Come Up With New Writing Ideas By Getting Out of Your Head and Engaging With the World Around You

Prompt: What are some recommendations you can provide to help other writers come up with new ideas?

Coming up with good ideas that can be easily and quickly written up is one of those things that writers can have difficulty with. When we try to write every day we can often get burnt out which can lead to our idea pool drying up for a period. It may not be a total lack of ideas but the inability to be able to develop an idea by bringing it down from where it originates in our intellect into a form that communicates something of practical value to your readers.

This problem is often associated with two related issues. First, the nature of writing itself, and second, the fact that many writers are introverted.

The first concern involves the constant need to come up with new ideas and to develop them into organized, clearly presented essays and stories. We’re always looking for new topics and are analyzing them to determine how best to spin lunch with a friend, a museum exhibit we’re touring with a date or a news story we hear. We are always trying to create a new way of discussing and viewing familiar topics. This means we are often focusing inside our heads or internally so to speak.

The other issue related to this internal focus is that many of us are very introverted and are perfectly comfortable being alone while we work. Een when we go out for example to a coffee shop to work, we generally don’t interact with others, focusing on whatever piece we are working on at the time.

While we enjoy interpersonal interactions, we aren’t driven to participate in them because of a strong outgoing need the way extroverts are. Similarly, after interacting with people, especially new ones, we need some space alone to recharge our batteries which can also interrupt our writing process.

When these two things are combined, the preference to work alone and concentrate fully without needing to shift our attention and focus completely to be able to analyze a conversation and the tendency to remain in our heads a large part of our day, it can inhibit new ideas from forming.

The best way to come up with novel ideas about familiar topics is to spend time engaging with the world around us and those in it. Sometimes we need to just disconnect from our writing mind to just experience things without conceptualizing, analyzing, organizing what we encounter.

Stepping outside ourselves, without always trying to fit everything to a writing lens may not seem to help us immediately but all of it will percolate and enable us to combine things in new ways. It also helps us see things less from an esoteric viewpoint and more a place in this world that others can relate to. The more we engage with the world around us, the more what we write will resonate with readers.

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