Today, go to the list of writing ideas you keep handy to collect your good ideas—um, a list that I hope you keep! If not, how about you start one right this second?—and pick about ten random things you’ve thought about as writing topics. Write them down separately. Next to each write the biggest possible expression of it and the smallest. Meaning, if you have “rain” on your list, the biggest expression of that might be a thunderstorm or a hurricane; the smallest could be a drizzle of rain or even a single drop of water. Add all of those ideas to your list. if one of them is immediately calling to you, write about it while it beckons so loudly.
If nothing on the list feels urgent, try this: go to Google News (not plain Google, but Google News, specifically) and search one of those ideas. Keeping with our example of rain, I typed that in just now and got urgent topics like Hurricane Hilary making landfall in Baja and southern California, Colorado farmers struggling with drought, rain in Texas brining relief to record high temperatures, and how retail sales fell in the UK in July after rain, quite literally, dampened demand.
By entering “drop of water” I see results about the Maui fires has prompted a shift in the long-running fight over Lahaina’s water supply, a story about how tiny drops of water trapped in salt hold 150 million years of oceanic history, etc. See? Suddenly, you have the intersection of weather and economics, weather and agriculture… you have climate, municipal infrastructures, geology, environmental and economic justice, and so on. Lots and lots of things to not only spark ideas around your area of deepest knowledge, but also ways to add urgency those topics today.
Best of all, you can do this absolutely every single day and make what you know relevant every time you want it to be, thus always giving you a reason to write about it in a topical and urgent way, always giving you a reason to use your voice as a writer.
Let’s write.