One of the reasons I at times struggle to write is because of the lack of genuinely good ideas. Don’t get me wrong, I get a lot of ideas, but not all of them are worthy of writing.
For months I’ve been meaning to write more regularly. But to start, first I needed a kickass idea. Or that’s what I thought. So I sat staring at my Evernote containing a list of all possible ‘writing ideas’, but there were just two.
I told myself I need better ideas if I’m really serious about this writing thing. What’s the point in starting now when just have a couple of ideas? I’ll be staring at my screen again by the next week. I need to have more ideas ready first.
But now while I look at it, it was more about procrastination than the lack of ideas. Funny how we make silly excuses for ourselves. And so I procrastinated for months, without doing any actual writing.
Then one day I said f*ck it and finally picked one of the ideas from the list. That idea led to ‘8 Effective ways to increase focus and kill distractions’. But once I started writing, that’s when the magic started to happen. That’s when the ideas started flowing.
The more I wrote, the more ideas I churned out.
I got at least 4 more writable ideas just while writing that post. No kidding. Those ideas got me covered for the next few posts (including this one).
This got me intrigued, but I wanted to test this again before coming to a conclusion. Last week while I was working on another post in the morning before going to work, this came out to be true again. That day I came up with a couple of more good ideas while at work. I bet there is some correlation.
When we start writing, we get into a creative flow. We get immersed in it. And our marvellous brain starts making an internal connection, which otherwise it doesn’t. Our busy lives
In fiction, more ideas for the plot appear as you write. Maybe the
same happens with the non-fiction writing as well.
It’s kind of a simple cycle. Something like the one shown below:
Writing it seems lights a creative spark in us. The more we write, the more ideas we come up with. I guess that’s how the human brain works.
Thanks to my writing in the past few weeks, I have more than a dozen ideas yet to be written about. And those dozen ideas will lead to many dozens more, and so on.
This has increased my writing rate. With my writing at Medium, personal blog and some copy writing at work, I have been producing some content almost every other day. I’m still nowhere near the goal I want to achieve, but at least now it’s down to my procrastination, not the lack of ideas.
Call To Action
We look for inspiration outside, but perhaps the inspiration is within us. It’s in our work. We can keep looking and searching for posts that give us a list of ideas to explore, but those ideas will be more miss than hit. But the ones we come up with ourselves, those are different. They strike a different core with us.
So in order to write more, get started first.
PS: I came up with another idea just while writing this post. 🙂
Nitin Sharma
