What do you do with your ideas once you have them?

Once you "have an idea," the next bit of the process for most writers is developing it into a story.

How one develops an idea depends largely on the writer and the idea. For a lot of us, the first stage is kind of like the effect of a particle accelerator: two or more interesting ideas go around and around in your brain until they smash into each other at high speed, causing a chain reaction. Other times, the initial development is more like putting a seed crystal in a supersaturated solution ...