If you’ve ever found yourself fresh out of ideas, you can quickly get more by using an exercise called “Idea Mating.”

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

In the second column, make a different list of random words. They might be verbs, song titles, emotions, holidays, or a million other possibilities. The two lists should not be related.

Let’s say you choose a list of holidays. You would list days such as New Year’s, Easter, the 4^th 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 4^th of July?

You can multiply your ideas even more by adding a third column of unrelated words or by breaking down your overall topic into three lists of people, places, and things.

This strategy works for fiction, as well. You can use it to help you come up with situations, plot points, characters, and more.

John Steinbeck famously 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 generate more ideas than you could ever use, no matter your genre or style.

Today’s Challenge: Try Idea Mating the next time you write and see what interesting ideas you can generate.