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‘What am I going to write about’ is the most important question that you’ve got to ask yourself before you start writing any paper. But it’s even more important when you’re deciding what you’re going to do for your midterm. After all, with a shorter paper a poor topic can still be fudged as there is generally enough pre-amble and post-amble to get you through.

When the paper gets longer, however, that’s no longer possible. You actually have a big body to fill and you better make sure that you fill it with something interesting.

So how do you decide what to fill it with? To that, we’re going to dedicate the rest of this article.

Give yourself some space

Sometimes the best place for an idea is your subconscious mind. So, make sure that you read the books well before you’re actually supposed to write the paper. Then, do a bit of brainstorming and let it lie.

Come back to it a week later. Look at your brainstormed ideas. Perhaps open the book at random or re-read a passage that you really liked. Then jot down a few more ideas.

Rinse and repeat that a couple of times and you’ll probably come up with some ideas that you would never have thought up on day one.

There are a lot of tools out there

That not enough? Then think about using the many tools that are out there. There are entire literary groups that you can ask for help. Note that if you do ask for help, you shouldn’t just ask ‘what should I write my term paper on’ as that will probably get you called out as being lazy. Instead, try something a little bit narrower in scope. For example, talk about a character that you love and why, then see if anybody has any ideas for how you can write your term paper about them.

Here are some places to look:

• Quora. It is quite amazing to me how great the answers are that you’ll get back from a site like Quora. They really have a lot of experts who will gladly go out of their way to give you some great advice. So ask them for help!
• Wikipedia. This site gets a really bad wrap in the academic community. That’s to your advantage, however, as it means a lot of your professors won’t read the site. So go on, plunder it for ideas! Just remember to find different sources.
• mastergrades.com: Of course, you can ask somebody else to look for you, provided you’re willing to pay. Mastergrades.com is a great place to head in that case.
• Google Scholar: Scholar is just full of research and literary papers that you can use for inspiration. Find a couple that deal with the books you want to look at and look at the ‘further directions’. Hey presto, themes galore.

Possible areas topic

Want to come up with your own ideas? Then here’s some places to look.

• Choose a minor character. The great thing about minor characters is that because we don’t have to follow them the entire book, they don’t have to be particularly likable. That means the writer can do a heck of lot of things with them that aren’t possible with the main character. And that means they are a fertile topic for midterm papers.
• How about the villain? People always ignore those. That’s because they don’t want to write about the bad guy. Why not? Just because you write about them doesn’t mean that you’re suddenly bad. And the bad guy’s motivations are often just as interesting as the main character’s. So explore their side of the story. Heck, you might even be able to turn them into a hero if you look at the world from their point of view.
• Look to recurring themes. Writers are people too. I know it’s hard to believe, sometimes, but it’s true. That means they’ve got their own hang-ups, issues and interests. For that reason, it can often be interesting to look at certain themes that stretch between books – as those will give us an insight on the mind behind the words.
• Explain how an event in their lives can be read back in their works. If you’ve got something serious that happens to you, then it will often stick around in your mind and in turn color your writing. So why not see if you can take how a certain experience might have transformed a person’s writing? The best thing you can do is explore a bit of the psychological effects of certain events and then connect that to trends in their writing. Hey, presto! Term paper! 

Last words

So that’s it! Some great advice to getting you a term paper topic in no time flat! Show a bit of initiative and you’ll have something so interesting, so exciting that you’ll actually want to write the paper.

Now that doesn’t sound so bad, does it? So go on, get out of here. You’ve got a term paper to write.