First part:
https://www.publish0x.com/real-world-assets/adopting-the-mindset-of-a-digital-writer-xjrndrw
The biggest challenge for most beginner writers is to generate novel ideas continuously. The idea is to develop a framework for generating ideas without difficulty.
Dickie and Bush suggest selecting 3 Content Buckets - General Audience, Niche Audience, and Industry Audience. For example, if I want to write about the crypto market, Cryptocurrencies would be my General Audience. Then, I can go further and pick a niche, such as Decentralized Finance protocols on Solana. Industry audience is the content where you predict the future of the industry you are writing about. In our example, this will be DeFi (decentralized finance) protocols that will perform best in 2023.
The four pillars of the Endless Idea Generator are the following: Topic, Credibility, Path, Approach.
Idea
The main idea with the topic is the specificity. The more general topic you select to write about, the harder it will be to write. That’s why you should pick a topic and get more specific. Let’s return to our crypto example. Our thinking will follow approximately this way:
- I want to write about the crypto market.
- I want to write about one important class of the crypto market, namely DeFi
- I want to write about the DeFi protocols on the specific blockchain, namely Solana.
Your clarity about what you want to write will increase as you go more and more specific.
Credibility
You don’t have to be an expert at something to write about that topic. You could be of course, but you can also speak from your personal experience. Just let your readers know the source of your knowledge.
Path (The 4A Paths)
It may be daunting for novice writers to write about any topic because there are many ways to approach it. We can identify 4 approaches to writing: actionable, analytical, aspirational, anthropological.
Actionable writing is when you show your readers exactly what actions to take. To guide readers through a Solana DeFi app and to show how they can invest in it would be an example of actionable writing. To explain something through numbers is analytical writing. If would take an analytical approach to our topic, we’d have written about some metrics on a specific decentralized app, such as TVL (total value locked) of Solend, a decentralized protocol for lending and borrowing on Solana.
Aspirational writing is when you motivate others to take action to achieve. Finally, to explain the cause of something is an anthropological approach. It is the “here’s why” writing.
When you pause for a moment and start thinking about which approach you’ll choose, writing doesn’t seem intimidating any more. You know exactly what you’ll write about. The advantage of “The 4A Paths” is that you can take any topic and approach it from different lenses. First, you can pick, say, an analytical approach to topic X. Then, you’d explore X through an aspirational prism, an actionable prism or an anthropological prism.
Approach
The final step is to decide how you will organize writing. If it is a “How to?” essay, organize it as Step 1, Step 2 etc. The outline could be Lesson 1, Lesson 2 etc, if you want to write about lessons learnt. To make your writing easy to read, your main points and subheading have to follow the same pattern.
