How to Write Articles Faster: Use a Mind Map

One of the factors influencing a writer's pay is how fast they turn out their product. This is especially important when writing for on-line websites where the per-piece pay is fairly low. For this type of writing, generating meaningful income is significantly dependent on being able to produce lots of articles in whatever time you have available. Writing faster while maintaining quality is a writer's dream.

There is a terrific tool to help a writer speed up the time it takes to create an article and be more confident that his or her writing is both high-quality and complete.

Use a mind map

Hate outlines? I do. I use a mind map instead when I'm going to write something. A mind map is sort of like a visual outline for your article.

How to do it

Here's how it works:

Take a blank piece of paper. In the middle of the paper write the topic of your article. Draw a circle around this topic. Draw a line from this circle out an inch or two. At the end of the line, write down an idea you want to include in your article. Draw another line starting from another place on the circle. At the end of this line, write another idea you want to include in your article. Repeat this process until you've captured every idea you can think of that you might want to include when you write your article. Put them in no particular order. Draw in new lines and add ideas anywhere they fit on the page. You'll end up with something that looks roughly like a bicycle wheel hub and spokes. Some of the ideas will have sub-ideas related to them. For these, draw a circle around the idea and put spokes coming off it with the sub-ideas at the end of these spokes. The whole thing will look kind of spider web-ish when you're done. Don't try to keep it neat; just slap those ideas down as fast as they come to you.

When you sit down to write the article, have the mind map in front of you as a kind of reminder and checklist. You'll find the article flows a lot faster as you jump around the mind map picking up your ideas. You'll probably find that you don't include every idea you wrote down. That's fine. The mind map will help you feel confident about what not to include when you write as well as what to include.

It will feel weird at first

It can feel very awkward and impractical the first time you write using a mind map. That's completely normal. But I urge you to force yourself to do the complete process one time before you think about giving up on it. It may seem like it takes extra time at first, but once you've done it, you'll find that it cuts down writing time by a huge amount. For me, it takes less than a third as long to write an article as it did before I used mind maps. And one of the best features is that because I've captured all my ideas ahead of time, I "know" when the article is done and I save a lot of time by not second-guessing and trying to re-write endlessly.

Don't forget to proofread

You'll still need to proofread your writing or have someone else do that for you. And you'll still need to have something to say. This tool won't make you into a writer. It can, however, make you a faster, better writer.