If you are a planner, I imagine that the answer to my next question will be obvious;
What inspires you to write that next post?
If you’re a planner, you’ve probably got a list of ideas to draw from, a sequence of posts that lead from one to the next to the next and so on. You may have a teaching plan that unfolds week by week to build into an exciting and informative series of articles.
But what if you hail from the Planet Pants?
What if you happen to be an impetious and spontaneous fly-by-luck scatterbrain like me?
I can often go for weeks without any idea about what I will post next – aside from my regularly irregular and often-late Six Sentence Sundays.
And then, without warning, an idea will strike, coming out of nowhere like a thunderbolt on a clear summer’s day.
Quickly, ere I forget the subject matter, I will fashion a post from old wood and used pieces of string – and as I write, I often realise that I am trying to cover several subjects, several concepts within the same post. Rather than (as they said in Top Gun) push a bad position, the disparate subjects will split into enough material to suggest several vaguely-related posts; In other words, the fledgling post will create spin-off ideas; it will have babies.
A half-dozen little pink and hairless posts will suddenly begin to mewl and squeak and demand to be considered as posts in their own right.
So the fresh flurry of fledgling posts will be nurtured. They will be a bit like my family – very loosely related and perhaps a little edgy. There may be very little to connect them to previous or future posts aside from a single word or a faint, shining thread of thought.
That is why, dear reader, you may see groups of related topics appearing from me – sometimes two or three in one week.
Despite my endeavours to hold them back and release them into the wild one at a time, they will often break free. When that happens, I am forced to watch helplessly as they circle the internet, scaring young women and inspiring modern Hitchcocks into making new movies a la noir.
But I’m interested to know; How does inspiration strike you? Your system cannot be as haphazard as mine…surely?
Do you have a rolling plan of posts that stretch towards a vanishing point on the distant horizon? Or is inspiration fired by a song on the radio, a news article or even another blog post?
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Write on!
Andrew Toynbee's very own Blog 