A Writer's Notebook, One-Thousand-Eight-Hundred-And-Forty-Nine

I have found an approach that seems to be working for me, in terms of always having an idea for a new story, although it is rather odd.  The key has been to allow the characters to be aware and to have them responding to my failure to give them adequate material.  It is a rather strange approach, I know, but it seems to help me loosen up and play.  The result has been that each time I started out without much of an idea about what to write and found my way through by letting the character go crazy and attack my failures as a writer, for example.  In some sense, I recognize this strategy as similar to the way that I often choose to write poems about not being certain what to write.  In this case, it involves placing many of the concerns that I might express directly in a poem into the mouth of the character instead.