After publishing more than 600 blog articles over the last thirteen years, I admit that there have been times when an idea may have sounded cool in my head, but by the time it made it to paper, it lost something along the way.
When an article doesn’t seem to be coming together for one reason or another, we need to dig deeply to find clarity, patience and perseverance to locate the problem and fix it, or to find another path to get from the introduction to the conclusion.
Here are some of the approaches that have helped me over the years, when an article was not cooperating and crossing the finish line the way I would have liked:
- Start again from a clean slate
Put your first draft aside and try telling the story again. Chances are, in the second version, you might use different wording, you might structure your ideas in a different order, or you might take a different approach to conveying your ideas. Then, choose the version that tells the better story, or take the best elements of the two stories and combine them.
- Outline the story
Another tool is to put aside your first draft and write out the essence of the story in point form to help reorganize your thoughts and ideas. Juggling a few summary ideas or keywords describing the introduction, the main points, and the conclusion may be easier than juggling the entire story, and may lend itself to a more objective view.
- Use the dictation function on your phone
Try telling the story out loud as if you were sharing it with a friend and record it on your mobile device. The dictated version may not result in a polished first draft, but it will likely be a draft constructed from a natural storytelling style. In doing so, I sometimes discover gems of ideas that might not have occurred to me while squinting at the computer screen.
- Strategic editing
During the editing process, when I find a passage that leaves me wondering if it really helps, I will cut and paste it to the bottom of the article and then read the article over to see if it flows better. If it does, bravo! If it doesn’t, I can move the passage back into place and try again with another passage.
- Step away from the story
If time permits, putting the story on the back burner might be the tool needed for inspiration to find you. Sometimes the right words come to me just before bedtime, in the shower or while doing something else like cooking or cleaning, where my hands are busy but the brain is processing things in the background.
- Brainstorming
When a story isn’t quite coming together, I sometimes hold a brainstorming session with myself, where I give myself five minutes to note anything and everything that comes to mind on the topic. Then I step away and consider if any of those points have the potential to bring value to the original story. Through this exercise, I sometimes find an idea that didn’t occur to me in the previous drafts.
When a story isn’t quite working, there is no reason to despair. As creatives, we have many tricks up our sleeves to help us shift our perspective from what’s not working to the infinite possibilities that could make a product of our imagination flourish. The six ideas above are just the tip of the iceberg, as different writers will have different suggestions on how to coax an article from the drafts folder to the completed folder.
We just need to keep an open mind to those suggestions and to keep trying, to bring our best stories across the finish line and to our loyal readers.
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Sincere thanks for reading!
Have a great day,
André
ANDRE BEGIN 
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