How I Never Run out of Ideas to Write About
And write 8 to 10 blog posts a week.
As someone who writes every day and publishes anywhere between eight and ten blog posts a week, a question I get often is, “how do you come up with daily content?”
I thought the same thing when I started blogging. I get it. When you haven’t done it before, it can feel daunting, you think, there is no way I can come up with something to write about that amounts to seven blog posts per week.
I bet you can. You just have to reframe a few things in your mind.
Whether you write for clients, a blog, or Medium, you need reliable ways to generate ideas to parse out, filter through your perspective, and give your spin for your audience.
Part of the equation is confidence in taking an idea and making it yours.
Where to start
Think about how much content you already consume daily and where you consume it.
Here are some places to name just a few:
- The internet
- News Outlets — Wapo, NYTs, Vox, The Atlantic, The New York Time’s Modern Love section
- Youtube videos
- Books
- Magazines
- Films
- TV
- Docs
- Podcasts
These are where ideas hide. Pay attention to what sparks your curiosity and interests. Now shift your mindset and put on your journalist hat because everything is copy.
“Everything is copy,” was the family motto in the Ephron household, which meant that anything and everything that happens to you is fair game to write. Nora Ephron was an American journalist, filmmaker, and writer. She wrote such hits as When Harry Met Sally, Heartburn, and Silkwood.
Ephron’s mother said, “Everything is copy,” when Nora struggled with some perceived negative in her life. She would fall or have some other experience she viewed as a hardship, and her mother’s advice was always “use it.” Use it as copy. Use it in your stories.
Every experience you endure is yours to write about — it’s content.
Use what you consume during the day as well — it’s content.
What happened to someone else, written in your perspective — content.
Use your mentors
You can also use other people’s stories and retell them using your perspective on how it relates to your experiences in life. Give your take on what you learned from another person, of course, giving credit to the original writer. Everyone steals. Even the best borrow from mentors and fill in the blanks of an idea with their thoughts to make it their own.
I’ve taken one tweet from James Clear and written an entire post around it, adding my own thoughts, experiences, and perspective.
Bob Dylan stole from Woody Guthrie, and Woody Allen borrowed from Bergman and Fellini.
Summarize people’s content while giving them credit.
If you’re interested in someone else’s life and perspective, write about it. I wrote a post about Michael Jordan, someone I didn’t know much about until I watched the documentary, The Last Dance on Netflix. Jordan’s perspective on the game and life — live in the moment and give it all you’ve got — is a perspective I admire. Especially because I grew up playing a lot of team sports.
His passion for basketball is impossible to miss.
If you aren’t interested in something, it’s going to show in your writing. When you’re passionate about a discipline, subject, or issue, your passion makes other people excited about it. Allow them to capture the joy and nuance you love about a subject through your writing.
This is what writers do. We don’t so much as write for a living; we think and regurgitate. Those who retell in easily digestible prose, using a distinct voice, do the best and gain an audience more easily.
How to come up with the next idea, and the one after that, and so on
To come up with the best ideas, you need a process for ideation. Ideation is a large part of writing daily content and the first part of the writing process.
When blogging daily, the first thing you must put aside is the idea that perfect exists. It doesn’t. If you aim for perfection, your stories will die a sad death, unread on your hard drive.
Author Anne Lamott writes in her beautiful book Bird by Bird,
Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.
Instead of aiming for something that doesn’t exist, aim for getting something out the door. That is where growth, as a writer, happens.
Publicly sharing is where the writer receives feedback on what is working, what resonates, and what doesn’t. Publishing is how you find your audience, and when you find them, even if your tribe is a group of seven, they will give you comments, questions, hints, and ideas on what you should be investigating to write about next.
The thing about blogging is that it’s often one’s imperfections that makes them a good writer. People like authenticity, and often, the simplest and most straightforward writing does the best. The writer’s imperfections is what adds variety to writing.
Your worldview makes you an expert
Everyone is different. We all come at topics differently because each of us has a different worldview based on experiences growing up, the cultures in which we were raised, and even the era in which we were born.
Share your perspective; that is what makes you interesting as a writer. It’s also what makes your voice unique. You don’t have to have an original idea to write; you just have to use your perspective because you are the expert on your worldview.
Adopt a mindset to let these ideas flow
Figure out what you don’t know and write about it. People love to read about other people learning something new and succeeding or failing. It is often in the failing and what you learned that is the most interesting for the reader. Why? Because we all fail.
Our most significant failures are where the largest and most profound growth comes from. I wish I remembered this advice when I was hemming and hawing on whether to publish on this platform four years ago. Think of how much growth I could have had, had I just taken the chance and had the guts to be imperfect in public. I would be a lot further on right now, my writing would be that much better, and my income would be higher as well.
But, we need to let go of past mistakes and just keep moving forward.
You are good enough right now to write. This platform works for all levels of writers, thinkers, and entrepreneurs at different stages of their writing careers.
If you didn’t start yesterday, start today.
One idea can spark a 3000 words article
If you have an idea, research it and write it. Don’t think too narrowly about what you’re able to write; if you think of yourself as a life-long learner, as a work in progress, then think about what is going on in your life right now and write about that in a way your readers will learn by reading your progress.
My process:
- I start with the headline. It is my jumping off point.
- The headline is what is going to dictate the ideas (the bullet points).
Get into the mindset that allows ideas to flow, and when I say ideas, I mean the headline, because the headline dictates the article. Then, come up with some bullet points.
Once you have the idea, it is like a seed; let it grow.
Schedule time into your day to do nothing to allow the idea to grow
Here is one of my secrets: after I have a headline and a few basic bullet points to riff on, my best posts come when I’m doing something monotonous like walking, bouncing a ball in my house (I know, strange), or mopping the kitchen floor. This is why my house is so clean. I need to do monotonous work for ideas to connect in my brain that make sense, to then turn into a post people want to read.
A writer’s life is one that needs to step away from all modern distractions like pings, notifications, sounds, likes, and chatter, to allow the mind to do what it does best, think about ideas deeply and connect the dots between ideas.
Looking up at the ceiling or bouncing a ball against the wall while laying on my back, or doing the dishes allows me to create massive amounts of content.
When you have an idea — go be bored and allow that idea to simmer in your mind and then come back to the computer, and words will flow.
Write when you have a big emotion. If you can’t recreate the emotion, hack the emotion with song
Whenever you are highly charged about a subject, write about it. Write when you are pissed, angry, or joyful.
Consume some sort of content that makes you feel a certain way.
Emotion drives the reader to take action — share, comment, buy something you are promoting, engage.
I hack the emotion if I don’t feel anything. If I need to generate a certain emotion for a post I want to write, and I’m just not feeling it anymore because I waited too long to write the thing, I’m over the feeling, I will play a song loudly to get into the emotion.
Music does this easily, as we’ve all experienced; it puts us into a certain state of mind to be able to write with a particular feeling. Which translates to the reader and moves them.
The next time you’re emotional about anything, sit down and write about it right away.
In conclusion
Because of the internet, you can get any information you want to write about.
Figure out what you don’t know and then tell people about it. To become an expert in anything is to learn about it, write what you learned, go through the process, and then tell your audience what you got out of the journey.
Once you have the mindset, you’ll become an idea machine. You’ll never run out of ideas to write about again. Everything is content; everything is copy, as are the experiences you endure and grow from.
Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering type-A personality. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats.
