Make Your Writing Work For You!
8:50 PM, Aug. 11, 2006
One trick I learned from a friend of mine who
is a writer is to make your writing work for you. This means, take one
idea and use it several different ways. One idea can be an article, a
devotion, a blog entry and material for a chapter in a book. In this
way, no writing is wasted and is used to its fullest capacity.
For instance, I have an idea on "being
grateful" that I am working on right now. I will make the key idea a
devotion for Proverbs 31, I will change my focus a bit and make it a
parenting article (not sure where I will submit it), I might list my
main points in a blog entry with a personal story, and finally, I will
take whatever I write and file it for a chapter in a book I am working
on.
I think many times as writers we write our
hearts out for an article and don't think about how we can expand the
idea to be used in other venues. I wrote an article on "balance" for
womensministry.net's weekly newsletter. It was a very brief listing of
ways to balance your life. Then I took the article I wrote, used those
same ideas and expanded them and honed the focus to fit the book
proposal I was working on. This article I wrote became material for a
chapter and boy did my word count go up fast when I dropped that info
into my writing! What a great feeling! I also do this alot with what
I write in my blog. I will use stories from my life that I wrote on
the blog and can just cut and paste that way. Easy! Quick!
One more way to use your writing is to take
main points and fit them into topics for speaking. For instance, I
feel certain I will use the "balance" points I came up with in my
speaking this fall at some point. So, again, my writing is expanded
and used to its fullest potential. More bang for my buck, so to
speak.
Well, I hope this helps all you writers out there to think outside the box. I hope I have inspired someone!
~Marybeth Whalen
www.MarybethWhalen.com
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