How to Consistently Come Up With Ideas to Write About

One of the common culprits of writers block is that people sit down at the blank page and they have no idea what to write about. Like every other aspect of writing, coming up with ideas is a skill that requires a process. The more you write the more refined that process will become.

Capturing Ideas

The truth is we all have ideas all day long.

• We have them in the shower.
• We have them while we’re driving.
• We have them right when we wake up in the morning.
• We have them right before we go to sleep.

But if we don’t develop a system to capture them, then we’ll be scratching our heads, wondering what we should write about. So let’s talk about a few methods for capturing ideas.

1. Create a Spark File

If you haven’t read Steven Johnson’s piece about creating a spark file, I’d highly recommend it. Here’s what he says about his own spark file.

This is why for the past eight years or so I’ve been maintaining a single document where I keep all my hunches: ideas for articles, speeches, software features, startups, ways of framing a chapter I know I’m going to write, even whole books. I now keep it as a Google document so I can update it from wherever I happen to be. There’s no organizing principle to it, no taxonomy — just a chronological list of semi-random ideas that I’ve managed to capture before I forgot them. I call it the spark file. — Steven Johnson

2. Just write a headline

Most ideas don’t come to us fully formed. When I was writing this post, the last few paragraphs came to me first. It was like I was making a sandwich that had the bread, but I had to go to the grocery store to get some additional ingredients. Our natural temptation is to resist doing anything with an idea that isn’t fully formed.

But by writing down a headline you plant a creative seed that might bear fruit tomorrow, the day after or a month from now. I’ve included a screenshot below from my journaling software where I’ve often written nothing more than a headline or a chapter idea for my next book.

Note: It took 2 weeks from when I had the idea for this article to actually completing it.

3. Read Before you Write

When I spoke with Dani Shapiro about mastering the craft of writing, she mentioned that she keeps a copy of Virginia Wolf’s writer’s diary on her desk and usually reads before she writes. I usually grab a book off my shelf when I wake up in the morning and always read before I write. This seems to consistently get creative juices flowing.

4. Incubation Activities

Research has shown that our subconscious mind is much more powerful than our conscious mind. Sometimes the best thing we can do in order to solve a problem is to quite literally step away from it. Lee Zlotoff, the creator of Macgyver, refers to these activities the have nothing to do with our work as incubation activities.

Reading books and watching TV are off-limits.

But you can go for a walk, exercise, paint, and build things with your hands. In the process of finishing my manuscript for my upcoming book, I would often take breaks when I got stuck and play NBA 2k15. And after a few games, I found myself unstuck and with new ideas that had bubbled to the surface.

Shaping Ideas

In addition to capturing ideas, we have to learn to flush out those ideas, shape them and make them coherent enough to produce something concrete. There are a few different ways to do this.

The Mind Map

The mind map is a tool that I’ve used regularly, especially for lengthier pieces of work. If you read my article on the things I’ve learned from writing 1 million words in 5 years, you’ll see how I used a mind map to develop all the concepts in that article.

The Outline

More often than not all I have on my mind is a headline, and a few ideas to go underneath it. For example, the other morning I thought of an idea for a post titled The 7 Phases of a Writer’s Voice. Because it was a really half-baked idea, I just wrote down one word for each of the 7 phrases. It might be a couple days, weeks or months before the idea fully forms. And when I came up with that idea, even though it wasn’t fully formed, additional material for this post emerged.

The Riff/Free Write

1000 Words a day and Julia Cameron’s morning pages are really forms of riffing and free writing. One way to do this is to write the post title at the top of a page and start writing whatever comes to your mind.

Remember you can always go back and delete things that don’t make sense or belong.

Another way I use the riff is to find a quote and start with that.

I’ll even let myself go off on tangents that seem completely unrelated to what I’m trying to write. The thing that’s difficult about this for most people is that it requires you to break all those habits from years of writing 5 paragraph essays.

Ideas and words need room to breathe, and we have to embrace the anarchy just a tiny bit. I don’t mind that things are always a bit crazy or don’t make sense. Half the fun of writing is shaping meaning into madness

Perhaps one of the most counterintuitive pieces of writing advice I could give is to aim for quantity over quality. While that might seem like nonsense, it actually takes the pressure off.

A process is something that continually evolves and changes as you do. If you try to become religious about following this, you’ll fail. Take what works for and then discard accordingly. Use this is a framework and then develop your own process.

I’m the host and founder of The Unmistakable Creative Podcast. Every Sunday we share the most unmistakable parts of the internet that we have discovered in The Sunday Quiver. Receive our next issue by signing up here