Few writers can explain "where the ideas come from", but we all learn where to look for them. One writer says "We can’t usually see it, but there’s a vast colorful swarming throng of feathered and scaly iridescent bodies, swooping and pressing around us all the time, and all one has to do is squint a little, reach out and… grab!" So these are the ways I go actively hunting...

Dreaming the stories of songs

Listen to music - on the sofa, lying on your bed, walking with your ipod, whatever enables you to concentrate intently. See the story it's describing in your head. With classical music, I let the instruments become different characters as well as a mood (try The Hall of the Mountain King for an example). With lyrics, imagine the story that would make complete sense of the song - the way the film Donnie Darko makes sense of an otherwise obscurely mystifying song Mad world. Don't pick-'n-mix lines as one normally does when applying a song to one's own situation - you have to use everything. If he wants the red door painted black - whose red door and why? What happened, there? To expand the music you know, discover Pandora's gift to humanity.

Walking

Walk for at least half an hour - two hours if you can. Let your mind mull, but if it's returning obsessively to unhelpful thoughts, stop it by concentrating on what you see around you - the leaves, trees, bricks, people, colours of the tar, isolated spider, architectural feature, whatever. It will drift off again soon. If I'm working on a specific idea, I set it as my mental focus but know that I will also think about many other things, and sometimes just clearing one's head of other thoughts helps. Finally - look up and around. It triggers positive feelings, whereas studying the pavement/path promotes dullness.

Making a collage

Collect magazines - if you don't read them, perhaps your friends do, the weekend papers are stuffed with them, and lots of free magazines are stocked about the place. When you're working around a nascent idea, flip through the pages pulling out anything that seems useful or pertinent - even if you don't like the whole picture, you can use the bit you do. Perhaps just the colour sets the mood you want. Get a big cheap canvas or a board, and with wallpaper glue stick all your images all over the place. (Apply the glue to the whole of the picture, not the canvas, then smooth it into place with your hands. Expect to get sticky. I use older magazines to glue on.) Put it up somewhere you can see it. Writing The Artist and the Mathematician, I ended up referring to my collage constantly, even following one of the sequences of images as I'd collaged it.

Creative visualisation

This is best with someone's voice guiding you. Rather than consciously inventing, you let things spring into your mind within the framework you're given, trusting your unconscious to give you relevatory images. It's the most powerful kind of imagining, with your analytical mind firmly kicked out the driving seat. (Of course analytical minds are essential or we'd all end up writing disconnected plotless wonders with no quality control, but I find I'm quite hypercritical enough of my own imagination as it is, and it deserves the occasional break.)

Getting something down

Rather than "think something up", The Artist's Way encourages you to "get something down". Keep jotting down thoughts and possibilities, whether or not they seem suitable or valid, and know that you are opening your mind to existing ideas in the ether rather than inventing.

Surfing images of dream worlds

Flip through the internet looking at pictures. You can use Google image search if you have some key words around the beginnings of an idea (you can specify large pictures) or try wallpaper sites. (If you like landscapes and trees, try my Scenery and Textures.) If it's for your own use, you can usually save them onto your computer and build up an image-bank of pictures that speak to you. One of my favourite sites is fantasyartdesign.com. Sometimes I build a story around several of the pictures; sometimes I just fill my head with beautiful things.

Setting aside an evening

Spend time getting your room/lounge ready: tidy, clean, candles, music, incense, wine, whatever's the kind of perfection you'd create for a special date. Curl up with a pen and notebook, settle into it, and write down all the ideas that occur to you - whether or not they're about your writing. (Caution: this may involve wine.)

Making it literal

When you're feeling strongly about something, it's hard to write anything that's not about you, about that issue, exactly as it is in your own life. So write down your feelings as they are, flat-out, with all the clichéd phrases that spring to mind - a good, long, pour-it-out paragraph or pages of it. (Setting a half-hour minimum can help.) Then look at all your figures of speech and make it literal. Whether you're "going in circles", "can't breathe", and"feel wounded" or are "jumping with joy", "walking on air" and "madly in love", use the metaphors absolutely literally. Most of us do this in our dreams, anyway - try doing it awake.

Keeping an ideas notebook

I run through notebooks so fast that my ideas end up distributed through dozens of them, and I'm not lugging all those volumes to my coffee-shop. A beautiful A6 notebook I was given (small enough to carry everywhere) is my "ideas" book - I either use it directly or copy things across from my current notebook. It's developing into a treasure-house of things I'll write one day.

Discarding nothing

False beginnings can make extraordinary stories. If you don't know where it's going, that doesn't mean it's going nowhere - it might simply be going to a place you haven't been. These things do happen started out as two paragraphs that got stuck, then an attempt to complete it that got dead-ended, and ended up as one of the best stories I've written. Follow it through and don't give up. If you need to let it lie fallow, the Publishing Machine database lets you store these as "fragments" to save up, like a sewing-box of splendid scraps.

Learning new stuff

As a child, I was only interested in what went on in my own head. Later, I realised the host of knowledge about the world I needed for the worlds I was creating. The collegiate system at Oxford, teaching EFL, and listening to BBC Radio 4 all opened my eyes to how much there is to know. Keep learning. Read beginners' guides to things outside your scope, learn new skills, watch films about things beyond your ken, listen attentively when people talk about their jobs and lives. Knowledge is never wasted. You'll use all of it - one day.