Writing Ideas

It’s day 3 and I’m already almost out of ideas.

No problem, let’s come with some! Now you might ask, but how do we do that?

Keep Writing

When you write something, decide at least the title for your next article. This way you have something to come back to. You also don’t need to start everything from scratch the next day.

The same thing is true for when you write something longer. You should never finish a section and just close the application. Start the first few sentences of the next section, so when you come back to it you get writing right away without wasting half an hour trying to remember where you left off.

Outline

A great alternative to writing a few sentences is outlining the next article. An outline should contain the main bullet points you want to touch on and nothing else. It doesn’t need to be in depth, just the general idea is more than enough.

For example for this article the outline was something like this:

• How to Keep Writing
• Leave stuff unfinished
• The Benefits of Outlining

Which can be seen as the titles of the paragraphs more or less.

Be Flexible

The outline shouldn’t be strict though if you feel like wandering around you should be able to do so. This comes with limits, if you’re going totally off the rails it is the time to stop and reconsider.

Depending on what you’re writing this might differ a lot. If you’re writing a generic article you might be able to go off the rails more than let’s say a novel where you have everything planned and flashed out. In a novel what happens next is dependent on what happened before in the story so you’re more limited.

Break the Rules

You should always be free to break the rules. Maybe you’re a pantser and like to write as it comes, I’m mostly a pantser too, but I argue that even pantser can benefit from a generic outline. That doesn’t mean that you stick with it, it’s so that if you feel lost you have something to come back to.

More of all just force yourself to write something, anything. The words will come.