Anything as a Topic

“Anything” covers a lot of ground but not all of it. There are still topics out there that if you used the plea of, “But I was told to write about anything,” your words would fall on deaf ears.

My battered copy of the Collins English Compact Dictionary defines anything as “any object, event, or action whatever.” Hence a writer when asked to write about anything could legitimately return an essay or article on bellybutton fluff, if he or she desired, because after all bellybutton fluff is an object. If the writer went down the event avenue of “anything” then he or she could quite possibly choose to wax lyrical about Cousin Fred’s 38th birthday dinner in Twizel – a small event but an event none the less. Or what about an action such as the time when I scratched my right earlobe with my right hand? The possibilities seem endless.

But is the topic of “anything” really the bottomless pit of ideas that it seems to be or is the writer still influenced by other factors that end up limiting a full exploration of the topic of “anything?” The answer is that of course the writer is limited. The writer is limited by the audience they are writing for, with the only exception being the private journal that is written behind closed doors and hidden from prying eyes.

Let’s face it, if you’re a writer and you earn your living writing for a parenting magazine, and your editor asks you to write a piece on “anything,” you’re not going to return with an article on how William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is not just a play about Jews. If you do, the chance of you ever being paid for such an article or the article ever being published in the parenting magazine would be very slim indeed. However an article on anything to do with parenting will probably stand a much better chance of being accepted.