Don't know what to write about (I'm a blogger)

Take at least 15 minutes of your time each day to write of whatever pops into your mind.

• Ignore the spelling and punctuation
• Make it random
• Play with your subjects
• Change the mood frequently
• Mix styles and registers
• Write hate letters to the people you are holding a grudge against, by writing a letter to them (which you will never send, of course) :)

Do this for a week and then return to your original project. Alternative is to freewrite 15-20 minutes to stabilize your thoughts, and then immediately return to your work.

You never know, you might come across a new topic by brainstorming like this.

Setting up the exact time when you start the work and when you finish it is very useful for many reasons.

• You're organized and therefore feel like doing the job properly
• You have a goal and know that after you have achieved it, you can rest assured
• You control your own time and can adjust it to your daily mood swings and needs

A slight modification in your writing location (or position) can get your writing flowing again.

Some inspiration where you may go instead:

• Your toilet sit! :)
• On the bench
• While playing chess with the elderly
• In the middle of the student protest
• Under your bed
• In the bath
• Under the rain
• In an open lecture or class

Ways and possibilities are many, you just have to be bold enough to try them out all, or at least the ones most enticing to you. Remember:

Change can be beneficial, even if the effect is temporary.

Ever heard of a proverb: "The early bird catches the worm"?

The old saying can certainly teach us a lot. For one, you should really try up getting earlier in the morning if you wish to let that brain of yours do some proper work.

Our focus is sharpest in the morning and the same goes for our memory. If you tire yourself properly before midnight, go to bed and then wake up in some decent early hour, your work might as well meet its deadline, but on time.

You should cut yourself a slack and forget about the proud "Grammar Nazi" title. When you are supposed to be writing, then write. Needless editing and correcting won't do you any good, just slow you down and distract your writing process.

It is true that all the mistakes, errors and lapses may distract you at first, but you should train yourself to turn on a blind eye in the 1st phase of writing.

• Accept that your first draft most likely won't be perfect.
• While writing, you can leave notes to self near the sentential constructions, word choices,  ambiguities that you think should be fast-checked, rewritten or condensed.
• Keep in mind while writing, the important thing is to keep writing, and keep writing alone!

It is well known what a turn off a boring topic can be. All the inspiration and the enthusiasm immediately sink into the bottomless ocean of uniformity. But, despair not!

Ever heard that there are no stupid questions? Well, there are no boring topics either.

Put yourself in a role of a detective, or in the worst case, a reporter, and ask yourself:

• Who
• What
• When
• Where
• Why
• How

And now - google! Dig! The answers can be quite intriguing. Especially because there is so much trivia, true and untrue, but quite enough to provoke someone's interest and make them read.

If you happen to be working on the topic of the "kitchen utensils", just wait for google solutions and users' questions to open your way up for you.

There are variety of questions you would have never thought of! For example:

• How to make sweets and cakes in the shape of the kitchen utensils?
• Kitchen utensils from "Beauty and the Beast" for my kitchen, and where to find them?
• The multipractical kitchen utensils for outdoor use
• How can you repair a stainless steel kitchen set?

etc.

If your imagination is lacking some craziness, let the others write your plot.

If you cannot come up with a topic or even start writing about something at all, you should use some of your virtual friends' comments, which will certainly give you a musely push.

A really useful trick is to :

• Post a question or a topic on some of your social profiles like Facebook or Twitter. (and do it somewhere where you have lurkers and followers waiting around the corner for someone to post a comment or a picture, so they can react to it)
• Post a question containing keywords that you will base your topic on
• Make them somehow give their own ideas and advice about what you will later use as a material
• Provoke them with the rhetoric question

What you are doing here is practically provoking them to give you a ready-made topic or triggering the process of random brainstorming, which you can safely borrow.

It is the same with food. You can eat more than just three or five times a day, but make sure that those intakes are nutritive to your health. The same goes for the concentration.

You don't have to glue yourself to the chair all day long. You can let the writing process be as short as writing a mere thought, but make sure that when you sit down, you should fill up that time with all the focus, creativity and skill you have.

What you can leave for later should be the proofreading.

Give yourself a goal and involve other people who will fall with you if you fail. That will keep you occupied to finish your work properly.

To make it easier, here's an example:

• Aim to write 2 pages a day
• Get your friends to sponsor you for charity
• If you fail, everything fails, your friends look at you as a nontrustworthy, and you feel extremely bad
• As a result, you work harder!

Peer pressure and social pressure can be both positive and negative. But, sometimes, negative pressure can trigger more positive outcomes than is generally accepted.

When you are digging for trivia, information and facts, remember that if you type down the "umbrella term", you might not see the end of the day before you dig out the right answer.

Instead, limit yourself to the more specific search for better and more particular results.

For example, if your topic is: Claustrophobia, you might put down

• Fear of the Cellars or
• Fear of the Atticks,

and by doing so, you are automatically choosing your audience, making the material more approachable, easy to come find, and certainly more interesting.

You should never plagiarize! However, you are free to use other people's arguments to support your own.

The only thing you should always think of is to credit all of them whose words you borrowed.

With your own point, you just need to find anything remotely relating to it.

Those can be quotes, whole passages, or even expressions. Even if a certain passage only dimly supports your argument, use it. Just always explain how the two are connected and in what way they relate to each other, and then put the quoted sentence in the right context.

"One man's trash, is another man's treasure."

Why we should never look down on people who are digging through the garbage is because they are putting an effort in front an putting their dignity aside to feed themselves. Much of the trash is still edible and usable. People who are to feel embarrassed are the ones throwing things so nonchalantly, without even considering the value it has for the ones who are poor. We should always think beforehand and do everything we can to help the starving and the poor, like packing the unfinihsed and still edible food in the plastic bags and hanging them on the side of the container.

• 1st part: Opening paragraph with your thesis statement + setup (or the explanation of the thesis where "you say what you want to say")

• 2nd part: Supporting the claims you made in the first paragraph, or simply explaining them one by one ("say it")

• 3r part: A wrap-up paragraph is a summary of what you've said in the 2nd part, and which should end with your thesis statement again. A good tip is to start it with a connector "therefore". This actually "says what you have already said before".