Finding ideas v. writing about them
Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t always just sit down here and write stuff. I’m often hard up for ideas, staring at the blank page like anyone. In moments like those, it helps tremendously to stare at a giant outline in my todo manager, grab something that looks good, and go for it.
We all need writing prompts, don’t we? I blame school for this. We went our whole lives creating what other people told us to create, and then we went into the wider world and could do… whatever we want. And so I have tried to account for this by building a separate routine that creates the structure necessary for writing all this.
As part of intermission, I’ve been using Naomi Dunford’s method to generate lots of ideas for things to write. I’ve been doing this every year or two since at least 2018. And while the aforelinked looks pretty content-marketer hyperbolic, the thrust is simple:
Find a few broad-stroke areas you’re good at.
Chunk it into sub-topics.
Write about the sub-topics.
That’s it.
So for me, that’s probably design, lifestyle, business. One can chunk design into physical products, software, human issues in shipping stuff, fun examples, etc. One can chunk lifestyle into food, gardening, baseball, travel. One can chunk business into independence, remote work, education, etc.
What’s funny is how the chunks seem to change over time. This might be predictable – we change, after all – but I think I’m known for being relatively consistent over time, and so it’s always surprising to me when I find new rabbit holes to go down.
For example, as we move away from design-hostile fields like contemporary independent ecommerce and back towards software, we’ve spent a lot of time investigating structures of leveraged power – and so power has become a major focus of our content writing. Power becomes hostile to design in highly predictable ways, which makes it a perfect topic to examine from a handful of perspectives.
I’ve done this exercise with text once or twice, but I seldom dip into the bucket for text – mostly I write what I want, or what you want me to. But if you want to suggest any areas for me to focus on more, now would be a great time.