How to use mind mapping to identify hundreds of new writing topics

Have you ever experienced writer's block? It's a pain, especially when you need to produce, but your creative muse seems to have left the building.

Darren Rowse, writing on the ProBlogger website, has come up with a marvelous technique that uses mind mapping to help you to generate fresh ideas for your writing. His article deals specifically with brainstorming topics for a blog, but this tactic can be used for almost any kind of writing. Here's how it works:

1. Take the last five topics you have written about and place them within five circles.
2. Spend time brainstorming on ways that the topic can be extended. How can you cover different aspects of it more deeply? Think laterally, too: What topics are closely related to the one you're considering? What do your readers need to know about that topic?
3. Map any ideas you generate as subtopics to the existing topic.
4. You may also want to consider each of the new ideas you've generated and brainstorm ways that they, in turn, can be extended.
5. Evaluate your ideas. Not all of them will be worthy of an article or a blog post. But at the end of this exercise, you will end up with a fresh stock of top-notch ideas for your writing efforts.

This is a terrific use of mind mapping, and one that I plan to use in 2008!