How I decide what to write about

Iʟʟᴜsᴛʀᴀᴛɪᴏɴ ʙʏ ᴜɴDʀᴀᴡ¹, ᴄᴏʟᴏʀᴇᴅ ʙʏ ᴍᴇ.

I've been doing this blogging thing for a while now and obviously have come across this incredible thing people call "writers block". I've made promises to myself, to friends, to my wife and then to myself again that I will post at least once weekly a number of times that's somehow significantly lower than the number of times I've actually broken that same promise. And I suffer of this even though I'm an amateur blogger with no audience to speak of and, therefore, no expectations from no one at all to make great posts.

I have devised multiple strategies to avoid this over time. Like, multiple. Even to the point of forcing my hand to pay $10 dlls a month in hopes it would hurt just enough that I would write so my money wouldn't go to waste. Spoiler alert: That year I wrote even less than before paying. But the one thing I can tell you is there were lessons learned. Not about writers block, not about strategies, not about how to write. I learned a lot about myself. What motivates me and what doesn't, what I thought I liked and what I actually liked, what I can write and what I can not—for the life of me—write about even if I want to. And I honestly think that's where the secret lies. You have to be interested and like the topics you'll write about, you have to be motivated to find a way to make your writing happen, and you have to know your limitations.

So, here it goes. These are my secrets to pick what to write about and do it often:

I write to practice other languages

I think some of you might notice that English is not my native language. That's by design. One of the ideas of me blogging is practicing writing in English and I've tried to do so for other languages, too.

I started writing more than 20 years ago and managed to reach a low level of clout back in the old days of Tumblr by writing poetry in Spanish, so I always wondered if I could do it in English. It would also help me improve my grammar tenses and orthography, because I actually never took classes, and reduce the habit of trying to do direct translation of my thoughts, so it was a win-win-win idea. And so I did. And so I've been doing so for 12+ years now. It's actually been a while since I blogged in Spanish, now that I think about it. Funny.

I write to learn or share topics that catch my attention

There's times when I don't actually know what to write about, so if something catches my eye in a social network or talking with my friends, I write it down in my notes app and return to it when I'm sitting in my desk. Or maybe I'd write if something interesting happened in my software exploration journey.

For example, for my robotics class in university, a professor forced us to install a Linux distribution called "Gentoo" and I had to jump through a bunch of hoops to make it work with my laptop hardware. So, naturally, I would write about my fixes in the internet, hoping someone might find them useful when they encountered the same issue.

I, sadly, don't do this that much anymore because it takes a lot of time to research on topics if you want to create a good post—and I always want to create good posts. Don't get me wrong, I could do it, of course, but right now I'm at the point where I'd rather write two shallow posts instead of a really deep one. And that's because I learned that I struggle with focus when I write. I fall into rabbit holes and my mind finds it incredibly easy to string other topics together or find new angles to what I'm writing about. I still struggle with this nowadays, so I restrict myself.

So I find a good topic, do my research on it and then do my best to explain or write about it in the broader sense I can and immediately post it. Of course, if something I really like and want to explore profoundly ever comes up, I'll do it.

I write to recommend stuff I like

You can find a small example of this in my latest post, where I shared "Yes Man" and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty". I just love those movies and they happened to be related to the topic at hand. But if I find something I get strong feelings about, I'd for sure write about it. It's been a while since it happened—I think the last time was about Hayley Williams' Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party.

There used to be a recurring category in Acento En La O, my old blog, called "Song Of The Week" where I would share the song I was vibing to that week and write about what I liked about it. It was a section I enjoyed a lot—and a safe thing to post weekly—so, I might bring it back into this blog.

I found a drawing at UnDraw that I inspires me

When all of the options above fail, I go to UnDraw and go through their new designs. Please believe me they're not sponsoring this, but I love their designs and have used them since forever. They describe themselves as "Beautiful, open source and free illustrations for post" and basically provide you with SVG you can customize or PNG you can use directly in your posts.

I just look at the new additions to their webpage or search for any word. Sometimes I go basic with "writing" and other times I go for "sunset". Depending on the illustration I get I come up with ideas on how to use it on a post. It's been working so good for me. It's actually the reason this posts exists. I didn't really had a topic today, so I just searched for "posts" and multiple options came up. I decided on this one as I thought I could make it work with a simple post on ideas for posting more often.

And here we are now.

My suggestion is that you find a source of images or videos that inspire you to write and just go along with it. Anything that comes to mind is okay. Just be mindful and make sure you to review the copyright and credit their creators.

So, what do you do to avoid writer's block? Or what are your tips to writing more often? Let us know, maybe you'll inspire someone.

Until the next one!