3 Ways to Guarantee You Never Run Out of Writing Ideas

Use your mind’s natural design to fuel your creativity

Have you ever been afraid that one day on your writing journey you may hit the wall and run out of writing ideas? I pondered this possibility for way too long. The thought that haunted me was along the lines of ‘What if one day I have nothing left to say?’

This didn’t just cause me to doubt myself for no reason, it also led to ridiculous mental gymnastics, such as “saving” my best ideas for later while creating something I didn’t enjoy. But recently, I had a sobering realization.

Although I’ve been writing for a living for 2.5 years, the running-out-of-ideas scenario never happened. In fact, the longer I write, the more ideas I have. I came to see that a lack of ideas was never my reality. It was only a fearful projection.

When I think of the conversations I’ve had with fellow writers in the past 30 months, I can’t recall one instance of someone telling me they were struggling with generating ideas. If anything, writers tend to struggle with which ideas to choose from the ever-growing pile.

Looking at my experience and the nature of the human mind, I realized that running out of ideas isn’t a feasible scenario. That’s because of the very way our minds are designed.

Your Mind Insures You Against a Lack of Ideas

The basic thing to understand about the human mind is that it functions based on associations. Your brain is designed to make connections between events, objects, people, and other experiences in your life.

Stephen Hayes, the author of the Relational Frame Theory which explains the mechanics of human cognition and language, put it this way:

“Humans think relationally; (…) in broad terms, humans are able to arbitrarily relate objects in our environment, thoughts, feelings, behavioural predispositions, actions (basically anything) to other objects in our environment, thoughts, feelings (basically anything else) in virtually any possible way (e.g. same as, similar to, better than, opposite of, part of, cause of, and so on). This characteristic is essential to the way the human mind functions because it is our key evolutionary asset and has permitted the human species a dominant role in the animal kingdom.”

In other words, the ability to make virtually any association is what makes us human. You can test it experientially with the following simple exercise.

Pick any one noun that comes to mind right now. It can be abstract or a real object. Got it? Then pick an object from the room you’re in. Now try to think of what the two have in common.

This shouldn’t be too hard if you give it a serious try. Now, go one step further. Take the same two items and find a way in which the first one is better than the second one. Then, think of how the second one is better than the first.

Do you see what I mean? Your mind is capable of justifying virtually any connection between any two items. This points to the observation that those connections aren’t objectively real. If they were, you couldn’t think of the first item being better than the second and then, just an instant later, the second being better than the first.

Those connections themselves are the creation of your mind. That’s your mind’s power of unlimited association which guarantees you’ll never run out of writing ideas.

Here are three ways to amplify this natural power and generate the kind of ideas you’re looking for.

1. Keep an Idea Log to Create an Abundance Mindset

Almost any successful writer will advise you to keep a log where you can dump all your ideas as they come to you. I found this to be an excellent practice, but not for the reasons I initially thought.

One advantage of keeping an idea log is that you have a go-to place when you’re looking for something to write about. It also relieves your mind from having to store ideas in your memory.

But piling up writing ideas also has one other advantage I didn’t expect when I started doing it. Namely, it creates a sense of abundance. Once I know that there are already many ideas sitting in the log, my mind has a much easier time generating new ones.

The sense of scarcity versus abundance works the same way for creativity as is does for other things in life. When you live with a sense of lacking something, it seems difficult to create more of it. Conversely, when you feel you’ve got enough, it’s often effortless to obtain even more.

It’s the same with making money. For people who live in poverty, making extra money always means a lot of effort. For wealthy people, the income generated by the capital they already possess is almost unquestionable.

As Edgar Bronfman said:

“To turn $100 into $110 is work. To turn 100 million into $110 million is inevitable.”

It’s the same with generating ideas. When you feel like you have few, coming up with new ones feels hard. But when you have a log full of writing ideas, your mind relaxes. You’re not pressed for more, therefore it’s likelier you’ll have them.

That’s why I recommend you to start an idea inventory as soon as possible if you haven’t got one yet.

2. Try to Force Your Mind to Stop Generating Ideas

The most natural way that my mind creates ideas is when I go on a long walk alone. When I’m relaxed and immersed in observing the world around me, my brain seems to make the kind of connections it never does when I actively try to solve problems.

When article ideas come to me on a walk, I often make a mental inventory. I don’t feel like stopping to pull out my notebook and write them down. But when I know I’m reaching the threshold for what I can keep in my short-term memory, I sometimes request my mind to stop generating more ideas. I just want to put the creative process on hold until I’ll record the ideas I already have.

What usually happens when I explicitly ask my mind to stop generating ideas is that even more ideas appear. This is due to the same mechanics of the mind that are at play when we “try not to think of a pink elephant.”

As I mentioned before, our minds work based on association. Having the thought “I don’t want more ideas” includes the phrase “more ideas.” Your mind doesn’t make the distinction between whether you want them or not. Since you mentally mentioned the phrase, it’s going to set in motion the process associated with that phrase.

That is, it will generate more ideas.

Carl Jung is credited with saying that “what you resist not only persists, but will grow in size.” Usually, this observation is used in psychology to help people who struggle with mental health problems. It’s a way of showing them that they’re better off accepting their experience rather than fighting it.

However, you can turn this upside down and use it to generate more writing ideas. Weirdly, the way to do that is by asking your mind to stop making new connections while it’s on fire creating them.

3. Learn to Find New Ideas Within the Ones You Already Wrote About

This is yet another way of using your mind’s natural tendency to associate. To do that, you have to redefine the very scope of the word “idea.”

Start by realizing that no idea is a finite entity, complete in and of itself. It always either contains or connects to endless other ideas. You can take advantage of this by looking at any piece you already wrote as a source of at least ten other ideas.

When you write your articles, you may be inclined to think that once the piece is finished, that’s it. That’s your one idea covered, from beginning to end. But if you go through it and look at every paragraph or sentence separately, you’ll realize that any of them could be a starting point to a new piece of writing.

You can try it with this article. Go through it from the beginning and see how many sentences, quotes or paragraphs you could extract and use as a point of departure for your own article. Then, you can do the same with all the pieces you already wrote yourself.

You’ll see that any piece of writing — good or bad, yours or someone else’s — is in itself a goldmine of ideas. To spot them, all you need is a new approach to reading and thinking.

This approach is the abundance mindset I mentioned earlier. Once you approach the content you read, write and think from a place of abundance, you’ll understand that there’s an unlimited number of ideas in the world.

This number is only determined by the connections your mind is able to create. And because this is what it does all the time, chances are you won’t run out of writing ideas until the day you die.