Now that you’ve exhausted your own life stories as well as those of everyone within a five-mile radius, it’s time to find other creative ways of filling up the idea well. Here are some techniques to fall upon in your brainstorming sessions.

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Are You Game?

Remember those word games in which one person would come up with a word, and then every other person would have to somehow come up with a related one? Try and play the same game with ideas. Think of a word, a sentence or a phrase, and then come up with ideas related to it. You can also do the same for titles and subheads that you pick up from a magazine or book. Here are the ideas I came up with from the subhead “Cheap Thrills”:

* Adventures Vacations on a Budget
* Sex in Fun Places
* How to Scare Your Neighbors on Halloween
* Dirty Pranks to Play on Your College Buds

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Let the Pictures do the Talking

Dig up your favorite photo album, an old magazine or just pictures that are lying around the house. What sort of article could you write around these pictures? Of course, this completely depends on the images you’re looking at, but if you were to place these photographs on a magazine page, what articles would they be accompanying? Would the photograph of you on a roller coaster be next to an article teaching readers to slow down and enjoy life rather than make it a roller coaster ride, or would it be about dealing with the fear of heights? Maybe it could turn into a personal essay about the first time you went to a theme park with your boyfriend and became so sick he had to take you home and tuck you into bed right away.

This is, by the way, a common trick used by greeting card writers to come up with verses.

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Start a Dream Journal

The technique is this: every morning as soon as you wake up, write down whatever you remember from the night’s dreams. It doesn’t have to make sense. In fact, it almost never will.

For the first few days, weeks or even months, you may find that you’re writing nothing but crap. Hang in there. Don’t give up thinking it’s a futile exercise and a waste of time. It isn’t. After the initial onslaught of madness, the really good ideas do start shining through. Or you start making better connections. I can’t explain what happens, but many writers have reported that it does work.
Here’s one of mine:

Dream: I’m trapped in a box, more like a coffin standing upright, and I’m trying desperately to push my way out. I can’t, because the box is probably locked from the outside. I’m breathless and trying to scream, but can’t. I feel nothing but the walls around me, and suddenly they start closing in on me.

When I woke up, I was actually trying to push open a door that had been closed by the wind, but I was pushing it in the wrong direction.

The dream was very vivid, so much so that I remember it very clearly even today, ten years later. I was mildly claustrophobic before this, but it’s after this dream surfaced that I actually started fearing elevators and closed, dark spaces. Years later, I came across a woman who feared heights. She said her fear had heightened after 9/11.

My idea: A look at how panic disorders and phobias can get heightened, and how to make sure you’re not aggravating your problem.

As you can see, my idea didn’t come fully formed in my dream. It never does. But I’ve often used dreams as context to look at topics and issues that may otherwise not have caught my attention.

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Journaling

I used to belong to the school of people who believe that keeping a journal is a waste of your writing time. Wouldn’t a writer rather spend her time on articles and essays for publication instead of indulging herself in whining about the state of her life?

That’s until I kept a journal, of course.

One particular memory forced me to start writing in my journal and address the issue. The more I wrote, the more liberated I felt. After a couple of weeks, I was still venting and letting out anger, but I was also recording raw emotions, frustrations, and new experiences. I had not only begun the healing process, but had also brought on to the page emotions that I hadn’t acknowledged until then. My writing was letting itself free.

I’m a big fan of Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way, which advises that all artists write three morning pages every day. I have indeed found solutions to my problems in these morning pages. I have also found essays, ideas, and nuggets of pure writing gold.

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Thread ‘em Together

Pick any topic, say technology. Now use this topic to generate ideas for other topics by combining the two. For instance, using my selected topic– technology– I’ll try to come up with ideas for women’s magazines, young adult magazines, relationship magazines, or maybe even business magazines. Similarly, I could pick another topic such as personal finance, and instead of finding ideas for a personal finance magazines, I’ll find ideas for magazines that cater to other audiences. Better yet, get specific. Think of topics like taxes, marriage, even cellphones. What can you tell readers of a relationship magazine about cellphones? Readers of a business magazine? A personal finance magazine?

Let me get you started.

TOPIC: Cellphones

MAGAZINES:

Women’s: Romance on Your Mobile
Young Adult: What’s Your SMS personality?
Business: Are Cellphone Cameras a Security Threat?
Personal Finance: Best Cellphone Buys of the Season

(These ideas are at least four years old, but you get the point.)

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What’s Missing?

Pick up a magazine of your choice and read any article that seems interesting. Now put down the magazine and try to think of what more you’d have liked to know. There you go– that’s your next idea.

Sometimes, it helps to be a reader instead of a writer. As a reader, try to figure out if there was some piece of information missing from the article that would have made a good sidebar or tangent. Write it.

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Questions People Ask

One of my best sources of ideas is from questions people ask and things they are discussing. What are you friends talking about over lunch?

A friend once asked me if he could go to jail over downloading free music. The rules were pretty clear in America. What about India? Good question. And one no one seemed to have an answer to. I quickly contacted lawyers and experts on IT law and published the feature, “Beware! Technology Could Land You in Jail,” about the legal aspects of the Internet and consumer technology in India.

More recently, a lot of my friends had been discussing virginity and the morality issues surrounding it in India. One told me about hymenoplasty (virginity “restoration”) and its rise in India, and that netted me my first assignment from Marie Claire. A friend who was getting into an arranged marriage and had hired a detective to get the scoop on her husband-to-be was the inspiration for my article, “In India, Parents of Brides-to-be Hire Sleuths.”