Inspiration for topics that I want to write about usually come from an article I’ve read on someone else’s weblog, or perhaps a news source. A secondary factor may be Twitter, which seems odd, but it works.
Sometimes an idea sparks and I like to start gathering my thoughts together on my iPhone. It usually starts with composing a tweet in Birdhouse, but then turns into something too long to keep under 140 characters.
So I proceed with trying to break it up into two tweets. Still too long? Break it up into three tweets. Okay this is getting stupid now, time for a proper blog post.
If I had written everything in Birdhouse, I use the email list feature to bulk send everything to Simplenote via a special email address. Simplenote parses the email instantly and makes it available by the time I open the iOS app. Since I pay for a Simplenote premium account, I have it also set to sync with my Dropbox account. If I wanted, I can then open up the corresponding text file using whatever text editor I want on my MacBook Pro.
Speaking of text editors, I upgraded to Lion on release day and I’ve just been using TextEdit for writing. Since I use Markdown as my formatting choice, I use Brett Terpstra’s Marked, which is a great app for previewing Markdown formatting from any text editor.
So that’s my current writing workflow. This works well for me, and perhaps it may for you as well.