brainstorm

This word gets used often, but just what does a person do to get their brain to storm? Where do ideas come from?

Everywhere and nowhere. All around you and only from inside you.

Our minds have a handy habit of disdaining lonely, unattached fragments of information. Sometimes all you need to do is juxtapose two wildly unrelated bits and then see what kind of connection your mind forms between them. You can give this process a nudge by intentionally sitting down with some random input (where's that list you made yesterday?), stipulate a time limit and/or a length requirement (15 minutes? at least five sentences?) and GO.

Here's an example, below, if you need one... The words were chosen randomly from the dictionary: