Where Ideas Come From

I’m one of those people who converse with checkout operators—because why the heck not?—and recently one of those conversations canvassed the “what do you do?” question. When I replied that I was a writer, the next questions was, “Where do you get your ideas from?”

Like Ursula Le Guin, I am very much of the view that ideas are pretty much everywhere, and that my ideas for stories come from a subconscious processing of life’s giant database. However, as I said to my checkout interlocutor, “If a...