Thinking of a topic

I normally take some time to think about what I should write about, I have a few questions I normally ask myself:

  • who am I writing this for future me or someone else?
  • do I have enough knowledge on the topic?
  • what should be the take away from this topic?

Using a mind mapper tool to get my thoughts out

I then dive into my mind mapper tool of choice WriteMapper, as it is more built around a writers experience and it also has a really good keyboard shortcuts.

But this tool actually let me get my thoughts out and keep them as simple as possible, it also means that from a high level I am only seeing the headings of each part of the topic as I had thought about them.

Copy these thoughts into Bear

I really love the writing experience of getting my thoughts out with WriteMapper, but when I now want the full picture of what my thoughts were, I move my content into Bear using the copy Markdown feature of WriteMapper, I like Bear because the formatting of markdown files is great and they have an iPhone app too. The iPhone app is very useful when I want to continue my writing in bed or while on the move.

I pay for the yearly subscription of Bear so that all my content is synced between all devices and to support the good work the developer behind it is doing. Unfortunately Bear is not available on Windows, but you can try out an open source alternative like Notable.

Run the copy through Grammarly

I have only discovered Grammarly as of recent thanks to Lindsey Kopacz who shared her writing process with me at a time when I was having writer’s block. She even reached out and encouraged me to continue writing and followed up a few weeks later to see how I was getting on. Thanks again Lindsey Kopacz for your support.

To get my copy from Bear into Grammarly, I use the “Copy As” feature from Bear which gives me a rich text option. Since I started using Grammarly my writing has improved so much since I have started using Grammarly, this tool is great for those of us who aren’t that great with English.

Once I have fine-tuned my writing with Grammarly, I then copy the content and paste what I have in Bear, this is where Bear shines again, it will convert the Rich Text content that you paste into Markdown format. I tend to not update WriteMapper once the content has left for Bear.

Create a new markdown file for my blog

For my blog, I use a static site generator called Hugo. All the content in Hugo is written in a markdown file. The wonderful thing about all the apps (except Grammarly, we are waiting on you Grammarly) I use is that they have a markdown export option.