This is a guest post by Ali Luke. She is a writer and writing coach from the UK, and you can find her as @aliventures on Twitter. If you’re struggling to get enough writing done, check out her free ebook How to Find Time for Your Writing (other goodies available there too!)

Whether you write as a hobby or as part of your business, there’ll be times when you feel like you have nothing to say. Perhaps you’ve got to come up with a blog post, but it seems like you’ve written about every possible angle of your niche – or you want to develop a great product idea, but you’re not sure where to begin.

These five exercises will help:

Exercise #1: Imagine You’re a Beginner

Whatever your niche, most of your audience will be beginners. If you’re an expert in your field, it can be tough to write posts or ebooks that reach those people.

So think back. Imagine that you’re a beginner, just starting to explore your field. What questions do you have? What do you need to know before going further?

If you’ve got a blog about playing the guitar, for instance, you might come with topics like:

• How to buy your first guitar
• How to tune your guitar
• The first three chords you should learn
• How to play a very simple piece of music

Exercise #2: Free-Writing

Free-writing is a technique where you write for a set period of time (10 minutes is common) without stopping. You can do this with pen and paper or on a computer; you might like to try both methods to see which suits you best.

When you’re free-writing, you should go fast without rushing. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar or punctuation: your task is to keep your pen moving on the page (or your fingers on the keyboard) until the time is up.

You can write about anything that comes into your head (this is also known as “stream of consciousness” writing). This is an exercise to get words flowing, not something designed to produce a finished piece: you won’t be showing your free-writing to anyone.

Once you’ve finished a free-writing session, look back through what you’ve written and highlight any ideas that you want to take further.


Exercise #3: Expand on a Previous Piece

One simple way to come up with new ideas is to draw them from something you’ve already written.
Print out a popular post on your blog, with wide margins so that you can easily jot down notes. Go through and look for anything that you could expand into another post. You’ll probably find plenty of ideas that you can easily develop.

Look out for:

• Opportunities to write the next step or a more advanced topic. For instance, if you wrote a post about “how to set up your Gmail account” then you might go on to write about “tips and tricks for using your Gmail account effectively”.

• Places where you might need to spell out something for beginners. For instance, if your post casually mentions “buy your domain name”, then you could write about how exactly to do that, how to choose a good domain name, and so on.

As well as being a great way to add depth to your blog, this also means you’ll have plenty of opportunities to interlink your posts.

You can use the same process for any piece of writing: for instance, if you’ve got a basic free ebook, you could develop each chapter to create a paid-for resource.


Exercise #4: Borrow from Another Writer

There’s nothing wrong with borrowing: writers do it all the time. Many of Shakespeare’s plots were borrowed, for instance (and plenty of people have borrowed plots from Shakespeare in turn...)

Some of the things you can borrow are:

• The first line of a piece. This works especially well if you’re writing fiction. (You can always change or remove the first line later.)

• The structure of a piece. If you read a great blog post or ebook, break it down to look at the structure – and see whether you can do something similar for your own niche.

• The title of a piece. Try looking on magazine covers for great titles, and see how you could tweak the title to suit your own purposes by changing a few words.

• A great quote. Starting your piece of writing with a quote can be a good way to set the tone and to add value for your reader. You could choose something famous, funny, or highly relevant to your own field.

Exercise #5: Use an Object

Look away from the screen for a moment and glance around. What can you see? If you’re in an office, you probably have lots of items nearby – perhaps pens, notebooks, a coffee cup, a phone, books...

Any object in your environment can become a tool to inspire you. Pick one at random and see what links you could draw between it and your topic. If you write about gadgets, for instance, a coffee cup could inspire you to blog about what to do if you accidentally drop your smart phone into your drink. If you write about celebrities, a pen could inspire you to produce a post comparing different celebrities’ handwriting.

Give one (or more!) of these exercises a try today, and leave a comment below to let us know what ideas you come up with.

Image source.