By John Hewitt

Some writers know exactly what they want to say. They merely have to start typing and passion flows from them. This doesn’t necessarily mean they write well, but they don’t sit around wondering what to write about. Most writers, however, need a little prodding. Sometimes they have great ideas, and sometimes they stare at their computer screen waiting for something to come to them. If you fall into the second category, you can reduce your time spent staring at the screen by creating a log of your good ideas when they come to you. You can also spend those slow times looking at a few tried and true idea resources and seeing what ideas you can grow for the future.

What is an idea log?

Your idea log can be as simple or as fancy as you wish. Some people create file folders for their ideas. They fill them with notes, clippings, pictures and whatever else will assist them. When they pull out the folder, they have all they need to start work. This can be a great system, but it is a lot of work, especially if you never pursue that idea later.

Many people take advantage of their computers. They write quick notes, or even put them in the form of a query to an editor, and keep them in individual documents or add them to a database. This is an excellent system and one that can also get you going quickly once you decide to write because part of the document is already written. You just have to expand on it.

The third way that I propose is simpler and not as thorough. I use it myself, however, because of its ease and portability. I keep a stack of 3×5 cards in which I jot down my ideas. I put a title and description at the top then jot down the note below. I rarely fill up more than one side of one card. It isn’t as thorough as a file or as ready to roll as a computer note, but it keeps me from prattling on about what is just a single idea that I may or may not follow. Plus, when I have a stack of these cards, I can pull them out and thumb through them quickly, more quickly than going through a file folder or a computer database. I can also take these cards with me anywhere and jot down the ideas as they come. I am a big fan of computers, but for this task I really do prefer the simplicity of a 3×5 card.

What do you like? What do you hate?

A great place to start looking for ideas is to look at your likes and dislikes. What makes you happy and what makes you sad or angry. These are the things in your life that will provoke your most passionate writing. This can range from politics, entertainment, to a lump in your carpet that you’d like to get rid of. It all depends on what interests you enough to upset or please you.

Who do you know?

The people in your life can be one of your greatest sources of ideas. They have jobs, hobbies, interests and problems that make them experts hundreds of things. Your architect friend can now be interviewed about what makes for a good or bad home design. Your divorced friend with three kids probably has much to say about child support issues. With a little fictionalization, the annoying woman at work might make for a great short story. Look at the people around you. Evaluate them as article sources, interview topics and as story ideas.

Who would you like to know?

People often portray writing as a solitary task, but one of the great benefits of being a writer is that you can use it to meet people. Think about the respected or famous people you would like to talk to: writers you respect, experts in fields you are interested in, actors and politicians. Some of them will be difficult to meet, but many are easier than you think. While the ten most famous writers in the world may be hard to contact, most writers do not spend the majority of their time fending off interview requests. The same is true of experts in most areas. Politicians and actors are probably the hardest to get an interview with, but even then you might be surprised. Just remember that the top few in those fields are nearly impossible to interview without some clout behind you, but there are plenty of others in the field who would be happy to answer your questions.

Where have you been?

Travel is a great way to generate ideas. Look at the places you’ve gone and the things you’ve done there. Think also of the trips you would like to take. From travel guides to the settings for stories, your journeys can be a great source of ideas. Whenever you travel, it is a good idea to keep a journal and write down your thoughts and impressions. You never know where you might find your next idea.

What have you been doing?

Take a look at your areas of expertise. What jobs have you held? What hobbies have you had? What have you studied? These are your areas of knowledge. You may not be an expert, but in writing it is generally enough to be an intelligent amateur as long as you are willing to do the research for your story. Just as your friends are great sources of information, you are your greatest source. Not only do you know something about these things, but also you can rely on yourself, more than anyone else, to do the work required to find out more. Every job, from working in a warehouse to being a phone solicitor to managing a small office, has requirements and areas of interest. Think about how these things can become articles or stories.

What have you been reading?

If you are a writer, then chances are you are an avid reader, and it pays to keep a few notes while you read. The daily paper, magazines, the Internet and the books you read are great sources for ideas. My favorite example of this process is the movie The Player, in which a studio executive challenges anyone to read him a newspaper article and he’ll come up with a movie based on it. Over and over he turns the most mundane articles into feature film ideas. Ideas are everywhere.

What happened to you?

Beyond the jobs and hobbies you’ve had, there is plenty more to your life. There are hundreds of high points and low points in every person’s life: people found and lost, love shared and unrequited, accidents, plots, plans, choices and mistakes. Most of your memories are worthy of a story or article, because chances are you haven’t managed to remember the ordinary and mundane parts of your life, just the highs and the lows and the elements that contribute to who you are. Your life is an endless source of material if you have the talent to make it interesting to others.

Ideas are all around you. If you go through the items above, you will have plenty of ideas to work with, but beyond that, you just need to keep your eyes open and your other senses ready to back them up. Ideas will come to you if you are paying attention. Just remember to have some system to keep track of them, even if it is just a notebook for you to jot things down in. Your ideas are fuel for your writing. Keep plenty of fuel handy.

By Shoma A. Chatterji

To survive as a journalist in a world of cutthroat competition and to sustain high standards of performance over time, every writer worth his salt should build up a documentation library for himself. Some people also term this a clippings file or an archive of documents. This offers a thorough database of secondary research, which could often stand on its own without the support of library books and files.

Over the past two decades that I have been writing prolifically for the print media in my own country, I have built up a documentation library of my own. I have around 100 envelopes of documentation. Which means that if I have to write an article, say, on Sexual Harassment of Women at the Workplace, I have just to pull out the plastic envelope labeled Sexual Harassment take the newspaper and magazine clippings out of it, choose the clippings I want, link these with the current topic I am going to write about and get set to work. This gives a solid base to the subject I am writing about, and makes the article more in-depth.

Below are ten tips on how you can begin building your own documentation library.

1. Subscribe to at least one daily newspaper and not less than two newspapers on Sundays.

2. On the Saturday of each week, collect the newspapers in chronological order. Sit down, preferably on the floor with a pair of scissors, a stapler, a stapler pin box, two thick paper, canvas-lined large envelopes and one ball-pen.

3. Open each paper, mark out the portions you would like to cut out, according to your subject-specialty and keep them aside. For example, you may be specializing in health issues and on television. Mark out only those articles, reports, analyses that have appeared in the paper for cutting and keeping later. If the paper does not have anything worthwhile to cut and keep, keep it aside and go on to the next.

4. Now take one newspaper at a time and cut out the marked portions, inserting the date on the top margin with your ball-pen.

5. Keep the clippings you have cut out in a thick magazine for later sorting as you go on doing this.

6. If you also mark the subject along with the date and the name of the newspaper briefly on top, this will make sorting easier.

7. After you have finished cutting out all the marked portions you have chosen from the previous week’s newspapers, you can turn your attention to the envelopes.

8. Since you have decided to have two subject-clippings only, you will need just two envelopes. Label one of them with the words HEALTH ISSUES in bold caps and the other with the word TELEVISION.

9. Take the clippings out of the thick magazine, sort them out into two neat piles and put them into the respective envelopes.

10. This is just the beginning. There is more to follow.

As you go along you will discover that with every succeeding week, your envelopes begin to thicken. Then begins the next part of your specialized clippings work.

1. Arm yourself with more large-sized, thick-paper, canvas-lined envelopes, pen and the two labeled envelopes you already have filled with clippings.

2. On a rough sheet of paper, break up the subject health issues into as many topics as you wish to write on. It would be wise to choose topics that never lose their topicality in the global market. AIDS, REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH, DIET AND NUTRITION, WELLNESS AND FITNESS, EATING DISORDERS, EVILS OF TOBACCO, DOCTOR’S INTERVIEWS, GYMS AND FITNESS CLUBS, HEALTH AND PUBLIC POLICY, THE ABORTION DEBATE, are just some of the sub-topics that are covered under the large umbrella of HEALTH ISSUES. If you wish to write on all these sub-topics, you are free to do so. You will then have to label as many envelopes as the number of sub-topics you choose and sort out the earlier clippings kept inside the HEALTH ISSUES envelope to place them in their new envelopes.

3. Therefore, where you began with just one envelope marked HEALTH ISSUES, you now have TEN envelopes with HEALTH ISSUES as the main heading and the sub-topic as the sub-heading on the envelope. You find yourself specializing in several areas of Health.

4. Do not discard the first envelope labeled HEALTH ISSUES. When it is empty, you will use it to update your documentation. Remember that it is ideal if you can update it on fixed day every week. Otherwise, the papers keep piling up and you feel lazy to sit down and sit with a large pile.

5. Keep your eyes and ears open to anything topical that may be happening around you in any of these areas. For example, a man dying of AIDS has been refused admission to a bed in a public hospital. You find this as a news item in you daily paper.

6. Make this story your peg to hang your article on. Dip into your AIDS envelope, pull out all the clippings, choose news items or stories on similar cases where AIDS patients were refused admission and died as a consequence, compare them with other news stories about AIDS patients having received sympathetic treatment at public hospitals and create an article around the subject AIDS AND THE HUMANE QUESTION. The article will surely find a good buyer because of the solid research base it has, solely supported by your own clippings. The same principle could be applied to the subject TELEVISION. You will slowly learn to do the classification yourself.

7. If you also subscribe to a magazine or two, you could add cuttings from these too, to your clippings envelopes.

8. When the paper envelopes get too thick to manage, replace them in large plastic envelopes.

9. Use schoolbook sticker labels to label these envelopes and file them on one shelf of a book cabinet.

10. Number the envelopes too, to create an index for easy locating.

11. Make an index of the envelopes according to number and the sub-topic of each envelope and keep this list on your computer or on a piece of thick paper which you can stick on the wall in front of your work table for easy reference. For example, you can give the number ONE(A) to the envelope marked AIDS. ONE stands for HEALTH ISSUES and (A) stands for AIDS. This will make it easy for you to locate the subject when you want it. Because as your documentation library begins to grow, locating them is a difficult task. REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH will be ONE(B), DIET AND NUTRITION will be ONE(C) and so on. TWO will then be used for TELEVISION. TWO (A) may be used for the sub-topic TELEVISION PERSONALITIES, TWO(B) for DAILY SOAPS, TWO(C) for SATELLITE WARS and so on.

The two pitfalls you must guard against are (a) asking someone else to mark out the clippings for you. This is one job you must do yourself and let me assure you, it is not a waste of time. In addition, (b) try not to postpone your weekly date with cutting and filing clippings. I’ve done it myself, and ended up spending an entire weekend clearing the backlog.

One last tip is to mark an envelope with the label MY OWN ARTICLES where published clippings of your own articles may be filed, preferably date-wise and not publication-wise because you often need easy access to a new article you may be writing on the same topic as before.

Happy clipping and filing!

Shoma A. Chatterji, gave up teaching Economics to undergrads to take up fulltime writing. She is a freelance journalist who specializes in gender issues, films, television and human rights. She has published six books: THE INDIAN WOMEN’S SEARCH FOR AN IDENTITY, YES AND OTHER STORIES, THE INDIAN WOMAN IN PERSPECTIVE, KAMINI AND OTHER STORIES, SUBJECT : CINEMA, OBJECT: WOMAN, A STUDY OF THE PORTRAYAL OF WOMEN IN INDIAN CINEMA and INDIAN WOMEN – FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT. She has traveled abroad extensively since 1988 and has been on the panel of the international jury at several international film festivals abroad.

Here are a few good articles I’ve come across lately. I hope these get you through your Friday.

Who’s the Biggest Loser in E-Books? If you guessed the authors, you’re right, at least when it comes to major publishing companies. This one is from the Freakonomics guys, so I would give the article some weight.

Major Publisher Investment Advances Inkling as the Future of Digital Textbooks: The affordability of textbooks has become a major issue in colleges today. The work being done to digitize the process will help keep costs down and eliminate middlemen such as campus book stores.

Tips for returning to normal after a large disruption: Getting back in the saddle after a long disruption such as an illness or a personal crisis can be a challenge. This article has some good tips for dealing with the disruption and moving forward.

10 Top Tips to Combat Procrastination: There’s nothing earth-shattering about these tips, but you probably need to be reminded of them anyway.

4 Ways To Make Yourself Complete a Book: I especially like her advice for breaking out of a slump.

The New York Times is once again attempting to move to a pay model. It’s an interesting approach they are using. You get a certain number of free page views per month (I think twenty) but if you access more than twenty pages, you have to pay to see more. This is similar to the way many bloggers sell  e-books. They give you a few pages or chapters for free, but you have to pay to get the rest.

I certainly won’t be one of NYT’s paying customers. While I read the occasional article, I mainly follow big news and the occasional Thomas L. Friedman column. I doubt I would ever go over 20 articles in a month and if I did, I would just stop reading. Also, I access the Internet from multiple devices, so I don’t know how well they could enforce the twenty page ban on me anyway. I’m sure there are far more avid readers of the paper than I though, and it will be interesting to see whether they convert these readers into paying customers or alienate their core audience. Which one would you bet on?

No site or service besides Google has sent me more traffic than StumbleUpon. In fact, well over a half million hits have come my way through the StumbleUpon service. At some point, when I was more dedicated to building traffic, I actually spent a lot of time trying to increase my StumbleUpon profile, but I have since learned to just let the service do it’s magic.

The beauty of Stumbleupon is that it is simple. People either give a page (usually an article) a thumbs up or a thumbs down. The more thumbs up you get, the more traffic Stumbleupon sends your way using the “stumble” feature that sends people to sites that the service thinks they will like.

The key to StumbleUpon success is to build pages people like. It’s just that simple. Unlike the methods for getting search engine traffic, you don’t need to stack an article with keywords or come up with some clever way to trick an algorithm. The people decide whether or not they like your articles. In general, judging by what has been popular on my site, stumblers like articles that are informative, funny, and/or help them to accomplish a goal. If you can produce articles that accomplish all three of these things, you’ve got a potential hit on your hands.

Assuming that you’ve been smart enough to join StumbleUpon and put a “Stumble This” link on your page, the rest of the process for getting hits is really just this simple:

1. Be funny
2. Be Informative
3. Help people accomplish a goal

Note: I wrote this article to be a part of the Brilliant Blogger Series at Blogworld blog. they include plenty of other links to great articles about Stumbleupon, which I am adding below.

Article Links from BlogWorld Blog:

• 4 Great StumbleUpon Alternatives To Discover New Sites by Damien Oh (@damienoh)
• 5 essential StumbleUpon power points by Blah, Blah! Technology (@blahblahtech)
• 7 Steps for Generating Free Traffic From Stumbleupon by Terry Dean
• 7 Tips for StumbleUpon Success by Ian Lurie (@portentint)
• 10 Simple Steps To Increase Blog Traffic Via StumbleUpon by Marko Saric (@markosaric)
• 28 Tips To Make You a StumbleUpon Superstar by Dharmesh Shah
• The 2008 Twitter StumbleUpon Experiment by Jacob Cass (@justcreative)
• Checking StumbleUpon Referrals and Reviews to specific URLs by Tony Adam (@tonyadam)
• Expanding StumbleUpon Network by Justin Germino (@dragonblogger)
• How StumbleUpon Traffic Is Bad For Your Blog by Nabeel
• How to increase StumbleUpon traffic? by Kevin Gibbons (@kevgibbo)
• How To Make A Blog Post Go Viral In StumbleUpon by Devash
• How to Use StumbleUpon and Make it Work for You by Evelyn Parham (@Evelyn_Parham)
• How to use StumbleUpon to Effectively Generate Traffic by Brendan van Son (@brendanvanson)
• How to Use StumbleUpon to Promote by David Risley (@davidrisley)
• How to Write Posts That Set StumbleUpon on Fire by Skellie (@skellie)
• Interview with Garrett Camp, StumbleUpon Co-Founder by Allen Stern (@centernetworks)
• The Most Useful StumbleUpon Feature You May Not Have Known by MohsinNaqi (@MohsinN)
• Never Trip in Link Building with StumbleUpon by Sam (@iacquire)
• The Past, Present and Mobile Future of StumbleUpon with CEO Garrett Camp by Frank Gruber (@FrankGruber)
• The Raw Power of StumbleUpon by Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan)
• Run a StumbleUpon Advertising Campaign For Your Blog by Darren Rowse (@problogger)
• StumbleUpon CEO Garrett Camp On The Downside To Getting Our News On Facebook by Bianca Bosker (@bbosker)
• The StumbleUpon Experiment by Dan Grossman (@djg)
• StumbleUpon Etiquette Guide and Best Practices by Tamar Weinberg (@tamar)
• StumbleUpon for Dummies by Mark Kuiper (@marcofolio)
• StumbleUpon: It’s NOT About the SEO! 4 Compelling Reasons to Become a Heavy StumbleUpon User by Neal Schaffer (@NealSchaffer)
• StumbleUpon Responds To Nick Denton: We’re Actually No. 1 For Social Traffic by Ben Popper (@benpopper)
• StumbleUpon Sucks by Eric
• StumbleUpon Users… Be Careful What You Stumble by Brent Csutoras (@brentcsutoras)
• The StumbleUpon Digg Experiment by JD Rucker (@0boy)
• Targeting StumbleUpon Users by Daniel Scocco (@danielscocco)
• Things To Know About StumbleUpon [INFOGRAPHIC] by Amelia Chen
• Ultimate Guide to Using StumbleUpon by Slick Affiliate (@SlickAffiliate)
• Visualing StumbleUpon Top Users and Their Friends by Chris (@chris_smt)

Update: As you can read in the comments, the CEO of Ayuda clarified some aspects of her original post. Apparently, I was incorrect in some of the details about her post, assuming that as a consulting company Ayuda was the one hiring employees either for themselves or others. That is not the case. Apparently the post was based on a discussion with a colleague who was having hiring problems. I have made some changes to the article based on this.

I recently read a fascinating article at Ayuda discussing several current employment issues. One of those issues is generational differences in the workplace. That is such a huge topic that I want to explore it in-depth in a later post (or several). For now I want to address their other issue. Some employers are having trouble finding workers, which surprises the blogger in view of this economy.

I admit that a shortage of workers seems odd in a job market with nine percent unemployment.  The blogger asserts that the length of unemployment benefits is the central reason, but I think there are other factors at play. The blogger identifies these as good paying jobs and good paying jobs are always better than unemployment benefits. I feel that the inability find workers in this economy may have a lot to do with one or more of these factors:

Mobility

Because of the housing crisis, most people can’t sell their homes easily so they are no longer able to switch cities to take a job. This makes it hard for them to look for work outside their local markets. During the housing boom, it was easy to sell one house and buy another. Even though there were less people looking for work in general, it was easier to attract a skilled worker from another market and that evened things out.

Qualifications

In my recent job search I applied for several positions that I thought I was perfect for, and never heard back from many of the employers. This discouraged me from applying for positions that I felt only marginally qualified for.  My impression (accurate or not) was that there was no point in trying to compete for jobs that I wasn’t fully qualified for.

The moral of this story for employers is that if you aren’t getting applicants, you may want to look at your list of qualifications as ask yourselves which ones are really essential and which ones can be taught on the job. Nine percent of the population may be looking for work, but if your position has specific qualifications that the average worker doesn’t have, your job pool isn’t very big.

Reputation

If a company has a reputation for laying off workers or having a poor work environment, that can make it hard to attract new workers. I turned down a fairly lucrative job offer once because people warned me that the company treated its employees poorly and several people had quit rather than put up with the environment. Reputation matters, even in a tough job market.

Poor Search Targeting

The blogger noted that the recruitment strategy used was traditional paper classifieds’ as well as internet search engines. Newspaper classified ads are pointless, so don’t get me started on that. Job search site ads are better, but still a very passive way to look for new employees. If you really want people for a position, especially a skilled position, you need to go out and find those people. Thanks to services like LinkedIn, it has never been easier to find qualified people if you really want to find them. An active search is better than a passive search.

Pay / Benefits

The blogger says the jobs in question are well-paying jobs, with good benefits and upward career track. That’s great. This is not always the case. Many companies in this environment have been trying to lowball their job offers, believing that workers should be grateful just to have a job. That is short-term thinking. If you want really good employees, you need to make good offers. The best employees are rarely out of work for long, so when you lowball you tend to find employees with flaws, even in a tough job market.

Also, good benefits are ones that really help the employee. Right now, the best possible benefit for many potential workers is relocation assistance (back to mobility). Not surprisingly, with the current housing market, this is the benefit that is hardest to get. Employers can’t afford to give it and job seekers can’t afford to take a job without it. It’s a sticking point that keeps the number of applications down.

Don’t Assign Blame, Fix Problems

Those are my thoughts. Blaming the job seekers for not applying is like blaming companies for not hiring. Whether you are correct or not, it is defeatist thinking. Look to the things that you can fix rather than concentrating things you can do nothing about:

• Conduct better job searches
• Adjust the qualifications
• Work on your reputation
• Try to meet job seeker’s real needs

Those are my views on the company’s problem. I could be right or I could be way off. Anyone else have any ideas?

Like much of the world, I recently found myself obsessed with the game Angry Birds (aff). It’s available on several mobile platforms, but I play on my iPod Touch. It’s a fun game in which you launch birds (why a flying creature needs to be launched, I’m not sure) at various structures trying to defeat the green pigs that have stolen your eggs. I was obsessed with it for about a week until I hit a level that I just could not beat. After about 60 attempts I figured out that I could actually go back to having a life, so I stopped playing.

If you blog, and if you like the game Angry Birds, I suggest you check out Deb Ng’s article, 5 Blogging Lessons Learned from Angry Birds over at Kommein. It’s a fun and informative read.

Update: My cutting and pasting failed to provide the right link to Deb’s article the first time. Please find it here: 5 Blogging Lessons Learned from Angry Birds

There’s a piece of advice I neglected to mention in my recent post, Seven ways you can get me to read your corporate blog. It’s a major tip, but it really goes beyond the scope of that article.  The tip is to decide who you want to have read your blog.

A corporate blog doesn’t have to appeal to everyone. Sometimes the best idea is to take aim at a very specific set of readers rather than the whole world. Those readers may be your existing customers or potential buyers, but they may also be your employees, your managers, your competitors, or the experts in the field your company specializes in. A blog doesn’t have to be for everyone. My blog certainly isn’t for everyone.

The important thing is to decide who you want your audience to be. Are you trying to appeal to a mass audience or just a few key players? Are you speaking to amateurs or experts? Decide who you are blogging for and move forward from there.

I spent a little bit of time this summer working on training materials for the Quicken product line at Intuit. It’s a small group by Intuit standards, and Aaron Patzer is considered to be the guiding force for its long-term web presence. Quicken is a product that works well on the web. This article about Patzer has some interesting takeaways.

1. Traditional corporate America (and I mean Inc. not Intuit) gets nervous when executives work remotely. They can’t wrap their heads around the idea, even though it is quite common at Intuit.
2. People with great ideas rarely take to the day to day grind of running a company (except for Steve Jobs).
3. Intuit really needs to ditch the cubical culture. I know what he means by “quiet”. Small teams thrive on energy, and large corporate cultures are a hard place to find that kind of energy.

Chris Brogran recently wrote a nice little article about the value of criticism and the differences between good criticism and bad criticism. The main value in criticism is that it gives you an opportunity to improve. If someone else can spot a problem or a weak spot in your work (in this case writing) and help you improve, that is useful. If someone has a problem with your writing but can’t or won’t explain it in a way that is useful (and not mean) then it really isn’t good criticism. The same goes for minor nitpicks. Spotting a typo on a blog with no editor (like this one) isn’t really a challenge. If you spot a typo, and it really matters to you, there’s nothing wrong with pointing it out but there’s nothing wrong with letting it slide either.

Here are four questions you should ask before criticizing someone else’s work:

• Is this important?
• Am I arguing over facts or opinions?
• Have I given the matter some genuine thought?
• How can I say it without being a jerk?

If you can get past those four questions, then you should be able to give useful criticism.