I’m a really chaotic writer. I tend to have some vague idea of where I want the story to go, but I know that when I start writing something better comes up and I’ll just roll with that. It also doesn’t help that I think best while I’m writing, because that’s when I see the characters interacting with each other and that’s when I realise what is doable with them and what isn’t. So for stories I usually write the first few pages and then totally rearrange my plot. After that small details get altered, but the large red line stays the same.
As for getting ideas… I usually start stories with a concept or a character in mind. For example I have one short story that should be part of a series (but the rest isn’t written yet and probably never will be, or a long time from now). That story started with four figurines I have on my desk. While I was cleaning my room I decided that it would be fun to write a story using just those characters. By now I’ve sort of cheated on that, but that was the initial idea. Just a few days before that I’d had a conversation about challenges and that it would be fun to write a series of stories, each with a theme.
I’d already done something like that with a series of the main emotions, so each story focusing on one of those. Now I decided to use the seven deadly sins, so seven short stories, all in the same world with the same set of characters, with each story themed around one of the seven deadly sins.
So yeah, long story short: I usually get ideas from stories from little things. I start with a character, a concept, a name, a country, and from there I develop other characters and a plot line, sometimes a world and a culture, depending on the setting.