THREAD: How to choose what to write about.

When you're blocked by the lie of "writer's block."

1. First, where I get ideas from:

• I teach others and rewrite the transcriptions into blog posts.

• I capture real stories I tell over dinner. Vulnerable, authentic experiences.

• I find strong opinions (on Twitter) that I disagree with. My counter-argument becomes a post.
Of these ideas, the BEST is whichever I can't not write about.

Which idea, of all those swimming inside your brain, are you compelled to pursue the way Ahab was driven to hunt Moby Dick?
—Steven Pressfield
Here's the two-step framework for finding your "must write" ideas:
My first step is choosing an objective for my article, such as:
Step two is pairing that objective with what motivates me:
Your objective clarifies what you're trying to accomplish.

Your motivation ensures you actually see it through.

That’s all that's needed to write with conviction: pair an OBJECTIVE with a MOTIVATION.

When writers lack one of these, they tend to not finish their articles.
Part 2. Okay, but what do I say on the topic?

Once I've chosen a topic, my next step is finding what to say.

One of my favorite writing tricks is to only write my introduction then hand it to friends and ask:

"What are the best ideas I could cover in the rest of the post?"
It turns out that a great time to ask for feedback is after completing your introduction.

People give you surprisingly novel ideas that are better than your original ideas.
Specifically, when I get lost writing, here's how I ask for feedback:

I ask several people to rate my intro from 1 to 10 on how interested they are in reading more.

Don't let them choose 7—that's a cop-out.

They have to decide between 6 (meh) or 8-10 (good).
I keep rewriting until I reach an 8 for my target audience.

I don't aim for higher than 8 because ideas are rarely super interesting to everyone.

(I only do this process when I'm struggling.)
A score of 8 validates I've met three ingredients of a great intro:

• It's a compelling hook into my topic. Readers sense they'll get novelty.

• It conveys the importance of my idea so that readers care to hear the rest.

• It's concise.
Amazon uses this same strategy for releasing products!

They start by drafting a fake PR announcement—as if the product were about to launch.

They share the announcement only with employees.

If the employees aren't interested in buying the product, they pause and start over.
They just saved themselves years of misguided work.
Back to the topic of writing. Let's wrap up.

I believe that people ultimately read for novelty and story.

The risk that readers face when reading your work is that they don't learn anything USEFUL or FEEL anything profound.
That's why I use my first draft to find novel ideas.

Novel ideas are typically:

• Counter-intuitive
• Counter-narrative
• Shock and awe
• Elegant articulations
• Make someone "feel seen"
Then I use my second draft to make those novel ideas resonate—via:

• Stories
• Analogies
• Examples

In other words:

Writing Quality = Novelty x Resonance
I post threads 2x/week like this.

If you want more writing content, follow and see past threads here:

@julian

More from Julian Shapiro

More from Writing

I want to talk about how western editors and readers often mistake protags written by BIPOC as "inactive protagonists." It's too common an issue that's happened to every BIPOC author I know.


Often, our protags are just trying to survive overwhelming odds. Survival is an active choice, you know. Survival is a story. Choosing to be strong in the face of the world ending, even if you can't blast a wall down to do it, is a choice.

It's how we live these days.

Western editors, readers, and writers are too married to the three-act structure, to the type of storytelling that is driven by conflict, to that go-getter individualism. Please read more widely out of your comfort zone. A lot of great non-western stories do not hinge on these.

Sometimes I wonder if you're all so hopped up on the conflict-driven story because that's exactly how your colonizer ancestors dealt with people different from them. Oops, I said it, sorry not sorry. Yes, even this mindset has roots in colonialism, deal with it.

If you want examples of non-conflict-driven storytelling google the following: kishoutenketsu, johakyu, daisy chain storytelling/wheel spoke storytelling. There was another one whose name I forgot but I will tweet it when I recall it.

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Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"


The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.

1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!

2) "Repressed memory" syndrome

3) Facilitated Communication [FC]

All 3 led to massive abuse.

"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.

Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.

FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.