You Don’t Need to Pick a Writing Topic — A Topic Will Pick You

Teaching people how to blog is a lucrative line of business. There is a never-ending list of people who are willing to sell you the blog membership, book, or course that will teach you how to grow your blog from internet anonymity to a million-dollar passive-income empire.

And the very first piece of advice any of these internet professionals will give you is this: you must pick a topic.

It’s a non-negotiable, they say. You have to pick a topic. According to these blogging pros, you have to pick a topic because…

1. Readers read what writers have to say because they think writers are experts in their topic, that they have authority. So to have a well-read blog, you need to develop authority. Since it’s difficult to be an authority on more than a few things, you need to pick the topic about which you will become an authority. (In reality, readers read for a lot of reasons. Sometimes it’s to gain knowledge from an authority, but sometimes it’s to be entertained or have their perspective changed. Shannon Ashley doesn’t claim to be an authority on anything in particular, but her enthusiastic and dedicated readership loves her all the same.)
2. Everything you need to do to market your blog, from naming your blog to branding your blog to SEO optimization to newsletter management, depends on you picking a topic. (In reality, the best marketing you can do for your work is simply to write more work, and you don’t need to pick a topic to write more work.)

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I’m a professional blogger too. And I’ve never explicitly picked a topic for my blog (my blog does have a theme, but more on that below).

In fact, when I did try to pick a topic, it led me directly to failure.

The Story of the Time I Tried to Pick a Topic

When I was making apps in high school and college, I was frequently asked out to coffee by people so they could “pick my brain” for tips on how to do it themselves. After doing this a few dozen times, I found I ended up saying the same sorts of things to people over and over again.

I realized it would save a lot of my time, and theirs, if I were to write down what I would say to them as a little how-to guide and simply give it to them instead. Besides, a how-to guide would have a lot more links and detail than I would ever be able to offer over a cup of coffee.

Next week, I wrote my little how-to guide and made it available on the internet. I didn’t charge any money for it. It was more of a pet project than it was a serious endeavor.

Until someone called me an author. A professional friend of mine introduced me as “Megan Holstein, app developer and author” at a networking event. Oh, did I like the sound of that.

Well shit, I thought. If people are going to call me an author, I better deserve that title. I went back to my little how-to guide and revised it, making it three times longer and much more detailed. I published it as Idea to App: The Complete Beginner’s Guide to App Development.

That would have been the end of it, but after all that work, I wanted the book to sell. And what do you do to promote a self-published book? You start a blog.

So start a blog I did. I started a topical blog focused on iPhone app design and low-budget project management called Idea to App. I populated it with articles inspired by the content of the book, links to further resources, and design and marketing breakdowns of then-popular iOS apps.

I wouldn’t admit it to anyone at the time, but I hated that blog. After a mere two weeks of work, it was already crushing my spirit. In the past, I just sat down and wrote about whatever I wanted to write about, but for Idea to App, I couldn’t do that. Writing a post was a procedure:

1. First, I had to pick a topic for my post. According to the professionals, this was a process that involved doing keyword research, brainstorming topics based on those keywords, and doing further keyword research to make sure my chosen post topic would rank well. (If you were really good, you did all this beforehand and created a content calendar with pre-populated research. If you were really good, your VA did this for you.)
2. Then, I had to write my post on my researched topic, making sure to hit every SEO optimization benchmark Google searches for when ranking pages in addition to packing it full of diagrams, charts, case studies, infographics, and other “fun” content.
3. Next came editing, again with an eye toward making sure I put the right amount of keywords in the right places. Crafting a beautiful sentence came second to maximizing keyword usage.
4. Then came formatting, making sure all my media had SEO-optimized titles, alt-text, that the article itself had the right type of canonical vs. non-canonical links, and taking care of every other nitpicky aspect of SEO.
5. Finally, I could hit publish — which had to be followed up with a flurry of scheduling social media posts so that my post would be promoted to the right people at the right time of day on the right posting interval so as to maximize Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram’s algorithms.

I have always enjoyed writing, but this wasn’t writing anymore. This was factory line production.

If you’ve ever wondered why successful internet blogs have a particular kind of intense focused tone, or why the people behind them seem less like humans and more like soulless single-minded robots, this is why. When you run a successful topical blog, everything about the writing process has been reduced to a game that pits the blogger against Google’s rankings and reader instincts.

I did not find that game fun to play. I found it to be both agonizingly boring and disconnected from any greater sense of meaning. After I published 20 or 30 articles, I gave it up entirely.

After that disaster of a blog, I gave up on blogging. I did everything the pros told me to do, and I hated it more than I’ve hated anything in my entire life. Clearly, I wasn’t suited for blogging — or at least, the kind of blogging that has half a hope of ever earning me money. That was fine with me. It sucked anyway.

It was two more years before I decided to try my hand at writing again. I knew I loved writing, I knew I wanted to be a digital nomad, and I knew the best way to achieve both of these goals was to start a successful blog. I also knew I was already disenchanted with what the blogosphere had to offer me, and I knew if I tried again using their strategies, I’d fail again just as hard. If I was to achieve my dreams, I had to find my own way to make it work.

When I tried again, I remembered a story I was told about the walking paths at UC Berkeley.

Designing paved paths on college campuses is difficult because it’s hard to anticipate what kind of shortcuts students will develop to get to class on time. When UC Berkeley started construction on a new section of campus, they developed a unique solution to this problem: they decided not to put in any paved paths at all.

Instead, they decided, they would leave all the grass areas unpaved for one year and see what kind of footpaths the student wore in the grass. At the end of the year, they paved the paths the students wore.

I took my inspiration from UC Berkeley. Instead of paving my path by picking a topic and sticking to it, I decided to wear my own footpaths in the grass. I made a plan to write 3–5 articles a week about whatever I wanted that week and see what happened.

Lo and behold, footpaths emerged. After a year, it was easy to see a theme with my writing. The vast majority of my articles ended up being about personal development topics like how to decide what you want, how to build emotional intelligence, and how to get things done. All my writing, however strange, ended up being about how you can make yourself a better person.

Most importantly, these footpaths emerged without any pain. I never sat down and did keyword research, brainstormed topics, or made a content calendar. I never did SEO optimization or keyword management. I just sat down every day, wrote about stuff I like, and had a blast doing it.

It’s not surprising things happened this way. Everyone has things they’re interested in, and that includes writers. If you tell a writer to write a few articles a week on whatever topic they want, they will end up writing far more articles about some topics than others. It’s just human nature.

So if you’re a new writer and you’re looking for advice on how to pick a topic, my advice is: don’t. Spend a year writing whatever you want without forcing yourself to write about anything in particular. You won’t need to try to pick a topic. Write enough articles, and a topic will pick you.