How to write when you have no inspiration?

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In the past, I was allocating some time to write, got a blank page, and wondered what to write about. Sometimes, after 20 minutes of wondering, I still didn’t know what to write about.

Imagine this : someone asks you to tell a joke, and you can’t remember any jokes at all. If that person asks you to tell 5 jokes, it’s even worse. If you didn’t remember one solitary joke, chances are almost none to remember 5 jokes.

What if that person asks you to write him a joke, in front of him? It’s the same thing. A blank page doesn’t provide inspiration.

What if that persons asks you to write him, by email, by tomorrow, a joke? That’s very easy: you search online for a joke, and send that joke to him. The simple solution is to search in a database of jokes, and to pick one.

It’s the same with inspiration : you need a database of ideas. This can be as simple as a text file, where you write your ideas as they come in to you. In the day you decide to write an article, you extract the most appealing idea from your ideas bank and write about it.

The simplest form of an idea is a question you know how to answer. For instance “How do I backup my digital files?” I know how to do this, as I do backups for myself. I also can explain the whole process, and I can tell you what can go wrong, what file format to chose for the archive and why, and so on. So, it’s enough to see this idea in my ideas bank to know what to write about. In this case, the inspiration is the question itself, for which I know the answer.

I created a file, called “IdeasBank.txt” and put there all my ideas. I can access that file with ib, which is similar to rx (more about rx you can find here:
https://lunlun.com/2/have-an-easy-to-use-digital-placeholder-for-what-you-write)

Here’s the good news: as a writer, you first write, then show to others what you wrote. You never write an article, in real time, in front of others. So, when you write, you can always use your ideas bank for inspiration.

I usually get at least 5 new ideas a day. If I write 1 article a day, it means that I have guaranteed what to write, every day, for the rest of my life. Which means that I’ll never get again in the “no inspiration” zone.