I recently wrote a post about the various places you can look to find things to write about. Over coming writer’s block can be harder at times than others, and even rummaging through other venues may not work. That’s when working with word association can help.

Word association is one of the easiest ways of coming up with ideas that I’ve ever personally used. In a nutshell, it goes like this. Write down any word that comes to mind. Doesn’t matter what, just write it down. Now, write down 3 or 4 different ideas that come to mind from that first word. Keep going from one idea to the next until you see an idea begin to form.

Another idea I created for myself is a little thing I call N.A.V.A. These stand for Noun, Adjective, Verb, Adverb. I just write down one of each, not thinking about how they go together or anything like that. Then, I work at trying to find a way to link them to each other. For example, my page would look like this:

N=Basketball
A=Globular
V=Crash
A=Sensationally

Now, I’d try and get each of those words to coincide with each other in a story or an article. For instance, I could write a story about a basketball player in a car crash. Or I can write about the sensation exploits of professional basketball players. There are several ideas that can be obtained from just these four words.

Mind you, these are only a couple of ideas to help you get over your writer’s block. One of the best ideas, though, is to create your own ways of overcoming this obstacle. If you can create your own ways of beating writer’s block, there will always be something to talk about.