The Writing Conundrum – Part 1
The Elusive Idea
Like many people out there, confined to the four walls of their abode over the last 2 years, in one lock down after the other, I decided to try my hand at writing as well. After all, I have been told that I am creative, and I have the linguistic capabilities as well as the wit to enthral an audience (my teachers told me this back in my school days and I took their word for it 😉). Whilst some people I know have been uber successful in their writing venture, publishing one article after the other and making money out of it too, I am still struggling to publish more than two articles. This made me think and retrospect, because it surely isn’t a question of knowledge, or capability or even the willingness to put in the hard-work, it is more about the topics they chose and ideas that they were writing about.
This brings us to the million-dollar question — What do you write about?
After days of thinking this through and careful deliberation, I decided to put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard to try and solve this writing conundrum, and catch this elusive idea — at least for my sake!
The answer to the quest of finding the right topic or idea to start writing lies in the three W’s –the Why, the What and the Who..
The Why
Why are you writing? What is the reason for you to pen your thoughts? Are you trying to express your creativity i.e. Fiction? Or are you attempting to impart knowledge or share factual information a.k.a Non-Fiction? Choosing between these two pills, will help shape the content and format of your writing.
The What
The What is more introspection than anything else. This is the process of looking inwards and being honest about it. They are two questions that needs to be answered here,
What interests you? — What are the subjects or areas that grabs your attention and makes you think? We humans are programmed in a way that we always excel in areas that interests us. So, what interests you? This could be Technology, Politics, Psychology, History, Fiction.. it could be anything under the sun that makes your mind tick!
What are you good at? — Are you an expert programmer? Are you someone who can quickly come up with a theme and characterisations. Knowing what you are good at.
The Who
No one writes for themselves, at least not in Medium. So, who are you writing for? Who is your audience? Figuring this out will impact the content and style of your writing. This will also determine how interested your audience probably would be and how much they would value your topic.
This exercise should help you list a few topics and ideas that could potentially be the one — the one idea that you start writing on.
In the next part, we can explore how to narrow down and finalise the topic of our choosing..
