Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

Students write to me on a regular basis. Some write because they’ve been moved by one of my stories; others write because of a school assignment. In either case, one of the most common questions I hear from them is: “Where do you get your ideas?”There might be many different answers to that question, but I’ve given one that has ended up in print—found in my book What's Your Story? A Young Person's Guide to Writing Fiction:“Where do storytellers find the wisdom to discover their own stories? From no place more mysterious than their own hearts.”Perhaps it’s an answer worth sharing with your students the next time you ask them to write a story of their own.