My New Secret Weapon for Fresh Writing Ideas
By: Cassandra Sigmon
Tags: Blogging, Writing Advice, Ideas, Writing Life, Writing Tips

My New Secret Weapon for Fresh Writing Ideas

It’s called a Harper’s Index, but with a few twists

Photo created in Canva using image by peshkov from Getty Images Pro

Inspiration can come from the strangest places. Surprisingly, I found that sometimes the best writing inspiration comes through a list of numbers.

For me, that’s saying a lot. I’m not a numbers person. In school, I thought math was the most boring subject. And then I learned how a few statistics could give me the writing inspiration I was looking for, and I had to change my opinion about numbers.

Starting in 1984, Harper’s Magazine began publishing lists of random statistics. Named after the magazine, each list is called a Harper’s Index.

These statistics are not what you would normally type into a Google search. They are pretty obscure, and sometimes comical too. But a Harper’s Index can provide a lot more than a laugh. It is my secret weapon for discovering new writing ideas, because I don’t just read the indexes. I create my own.

Random facts are fun, but a personalized Harper’s Index is even more useful. You can choose any topic and start compiling a list of statistics about that topic. You might be surprised at all the numbers you think of. I was!

Creating a Harper’s Index is easy. Each entry follows this format:

Description: number

As long as you follow that format, you can’t go wrong. Each entry in your index is a possible future topic you can write about.

1. Start with yourself

You know yourself better than anything or anyone else, so it makes perfect sense to begin with a Harper’s Index of your own life.

For example, here is an excerpt from my Harper’s Index:

Violins I own: 3 Mileage on my car: 141,724 Cats my family owns: 6 Words in the book I am working on: 61,230

You can use any statistics related to your life. Don’t think too hard! Just start scribbling numbers down.

After twenty entries or so, put down your pen and stop. Congratulate yourself. You just wrote down twenty new writing ideas!

Every entry in your Harper’s Index can be used for a blog post, a story, a poem, a memoir, a social media post, or some other piece of writing. For example, I can take the entry “Violins I own: 3” and write a story about how I got my first violin. I can take the number of cats we own and write a blog post about what it’s like to live with six cats. I can write a social media post about the progress on my book and say “61,230 words and counting!”

You get the idea. You can use your Harper’s Index many different ways.

2. Branch out into different topics

After creating your first Harper’s Index, you may want to branch out into different topics. This is a great way to start collecting ideas for a blog post or story in a specific niche. This is also useful if you have a general idea but you need to narrow down your topic.

For example, let’s say I want to write a blog post about horses but I needed to narrow down my topic. To begin, I could write a Harper’s Index about horses. It would look something like this:

Muscles in each ear: 10 Age at which the permanent central incisors come in: 2.5 Inches in a hand: 4 Length of the Kentucky Derby in miles: 1.25

Let’s say I continue the list until it is a hundred entries long. That gives me one hundred different specific blog ideas. I could write about how the ten muscles in a horse’s ear allow the ear to rotate in the direction of the sound. I could write a post discussing horse teeth. I could write about why the hand is the standard unit for measuring a horse’s height.

If you write in a specific niche, a Harper’s Index could become your secret weapon for never running out of ideas.

3. Ask your friends to contribute

Whether you are creating a Harper’s Index about yourself or another topic, you can ask other people to contribute. Reach out to your family, friends, or even social media followers and ask them to add to your index.

You don’t have to come up with every idea yourself. Sometimes it is helpful to get ideas from other people.

You can also turn your Harper’s Index into polling ideas. For example, let’s say you make an entry in your personal Harper’s Index that says “Pairs of shoes in my closet: 13.” You can then post the entry on social media and ask your followers how many shoes they have in their closets. This is a great way to engage with your followers and collect data that you might be able to use for a future writing piece.

4. Organize your indexes

To help organize your indexes, I suggest breaking them down into categories. This will help you keep writing ideas organized, and will help keep your lists to a reasonable length.

Example categories for your indexes.

Your Harper’s Index can be as long or short as you want it to be, but I recommend making each list somewhere between 20 and 100 entries. You can add a few entries every day to keep up a steady flow of ideas. I warn you: it’s addictive. Grab a piece of paper and give it a try!