What to Write About When You Don't Know What To Write About

It's time to kill your imposter syndrome as a writer. Find the "orange" intersections that turn your interests into a loyal, well-lit tavern where your tribe actually wants to hang out.

The legendary sportswriter Red Smith was once asked if turning out a daily column was difficult. He replied, “Why, no. You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.” And that he did, thousands and thousands of times in the pages of the New York daily papers.

Every time I open a blank Substack editor, I think about that quote.

There is nothing quite as deeply intimidating as a blinking cursor on a stark white screen. It’s a tiny, pulsing metronome mocking your absolute lack of ideas. You sit there, your seven-dollar oat milk latte turning into room-temperature sludge, wondering why you ever thought anyone would care about what you have to say.

Orange in the dive bar bathroom.

And here is the painful, unavoidable truth of the modern internet: thanks to the infinite scroll and our collective screen-to-screen ping-pong, they usually don’t care.

Keep in mind how people consume the internet. They are experiencing the two-screen phenomenon. They are scrolling their phones while watching Netflix. They are highly distracted. If you are just throwing generic observations at the wall, you lose to Netflix every time.

Unless you give them a damn good reason not to.

The other day, a reader named Mark left a comment on one of my Substack notes that perfectly encapsulated this exact brand of digital paralysis:

“I’m going through that now. What do I want to write about daily that people will read?”

It is a massive bummer watching talented people spiral because they don’t know where to start, but I know that feeling intimately. Pouring your soul into a piece of writing, only for the algorithm to shrug and bury it beneath a teenager’s dance trend, is deeply demoralizing. I know writers despise the word "content," but when the internet fails to recognize your life-altering prose and instead treats it as digital filler... yeah, it feels like content. It makes you want to throw your laptop into the ocean.

But instead of committing hardware homicide, it sparks the once-upon-a-time-aspiring English teacher in me to step to the front of the classroom, aggressively tap the chalkboard, and coach.

We suffer from this delusion that we need to be brilliant polymaths right out of the gate. We stubbornly think we need to write the definitive, world-shifting essay on politics, culture, and the human condition by 9:00 AM on a Tuesday.

But the internet is an unruly and deafening place. Consider what you are actually trying to pull off: you are trying to tap into a marvelous, relentless output network of collective human consciousness and somehow stand out. It is sheer bedlam. If you try to write for everyone about everything, you are just whispering into a hurricane.

When it comes to making stuff for the Internet, I believe that world-shifting epiphanies are overrated and often end up a waste of time. It’s an easy way to bite off more than you can chew. They’ll send you down a tedious path toward a vision that will never unlock the true creative momentum you’re looking to achieve.

Instead, you need a lens that you want to share with the world. A framework, or a boundary.

You need to find your orange. I’ll show you what I mean here in a second.

I went through my Huji app and found all the orange-hued photos I could find to illustrate this essay. This is the orange hues of the Venetian-side entrance at Sphere Las Vegas.

But first, if you are staring at the blinking cursor of doom right now, I want you to try this exercise. It’s something I used to fall back on during my teaching days, and it is the single best way to unclog a creative drain.

One quick, non-negotiable ground rule before we begin: You do not need to be an expert. So damn your imposter syndrome! People routinely paralyze themselves into absolute silence because they think they need a PhD or ten thousand hours of mastery to write about a topic. That is a damn shame. No one is asking you to write a peer-reviewed academic thesis. We just want to read about the things you are genuinely, irrationally interested in. Pure, unfiltered enthusiasm beats credentials every single time.

Your innate curiosity and finely-tuned powers of observation are remarkably good guideposts when it comes to writing.

Now grab a coffee, get a pen, and do this:

Step 1: Start with Broad Buckets

Write down three things you are generally interested in. They can be incredibly broad. Let’s say your list is:

1. Travel

2. Cooking

3. Personal Finance

Step 2: Find a Narrow Qualifier

“Travel” is too big. You cannot own “travel.” So, let’s build a fence around it. Give each of your broad buckets a hyper-specific qualifier. This is your thematic anchor or running conceit.

By narrowing the motif down to “Italy” under those three topics, you’re now giving yourself a chord structure for your thought-jam.

Then, start riffing until you land on a distinct angle.

1. Instead of “Travel,” get specific about a region you love to visit: The Two-Week Tuscan Pretender. A newsletter strictly dedicated to helping burnt-out millennials plan hyper-specific, 14-day itineraries in Italy where they can successfully pretend to be minor European aristocracy.

2. Instead of “Cooking,” get hyper-specific about a relatable household pain point that you have found a solution to: The Desperate Dad’s Sunday Gravy. A column built around mastering budget-friendly, 45-minute Italian dinners for a family of four that will successfully bribe your kids into putting down their iPads.

3. Instead of “Personal Finance,” get practical about a wildly impractical pipe dream: The Sicilian Fixer-Upper Delusion. A deeply neurotic breakdown of the spreadsheet-heavy financial gymnastics required to actually buy and renovate one of those abandoned $1 houses in Sicily without bankrupting your bloodline.

Voilà! Now you are no longer shouting into the void. You are talking to a specific person in a specific room.

Step 3: Answer The “Three Whys”

You aren’t done yet. For each of your newly narrowed topics, write three bullet points about why you actually care about them. Go deep. Be Socratic. Get as personal as you feel comfortable being when telling your story on these topics.

Let’s look at The Desperate Dad’s Sunday Gravy:

• Why 1: Because my grandmother used to make Sunday gravy, and the smell of simmering San Marzanos is the only thing keeping my lingering existential dread at bay.

• Why 2: Because the grocery store checkout screen looks like a ransom note in this economy, and a box of rigatoni is the only way I can feed four humans for under ten bucks without serving them instant ramen.

• Why 3: Because my kids are hopelessly tethered to Roblox, and physically forcing them to roll meatballs with their bare hands is the only way I can get them to maintain eye contact with me for twenty consecutive minutes.

The one that sparks the most natural flow state and introspection, and that feels most comfortable bleeding onto the page, is the one you should tackle.

Look at what just happened.

You went from having “writer’s block about cooking” to having a deeply personal, highly relatable thesis about family, economics, and modern parenting—all disguised as a piece about making spaghetti. That is an essay people will read.

More importantly, it is the ultimate antidote to imposter syndrome. The voice in your head screams that you aren’t a culinary expert, so you have no business writing about food. But you aren’t writing about ‘food.’ You are writing about the highly specific Venn diagram of grocery-bill anxiety, screen-time battles, and nostalgic grandmother guilt.

Everyone has a Venn diagram of interests, and your true tribe lives right there in the overlap.

That lane between two seemingly unrelated things is your orange.

The second you realize you are the only person standing in that exact intersection, the imposter syndrome simply evaporates. You don’t have to fake being an industry expert when you are the undisputed master of your own little puddle.

Orange at twilight over Los Angeles

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Why This Matters…

Here is the thing I’ve learned after 17 years grinding in the digital media trenches: This “Three Whys” exercise serves as a highly effective content business strategy, in addition to conjuring up your muse.

If you ever want to make a living doing this—if you ever want a subscriber to buy into your publication or a brand to pay you for your attention—you have to understand what they are buying.

Brands do not buy generalists. A high-end olive oil company does not want to sponsor a newsletter about “cooking.” Hell, they’re probably already spending money with the New York Times and Bon Appétit anyway. They want to sponsor the writer (or the team) who has cultivated a fiercely loyal micro-tribe of parents trying to preserve their heritage on a budget. They want to own the mindshare across many related hyper-niches.

Rarely do readers, either. Let’s be brutally honest about why people actually subscribe to things on platforms like this. No one is smashing the ‘Subscribe’ button and handing over their email address (or worse, their actual credit card!) just because they think you seem like a cool guy who strings nice sentences together. They subscribe because your hyper-specific obsession perfectly aligns with their own. Or hit that button because they want to feel understood, or because they want to learn something, or because they want to feel like they are paying dues to join a very specific, weirdly wonderful club. Hitting ‘subscribe’ is an inherently selfish act, in the best way possible.

They are supporting your tribe because they are getting a tangible piece of identity (or utility!) out of it for themselves.

Finding Your Orange

This brings us to the ultimate sweet spot.

Perhaps you’ll recall that at the beginning of this instruction manual, I told you to find your orange. Let’s unpack that a little more.

If you really want to figure out what to write about, you have to train your brain to look for topical and audience overlap. Find the intersection between what a specific group of people considers core to their identity and another seemingly unrelated thing you happen to be deeply obsessed with.

Think of it like mixing paint. You have a red lane and a yellow lane. You have to find your orange.

The orange glow of a dive bar in the Pennsylvania woods.

For example, at BroBible, our absolute bread and butter is the NFL. It is the biggest sport we cover. Millions of people come to us for water-cooler football stories. That is one of our massive, primary lanes, and our business success is dictated by how we report on it.

But NFL fans are human beings; they like other things besides football. And a very small, very vocal subset of those football fans happen to be aggressively obsessed with the jam band Phish... Just like me.

When I write a piece that threads the needle between the NFL and Phish, that specific concentric overlap goes absolutely rabid. It triggers this primal, deeply internalized “One of us! One of us!” reaction. Think about the sheer math of it: there are hundreds of millions of NFL fans out there. Capturing their attention as a whole is virtually impossible because a gazillion other writers, creators, and multi-billion-dollar networks are fiercely competing to do exactly that. It’s an absolute bloodbath.

Graphic design is NOT my passion.

But hundreds of thousands of Phish fans that also happen to be NFL fans? That is a significantly narrower group, but it is still a massive audience—and they are infinitely easier to capture because no one else is talking directly to them.

It proves you aren’t just talking at them from an ivory tower and that you actually understand them. You get just as unhinged about a flawless trick-play pass to a 330-pound offensive tackle like Penei Sewell as you do about a grimy, 30-minute, type-two Tweezer jam from a random Tuesday in 1997. You speak their weird, hyper-specific dialect, and don’t just see the world through the lens of what happens between the hash marks.

If you are struggling to find your orange, start crashing your broad interests into your weird obsessions and see what survives.

Here is some food for thought:

The Powerlifting Nerd

General fitness is so oversaturated. But gym bros who also aggressively debate the lore of Elden Ring between heavy deadlift sets? That is a fiercely loyal tribe. They’re out there, trust me.

The Fairway Aviator

Despite its popularity, traditional golf content is a saturated nightmare. But what about weekend hackers who are also pilots or hardcore aviation nerds? They’re out there, and they travel with their clubs in the cargo bay of their personal aircraft. The guys who aggressively calculate the aerodynamic crosswinds of a 7-iron using local air traffic control data and write manifestos on how Bernoulli’s principle can cure a wicked slice… You’ve just cornered the fairway flight-path market.

The Michelin-Star Prepper

Doomsday survivalist content usually features paranoid guys hoarding buckets of freeze-dried sludge that tastes like salted cardboard. But look at the Conservas obsessive. This is the guy who has the full-blown prepper mentality—the night-vision goggles, the tactical water filtration systems, the reinforced bunker—but he’s used that survivalist discipline to safeguard a temperature-controlled library of vintage Portuguese spiced sardines and smoked small-batch octopus. While the rest of the neighborhood is outside engaged in a frantic bartering session, trading their last few gallons of unleaded for a dented can of off-brand ravioli, he’s pairing foraged apocalyptic truffles with $40 tins of Nuri and a good Barolo. That’s the bougie elite doomsday market.

Blaze orange in the Pennsylvania woods near where I grew up.

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At the end of the day, readers don’t care about your vanity metrics. They’re all about how you vibe and alignment with their own interests, identity, and worldview.

Orange is a license to creative freedom, too. It’s important to remember that “orange” isn’t a monolith. In your citrus grove of ideas, you’ve got Valencias, Sumos, and zesty little tangerines—meaning once you find your lane, you start finding shades of it in everything you touch. This is what we call having “taste,” but I call it building an editorial lens. It is the cultivation of a specific storycraft that allows you to share your world without sounding like a robot. It’s the freedom to explore every corner of your obsession, as long as you stay true to the zest.

The orange glow of a Phish show, at just the right moment.

When you narrow your focus and find your orange, you stop competing with other broadly defined writers and creators who actually are experts in their chosen topics. Your interests and innate curiosity became your north star, and in doing so, you became a publisher with a distinct editorial mandate. You build a cozy, well-lit tavern on the internet where people actually want to hang out.

So stop staring at the cursor. Or trying to boil the ocean by yourself.

Pick a puddle, figure out why you like splashing in it, find some friends to splash with you, and start typing.

You don’t have to open a vein. Just open a Google Doc.