How to Start With Nothing and End up With Something.

You can’t make something out of nothing, they say. That’s true. But if you have nothing to make something out of, you can still create something. Writers do it every day.

Sometimes we sit at our laptop in the morning and have absolutely no idea what we want to write. As long as it stays that way, we can’t create anything.

But most of the time, we have created something new at the end of the day. We have succeeded in doing this even though we had nothing at the beginning — not even an idea.

We look back on the day and wonder how this happened. Did a higher power help us?

Without wanting to hurt religious feelings, I would say that higher powers have nothing to do with creating something from nothing. We just started with nothing.

So at some point over time, something must have happened. One second we had nothing, and the next second there was something to work with.

Some people call it inspiration, and they mean something mystical. A small, inconspicuous idea seems to appear out of nowhere and settle down in our head. This process seems magical and inexplicable to us, but in reality, there is nothing mysterious about it.

Let’s look at what happens when we sit down at the computer, and we have no idea what we want to write about. We open the word processor and stare at a blank document.

What the hell am I going to write about? We think desperately and feel lost. We have nothing and cannot create anything from it.

But in this desperate question of what to write about lies the very seed of our success. We do not have nothing. We have this one question: What should I write about?

When we have a problem, and we formulate it, it becomes a question, and a question can be answered. The first thing we have in our creative process is a question.

Before we sat down at the computer, we didn’t even have a question. We really started with nothing. The something that we have now is something that we created ourselves. Our brain is continually creating something out of nothing, trying to interpret the world around us. Attempting to understand leads to questions, and questions always include the possibility of being answered.

Once we have this first question, we can specify this question or ask further related questions.

What to write might lead to the next question: “What do I know enough about to write about?”

Suddenly we have dramatically narrowed down the possible answers. The answer to the first question could have come from absolutely any conceivable area, but the answer to question number two can only come from our personal experience.

Immediately, many possible answers come to our minds. We think of the sport we like to do most, the movies we have seen, our job, our travels or books we have read. Everyone has an inexhaustible store of experiences. Now that we have asked this question, we can draw from this reservoir.

Of course, we could also ask an entirely different question. For example, we could ask: What interests my readers most?

This question leads to completely different answers than the question of what we know a lot about.

But perhaps some answers from both questions overlap. If I know a lot about fishing and my readers are interested in it, it is worth thinking further.

Whichever way our thoughts take at this point — we definitely have something to work with now.

We human beings can produce innovations because we ask questions. We respond to every problem we encounter with a question, even if we are not always aware of it. Our brain helps us answer these questions by applying things we already know to the new problem and seeing if that brings us closer to an answer.

But we also can play through scenarios in our heads. We are the only species capable of doing thought experiments.

In our example, we also started with a problem. We didn’t know what to write. This problem automatically led to the question: What should I write?

In turn, we could not answer this question without further specifying it or, respectively, supplementing it.

Now our question was: “What do I know enough about to write about?

We were now at a point where we were able to draw up a list of possible topics for the first time. A list of possible answers is substantially more than the question we had initially, and this question was more than the nothing we had when we started the computer.

Let’s fast forward a bit and assume we found an answer. We may have concluded that we want to write an article about fishing because we know a lot about it and our readers are interested in it.

Now we need to narrow down the subject even further, and we might end up with the article title: How to catch a big carp.

Finally, we have something concrete. We now know exactly what we want to create, namely an article about how to catch a big carp.

Now we take our experience, supplement the facts we are not sure about with an internet search, and then write the article.

We have created something from nothing. In the course of the day, we have gone from “no idea” to “that’s it.”

Every piece of art, every scientific breakthrough, and every new idea, in general, comes from nothing. At some point, a question appears in this nothingness because a problem gets in our way, and suddenly there is something in the vacuum that can grow.

If we are dissatisfied with what is, we simply have to ask the right questions to initiate change.

The more questions we ask the world, the more chance we have to grow. So let’s ask more questions. Only then will we get answers.

René Junge a published author writing on ILLUMINATION.

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