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Transcript

How to Multiply Your Ideas · The Daily Writer

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Daily Rider Podcast, where we bring you tips and inspiration each day to help you build habits for writing success.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: For more resources, including your free Daily Rider Starter Kit, visit DailyRiderLife.com.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you've ever found yourself fresh out of ideas, you can quickly get more by using an exercise called idea mating.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: So let's say you're writing an article on how to be a better parent.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: First, make a column with 10 qualities or traits of your ideal reader.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: In this case, it's parents.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: You might list 10 types of parents, including men, women, single, young, traveling, working, staying home, and so forth.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the first column.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Then in the second column, make a different list of random words.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: It might be verbs, song titles, emotions, holidays, or a million other possibilities.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: So the two lists should not be related.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: So in this case, the first list is 10 types of parents, the second list is just random words.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's say that for the list of random words, you choose a list of holidays.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: You could list words like New Year's Eve, Easter, the 4th of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Arbor Day, and whatever else you want to throw in there.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: And then what you do is you randomly mate or match a word from each column.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: For example, put a single mother with Christmas.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: What other possibilities for an article on that topic?
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Or what about traveling parents and the 4th of July?
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: So you get where I'm going with this.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: You have two columns of different words, you're matching random words, and you're coming up with some interesting possibilities that way.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the cool thing is that 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 related to an overall topic.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of different ways to do this.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a good way to do nonfiction ideas, but this strategy works for fiction as well.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: You can use it to help you come up with situations, plot points, characters, and a lot more.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: The great author John Steinbeck famously said, ideas are like rabbits.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: You get a couple and you learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: And that really applies to what we're talking about here.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: By using the concept of idea mating, you can generate more ideas than you can ever use, no matter what your genre or style of writing.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: So here's today's challenge.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Try idea mating the next time you write and see what kinds of interesting ideas you can generate.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: A big thanks to today's sponsor, the new book Monetize Your Book with the Course, your guide to quickly creating a profitable and impactful course from your book.
• 2:55
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• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're ready to create a course that helps you build an additional stream of income, and if you're ready to engage your students at a deeper level, visit dailywriterlife.comslash monetize to grab this incredible resource.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: As always, thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.