How to Milk Content Ideas From Literature

A definitive guide on how to get the most out of what you read

The hunt for content is the ultimate definition of a writer. Constantly seeking ways to feed your loyal readers with vital information or whatever strokes your curiosity is a firm struggle. Some days you got it, and other days, you are high and dry. You got the most infamous blues that a writer could get.

Yes. The block. The writer’s block.

Learning how to avoid this is a trick, even the best of us cannot completely crack. Have I cracked the code? Definitely not. But I can teach you how to suck the life out of any literature you have and produce tons of content using what you have. Let’s get to it.

To proceed, you first need to pick literature that is relevant to you. Think about what you’re looking for? Where is the most likely place you will find the inspiration you’re looking for?

Is it a book, an essay, or even a letter? What you pick will go a long way to determine how much you can extract from that. Anything can spark a good idea.

A book or an essay with a synopsis and a table of contents would be best to improve our navigation of the piece of literature. These two will be our guides to mapping out what is necessary for the content we will produce.

After picking the literature, the next course of action would be to draw a road map for your content.

There will be an audience for what you may want to write on any platform that you decide to share your content on. It is possible to find the inspiration for stories or articles that are philosophical, historical, and even scientific — all from the same piece of literature. And writing a piece with a target audience in mind will heighten your chances of publication. For example, it would be no good to pitch a piece on life lessons to a writing magazine.

So start with a road map. If you know where you’re headed, you won’t get lost.

The notes you jotted down from what you read are the light in your path to turning an idea into whole pages of content.

Enriching what you have acquired from an author with your own perspective is never enough to justify your written content. Unless you are writing a piece from personal experience, you need to expand your idea by doing plenty of research. This will help in expanding the ideas that have been inspired by other people’s work and turn them into your own work.

The above steps guarantee a better experience in seeking out information from the literature we engage with. This is how to read like a writer. Reading books, short stories, articles or poetry is always a pleasurable experience but analyzing and critically viewing works of literature gives us so much more. If you learn how to spot ideas, you are halfway there.

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