How to Write Good Stories: Tips and Tricks For The Beginning Content Writer
If your writing skills are good enough and you are considering
building a career out of content writing or ghost even, you might find
yourself in the troubling position of spending two or three hours on a
average six hundred words article. Which is not bad, if your value in
life is to focus on quality rather on quantity – basically to
distinguish yourself from the other farm – writers out there who had the
same idea for their future careers. But in a cost-effective world, if
you are good enough as a freelancer, you might find yourself not being
able to respect all the deadlines and all your clients’ wishes and
needs. If you were lucky enough to get hired by a guest posting writing
servicescompany, the amount of work is likely to overcome the speed of
your fingers typing. You will be the slow one, or the one that doesn’t
meet the criteria and your fabulous career in SEO
or independent blogging might not see the desired outcome. So what do
you do? Sacrifice content for quantity? Definitely not! Stir your wheel
to more shallow approaches? Definitely not! So what do you do to write
awesome content and many articles a day?
Choose your fields of interest
Content writers should be able to write anything about everything, but this doesn’t mean you have to be a scientist having deep knowledge on every possible subject. Find your best and most comfortable niches (which should be more than one, experts say) and develop them. Use your past college knowledge or even your personal hobbies and start working on them. Make a database with the best and updated information on a subject, read, and study and have them at hand. When you will need to write about a specific topic, you should know exactly where to look. Use high authority websites and even take notes about news and recent development in a field, they might be useful later. Having multiple niches at your fingertip is the best thing you could achieve: cross-referencing subjects and intertwining them allows you to be more creative, to draw inspiration more easily and to ease up the process of writing. Making analogies, being able to provide educated comparisons and interlinking different fields is one key to success in professional content writing.
Build a story starting from a general outline
Just as in creative writing, having an outline helps you save time. Before putting the words on the paper, you should know what is the story’s subject, what are its main points, where do you want to lead your readers to. Give the story a purpose. Professional writers, just as novelists make up a story having only a vague idea and improvising along the way. This doesn’t mean that inside their heads they know nothing about what they are writing about. As a beginner content writer, your outline should include an introductory paragraph, configuring the premises, the general story and the goal, followed by the actual content. You already know it should be unique, original and highly informative so the next step and the hardest, is to provide that content.
Research
Many beginner writers lose themselves in this stage, spending a great amount of time cross – referencing the information they found, analyzing multiple sources, wanting to give their best. These are the hours that differentiate you from a prolific writer. What is to be done? First rule of journalism says to check your source and you can do it easily, because you already have an ever-growing database of resources you can verify and get inspired by. Next step is to permanently ask yourself the same question over and over again: what is this article about? Restrain your interest to the story’s subject and keep in mind that you are not working on a doctoral thesis. If you have to present five new business opportunities, do exactly that: present them, having in mind the person who reads the article. Is that information useful to them? Does it provide enough data for them to start searching on their own, if interested? Is the information presented in a logical, simple, attractive way? Will they bother to finish the article and read the conclusions? You will see that comments about business ethics stranded far away from your purpose to presenting the business, so you should know where to stop when developing on a subject.
Clear the mess at the end
Take a look to the beginning and look at what you are typing now: are you still on the subject? Does it still sound like having a purpose and is still loud, clear, informative and easy to read? If not, brush the text until it serves its real purpose. It may take you some extra – time, but once you become a little more skilled, you’ll end up doing it as it goes.
Writer’s block is only inside your head
It is true that even novel writers and professional content writers meet the so called “writer’s block”, when they don’t know where to begin and where to finish, what to write and how to sound like they are not completely bored. Many experts say that you should write no matter what. But in truth, you might end up with a messy article, showing your lack of mood and creativity and your complete disinterest in the subject. This doesn’t pay. If you experience the phenomenon, you should try to find your own methods to overcoming it. Some writers go for a walk, others read (inspiration comes from the most unexpected of places!), others take a break and do something else. You will be more efficient and your work quality will be higher if you take a break and come back in full force than making efforts to put some words on the paper, just because you have to.
Choose your fields of interest
Content writers should be able to write anything about everything, but this doesn’t mean you have to be a scientist having deep knowledge on every possible subject. Find your best and most comfortable niches (which should be more than one, experts say) and develop them. Use your past college knowledge or even your personal hobbies and start working on them. Make a database with the best and updated information on a subject, read, and study and have them at hand. When you will need to write about a specific topic, you should know exactly where to look. Use high authority websites and even take notes about news and recent development in a field, they might be useful later. Having multiple niches at your fingertip is the best thing you could achieve: cross-referencing subjects and intertwining them allows you to be more creative, to draw inspiration more easily and to ease up the process of writing. Making analogies, being able to provide educated comparisons and interlinking different fields is one key to success in professional content writing.
Build a story starting from a general outline
Just as in creative writing, having an outline helps you save time. Before putting the words on the paper, you should know what is the story’s subject, what are its main points, where do you want to lead your readers to. Give the story a purpose. Professional writers, just as novelists make up a story having only a vague idea and improvising along the way. This doesn’t mean that inside their heads they know nothing about what they are writing about. As a beginner content writer, your outline should include an introductory paragraph, configuring the premises, the general story and the goal, followed by the actual content. You already know it should be unique, original and highly informative so the next step and the hardest, is to provide that content.
Research
Many beginner writers lose themselves in this stage, spending a great amount of time cross – referencing the information they found, analyzing multiple sources, wanting to give their best. These are the hours that differentiate you from a prolific writer. What is to be done? First rule of journalism says to check your source and you can do it easily, because you already have an ever-growing database of resources you can verify and get inspired by. Next step is to permanently ask yourself the same question over and over again: what is this article about? Restrain your interest to the story’s subject and keep in mind that you are not working on a doctoral thesis. If you have to present five new business opportunities, do exactly that: present them, having in mind the person who reads the article. Is that information useful to them? Does it provide enough data for them to start searching on their own, if interested? Is the information presented in a logical, simple, attractive way? Will they bother to finish the article and read the conclusions? You will see that comments about business ethics stranded far away from your purpose to presenting the business, so you should know where to stop when developing on a subject.
Clear the mess at the end
Take a look to the beginning and look at what you are typing now: are you still on the subject? Does it still sound like having a purpose and is still loud, clear, informative and easy to read? If not, brush the text until it serves its real purpose. It may take you some extra – time, but once you become a little more skilled, you’ll end up doing it as it goes.
Writer’s block is only inside your head
It is true that even novel writers and professional content writers meet the so called “writer’s block”, when they don’t know where to begin and where to finish, what to write and how to sound like they are not completely bored. Many experts say that you should write no matter what. But in truth, you might end up with a messy article, showing your lack of mood and creativity and your complete disinterest in the subject. This doesn’t pay. If you experience the phenomenon, you should try to find your own methods to overcoming it. Some writers go for a walk, others read (inspiration comes from the most unexpected of places!), others take a break and do something else. You will be more efficient and your work quality will be higher if you take a break and come back in full force than making efforts to put some words on the paper, just because you have to.
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