Igniting Inspiration; or, where do you get your ideas?

For me human behavior has sparked everything from full characters to short story scenarios to poetry.
For example right now I have at hand the cornucopia of the differing reactions to a possible category 5 hurricane wobbling like a top off our city's shores. I am getting multiple story lines on how people react to secure their survival when facing the unknown, how people respond by creating their reality to replace the unknown ( "it won't hit us, we haven't had a direct hit in 20 years") and the high levels of "resigned to their fate" reaction. My fingers are flying these days. And I am stocked up with canned goods, bottled water,boards for the windows and cash, medical kit and clean up tools for the aftermath. So now to the important thing, writing.

Everywhere. Other books, movies, shows, some person I saw/met, a thing I saw, a story I heard when I was a kid...whatever.

I've always been the type to notice little things. And I mean really, really little things. Like...the patterns in the grass, or the way a rock smells. My brain processes them all, stores them, and makes connections. These little things accumulate over time, until you get a sentence like, "The grass bent away from her in a zig-zagging, neverending wave of light" or something. These sentences are usually horrible and need to be edited 5 bazillion times. Often they never make it into the first draft.

Then the sentence becomes a paragraph, because obviously after noticing the neverending wave of light, the chick has to do something, whether that is to stand up or sit down or close her eyes.

Then the paragraph becomes a page, because there's obviously something else out there that's prompting her to stand up or sit down or close her eyes.

Then I just need to work out the plot, characters, and motivations. For example, from this little sentence, I can tell you that the character is going to jump up and run away because she's being chased by a gigantic, motorized steamroller/castle/giant thing with a big, big, club.

I think it's name is Fawkner.

And that's how I get my ideas.

A lot of times, a song twigs something, but more times it will be a passing comment, a news article, or sometimes it just pops into my head without any prodding. When I wrote Bhisti, literally I woke up with the first line and nothing more. The story built from that point.

my inspiration comes from within. To be honest, it always feels like I am discovering it while I'm typing it. I get excited to see what will happen next. Watching the words appear on the screen, I sometimes feel disconnected from the hands making the words appear there. It's scary, if I really think about it...but fun...to write like crazy and get so into the reading of the words appearing on the screen. To be that detatched while the writing process is going on...it's a rush. I don't get my ideas from anywhere...they lock in and exit from my fingertips.

Almost anything, from personal experiences to an article in Science Magazine to an old movie to a news item to a discussion with friends... I never know when an inspiration will strike. I have ideas all the time but not all of them materialize into stories. But when they do, it's pretty sweet.

I'll echo a lot of what has already been said. Anywhere and everywhere. And as Ray stated above, not all of the ideas turn into anything, but it is pretty amazing when they do.

I get them from everywhere... and nowhere.

Ideas

Getting ideas is easy. There come swarming in from everywhere, thick as locusts. Knowing which ones to keep, and which ones to discard, is the trick.

I have a file full of newspaper clippings and scribbled bits of notes that I started years ago. I use to put anything and everything into it. I've used a couple of those things over the years, but mostly, they just sit there. Nowadays, I have to force myself to look for potential workable ideas in everything I see. But that's hard work. It's very rare that an idea just comes out of nowhere, but if it does, I see if it hangs around. If I lose it, I don't worry about it. If it stays, I can usually make something of it.

You know that issue of Sandman where the guy keeps a Greek muse locked in his house, and becomes a famous writer/poet/screenwriter/director from the ideas she imbues in him?

Then Dream shows up and tries to get the guy to let her go, and he says he can't, where would he get all his ideas from? And of course, keeping a girl locked up for the ideas is so disgusting that Dream gets involved and fills his head with so many ideas the guy goes crazy? Actually tries to scratch them out on his skin with his fingers they come so fast?

That's me.

My ideas come mostly from my very vivid dreams--usually two, "movie length" dreams a night, complete with plot and character and dialogue and all that nonsense. I've dreamed operas. I've dreamed epics. I've had flashes of brilliance and insanity.

But then I've got to write them down. And translating that much information, all that sensory detail, is darn near impossible. So I've taken to keeping a dream journal and writing down, a little throughout the day, as much as I can and all the important parts of all these stories that come to me in the night. Most of them don't make sense. But they are filled with so much emotion that I can't just let them disappear.

Eventually they get transformed and twisted and combined into logical stories. But that takes a while. And in the meantime, I'm frantically scratching away trying to get all these ideas down that I hardly finish anything. And as a result, my multiple WIPs become receptacles for all the new ideas I have along the way, and the end product is so totally unlike the beginning I wonder what happened. Like starting to draw a picture of a bowl of fruit and it ending up looking like a portrait of your dead grandmother. What went wrong???

99% of my ideas come from things I see. As strange as it sounds, it's almost always something landscape-wise. A house, a tree, a mountain, a lake. Rarely people but it's been known to happen. I've never gotten an idea from reading or watching tv.

where do you get your ideas?

Click to expand...

I keep turning over rocks until something slithers/crawls/jumps out. If it bites me I know it's a keeper.

WOOT! There it is!

Yep, just like that.

I listen to people; I watch them. The ideas are everywhere.

Through Reading, Watching, and Listening.

And sometimes, though I didn't think to put it in when I put my entry into this poll, I get inspiration from dreams.

I get my story ideas from a lot of places. Contest requirements, factoids from non-fiction books, television. I even got an idea simply from inventing a character back when I wrote fanfiction. I thought I'd have a go at writing a disabled character, so I made the little brother of my new character deaf. The result? After a while, I had the entire backstory about how the kid became deaf. I only touched the tip of the iceberg in the fanfic, and I could probably have a go at writing a novella or short about it if I get stuck for ideas.

I don't get ideas from a specific place, usually they just appear. Then run around looking for something to write them down on, before i forget them.