Hardy perennial
"Where do you get your ideas?" is probably the most-asked question writers get, and one of the reasons writers hate getting it is because it can actually be fairly hard to answer. Oh, not if the person asking the question is a semi-interested reader who's more interested in making conversation than in any kind of realistic answer - those folks are usually satisfied with throwaways like "From a post office box in Schenectady." But when an actual would-be writer asks in all seriousness…then it gets hard.
It's hard partly because not only is every writer different, both in their general process and in the specifics of how-they-do-it, but nearly every story is different. It'd be a lot easier if I could hand the eager or desperate young writers a card with a post office box number on it, but I can't. So here are some other things to look at.
In the long term, getting ideas is a matter of how you look at the world. I've posted about this before, so I won't go into great detail here, but basically it's a matter of not taking the ordinary for granted. You can find stories in commonplace things, from grocery lists to car repairs, if you look at them slantwise and ask yourself the right questions. ("Right" in this case being whatever sorts of questions make your backbrain start giving off little sparks. For some writers, those are character-related questions, like "where does the alien embassy get its groceries, anyway?" or "what is a dark dwarf doing fixing people's cars?"; for others, the questions are plot-related, or theme-related, or…whatever. You have to figure out for yourself what angle you approach things from, but once you do, it's usually not too much trouble to keep doing it. In fact, once you learn how, it's hard to turn the dratted thing off.)
In the short term, though, people are impatient. Also, a lot of folks haven't ever learned how to brainstorm, or even how to just poke around looking for possible ideas. Heck, a lot of folks haven't the first idea where to go to start poking. So here are some suggestions.
A lot of writers are very verbal (big surprise), so one of the logical places to start looking for ideas is with words. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of places on the web and elsewhere that will provide "writing prompts" - short suggestions to get you going. Or you can make up your own; a really popular one used to be to open a dictionary twice at random, take the first word at the top of the first page and the last word at the bottom of the second page, and see what you could come up with to link them all together. Another is to take several of your favorite poems and pull out six or eight phrases (three to four words each) that really appeal to you, write them on cards and dump them in a jar, pull two, and come up with something that ties them together.
For writers who are more aural than verbal, songs and music can be a similar sort of idea-trigger. One can get even more direct and take one of the many songs (modern or traditional) that tells a story in six dense verses, and expand it into ten pages of prose, or even into a novel. (Fairy tales work fine for that, too, but that's back to words.) Quite a few writers I know have gone so far as to assemble play lists of songs that "fit" whatever story they're currently writing, to keep them in the right mood while they work.
Pictures and photos can trigger a writer's imagination, too, whether they're ones you took yourself, or things you've found on the web or in an old shoebox at a garage sale. Objects, too - "Why on earth would anyone buy that?" can be a perfectly good story-trigger, and so can "The people who put together this garage sale must be aliens…wait a minute…"
Everybody has thoughts like that; the trick is to slow them down so that you notice whenever you think "That is so weird" or "I don't understand why anyone would…" or "What were they thinking?" And then, once you've noticed, to come up with a possible explanation or answer, or even just a mental picture of the sort of person who is that weird, who would do that, and who was thinking…something interesting.
Fanfiction aside, other people's stories can actually be a pretty good place to look for ideas, too. Nottaking someone else's background or plot or characters and redoing them, but looking at the things you'd put in, or do differently, and then dropping all of their characters and background and plot and riffing off just those missing/different bits that appeal to you. Change the characters and setting, and you have a brand-new story, even if the source material is recognizable. It worked for West Side Story (Romeo and Juliet), and for Working Girl (Cinderella), and for countless other things.
And one of my favorite methods is to take two characters from completely different stories - Prince Hamlet, say, and Darth Vader - change their names, and throw them into the setting from a third story (Lord of the Rings, maybe, or Oz) and see what happens.
That's the first half of the answer to the "where do you get your ideas?" question, and it's what most people want to know when they ask it. It is not, however, all that they need to know…that's for the next post, on Sunday. 
