1 Simple Exercise To Defeat Writer’s Block Forever

What's up, friends? My name is Nicholas Cole, but you can call me Cole. I'm the co creator of Ship 30 for 30, a writing program that helps people learn how to write online, and a paid newsletter on category design called Category Pirates. And if you love writing but aren't sure how to make a living doing it, then you're in the right place. So today I want to walk you through an exercise. I use this formatting technique, actually every time I sit down to write. I've been writing online for 10 plus years. I've written thousands and thousands of articles. And this is a way of basically getting all the main points out and filling in the skeleton as opposed to staring at a blank page. So if you notice, you know, every time you sit down to write, and if this is what you're staring at, it feels like a huge lift. You know, you basically have to hold a lot of information in your mind at the same time. That's what makes staring at a blank page so difficult. So what are the things that you need to hold in your mind? Well, you need to think about the title. You need to think about how you're going to introduce the concept in the introduction. You need to think about what your main points are, where the whole thing's going to go. And then you need to think of what's the conclusion, what's the final chord, the final note that you want the reader to end on. All of these things are really easy in and of themselves. It's when you have to hold them all in your mind at the same time that makes it difficult, right, because they're each serving different purposes. And so when you have to do all of that mentally, simultaneously, that's what makes it hard. So I created a solution for this, for my own writing process. I produce a lot of written content. I'm writing every day for myself. I'm writing for the businesses that I have. I'm writing for CEOs and founders. I still go straight for a handful of executives. So in order to produce a lot of content, I need to be able to fly through it, right? So I use this exercise that I call prepping the page. So what does prepping the page mean? Well, if we scroll down, this is essentially what everything that I write doesn't matter if it's an article, a newsletter. I even use this for books. Now, prepping the page means you're organizing what you're staring at by section. So before I even actually get into the writing, right, When I, when I say writing, I mean you Kind of lose yourself in it. You know, you're just thinking about the words. You're just. You're flowing. You're going, right? That's the actual writing process. Well, in order to make the writing process more effective, it's really helpful if you basically segment the page into different sections, right? Some people call this outlining. I call it filling in a skeleton. And all you're doing is you're saying, okay, this part of the page is for the introduction. This part of the page main points, this part of the page conclusion. By visually looking at it, what's interesting is when you go through it, this essentially looks like a finished piece. You know, at a glance, you. You almost don't even realize that it's not fully filled in. You know, you go, oh, I'm already halfway done. This is the beauty of prepping the page. When you prep the page, you don't feel like you're actually looking at an entire blank page, which makes it feel mentally very strenuous, right? So if you're someone like me, my entire livelihood, all of my income is based on writing online, writing for other people, writing my own books, writing for my own products. So if all I'm doing is staring at a blank page over and over and over again, that makes it really hard, right? That's a lift. So how do you reduce the lift? Well, you segment the page into. Okay, here. This is what I'm going to talk about in the introduction. This is what it's about. This is who it's for. This is the promise I'm making to the reader. And. And here's the little bit of credibility that I want to explain. You know, here's. Here's why you should listen to me. These are the four pieces that you need to put in the introduction. Then you have your main points, right? So if you're writing about the reasons why something happened, every main point is gonna be a reason. If you write about tips to accomplish X, each main point is gonna be a tip. If you're writing mistakes that I made that kept me from doing xyz, right, Each main point is a mistake. And then finally you have the conclusion. Which, if you've read any of my work or if you've come across kind of any of my philosophies on digital writing, conclusions, I think are optional. You don't really need them. But if you want to put a nice little bow on it, this is where you would do that. And I have, you know, two rules for conclusions. One is you have to say something that's fundamentally different than everything else that you've said before. You know, don't. Don't spend another three paragraphs recapping all the same stuff that you already told the reader, right? The reader's like, you already said that. Move on. And second is if you don't need that, right? If you don't need to recap anything and you don't have anything else different to say, then just end on your last main point, right? And I call this the cliff. Just end on the last main point. Push the reader off the cliff. And what this does is this forces this reaction in them where. Where they go, oh, this was so valuable. You didn't waste my time. You kind of left me hanging a little bit. I'm ready for the next thing. And then they click back to whatever profile you know, they're perusing, whatever platform they're on, and they read another thing that you wrote and another thing that you wrote. This is something I hear from readers all the time. They go, I just discovered your work, and I went down your rabbit hole, and I ended up reading, you know, 100 articles of yours. The reason why that happens is because each one is essentially a cliff. You know, I'm just saying, hey, I gave you exactly what I promised you. Now we're done. If you want the next thing, you gotta go and click the next one. So the best way to prep the page is. And we're gonna walk through this real quick so you can see, but it's almost moving linearly and then at each step, kind of reassessing back at the top. So the first thing that I like to do is come up with a working title. So don't just dive into the writing. I spent years doing this. Don't just dive into the writing. Instead, force yourself to create a frame. A headline is a frame. It's basically telling the reader and telling yourself, before you even start writing, which direction are we going? Are we going north? Are we going south? Are we going to the east coast? We go into the west coast. You know, what is the thing that we're actually writing about? Then? Usually at some point in the headline, right, you have to make a decision like this. Here, here. Three reasons, okay? Whatever that thing is, that becomes the outline of the piece. You know, as soon as I write three reasons in a headline, I know that the piece is organized into three reasons. It's pretty simple. Or if I put in the headline 5 mistakes, the piece is going to be organized by 5 mistakes, right? So the value of the piece is actually in this small part of the headline. Okay? So essentially all you have to do then is go, alright, the most valuable thing about this, whatever I'm writing, this chapter, this piece, this atomic essay that we use in ship 30 for 30, this Twitter thread, all of these things are organized by main points that, that is the bulk of the value that you are giving the reader. So if you're going to spend a disproportionate amount of time on anything in your writing, it should be on the main points. Because that's what the reader's coming for, right? This headline says three reasons why. So why a reader clicks on that is they go, I want to know what the three reasons are. So they are going to evaluate your writing based on how valuable those three reasons are. So if you sit down and you go, oh, reason one, you just got to try hard. And reason two, you just got to do it right, Those aren't very good reasons, which means the value of your piece is very low. So if you're going to spend time thinking through how do I make my writing more valuable, it's here, it's all in the main points. What are you actually saying? This is where I spend. The two places that I spend the most time in my writing is the headline and the main points. The headline is, why does it matter to the reader? You know, what's the promise that I'm making? What are they going to get out of it? And then the main points are, how am I delivering on that promise? You know, how valuable, how differentiated is what I'm saying compared to status quo information. So those are the two places you want to spend the most time. And then after you make those decisions, the writing becomes really easy, right? Because here all we got to do is open these sections up and essentially all you have to do is just fill in, okay, I'm going to have a couple paragraphs here and we have a couple paragraphs here and then a couple paragraphs here. And then I go back and in my intro I just quickly get through the here's what it's about, here's who it's for, here's what the promise is, and here's what makes me credible. And then I'm done, right? So you can see how if you just start with a blank page, you're probably gonna sit there and you're gonna write all the way through it. You know, you might pretty much produce 300 words, 500 words, 1,000 words, 3,000 words. And then you have a bunch of problems, you know, you go, okay, I've got all these thoughts here. How do I organize it? You know, what order do I present them in? Is this even what I really wanted to say? You know, maybe I started with a reason, and then I moved into a tip. And then I was telling a story about a mistake that I made. And you don't really have that through line. This is a through line. You know, this is. This is what it's about. And here's all the things that we're going to go through, right? It's an outline, essentially. So I used to write in the blank page format, and I thought it was the writer's way. You know, I thought only true writers, only the purists let themselves go and go and go. And I did this to write my first book. My first book was a gaming memoir called Confessions of a Teenage Gamer. I was a pro gamer as a teenager, and I ended up spending four plus years writing this memoir because I rewrote it basically four or five times over, start to finish, and I was rewriting chapters hundreds of times because every time I was just writing and writing and writing, I produced hundreds and hundreds of pages of content. And every time I would basically have to start back over and go, oh, let me try and reorganize it now, and let me try and figure out what the direction is. And then after I spent, you know, four years doing that, I started to. I started writing a lot more on the Internet, and I started just evaluating my own frameworks and mental models for how I write and produce work. And I realized this is so much more efficient. And it also gives me a lot more clarity on what I'm giving the reader. And it gives the reader a lot more clarity into what they're signing themselves up for, because when they click the headline, they're making decision number one, do I want this? You know, then they start reading the intro and they're like, I just want to make sure I'm in the right room. And then they start skimming the main points and they go, oh, okay, this is what I signed up for. I'm liking it. All right? And then after they do those three things, that's when they start actually reading the content within each thing. But it's not until they've bought into the headline, skimmed the intro, and then skimmed your main points that they've made the decision. This is either something I'm going to spend 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 minutes reading, or I'm not. And I know this to be true, because, I mean, think about how many times when you're scrolling through a social media feed and you're clicking on things, you click on something and within five seconds you decide whether or not you still want to be there, Right? What are you doing in those five seconds? Well, you're comparing the headline to the intro, to the main points. And if you notice, nowadays, especially on the Internet, if you go to skim it and you can't get a sense for where it's going, you know, there aren't subheads, it's not well organized, you don't really know what you're going to get out of it. You don't buy into it. You click away because you're like, I'm afraid I'm going to waste 30 seconds of my life, right? So this whole strategy here is all about basically reverse engineering. Where do you want to end up and. And where you want to end up is clarity. You want it to be very clear for the reader why they're going to get or what they're going to get from your piece. You want there to be very minimal friction from the moment the reader clicks on the piece to understanding whether or not this is for them. So the way I frame this is readability is skimmability. The more skimmable it is, the easier it is for the reader to decide this is what they want to buy into or not. And then third, you want to reduce the amount of time it takes for you to produce high quality work, right? So if you start with this, it's going to be a lot easier for you to get to that end state over and over and over again, which is just going to increase your writing and your content output, which is just going to make it easier for you to improve, which is going to make it easier for you to put out more work, which is going to make it easier for more and more people to get introduced to your work, right? It's all a flywheel. So that old model of being a purist and going, I'm just going to write and write and write, and then at the very end, somehow it's all just going to make sense, right? It's almost like this close your eyes and hope the magic happens strategy. I spent years doing it. It was a monumental waste of time. Instead, I really encourage you to prep the page, start with a working headline as you go through. You can always go back and make adjustments. Use this little checklist for your intro. What is it about? Who is this for? What's the promise that you're making to the reader? What Are they going to get out of it? And what credibility do you have? Or whose credibility are you leveraging? And then what are your main points? 1, 2, 3. These are the three reasons. These are the five tips. These are the seven mistakes. Lists are great ways of learning how to prep the page. It's the easiest format to get started with, so I encourage you to play with that. And then if you want to start moving away from a list format, well, then just remove this, right? And all you're doing is just organizing your main points by ideas. That's it. You're just saying, in this section we're going to talk about this, and in this section we're going to talk about this. And if. If it turns you off to have numbers in front of it, then just remove the numbers. But it's the same idea, it's the same concept. And then finally with the conclusion again, if you don't have anything new to say, just end it. After your last idea. There's no need to feel like you need to go on this big grand, you know, tie a bow on top and make it this special gift. Just push the reader off the cliff. You know, just say, this is it. Here's the next thing to read. So I hope this is helpful. Again, this is a framework that I use constantly, and I encourage you to, you know, take it out for a test drive, see if you like it. The first couple times you do it, it's probably gonna feel a little janky and a little forced, but once you start training your brain this way, you'll actually start thinking this way, and you'll assemble pieces in skeletons in your mind, and then you're just filling in the skeleton as opposed to sitting down in front of a blank page and just trying to produce magic. So I hope you enjoyed this. Again, if you love writing and aren't sure how to make a career out of it, you. You're in the right place. I encourage you to keep watching. I got plenty more to share with you.