SCP Foundation

So where do you guys think ideas start from? Do you find an image and then work off of that? Hear somebody tell you that something would be scary or cool and then make it into a skip? Do you think of a common, everyday thing and wonder what you could do with it?

For three days before the start of Samhain I fast and stand awake by the balefire, reciting tales of the age of heroes to entertain my kinsmen. Then at sunrise of the day when the gates to the Land of Death open, I eat a pound of salt pork, and wearing nothing but a linea and a sprig of mistletoe in my hair I walk alone into the faerie mounds and lay myself down in a stone circle.

When sleep claims me, I awaken in Tír nAill and for twenty years I live among the Sidhe. I have been a captive pet, declaiming poems of the deaths of kings for the amusement of fine fair elfen maids, I have been a slave-soldier marching to war against the forces of darkness in a never-ending war, I have been a wild man living free by my wits in an alien wilderness, I have rowed a pirate galley across the Pearl Bright Ocean, I have been trapped in a castle ruled by the dead and surrounded by a wall of thorns, I have been a slayer of monsters feted as a hero, and I have been lost and abandoned by all who knew me. In all this, I see and store such wonders as I have witnessed, that I might bring them back to the mortal realm.

Each time, I return, or am returned, to the stone circle after a score of years. Sleep claims me, and I awaken again above the village, as the sun sets on the end of year, with only Samhaim having passed while I was away.

• I think of objects, places, or concepts that make me anxious. Then, I take whatever makes me anxious about them and turn it into an anomaly that expresses that anxiety.
• I cultivate weird ideas that I stumble upon. If I think there might be something to it, I jot it down somewhere.
• A lot of SCPs start as just weird conversations or ideas that occur and stick in my memory. For example, today I thought: "What if the Mandela Effect is, itself, a manifestation of the Mandela Effect?". Weird idea!
• Every morning, I sacrifice a first-born child upon the altar of Asakku, the Hideous One — who's presence alone makes fish boil in rivers and maidens weep blood.
• Whenever I find a really weird or creepy picture that I like, I save it. Especially if it's CC-compliant.

I suppose what I do is I think about what hasn't been done before or I think about how something uninteresting can be expanded. For my tales, it's the first one. I think "There hasn't been crossover between Wondertainment and Oneiroi" and then I made Do They Know It's Christmas Time At All?, or I think "What if SCP-2006 escaped on Halloween?", and then I made Tension and Release. When I'm brainstorming with others about skip ideas, I use the latter strategy. They say "It's a magic 8-ball that can really tell the future" and I think "What if it was a Magic 8-Parrot, and you could shake it around and it'd give weird bird metaphors for everything in the future?" Generally I like to go the surrealist route with my ideas, but the theme should be distinct from what's already out there, tying into the first strategy.

Random pictures I take with my phone, thoughts I have while standing in line, sleep deprivation via illogical sense of duty, and emotional things I scream internally at.

Also, OP, the Essays on Style may be good reading for you here.