Episode 12: What Do YOU Want to Write About?

Today I'm asking the question, what do you want to write about? Because as we've discussed in the last couple episodes, asking why gives you your writing fuel.

Asking how gives it a recognizable human voice, preferably your own.

But then there's what, which sounds like the easiest question of the three until you try to answer it without the aid of algorithms, audience expectations, professional positioning, any shoulds you have floating around in your head, or whatever's trending this week.

What do you actually care about enough to go investigate and share your ideas with the world? Now, my personal interests, they live at kind of the intersection of science and creativity, and I've never treated those things as separate silos.

I can run the same scientific method on a book project the same way I'd run it on a research project.

It starts with a question or a hypothesis, then followed by exploration, evidence, any complications, discovery, conclusions, and sometimes the conclusions spin off a new set of questions, which could be a sequel.

And that's how science works too.

I'm fascinated by mapping human writing voices, the history of innovation, combinatorial creativity, writing habits, storytelling, psychology, adult scoliosis research, and the list goes on and on.

Now what's the one underlying question or kind of common denominator that connects all those things? I don't know.

Maybe that's the point.

I don't need a clear answer for why I like everything I like or write the way I do.

I just need just enough self-awareness to recognize my interests when they show up, know that they're mine, and decide whether I want to follow them or which ones I want to follow in any given moment.

I need to know where the mirror is and what's in it, and I don't need AI or an algorithm or even a content strategist holding it up and telling me what they see before I've looked into it myself.

This gets hard because writers are drowning in data about what audiences want these days.

You can research keywords, you can track trends, study what's performing, ask readers what they need, and yeah, some of that's useful.

But without keeping yourself in the center of the conversation, those trends can also pull you towards subjects that have no real-life interest for you.

I tried that during my scaling era, as I call it.

I followed the formulas and built the funnels and I made the content that was quote unquote supposed to perform.

The result was work I didn't enjoy making in a voice I didn't recognize and chasing outcomes I could not control.

Social media algorithms are unpredictable no matter how many people claim to have cracked them.

So you can pick a topic you don't care about, force the content out, spin the roulette wheel, and still watch it flop.

And that's a remarkable amount of work and stress to build for yourself on purpose, especially if you don't care about the topic at hand.

One of my author clients has a phrase I really like.

She says, hold your outcomes loosely.

I like it because it puts the emphasis back where you actually have control, your input, what you care about, how deep you go, what you say, and whether the work actually represents you.