I received two emails last week from readers who blog, asking me how I have managed to keep my blog alive for three years, where I get ideas from for posts, and how I manage to publish at least two posts a day. They were feeling blog fatigue and running out of ideas. I think that can happen to anyone.
I have thought about this for a while now and I think it is down to just one thing. I am very curious. I was so curious that when I was four years old, my father (who was tired of my endless ‘why daddy why’ questions) taught me to read and soon after gave me my first dictionary and encyclopaedia.
As a journalist this curiosity really helped me because I could write stories about anything. Things most people found boring interested me and I was always looking for new things to explore.
So I get my ideas from articles I read, things I see, useless facts and figures. My brain is always flitting like a butterfly from one thing to the next.
My students often comment on the wide variety of things we do in class and say it means they never get bored and learn a lot of new things. My blog, I guess, is an extension of that.
I often do not write long articles – just short thoughts. And anything goes. I make notes of topics for articles as they pop into my head and over weekends I write quite a few articles and schedule them in advance. I work between 2 weeks and a month in advance. So that means that I have something written even for those days I am too busy or not feeling inspired.