Fear of an Empty Page Amid Abundant Headlines and Opinions

To maintain an artistic writing habit is a priority. According to Today.com, October 8 was National Face Your Fears Day. It’s difficult to identify weekly essay subjects when neither life experiences, headlines nor monthly observances, e.g. National ____ Day, provide great premises. 

I live a calm, routinized life, living less dramatically than a legion of others. This leaves me with few life experiences which relate to headlines from The Associated Press’, Cable News Network’s, or National Public Radio’s websites, or idea nudges from NationalToday.com. 

Idea-wise, there are dry weeks.

A writing teacher at the Loft Literary Center, nationally known author David Mura, strove to disarm our artistic anxiety thusly “lower your standards” for quality of prose. This serves long-form and long-term projects – Not those brief ones, 500-words, which you want to write consistently and turn around within one week.

Newspaper and magazine columnists are maybe cleverer, or smarter or both than moi? Pulitzer Prize earning columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr (retired from “The Miami Herald”), and Sarah Cupp, of the “New York Daily News,” write deftly and ably (respectively) about current events. I wish that I found column writing to be as easy or doable as them.

At the end of each week, I seek new ideas so I know what matter I’ll observe or opine about for the next essay. And, given how slowly I write essays, those ideas, which demand the most meager of research. Is my problem one of daunting standards, or a blockage? 

How do writers break through the seeming absence of attractive or exciting subjects or topics?