Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

As a writer, this is a question I hear often. Where do I get my ideas from?

I get them from all over the place. Sometimes, I wake up from a particularly vivid dream and realize that it would make a good basis for a story. Sometimes I hear a song that reaches into me and whispers, "You must write a story to go with this."

The people around me help me to form ideas for stories. I watch the people who take the bus with me, or the people who stand outside the shops in town and try to think up stories to explain the way they dress, the way they move or even why they are on the bus, where they are going, why they are standing outside of a particular store. These ideas can be endless.

Conversations with friends and family sometimes help me come up with ideas. Last night, my husband and I went to see a movie, and after the movie, when we went to dinner, we discussed some of the new movies that were coming out. That discussion became a discussion of how we would write about simlarly-themed stories and then we came up with several story ideas and a way to research even more stories.

My children are wonderful little inspiration-builders. Tonight, my son woke up from a bad dream and told me he couldn't get back to sleep because he was worried that he would have another bad dream. I made up a story to allay his fears, and that story has given me an idea for both a children's story and an adult short story.

So let's hear it: Where do you get your story ideas from?

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