I was just wondering where other people's ideas come from. The script I am leaning towards writing is inspired by a song.
The plot is about a supernatural killer, that defends children/teenagers that no one else will, whether they want him to or not.
If I do it right, it should look like the teenagers are doing the killings.
I'm still amazes that came from a 3 minute song about Jack the Ripper.

http://therathskellar.blogspot.com

Mine is actually from a quote by Ambrose Bierce that my Intro to Linguistics professor showed us: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." It's an example of how a sentence can make perfect grammatical sense but not make any sense. I liked the way the sentence sounded, and so I decided that "Colorless Green Ideas" would be a good name for a story. (Dave Barry collects rock band names. I collect story titles.)

The plot actually centers around two kingdoms--where everyone is named after colors, although they're rather obscure colors so people might not get that--and the "World Beyond", kind of a spirit world (except you find out at the end of the story that it isn't the Spirit World), inhabited by creatures called Colorless Green Ideas.

A girl I saw the other day with fantastic pink hair, Alan Moore's worship of an ancient snake god that he admits was a hoax, and JFK's assassination are the main things influencing the current idea. I should really let my partner know what the idea is...

After watching lots of horror movies and reading some of TransMet and 9th gate I had the idea of a "gate" system that you can open with incantations. Kinda exploded from there :D

It's kind of sad and Paolinish, really. I'd been reading College Roomies from Hell, and I realized that what I really wanted was to make a game that quantified all the crazy things I love about the comedy/sci-fi/fractured fantasy genre (in both Western and Eastern media).

I can only hope that it manages to rise above its inspirational sources.

A mix of the classes I have taken, people I've met, friends I've lost, music, horror movies, a morbid curiosity, zombie novels, literature, and a general disgust with society as a whole.

Mine came from a newspaper article I read 10 years ago about Albanian refugees.
The story's now morphed into a sci fi epic - with refugees.

My inspiration came from 18th century scientific journals and the astronomer William Herschel...in a very roundabout way. At some point I kind of ditched everything that made sense.

Mine is partially inspired by actually squatting in Mayfair (the area of London where millionaires live). There was something of a scandal caused by squatters being in Mayfair when I was there, and in one of the interviews, one of my roommates explained that people are only going to see more of this. During a power point presentation at the Temporary School of Thought, someone explained how squatting is going to be one way of surviving when the economy/culture/world as we know it comes to an inevitable end due to "peak oil". Naturally, I think the story of squatting in Mayfair lends itself to a sci-fi in which the main character starts out living in the worst squat that I ever lived in (it was affectionately nick-named the "pigeon shit hotel"). But of course there's a lot of things that heighten the drama and tension and make it more dangerous for the characters to break into abandoned Mayfair houses than it is in the present day. For example, in the futuristic version of London, squatting is NOT legal, and the bailiff will NOT ask you politely to leave before carrying your stuff out for you.

I also want to use in the setting certain things which make some present-day Brits get a little paranoid. Who DOESN'T find the non-stop presence of CCTV a bit disturbing? Or how about the debate over national ID cards? Who else finds it creepy that to get entry clearance to the UK you need to have eye scans and finger prints on record? There's got to be loads of potential for a really screwed up creepy future London setting! (because a creepy oppressive setting has WAY more potential for drama than a laid-back liberal setting. lol.)

That's actually a tough question. A few years back, I wanted to write a short story poking fun at the fantasy genre, with over the top characters, the epic quest, and a dragon who ate everyone at the end. Then, as I was writing it, it just kinda...changed itself. I think I knew that the original idea was a lot more boring than it sounded, but I wasn't willing to admit it until it morphed into this new, much cooler story! (Now it's about an Aztec priestess who gets caught in the middle of a war between heaven and earth.) Thing is, I never finished that story. I still like the idea and I think it will translate really well into a graphic novel, so that's what I decided to do!

P.S. @ WrittenWord - That's a very cool quote, but it's actually from Noam Chomsky. :)

My inspiration comes from playing way too much Dungeons and Dragons and watching the Futurama Movie Bender's Game too many times. It's about a group of gamers who find a doorway to the world they've been exploring, and the various hijinks that will ensue.

I am such a nerd.

Changeling: the Lost, a role-playing game by White Wolf, set in the World of Darkness.
That was my inspiration, but most of my major ideas are coming from faerie tales. I'm writing horror that centers on the Fae and Faerie.

I was teaching a class on developing story ideas with a friend, and I decided to take one of our sample prompts and run with it. Though one of the possible twists I had in mind came from a short story I read once, which I didn't realize until after I thought of it.

For me, Dante's Inferno and some sci-fi shows. LOL interesting mix!

It started as an AU fanfiction of an old television show ("The Magnificent Seven"), then I threw in some fantasy elements and changed around the characters (mixing in some of my own and some from (of all places) "Prince of Tennis"). By the time I started writing out my plot, most of the characters were unrecognizable as the characters that originally inspired them and the plot is unlike anything from the original universe.

Death toll: 7 named, about 181 unnamed

I put my music player on shuffle and made a list of all the interesting themes that were brought to mind by the music.

The power of words, unreality (signal to noise?), dreams, existentialism, betrayal, trust, nostalgia, emotional breaking points, abandoned memories and places, amnesia, post apocalypse, 'drifters (amnesia epidemic?)'.

This evolved into an idea about a post apocalyptic world where people start losing their memory, and have to revisit the places where those memories took place to retrieve them. Fun stuff.

I got my idea for a zombie screenplay while attending a birthday party about a year ago.

Reading lots of Stephen King, the video games The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour (which I played a ton when I was younger),dark anime I have loved like "Death Note" (and particularly "Hell Girl", which I watched much more recently.) My screenplay started out as an old-fashioned radio serial--sort of a kinder, gentler "Ghostbusters" with a single female superhero (ghost therapy instead of banishment to another dimension). Then it took a much darker turn, and I'm loving it so far.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Meg Cabot, and this painting by Jason Chan: http://wallpaperslife.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/zombieplayground.jpg

Lot's of reading and a strong love for ancient human history, the bible, and how the mind perceives the world.

Seriously, out of the deep pits of my imagination. Usually I have several ideas from several sources percolating in my head until all of a sudden they smack into each other with such force that a story is formed almost spontaneously.

I'm really not kidding you. That's pretty much what it feels like. I have ideas rummaging around my head that are 10 years old and waiting for that little bit of an idea to hit them and make me relook at them.

What I'm writing now is originally about a year old. It's been smacked into by several other random ideas to create what now resembles the story I'm writing. The original looked like this stories second cousin.

X-Files and Ghostbusters mainly. I'd been watching a bunch of X-files episodes. and I'd recently found this ghostbusters rpg game at a second hand store. And I realized, for all my obsession with the paranormal, I never write about it. So I came up with the concept for L because of that. It's about a reporter who ends up involved in paranormal mysteries while trying to work out the mystery surrounding her fiance's disappearance. So I'm trying to base everything they run into around mythology and cryptozoology.

lately i've been obsessed with sex demons and other sorts of vampiric, predatory beings that aren't vampires or werewolves. i'm writing about another sort of traditional beastie, the succubus, which manifests itself through the internet namely, and other digital means i'll have to consider.

I got thinking about dreaming and waking, and then I wondered what if my dreams were a window to another world? My story is pretty much based on that premise.

Donate & get your own shiny halo!

My script is based on the Doctor Who episode "The Doctor's Daughter". I'm going to expand upon the idea, giving Jenny adventures of her own.

Arthur C Clarke and Philip K Dick.

Gonna have to work pretty hard to find an idea they haven't done better already.

I can oddly relate to that, because mine came about because of an article I read on human trafficking and the sex slave trade and now it's a sci-fi epic as well. :)

An instrumental piece from an anime series. Partly the title, and partly the characters in another anime series that it reminded me of. That's what gave me my story.

(If anyone wants to know, the song is "young knight and priestess" from .hack//Roots)