If You Are an Writer, You Need an Idea Day

Everything we write and publish once started as a small idea. Most important is a daily writing routine, but without ideas, we are still nothing.

Anyone who makes a living writing books or articles knows days when we just can’t be productive.

To continue writing a new novel seems to be too much of a task for the day. To write an article from scratch is beyond our powers at the moment. But we cannot afford not to make progress. Bills have to be paid, and the fans rely on us to provide them with new reading material soon.

The wrong way to use unproductive days

I used to do completely different things on days like this that had nothing to do with writing. I took care of the bookkeeping, tinkered with my homepage, or researched a few facts I needed for my current novel.

But that always left me with a bad conscience. I did things that needed to be done, but they had little to do with advancing me as an author. Above all, I did these necessary things in times that I had reserved in advance for writing. Actually, there are other blocks of time in the week I had booked for these activities.

There had to be a way to write without writing. There had to be a way to move my writing forward without working on a story or an article.

A writer’s block put me on the right track

I haven’t had a real writer’s block for a long time. But about two years ago, I was struck once. Every day I sat down at my laptop, stared at the blank page, and then closed it again after an hour of frustration.

I looked for ways to prevent this terrible condition reliably, and I found them.

One of the most important tips I found at that time was about good preparation. It was about knowing at the beginning of a writing session what you would write today. To achieve this, you have to separate the planning of a story and its realization clearly. Since then, I don’t plot on writing days, and I don’t write on days reserved for planning.

The result was that I have become much more effective and faster in both plotting and writing.

The right way to use unproductive days

Knowing how to overcome writer’s block is very useful, but it doesn’t help when we have a really unproductive day.

These days are characterized by little energy and low motivation. Plotting and writing are both very demanding, and thought-intensive tasks and are therefore not suitable for such days.

But in the same way that we can separate plotting from writing, we can also divide one part of writing and plotting even further.

You are probably familiar with the concept of dividing big tasks into many small tasks. Many authors use this principle by dividing the big goal of writing a book into many intermediate goals. Such intermediate goals can be chapters, individual scenes, or a certain number of words per day.

These are all excellent ways to reduce the pressure on us while writing. But even here, we still have the problem of simplifying writing instead of replacing it with something that can be done with little mental energy.

Dividing the writing into small portions is of little use in this case. But what about plotting or designing an article? This is where we can start because writing starts with plotting, but plotting always begins with a small idea.

We usually have the idea for our current project when an unproductive day gets in the way. But we know that later, we will need ideas from which we can develop a plot or a draft for future projects.

So why don’t we just try to develop some ideas that we will need later?

An idea day can be your secret weapon

At some point, I actually started doing nothing more than writing down ideas on days with little mental energy. Many of these ideas later became articles, short stories, and even whole books.

I had these ideas on days when I could not do anything else but write down a few notes and thoughts, but the ideas I developed in the process saved me from being blocked many times later.

Now there is one fixed day a week when I only develop ideas. These days I do not have to work on my current novels or articles. My daily goal is reached as soon as I have written down a few ideas for later work.

Today, for example, I had four ideas for erotic short stories and thirteen ideas for thriller short stories.

Each of these ideas is between one and five lines long in a Word document.

I worked on them for only one hour. So in one hour, I developed ideas for seventeen stories. They are not plots but simple basic constellations or concepts, but each idea can potentially be developed into an entire novel.

Use writing prompts to find ideas

Google delivers hits for every search query. We know this, and yet we use it far too rarely.

Of course, not everyone can bubble over with ideas at all times. Often we need inspiration from outside. For example, I developed my thriller ideas today by searching Google for thriller writing prompts.

If you think I just copied a dozen of these prompts, you’re wrong. That would have been too easy for me.

Instead, I read many prompts and concentrated on those that didn’t appeal to me at all. After that, I always looked at two of these prompts together, thought about what was bothering me in each case, and then developed my own prompt that used the other two but eliminated their weaknesses.

This kind of idea development is only one of many possibilities. There are many books on the topic of idea generation. I suggest that you look into some of these methods and find one or two that appeal to you the most.

The goal should always be to be able to come up with up to a dozen ideas off the top of your head without having to work too hard mentally.

When you know how to develop such fundamental ideas reliably, you should devote one day a week just to the idea generation. Over time, many hundreds of ideas will accumulate in your notebook.

Many of them will turn out to be useless later, but there is still enough left over never to have to sit in front of an empty page again for the next few years.

Make your next weak writing day an idea day.

René Junge a published author writing on The Full Time Writer

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