Don't know what to write about

Writing about trending topics makes sense because that's what people are currently interested in, i.e. it maximizes chances that your article gets traction (readers).

Browse the following sites to get inspiration for trending topics:

• Google trends
• Buzzsumo
• Do a Twitter search, then you'll see trending hashtags and topics on the search results page

Believe it or not, sometimes, just changing your writing tool is enough to put your imagination and focus to work. When you see that the lines and letters are going smoothly in your scribbles, the need to take a paper and let the stream of consciousness flow its way might come to you quite naturally.

Highly recommended smooth-writing pens are quite cheap to find gel ink pens and the classical but almost ancient fountain pens, which can be quite a challenge if you aren't used to the sense only the mastery of caligraphy can infuse you with.

A slight modification in your writing location (or position) can get your writing flowing again.

Some inspiration where you may go instead:

• Your toilet sit! :)
• On the bench
• While playing chess with the elderly
• In the middle of the student protest
• Under your bed
• In the bath
• Under the rain
• In an open lecture or class

Ways and possibilities are many, you just have to be bold enough to try them out all, or at least the ones most enticing to you. Remember:

Change can be beneficial, even if the effect is temporary.

Ever heard of a proverb: "The early bird catches the worm"?

The old saying can certainly teach us a lot. For one, you should really try up getting earlier in the morning if you wish to let that brain of yours do some proper work.

Our focus is sharpest in the morning and the same goes for our memory. If you tire yourself properly before midnight, go to bed and then wake up in some decent early hour, your work might as well meet its deadline, but on time.

You should cut yourself a slack and forget about the proud "Grammar Nazi" title. When you are supposed to be writing, then write. Needless editing and correcting won't do you any good, just slow you down and distract your writing process.

It is true that all the mistakes, errors and lapses may distract you at first, but you should train yourself to turn on a blind eye in the 1st phase of writing.

• Accept that your first draft most likely won't be perfect.
• While writing, you can leave notes to self near the sentential constructions, word choices,  ambiguities that you think should be fast-checked, rewritten or condensed.
• Keep in mind while writing, the important thing is to keep writing, and keep writing alone!

Always have a little notepad, or a torn piece of paper at least, where you can note down your ideas and thoughts before forgetting them completely while leaving your work to take a bite or a break.

You can also record your notes with a voice recorder, enter them into the Sticky Notes on your desktop, or remember them by heart by repeating them out loud :) Anything goes.

It is well known what a turn off a boring topic can be. All the inspiration and the enthusiasm immediately sink into the bottomless ocean of uniformity. But, despair not!

Ever heard that there are no stupid questions? Well, there are no boring topics either.

Put yourself in a role of a detective, or in the worst case, a reporter, and ask yourself:

• Who
• What
• When
• Where
• Why
• How

And now - google! Dig! The answers can be quite intriguing. Especially because there is so much trivia, true and untrue, but quite enough to provoke someone's interest and make them read.

If you happen to be working on the topic of the "kitchen utensils", just wait for google solutions and users' questions to open your way up for you.

There are variety of questions you would have never thought of! For example:

• How to make sweets and cakes in the shape of the kitchen utensils?
• Kitchen utensils from "Beauty and the Beast" for my kitchen, and where to find them?
• The multipractical kitchen utensils for outdoor use
• How can you repair a stainless steel kitchen set?

etc.

If your imagination is lacking some craziness, let the others write your plot.

If you think the topic you have been tasked to write about is a bit too boring or plain for your taste, you can simply give it a retouch. In other words, recreate it by giving your own remake of the topic!

And you will do this by choosing one of the enlisted ways:

• Use the topic as a metaphor to write about something totally different, but still defending your approache.g. Quite a hilarious but very charming and interesting essay by a high schooler proved to be an excellent example for such a practice. Apparently, he was supposed to write an analysis on the given topic which was the quote from the book he had to read before doing  a written test. He didn't read the book, of course, but he wrote one of his own, or rather a story. He used the quote to start the story of a dead man, his soul slowly leaving his coffin, the bereaved family and his earthly abode. His whole "goodbye" was written in a really post-modern, witty and approachable style. At some point he arrives to Heaven and meets with God. Well, the conversation between the two of them is a very creative punchline which ends with God asking the diseased one whether he read the book and whether he feels bad about it, because he should - he totally missed the topic.

• Use the topic as a title for a poem you will write, or as a rhyme, or a strophe.
  
  
• The topic might look like a potential quote or a wordly wisdom, so use it to talk about the symbolism in that author's work and the message he wanted to convey. Or what the people wanted to warn us about by saying such a thing.
  
  
• The topic might remind you of the work you have read, a documentary, or a movie you have watched, or even an event you have been present at, so you can relate the two. Connect them like they are one and the same, or make parallels between them to prove your point. Breathe your philosophy into it, or make a story out of it.

If you cannot come up with a topic or even start writing about something at all, you should use some of your virtual friends' comments, which will certainly give you a musely push.

A really useful trick is to :

• Post a question or a topic on some of your social profiles like Facebook or Twitter. (and do it somewhere where you have lurkers and followers waiting around the corner for someone to post a comment or a picture, so they can react to it)
• Post a question containing keywords that you will base your topic on
• Make them somehow give their own ideas and advice about what you will later use as a material
• Provoke them with the rhetoric question

What you are doing here is practically provoking them to give you a ready-made topic or triggering the process of random brainstorming, which you can safely borrow.

Maybe you have just been chronically exhausted a couple of days in a row, or on this particular day. So if nothing else helps:

• Coffeine overdose,
• Forcing yourself to write, or
• Getting some fresh air before going back to work,

you are definitely pushing yourself to stay awake but are obviously not in a state to pull it through.

Find yourself a bed and sleep!

Get yourself charged, reboot and go!

If you cannot seem to focus on what you are doing due to fatique, the best and healthiest possible solution would be to let your body and mind relax by releasing all the pent up energy inside of you.

Naturally, you can do that by engaging in some kind of an activity which suits you the best...

• Going for a walk
• Jogging
• Swimming
• Riding a bycicle
• Practicing yoga
• Vacuum cleaning the house

etc.

Suit yourself. The activities are plenty.

Ever heard about a very quick and relaxing home activity called streching? Well, now you have.

If you feel like you're done for today, and you cannot sit still and go on with your work any longer, you might try stretching a little. You can do it in whatever pose you feel it is comfortable for you to unscrew your body a bit.

You can:

• Stand and strech
• Lie on a mat and do some ground streching

Feel comfortable, that's all. Stimulate your circulation and you'll be as good as new.

Feeling stuck? You brain is blocked. You're trapped. Total confusion!

Just relax and let yourself do whatever you feel like doing at that very moment of stuckness. It is okay and besides, whatever other activity you take on yourself will just further stimulate your creativity.

You can:

• Doodle on the working paper
• Do some serious painting
• Play video games
• Watch a movie
• Do sudoku
• Solve the cross-word puzzles
• Scroll through an endless Facebook posts column
• Wash the dishes
• Iron
• Sing karaoke
• Filter some selfies of yours so they can look retro
• Take a walk
• Take a nap
• Bake a cake 
• Fix the closet
• Water those plants that are almost dying in the corner

Just do whatever. Let yourself be free from the restraints of the form. Once you have satisfied your carefreeness, the desire for writing will come back to you naturally and you'll be even more inspired to do your work.

Take at least 15 minutes of your time each day to write of whatever pops into your mind.

• Ignore the spelling and punctuation
• Make it random
• Play with your subjects
• Change the mood frequently
• Mix styles and registers
• Write hate letters to the people you are holding a grudge against, by writing a letter to them (which you will never send, of course) :)

Do this for a week and then return to your original project. Alternative is to freewrite 15-20 minutes to stabilize your thoughts, and then immediately return to your work.

You never know, you might come across a new topic by brainstorming like this.

Do the obvious:

•  Turn off everything you are so addicted to that is constantly distracting you (your phone, your internet, in case you do not need it for your research)
• Clean up the mess on your table so you won't be distracted by (it can disturb you and confuse you, however strange that sounds)
• Tell yourself that 3-4 hours of writing are a must for the day
• Write when everyone is sleeping or at least when you know you're safe from the interruptions
• Be alone with yourself (that's how you focus better and are more free to let your thoughts take over)

...that will give you some ideas. 

If you're doomed to spend your days sitting by your PC, writing endless documents in the same manner and style, if that moment of block comes, you can simply play with your Word to break the monotony - change your font.

No matter how silly it may sound, changing and playing with the very many different fonts and writing styles you have at hand, can be quite refreshing and inspirational. You might like how the writing looks like, which will give you a push to keep up writing.

In the end, if you still have to submit the document in the standard form, simply switch it back to the regular formatting. The creative process has already been performed.

If you're a PC user, an everloving follower of the digital writing, give yourself a chance in giving the chance to the oldie way - good ol' paper. It can get exciting, and even challenging after you find yourself in confusion because you forgot how the real hand writing feels. And it can get even better...

If you're a lifelong paper user, you might try to learn something new, educate yourself how to use digital papers and what do they offer, and they do offer a lot of options. At first, it can be too big of a challenge, but grit your teeth and pull this one through. It'll certainly be a big win. Why? You'll see when you get there.

It is the same with food. You can eat more than just three or five times a day, but make sure that those intakes are nutritive to your health. The same goes for the concentration.

You don't have to glue yourself to the chair all day long. You can let the writing process be as short as writing a mere thought, but make sure that when you sit down, you should fill up that time with all the focus, creativity and skill you have.

What you can leave for later should be the proofreading.

After you have finished with writing for that day, leave a note or two as a hint or a clue as to what you might write about tomorrow, how to wrap up the already started work, or where you left off the day before.

Keywords and unfinished thoughts can be a good way to get yourself started the very moment you sit down, ready to write.

Setting up the exact time when you start the work and when you finish it is very useful for many reasons.

• You're organized and therefore feel like doing the job properly
• You have a goal and know that after you have achieved it, you can rest assured
• You control your own time and can adjust it to your daily mood swings and needs

Two heads are better than one.

An idiom that never gets old. If you are having difficulties working through a problem by yourself, seek your friend's help. You can join forces and create as a team.

• Writing shoudler to shoulder,
• Over an open Skype line,
• Facebook chat,
• Open phone call, or
• Via simple text messaging.

You can get excited, fired up and what's most important - encouraged.

Peer pressure isn't necessarily negative. It can give you a mighty push to get yourself started on a topic. It might grow into a form of a competition, but will anyway keep you both working hard.

Give yourself a goal and involve other people who will fall with you if you fail. That will keep you occupied to finish your work properly.

To make it easier, here's an example:

• Aim to write 2 pages a day
• Get your friends to sponsor you for charity
• If you fail, everything fails, your friends look at you as a nontrustworthy, and you feel extremely bad
• As a result, you work harder!

Peer pressure and social pressure can be both positive and negative. But, sometimes, negative pressure can trigger more positive outcomes than is generally accepted.

If you're one of the extreme ones, this is the program for you. It is not about existentialism, it is about purposefully punishing yourself in case of a chronic idleness.

Write or Die  - an online productivity tool that actually forces you to write. Curious? Check it out for yourself.

The primordial solution to everything has always been the acceptance, no?

It is quite fashionable to deal with your fears and anxieties in a calm and meditative way today. The same applies to distractions.

If you cannot fight them actively, you can resist them passively. Accept their presence and learn to swim in their flow.

• In other words: GET USED TO THEM!

Give yourself a nice slap on the cheek, tell yourself that you're doing too much daydreaming and too little writing, and focus!

When you are digging for trivia, information and facts, remember that if you type down the "umbrella term", you might not see the end of the day before you dig out the right answer.

Instead, limit yourself to the more specific search for better and more particular results.

For example, if your topic is: Claustrophobia, you might put down

• Fear of the Cellars or
• Fear of the Atticks,

and by doing so, you are automatically choosing your audience, making the material more approachable, easy to come find, and certainly more interesting.

If you cannot come up with anything good enough to be an interesting writing material, use your real life friends and their spirit for good games to get some ideas.

There are already-made card and board games that you can use, but a more simple trick would be to:

• Write sentences (quotes, or random names and words, names of the movies, books, or people) on the small pieces of paper that you will
• Fold 4 times.
• You can even draw on them instead of writing anything
• You should then put all of the pieces in the hat or some bowl, and make people pick one without looking.
• In turns, you should open your paper and tell a story using a drawing or a word on a paper as a topic or idea. There should be no time for thinking. It is an oral brainstorm.
• You can always add something knew to this game. Introduce more papers as a help. For example, plot twists, or a setting, or an object on an additional paper.

You can always have lots of fun and borrow an idea or two from your inspired company. Maybe even a whole story if it turns our great.

As mentioned on one very interesting web page - How To Write When You're Really Tired, when you don't feel like writing a word and when you really don't have a spare atom to put into the work, one of the ways is to make yourself do it by "bullying yourself into doing it".

In some cases, it does end up being productive and turns out to be a worthy step to push yourself from the phase of idleness into a very productive hour or two of creation.

Alas, in some other cases, people tend to develop an inner resentment against your work that can actually lead you to be even more unproductive later on.

You can take a risk, and it can actually work out for you, but beware of the consequences.

If you are so tired that you cannot even think, say less write those lethargic thoughts down, maybe, you should turn to your inner voice for help. And you will do that by asking yourself those very important questions that we are very often unable to vocalize to the others.

Be honest to yourself and go through the following:

• How do you feel about this whole thing?
• What do you really want to write about?
• What should you do to make this whole process more easier and most importantly, more interesting to you?

Once you have asked yourself these questions, you will get your true answers and finally find your inspiration, by letting yourself free from the restraints of the form.

If you feel drowsy and unable to put yourself into a motio properly, you might go for a good ol' cup of coffee, no?

Similarly to the coffee option, you might as well try shaking yourself up with an energy drink. Easily found at any time of the day, in any kind of a store. And to add, it is quite cheap for the problem you have.

One additional advantage of going for some energy drinks is taking a stroll. Airing your head a bit and giving some space to your thoughts to reorganize and clean the cache.

Did you know that when you're sleeping, your subconscious is thinking, learning and writing instead of your conscious mind.

A good trick to let your subcoscious do the job for you is to think about the problem before falling asleep. You might have a dream which is practically a continuation of the story you are writing, or a potential topic you are yet to start. Usually, what you dream is the perfect fit in the place you couldn't finish properly.

It is amazing how the characters can come to life in your dreams and get the mind of their own. They will tell you what they want to be and how they want you to present them in your work. You might get a perfect conclusion to your thesis' problem. You never know who is awake in there while you are deeply asleep.

You have been discussing the matter in question in the class or on the seminar. There is one subject everyone has to pick something interesting from and turn into a topic.

Usually, what is expected from you is to defend a viewpoint of your own in your paper, but you first need to choose what the topic will be. Regarding the questions the teacher or professor has been most interested in, you can make you own topic, following your preferences as well.

The title of the paper, your topic can also be the name of your point, like for example:

• Teacher's question: What caused the fall of the Roman Empire?
• Your topic and viewpoint: Loss of traditional values, Lost Roman Empire

• Don't try to sound too smart
• Use only the words whose meaning you are sure about
• Be straightforward, with easy-to-follow arguments
• Do not pile up the connectors
• Include as many active verbs and simple subjects
• Your argument doesn's have to be complicated to be good
• Pull the right information from your mind and state it precisely
• Take whatever piece of information on the subject is exchanged during the lesson and use it in your paper

You should never plagiarize! However, you are free to use other people's arguments to support your own.

The only thing you should always think of is to credit all of them whose words you borrowed.

With your own point, you just need to find anything remotely relating to it.

Those can be quotes, whole passages, or even expressions. Even if a certain passage only dimly supports your argument, use it. Just always explain how the two are connected and in what way they relate to each other, and then put the quoted sentence in the right context.

"One man's trash, is another man's treasure."

Why we should never look down on people who are digging through the garbage is because they are putting an effort in front an putting their dignity aside to feed themselves. Much of the trash is still edible and usable. People who are to feel embarrassed are the ones throwing things so nonchalantly, without even considering the value it has for the ones who are poor. We should always think beforehand and do everything we can to help the starving and the poor, like packing the unfinihsed and still edible food in the plastic bags and hanging them on the side of the container.

• 1st part: Opening paragraph with your thesis statement + setup (or the explanation of the thesis where "you say what you want to say")

• 2nd part: Supporting the claims you made in the first paragraph, or simply explaining them one by one ("say it")

• 3r part: A wrap-up paragraph is a summary of what you've said in the 2nd part, and which should end with your thesis statement again. A good tip is to start it with a connector "therefore". This actually "says what you have already said before".