One of the biggest obstacles to writing consistently and freely is not having enough ideas. If you felt you had plenty of ideas to work with and to develop, then writing would be exciting and motivating and become the pleasure and adventure it should be. Trying to write without any ideas to develop is like trying to build a house without any bricks.
They're the raw material you need to build upon. A lack of ideas leads inevitably to a lack of confidence in your creativity. When you feel you never have any ideas, you write less often. And the less often your write, the more difficult it is when you DO come to write.
So how can you generate more ideas out of thin air? The answer is you don't need to. The problem lies not with the fact that you don't HAVE enough ideas. The problem is you don't CAPTURE enough ideas.
If you have nothing in place to record your ideas as they come to you, then they don't hang around, they just evaporate as quickly as they came, leaving you with that frustrating "just out of your grasp" feeling where you know you had a great idea, you just haven't a clue what it was! When you use an ideas journal or an ideas book - which can be just a simple pocket notebook you carry with you at all times to jot down your ideas - you give out a very strong message to your creative mind.
The signs you're emitting are saying "All ideas welcome here! Come inside - hot meal and cosy, comfortable bed provided. Stay as long as you like. All travellers welcome..."
You gain a reputation for being somewhere that ideas are valued and taken care of, given shelter from the cold outside. And the more ideas you capture, the more ideas you attract.
Before, by not capturing your ideas, you were like a hotel out in the middle of nowhere with no signs. Hardly anyone knew you were there, and the odd idea that did happen to stumble across your door was turned away back into the cold, neglected and unwanted. This whole concept comes down to giving your creative mind PERMISSION to be creative, allowing yourself to have a constant flow of ideas.
If you went to a hotel where you were welcomed in like a long lost family member returning home, and genuinely made to feel like this was a place you could stay and be happy for as long as you wanted, you'd recommend it to your friends, wouldn't you?
That's what happens when you use an ideas journal or notebook, the ideas are welcomed in, they tell their friends, more ideas come, and in a short space of time your hotel is thriving with all sorts of wonderful creative ideas, all intermingling and sparking off even more ideas.
So start using a writing ideas journal today.
It's the secret to having all the creative ideas you'll ever need, and could well be the best action you've take to stimulate your creative writing in a long time.