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One of the questions most commonly asked of writers is "Where do you get your ideas?"  Some smart-mouthed writers quip, "The Idea Warehouse."  Which is dumb because everybody knows ideas come from the Idea Fairy.

I suspect our silly answers arise from the fact we don't often know where ideas come from.  Oh sure, sometimes you succumb to an opium-induced dream--who hasn't, right?--and jot it all down in a fevered Xanadu rush only to be interrupted by your Twitter account notifying you that you have one new reply and you abandon your opus to see what somebody was saying about you. 

But for me, I often find that ideas come together more like a dung beetle's ball.  I get some crap; I roll it around for awhile.  Stuff sticks to it.  It starts to take shape and starts rolling a little faster.  The eggs incubating inside it eventually hatch, along with a few random seeds, and, look, I have a story!  This is less sanitary and more effort than the "came to me in a dream" version, but more (ha) organic and gives me the illusion of control. 

Of course, if you've seen nature show footage of dung beetles at work, you know that control is probably tenuous at best.  And by the end of the process--with baby dung beetles running around and unidentified seedlings sprouting everywhere--it's hard to look at the scattered clumps of elephant poop, dirt and dried grass and say, see, there's where the idea started.  Plus, who wants to look that closely?