Where Do You Find Inspiration For Your Stories?

I am sure as authors, you have all been asked this same question - Where do you get your story ideas from? I will keep today's post short because I would love to hear from all of you. But, for those of you who are authors and still struggle with this, let me throw out a couple of ideas.

One of the biggest concerns authors have is taking too much of someone else's story for their inspiration. We hear over and over again about plagiarism charges and these are certainly serious. So, how do you get those ideas? Look at small pieces of life.

One of the things I do with a lot of my authors is take a single situation for a character. Consider the following (please note these are for romances because that is what I represent):

• Heroine is caught in a potential criminal situation and has only one place to turn, the guy she had a crush on for support.
• What if the hero and heroine are in competing businesses and now have to fight for a piece of commercial property?
• Hero of a story meets a great heroine only to find she is a ghost trying to come through.

The idea is just to start with a snippet. Don't push for the whole story.

Several of my historical authors like to start with an event that happened in history and then think of characters that might have been there at that time.

You can also start with a setting. You are driving down an old country road and see some small town?  Who lived there?

I love this last one a lot, mostly from my background in literature. In high school, I totally fell in love with Edgar Lee Masters SPOONRIVER ANTHOLOGY. This later turned into my love of William Wordsworth and Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.

So, share some of your places for inspiration!