All Ping

You are a webmaster with a killer blog with readers hungrily demanding new content daily. You wake up, head mailbox to see what your faithful content writer has in store for the waiting audience. Through the steam rising from the hot cup of black coffee raised to your lips, the only thing you find is a letter of resignation, effective immediately. Apparently, getting a book deal from a well-known publisher takes away your desire to write blog posts.

If you are a non-writing webmaster, your obvious first reaction is… PANIC! Guess what, you don’t have time for that, you have a blog post to write. So even if you couldn’t write your way out of a can of alphabet soup, calm down and read on.

We have five creative writing tips that will help you to forge ahead until you find a replacement writer.

But First…

If you have never learned meaningful research for writing, we need to have a quick chat first. Researching an article or blog post is nothing like going online to find the right fishing reel for bass because:

1. Real research is at least three levels deep (At the very least)
2. Cross-referencing sources to ensure voracity is time-consuming
3. Fact checking statements to include three “official" sources with at least one link for the reader, usually the easiest one to understand

My point is if you make a claim, you have to be able to back it up, so stick to what you know, especially when you are caught in a situation like this.

1. Make Use Of Your Life

Making use of your life makes it easier to reach readers because while you are unique, you are still living on the same planet, experiencing the same emotions, and making the same dumb mistakes as everyone else. Using examples from your life makes you someone that everyone can relate to and feel for. This will go a long way to cover a great many of the mistakes in grammar you may make along the way.

2. Show, Don’t Tell

Show, don’t tell is a trick that creative writers use to help readers use their imagination rather than their analytical reason. Imagery in writing can be difficult, but it can also be fun.

People think in words. We literally hear the words before we speak them. It is like a voice inside our heads telling us what to say. Imagery and ‘show, don’t tell’ allows the reader to see what you say rather than read what you wrote.

An example of this is in the first paragraph of this post. "Through the steam rising from the hot cup of black coffee raised to your lips, the only thing you find is a letter of resignation, effective immediately." Until these bits of imagery, you were merely reading my words.

When you reached this sentence, you began to see the steam, feel the heat of the cup, and realize the shock. Descriptive writing helps visualization.

3. Third-Person Omnipotence

If you are a first time writer, being God-like is the easiest solution to writing without making tense mistakes. Here is an example of a tense mistake.

“They all went to town yesterday. It was an exciting and eventful day. Everyone is having so much fun that half of us slept on the way home."

In case you did not spot the two mistakes, I jump from past to present and them to us. The easiest form of writing is third person omnipotence. This makes you an ever-present, invisible story teller that knows what everyone is thinking and what is going to happen.

Third-person writing combined with omnipotence gives you complete control. Pick up any Stephen King book to learn more about third person omnipotence. Mr. King is the king of TPO.

4. Creative License

Having creative license is not a license to lie or make up facts. It is simply the writer taking small and reasonable liberties with language, grammar, or an adaptation or interpretation of someone else’s original writing for the sake of creativity and plot destination.

I have taken creative license throughout this post to demonstrate that you do not have to be perfect – just interesting. While the statement, “You could not write your way out of a can of alphabet soup" is an original thought straight out of my pointy skull, we all recognize that it is a variation of someone else’s clever line.

5. Tell A Story

Using an experience out of your own life and tying it together with whatever point you are trying to make about a product, service, or the overall idea of your post makes it easier to get that point across in an interesting and engaging way.

If your post is about using duct tape to fix just about anything and you were once duct taped to a wall as a prank, telling that story in relation to the point of duct tapes versatility would be an excellent idea.

Conclusion

Just remember to take your time, use what you know, and write in the third-person omnipotence style. If you make references from a recognizable source, do so in a way that does not even come close to outright copying (plagiarism) or you must clearly state who said it first and in what work it was said. Story telling is always an interesting way to write about anything. Try it.