Here are the final powerful secrets to infuse your brain with the write idea.



1. Making appointments with yourself in your personal planner or PDA will ensure you get some writing done. Often what gets written down gets done and your writing time is no exception.

2. Establish realistic time lines for long-range goals. View target dates with flexibility in mind. Be prepared to change direction temporarily if circumstances dictate it. Three thirty-minute writing sessions may be more realistic than one session of one and a half hours. Do not put undo pressure on yourself or you will act in a counter-productive manner and will find excuses not to write.

3. If you are watching television and the show is not really capturing your interest, take that time to write. If you have materials readily available and organized then shifting your attention to writing rather than watching won't be a problem. This applies equally well to other activities that aren't capturing your interest.

4. You write more effectively and efficiently by taking regular breaks during long writing sessions. Taking breaks is using your time wisely. The breaks allow the sub-conscious to take over and generate new ideas. Make sure you record these brilliant revelations!

5. Take one lunch hour per week. Eat a quickie lunch and use the time to write. Is there a library or quiet spot near your workplace where you can go? Is writing in your car out of the question? What about staying at your desk while others are away having lunch?

6. If you commute to work by train or bus or car pool, you can use that time to write. If you're usually the driver, perhaps you can be a carpool passenger once or twice a week so you can write during the trip. Make sure your car-pooling partners are aware of what you want to do during the commute. On vacation trips or other long drives, write while your spouse drives. Drivers are usually content to watch the road and concentrate on driving, so they will not miss your conversation.

7. Be ready to pounce. If a window of opportunity presents itself to get some extra writing time, pounce on it. These unscheduled spontaneous writing sessions are often most productive. Appreciate the fact that you must be ready to take advantage of these situations. These are golden opportunities to do something you love to do. Go for it!

8. View your practical every-day writing as an opportunity to hone your writing skills. It's attitude that's important here. Those thank-you notes, staff memos, friendly letters, emails, journal entries and special reports are all writing exercises that give you an opportunity to work on the skills of written communication. You can learn a great deal by writing in all situations. There is always a carry-over to other writing circumstances.

9. Keep writing tools (pen and paper) handy at all times in all places where you just might get the opportunity to write.

10 Writing breeds more writing. The more writing becomes a habit the more it happens. Research says it takes 21 repetitions to break an old habit and establish a new one. Writing for 5-15 minutes per day for 21 consecutive days should establish this writing as a regular habit. So give yourself a reasonable target of 21 repetitions to establish new writing behaviors.

11. Write quickly. Write legibly. Write legible scribbling if necessary. Use abbreviations like w for with and acronyms and the first parts of longer words only. If the only person who is going to read your notes is you, you can take whatever liberties you want to in order to get your ideas on paper and keep the flow going. Scribble now and translate later.

12. As you are writing, put new ideas in the margin of the paper as soon as they come to you. You won't interrupt the flow of your thoughts on the page because you already have some key words to help you and you have already been writing. Slow down to record your new ideas, but don't stop!

13. Use the Cloze method of reading for your writing. One technique for teaching students to read is to provide a paragraph with words missing. Students have to fill in the blanks with words suggested by the context of the paragraph. Use this same method to speed up your writing. Insert a straight line in your writing for words that you will know by context when it comes to transcribing your draft copy. Put a _______ in your writing as a placeholder.

14. Use acronyms in your draft copy. You can use the authentic conventional acronyms or you can invent some of your own. For example, ataw could mean Awaken The Author Within or b for book.

15. Learn to cover the page. Think in terms of starting every page as if you are going to cover it with writing as quickly as possible with quality ideas. Thinking this way will help you accomplish more writing.

Implementing these tips will get you off to the WRITE start.