What's the point with writing? How about preplanning?

Do you ever get started on your keyboard and you realize that you don't have much to say? Do you then sit there staring at the blank white page or screen for seemingly hours or do you just start keyboarding such that words start flowing onto the page?

That's the dilemma with any type of writing--where to start and what to start.

So, it would be wise to maybe kick around some ideas on a notepad or whiteboard, or hey, even a napkin, before even starting the writing project.

I'm not talking about wild posts on Facebook or Twitter or even emails to your group on Google or one of the other email providers. I'm talking about writing that you want to use to showcase your thoughts and even your personality.

After making much of my career with writing over the past 35 years, I'd like to share my thoughts with you.

Ever since I started writing -- maybe even when I was in junior high school -- when I get the glimmer of an idea for an article (for a newspaper or magazine) or other type of document, I jot notes on a small notepad or even in a three-ring binder to fill out the idea's form and give it more substance.

Although I still do that (I always have a few pens and some paper handy when I'm out and about), I've found that having a whiteboard handy in my office helps for fleshing out those ideas.

What is this? Brainstorming! And it's a form of Preplanning!

It's a technique that I learned when I started in college and worked part-time at a marine laboratory. The scientists had blackboards in their offices on which they'd scope out their research projects. Sure, scientific reports and journal articles have a set organization as dictated by their fields, but they still have to plan their research approach. And the researchers seemed to get a better handle on their upcoming work by getting some of the most pertinent points on their boards so they could start aiming their thoughts in those directions.

I've learned to do the same -- for my fun writing as well as for my work writing. I did this a little for this post as well--just some notes on a piece of paper for things I wanted to discuss here.

As a Squidoo fan, I love creating fun Squidoo lenses (what Squidoo calls the sites that folks make on their site) that showcase my writing and photography (and generate a little cash, too!). And for most of my Squidoo lenses, I get the idea while I'm out driving around or some other place where I can't just start getting it captured by keyboard. So I'll just jot a note on a piece of paper so I can get to it later. Then, I carry that paper around and add to it as I think of more angles or items I can add.

But a Squidoo lens, like this blog post, is not a formal document. So I don't feel a need to wait until it's perfect or darned close before I release it to the world. I try to get it as robust as possible, but I'd rather get something out than to let it sit for days, weeks, and months before it is published. Yes, I occasionally find typos or unclosed parentheses or broken links--the nice thing about this blogging platform and my Squidoo lenses is that I can always go back into the post and fix the problems. Sometimes you have to look at a post (or publication) with fresh eyes before you can see the issues that could use polishing.

Do you wonder what a Squidoo lens looks like? Here is one of my first ones: "If You Write--Get it Edited".