Doodling in writing

If you're not familiar with the word "doodling", it basically means creating a bunch of random things without investing all your attention into what you do.

The term is usually used by artists when they are trying to draw something without having anything particular in mind, or even having an idea, but not knowing exactly how to make it real.

In some cases, doodling can be done without lifting the pen from the paper, but the term started to be associated more with random drawings and lines on a paper rather than working with a continuous line (as far as I know).

Now, doodling is something really interesting to do when you want to draw, especially if you have nothing in mind. You can do it even when you work in Photoshop or trying to create some music. You just try a bunch of things and see if you can come up with something decent.

And as you can expect, the same method can be used when writing.

Not having ideas when you need to write something is a common part of the writing process. Sometimes you just don't know what topic to approach, while other times, even if you have enough ideas, you just can't create something you're happy with.

It happens to everyone, even to those who have years of experience, and there's not much you can do about it. However, doodling helps.

Getting a piece of paper or creating a new document and writing a bunch of stuff just for the sake of doing it, without having a purpose, an idea, and without trying to achieve something good, will often help you get out of that "writer's block".

Not only that, but in a lot of situations you'll find out that you may be interested into writing about some new topics, but you never knew that before because you didn't try to write about anything other than what you were used to.

Writing random things every day, doodling and just creating content without knowing what your final destination should be, without expecting anything good once you're done, is a great way of both getting good at writing and getting more ideas every day.

Plus, this is a great way of getting motivated to write when you want to do something else. Once you start doing it, even if for a few minutes, you'll get in the mood to write and you may even be able to come up with something decent, even if you didn't think you can do it at first.

Give yourself some time to explore what other topics you can approach, doodle, write random things, and just keep them somewhere, in a folder. You don't need to publish if you don't want to, but it's a great exercise and it can help you a lot more than you think.