Writers are known for their creativity, but the truth is that the well sometimes runs dry. If you’ve ever found yourself fresh out of ideas, a way to instantly get more is by using a strategy called “Idea Mating.” 

Let’s say you’re writing an article on how to be a better parent. First, you’re going to make a column with ten qualities or traits of your ideal reader. In this case, your ideal readers are parents. So we might list ten types of parents, including men, women, single, young, traveling, working, stay-at-home, and so forth.  

In the second column, make an entirely different list of random words. It might be a list of verbs, words from book or song titles, emotions, holidays, or a million other possibilities. The point is that the two lists should not be related. 

Let’s say we choose a list of holidays. We would list words such as New Year’s, Easter, the 4th of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and so on. 

Then randomly “mate” a word from each column. For example, put a single mother with Christmas. What are the possibilities for an article on that topic? Or what about traveling parents and the 4th of July? Are there some interesting possibilities by mating those topics? 

You can get even more interesting by adding a third column. You can have a column for people, places, and things, with three unrelated lists.  

You can use this same strategy for fiction. It can help you come up with situations, plot points, characters, and much more. 

John Steinbeck said, “Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” By using the concept of idea mating, you can do this almost instantly.