Writing, Writers Block and school detention

Books on the way

I have written thousands and thousands of words for my websites. So I have taken a number of articles that were written for the Spondicious photography site and repurposed them for a book – Geek Photography is the working title. I also have a number of other ideas for using the articles I have written for my Mac website and other websites and turning those into other books too. I even have two good ideas for writing as novels. My love of writing goes back to when I was at school and I was given the opportunity of writing plenty of creative pieces. That was generally because I was in school detention. They gave me stupid essays to write as a punishment and I turned it around so it was a bit silly because I really enjoyed the creativity of writing. I usually got the detentions after school because I was a lazy student and didn’t do my homework. I did quite a bit of creative writing when I was at art college too. On one occasion I read out some of my poems and one of my short narrative pieces publicly. Goodness me, the crazy things that you do when you are an art student.

David Allen Wizardgold Google

Writers block – What’s that?

Pasted Image 12 06 2014 22 54Now I still love to write, to work on ideas and to create digital content whether its scripts for audio podcasts, video tutorials or writing for my websites and books. I find it difficult to comprehend why some people would have writers block. There are always lots of things to write about and ideas to work on. My favourite way to work is by using a mind map. Creating these mind maps on my iPad is the best way to do it. My head is screwed on in such a way that I’m much better at working in that non-linear way. If I was to write using a pen and paper I would have to have many small sections written separately and with little arrows pointing to where they should be within the final text. I am so very grateful that it is really possible to use a digital non-linear way of working as you can do with a mind map. I use the Mindmapping application iThoughts on my iPad and I use the Mac application MindNode Pro on my iMac. It’s very easy to take the mind map that I have created and turn it into an outline for a book afterwards. I have got a couple of Outliner applications on my iPad that I am still testing to see which fits me best. It is pretty easy to get the OPML output from the mind map and then do some organising to make it more sense for reading. I can start to fill in the spaces writing in Markdown.

Time off for good behaviour

The camp site where I work is closed between October and March and it gives me some time for my writing. There are many occasions when I think that I would like to be working on my writing all year round. Maybe next year that could happen if the books that I am working on actually start to make some money. Having said that, it is quite good to get out of the house, so maybe just a part-time job would be an interesting option.