Note: This article is from blogger Darius Foroux, who talks about the steps to finding new article ideas.
I imagined Ernest Hemingway sitting in a dark café in Paris, and the poet Charles Bukowski smoking his pipe, and it seemed to me that some source inspired these writers.
We all stared at a blank page waiting for inspiration to finally come and get us to write, but my experience has taught me that this strategy is a failure. Trying to start writing an article or a book from nothing is a waste of time. Instead, I always make sure I have ideas that make writing easier.
In this article, I will explain the steps I follow in coming up with new ideas for articles, and I have used them hundreds of times successfully.
Effective steps to help you come up with new article ideas
1. Look at good materials
Because you are a writer, your main task is to produce words, which is the output by which you evaluate yourself, and without good input, you will not get good results. Writing is similar to dieting, as will happen when you eat unhealthy food, and it seems clear in your appearance that your product will be poor without access to high-quality materials.
Your job is to treat your mind like an athlete treats their body. You can do this by looking at suitable materials from books, articles, podcasts and great videos, which may also include personal experiences.
Try a lot of things in life; every experience is raw material. For example, I worked in a company just to try it. Based on my experience, I wrote an article on some facts related to the workplace.
I received hundreds of emails from people who said it was the most useful article they read on this subject, but if I thought that working in a company did not suit my level, I would not have written that article and others.
2. Write down your thoughts
Access to materials is only the first step, and everyone can do it, but to ensure that you always have enough ideas to write about, you must train yourself to think of ideas for writing articles.
Every experience you go through is an idea for an article. Start to notice everything you come across, and write down those ideas regularly.
I always start with the title. For example, I came up with the idea of this article when I was talking to my blog friend, and then suddenly I came up with this idea, so I immediately opened an application on my phone to take notes and wrote the title: "How to Find New Ideas for Articles," and I wrote under the title: "Explain the mechanism of work, conduct research, and do not wait for inspiration."
When you write down your thoughts, think about the future and keep in mind that you will forget most of what occurs to you, so write down your thoughts as if you were explaining them to a friend, and add some notes that may help in the future to remember what was originally on your mind. When I returned to my note to write this article, I knew exactly what I would say.
3. Research procedure
In my writing course, I devoted some lessons to teaching my students how to do research better; some people found it strange at first because they thought it had nothing to do with writing, but to become a better writer, you must first become a better researcher.
We, writers, collect the best words, results, and ideas that our readers will love, and my interns feel relieved when they realize that they don't have to invent everything themselves and that all they have to do is research and then write about what they've learned. This is the key to writing great non-fiction articles.
The best example of this strategy is Robert Greene's "48 Laws of Power", which contains hundreds of historical stories and interesting tales, and you can only get to know these stories by doing research.
I noticed that the writer's answers when people ask them about the source of their ideas are mostly about the research process and not the actual writing, which explains the importance of the research.
4. Choose topics that excite your passion
I find it challenging to find ideas for articles related to a topic that I don't care about at all, and I've tried writing articles for SEO purposes in the past, but I've found it to be one of the least interesting types of writing for me.
But I can't stop writing when I write about productivity, mindfulness, investment, and many other topics that arouse my curiosity. Writing turns into an intellectual activity suddenly, and the more I write, the more I learn.
In conclusion
You can be the best writer in the world. Still, you will not produce anything if you have nothing worth writing about, so be sure to write about the topics you already love and what you want to say and talk about.
In this way, you also protect your mind; even if a few people read your articles, you will not mind because writing has become an intellectual activity.
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