Running Out of Ideas? We Got Chu.

Let me tell you one thing right off the bat - You are NOT out of ideas! Maybe you’re too busy rejecting them before even giving them a proper chance.

(Don’t do that to yourself)

As simple as it might sound, what I just said is a real problem for a lot of writers. Idea drought is normal, and it’s easier to get out of that rut than you think -- because no, your head is not empty. Let us elaborate.

It Might Be a Perception Problem

Try this experiment: Go ask a developer what they could write about and see what they tell you. Normally, it’s a shrug (because it is like that), but try and ask the same person what they’ve been working on, say, last week - and you’ll get a full 30-minute TED Talk.

You see, everything they mentioned - each one of them is publishable. Why? Because the difficulty one experienced is itself evidence that there’s a need for explanation. If the answer is easy to find and well-documented, they wouldn’t have lost so much time looking into it. The frustration in solving a problem is concrete proof of gaps in public record. And what is a gap in public record? An article idea!

What stops these ideas from being written is the assumption that an article, once written, must be finished, impressive, and unique to be able to exist. And when you look closely, those 3 criteria have nothing to do with whether or not the published piece would be useful to somebody. Your ideas are being measured by a standard you placed on yourself, and has never been tested in the real world.

Therefore, the first tip is not, unlike people might guess, generating more ideas. The first tip of ideation in writing is to catch ideas that might’ve gone past your head.

Keep a Journal First

This one is simple - keep a note. To be more specific, a running note somewhere you will open and revisit regularly. It can be as simple as adding one single line per entry without editing.

So what are some things worth opening the journal for?

1. Anything that took you more than an hour to work out
2. Any moment you realized something is not the way you think it is
3. Any tools you tried and abandoned (remember to ask yourself why? Why did you abandon it?)
4. Any question someone came up and asked you more than 1 time

This works only when you separate recording events and judgment. Don’t judge right away; let the idea sink in, think about it, research more, and try to find relevant information. After 2 weeks, you’ll find that you have too much to write about, and they just keep coming!

Write About the Unfinished Thing

This is the part most writers appear to need explicit permission for, so here it is: you do not have to wait until the thing works.

The half-built project, the migration you are still in the middle of, the app that currently crashes on launch — none of these are disqualified as subjects, and there is a specific reason they are frequently better than the finished version would be. Once you know how something turned out, you reconstruct the path backwards as though it had always been logical, and in the process you quietly delete the wrong turns, the assumptions that proved false, and the hours spent on approaches that led nowhere. Those deletions are exactly the parts that would have helped somebody currently lost in the same place.

A completed write-up can tell a reader what eventually worked, which is useful but replaceable. Something written while you are still inside the problem can tell them what the decision actually felt like from within it, which is both much harder to fake and genuinely impossible to reconstruct afterwards, because by the time you have finished, you have honestly forgotten what confused you.

Three Prompts for When You’re Genuinely Stuck

“What did I get wrong?” Corrections consistently outperform what their authors expect of them, and the mechanism behind that is straightforward: a reader has no easy way to verify how expert you are, but they can directly observe that you were willing to publish something which made you look worse, and that willingness is costly enough to be believable in a way that confident assertion never is.

“What did I have to assemble from six open tabs?” If the complete answer did not exist in any single place, then you have both located a gap and already done the research required to close it, which means the hard part of the article is finished before you start writing.

“What would I tell myself three months ago?” Anything you know now and did not know then is, almost by definition, useful to somebody standing where you were standing, and you are unusually well placed to explain it clearly because the memory of not understanding it is still recent enough to work with.

A Reason to Start This Week

If the argument above needs a deadline attached before it becomes real, the #Shipaton Writing Contest is running right now through HackerNoon and RevenueCat, with $2,500 in prizes for builders documenting a real app. It is constructed on the same premise as this article: the rules state directly that there is no need to wait until your app is finished. Participants are encouraged to publish at several stages rather than saving everything for a single launch post. Build logs, technical deep dives, product pivots, growth experiments, and lessons learned all qualify.

Read more about the #Shipaton Writing Contest here:

https://hackernoon.com/building-for-shipaton-2026-share-your-journey-on-hackernoon-and-compete-for-an-extra-2500?embedable=true

Contest closes on September 30, which leaves roughly three weeks -- enough time to turn something half-built into something published, and considerably more than you need to open a note and write the first line.

Want to Sharpen the Rest of It?

Finding the idea is only the first step, and if you want help with everything that follows it, HackerNoon’s Blogging Course runs to eight modules built by working writers and editors, including:

• How to Find Your “Voice” and Ideal Writing Workflow

• How to Write Great Articles That People Will Read

• SEO + Storytelling: Write Content That Ranks and Resonates

Until next time, Hackers!