Beating Back Writer's Block

Writer's block: Maybe the scariest two words for people who live and die by the output of their word processing programs.

I've been looking around the blogosphere lately to see what issues on are the minds of writers. Not surprisingly, writer's block is a big one--especially for people who do a lot of blogging. I can understand that. Blogging is like daily journalism: Blank front pages don't go over very well with your readership.

Some people trigger new ideas by using prompts--opening a book or web page at random and using something on the page as a starting point. Other people do stream-of-consciousness writing. Still others review past writing/posts--and the metrics for those posts, try to find clues to what topics people are most interested in, and then see if they can deepen that topic.

There are lots of tricks and tools to trigger our creative thinking. We, of course, think that mind mapping is one of the best ways to to it. But what about you? What do you do to keep the ideas flowing so that you don't smash into blank pages--at least not too often?