The “I Don’t Know What to Write About” Blog Post
Imagine this—you’ve just brewed yourself a fresh cup of coffee and are poised in front of your computer screen. Your boss has tasked you to come up with a great story idea for the upcoming issue and you’re on deadline. You begin to rack your brain for potential ideas and all that’s coming up are thoughts about what you’re having for lunch, upcoming weekend plans and whether you should pour yourself that third cup of coffee. Twenty minutes pass… then an hour. It’s now past lunchtime (which wasn’t as satisfying as you had originally imagined) and it hits you. You’re in a writer’s rut. Cue the panic.
PR pros, writers, editors, bloggers, you know the feeling. This just happened to me yesterday after having completed an assignment that I was quite absorbed with. Once the haze of the singular focus I dedicated to this task had cleared, I realized, “I have a blog post due today!” Instead of taking the usual 15 – 30 minutes it takes for me to come up with a halfway decent idea, I decided I should write a blog post on exactly this situation and what I usually do to overcome it.
Luckily for us, we have a variety of resources to pull inspiration from: PR Daily, The Holmes Report, the PRSA newsletter, past PRGN blog posts, our HMA blog posts and current news, to name a few. I surf these channels looking for a morsel of intrigue that I can somehow tie in to an aspect of PR. And I’m happy to say that I’ve never been unsuccessful, something I know can also be said about my colleagues.
Working as a PR pro, you quickly learn the value of thinking on your feet, a skill this business requires and one that we at HMA pride ourselves on. In fact, one of our greatest strengths is our ability to wear a lot of hats in the workplace. This translates to our ability to think on our feet and take on whatever role the client requires of us in that moment.
With all of this being said, I know that no matter how long I’ve been in the business or the number of resources I have to pull from, there are going to be times when my creativity juices refuse to flow. In these instances, I find it best to get up from the computer, take a walk outside, maybe turn on some music and just give my brain a quick rest.
What are some of your tips to combat writer’s block?
