Here’s a typical first draft of a blog entry opening paragraph: After a recent coaching call, I had more scene notes than I knew what to do with. My coach really honed in on a few fundamental errors that were consistent throughout my writing. Throughout the entire call, she went through one of my scenes, pointing out one error after another, but each of them fell under the same umbrella of errors. So, over the next week, I’m going to break them into blog entries and identify my common errors in my prose.

At times, it’s good, but more times it’s like this, a jumbled mess of ideas that just adds confusion and mixed direction. I’ve learned that I can simplify this and find my direction by asking if I said this to a friend, what would I say?

  • I just got out of a call with my coach.
  • It went well because I learned so much about scene writing, more specifically I learned about many of my own misconceptions about how to write a scene.
  • Throughout the call, my coach pointed out mistake after mistake, and among these I noticed a common theme.
  • I write like a writer when I should write like a storyteller.
  • I want to fully understand that theme. So to do that, I will blog about my mistakes and what I learned from them.

This is a great way to break down what I’m trying to say. From here, it’s easy to build that back up into a paragraph:

After a recent coaching call, I learned so much about scene writing, more specifically I learned about many of my own misconceptions about how to write a scene. Throughout the call, my coach pointed out mistake after mistake, and among these I noticed a common theme: I write like a writer when I should write like a storyteller. Over the next week, in order to fully understand that theme, I will blog about my mistakes and what I learned from them.

Now, my direction is clear. And with clear direction, the rest of the blog becomes easy to write. This technique will be handy as often my blog entries have too many ideas in this. So next time I’m unsure what the blog entry is principally about, I will write simply and build up from there.