First off, you'll have to excuse me if the following is a bit fragmented. I've been reading Athenaeus's The Deipnosophists for the last five hours and every thought running through my mind sounds like this:

"...and thus the Shadowrun, as portrayed by Flababarius in his Consort To The Bonnet Queen, is but the calm before the storm when we examine Deivoplubious's quote: 'Fine is the sammy who, unto his own, can quarter the might god Renreku with only sword of stone and shield of bone'."

In any case, I recently received an E-Mail message from an individual located in, I believe, Germany who, offering advice on how to get over my case of writer's block, suggested that I use ideas found in everyday reality as a source of inspiration. If this person is reading this article right now I'd like to apologize for the complete lack of civility my response may have portrayed, the actual wording of which amounted to, as I recall: "No shit." Perhaps my annoyance was rooted in the fact that I figured this was how EVERYBODY got their ideas and that by singling me out as an individual who may not have been aware of this universal concept this individual was basically calling me an idiot. But, upon close examination of the circumstances, I believe the six cups of coffee I had before checking my E-Mail may have been more of a factor in my short fusedness (pronounced "fuse-ed-ness").

This whole scenario alerted my to the possibility that there may still be people out there who perpetually attempt to yank ideas out of thin air when instead they could be lazy like the rest of us and simply pick up a copy of Newsweek. I personally utilize three basic methods to extract ideas from common, everyday, materials and situations, although I will only cover one now because I have to, uh, get milk before the 24 hour mini-mart closes.

The method I'll explain is what I call the "Word Association Method", thus named because that is what I have named it. It's a bit tricky and you have to have a special kind of wandering, unpredictable, associative type of creative mind which allows you to take single words, or a simple idea, and build a story around it. People with this type of mind can be wandering down the street, hear somebody say "Hi, Bob!", and their mind will suddenly create Bob's entire world including what Bob did today, what foods he likes, what movies he watches, and whether or not he is the mastermind behind a large criminal organization known as Spartan who, using a policlub as cover, is engaging in the shipment and manufacture of various items which could, conceivably, be used to build a nuclear weapon by an "associate" of Bob's in the Middle East, a mysterious man known only as Kabar.

I believe the technical term for such a personality is "psychotic" which is why most people with these kinds of minds can only write if their ward attendants are nice enough to put a pencil in their mouth because their straitjackets prevent them from using a word processor. In any case, for those of us who managed to escape the asylum, such thoughts provide us with years of entertainment until such time as we go nuts and blow up the Department Of Motor Vehicles [POST 9/11 NOTE: KIDDING, OF COURSE!], although there are many perfectly sane people who would like to do this as well.

In order to illustrate another, non Bob-oriented, example I will, right now, at this very moment, pick up my copy of The Deipnosophists, flip to a random page, read it, and get an idea for a shadowrun. Most of this volume is about sex so I should be able to find something interesting. Hold on a sec. . . . hmmmm . . . . well . . . .I'll have to reach but . . . . OK! In the footnotes the quote "Ye stocks! Ye stones! Ye worse than senseless things!" appears. I have no idea what this actually means. It's Greek to me (ugh). But the stocks part reminds me of the time I visited Salem, Massachusetts, the site of several supposed witch burnings and hangings back in, I believe, the 1600s (although it was nothing like Europe where witch burning was so common that it caused a temporary spike in global temperature.) I remember being disappointed because the whole place was incredibly commercialized and every other store had some witch-looking chick with a black cat squatting in it, selling books with titles like: "Fifteen Easy Ways To Summon The Devil". So, lets say, such a situation still exists in the world of 2050 but, finally, the spirits and ghosts of the deceased are getting a bit pissed off at their exploitation. They want the commercial types to get out of Salem.

This run could actually go two ways. The runners could, if they had a magic user, be hired to combat the spirits. But I happen to be a big fan of deceased Puritans so what I would do is have the GHOSTS hire the runners to get rid of the store owners. The ghosts could use a free spirit or possess somebody or do any number of things to inform the runners of their need and they could pay them with magical formulae or information regarding hidden historical artifacts. So there's your shadowrun, all thanks to a dead Greek person who happened to write something with the word "stocks" in it.

So, how can you as an everyday, non psychotic person utilize this method? Practice. If your mind doesn't create the situations for you force it to by sitting back and dwelling on a single word until something in a remote portion of your brain associates it with something else. Keep following the chain of associations until you have enough of them that, if you assembled them into a plot, they could conceivably kill off every PC in your entire roleplaying group.

Well, I'm off to write another shadowrun because the song Who Drove The Red Sports Car, by Van Morrison, just rolled around on the CD player and since the person driving the Red Sports Car is a former terrorist named Krell who is thinking of getting back into the killing business the runners are going to be hired to take him out before he even has a chance to go back to work but, unfortunately for the runners, Krell never actually left the business and has been working for a group known as Pure Society for the last five years while stockpiling weapons and training at his rural Seattle home so, needless to say, things aren't going to go down as smoothly as the runners had hoped.

Then I'll go blow up the DMV.  [POST 9/11 NOTE: It’s sad that, since the time this was originally written, free speech has devolved to the point that I feel it necessary to add a comment noting that I do not, actually, intend to blow up the DMV.  But, well, here we are.]