In many places the question "where do you get your ideas?" comes up.
The standard Golden Age answer was "There's a post-office box in Poughkeepsie." The real answer is, of course, not quite what the young writer wants to hear.
In any case, I ran into something this morning that I'd use the next time I needed an example. Randall Munroe, in his weekly webcomic XKCD, did a strip where he made a grid of several disciplines (physics, chemistry, etc.) and several prefixes (theoretical, astro, etc.) and then did a Google Scholar search to count for titles.
"Marine Biology" turned up 945,000 papers. No surprise there. "Marine Psychology" was less well-represented with a mere 35 papers and "Marine Dentistry" picked up only one.
The search phrase "High-energy Theology" returned zero hits.
A writer would see that as an opening. That's the real place ideas come from; the spark might have been drifting around in the air around you, but the real trick is the eye to latch on to it, and the skill to develop it into something you can make a story around.
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