t anything better.

What kind of writer would you be if you couldn’t carry around your mind maps with you at all times? iThoughts makes it easy to mind-map from you iPhone and has a pretty unique and intuitive interface. Adding items to your maps is easy and also adding children and siblings is as simple as double-tapping the return key or spacebar.

iThoughts has a ton of features to it and really is a full-fledge mind-mapping suite.

Day One is a neat little “diary or logging application”. We spoke about the benefits of logging your day recently and this app can help you do it with ease. Day One is built to make logging super fast with a click of the “plus” button to add a new entry. I use it almost like my own private Twitter. Anything I am thinking internally I just jot it down.

Day One can be synced via Dropbox and it also has a nifty reminder system to help you remember to journal something. Oh, and of course to hide your dear diary entries Day One includes a passcode lock.

Removing the friction of writing is extremely important if you want to get good at it. These seven apps are what I consider to be the “best of the best” when it comes to planning and writing on your iPhone. Let us know in the comments of any other apps that help you write while you are mobile.

Chris is a developer, writer, tech enthusiast, and husband. He holds a degree in MIS and CMPSC from Penn State Behrend. Chris is also interested in personal productivity and creativity and how to utilize technology to get more things done. Check out his tech writing at androinica.com where he writes about Android.

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Writing on cocaine, literally

The New York Times reviews a new book about the early enthusiasm for cocaine among the medical community and particularly how it affected two of the world’s most influential doctors.

The book is called ‘An Anatomy of Addiction’ and looks at how psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and pioneering surgeon William Halsted became heavily dependent on the drug.

A long-term cocaine and morphine addict, Halsted is of particular interest because he wrote a scientific article about cocaine, while clearly off his face on cocaine.

Despite being almost complete nonsense it got published in the New York Medical Journal in 1885.

Rather ironically, it was entitled “Practical comments on the use and abuse of cocaine”. This is the first paragraph:

Neither indifferent as to which of how many possibilities may best explain, nor yet at a loss to comprehend, why surgeons have, and that so many, quite without discredit, could have exhibited scarcely any interest in what, as a local anesthetic, had been supposed, if not declared, by most so very sure to prove, especially to them, attractive, still I do not think that this circumstance, or some sense of obligation to rescue fragmentary reputation for surgeons rather than belief that an opportunity existed for assisting others to an appreciable extent, induced me, several months ago, to write on the subject in hand the greater part of a somewhat comprehensible paper, which poor health disinclined me to complete.

This was a different era in the the history of cocaine, however. So different in fact, that His Holiness the Pope endorsed a cocaine infused wine.

Link to NYT article on Freud and Halsted on cocaine.

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Kickstart Your Creativity By Writing 750 Words a Day

If you are a creative person, you may understand the idea of writer’s block in some form or fashion. You don’t have to necessarily be a writer to experience this, in fact software engineers, artists, or anyone that has to create things for a living is susceptible to the horrible affliction of writer’s block.

There are a ton of ideas out their on how  to get over this creativity stumbling block, but they all come back to a standard tome.

Work.

Creativity is work no matter which way you slice it. It isn’t always fun and in paraphrasing Merlin Mann, “you don’t need a beret to be creative.” Creativity is a dirty job. It is something that requires passion, long hours, and banging your head against the wall. It requires you to make a ton of mistakes along the path of creating something awesome. Creativity isn’t about being perfect; it’s a about working hard and making things, having ideas, scrapping projects, and getting to a point where something you have made is awesome.

I am about to be a full time Programmer Analyst for an insurance company and have found that in working part time I have a lot to learn. I create crappy code and refactor it until it is something that is decent and then refactor it again until it is readable and somewhat efficient. It takes time and energy to make code that is worth a damn. To get to the spot of creating something that is worthwhile, I had to make a bunch of stuff that kind of sucked.

This is where the idea of 750 words a day comes in. I have partaken in writing 750 words a day for the past 90 days and I have to say that it is truly liberating. What this practice does is allow me to make mistakes and write a bunch of crap every day to get ideas out of my head and on to paper without being too critical of myself for 15 minutes.

Writing 750 words a day is all about letting your “stream of consciousness” take the wheel allowing yourself to not think too much about what you are writing. It wakes up the creative “juices” and helps you get ready to work on real project that requires your full attention.

Writing 750 words a day is not at all my idea. I heard about it a while back in the form of “Morning Pages” which is the idea to write about 3 pages, long hand, every single morning. It is part of Julia Cameron’s, “The Artist’s Way” which can be combined with “The Artist’s Date” which is a weekly “date” with yourself to explore something creative that interests you.

I highly suggest writing your 750 words every morning, but you can write them anytime. There really isn’t a wrong way to do this; just as long as you write 750 words a day no matter what. Also, don’t try to critique anything you write or edit it while you go. In fact, don’t even re-read the crap that you wrote. Just let it come out, whatever it is, and then be done with it until the next day. This helps you to get in the habit of creating something without being critical.

I can’t say that there is any one tool or set of tools that make you a better “750 word writer”. You can use a junky notebook, a text file, a Word document, or even the 750words.com service. No matter what you use to write with the most important part is to write.

Being the techy that I am as well as being obsessed with stats, I chose the 750words.com service. It’s free to use and keeps track of what you write. It also has monthly challenges that you can sign up for to keep you on the right track. Over the past 90 days I have written a total of 68,567 words. Most of which are total junk I am sure, but what is nice about 750words.com is that it parses your writing and gives you charts and graphs of what emotions your content carries, the “maturity” of your writing, your concerns, and your mindset. It’s a handy way to see what you are writing about and a good way to keep you motivated.

Now that you have a decent tool to overcome writer’s block and to spawn creativity it’s time to use it. We can think of a thousand reasons why 750 words a day won’t work for us or will be too hard or is stupid, but the fact still remains that we have to do something to induce creativity. Writing like this everyday is an awesome way to start and no matter what field you are in this practice can benefit you.

Chris is a developer, writer, tech enthusiast, and husband. He studies MIS and Computer Science at Penn State Behrend. Chris is also interested in personal productivity and creativity and how to utilize technology to get more things done. Check out his tech writing at androinica.com where he writes about Android.

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Use Markdown For Easy Web Writing

In listening to a bunch of Mac-centric podcasts lately, especially on workflows with the Mac, I have come across a tool that has been around for a while but is still not extremely popular with everyone. The tool is called Markdown and was created by John Gruber (Daring Fireball fame). The best way to explain it is the first paragraph from Markdown’s description on Mr. Gruber’s page:

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

Yeah that is it in a nutshell. Before I jump in how to use this awesome tool on Mac and Windows, you may be wondering what the point of a tool like this actually is.

At first I didn’t get the reason for using Markdown. Cool, you can transfer plain text stuff into HTML, but who the hell uses HTML anymore? Well, if you are a web writer you use HTML every single day whether you know it or not and if you have used WordPress or any other CMS for any length of time you have most likely had to tweak some HTML.

If you are using WordPress there is nothing more agrevating than the WYSIWYG editor becoming too helpful with HTML tags in the background essentially destorying your formatting. Markdown can help you by transforming your text file into valid HTML. This allows you to paste your HTML into the HTML editor thus keeping your hard-won formatting. So nice.

Also, there is something to say for document portability. HTML is an agnostic type of document markup and can be rendered in pretty much any crappy web browser. With the continued use of many different operating systems and devices out in the wild (iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows, Mac, Linux, etc) the need for a standard format for text is highly needed. Markdown helps this along by allowing you to standardized all your note formatting without locking you in to some proprietary format. Just HTML and txt files.

Markdown is pretty darn easy to use and if you have any experience messing aroudn with software and HTML it will be a snap. Markdown is written in Perl, so if you don’t have Perl on your Windows machine you can download and install Strawberry Perl from here. If you are a Mac user, Perl is already installed for you.

Next, go over to Daring Fireball and grab the Markdown.pl script, unzip it and put the Markdown.pl file in the directory that you will use to create and tranform your input text files.

Now the fun part; learning how to use the syntax and creating your input text file.

I am going to briefly explain some of the most used syntax snippets that will get you off an running with Markdown. If you want the whole shebang, head on over to Daring Fireball to get a detailed list of all the niceties of the Markdown syntax.

Headers tags (h1, h2, h3, etc) are simple to create in your text document. To signify the h1 tag, “underline” the text with the ‘=’ sign:

This is a h1 header===================

or for h2 use the ‘-’ character:

This is a h2 header-------------------

You don’t need to put the same amount of ‘=’ or ‘-’ characters under the heading; any number will due to produce the header tags.

I think in bullets and lists so it’s nice that Markdown handles them well. To insert a bullet append an asterisk to your line like this:

* This is my point

You can also use the ‘+’ or ‘-’ characters as bullets.

Ordered lists are easy too:

1. Number one2. Number two3. Number three... now you got it!

If you want multiple paragraphs under a bullet or number just indent the first line of each paragraph or indent all the lines if you want it to look nicer:

1. Here is the first point that I am trying to make about numbered lists. By the way, I should probably mention this too.2. Next point

One of my favorite things of Markdown is the easy way to insert links. First, bracket the word or phrase that you would like to be “clickable” and then follow that by a parenthesized URL:

[click here](http://www.google.com/)

After you have created your text file it is now time to pass it to the Markdown.pl script to produce your HTML output. If you didn’t create a text file to test, you can download the quick text file that I created to try it out.

Place your text file in the same directory as the Markdown.pl script (you can pass the arguments with the correct path if you want to, this is just to make it easier). After that is done open up your command prompt in Windows or your terminal on your Mac or Linux and navigate to the folder with your input file.

To create the output directly in the terminal window use the following command:

perl Markdown.pl input.txt

This will then parse the text file and output the valid HTML markup to the terminal. If you want the ouput to be directed towards a totally seperate HTML file type the following command:

perl Markdown.pl input.txt > output.html

This will create the HTML file output.html in whatever directory you are currently in.

Let me just say that if you think Markdown is interesting and understand the utility of it, I highly suggest that if you write anything you should write it with Markdow

n syntax. It is cross-platform, open source, free, and compatible with everything. To me it is a game changer and I feel like I am a little behind in not utilizing it sooner. Once again, there is much more to the syntax than I have highlighted here, so check out Daring Fireball for more.

By the way, I wrote this entire article using Markdown and if you want to see the syntax you can download it here.

Chris is a developer, writer, tech enthusiast, and husband. He studies MIS and Computer Science at Penn State Behrend. Chris is also interested in personal productivity and creativity and how to utilize technology to get more things done. Check out his tech writing at androinica.com where he writes about Android.

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