What do you write about, when you don’t know what to write about. It is a dilemma. Some people choose to just stop writing and come back to it later.

For me I like this exercise called Free writing. I did it last Monday and it’s Monday again so I thought it would be fun to make Monday’s Free Writing Monday. Of course next Monday I may have something so important to write about that I miss it. Now though I am going to make it a thing.

I started to write this at 11.02. And I will write until I have 500 words. And then I will hit publish.

The question is whether I can entertain you and titillate you enough in the next 500 words so you will subscribe and never miss another post of mine again!

So how do you get ideas as to what to write about. I discovered something called Prompts recently, which is where someone will give you a prompt and then you can write about that. It’s a good idea and I recently got a Kindle book with 14 prompts in it. So far I haven’t done a prompt because I have come up with something else I would rather write about.

If you are interested you can get it here. I got my copy via the Kindle Unlimited Program. Although there are lots of other places to get prompts too. I have mentioned coach.me before. I am a member of a challenge called Write 500 WED and Cecily Kellogg does an amazing and vastly under appreciated job of giving prompts.

Some other nifty ideas come from Hubspot who have a blogging ideas generator. You enter in three nouns and it will spit back 5 blog posts you can write. So for example I just entered in Writing, Social Media and Productivity and it has given me five really quite interesting sounding topics to write about. They are below and I may just write about them over the next few days.

  1. How To Solve The Biggest Problems With Social Media
  2. 7 Things About Writing Your Boss Wants To Know
  3. 15 Best Blogs To Follow About Productivity
  4. 5 Tools Everyone In The Social Media Industry Should Be Using
  5. The Worst Advice We’ve Ever Heard About Writing

Another tool that I quite like is much simpler. You just enter one word and it comes up with a title, Buzzfeed would be proud of.

In this case I entered my name and got these two:

  • Why Justin Wheeler is Scarier than Tyra Banks. (I had to google Tyra Banks and well you just have to look at us both to see who is scarier!)
  • 12 Ways Justin Wheeler Could Leave You Needing a Lawyer.

Justin and Tyra

*Photo of Tyra Banks licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0

So there we have it. A couple of great ways to find something to write about when you don’t know what to write about.

And if you are stuck, well you can always start off by writing: “What to write about when you don’t know what to write about and see where it takes you. That is what I did here. It is now 11.29 and we are over 500 words.”

Let me know what you think and what ideas you have if you don’t know what to write about.

Time spent writing: 20 minutes.
Time From Starting Writing to Finishing: 29 minutes
Time Editing: 0 minutes
How Happy I am with Result: 6