How to Maintain Your Writing Flow When on a Roll

Writers and communicators, like most everyone else, can experience peaks and troughs - especially in creativity. Some days, "words come easy" and everything matches up perfectly. At other times, you may feel like you have to drag each useful phrase, lead or idea kicking and screaming out of your head. The rights words and paragraphs and structure and design just refuse to come. During periods like these, I'm reminded of the following quotation from author, Red Smith, who perhaps illustrates the point perfectly enough:

Writing is easy, you just sit down at the typewriter, open up a vein, and bleed it out drop by drop. Red Smith, Author

When the opposite is true; when the muse is well and truly sitting in your head having a party, with everyone invited; when you find yourself in the middle of a creative volcano, my advice, is to be "true to form" and explode, to help ensure that you carry on writing without interruption. Continue as long as you're physically able to ensure that you get your thoughts recorded. Notice I didn't say written. More on that in a moment.

While experiencing highly creative periods like these, below are three established ways that can help you have a chance of "keeping up with your thoughts":

• Use a sound recording device like a dictaphone to speak your piece and directly record your thoughts as they emerge. Later, you can transcribe the information onto paper or computer disk.
• Better: set up, train and use voice recognition software installed on a PC. As you speak into a microphone, your words are converted into text and saved into a document file. Make sure you also keep backups. Using this option, periodically, you can easily edit and correct the few mistakes that may have been made by your voice recognition software. Update: the latest software is better than ever in terms of accuracy. I may switch to this myself too.
  
• The last option - and the one I usually use myself to-date, is to master touch-typing. If you use a PC and don't already touch-type, I highly recommend you take the time to learn. Get a touch-typing software tutor program, then take a little time each day to learn how to "tickle the keys."

Why Invest the Time and Effort Required to Learn Touch-Typing?

There's something special about the link between a writer and a keyboard. The keyboard - whether typewriter or PC-based - can start to feel like an almost natural extension to your brain. Before we get too carried away with the benefits, here's a little more information about the reality of embarking on a touch-typing training course.

• Learning touch-typing is probably one of the most soul-destroying feelings ever - at first!
• If you're progressing properly, you'll make mistake after mistake after mistake! In fact, you'll probably make so many errors, you'll begin to doubt that you'll ever "master this thing!" If that's how you feel, good, you're definitely on course. Well done: just don't give up!
• Do the exercises - boring and pointless as they seem at the time.
• Keep practicing concentrating on finger accuracy first. Speed comes later - naturally.
• Practice daily while learning.
• Really believe that you will become a touch-typing pro (you will if you endure).
  
• When first starting to learn touch-typing, I experienced a few weeks of what can only best be described as sheer grind. However luckily, I persevered and stayed the course.
• After a while, just as when you work on developing almost any skill, you can start to see real progress. When you reach this point, you've achieved a key goal.
• When your accuracy level go up and error rates go down, if you continue with the exercises, you can really start to make progress even faster.
• Start touch-typing your day-to-day articles, projects, publications and content for web pages as soon as you think it's worth doing. That way, you can get a double pay-back: (1) your normal work gets done, and (2) you get even more practice.
• Later, when you don't need the exercises any more, you can bless the day you learned to touch-type.
• Plus, you'll have gained another valuable IT-related, communications skill to add to your c.v. or resume.

Using the Power of Touch-typing to Capture Those Fleeting Thoughts and Ideas Before They Disappear

When you're in the middle of a "creative roll", the words and ideas can come so fast that being able to type quickly can be incredibly useful - and may even support a "deciding moment." As you experience an easy flow of information, sometimes, your mind can deliver the words so fast, that the ability to touch-type seems almost essential.

Therefore, do remember, when you're on a roll, do find a way to ensure that whatever tools and skills you choose to develop to record your thoughts can keep pace with your brain. Do whatever you can to keep rollin'.