You’ll run out of ideas

I don’t want to be “that guy”, but if you’re fairly new to writing, this is an unpleasant but very good piece of information that you should remember, because regardless of how talented or good you are, this will eventually happen to you.

To put it bluntly, you’ll run out of ideas. This will happen, sooner or later, especially if you write and post a lot of articles.

The problem with this is that at first, when we begin, we don’t think about it. We have so many ideas going through our head at all times that we think we’ll never experience a creative block. We’re all able to write article after article, to get several ideas a day and to keep on going for a while.

But at some point you’ll realize that the balance has been tipped and for some reason you now write a number of articles higher than the ideas you get. This means that at some point in the future you’ll end up going through all the lists you made and all the “reserves” you had.

And once that happens you’ll find yourself in an unpleasant position. You need to write, but you can’t come up with anything interesting or worth posting. You go through all the things that used to inspire you, through multiple websites, through multiple images and videos, but nothing works.

You’re stuck.

What do you do then? Do you spend hours and hours trying to get an idea? Do you go through dozens of articles hoping that you’ll find one that you can copy a bit from, and maybe end up with something yourself?

We all heard of the “artist’s block”, but it’s hard to imagine how that feels until we actually experience it ourselves. And when it happens, it can completely paralyze one’s ability to create.

The only way I have found to combat this situation is to make sure that you “feed” your brain as much information as possible over a long period of time so that it can have something to work with when it comes to getting ideas.

This means that it is vital that you read, that you watch movies, TV shows, that you play unique games that you never played before, and so on. In short, you need to consume content, especially new things that you aren’t really used to. If you just read, watch and play the same things over and over again, it’s not surprising that you only get a limited type of ideas.

What’s very important is to do this as often as possible. If you wait until you run out of ideas, you’ll discover that just because you switch the type of content that you interact with, it doesn’t mean that you’ll immediately begin to think of great topics that you can approach. It takes time to think, and it takes effort. You will, eventually, start to get new ideas, but it might take weeks, even months.

So, while I think that it’s great when people decide to write often, I also think it’s very important to make sure that your ideas don’t just run out. Give yourself something to think about all the time, and always make an effort to think of new and interesting topics to approach. It might not make you completely invulnerable to the “creator’s block”, but you’ll have a much easier time dealing with it when it finally happens to you.