Last week I had the following question pop up in my writing mentorship:
I know a general direction into which I am going. I don’t know the message, I don’t know the specific topic, it feels very exploratory. I want to write deeply on a topic and explore my thoughts and order them... I feel like I’m branching off and off and off and start new topics, never concluding - if I continued, I’d get to 5000 words on 50 topics... My thoughts seem all over the place and I don’t really know where to go with this.
The problem is common enough. But it's actually the consequence of solving an earlier problem: writer's block.
The solution to writer's block is free writing: switch off the monitor and just write anything that comes to mind.
But that solution causes a second order problem: a text that branches off into countless different directions, cul-de-sacs and dead ends.
So I put together an interactive workshop to help writers get clear on what they're writing about.
At the start of that workshop I asked everyone to complete this sentence:
I am writing about ___.
One writer, Bryan, writes:
I am writing about the financial independence movement (F.I.R.E.)
A good start. He'd already achieved FIRE two years ago, and he'd been wanting to write about it for months.
But F.I.R.E. isn't really a topic. It's more of a subject, a category. An umbrella term that could comprise any number of sharper topics.
So I asked Bryan and the other writers to do something small: Take that subject, and find the action hiding inside it.
The action isn't necessarily a verb. Grammar is beside the point here. The action might be hiding inside a noun, or it may be implicit in the subject itself. The question of action is about meaning:
What's actually happening in this thing you care about?
To answer that question, here's the 3-step process I walked them through: