Why I Rarely “Create” Content Anymore

It’s not what you think!

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A year ago I wrote an article where I said I’d stopped creating. Twelve months later, I’m even more convinced it was the right call.

About a year ago, I admitted something that made a few people cross, which was mostly because I didn’t take the time to explain what I meant early enough in the article.

I said I rarely “create” content anymore.

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Not in the way most people mean it, sitting down at a blank page and trying to conjure something clever out of thin air. I’d more or less given that up, and my writing had got better and easier for it.

Twelve months on, I want to tell you what’s actually replaced it and hopefully explain what I meant a little better, because the change has gone further than I expected. (so put down the torches and pitchforks for a while)

Here’s what I meant in plain terms. I used to think my job was to create. Now I think my job is to notice.

A blank page is the hardest place to start anything. So I mostly don’t start there. The world hands me more material in a day than I could use in a month, and all I have to do is pay attention and write it down.

I am not a writer, I am a diarist, or a journal-ist.

Most of my content starts as something I saw or a random thought that pops into my head. A couple in a café swapping their breakfast plates the second the waiter walked off.

A post that annoyed me online.

A daft thought I couldn’t clarify on a walk.

None of that is “created.” It’s collected. I just keep my eyes open and grab the ideas before they float away.

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A good few come from other people. A reader leaves a comment that’s better than the article it’s under, and there’s my next piece. Someone asks me the same question for the tenth time, and the answer becomes a post. I read another writer’s work, disagree with one part of it, and that disagreement turns into something of my own.

Even this week, a Groucho Marx line I’ve loved for years collided with a word I can’t stand, and a few minutes later I had a Substack note I was happy with. I didn’t create that. I just put two things I already had side by side.

screenshot by author

The rest come from my own back catalogue. I went looking through old work earlier this year and found whole books I’d forgotten writing, plus dozens of articles building on ideas I could explain better now. (errr, this article, for instance)

That’s a year of material I already owned, sitting there waiting. The June pieces I’m writing right now are mostly old ideas given a second, better run. Most of you will have never seen the originals.

So what does “creating” even mean at that point?

For me, it’s stopped being an invention and has become an arrangement. Noticing a moment, noticing a great comment, joining up dots between things I already knew, explaining an old idea better than I managed last time.

The actual writing still takes craft, I’m not pretending it writes itself. But the panic of the blank page is gone, because I almost never face one.

This Matters For You

If writing sometimes feels like squeezing water from a stone, you might be trying to create when you should be collecting. The river is right behind you.

So for the next week, try this instead of sitting down to “come up with something.” Carry a notebook or an app on your phone and write down the moments as they happen. The thing a friend said that stuck. The comment that made you think.

The small incident you watched in the supermarket.

The line in a book you went back and read twice or felt the need to highlight. By Friday, you’ll have more starting points than you can use, and not one of them will have come from a blank page.

A year on, I’m more sure of it than ever. The best content was never created. It was noticed and then written down by someone paying attention. (I’ll give Tolkien and Pratchett a pass on this one)

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Originally published at https://thesystematicwriter.substack.com.