4 Ways I Come Up with Ideas for My Weekly Substack

What’s kept me consistent—and creatively alive—for 117 weeks.

Today’s pictures are taken from the road from my camper!

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In Brief — For Writers Building a Consistent Newsletter Practice

• How I’ve published 117 issues without burning out

• 4 ways I consistently find ideas

• A deeper philosophy of creative noticing (not just productivity)

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Dear friends,

Someone recently asked how I come up with writing ideas. It felt like the perfect question to explore today.

This is the 117th consecutive edition of this newsletter — and I could never have imagined, starting out, that it would become such a centrepiece of my creative life.

I began with a publishing schedule in mind — but more as a guideline than a discipline of self.

What I’ve learned is that, like any creative practice, you have to start — and then figure out how to keep going along the way.

At the start, you have the energy of beginning — and this is sticky for inspiration.

But over time, you meet all the familiar blocks.

One week you are smashed on all fronts with work, deadlines or life’s manifold ways to set us adrift. You find one window of time and it has to happen then.

Another week, you are just off your game. You’re not inside life’s pulse, as if its heart exists inside another body.

Or worse: you’re fired up and ready, and then the blank page arrives like some unimaginable horror.

We all know it:

Life is wildly inventive at throwing you off course the moment you commit to something creative.

This week’s piece is about all the information I didn’t know in advance.

Because through these 117 weeks, I’ve curated 4 simple approaches which help me when it comes to writing.

What I’ve realised over time is that they’re not just writing tools. They’ve become philosophies of attention.

If that sounds dramatic — well, writing this newsletter has made me more available to life, more attuned to its rhythms, and more driven to uncover its meaning.

As I write this, I’m camped above the white cliffs of Dover, Donna (my campervan) tucked into a hedgy nook, the English Channel in view.

It’s a joy to be back on the road for a few days to visit family — and take a moment to share what’s helped me keep going on the creative path.

Here’s what I wrote back to my friend.

With love,
Jim

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1. How I Collect Ideas

I keep a running Notion file called “Ideation.” (see above)

Into it go fly-by thoughts, words, phrases, half-glimpses, stray emotions.

We’re so swamped with information these days that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Writing a newsletter has become one way I arm myself against that overload.

To do so, I try to notice what inspires me.

That often means intentionally not moving on to the next thing, but instead pausing to reflect on whatever comes up.

Of course, that inspiration can hit at any time — and only rarely can you chase it in the moment. So I just pop it into my ideation folder.

Anything that helps me in my own creative process goes in there. It might be a bit of spiritual advice, something a friend says, or even an unfinished musing overheard in a coffee shop.

Here’s what I try to notice:

• What inspires me

• Pain points I see artists struggling with

• Creative breakthroughs

• Practical hacks that help me get through the day

• Wisdom from creatives I admire

The key here is not to flesh things out yet — it’s just about collection.

Because here’s the thing:

Writing a newsletter means you face the blank page every single week.

If — like this week — I’m utterly pressed for time, I’d panic if I had to come up with an idea from scratch. But when I open Notion, I have fragments, sparks, and half-formed thoughts ready to go.

Life gives me the edge.
That’s my head start.

And beyond that, collecting ideas trains me to notice what moves me — and noticing what moves you is one of the deepest creative practices there is.

Honestly, that’s reason enough to write a newsletter.

As Mary Oliver put it:
“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
The ideation tab is how I train that attention — not perfectly, but persistently.

2. The Surprising Way Substack Notes Spark Ideas

I’ve written before about my struggle with short-form content.

I guess I’m just old-fashioned in my habits — I like to read, write, listen to audiobooks, and (my guilty pleasure) watch a lot of YouTube.

But when it comes to TikTok, X, and Instagram, it’s never really clicked. Maybe that’s a good thing — I’m naturally barricaded against being a scroller.

Still, I recently realised I wanted to experiment with short-form content — on my terms. Having tried the other platforms, I decided to focus on Substack Notes.

Here’s why:

1. People don’t like being deplatformed.
   If someone’s on Instagram, they don’t want to be sent to X. If they’re on X, they don’t want to be nudged to YouTube. But Notes lives inside Substack — so everything stays in one place.

2. Notes is built to support your writing.
   When you promote your article or share a clipping from your post, the algorithm doesn’t punish you — it promotes you. You’re not hacking a system built for something else. You’re flowing with one designed for writers.

3. I value a subscriber more than a follower.

   Because a subscriber has chosen to come deeper into what I offer or create. On social media, people stumble across your work depending on the whim of the algorithm. A subscriber, on the other hand, has made a choice to read you.

When starting on Notes, I wanted to try a different approach.

Rather than just posting, I decided to deepen my participation.

Instead of pumping out my own “Notes,” I mostly comment.
That’s it.

If I write one Note of my own, I’ll balance it with three thoughtful comments on others.

When I scroll, I’m looking for something that someone’s written that either moves me, or a pain-point or problem that I think I might be able to help with.

I’ve been doing this for a few weeks, and it’s surprised me how much I enjoy it.

It’s put the social back into social media.

But even more than that — it’s opened up new relationships.

What started as an experiment has led to new connections, a wave of around 100 new subscribers, and some proper conversations with fellow writers.

The lesson?

The more you’re willing to give, the more you get.

And here’s the bit relevant to idea-generation:

I’ve had so many newsletter ideas emerge from these comment threads —because people reveal so much in their Notes.
Their struggles.
Their pain points.
Their breakthroughs.

Sometimes I’ll reply to someone and — without planning to — I’ll end up writing a mini essay in response.

That kind of depth is, in turn, how new people find your work. Not through perfect strategy — but through participating.

And when you show up — you reach far more people than you might on your own feed, which is subject to the whims of the algorithm.

In a content-saturated world, what matters more and more isn’t what you produce — but how you participate.

Amidst this amidst the noise, this is what I see emerging:

The growth of the Micro community.

Substack Notes has been my experimentation with doing something a little different, and I’m really enjoying drawing inspiration from somewhere entirely unexpected.

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3. The Diary — Remembering the Joy of the Analogue

We’ve become obsessively digital.

What I’ve noticed — whether as a songwriter or as a writer — is that the work you produce is entirely different depending on what medium you start with.

Whether it starts on a computer, or on an instrument, or in a diary or a notepad — it changes the nuance, delivery and expression.

When I write in my diary, I’m in conversation with myself.

There’s no sense of being in public, or of writing for an audience.

You play with words.
You mingle with your own private catastrophes or insecurities.
You’re blunt with yourself.
You allow yourself to feel good about those little good things — the ones that are important markers along the way.

Those moments of reward and gratitude are important too — because the creative path is full of self-questioning and doubt.

That’s why a diary matters — it lets you notice your own becoming.

There’s so much noise online about “giving value.”

But the good stuff isn’t just about helping people, or solving problems, or offering your experience in service of another.

You also need time to investigate the cracks — to write for nothing other than the fact it needs to be written.

For me this is the good stuff — in the “working out of things” itself.

Paradoxically, other stuff breaks out as soon as you stop trying to hard to give “value”

And my, so much online writing just feels like it’s trying too hard.

If you’re always pulled into the entanglement of solving things for other people, you miss the threshold of your own problem-solving.

That happens — often — through inference.

Through letting your play with words drift into an idea, with no intention or purpose.

When was the poetic ever about problem solving?

The rumination is too quickly discarded in digital writing.

Poetry — or rather, the accidental wandering into poetic idea — in my experience, comes when you explore with no intention other than drifting into the thing itself.

Maybe longer-term readers of this newsletter intuit that here, too.

Sometimes I’m writing for you, sometimes I’m just sharing my experience of working it out.

That’s why I like to share both.

Because I can’t deal with the numbskullery of too many how-tos, listicles, or advice bombs.

Damn — tell me a bit about who you are!
Dare to!

You get a much deeper understanding of someone through the storylines, the blocks, the struggles of their life.

Give yourself if you want to give yourself.
Give yourself if you want to help.
Don’t always instruct.
Offer a space for others to walk into.

That’s where inspiration happens — when the giving is without intention.
Where space is left to the reader.
Sometimes it’s just blunt honesty.
Or the warbling idea, made holy by the beholding that happens before thought sets in.

A diary is a letter to yourself.
A challenge to the godhead.
A hardline into your own longing.

When I’m most connected to the world, I’m making space to write in my diary.
And when I’m brave, I share a bit of it.

That’s usually when I give the best of me.
Or discover it.

Even if, occasionally — like on Thursday night — I wake in the middle of the night and wonder whether I’ve found the right balance between the public and the private.

Maybe that’s where the best writing comes from.

The sphere between the two.

And if it makes you just a little uncomfortable — that very well may be exactly what the world is drawn to…or what it’s missing.

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4. Essay Writing as a Means of Self-Discovery

Do you have the courage to find out what you really think?

Most of us might bristle at that — Yeah, I know exactly what I think, thanks.

But for me, I’ve noticed that to reach my own real response — or to get beyond what I think my response is — I have to challenge myself.

Critical thinking always leads to new avenues of thought — deeper into your own self.

I wrote a couple of lengthy essays recently:

The Death of the Artist in the Age of Algorithms
An Artist’s Assault on Niching Down

Both were deep dives into ideas that had been gnawing at me. I’d found that what I was supposed to think just wasn’t landing. It didn’t wash.

I hadn’t planned to go so deep — but I had to find out what was bothering me.

I figured: if I’m struggling with it, other creatives probably are too.

The funny thing is — when you take on an idea, you have to go where your own thought takes you.

And each time, I discovered something new about myself — like how much more contrarian I am than I realised!

But that’s the thing:

To find out what you want to challenge, you have to go deep into your own capacity to discover yourself.

Where does that take you?

Is it against the grain?

Well — it very well might be.

But that’s the role of the arts. That’s the path of a creative life:
To follow your thought to the edge of its road.

And if what you find is entirely yours — and sits in opposition to everything you’ve read, everything you’ve been taught to think, everything the guides, influencers, politicians and quacks are pumping down your throat?

Congratulations — you’ve found your take!

We lose the muscle of essay writing after school.

And with it, maybe, we lose part of the adventure into our own thought.

My mission when I write is to excavate myself.

Can I exorcise the bullshit and land in my own version of the thing itself?

It comes at a cost — of time, of self-exposure, and of self-questioning.

But if you follow the questions all the way to their root —
That’s where you find the basement of your own being.

And that’s worth digging up.

It teaches you how to discover your own thought.
To meander into the unexpected.
To sit in the spaces society forgets or rejects.

That’s why I write.

Not just to make sense —
But to tear apart, renew, and maybe, offer something with a voice of its own.

I hope these ideas encourage you in your own journey.

And if you have more to add, drop a comment below — I’m hungry to know more, to walk to new precipices, to break open into a new outlook.

With love from — Dover!
Jim

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