Back to Basics: Generate Ideas to Find What You Have to Say

[Ep 226] With my Back to Basics series, I'm providing tools you can apply to your next project in hopes it will make the writing process easier and the final product stronger than ever—so you can make an impact. Last time, we started by identifying a project's high-level elements—its Topic, Audience, Purpose, and Medium. After that, you can focus on the message of your project; that is, given your topic, what is this project’s IDEA. What do you write about​? Is it running, longevity, RV travel, cooking on a budget, stamp collecting, or social justice? Maybe you’re known for this topic and it’s your brand identity, or maybe you’ve been assigned this by an editor. Regardless, you start with a topic, but you don’t stop there. You have to hone in on an idea: a narrowed idea suitable for this particular project and this particular audience. Your finalized idea will reflect the slant or angle you’re taking that will provide focus and set your project apart from others tackling the same topic. It’s tempting to latch onto the first idea that pops into our heads—and sometimes those are indeed fresh and full of potential. Most of the time, though, if we want to write something that stands out, we’re better off taking time to send the idea through five phases: GenerateNarrowValidateRevise (adapt, adjust)Confirm or Finalize 1. Generate First, you’ll generate ideas. You’re about to hear lots of tips for generating ideas in this episode, and I’ll include links to a few other articles and resources. You can test them out and find what works best for you. 2. Narrow When you land on some ideas with potential, you’ll narrow them to suit your audience, purpose, and medium. You’ll also find your unique slant. 3. Validate When it seems your idea has potential, you’ll validate the idea, especially if you’re launching a big project like a book. But even when you’re planning an article or blog post, it’s smart to take a few steps to vet the idea, and I’ll explain that in another episode. 4. Revise After that process, you’ll adapt it based on the input you receive during the validation phase, revising and adjusting the idea as needed. 5. Confirm or Finalize The last phase will be to confirm your idea and finalize it so you can dig in and—finally!—write. A five-phase process just to lock in an idea may sound like overkill and it may seem like it’ll take ages, but you’ll breeze through it—especially for short projects. And it’s definitely worth it for longer projects because they’ll come together more efficiently when you walk through these phases. Let’s start with what it takes to generate ideas. Generate Ideas to Find What You Have to Say When we begin our search for writing ideas, we start with ourselves. What are you drawing from to produce your projects? What’s in you? What do you have to say? Generate Ideas by Remembering Our writing usually flows out of the person we are. The ideas we share are ideas inside us, so writing about our past and drawing from memories, we can pull up ideas that formed us, challenged us, confused us. Using those memories as the centerpiece of a project, we can dive in to explore the meaning, the truth, the lies, and the message locked in our past. These ideas flow from the richness of remembering. Generate Ideas by Living We continue to add to our memories by increasing experiences. So another way to generate ideas is by living. The stories we tell, if nonfiction, are experiences we’ve had or observed in others—or heard from others. And, actually, if we write fiction, the scenes and ideas still flow from what we’ve seen, heard, tasted, smelled...from what we’ve experienced. Even mundane assignments start with our exposure to and understanding of the subject matter. To generate ideas, we have to live. To live well, we can make choices that take us places, switch things up, change our perspective, widen our lens.