Where Do I Get My Writing Ideas?#

About a year ago I set out to start a Youtube channel. One of the challenges I faced then was conjuring up ideas to present on the channel. At first it seemed fairly simple but the more I started thinking about it, the more challenging it became and very soon I felt like I had no more ideas to address.

Well, that’s not quite true. I had ideas but they weren’t fully formed and often didn’t fit into what I perceived to be my ’niche’. You see, I started out wanting to write about my experiences in retirement, but I realized a few months in that I didn’t do anything that seemed worthy of sharing.

A few weeks ago, though, I started thinking about doing this 100 day challenge – writing a post every weekday for 100 days. That’s 100 posts that I needed to find content for. I had no idea when I began what I would write about. But I knew that it would not likely be all focused on one topic. I have a number of interests and perspectives on a number of topics that simply don’t fit neatly into a single niche.

Somewhere along the line I began to realize that it didn’t matter whether I was focusing on a specific subject or was simply sharing my thoughts. It seemed to me that by touching on a wide variety of topics I was providing a more complete picture of who I am. And, I also realized that focusing on a single topic area (computers is a natural domain for me) would soon get old both for me and for my reader (note the lack of a plural there… I hold no illusions that anyone reads these pages beside me).

Now a common ‘rule of thumb’ for writers (and YouTube creators) is to identify your audience. The argument here is that knowing who you’re writing for helps you to target your work more appropriately. After I thought about this a bit, I realized that I didn’t really care who my reader is. I am basically writing for me and if someone else finds my ramblings interesting, informative, or helpful, great! But I’m not setting out to win followers or meet some arbitrary metrics. I’m just thinking through writing.

Okay, Now Answer the Question#

I give you that bit of background so that you’ll understand where I’m coming from in my writing. I do think that understanding the author’s motivations, background, etc is helpful to readers. Having that background also helps you to understand that I simply write what comes to my mind, captures my interests, or fills some knowledge gap I may have.

Where do my ideas come from? Everywhere. It might be a TV show I watch, an article I read, a book I read, a YouTube video I watch, an experience I have as I bumble my way through life, or any of a dozen other sources of inspiration. My Memories of Summers Past post was inspired by the fluffy white clouds I saw one summer day. My treatise on The Fault of Not Reading was inspired by a web post I ran across just to give a couple of examples.

Sometimes my ideas come from bits and pieces of thoughts that have been floating around in my mind for days or months. Those thoughts bubble to the surface and as I write they begin to coalesce into some semblance of a coherent thought and then, hopefully, take a shape that resembles something valid and reasonable. Or not. Sometimes my thoughts wither on the vine as I’m writing and I end up shelving those thoughts, waiting for the day when the missing pieces reveal themselves, allowing me to assemble that puzzle into a recognizable thought.

There are also those posts that explain some technical issue that I’ve dealt with, some technical obstacle that I’ve resolved, or something I’ve learned. My experiences with OpenBSD fall into this category, as do my early posts about self-hosting, weather stations, and so on.

Finally, there are some topic areas that are ripe for generating a lot of ideas. For example, I am slowly working on a set of documents that will walk through using Linux for seniors (and others who might be new to Linux but don’t want all the highly technical stuff such as working on the command line).

A couple of years ago I started learning photography (Hey! There’s another set of topics to write about!). As with finding topics to write about, finding interesting subjects to photograph is challenging. But, the more time you spend looking for those interesting subjects, angles, etc the easier it becomes to find them. Your eye begins to recognize good angles, good color combinations, etc almost automatically. The same is true for writing.

I have now written a post every working day for almost four weeks. That’s 19 posts (including this one). One of the more interesting things that I’ve realized throughout the process is that the more I write, the more aware I become of potential topics and the easier it has become to generate ideas. Writing about one topic generates ideas for additional topics. In fact, writing this post has given me at least five other ideas to cover, including how I keep up with my writing ideas.

So, where do my ideas come from? Life.