When I first started writing online, there was always one problem I feared most: what to write about.

On the nights I needed to post, I would regularly take a long shower, clean my desk, boil some tea, and take a few deep breathes before sitting down to write, expecting the creative genius of my favourite authors to flow through my fingers and create masterpieces. Of course, this never happened. Instead, I spent many hours slumped in my chair, desperately thinking of a topic, or a way to begin my piece, and growing frustrated that my expectation of what writing should be like wasn’t what it actually was. Compared to being in constant, happy flow, I often had to dig in the mud to find a topic that was usable.

The thing was, this never needed to happen. I had things I could’ve written about. There were just two issues: I couldn’t remember them, and the things I could remember were too elementary to put down.

The solution I’ve since found to this is immediate note-taking and half-finished ideas.

I’ve previously written on the value of taking immediate notes, which is one of the best practices for my thinking and writing. This is important because sometimes a great idea hits you out of nowhere and you have a limited window before it goes away. By writing it down, you’ve captured it for eternity. The idea is more secure written down than in your memory.

From these jottings brings us to this concept of half-finished ideas, which is an extension of note-taking.

The point is whenever you write something down, it becomes a writing stimulus. In your spare time, you read through all the notes you’ve amassed, dwell on them, develop them a bit, until what started off as a single quote or phrase becomes sentences and paragraphs. The purpose is not to convince yourself that it is right, but to explore the idea in more depth. In what ways does this idea not apply? Why is this important? Can you create a story around it? And before you know, what began as a short prompt has become something more substantial.

When I started doing this, my previous issues with finding topics to write about vanished. I just thought about my notes more during the day, such that they were unconsciously processing in my mind, and when I needed to post, I wrote about those.

Don’t get me wrong: writing is still hard and I still need to finish the pieces I’ve started. But by having a bank of half-finished ideas to go off of, I can just decide which of my musings I should complete, rather than pick something out of thin air. They are like little dishes simmering away on a cooktop; dishes I visit every so often to add some flavour, and develop them a little, until they can be presented to the world.