What do you do for content when absolutely nothing seems worth writing about?

First of all, know that I have been there many times.

I’m guessing you have, too. It’s as common a problem for writers as any other problem. You might call it writer’s block or ambivalence or perfectionism or resistance.

No matter how you see fit to label it, the problem is getting words on the page. And believing they will matter.

You know that in a business brand that markets itself online, content is essential. Essentially, it’s the lifeblood of operations. Without meaningful content going out on a consistent basis (and I don’t just mean blogging — e-newsletters, podcasts, videos, images and graphics, and social media updates all count as content), a brand’s ability to connect withers and wanes.

When writing fresh, new, meaningful content feels impossible

There are times when you don’t feel inspired, tuned in, or capable of writing content that matters to your Right Person. This is so normal. Life isn’t an endless pipeline of inventive energy. It’s just not always there, or palpable.

But you’ve got a business to run and a brand to build, and if you want to keep going, you have to keep showing up.

For the times you have to push through the sludge to get to the gold (or even just the pyrite, which is still beautiful and worthy), here are 5 suggestions:

1. REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE. You are a uniquely designed amalgam of gifts, talents, strengths, obsessions, genius, preoccupations, loves, and predilections. (Dark matter, too, of course. That’s what makes us whole.) All that is in you is there for a reason. Make a list so you can see it in front of you, or if you feel more comfy in the visual realm, make a pinboard. Pick something from that list or that board and tie it in to your business and your Right Person’s journey. Write about that.  If you just can’t see who you are (the star stuff, not the dark matter), ask someone who loves you to remind you.
2. REMEMBER WHY YOU’RE DOING THIS. This work, this business, this brand. This mission, this vision, this Right Person potential reader. Write down 5 sentences you consider to be TRUE that tell the world why your business exists. Or 5 sentences about why your Right Person needs a business like yours to exist. Let each sentence can be a standalone — a one-liner. When you’re done, pick your favorite and write about that. Unpack it. Unfold it.
3. START WITH WHAT’S RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU. I truly mean what’s right in front of you. Years ago when we were cohorts in a Master’s program, my friend Kelly and I used to take ourselves out to this place called Ray’s, a local diner. Just off the campus of Kent State University, it was a favorite watering hole for students, profs, alumni, and locals. We were both (are both) aspiring fiction writers as well as English teachers-in-training. We’d sit down over plates of grilled cheese and fries with salt and ketchup. We were there to nosh and talk and also to write. Inevitably, one of us would grab the salt shaker and say, “Write about this salt shaker.” And there we’d start. We’d end up somewhere else entirely.
4. START WITH THE VERY FIRST THING YOU REMEMBER. Go back to the beginning of your business. What’s the very first thing you remember doing/thinking/feeling? Sitting in your accountant’s office as you filled out paperwork to set up your LLC? Doodling ideas in a notebook in a doctor’s waiting room? Announcing to family at Thanksgiving Dinner that you’d be quitting your job and going out on your own? Tie that memory into something that’s meaningful to your Right Person: a need, an interest, a question, a desire. Write about that.
5. START ON THE DAY THAT IS DIFFERENT. This is how you start a short story, according to my very first creative writing professor. Don’t start way back at the beginning, when the main character was born or married or got her first job, and then work forward into the action. Start on the day that is different. She wakes up and her living room furniture is gone. She wakes up and the sky is orange. She wakes up and wants to leave the country. Something has changed and now nothing can be the same. For every Right Person customer or client, there is a day on which they decide to hire you or make their first purchase through your shopping cart. What is happening for them on that day? What point have they reached? What decision have they made? What have they perceived differently today than they ever have before? Start there and write something for your Right Person about the day that is different (for them).

Sometimes writing for your brand will feel inspired and glow-y, like a gift from the gods, arriving whole and perfect and able to breathe on its own. Other times, writing will feel pedantic or pathetic, dry or hackneyed or even ridiculous.

We hope these suggestions help you to take a second look at your experience and find a new way to talk about it — even when it’s tough.

If you could use some extra inspiration for developing content that’s meaningful to you and your Right People, check out our 4-week course, Run Your Business Like a Magazine.

In the comments, we’d love to hear:

What do you do when absolutely nothing seems worth writing about but you still want to create something for your brand?

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“Whoa,” I wrote to my friends inside a private Facebook group.

“Back from hiatus and TOTALLY BLOCKED when it comes to blogging. WTF to write about?”

“Your hiatus, natch,” replied Angela.

I got up from my computer and left the room, huffing. Nobody wants to read about the same old things, I thought. I don’t want to add another “I Took a Social Media Hiatus & Here’s What I Learned” post to the internet pile. After all, I’d already written that post here.

The truth is, I took my (short lived) social media hiatus last week because blah-blah-blah-struggling-with-comparison-yadda-yadda-yadda-clearing-mental-space-blah-blah-blah-entering-a-season-of-heightened-creative-production. All true. All great reasons to go off of social media for an undetermined length of time. But blog post-worthy? Mmmmm. Maybe not. Maybe I’m not the only person who’s tired of my SAME OLD THEMES.

And then lightning struck.

(Thank you, Angela.)

THE SAME OLD THEMES. We’ve all got them.

You know them when you see them. The latest post from your favorite blogger lands in your inbox and before you’ve even read through the first paragraph, you know where this is going.

Be a rebel. Call bull*it on what irks you. F*ck the status quo. [High Audacity value talking.]

Become real. Let the true you shine through. Show up as you. [High Transparency value talking.]

Overcome obstacles. Push through. Champion yourself. [High Power value talking.]

Now, granted, these sentiments don’t have to be rendered in cliches for them to feel familiar. (In fact, they shouldn’t be.)

“Voice is the embodiment in language of the contents of your unconscious.” — Robert Olen Butler

We use language unconsciously, we reach for metaphors unthinkingly, and the ones we choose reflect what we believe to be important about the world. (This is why my Voice Values paradigm for branding and copywriting is mapped not only to personality types but to the Enneagram, to astrology, and to buyer types. And, to your personal choice about how to steer your brand in any given moment.)

As writer Pamela Druckerman puts it, “More about you is universal than not universal. My unscientific assessment is that we are 95 percent cohort, 5 percent unique. Knowing this is a bit of a disappointment, and a bit of a relief.”

Those same old themes you’re tired of hearing yourself wax on about are the very themes your Right People yearn to hear from you.

When I want to feel wrapped in beauty and in touch with what’s realest about myself and my point of view and creatively stimulated, I look to Susannah Conway.

When I want to feel challenged and (righteously) disillusioned and cheered on in getting back to the basics in a creative process, I read Paul Jarvis.

When I want to feel resourceful and delighted and visually gratified, I read Design Sponge.

When I’m craving depth and intellectual rigor and cultural analysis, I look to Justine Musk.

Your same old themes are wanted, anticipated, and hugely helpful to your Right People. And there are a million ways you can repackage and repurpose your best-beloved ideas to fit new modes.

So this is in favor of revisiting your same old themes, as often as you need to. Your people don’t get tired of them — they depend on them.

In the comments, I’d love to hear:

What are YOUR same old themes? What topics and issues do you keep returning to again and again?

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Fact: we, as human beings, are inspired by one another.

We almost effortlessly push off of one another’s ideas, as we learn to articulate our own perspectives. We read a great book and have an inspiration — ding! — for our own great book. We gaze at a photograph or a work of art and we feel the stirrings of something altogether new in us.

It’s not wrong to tap into inspiration from elsewhere in order to fashion your own point of view. After all, theme-and-variations can be found throughout great art, literature, and music. (I wrote here about my own coming-to-terms with uniqueness — and accepting inspiration from elsewhere.)

But as brand creators and business owners making content for the interwebs, where’s the line between having your own iteration of a well-worn idea, and straight up parroting what someone else has done or said before you?

Where does inspiration become mimicry? Where does vibing off of someone’s idea, and then writing about it from our own point of view, become copycatting?

Keeping one’s own brand conversation well-defined and unique is a major concern of most of The Voice Bureau’s clients — and rightly so.

So how do you go about taking a well-worn idea — either a concept piloted by someone else or just a well-known concept that is ‘out there’ and begging you to put your unique spin on it — and make it your own?

Here are 3 questions you can ask yourself to help you hone in on your own point of view on a well-worn idea:

1. How did [the idea originator] get it wrong? In other words, what are you clarifying/putting to rest/setting straight?

2. What did [the idea originator] miss? What was overlooked? What didn’t they say?

3. What’s the ONE thing your Right People really need to hear/know/do/understand to make this idea work for them?

It’s true what they say: there’s nothing new under the sun. But there’s always a way a thoughtful and empathic brand creator can start with a well-worn idea and make it her own. Finding that point of differentiation is all about asking good questions.

In the comments, I want to know:

How have you made a well-worn idea your own? I’d love to hear about your process.

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Newsflash, microbusiness owners: there is never a shortage of creative inspiration in the world around you.

But knowing where to look for creative inspiration — and more importantly, where NOT to look for it — as a values-based business owner, makes all the difference between being a strong and clear original voice and just a bounce-back in the online echochamber.

Here are 6 places to look outside your business niche for creative inspiration (and a little further down the page, 3 places never to look):

1. Choose 3 magazines that have nothing to do with your industry but that you find engaging, aesthetically interesting, page-turnable. Bon Appetit? Real Simple? Redbook? What cues can you take from their page layouts, headlines, types of features and columns, monthly foci? How can you adapt what they’re doing to suit your brand conversation (sans blatant ripping-off, of course)?
2. Allow music to sway you. Choose three songs or bands that move you and feel like the world you’re creating through your brand and bask in them when you’re getting into the creative flow. Curate a Pandora station that grooves you when you do your work. (Those Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down buttons really come in handy.) Or handcraft playlists reflective of your brand’s mood on 8 Tracks. (Hat tip to Brit Hanson for leading me to 8 Tracks.)
3. Get visual. Create a Pinterest board depicting the world of your brand. Add to it often and reference it (at least) weekly. Keep it tight, on-message, and on-mood. For good examples from friends of The Voice Bureau, check out Laura Simms’ board for Create As Folk, Kàren Wallace’s vision for her Calm Space Salon, and Kyeli and Pace Smith’s brand inspiration board. For even more examples, see this thread on our Facebook page.
4. Watch films and TV shows that have qualities you’d like to play up in your own brand. Maybe the bawdy humor and curiously funky apartment set of New Girl really calls your name. Perhaps there’s something about the writing of Mindy, The Office, or Scandal you’d like to embrace in your brand. Inspiration can come from the oddest of places.
5. Find your muse’s favorite place to play. My muse loves water. For me, there’s no place like the shower to generate fresh new approaches to the work I do. I’ve been known to mindmap a novel when sitting by the ocean. Driving on a road up into the Blue Hills that runs beside Walla Walla’s Mill Creek (see my photo in this post) — that gets me all hopped up on business ideas. Honestly, even doing the dishes does it for me and my creativity. What’s your muse’s natural element? The woods? The dark? Wintertime? (Better book that trip to Antarctica.)
6. Find your layperson with genius business ideas. I guarantee you have one of these in your life, though you may not have identified him or her yet. What I mean by ‘layperson’ is someone who does not have any specialized knowledge of your topic area and certainly has no familiarity with doing business online. As you’re casually chatting with people like this about your business — think: your across-the-street neighbor, your favorite barista, your college roommate who you haven’t seen since you were 22 — stay open to their spontaneous input and off-the-cuff questions about your work. Their beginner’s minds and unjaded eyes might become your secret assets in generating new ideas. And if you’re lucky enough to live under the same roof with a layperson business genius — good for you!

And now, let’s switch gears.

I’ve written a good deal about mimicry in the past. This post on eschewing the mimicry of “brand idols” has been a popular read. And I once wrote about my own unintentional mimicry of an online voice I really admired.

I’d like to believe that most mimicry comes from an unpracticed voice and from insecurity about one’s own gifts, strengths, and points of differentiation. Still, if we catch ourselves mimicking online colleagues, peers, or inspirational voices — it’s time to cut that stuff out.

Here’s how to stop borrowing other people’s ideas before you even start.

3 Places Value-Based Microbusiness Owners Should Never Look for Creative Inspiration:

1. On your direct competitors’ websites or social media profiles. If you feel you must keep an eye on these people, keep them in a separate Twitter or Facebook list where you can check in on them in discrete intervals — and then resolutely look away.
2. On the websites or social media profiles of the most prominent, beloved, and widely shared voices in your industry. Really? you may ask. But these people do inspire me. I get that. But marinating your brain in a high profile brand conversation day after day only serves to dull your own creative angles. And when many, many values-based microbusiness owners are watching (and unintentionally mimicking) the same few brand conversations, this is how the echochamber effect gets perpetuated.
3. On the websites of same-niche people you have worked with in the past, either as hired creative professionals or as your own clients. In other words, don’t closely watch people you have hired or who have hired you if they’re in the same niche (i.e. you are a life coach who teaches yoga, they are a life coach who teaches yoga). There are too many similarities, shared values, and overlapping conversations, and that similar material can be downright irresistible.

In the comments, I’d love to hear:

Where are your favorite outside-your-niche places for creative inspiration? And what do you think of the 3 places never to look? Do you agree? Disagree? I value your take, so lay it on me.

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