What to blog about when there is nothing to blog about?

Because I have nothing to blog about right now. Literally.

I’ve been asked this too many times and I’ve given advice verbally a ton of times. Since I’m in this position myself today – after a LONG time – I thought I’ll blog about it as a reference point if I ever encounter this situation again in the future. As with all my “Article & Writing” blog posts, this will be loosely structured, no tips / bullet points.

Generally, when I have nothing to blog about, I blog about things I think about. Currently, the things I’m thinking about :

The canvas I’m currently working on. Once it’s done, what am I going to do? I’m making this 48 x 36 inch piece where I’m cutting up Pantone Chips and sticking them onto canvas and I don’t have too many chips left. Once those are all stuck and the canvas is completed, I will have to either work on the two large 36 x 36 black and white rose prints on canvas and make them into something else. So. I could blog about this and post photos of the one complete Pantone canvas, one incomplete and one photo of the rose canvas. I can talk about how I’m doing it – where the Pantone chip charts came from, why I wanted to create these canvases in the first place and how working on structured, repetitive pieces de-stresses me. ( Which could then lead into another piece I could write about the other things I do to de-stress. )

My blog has always been about the things I do. About me. I take the “experience collector” tagline quite seriously and try to blog about every experience I go through.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about lately is how to increase the intake of drinking water in my daily routine. I hardly drink water throughout the day and I know many other girls who struggle with the same thing. I’ve noticed how I feel mentally and how my body feels when I drink a fair amount of water daily – if I drink even 1.5 liters during the day, I feel remarkably better in terms of less fatigue and better sleep and bowel movement than if I had only consumed say 500ml. 500ml is also difficult for me. I drink coffee ( about 200ml chilled black coffee in the morning ) plus beer ( about 320ml ) pretty much on a daily basis. But plain water is a struggle. So I started infusing water with lime and salt. It also helps with acid reflux, if you have that sort of thing – it is because there’s less acid in the stomach, not more – as I learned recently. The lemon helps with that. So, this could be a short piece about how to drink more water.

One of the books that’s helped me immensely is Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Now. I could write about the book and how it has helped me – and how the audio format in particular has been nice because it is in Eckhart’s voice and he is SO calm. Maybe my readers could use that calm in their lives too. This could be another thing I could blog about and connect it with other book recommendations I’ve blogged in the past. This would also talk about the recent podcast Joe Rogan did with Russell Brand on his Joe Rogan Experience. It was a fun podcast and for me, it drove home the point that one must always be open to learning. Russell Brand was open to learning about podcasting, asked questions and Joe Rogan was more than willing to help and answer those questions. I really really really like Joe Rogan. If someone in my audience has never heard of Joe Rogan and finds about his podcast fro my blog post, and finds it useful, that’ll be a successful blog post. I could also talk about how this podcast has helped me get through some of my darkest days when I’m missing the boy.

I’ve also been thinking about how to make a solid case for the boy to really jump into blogging. He’s been blogging about gaming and technology and other opinion pieces but it would be nice to have him dip his toe into lifestyle blogging as well – because he has me and Axe and we could help him like no one else could. But the boy looks at logic and everything is black and white and convincing him to even try something he’s never considered is an uphill task. So I will need to make a really strong case without disclosing my true agenda, which is to get him to pose for my camera. Heh. Love. I could write about love and the things that have kept me going in his six-month-long absence from home.

I recently received an impersonal email from a journalist asking me a set of questions. I have no intentions of responding to that email – apart from the fact that I have answered those questions in a piece I’ve published on my blog about a year ago, the email was just too impersonal for me. I could take those questions and answer them in a new blog post and also link to the older blog post and write about how things have changed in the last one year.

I’ve tried to blog a series called #WhatsUpNaina, precisely to fill in this gap of “What to blog about when there’s nothing to blog about?” There’s always something that can be blogged about but the problem of motivation and putting fingers to keyboard is where I cannot help you. That is your problem. Just like it is mine. ( I could blog about this subject too – which is exactly what I’m doing in this post! ) Finding motivation, in my case, is not hard. This blog depends on me and I depend on it – it is who I am. The blog is part of my identity and regardless of whether I have paying clients, I will always find reasons to blog and things to blog about. Usually, all I have to do is simply look around me and I will find something. I haven’t been very regular with #WhatsUpNaina because I usually blog reactively and not proactively. When I started blogging in 2004, it was all proactive. But over the years, as paid client work has increased, blogging for me has been reactive in the sense that I blog about a photography gig or a client campaign or a speech I gave or the things that I do professionally on a daily basis. My blog posts are less about what I’m thinking of and more about what’s been happening in my professional life. I’m unsure if this is a good thing or a bad thing – as long as I am blogging, it’s all good.

I could also write follow-up blog posts about some subjects I’ve blogged about earlier. How I quit smoking, how I lost all that weight – follow-ups to these to share current status.

I recently watched True Cost The Film and I could write about how, as bloggers, some of us are stuck between wanting fashion to be more environment and human-friendly and wanting to pay rent.

I’ve been tweeting about my experience with the Uttar Pradesh Power Corporation Limited using the #BijligharNoida hashtag and I could put all that in a blog post and explain how it all got started and where I’m at.

Also been meaning to blog about this social media scheduling app I’ve been using for the last one whole year on my blog called CoSchedule. And not just because blogging about it will get me a 50% discount on their annual subscription. It’s been such a huge relief to use the app – of course they can improve it further and they are releasing new updates these days – but compared to literally anything else on the market, CoSchedule is a life-saver. I recommend it all the time to whoever cares to ask. It can also help with the subject line of this blog post – you can plan your editorial calendar using the tools CoSchedule provides. They have a 14 day free trial but it didn’t take me 14 days to sign up for the annual plan that currently costs $300 – totally worth it if you blog anywhere nearly as much as I do.

I could write about the Werner Herzog Masterclass on filmmaking that I signed up for and the first extract I’ve already listened to and what I thought about it and how I correlate it with my blogging or photography. Or why I even signed up for it – I am no film maker and have no plans to move away from still photography.

There’s an interview that I need to give to SoDelhi and they have sent in the set of questions that I plan to respond to via a video that I will add to #TheNainaRedhuExperience, which will be turned into a blog post as well. I have to first answer the questions though and await publication of the feature on the SoDelhi website – so I can plan and schedule this accordingly.

That right there is a list of subjects I could blog about. Even if I blog about one of the above subjects per week, I have an editorial calendar, ready to go for at least twelve weeks. Meanwhile, I have the daily landscape feature I blog about from the #EyesForArunachal series and I will continue to get client work that I will be blogging about and more subjects that I can subsequently blog about.

You could be a food blogger or a style blogger and you could write about a vegetable you like, a particular piece of clothing you’ve had in your wardrobe forever and why. Or something from your Dad’s wardrobe – that you saw him wear growing up and how it made you feel. There’s hundreds of things around us that affect us and those are the things that shape us and shape our thoughts. Our readers might want to know what makes us US. Those are the things I recommend blogging about. Keeping it personal, authentic. Real. That’s what I’ve been recommending to my friends who want to start blogging. Most of them ask, “But what am I going to write about?!” Write about you. If you are fortunate enough to have a “happening” life, there is something happening daily – write about that.

A friend of mine is currently working on a series of books that she’s the art consultant for. She has almost daily meetings with the printer / authors / representatives of the brand at locations where regular people are not even allowed to enter. I’ve told her she doesn’t even need to take DSLR photos – the location is so exclusive, she could post shitty grainy mobile phone photos and people would still come to the blog to see and read what she has to say. She could document her journey with the book publishing process.

Another friend of mine is an edible couture artist – she could blog about the work she does for her clients – from finding the best sugar to the moulds she works with, the way the city looks in the morning when she wakes up and steps into her studio, a client meeting, her sketches. She recently planted strawberries and was raving about how well the plants are doing – I asked her for photos on Whatsapp. She could easily use those very same photos and make a blog post. It doesn’t have to be long and neither does it have to have 20 photographs. Write a hundred words and include one photograph and you’re done. You don’t even have to do this on a daily basis – do it twice a week. Try doing it daily and see how it goes. It’s easy. But you’ll only know once you do it. You’re a blogger – not a journalist – you don’t have to spend months researching a particular subject that you know nothing about – you can write about a subject that you know best about : YOU.

( If you want some laughs instead of using anything from the above, there’s this Blog Topic Generator by HubSpot – thanks Meera for the tip. )

Other blog posts from Articles & Writing.