What to do when the ideas dry up

Hello, Illogicopedian.

You make two to three articles a day and don't look back. Unfortunately, that won't last forever.

There comes a day when the ideas dry up.

How you know the ideas have dried up

You say, "No! I'm a creative person! The ideas won't dry up!!!" I say, well, that's what we all say.

Everyone's ideas dry up.

You may not even know when it happens. One day you have thousands of great topics and the next... you fall to the self-reference monster.

The Self-Reference Monster

In short, once you start making articles referencing themselves, you know that the end is near for your ideas. These are the most obvious articles you can think of. You try to dig deeper, but there's nothing there.

Alas, the day will come when you can only muster up writing an article about writing an article; which is the ultimate self-reference monster. Then you're done.

What you normally do when the ideas have dried up

Now you're sure the ideas have dried up. Your old thirty articles per week pace has slowed to thirty articles per year. You occasionally crack out a useless self-reference article. Maybe you'll spend time to create the full-out article every once in a while. Mainly, though, you'll spend your bored weekends penning EPICs with decent topics, relying on halfway decent dialogue as a crutch.

You spend most of your time on the forum, trying to have a conversation, rather than facing the reality that you haven't contributed an article to the site in a month.

Collaborating is a must. You need to have someone else helping you along the way. You may not realize it, but you haven't had any ideas to inspire an article in so long, you lose any will to get through a serious project.

You're lost.