Where do you get your ideas?

When someone asks you “where do you get your ideas?”, how do you respond?  Reading lots of books and stories helps, both in the same genre you write and even outside it.

Sometimes the newspaper will trigger an idea, including the comics section.

I usually respond that ideas are all around us, we just need to be sensitive to recognizing them.

Remember last Monday's post about experiencing life as a writer? Discovering that you notice little details in your travels through life that you never would have noticed if you were not a writer?

As a follow-up to that post, have you also discovered that scenes and sometimes entire plots jump out and grab you as you're simply going through life?

For example, while on our train trip to the beach I had the following ideas.  I write MG so these ideas are mostly focused on that age group.

~boarding the wrong train, alone or with parent
~train leaves station with parent on board but MC still in the station restroom
~train leaves station with MC on board but parent still in the station restroom
~sneaking on train without a ticket
~getting caught on train without ticket
~train derails
~train hits car [who's in the car – friend, enemy, parent, grandparent, sibling, sibling of friend, etc]
~MC finds friend and/or enemy on same train
~MC sees someone/something through train window
~MC overhears conversation
~stairway from road down the bluff to the beach is broken
~high tide/low tide and how it affects story
~burying self or others in the sand
~making sand castles
~sand castles wrecked by seagulls/bullies/tide
~exploring tide pools, what does MC find – sea life, trash, clue to mystery
~wave sweeps MC off jetty
~lifeguard rescues MC
~MC rescues someone
~MC gets major sunburn

When someone asks you “where do you get your ideas?”, how do you respond?  Tell us in the comments!