Hi Craig! Hey everyone! It's Craig!
This answer is coming "post burrito", so no promises...
To answer this, I'm going to use an article that I wrote this week on GraphQL (shameless plug), and kind of dissect how I got from zero to article.
Simona has been teaching me GraphQL and each time she and I got together, we recorded the session. That left us with three videos in which I go from zero to GraphQL in a React app. We wanted to share those videos with everyone, so we needed a blog post to let the world know.
That's the premise from which I started - a blog post announcing three videos on GraphQL with Simona.
So here's how this comes together.
I don't write titles first - always last. Because there is a good chance that I will change direction in the article and not even go with my original premise. This last article is a perfect example of that.
I start writing an intro. I usually write the first sentence and delete it about 5 times until I have something that I like. I try and let people know what the article is going to be about in the first sentence. This is called "not burying the lead".
The first paragraph is always the hardest, and then I just let it go. In this case, I wrote a draft and sent it to Simona. She reviewed it, offered some feedback and said "There aren't many jokes. Where are the jokes?"
I slept on it, got up on the right side of the bed and went back and began to re-write the article. About halfway through, I realized that the article was mostly about how GraphQL keeps you from going into technical debt. That was the main thing I took away from these sessions with Simona and it was coming out in the post, so that's the angle I went with. Once you figure out what exactly it is you are trying to say, articles nearly write themselves.
Whew! That's a whole wall of text and part of me is sorry you have to read it, but another part of me is just hungry for peanut M&M's. Priorities.