What’s the seed of a story, for me? I mean, everything.
A song.
A yearning.
A thou-shalt-not.
An image I can’t get out of my mind. (Wanted and Wired’s earliest moment was Heron pulling up to the curb
to whisk Mari to safety after she did a Very Bad Thing. I didn’t know what she’d
done or why he wasn’t upset about it or even who those people were, only that
it was raining and the world was ruined and they had each other’s backs.)
A book that almost accomplished its purpose but ultimately failed
and frustrated me enough to try and do the story better.
A movie or TV show. (The scene from the Farscape
episode “A Dog with Two Bones” inspired almost everything I wrote for, like, months. Years?)
Impotent fury. (I wrote Perfect
Gravity in 2016. Of course it was
about a powerful woman bringing down a corrupt government and taking over the world.)
Science. (On Saturn the rain is made of diamonds. Tell me
that doesn’t make you want to write something.)
A might-have-been. (I’m currently obsessed with pre-colonial
Africa, and not just because Black
Panther made me cry.)
A news or human-interest story. (There was a
Daily Beast article about a Paris apartment that had been locked up and
untouched for seventy years. It was just crammed with stories waiting to be
told.)
A nuance of psychology. (How is it that someone who has been
abused has learned to move forward and take control of her life when the people who
were never harmed are still holding life-destroying grudges on her behalf?)
Point of all that is a story can start from anything, and the suckers are literally everywhere. I can't put my finger on just one source. I mean, I dare you to stop ideas from jumping right out at you in traffic, in the shower, in a look, in a lyric, in some stranger's voice, in a broken earring wedged in your seat at the theater or a strange storm-wet stray on your doorstep when you never even knew you needed a cat. We only need to notice these magic seeds, and then, if we take our charge seriously, to nurture them into stories.
