When You Do Not Know What to Write, Tracing the Reasons Brings an Outline Out

When what to write will not settle, the prescriptions that come back reduce to roughly three. Fit it to a template. Search your own interests and experience. Just start writing.

All three get the hands moving. Because they do, whoever carries them out gains, that same day, the sense of having moved forward. The reason you arrive back at the same place is that what emerges at the far end of the movement shares a property. What got written is writing that did not have to be yours. Fit it to a template and what emerges is the template’s; line up your interests and you stall again over which of the listed items to write. Start writing and by the third paragraph you can lose track of what the subject was.

There is one place none of the three touches. What counts as important has not been settled. Subjects are not short; what is in hand is not visible as a subject. Increase the places you search from this state and what increases is the list of candidates.

Let me first write out the range in which this article produces answers. First, how many kinds of state are actually called cannot write, and between which of them the available move changes. Second, by what mechanism material becomes invisible while sitting in your hands. Third, whether what settles the writing is selection or some other work.

Two things remain outside this article. Whether a given claim holds value for the reader cannot be adjudicated on the side of before writing; only observation after putting it out will tell. And how many candidates to hold, how long to think before starting, does not come out either, since it is a quantity that varies with which state you are presently in.

Treat the unsettled state as a shortage of subjects and what gets spent is time. Looking at search tools, looking at other writers’ articles, building a list of candidates. The list keeps growing and the number of pieces written does not. Not growing, you go searching again. Searching has a feel of progress to it, so the period during which nothing is written becomes a period with an explanation attached.

The spending has a second layer. Apply a prescription without confirming which reason has stopped you, and all that remains is the result that it did not work. And the reason it did not work gets attributed to you rather than to the prescription — you did not search hard enough, you did not write enough pieces. The misdiagnosis grows more certain with every prescription applied.

What gets reset here is an order. Writing is not selected but remains once a criterion has settled, and that order is examined here from both the mechanism and the adjudication.

What the World Answers to I Do Not Know What to Write

The state of nothing coming to mind is described as a stage many writers pass through. It arises easily in the period soon after starting, or after a first pass has been completed. The positioning is that it is not unusual.

The first prescription gets shown. Fit it to a template: the form of listing recommendations, the form of comparing, the form of explaining a procedure, the form of relating an experience. Hold a template and fitting content into it produces a piece.

The second prescription gets shown too. Write out your interests and experience — what you are good at, what you have done, what people ask you about. From what you wrote out, select the parts overlapping the reader’s interests.

The third prescription gets shown as well. Start writing without aiming at perfection. Think while writing. Accumulate quantity before quality. Increase the number written and you become able to write.

Supporting advice comes attached. Search the questions readers ask. Search the terms people search for. Look at other writers’ articles and consider what you would write.

The prescriptions lined up here are accurate as practice. With a template the hands move, and as the number written increases the speed of writing rises. That readers’ questions become subjects is exactly right. None of them can be dropped.

The whole set rests on one premise. What to write will not settle because subjects are short. So you increase the places you search and prepare vessels to fit content into. The attempt to resolve it sits on the supply side.

In some cases subjects genuinely are short. At a stage where experience is shallow and the range handled is narrow, searching works as it stands, because there really is territory at the far end of the search that you do not yet know.

What stops working is the case where it has been organised entirely as a matter of supply. Ten candidates come out and which to write is still unsettled. Selection can even become harder as candidates increase. The added candidates carry no axis of comparison.

You can answer that you should select whichever holds high interest for readers. Subjects of high interest, however, have already been written by many writers. Select the same subject by the same criterion and the content that emerges resembles theirs. With the criterion of selection sitting outside, the result of selecting agrees with the outside as well. Articles that would hold up regardless of who wrote them are born along this route.

The condition under which the advice to search the terms people search for actually works is settled here too. It works well when that term sits at a place that touches your own criterion. Pick up a term that sits elsewhere and you write, on a subject with demand, content that did not have to be yours.

And thickening the supply side has a by-product of its own. A place to hold the list of candidates is required. A system of organisation is required. The work of managing subjects rises up in place of the work of writing them. The hands are moving either way, so the substitution is invisible from inside the work.

Cannot Write Points to Three Different States

The state spoken of under one phrase divides into at least three.

The first type is the state of having no material. Experience in that territory is shallow and the content available is genuinely small. The available move is to accumulate experience. Searching produces little.

The second type is the state of having material without recognising it as material. What has become self-evident to you is not recognised as an object of writing. The available move is to build a frame.

The third type is the state of knowing something is important and being unable to put it into words. There is content you wish to write, and how to begin will not settle. The available move is to raise a question.

The three share a symptom. All of them feel like nothing comes to mind. And the move that works differs across all three.

Have somebody of the second type carry out the first type’s prescription and their material does not appear at the far end of the search. What is being searched is outside, and the material is in hand. This misdiagnosis grows more certain the longer the searching drags on, because there is an explanation available: nothing came out because the searching was not thorough enough.

Whether it is the first type can be gauged with one question. Can you raise three occasions in the past six months on which you judged something. If you can, you have material. If you cannot, it is the first type.

Self-report is of little use for this distinction. Somebody in the second type tends to report themselves as the first type, because the object of comparison sits outside. Set what other writers have written beside what is in your hands and your side looks the poorer. It looks poorer because their side has already become words and yours has not, and that is not necessarily a difference of quantity.

The three also mix, and the way they mix often differs by territory. In a territory you have worked in a long time it tends to be the second or third type; in a newly begun territory, the first. The distinction is made after narrowing to one territory.

Writing has a use against the first type as well, since there is an aspect in which experience gets organised while writing. Without an object to organise in hand, however, no organising occurs.

The third type has an easily recognised symptom: being able to talk about the content you wish to write and stalling when you try to write it. Being able to talk means both material and criterion are likely already present. What is short is the identification of which question that content answers. Here, writing the question in one sentence is often enough to begin. The raising of questions itself is treated in how to write headings.

Split into three and what can be done about the first type shrinks, since there is no move other than accumulating experience. The reason for splitting anyway is that the time spent on ineffective prescriptions disappears.

Material Is Not Absent; the Frame That Divides It Off Is

Looking at the same thing, what people see differs.

What produces the difference is what you hold about that territory. Not the quantity of knowledge. Whether you hold a frame that divides things into meaningful units.

An experiment shows what a frame does. Chase and Simon ran a task in which a chess position was shown briefly and then reproduced (Chase & Simon, 1973, Cognitive Psychology, 4(1), 55–81). Experts reproduced positions arising in actual play far more accurately than beginners.

With the pieces arranged at random, however, that difference almost disappeared. What the experts held was not memory capacity but a frame that grasped a meaningful arrangement as a single chunk.

That experiment measured the reproduction of chess positions. It did not measure the finding of subjects to write about. What it showed is only the direction in which a frame changes the quantity extractable from the same information.

As a direction it carries over. Material for writing sometimes becomes invisible not because it is absent but because there is no frame dividing it off as material. Without a frame, the material passes in front of you.

Suppose there was a day in your work when you declined a request. The event of declining stays in memory, and it is not taken for material to write about. Hold the frame the criterion by which I decline is a judgement worth writing about and the same day becomes visible as material.

There are two routes by which a frame is obtained.

One is borrowing it from other people’s writing. Read a writer setting out the criterion for declining and the same events inside you become visible. Material made visible by a borrowed frame is yours.

At the same time, borrowing a frame sometimes brings the content along with it, in the form of interpreting the material you saw to match that writer’s conclusion. To keep them apart, record the event you saw first and place the interpretation behind it.

The other route is being asked. When somebody asks about a judgement self-evident to you — how do you decide that — you find that this is material. What makes it invisible until asked is that what has become self-evident sinks into the background. What to ask, and how, is set out in how to conduct a customer interview.

As frames increase, material increases too much. Everything starts to look like material to write about. That is a separate problem sitting elsewhere, arriving after you have left the second type.

A Template Moves the Hands, but Without a Claim What Gets Written Belongs to the Template

A template does well at resolving the state where the hands stop.

Hold the template raise five recommendations and raising five produces a piece. There is no place for the hands to stop. This benefit genuinely exists.

At the same time, a template settles the range of the content. Inside the form of raising five, only content that can be raised as five can be handled. Content that shows a boundary, or that doubts a premise, does not go into this template.

Keep writing with templates, accordingly, and only content that fits a template gets written. Content that does not fit remains unwritten. That it remains is hard for the writer to see as well.

On top of that, templates are shared. Writing composed in the same template already exists in quantity, and readers can guess the content at the sight of the template. Once guessed, the reason to read thins out.

What goes into the template seven methods for improving your writing is items that can sit in parallel. The question of what the phrase improving refers to does not go into this template. Not fitting, it does not get written.

You can also read this as meaning content that does not fit a template has no demand. The adjudication depends on how demand is measured. Measure by the terms people search for and terms fitting templates come out more. A question that has not become a term does not appear in the measurement. Not appearing and not existing are different things.

At the starting stage, using a template produces better results, because removing it without material for judgement leaves you unable to explain to yourself why you removed it. The judgement to remove can be handed down only after several pieces written with one.

And using a template does not itself mean becoming the template’s. With your own claim inside it, the template can be used as a vessel. What emerges as a vessel and nothing more is the case where the claim is unsettled.

Where it is used as a vessel, the template gets selected afterwards. Settle the claim in one sentence, then select the arrangement suited to handing it over. Select the template first and only claims fitting that template get raised. One swap in the order changes which thing is being settled.

Read it with the template removed and the adjudication comes out. Turn the parallel items into continuous prose and see whether it holds as an argument. If it does, a claim is inside. If it becomes nothing but an enumeration of items, the template was standing in for structure. While it stands in, the writer is not practising the building of structure.

This standing-in is hard to notice, because what results has the shape of an article. The shape being in order, it does not become an object of inspection. What gets inspected is only the pieces that did not go well.

Writing Out Your Interests Produces a List With No Order

The advice to write out your interests and experience is asking for the creation of a list.

In most cases the list does not come out as such, because interests are not held in consciousness as items. What can be answered to what are you interested in is only what has already become words.

What has become words is what has already been said many times, and what has been said many times has often been written out. What emerges from the list is accordingly often a subject already finished.

And a list contains no order. Write out ten items and which to write first is unsettled. Settling it requires a criterion, and the criterion is not inside the list.

Suppose you write out music, management, reading. From these three the content to write does not settle, because all three are too wide. Narrowing them requires knowing what within them you consider important.

This structure takes the same shape as the work of settling whom to address. As handled in how to build a persona, the audience is an output of the design rather than an input and can be narrowed only after the criterion of value has been settled. A subject is the same: it cannot be narrowed before the criterion.

Writing out interests does not thereby become wasted. It works as the confirmation of a stock of material. What jams is the expectation of selecting from that list. Unable to select, you spend longer looking at it.

A list fills its proper role at one stage: where the territory is too wide and even which part to handle is unsettled. Here the list becomes the work of narrowing the range. After narrowing, a criterion is required again. Narrowing the range and selecting from within it are separate processes.

Change what gets written out and the property of the list changes. Instead of interests, write out the occasions on which you recently judged something. A judgement is an individual event, so concretes enter the list.

Another change is to write out things I recently explained to somebody. Having explained something means the other party did not hold it and you did. The list preserves that difference, and the difference, unlike an interest, has a shape visible from outside.

The work of building a list is accompanied by a sense of progress, since the hands move and the items increase. What is progressing is the grasp of stock; the work of selecting has not begun. Mix the two and you end up handling the list for days. While you handle it, not one piece gets written.

What You Trace Is the Moment You Judged Something Important

Swap the object of the search. What you search for is not a subject but the history of your judgements.

A judgement is an occasion on which one thing was chosen from two or more options. Whether to take a request. Which of two methods to adopt. What to stop. Having chosen means having regarded something as important.

The criterion by which it was regarded as important has, in most cases, not become words. It is used while choosing and is not held in consciousness. The work of tracing becomes the work of extracting this criterion.

The extraction is simple. Recall one occasion of choosing and write why you chose that side. Ask why again of the reason you wrote. In two or three rounds you often arrive at a place that cannot be restated.

Suppose you declined a request. The reason was that the timing did not work. Why did you not clear the time. Because you wanted to build your own thing in those hours. Why do you give that priority. What emerges here is the criterion.

Once the criterion emerges, what can be written comes into view all together. How to select the work you take. How to settle the use of your time. How to secure hours for building your own thing. All of them emerge from that criterion.

The worry that this turns into talking about yourself holds. The dividing line sits on the side of how it is written. Write the criterion itself and the reader can apply it to their own judgements. Write only the course by which you arrived at it and it ends as that person’s story. What gets used is the criterion, with the course attached as a concrete.

There are territories with a thin history of judgement. In a territory just begun, the occasions of choosing are few. Here, as with the first type, experience is required first.

Tracing goes faster with records. Note down what you chose and what you stopped. Recalling afterwards drops the side you did not choose.

The reason it drops sits on the side of memory. The result of choosing remains, and the option not chosen starts dropping from memory at the moment of choosing. And the substance of a judgement appears precisely on the side not chosen, because what was discarded is what shows the criterion.

What gets recorded is accordingly not the result of the judgement but the options that were lined up at the time. Write two and mark one. That alone lets the criterion be reconstructed afterwards.

Put the criterion into words and past judgements contrary to it come into view alongside it — the places where criterion and behaviour fail to agree. Seeing them is not pleasant, and they become material well worth writing about, because a gap between criterion and behaviour is visible only to somebody who holds a criterion.

Once the Criterion Is Settled, What to Write Settles as the Remainder

A subject is not something selected but something that remains once a criterion has operated.

Once the criterion is settled, what is important seen from that criterion divides from what is not. The important side becomes the object of writing. You are not selecting; the criterion is dividing.

This order runs continuous with the work of settling whom to address. As handled in how to build a persona, the audience settles only after the criterion of value. What to write emerges from the same place.

The state of not being able to settle what to write is therefore, in most cases, the state of an unsettled criterion. Not a shortage of subjects.

Whether the criterion is operating can be adjudicated. Line up two subjects and see whether you can settle within a minute which to write first. If you cannot, the criterion is likely not operating.

Which to write first, how to write headings or how to write from personal experience. If the criterion is that the reader becomes able to adjudicate for themselves, it settles on whichever is closer to that criterion. Without a criterion, it gets settled by search volume.

Settling by search volume is, in itself, a coherent move. What becomes known is the size of the demand; what does not is whether that demand belongs to your readers. Terms with large numbers have, in most cases, already been occupied by other writers. Settle by numbers alone and you tend to select a place you cannot win.

Looking at both criterion and demand is the ordinary form. From among subjects fitting the criterion, select those with demand. Reverse the order and you end up fitting the criterion to subjects that have demand.

A criterion is not finished once settled. While writing, the criterion itself becomes more concrete, and as it does, the subjects available increase.

The increase has an order. At the stage where the criterion is abstract, too many subjects fit and it cannot be narrowed. As you write, instances of the criterion being applied accumulate. The accumulated instances become the measure for adjudicating the next subject, and the measure gets finer with every use.

The first few pieces are therefore hard to settle and the ones after become easier. Misread the hard-to-settle stage as a shortage of subjects and you return to the work of searching. At the far end of the return, there is still no criterion.

Place the criterion first and the subjects available fall, since whatever falls outside it drops away. The reduced state is unsettling, and everything remaining is something you have a reason to write. How many you can write and how many you have a reason to write are different quantities.

When Just Write Works and When It Does Not

The prescription to just start writing works differently depending on the state.

It works for the third type. Where something is known to be important and cannot be put into words, the work of writing itself builds the words. Nothing takes shape until it is written out, so waiting produces no start.

It does not work for the second type. Start writing while material is not visible as material and what comes out tends to be general content, since the object of writing is not in view.

The first type is the same. Write with no material and it tends to become a reassembly of what was read elsewhere.

Just write is therefore not a prescription but a procedure with a condition attached. The condition is that the object of writing has already been settled.

With I will write about the criterion for declining settled, starting to write moves things forward. Settle on I will write something and start, and you tend to stop at the third paragraph. You stop because what is unsettled is hard to settle while writing.

Things do sometimes get settled while writing. In that case you end up rewriting from the start once they settle. Premised on rewriting, this form is effective. Premised on using what was written as it stands, the unsettled state gets preserved.

The benefit of accumulating quantity sits elsewhere. Speed of writing, the construction of sentences, the assembly of steps — all rise with quantity. What quantity alone hardly raises is the judgement of what to write.

Mix the two and the remedy gets mistaken. Where the jam sits on the side of judgement, attempting to solve it with quantity increases only the number of pieces written while unsettled. The increased count does little to assist the next judgement, because the material for judgement accumulates in the number of decisions made rather than the number of pieces written.

And just write has a use for digging material out: the form of writing about occasions of judgement rather than about subjects. Write out the request I declined last week and the criterion emerges. This is not writing for publication.

Writing that will not be published works differently, because premised on nobody reading it there is no need to keep up appearances. The criterion emerges more plainly in writing that keeps up no appearances. Write premised on publication and a judgement gets applied at the stage of putting it out, and that judgement hides the criterion.

This use carries a risk of stopping there. Writing that will not be published is easy to write, so it can be the only thing that accumulates. Digging material out and handing over what was dug out are separate, so continuing the former does not begin the latter. To keep them apart, insert a stage in which the criterion you dug out is folded into one sentence and set down as material for the article that will be published.

Continue and what was written accumulates. Usable material sits mixed inside the accumulation. Being mixed, the work of selecting arises again. The criterion of selection is, as before, one step earlier. What was needed before writing turns out to be needed after writing too.

Whether It Has Settled Can Be Known Before You Begin

Three ways of confirming that a subject has settled follow. All can be carried out before beginning to write.

The first confirmation is to write in one sentence what that article says.

If it can be written, it has settled. If it cannot, what has settled is the name of the subject alone. I will write about how to write headings is a subject; the number of headings settles as the result of decomposing a question is a claim. The gap between a name and a claim shows up directly in whether this one sentence can be written.

The second confirmation is to write in one sentence why you are the one writing it.

If it cannot be written, the subject may have been selected from outside. If it can, that sentence is the criterion. With the criterion written, the next subject emerges from the same place.

The third confirmation is to see whether your claim differs from existing articles handling that content.

If it is the same, the reason to write grows thin. If it differs, see whether you can say in one sentence where it differs. If you cannot, the difference sits on the side of expression alone.

Demand does not enter any of the three. Demand is a condition, and lies on a different axis from whether what to write has settled.

A question survives all three: whether that claim holds value for the reader. An article that is writable in one sentence, has a reason, differs from what exists, and is still not needed by readers is entirely possible. This adjudication cannot be carried out before writing. What can be carried out is observation after putting it out. Attempt to adjudicate without putting it out and, being unable to adjudicate, you become unable to put it out.

How many candidates to hold, how long to think before starting, in what order to write. None of the three gets answered in the form of a count. Place a number first and the number itself begins operating as a new criterion. Settle the remainder by a criterion that came from outside and what remains carries no reason of yours for writing it.

The three prescriptions — fit a template, search your interests, just start writing — all move the hands and still return you to the same place. The reason for the return is that all three touch the supply side and none touches the dividing side. Increasing subjects and dividing subjects are not two faces of one quantity; they are separate work. The searching prescriptions were not invalid — what was missing from them was the account of the measure you use at the far end of the search.

The place where you are presently stopped can therefore be identified among the three. No material; material not visible; material visible and no question raised. Narrow to one territory, identify it there, and the next place to reach settles to one. Which one it is, this article cannot decide.

How to put the criterion of value into words is treated in how to design a concept and how to build a worldview. The stage of settling whom to address is how to build a persona, and how a settled claim gets arranged is taken up by the principles of article structure. A different three-way classification of the state of not having words — no distinction, no word, or a range that does not match — is set out in verbalisation as a whole.