Where do Writing ideas come from?

My stories run up and bite me on the leg -I respond
by writing down everything that goes on during the bite.

When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

Ray Bradbury

  Sometime I wish my stories or poems would bit me on the leg because lately they've been hiding from me. On February 1, I started to write a poem about spiritual liberty, it took me seven days to finally come up with the first lines. Even then, the first two lines I wrote were from a poem I started several years ago. After I got the first rhyming couple down, then the other six lines came to me. After that, I changed the lines that didn't fit in the poem.

I have the idea for a story peeking out of the back of my mind, but every time I focus on it the idea runs away and hides. I'm not sure whether it will be a fantasy or science fiction story, the only thing I'm sure about is that it has something to do with the weird noises a house or apartment make when I'm the only one living there. I got the idea when I was living in the house before I moved to this apartment.

Perhaps it's a ghost story I'm attempting to write. The sounds could suggest a ghost rather then just the house or the apartment settling. Some of the noises I hear don't sound like a building settling on its foundations. Most of the noises I can explain as water running through the pipes or the neighbors, but a few of the other noises I'm not sure what's making them. That was the problem I encountered when I was living in the house.

I know the noise of a refrigerator running or an environmental unit kicking on, but some of the knocks and bangs stump me. Especially when they come from an empty room or the three-bedroom apartment to my east. It's empty, so noises shouldn't be coming from that direction; however, they do. Maybe the noises are ideas knocking at the door of my mind asking to come in.