Photo credit: Karen Osborne
"Where do you get your ideas?"
The joke answer is usually "Schenectady," but the truth is that ideas are everywhere. You can find ideas in scientific articles, in works of art, in songs, in the time your dog barked in the middle of the night and it sounded like a word, in the face you see in the trunk of the sycamore at the end of the block, in a conversation overheard. Ideas are the easy part.
Sometimes people tag me in a Facebook post or send an email saying "story idea…" giving yet another answer to the first question. People hand me great ideas all the time, even other writers, the ones you'd think might want to hang on to them for themselves, but they know the secret: ideas can be traded freely...