Where do authors get their ideas?

Rosemary Wells (author of the Max and Ruby books, the McDuff books, and many others) gives some excellent answers to this question in her video A Visit with Rosemary Wells.  While watching this video with our first graders as part of an author study, I was struck by three things:

• Authors get ideas from their real lives.  We could see Rosemary Wells walking her dogs (Westies) that look just like McDuff.  She also says that the expressions on these dogs' faces helped to inspire the characters of Max & Ruby (that, and the behavior of her two daughters).
• Sometimes ideas just come to us and we do not know where they came from.  Rosemary Wells says that when she first wakes up in the morning and is still half-asleep, ideas just come to her like birds landing on the railing of a ship in an active ocean.  She says that it is then her responsibility to take care of those "birds" (or ideas) so that they can become stories.
• Everyone has stories in his/her life, and they don't always seem very special at first glance.  In her video, she shows a bunch of plastic beads and clips that she found in a junk drawer in her house.  They do not look like much, until she puts them into a kaleidoscope and then all sorts of wonderful patterns are revealed.  Part of an author's job is to look at ordinary things in a way that makes them interesting to readers.