The surest way to know if a blog idea has legs? Write the damn thing.
You can sit around making grandiose plans, doodling elaborate mind maps, and reassuring yourself with bullet points, but nothing separates genius from drivel quite like seeing your own words sprawled across the page. It’s rather like testing a parachute by leaping from a plane—there’s an undeniable clarity in the moment of free-fall.
Some ideas, dazzling in theory, collapse into a pitiful heap the moment they’re stretched beyond a sentence. Others, barely a flicker of a thought, suddenly sprout limbs, take on a life of their own, and before you know it, you’re holding forth on a topic you hadn’t even realised you cared about.
Writing the whole post has its uses. It exposes the flimsy foundations of bad ideas and uncovers promising tangents that would have otherwise died a quiet death in the margins of your notebook. More importantly, it forces you to consider the unfortunate business of the reader. If you, the grand author, find yourself yawning halfway through, then spare a thought for the poor sod trying to slog through your words with nothing but a cup of tea and mild curiosity to sustain them.
The method? Write fast, edit slow. Get the words down with reckless abandon, as though you’ve been possessed by the spirit of an over-caffeinated lunatic. Then step away before the horror of what you’ve done sinks in. Return later, sober and sensible, and ask yourself the hard questions: Does this have a point? Is it remotely interesting? Or is it just the literary equivalent of a man shouting at pigeons?
If the post still holds up, show it to someone whose opinion you trust—someone who isn’t just being polite. If they respond with enthusiasm rather than an awkward nod and a change of subject, you might be onto something.
And even if a post turns out to be utterly hopeless, don’t despair. You’ve still written something, which is more than most people manage. At worst, it can be dissected for parts, repurposed, or at the very least, serve as a warning to your future self.
Not everything deserves publication. If writing a post feels like wading through wet cement, if it regurgitates something you’ve already said, or if it’s so tedious that even you lose interest, then have the good grace to bury it quietly.
But the truth remains: you only discover if an idea is any good by actually writing it. So if a topic keeps rattling around in your brain like a loose marble, don’t just sit there wondering if it’s worth the effort—write it, and let the words decide.