Where do Writers get Ideas?

People often ask me where I get ideas for my stories. I’d never really paid attention to it much, because I’ve always had a fairly active imagination and it comes naturally to think of the things I write. Where do writers get ideas?

But I did notice something the other day, and it stuck out as an ‘ah-ha’ moment. *That* is how ideas come to me, and that’s where they come from.

I don’t get ‘whole’ ideas (for whole stories) from single inspirations. I get snippets. The snippets together make the framework for my story.

To give you an idea of how ideas work for me, think of how a CD player fills in over minor scratches so that you don’t hear a skip when it’s playing. It just sounds like the music is playing normally, and the better the player, the better it is at filling in the tiny little gaps that are caused by scratches.

What exactly was it that I noticed that *ah-ha* day? as it whizzed through and skimmed across the top of the fence into the pasture beyond.

Or the blast of leaves could have been made by a beast smashing leaves out of his way, something giant and from another dimension, lost and bumbling through the trees, stepping over fences as he crashed out onto the road from the undergrowth…

My ideas come from the gaps.

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If you write, where do your ideas come from? If you’re not a writer but a reader, where did you think our ideas came from?

Here’s another post about how nature inspires some of my ideas.