If you struggle with writer’s block (and I mean who doesn’t), I got good news for you.

After dozens of experiment I finally found a solution that actually works and leads to great results.

Currently, AI-writing tools are all the rage. But honestly, they never really worked for me. They can be useful to brainstorm different formulations but aren’t useful to get that initial spark. And getting that initial spark is what I usually struggle with the most.

So no worries, I won’t tell you about some new AI-writing tool.

My solution is far simpler.

I started by scraping a large number of popular quotes, headlines, and tweets.

Then I turned them into fill-in-the-blank templates and prompts.

For example, the tweet:

Unsolicited advice: if you just met someone, you usually shouldn’t give them unsolicited advice.

becomes:

Unsolicited advice: if you __, you usually shouldn’t __

or as a prompt:

What’s a piece of unsolicited advice would you want to share with a friend?

I also used a simple machine-learning model to categorize all inputs. The tweet above, for example, ends up in the category “social”.

So now whenever I struggle to come up with content ideas, I simply open my list of templates and prompts, and the ideas immediately start flowing.

What makes this method truly magical is that it facilitates true creativity not plagiarism.

You’re not regurgitating what someone else has already said before. Instead, the prompts and templates are simply a more effective way to get the insights, stories, experiences, and ideas out of your head than staring at a blank page.

I usually struggle to write tweets. It’s simply not my medium. I’m much better at longform writing. But using this method I almost effortlessly wrote 49 tweets within less than an hour.

For example, I was inspired by this template template

Everyone wants __ but nobody wants __.

(which is based on this tweet) to write the following tweet:

Everyone wants a $10k MRR business but nobody wants to launch dozens of unsuccessful experiments, hop on calls with potential customers, or spend hours thinking their plans through.

This tweet and quite a few other ones I wrote during my session resonated with people. But more importantly, writing tweets was finally fun.

Now I should emphasize that I’m not using this method for all my tweets and if I do, I usually don’t follow the template’s structure exactly. I just picked a very direct example here to explain how the method works.

Even though I haven’t done many tests so far, I’m pretty sure the method is also effective for other kinds of content like blog posts, podcasts, videos.

You can use the templates or prompts to write a compelling headline or title. Then you deliver on the promise in text, audio, or video form.

To make it easy for others to test the method I created this little website. You can filter by category (productivity, money, …), source (tweets, headlines, quotes), and the type of inspiration you want (sparks, templates, prompts)

The tool is completely free and there are of course no ads as these definitely would be counter productive.

If there’s sufficient interest, I might add a paid tier later on to support further development and add a larger number of templates and prompts. But I built the tool in its current form primarily really just for myself and hosting it costs like $7/month. So the paid tier is not a priority right now.

Any feedback is appreciated!