Telecanter Talks About How He Generates Ideas

Something that I think everyone who runs an old school OD&D game or other game and creates you own stuff, is always searching for ideas and trying to create new things to keep the game fresh. We all have our own methods of doing this.
In between games I read everything I can make time to read. I take a thread of a theme or idea and I pursue that, tracking down everything I can learn about it. I think and meditate about it. When I am driving to work and back I often run ideas back and forth in my head to find the ones that grab me. I try to get them written down as soon as I can. I don't know about you, but I am at my most creative in the game as the referee. My mind works best when I have to create on the fly and I like it when my players do something crazy and unexpected and strike off into the unknown.

Let me point you to the blog Telecanter's Receding Rules and his essay titled Generating Ideas.

In the essay he covers the following areas:

Constraints
It's counter-intuitive, but putting constraints or boundaries on a topic is helpful.

Patterns
Once you start producing ideas, you can look for patterns in them that you can then use to come up with even more ideas.

Associative Leaps
This whole post is based on the idea of logically figuring out how we generate things and then using it.

Inspiration
I hate the word inspiration.

Incremental Improvement
You don't have to get the whole idea on the first go. 

The Brain is a Muscle
The more we do this kind of generating, the easier it is to produce things in these ways.  

Go check out his essay, and let me know if you know of other essays on the subject, if you please.