Brainstorming Ideas  Over at Bizarro Central, people are talking
about how they get their ideas for stories. So I am posting my
answer here. I usually get my ideas using a variety of methods,
but the one I use the most is a variation of the Ray Bradbury
method.  Ray Bradbury’s method for coming up with stories works
great, in my opinion. He would write down dozens of words
(usually nouns) onto a sheet of paper. He would pull them out of
books by flipping through pages and pointing randomly at words.
They were words like Skeleton, Scythe, Crowd, Maiden, Wind,
Lake, Coffin, etc. Then he would pick a word from the list and
think of it as the title of a story. He would try to come up
with the most interesting and imaginative plot he could based on
that title. So, the Skeleton was about a man who learns one day
that his skeleton has awareness and is rebelling against its
body. The Crowd was about a mysterious crowd that always shows
up at every car crash. Basically, he used a word as a trigger
for his imagination.