That’s the nature of research – you don’t know what in hell you’re doing.–Harold “Doc” Edgerton Has this ever happened to you? You have a great topic for an article. So, you open your internet browser and type in a bunch of key words. You find several excellent articles on your brilliant topic and collect all kinds of useful and interesting facts, figures, and quotes. Stuffed to the gills with information, you excitedly sit down at your computer, roll up your sleeves, and then…nothing. You’ve got so much information running around your brain that you’re totally lost and overwhelmed. You vaguely remember having a premise for your article, but you don’t quite remember it anymore. If you ever had a hook, you’ve forgotten that too, and the whole article is dead in the water before you’ve even written the first word. Okay, so maybe this hasn’t happened to you, but it’s happened to me several times since I started my blog poetryNprogress this year. Right now, I’m sitting on research for a handful of articles I had hoped to shape into blog posts, and while I continue to try to make sense of all the research on each piece, I’m getting nowhere. Sadly, every time I try and fail to make headway, I grow that much more ready to ditch these articles altogether. So, where did I go wrong? How did my well-intentioned efforts at research end up killing my blog posts?Read the rest of the article at poetryNprogress.