There is a great deal of mysticism about the creative process. And justifiably so. No one truly knows where great ideas come from. The trouble with this mysticism is that it’s not terribly helpful when you know you have to come up with an idea quickly. Sure, you can wait for your muse to strike. But how do you know when that will be? Especially if your muse happens to be as mercurial as mine.

Fortunately there’s a great technique you can use to speed things along. It’s a tip I learned from the writer Joe Dunthorne, and it makes use of a largely unknown attribute of the internet.

Type ‘Special Wiki Random’ into Google and you’ll turn up a link which will take you to one of more than 6 million articles on Wikipedia at random.

Once you arrive at an article you think about how your problem could be solved using the content of the page as a kind of creative springboard.

Let’s try it.

Imagine I have a brief to create a TV spot to promote the Champions League football tournament — as one of my clients does at the moment. I type ‘Special Wiki Random’ and arrive at … the Flag of Anguilla, a British overseas territory.

Next, I scribble down any ideas the page inspires.

Flags … Football and flags. What if my spot is an emotive film showing all the different ways fans display team flags — in cars, bedroom windows, tattoos etc. Could I render competing teams’ flags as something else? A quilt? A giant Battenberg flag cake? Could I redesign the club’s existing flags? Maybe I could add text or images or animation to the giant flags fans drape across the stadia? What if the Champions League was the United Nations and all the delegates players from different clubs? What if I tell the story of a kid from Anguilla trying make it to the Champions League? There are dolphins on the Anguillan flag, what about an opinionated dolphin football pundit?

This exercise took me no more than a couple of minutes — as you can probably tell by the quality of the ideas. But at this stage quality isn’t important. Quantity is. The more ideas you generate, the greater your chances of unearthing something really good.

Once you’ve tried one random article, you try another until you have a couple of pages of ideas. Then you pick the ideas that feel the most fertile and develop them further. And most likely your final idea will have nothing to do with flags or Anguilla, even though it was the Anguillan flag that got you there.

Next time you have a brief, give it a go.

It’ll be a lot quicker than waiting for your muse to show up.

Need Ideas Quickly? Try this Simple Trick