One of the keys to creating a useable thought bank is this:

Once the writer has done their raw writing, they should comb through it, pick out the best ideas, write those ideas up as complete sentences or paragraphs, and squirrel them away in an easy-to-find computer file.

Now, when the writer needs new thoughts, they don’t have to search loads of meandering freewriting documents. Instead, they have pages and pages of clearly articulated ideas to choose from.

Makes searching for one’s good ideas much more pleasant and efficient.

When shooting a video, I’m conscious about what part of the story I want the video to play. Is it telling a complete story or a piece of the story?

So far, the videos I’ve tended to shoot and use are ones that are short and tell only a piece of the story. That said, the piece they tell is usually a main idea. I’ve yet to use a video for tactics and detail.

Thanks for commenting.

Most of the young people in my life would rather watch video than read, though. This makes me feel a little torn, but it’s something to take advantage of on a website. My own website is way too verbose, and I know it. The trick is to strike a balance between the verbiage and getting the word out through video. Any suggestions?

I’m always reminding writers (and myself) that every choice they make on the page is just that: a choice. The direction they’ve taken in a given piece is likely just one direction, out of dozens, that they could have taken.

This also reminds me of a practice from freewriting workshops where we would look at a piece of writing to find the “windows,” words or phrases that implied a much larger view of whatever the piece was about, then use those windows to enter that other world.

Writing a book certainly takes a different mindset than blogging, and going back and forth can be challenging, so practical tips like this are valuable.