Trouble writing? You probably aren't scaffolding enough

The scaffolding process

1. brainstorm
2. turn the brainstorm into form-free points structure
3. play with the structure of the points
4. decide what order you'll describe them
5. background: get into your reader's head. Decide what background, context, stage you need to describe so the reader understands your points.

Writing prose

You try and write a sentence. You write a fragment. Then you're stuck figuring out how it should end. Your so focused on figuring out how to continue the fragment that you don't see the big picture. Should I have started with this fragment in the first place?

Here's a technique that works better:

• Don't write a fragment and try to end it.

• Write lots of fragments, that start from different places. Different perspectives. Different relations.

• The fragments don't have to connect to each other. (at first)

• You want to say 3 things. Instead of starting with one and trying to tack the two, write fragments for all 3.

• Copy fragments and then try to change them, instead of changing an original you feel has value. This way you aren't afraid of making the fragment worse, and loosing the value.

• It's much easier to string together a good sentence from all of these fragments then to come up with a good sentence from the first go.

• Write tree sentences from variations of sentence components you describe. It's like brainstorming and writing combined:

  Instead of
      starting out
      beginning
      trying to write
  with the
  the
      perfect sentence
      one precise version
  of the description that you are
      trying
      attempting
  to
      write down
      illustrate with words
  you can use break a sentence into
      multiple fragments
      a tree of possibilities.