Use a presentation to break writer's block - Christopher S. Penn

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Are you stuck feeling like you’re writing the same old thing and need fresh new ideas about it?

Try this trick to get yourself unstuck. To make the most of it, have a notepad available at all times to take notes on fresh ideas and thoughts as they occur.

Take any topic that you’ve got experience on and create a slide presentation about it.

Aim to have a 60 minute presentation, and aim to spend about a minute on each slide.

Get ready to go present it. It doesn’t matter whether or not anyone else watches – but present it as if you were doing an hour-long talk at an event. Before you start talking, get a portable voice recorder and record yourself as you present.

Present the content and record yourself. A webinar format is actually ideal for this because you won’t be obsessing over how you look or how you appear to the audience – you’ll just be sharing what’s on your slides and speaking about them.

Next, take the recording and listen to it. Chances are, even if you’ve written about your area of expertise before, even in depth, there will be at least one new thing that you shared in your talk that you haven’t written about. If you did it in front of an audience and took some Q&A, listen to how you answered the questions.

You’ve now got a giant amount of content, from presentation slides to the prepared notes to the actual delivery of the material itself, more than enough information to create followup blog posts, articles, emails, and more. By switching processes and formats to something much more long form, you’ve forced yourself to create a lot more material, material that you can then refine, expand upon, and share.

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