For about a year, I had a goal to write something for twenty minutes, every day. Didn't matter what it was, didn't matter if it was dross (a lot of it certainly was), I just had to write. And they had to be discrete snippets - no picking up where the previous one left off. They were distinct pieces so that I couldn't get too attached to a particular line, story or setting, and therefore be worried about "ruining" it, or feel that I had to write about that, rather than something else.

I did permit a whole lot of snippets that used the same setting and characters, and even quite a few that followed each other in a roughly-logical order (once I ordered them...). Though I once pulled them all together into a "novel" to see what I did have, and was highly amused to see the story routinely dump the characters into an about-to-die scenario and then skip ahead to the next 'scene' without any mention of how they'd pulled things out of the fire... Anyway.

I still think it's a pretty good habit to have - I certainly have a lot of ideas milling around because of it. More, in fact, than I could ever possibly write. There are over fifty novel ideas and hundreds of short-story ideas in various stages of incubation. Those are just the ones I think have legs. They're all written down, too. They're one of the reasons I'm trying to train myself to produce work quickly.

But there were times that I really struggled to come up with something. Sometimes your brain isn't in ideas mode. Most of the time, I used tarot cards for this - I'd shuffle a deck (I have several, precisely for this purpose) plonk down a few cards, and see if anything inspired me. I chose decks with complex, surrealist artwork, because I find there's no faster way to give myself an idea than trying to stick too impossible concepts together, and it's an art style I like. (If you're planning to buy tarot cards for this pupose, look at them first, either through amazon, or a review site - see if the artwork 'speaks' to your idea-mind.)

All that was a ramgling preamble (I've had a really long week) for: using random elements to inspire regular writing, training yourself to build whole ideas out of snippets.

If you don't have tarot decks, you can grab a random article from Wikipedia (look at the logo in the top left. Look at the collection of links right underneath it. The fifth one says 'Random article'. Click it.) or you can play with some web-based random generators:

• Seventh Sanctum has too many to name, and a lot of them hilarious.
• Chaotic Shiny has them nicely organised by category
• Scaldrow has mostly plot or genre-based generators
• And Squid has some mostly-tolkein-inspired names, cultures, places and items.

One last word - using random generators can take some getting used to. It can be hard, at first, to see the inspiration in "The eleven pieces of the Burning Lute of Worlds. And a gay dwarf." but working to create story out of these snippets trains your mind to see inspiration in anything. And then it's just a challenge of writing down the idea before it gets away.