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Successful writers are often asked where they get their ideas. Writers like Stephen King and Harlan Ellison have written imaginative and humorous anecdotes which explain how they use their creative talents to come up with brilliant story ideas. Most of these stories are just attempts to make light of the creative process and occasionally to poke fun at those people who are looking for a magic well full of great ideas. However, they do raise some intriguing questions about creative inspiration. Where do our ideas come from? Given that great ideas can be entertaining and profitable, there's a lot of interest in discovering more of them. Finding great ideas, however, is not always simple. Thus, being able to figure where our ideas come from can be quite valuable.

Idea generation can be a tricky business. There are three possibilities to explain where our ideas come from. The first possibility suggests that ideas come from a divine or supernatural source which seems to magically deposit them in our brains. The second suggests that ideas are purely the product of our own thinking, developed or created by the brain as it processes all of the facts and sensory inputs, including thoughts and ideas from other people, that we absorb each day. Finally, the third possibility allows for both divine and internal inspiration to help us discover new ideas. As divine or supernatural inspiration is virtually impossible to prove, let's focus on what we can do on our own to create ideas.

Put simply, anything and everything in your life and your surroundings can be the source of inspiration that allows you to develop new ideas. The brain has been compared to a sponge and it's a good analogy: as the sponge absorbs and retains water, the brain absorbs and retains many kinds of sights, sounds, thoughts, and feelings. Much of this information is filed away and rarely accessed again due to sheer volume, but we certainly rely on our memories to live day-to-day and to do work.

One tip that Stephen King imparts to his readers in On Writing, his excellent book about his experiences and knowledge of writing, is that great ideas often come from the combination of potentially unrelated pieces information. He cites the example of his first big novel, Carrie, whereby he combined psychic and supernatural phenomena with the biological changes of girls becoming women in order to develop his main concept of a girl who gains telekinetic powers when she hits puberty.

Another famous example of putting

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