10 votes

How do you deal with a blocked mind that won't sprout enough writing ideas?

I've decided to write a detailed post each morning about some topic but the ideas just won't come up. It's far too easier to share links to articles and social posts which other folks have already written but why is it so hard to come up with your own original writing?

A related question here is how do you make a very technical topic like programming or web-development into something creative or interesting enough so that you can tell a story which is palatable to even less technically savvy audience? Is it even possible and if so, where can I learn that art?

7 comments

  1. DrStone
    Link
    This sounds a lot like your topic from less than two weeks ago and the same general advice applies. Just. Start. Writing. About anything and everything. It doesn’t all need to be share-worthy;...
    • Exemplary

    This sounds a lot like your topic from less than two weeks ago and the same general advice applies.

    Just. Start. Writing. About anything and everything. It doesn’t all need to be share-worthy; it’s really the practice.

    You’ll get better both technically and creatively with practice, same as any other skill.

    20 votes
  2. [2]
    DavesWorld
    Link
    The same way you get to Carnegie Hall. Practice. You're tripping over the perfection trap, which many, many, many newbies do. You're caught up in perfect. In "what will They think?" and "what will...

    The same way you get to Carnegie Hall. Practice.

    You're tripping over the perfection trap, which many, many, many newbies do. You're caught up in perfect. In "what will They think?" and "what will they say?" You're allowing all these things to serve as excuses which prevent you from writing. You're letting the excuses consume you.

    Solution? Write. Stop making excuses. Stop caring what They will say, what They will think. Is your goal to write? Then write? It has absolutely no bearing how "good" or "bad" the idea is. Idea isn't everything. Hell, idea really isn't most of it. Idea is a tiny little almost forgotten part of writing, because by the time you get done with something what you have and what the idea was are often drastically different.

    Pick a time, you said morning. Every morning, sit down. Butt in chair, hands on keyboard. Write. Don't think about writing. Don't think about ideas. The very first thing that pops into your head, that's what you're writing about. No excuses, no what-if, no worry. Write. If you think "that's stupid", so what, write. If you think you don't know how, so what, write. If you think "others have covered this already", too bad, write.

    Every, single, morning. Write.

    There is no magic solution. Butt in chair, hands on keyboard, write. Set a timer. I'd say at least half an hour, maybe a full hour. During that time, you write. You don't edit, you don't reread, you don't stop to ponder, you just, keep, writing.

    Because you've brought this up before, and the issue then is the same issue you're having now. You're in your own way. Removing yourself as an obstacle starts with you, which starts with you Doing Something. That something is writing.

    The other twenty-three hours of the day you're not sleeping or doing something else, you can think about writing. And should. You can read what you've written, and should. You can think about what you've written, and should. But for that period each and every morning, you do nothing but write. If, during that time, you're not actively writing, you're fucking off and doing yourself a disservice.

    Is your goal to write, or not? If it's to write, then sit there and write. Excuses come later, if you insist. But each morning, during writing time, butt in chair, hands on keyboard, writing.

    It's not any harder than that. Nothing else that will be relevant to developing as a writer will come until you do that. What's that? Butt in chair, hands on keyboard, writing.

    Now go write.

    6 votes
    1. smiles134
      Link Parent
      I used to teach Freshman Comp and this was the most important lesson of the semester, every year. Take the pressure off yourself. It does not have to be perfect on the first draft, or the...

      You're tripping over the perfection trap, which many, many, many newbies do. You're caught up in perfect. In "what will They think?" and "what will they say?" You're allowing all these things to serve as excuses which prevent you from writing. You're letting the excuses consume you.

      I used to teach Freshman Comp and this was the most important lesson of the semester, every year. Take the pressure off yourself. It does not have to be perfect on the first draft, or the thirtieth draft. It's a continual process, but you can't improve on something you haven't drafted yet.

      Get your "shitty first draft" down, set it aside, come back to it with fresh perspective and keep improving.

      @pyeri -- I cannot recommend Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott enough.

      4 votes
  3. arqalite
    Link
    Since you mentioned programming, I'm sure you've ran into an issue at some point which wasn't trivial to solve, and there were no good enough online resources. Write about that. Tell us what was...

    Since you mentioned programming, I'm sure you've ran into an issue at some point which wasn't trivial to solve, and there were no good enough online resources. Write about that.

    Tell us what was the problem, why you needed to solve it, and the steps you took to solve it. That's all. Even if it is the most obscure thing ever, it doesn't matter, what matters is that you wrote something.

    If you struggle with getting the first sentences out, write it in a stern, matter-of-fact tone.

    I needed to connect to a SQLite database via a Rust WASM program.
    I needed to do so in order to make my web application save its state across refreshes.
    I used the rusqlite crate to create and load the database, but it didn't compile on Windows. I switched to WSL and it worked there. <insert other stuff here>

    Now you have a base to build on. Expand these ideas, adding detail and context to them. In my case, I could expand on why it didn't compile on Windows, why I chose WSL instead of fixing it on Windows, or why didn't I pick another crate that did compile.

    Maybe the final result will be boring, who cares. You wrote something, and that is experience towards writing more stuff. Maybe as you wrote about this topic, you realized you could rant for a while about a certain topic, like how Windows is so incredibly bad at handling shared libraries, or how SQLite is confusing for a beginner to set up on Windows. Those could be different posts, or mini-rants in your original post.

    As for making it palatable to others or telling a compelling story - that's something that comes naturally, after a volume of work. Your goal right now is to create that volume of work, post after post after post until you feel like you're not creatively blocked, but instead filled with ideas.

    And make sure to get inspiration from loads of places - your programming projects, a YouTube video you watched but felt isn't complete, a story of a coworker, or a bug your phone randomly exhibits.

    Write ideas down as they come, and build a backlog. When you feel like you don't know what to write about, look at the backlog and pick the most interesting topic. (Or, creative exercise - pick the most boring topic and try to make it interesting.)

    You can also build a library of stuff you look up to. Maybe you read a tech blog that you enjoy, or you saw a comment/post on Tildes/Hacker News/Reddit whose writing you thought was cool, or anything else. When you feel stuck, go through them and try to determine what they do best. Do they explain things very concisely, or do they provide a lot of context? Is the writing fast-paced or do they take their time? Analyzing other people's work is a great way to refine yours.

    And don't be afraid to steal. Don't copy-paste, obviously, but if you saw a certain writer explain something in a way you thought you could reuse, or they had an awesome format/layout for their blog post, or maybe they said something that impressed you, save it and reuse it later. Modify it until it's yours. Feel free to save quotes and use them, just make sure to link the source article.

    And lastly, force yourself to write. I've been through so many years of "I want to create X, but <insert million reasons here>". Shorten that thought to "I want to create X", go to your desk, and start doing it. If you feel like you really can't write anything, see the paragraphs above, or organize your workspace. Clean your folders of drafts and early versions of finished stuff. Organize and rename your unfinished drafts. Adjust your text editor's UI to your preference. Get yourself in the headspace of writing, even if you're not truly writing, and you might just get inspired to do it.

    I've rambled enough, I think - try some of these tips and see how they work out. Report back when you can. Or a final creative exercise - take this comment and rewrite it in your own style. Make it yours. Have fun. :)

    4 votes
  4. [3]
    R3qn65
    Link
    What do you mean by tell a story? Do you mean in sort of a literal “I want to write fiction” sense or a more metaphorical “I want to help people understand this using storytelling as a medium”?

    A related question here is how do you make a very technical topic like programming or web-development into something creative or interesting enough so that you can tell a story which is palatable to even less technically savvy audience?

    What do you mean by tell a story? Do you mean in sort of a literal “I want to write fiction” sense or a more metaphorical “I want to help people understand this using storytelling as a medium”?

    1 vote
    1. [2]
      pyeri
      Link Parent
      The second one. I want to help non-technical or folks without CS background understand these concepts such as the Internet, TCP Networks, operating systems, programming languages, databases, etc....

      The second one. I want to help non-technical or folks without CS background understand these concepts such as the Internet, TCP Networks, operating systems, programming languages, databases, etc. through the medium of stories and allegories. Is there an established way of doing that?

      1 vote
      1. arqalite
        (edited )
        Link Parent
        Well, you could build a small world with characters, and use those characters to make your point, like Dilbert or XKCD. Yes, these are comics, not writing, but the principle is the same. Create a...

        Well, you could build a small world with characters, and use those characters to make your point, like Dilbert or XKCD.

        Yes, these are comics, not writing, but the principle is the same. Create a story about a certain topic or issue - let's take setting up a home network - and make these characters deal with it. Have the main character of this story go through the premise of wanting more WiFi coverage for example, and build a sort of adventure of shopping for routers and cables, the challenges of setting it up, bugs and issues they encounter. Make them frustrated with a roadblock, then make them break through that roadblock and end the story happily.

        The characters could be entirely episodic with zero context besides their name and descriptions relevant to the story, or you could re-use characters and give them backstory, personality and flair, with each character starring in a story that would fit them.

        You could have Zack, a web dev working a 9 to 5 job in an office setting, feature in stories about corporate IT systems and their struggle, or how awful Jira/Asana is, or how awesome Jira/Asana is, or debugging an issue that plagued their users. He's a very "move fast and break things" kind of guy, so you could talk about his quality control issues, or how his unit tests kind of suck, or the fact that he didn't notice a major bug before going into peer review.

        You could have Anna, a stay-at-home mom turned tech nerd, who wanted to set up that home network from above, and her journey learning about how WiFi works and then making it work in her home. Then how she wants to set up port forwarding and a Minecraft server so her 10-year-old boy can play with his friends (and maybe sometimes she joins and subtly trolls them, or builds her own island far away from everyone else).

        You can have Joseph, another webdev at the same company as Zack, but he's kind of burnt out and stopped caring as much about his work, and how he pushed a feature to production that caused hell for the entire department in the following days - and you can use this story to talk about safeguards and guardrails, how to rollback a change in Git or on Vercel, and what factors could have caused this issue to slip by QA in the first place. (I stole this idea from Theo, a YouTuber who recently talked about how Vercel makes it easy to revert deployments, and then developed it into my own idea - see my other comment about how stealing ideas is good.)

        Or again, if you think it fits your style better, you could have John and Mike be two faceless database architects discussing how to implement a certain data structure in PostgreSQL - anything works as long as it helps you get the story from point A to point B.

        4 votes