All beginning and even seasoned writers struggle to generate ideas. Some time ago, I too have difficulties about which topics I can write about; luckily I got an idea from an article called “How you can generate 112 ideas in 30 minutes” by Dickie Bush.
Bush suggests a 3-step plan the first part of which is what he refers to as “The 2 Year Test”. If you have difficulty as a beginning writer what you want to write about, you can use this test. The idea is to ask yourself just 1 question: "What are all of the problems I've solved and topics I've learned about over the last 2 years?" You can generate a lot of ideas at this step. As Bush notes, novice writers erroneously think that you should be an expert in a field to write about it. However, readers don’t necessarily want to learn from specialists. You can engage them just by being a bit ahead of them on some topic.
So I started to do my 2-Year Test - I wrote down some ideas that I have been quite enthusiastic about during the last couple years. Main topics that interested me were trading, financial markets, computer science, crypto and web 3, and biology. After this initial list, I selected trading to write about mainly because out of all topics mentioned I know most about it; and also I work at a commodity trading firm.
At the next step, as Bush suggests, I decided to add specificity. Since trading is too big a topic, I decided to be more specific by focusing on commodity trading. First, commodities (along with currencies) as an asset class are investments that interest me most. Second, I work in the field and read a lot of books and research papers on the topic.
I read many books, research papers, and blog posts on commodity trading strategies. I read about almost all types of commodities, such as energy, tropical, grains, livestock and meat, metals. But grains so far are most interesting to me so I think I will mostly write about them.
Besides the aforementioned, there are more reasons that I want to write about commodities for retail traders. First, commodities provide a good diversification to traditional portfolios containing stocks and bonds because they usually have low correlations. Second, commodities historically tended to be a hedge against inflation. TThird, they are less talked about than traditional investments, such as equities, bonds, and real estate.
You can do the same thing. First, select 5-10 topics that you're passionate about. Then narrow down this list to 2-3. Once it's done, you can add more specificity. Remember that readers don't need experts, they just those who are a bit ahead of them in things interesting to them.
