One Problem All Writers Face After A Time

You may not feel it now, but it is coming for you

Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

My desk has three Top-Flight, 1 Subject Notebooks on it right now. They collect dust at my desk while I work on my books or my day job. And they will continue to do so for the time being.

The other day, my wife asked if she could throw them out. I gasped. Of course, she couldn’t throw them out. She asked ‘why.’ And then I opened them up.

I have over two dozen book outlines, ideas, and research pages in these three cheap notebooks. Two dozen books are sitting and waiting for their turn to be typed into being with my well-worn iPad.

My wife began to flip through the pages and asked me this question:

“How do you come up with all of these ideas? I remembered a couple of years ago. You had a hard enough time figuring out what you would blog about weekly.”

And it’s true. Two or three years ago, I struggled to write one blog post a week. Now, I have over a hundred topic ideas for blog posts and more than 24 books waiting to be written.

How did this happen?

Problem: The water faucet is stuck, and I can’t turn it off.

Have you ever turned on an old outdoor water faucet after winter? When you start to turn it on, the water drips slowly out of it. Then, as it starts flowing, you get a trickle of water. And finally, the water flows freely.

Writing and ideas for writing are the same way. When you first start writing, ideas come one drop at a time.

Then, you get a slow stream of them after a little while. Once you reach where I am, the ideas flow so freely that you can’t contain them in the bucket.

Now, the faucet is stuck on, and I can’t turn it off. Every day, ideas come to me about books, blog posts, social media posts, podcasts, and YouTube videos. What I have found is that I can’t act on them all.

So, I have to remedy my problem.

Solution: Fill buckets full of ideas and come back to them.

I keep the notebooks for book ideas because they seem to collect the ideas and outlines better than my Apple Notes. However, I use Apple Notes now to collect all my blogging, podcasting, and YouTube ideas.

Daily, I enter ideas into these buckets. And in the mornings, when I write and create, I come back to these ideas individually. Creating the content, you read. And I am slowly emptying my buckets.

The good news is that my buckets are never empty. And at this rate, they never will be empty. Sure, I write a book or two out of the notebooks. Sooner or later, I will be able to toss that notebook out once the books are all written.

But there will be other notebooks to take their place.

Final Thoughts on the Never-ending Supply of Ideas

You might not be at this point. It took me years to cultivate this ability to have never-ending ideas. However, once it started to happen, I needed to have a sound system.

That’s where my three-bucket system comes into play. Suppose you are still struggling to have ideas weekly or from article to article.

Check out my Three-Bucket System download for Notion.

It has the Notion template plus a guide to get started. This is precisely what I did for ages until things started flowing overwhelmingly.

Where are you on the idea journey? Are your ideas flowing like crazy? Or are they at a trickle?

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Start Here!

Are there other books to read? Sure are. I have two short lists of them in my Writer’s Starter Pack on Gumroad (It’s free, you should check it out). The only other book I want to highlight is my own.

It’s called Transform Your Medium Stories.

Initially written for writers on the Medium platform, the content of this book works for any online content. And it is a great short guide to help you write and publish your first book. So grab your copy today!

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J.R. Heimbigner is a #1 Bestselling Author on Amazon who loves helping people grow in their faith and help writers become authors. You can connect with him on Medium, his website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Substack!