Seth Godin has said repeatedly that “writer’s block is a myth”. He said it’s really more like “I have a fear of bad writing”, as he explains in this short video:
However, I tend to disagree. When I sit down to write, I’m not afraid of bad writing, but I often just don’t know where to start. For me, the key is having some ideas ready go to, and I usually do. For most of my posts, they go through three phases.
Capture
Many of my ideas pop up while I’m driving. Perhaps it’s from a podcast that I’m listening to, or maybe my mind is wandering and idea shows up. Either way, I want to capture it for later. In my case, I just use Google Keep for that. I tell my car “Hey Google, take a note” and then leave the note with my voice. Case in point, the idea for this post came in the car, and here is the Keep note that was waiting for me when I got home.
The other big source of my post ideas is from reading, which I unpacked quite a bit here.
Processing
The next step is to move it from Google Keep, or Kindle highlights, or wherever the idea is and get it into Roam Research. You could do the same into Evernote or almost any kind of note-taking app. For this post, it looked like this:
Every idea for a blog post that I have goes into Roam like that, so I always have a steady supply of small nuggets of ideas that I can build out. For this post, that’s all I had to work with, but it was enough.
Writing
Finally, I write the post. I simply head into WordPress, use the title from Roam, and start putting it together. Sometimes I have a lot of notes to work from, sometimes it’s just a few bullets (like this one). Either way, I work it all out in WordPress, and when it’s ready I figure out where it fits into the upcoming schedule via the WordPress Editorial Calendar plugin.
Enough in the queue?
With the daily streak I have going, I’m always a bit nervous that I might run out of ideas and break the streak. That concern isn’t when I have very few posts in WordPress ready to go (though I’m not a fan of that situation…), but it’s when I have too few ideas in Roam that I can build out.
If I can keep Roam topped up with ideas, this streak will be easy to maintain. The more easily I can get an idea out of my head and into Roam, the better I’ll be, and things like Google Keep really help make that easy to do.
