The last time I googled “How to cure writer’s block”, wise people on the internet told me “go for a long, boring drive.”
I tried it and ended up at McDonald’s. My essay wasn’t written that day.
In my last essay, I talked about two common causes of writer’s block. (1) Having too few ideas, (2) Having too many ideas.
We need to fix the “idea” issue. No beating around the bush.
Most people know what they want to write about they just don’t know:
- How to package ideas: wrap them nicely and don’t get overwhelmed by their own thought jungle.
- How to realize the ideas’ values: turning bland concepts and mundane stories into juicy nuggets of information.
So here comes The Atomic Idea Framework.
As suggested by its name, an atomic idea has two properties:
- Indivisible — You cannot split it up into multiple ideas without losing its value.
- Powerful — like atomic energy, an atomic idea delivers a potent punch despite its light weight.
An atomic idea is a thought captured to be spread. You want to pack the idea so that it is light enough to ship easily but heavy enough to carry substance and value to your readers.
That package could be a sentence or a tweet (280 characters). The key is to constrain the length and force yourself to wrap interconnected concepts in a box, so you don’t get too overwhelmed when presenting the ideas.
We often don’t create atomic ideas. They are gathered from the wild, nursed in our garden, and plated for our consumers.
Once you learn to capture high-impact ideas and package them, you will become a content machine.
This post was created with Typeshare
