Yesterday, I said that I keep a topic list that goes at least a month out. In reality, not all of those will be written into posts, but I need a lot of choices each morning as I sit down to write. The list is under constant maintenance, but the most important thing to do is to keep adding to it.

Here are some of the places those topics come from:

1. From a question I am using to drive my thinking. See: What are books for?
2. From the notes I am taking while reading. See Playing Non-programming Books
3. From writing posts. Yesterday I consciously listed the new topics I thought of while writing the post on topics.
4. From editing my banked posts. When I delete a paragraph that is interesting, but not related, that paragraph can become the seed of a new post.
5. From solitude. See Use Deprivation to Make Space
6. From correspondence. If someone asks me an interesting question, my answer can often be generalized into a blog post.
7. From my old work. I’ve been blogging and writing publicly for over 10 years. Old posts need updating: See Use GitHub Profile Pages to Mirror Your Personal Site
8. From my tweets. I don’t tweet a lot there are enough to look back at and see if there’s a bigger idea there.
9. From my other works. I write about my apps, like in Sprint-o-Mat 2021.1 is Available
10. Current events, like WWDC. See: WWDC 2020 Wishlist – Xcode / Swift or WWDC 2017 for iOS Developers

I personally keep them organized into a schedule so that each day, when I am ready to write, I can just look at that day’s topic and give it stab. It doesn’t always work out, but not having to choose from the list helps me get started.

If I give up on a topic, I can take what I’ve written and link it to that topic in Obsidian. I move it down a little in the list and move onto the next one.

If it’s too big, that’s actually great, because I break it down into a few mini-topics to build up to a bigger idea later.

The last few posts have been about my practice of blogging every day, how I bank posts, how I start with a bad first draft, and how I ease into my writing day with morning pages.

In the past, when I set goals to write more frequently, I was always stopped by not having ideas for what to write about. Or when I got one, I didn’t have a systematic way of collecting them. I would sit down to write, but getting started on a new piece was too difficult.

My goal now is to make writing a first draft easy by keeping a long list of writing topics of varying degrees of difficulty.

When I add a topic to the list, I try to develop it a little with notes for why it’s on the list in the first place. If I have already have notes in Obsidian that are related, I link them. All of this will make it easier to get to a first draft later.

Having a long topic list gives me lots of choices for what to write in the moment based on how motivated I am. Not every topic will work out. If that happens, I grab another one.

The key is that I am not blocked at the time I sit down to write by not having any ideas.

Tomorrow, I’ll write about how I generate this list.

Update: Here is the post about generating the topic list

I am in the middle of reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way [amazon affiliate link], a classic about what it means to be a creative professional. The book is not meant to be just read, it’s a book you use, a book you play.

There are many tasks and exercises throughout, and you are meant to read one chapter at the beginning of the week and use the rest of the week doing the tasks in it.

But, before you even start, Cameron describes a task you will do each morning: your morning pages where you fill three pages with long-hand writing. What do you write? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you start and do not stop until the pages are filled. She says to think of it as DOING morning pages, not WRITING morning pages. I think of it as PLAYING morning pages (like scales).

These pages are write-only. You can destroy them right after. Don’t read them and never show them to anyone. They are not writing—you never want to expose them to criticism because you never want any reason not to do them.

I started my morning pages journal on December 28th and have never missed a day. I can’t wait to do them, and once I start, I can’t wait to finish. Because, right after I do them, I am so ready to write “for real”.

It is 7:45am right now, I finished my pages at 6:56am. The first thing I did was edit the next two posts that are scheduled to publish, and then I opened my topic list and wrote a first draft of this post. I just noticed that I never wrote about my topic list, so now I am ready to write a post about that. Like blind drawing does for sketching, the morning pages prime my brain for continuous writing, which carries through the whole morning.

In Bird by Bird [amazon affiliate link], Anne Lamott’s book on writing, she recommends writing “shitty first drafts”. I am using this advice as I bank blog posts. This morning I reviewed The Practice, and about 5 minutes ago I finished writing the post about banking posts. At the end of that post, I wrote that I had more tactics, and shitty first drafts is one of them.

Right now, I am typing this out as fast as I can, not editing. Just writing. This practice makes it so I have some raw material to work with. Since it’s now January 28th, and this post won’t be published until February 11th, I have 2 weeks to edit it.

Having gotten this far, I think I might leave this one the way this is so that you can see what a bad first draft looks like. In general, I would try to tighten it up—I can see that this one is a bit wordy already.

At this point, I’m just leaning into it. If this is going to be a shitty post, I might as well make it extra shitty so that you can see that there’s no need to have a polished post right away.

The only hard part is coming up with some kind of ending, but I usually find one in the edit.