Hi Jon. One little tweak that might add to your “pre-planning” note taking and allow access to other parts of your brain you’re not using. I pick a post topic, then immediately do a mind-map of all the random thoughts on the topic that occur to me. I don’t assess the ideas, critique them, dump on them: whatever they are and however random, I just let my ideas encircle the topic in the center of the page. If one idea connects to another, I draw an arrow between them to indicate they’re related.

Then, I do nothing. I let the mind-map sit while I’m busy on all my other life tasks. My subconscious burbles away and when I come back to write my post, I’ve already worked out what I want to say.

For imagery, I constantly shoot interesting things with my iPhone. I also use the Dubbl App on the iPhone and Dubbl with myself (so I own the images). I often arrive at very interesting multiple exposures. I’d show you if Medium allowed me to attach an image :-)