A little while ago someone asked me where I get all my ideas.  For my writing, she meant, because that was what we were talking about.
    I sat there and just looked at her.  Really?, I thought, really?  Get my ideas?  I don’t have to go and get them; they swarm around and crowd around and flap around in my head all the time.  There’s no “getting” involved.
    I didn’t answer her at first, because even just hearing the question had set a whole new gang of ideas tearing around in my head, none of which involved, in any way, my having to get them.
    “I just have them,” I finally said, pretty lamely, which ended up being a conversation-stopper.
    A conversation-stopper, but a thought-starter.  I wondered if other people had the same near-constant barrage of ideas in their heads, and realised that—for once—I had no idea.  In any case, my own barrage is enough to cope with; never mind other people’s.
    Then I wondered how many of my ideas actually make it into a rational, write-down-able thought.  Not very many.  Most of them just rattle and tear around in my head, until they eventually disappear to be replaced by other ideas.  I’m aware of them, even have a look at some of them, but mostly they come and go on their own.
    The ones that I do grab out of the space in my head, I use.  In conversation, in thought, in writing.  The ones that become story ideas get a good going over.  A thinking-out.  Development.  They have to withstand the scrutiny of logic, even if it’s only internal logic.  They have to lead to other things, to connect.  And they have to be durable, not peter out for lack of interest.
    Some of these ideas, after days or even weeks of work, end up being dumped outright.  Some end up in a computer file I have creatively called, “Ideas for later”.  Some end up as the kernel of a story, a book, a poem.  A kernel that grows and becomes more than the idea it started out as, but still is the idea.  Somehow.
    Once past the idea stage, and the testing stage, the word-by-word, brick-by-brick process of writing develops, sculpts, and sometimes chases the idea into shape.  All the while adding or fending off other ideas as they plunge and leap in my head.
    That’s how I “get” my ideas.  I don’t.  They get me.  I just grab at some of them and go from there.