Writing fears – recommendations

The fear of the blank page: Just do not say they have you too. What should a blank sheet do to you? Writer’s block … frippery! Anyone who says he has a writer’s block uses the wrong strategy.

For example, he wants to start writing the introduction immediately. Why did you laboriously create an outline? First write the part for which you have a picture in front of you. And collect your ideas for the other parts, write down bullet points under each bullet point, as you think. In general – just as you have collected the outline points, you can also collect bullet points. Do you remember? Writing a scientific text means performing 90% of other activities than writing.

Take Schiller as your role model. He wrote in 1788 in a letter to Gottfried Körner:

The reason for your complaints lies, it seems to me, in the compulsion your mind has imposed on your imagination. I have to cast a thought here and to make it a parable. It does not seem to be good and detrimental to the soul’s work of creation, when the intellect examines the inflowing ideas, as if at the gates, too sharply. An idea, considered in isolation, may be very insignificant and very adventurous, but perhaps it becomes important through one that comes after it; perhaps, in some connection with others, who may seem just as tasteless, it may be a very useful member: – all that the mind can not judge if it does not hold her until he has looked at her in connection with those others. On the other hand, with a creative head, my mind has withdrawn its watch from the gates, the ideas overthrow pêle-mêle, and then it overlooks and examines the big pile.

Free association, that makes the mind loose. This was also the view of a contemporary of Schiller, Heinrich von Kleist, who wrote in his famous essay On the Gradual Making of Thoughts While Speech:

If you want to know something and can not find it through meditation, I advise you, my dear, ingenious friend, to talk to the next acquaintance who opens you. It does not need to be a sharp-thinking head, nor do I mean it, as if you should ask him about it: no! Rather, you should tell it to yourself first. […] I believe that many a great orator, at the moment he opened his mouth, did not yet know what he would say. But the conviction that he would draw the necessary amount of thought from the circumstances, and the resulting excitement of his mind, made him brazen enough to set the beginning, for good luck.

So it is also true for the letter. Write it down, let the ideas pêle mêle flow! Do not worry about spelling or style – and if you do not remember anything, write about the weather. You can and still have to shorten and edit it afterwards.

Anyway, writing will be easier if you often write. Start the day with a writing exercise. Write a letter, an e-mail, a longer comment in the forum or blog of your confidence. Activate the part in your brain that is needed for writing, for the letters, for speech.

Oh yes. As long as there is nothing in your head, there is not much to write. If so, read the chapters on research and reading again.

From paragraphs

Do you know what a paragraph is? You can recognize a paragraph in the text as a collection of several sentences, which are visually separated from each other. On the Internet – and more and more frequently also in printed matter – after a paragraph is a small white space (bullet called) ranging in size from half a line to a whole line. Traditionally, however, a new paragraph is identified by a left indent of the first line.

A paragraph usually contains an entire train of thought. Stick to it. By trying to create the most balanced paragraph image on paper, you should also strive for balanced thought processes. Five short paragraphs, each with two sentences one after the other, do not exactly bear witness to the depth of thought. The restlessness of your thoughts is transferred to the paper.

Remember: Write = service to the reader. Make it as comfortable as possible for the reader in your writing. A calm and balanced sentence picture will greatly simplify reading.