Advice on Finding Writing Ideas

Mostly for non-fiction authors.

Many writers have published advice about how to write better, myself included. But I recently went looking for advice about how to find writing ideas, and noticed a dearth of such essays for non-fiction writers. Here is my (brief) attempt to remedy that.

1. Be a thoughtful consumer. Read an essay (or two) every day. Treat your reading list as a river, not a bucket. Give yourself time to think about what you’ve read; and I mean really think about it. Diversify your news & blog sources.

2. Treat idea discovery as a key part of the writing process. I have a bookmark folder on Safari with ~100 links to science journals, news websites, and blogs that I frequently read. I open all of these bookmarks three times each week and skim through them, which takes about 30 minutes each time. Paul Graham has said to look for ideas at the “frontiers of knowledge;” keeping up with papers in your field — and adjacent fields — is a good way to do that. And when you have ideas, write them down using Telegram (multi-platform, multi-medium) or other app. (h/t Ian Vanagas).

3. Talk to lots of people. This is the most important thing. Very few ideas are truly original; all derive — consciously or not — from conversations with others.

   1. When I travel places, I always extend my trip by at least one day and pack in as many meetings as possible.

   2. Every day, I email someone and ask to talk. Sometimes I ask them about things I’m writing, and other times it’s just a free-flowing conversation. Lead the questioning and listen more than you speak.

4. Write about what you bring up in conversation. If you keep talking about a topic with friends and they think it’s interesting, there’s a good chance others will find it interesting, too. This is true even if the topic is incredibly arcane, such as this article about the history of car phones.

5. Follow-up on brief mentions and rhetorical questions. Essays and articles sometimes have a sentence or two that is incredibly intriguing, but that the author never flushed out because it was only tangentially related to their argument. Follow-up and pursue these ideas! Similarly, taking rhetorical questions literally might be a fruitful way to find ideas.

6. Writing more makes you better at spotting good ideas. Write a lot; ideally at least a little bit every day. As you write more, you’ll begin to consciously “search” for ideas more. You’ll ask more probing questions during conversations, and immediately recognize when somebody’s off-handed comment should be expanded upon and made into a complete essay. 

   1. I’ve had dozens of conversations (especially with busy people who don’t normally write down many of their ideas, like scientists and CEOs) where they say something and I’m like, “Woah, have you written that down? That’d be a great essay.”

7. Share your ideas publicly. Don’t be stingy. I’ve never been in a situation where I shared an idea and another writer overtly stole it. (Except for that one time, when the Financial Times ripped off my reporting and never acknowledged it.) Post your ideas on Twitter or LinkedIn; if lots of people engage with it, that’s a good indication that a fuller essay might be worthwhile.

8. Un-censor yourself. Most aspiring writers seem to kill their ideas before they give them a real chance and hit ‘publish.’ Don’t do that. Err on the side of publishing your idea, even if you think it’s unoriginal or not very good. If the idea/execution flops, at least you have a data point to learn from. If you don’t publish, it will take longer to learn about what other people find interesting.

   1. Many people think “timeliness” is the key to “interestingness,” and that if they wait too long to publish, their article will lose relevance. But I don’t think this is true. If you remember thinking, “This was really interesting to me when I first heard about it,” there’s a good chance that writing about that thing will still be interesting to others, even if it’s decades old. 

9. Ask “what if?” Speculative questioning can lead to novel ideas. What if the world was like this? How could we cut the cost of X by 10x? What if event Y never happened? This line questioning inspired an article I wrote with Julian Englert; we asked, “What if there were a technology that could print proteins on-demand?”

Acknowledgments: This essay was directly inspired by Alexey Guzey’s Writing Advice.

---

Advice from other writers:

1. Tyler Cowen (Marginal Revolution): I get a lot of [my ideas] from talking to people, and then noticing both what they and I say.

2. Alexey Guzey (Guzey): Usually, I try to talk to people a lot and when I notice that I've been talking about the same thing to people for a few weeks or have been asked the same question a bunch of times, that's a good sign that there's a blog post to write somewhere around.

3. Brian Potter (Construction Physics): Almost all of my ideas come from reading. I read something and wonder, “Well, how does this thing work? Why did that happen the way it does?” And it's almost always the case that I don't understand it very well. There's almost always an opportunity to understand how something works more deeply.

4. Jason Crawford (Roots of Progress): Personally, I started with a Big Question. I wanted to understand human progress (link #1, #2). I knew that in order to discover the roots of progress, I needed first to understand *what* progress even consisted of. What is there to be explained? I had only a vague idea of what the Industrial Revolution even consisted of: steam engines, steel, trains, I dunno, textile machines? What were those things? Why are they the things that mattered? What else was there? I started out trying to find a one-book overview or summary of the industrial age. I couldn't find one. I found a summary of the Industrial Revolution but it was very episodic, a bunch of disconnected vignettes, not a unified overview/narrative. Still, it gave me several pieces of a puzzle, even if they weren't all put together. So, I just started picking off topics that I knew were important. Steam? OK, read a history of the steam engine. Cotton? Read a history of cotton. Etc. And then I started writing about what I was learning. First just little notes and open questions, like “What is Charcoal?” Then one day I read a book that had enough of a coherent narrative that I could summarize it and make a nice longer post. People (my friends, who were my only audience at the time) liked that. So I decided to do more posts that told a whole story. Some of these, I had to do more than read one book, because the book wouldn't answer my questions. I would read a book, then do extra research to create a narrative, then write a post. At a certain point I could start asking big questions. Later I would be able to give preliminary answers. Eventually I am philosophizing about the nature of progress—what I set out to understand ~seven years ago.

   1. So to more directly answer your question, once you have a Big Question, it's easy to find lots of stuff to write about because there are so many specific sub-sub-questions you can investigate. Once I wanted to understand the history of technology and industry, every major invention or industrial process was something I could write about. Every chart on Our World in Data had a story behind it I could tell. Etc. And I didn't feel that I had to master a topic before writing about it. I was OK to write about anything I learned about, once I had learned it, or to summarize things I had read and comment on them. So the whole learning process could become a series of posts, rather than the post coming *after* all the learning. If I could try to generalize this in a way that might be applicable to others, it's something like:

      1. Find a big, burning question that you are dying to answer. Something very ambitious in scope is good. (If you don't have this: read about and try all kinds of stuff until something catches you and you become obsessed.)

      2. Set out to become an expert in the topic, in order to answer your Big Question. Start bottom up, with the very basic, object-level questions. Be humble at first, know that you know nothing to start and have a ton to learn.

      3. As you learn, write about what you are learning. Any time you learn a cool thing that you'd like to tell people, just write it up. Any time you read a piece that taught you something or was worthwhile, summarize it and comment on it. (Book reviews make great posts.) Don't feel you have to master the topic before you start writing; work in public (“with the garage door up”: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Work_with_the_garage_door_up)

      4. Now you should have an endless supply of writing ideas. At first, you will just be writing about basic things and open questions, since that's where you start. Over time, you will start to see patterns and trends. And you will start to have preliminary answers to the open questions. It is like putting together a puzzle where you receive one new piece a day: at first, all you have are disconnected pieces; then you start making links; then entire connected regions form; eventually you have the whole structure in outline and you are just filling in holes. Your writing will move up the hierarchy as your learning does.

      5. By the time you have the overview, maybe it's time to write a book 😄

5. Ruxandra Tesloianu (Substack Link): For better or worse, I was born with a little voice in my head that just debates whatever argument I hear from my surroundings, almost involuntarily. I often end up voicing these arguments, which does not win me many friends. On the flipside, I think it's good for writing. Most of my pieces are born out of a desire to debate whatever it is that I hear -- on a podcast, from a friend, on social media. For example, my piece: "Why haven't biologists cured cancer?" was written because I had listened to an interview with Peter Thiel where he expressed an opinion I disagreed with. I then ended up going through the history of biology to flesh out my argument. Another popular series of mine was a string of articles on luxury beliefs. This was written, again, because I disagreed with how people used the concept. I would say I try a lot as a writer to not just be argumentative and combative, but actually provide new ideas and flesh out my own framework. But even then, the spark is almost always a deep need to argue.

6. Jose Luis Ricón (Nintil): There's a background level of interest I have in topics; something may be simmering for a while until it rises above some threshold where it merits some writing. Historically what tends to trigger that is the accumulation of puzzles to solve, or whether I see smart people disagreeing about a topic. When I wrote my Soviet Union series section on caloric consumption in the USSR, the puzzle there was the widespread perception that the Soviets were starving while simultaneously the UN FAO agency reporting that they were eating more calories than the US. What was going on, I wondered? In other cases, the motivation has been a hunch that someone is wrong on the internet; at first I may not know why they are wrong, but something in their writing bothered me and the writing is a means to clarify my own thinking. When I read A Vision for Metascience I was bothered by its hopeful optimism and wanted to write a more realistic take on the topic drawing on my own reading which had been ongoing for years at that point so I wrote Limits and Possibilities of Metascience. More recently, I've been wondering whether to write a response to Founder Mode from Paul Graham; as I think he doesn't give the topic the justice he should given his experience at Y Combinator. More can be and should be said about Founder Mode, it seems to me, though I don't know exactly what I will say. Sometimes there seems to be something I will say but when I get to writing there isn't. That's part of the process; learning that my disagreements were minor and not worth an essay.

7. Xander Balwit (Asimov Press): Most of my best ideas emerge from participating in (or listening to) spirited conversations with smart people. Even better, is when these are people with different domain expertise and curiosities. This collision of perspectives is a fruitful place for ideation—almost like a fusion meal, with influences coming from multiple cultures. What does statistical modeling have to say about animal welfare? What does aesthetics teach us about politics? Beyond thinking about ways to synthesize and borrow between disciplines, I cannot stress enough the importance of reading widely; a throw-away sentence or speculation posed by another author can become a whole essay. 

---

If you have advice about how to find writing ideas, please send them to me (nsmccarty3@gmail.com) and I may update this article.