Eight HUGE Signs You’re Out Of Ideas!

And your Substack journey is about to fail

Philip Ogley

Sep 05, 2025

You Start Writing Listicles (Like This One) Again

It’s classic. You’ve run aground. You’ve got absolutely nothing of interest to say at all.

So what do you do? You think of a listicle.

— Eight AIRPORTS I’ve never been to…

— Eight THINGS to do on Good Friday…

— Eight WRITING tips for infants…

Nothing is working! You are out of ideas!

You’re Using Too Many Headings

When you’re on a roll writing, you never think of headings. You don’t even bother with paragraphs. You’re so supercharged with ideas that you blaze away to the end without even putting in a comma or a full stop

But when you’re down. Not, only, is your: punctuation, terrible. But you can’t help adding in a heading every other sentence.

Step One —

Step Two —

Step Three —

Key Takeaway —

Conclusion # 1 —

Conclusion # 2 —

You Recycle Everything

You start looking for pieces to rehash with minimal effort.

(like this one).

Even the pieces you wrote a few weeks ago are suddenly worthy. Would anyone notice? Are my brain-dead readers really paying attention?

I published this very article last Thursday, and no one has picked up on it yet?

Your Titles Are Often Long, Convoluted, Baffling, Overly Worded, Annoyingly Smug — And Cheap — And Tell the Reader Nothing About the Piece.

Gone are your short titles of yesteryear. Those economical three-word killer headlines that had everyone on their toes.

Now, a couple of years into the journey, not only are your titles as long as the pieces themselves.

But you’ve been stupid enough to put them through a title generator a thousand times. So the resulting headline is the hell-child of an 18th-century economist if he were to write an article on Medium.

Something like: “Post Napoleonic Fiscal Economical Hypothetical Theory Based on Profit and Loss With Specific Reference to Welsh Tin Mining in Prehistoric East Mercia, Circa AD 131.”

Your Pieces End Without A Point

You’re 1000 words in, but you’ve no memory of what the piece is about, how it started, or what the title was.

BUT you’ve got to get it out there!

It’s nearly six o’clock in the evening and time is against you. You’ve got kids to feed, even though you’ve never earned any money on this platform anyway.

So you decide on a quick ending, and hope no one will notice there will never be a follow-up.

“To be continued…”

You Start Using Wiki Comms Instead of Unsplash to Try to Be Reactionary

The quality of Wiki Comms’ photos is often so harrowing and shocking that you decide it’ll make your pieces look grudgey and downbeat. And so do for your writing what the Seattle music scene did for music in the 1990s.

Make it respectable, even though it’s ultimately shit. Which is really all we’re asking for.

Right?

ChatGPT is Tempting

So what happens if I put one of my old pieces into ChatGPT and ask it to rewrite it?

Will it work?

Of course. It’ll be an entirely new piece, for sure. But just as crap. It’ll probably lead in with a boring title. Have plenty of pointless headings. Have no real point or conclusion, and end with a