Too many ideas to write about? Spinning your wheels (forever) deciding?

Here are nine great ways to get going

A therapist that I once sought help from described my mind as a 16 lane highway. He wasn’t so much saying that I had ADD but rather that I had the type of mind that given a simple problem, or given almost any situation at all, will immediately complicate and complexify it.

And it’s true. I think in shades of grey, a vast assortment of them, and flounder in all the possibilities. As to ideas and solutions, they just pour forth.

It has its plusses but coming up with too many ideas, too many choices has been a serious problem for me, especially with my writing. I’ve spent way too much time flitting from one idea to the next, trying to perfectly judge its merits versus all the rest of them. And as the lists have grown longer, there’s just that much more to review, because, of course, I must go through ALL of them to insure I’m getting the very best one.

At least I’m not alone. Many others suffer from this as well. There’s even a name for it: “TMIS” Too Many Ideas Syndrome.

I’ve gone to the ends of the ‘Net, read books, countless articles, and consulted therapists on how to get through this.

It’s been a long slog, but I’m happy to report I’ve made some progress. I have my enormous lists but I’m now, more times than not, able to make a final pick and get a finished article/post written within my deadline. For someone who spent two years never clicking “Publish”, in list paralysis, that’s huge.

So in hopes of helping others, I’m condensing some of what I’ve learned and experienced into the following nine ways to tackle TMIS.

Prune your lists… Good advice for those who can do it (I can’t)

There are people who can go through their lists of ideas on some periodic basis and ruthlessly delete the majority of them. They aren’t hoarders. They’re free of the fear, of the OCD mentality that they just might be eliminating the very best idea of their life. They’re blessed with the ability to Cross out and Let Go.

If you’re one of these lucky people, then you need read no further. Just go through your idea list every so often and wipe out most of them. Like pruning a rosebush, the remaining ideas will flourish in your less divided attention and turn into magnificent roses, finished pieces to add to your increasingly professional portfolio. I envy you!

Ask someone to be the “Keeper of the List”

Here’s a way to prune vigorously without any fear that you’re inadvertently depriving the world of the next Great American Novel.

Go through your big Master list of ideas and select the ten that most appeal to you at the moment.

Then, email the rest, those hundreds left over on your “Master List” to a friend or confidant for safe-keeping. Once they’ve confirmed receipt, delete the Master list on your own computer. (You could use a Word file. Something easy to send and delete and receive back again.)

You still have to select the final ideas to write about, but now from a much shorter, manageable list. You haven’t lost any of your precious ideas, you’ve just made the great bulk of them less handy to check on.

When you’re ready for more, have your friend send you back the list, update it with any new ideas that have occurred to you in the meantime, and… repeat the process.

You could even build in some extreme accountability by asking your friend not to send the big list back until they see X number of articles produced from the ideas you kept.

Commit to posting/publishing something every day for a month

Many swear by this idea and it certainly helped me. I’d gone through a period of several months of not showing anyone in the world a word of what I’d written and was desperate. So finally, I committed to posting a 250 word post every day on my almost pristine blog.

With that short a time frame, you simply can’t mull and weigh the merits of every idea on that burgeoning list; you’re forced to pick one quickly and get going on the writing. Plus, there’s less pressure as you’re only investing a little time in each post, and you can always cover that other great idea in tomorrow’s piece.

From not having finished or posted anything the entire month before, I went to having 21 posts done in 21 days. None were great or original and many were forced, but I wasn’t going for quality; I was going for quantity. With the habit now grooved, I pulled back to the more comfortable pace of one to two pieces a week.

Let others decide for you

Ask someone — a friend, a confidant, a teacher — to tell you what to write about. Commit to writing at least a first draft of everything they propose, without any negotiating.

To help them come up with relevant topics, you can share with them your voluminous idea lists. You can tell them about your passions, your areas of expertise, what scares you…whatever. It’s all grist for their mill.

They’ll send you the topic, perhaps phrased as a question. A very specific one, not something wide-bodied that’ll just have you shoot off into another brainstorm.

Ie not: “Think of a challenge in grade school that made you grow, though you didn’t think so at the time.” But rather: “Tell me about the time you accidentally set off the fire alarm, and no one believed you when you said it was an accident.”

To get the juices flowing, to get past the self-critic to some extent, you could even just hit Reply and write as if you were simply responding to them.

If they are generous to a fault, perhaps they’ll even be willing to go through that first free-write and point out what appeals to them. Give you some content feedback.

Work as a content provider for a while

Take yourself and the choice completely out of the equation by writing content for others.

Extra income is great, but your main goal in this case — as someone suffering from TIMS — is to get past your own paralysis. Thus, you’re even willing to work for free, for a while. At that rate, there are people/content providers that will hire you.

You’re only looking for someone that’s going to give you assignments, that just wants to hire writers that will write what they ask you to.

Thus, steer away from the freelance /professional writer sites that require a mountain of self-marketing and client interaction. Look for straight employment/ assignment sites instead. For example, iWriter and Textbroker are two that I’ve signed up with. (You don’t have to post your name to the articles you write in case you’re concerned about marring your reputation as a real Writer with ten different versions of “How to make a million dollars”.)

Or consider volunteering to write articles for causes you support. Write to those organizations and say that you’ll work for free for them. All you need is for them to tell you what to write about.

Or offer to write articles for friends with small businesses. Ask them to provide you with the specific article ideas, provide the information to include, and you’re ready to go. You’ll also be helping your friend out and get to see your writing published, read, and perhaps contribute to the welfare of others (at the very least your friend’s.)

Select a list of Great Questions and commit to answering them fully

Again, the idea here is that once you’ve selected ‘the list of Great Questions to answer fully’, the searching around for what to write about is done. (You can even hold yourself to answering them in order to keep yourself from jumping down the list and trying to find just the right one to start with.)

And since you’ve chosen a list of questions that in some way resonate with you, and that thus also speak to the common plight of humanity, you’re mining a vein that others might innately find interesting or relatable.

Google the ‘great questions of life’… or ‘the questions that most perplex ear nose and throat specialists’… whatever you want to focus on.

Or go with the best set I’ve ever come across, posted here, by the School of Life, the organization started by the essayist Alain Botton. https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/virtual-dinners-conversation-menus/

As they describe it:

Arranged to accompany a virtual dinner party, these Conversation Menus invite us to open up around key themes: the virus, but also love, money, travel, ambition, self-knowledge and the meaning of life. They contain questions that will raise smiles, build friendships and foster the best kind of intimacy, ensuring that our meals apart can be as good as they ever were together.

Another more elaborate and expensive approach would be the ‘memoir in a year’ package sold by Storyworth. For a year, they send you weekly questions/prompts about your life, your past, your family. It costs $99 but includes a hardbound book of all your answers, arranged as you wish and with images too, at the end of the year.

Commit to a weekly writing prompt from Poets & Writers magazine

There are a million and one writing prompt lists and generators on the Web. You could spend a week just going through all the choices.

Here is one of the best ones, a weekly prompt from the Poets & Writers magazine. One each for poetry, fiction and non-fiction. These prompts are fully fleshed out, a long paragraph, not just a phrase snippet. You can sign up for them here: https://www.pw.org/writing-prompts-exercises

To build in more accountability, you could even commit to doing this along with a writing partner or group.

Write only about your latest ideas

Consider just writing about the ideas that have occurred to you in the past week. Keep those master lists but resolve, for a few weeks at least, to only write about your most recent experiences and epiphanies.

Tim Denning, one of Medium’s most prolific and followed writers, does this to obvious success and wrote a great article about it here. https://medium.com/better-marketing/the-best-time-to-write-about-an-idea-is-when-you-think-of-it-a8606d8863e5

The best time to write about an idea is when you think of it….

One of the core reasons there is so much power in the present moment is because of your emotional state….The sooner you can sit down and write about your idea, the better.

These ideas will often be the freshest and most exciting, the ones that are still bathed in the original promise and passion that birthed them in the first place.

For some, ideas about things to write about have a short half-life. Languishing on those long lists, they grow old and stale. When this kind of writer goes back to write about last month’s epiphany, the original mojo may no longer be there.

But that’s for some, not all. You’ll find many more examples, at least I have, of the opposite — of people who note and store their ideas in order to mine them later, sometimes years later, to good effect.

The Big Kahuna(s) — Treat the Cause(s) of it all

ADD — Perfectionism — Performance anxiety — Childhood traumas — Emotional challenges of almost any stripe. They can all play a hand in what’s going on with all those epiphanies, all those wonderfully seductive lightbulb moments, those long lists. And often, like an alcoholic in full denial, we can be totally blind to how these serious mental conditions can actually be causing are TIMS.

So maybe at least be open to the possibility that these psychic conditions might be influencing you more than you may realize. It’s at least worth exploring if you were as stricken as I was.

For me, it was a writing coach who finally told me after I’d submitted the tenth reorganization of a book outline (that he hadn’t asked for): “you’ve got ADD… plus your way too perfectionistic… and you care too much about what the world thinks of you. Go and deal with that first!”

It opened my eyes. In retrospect, I can’t believe how blind I was to my own serious mental twists that were affecting not only my writing, but my life as a whole.

As for how to solve and deal with those root causes — oh my God! That’s got its own entire folder of files with lists in it.

If you are a fellow sufferer of TIMS, I hope that at least one of the above methods opens the door, at least a crack, for you.

And if you don’t know which one to start with, start at the top and work your way down! :) (Ok, second from the top as that first one is more of an unobtainable ideal, at least for us.)

Tame the curse — learn to make the choice — and release the blessing. Too many ideas? Wow! How fortunate, really, we are!

(If you care to share, I’d love to hear about your experiences and ideas for dealing with this strange and befuddling malady.)