I am in awe that just one sentence can bring about these wonderful stories of yours. Your imagination is an amazing place Crash and thank you for sharing it with us.
The first time a small germ blossomed into a full-fledged story inside my head was just amazing. If I had been writing (or at least making up fiction even if I never put it down on paper) my entire life, it might not have been such an incredible experience. I have occasionally joked that I thought David Kemper had hacked into my keyboard and that he was taking over my machine. When a story appears full-blown on the page without any sense of a creative process, that's really what it feels like. The best example I have of that happening is
Hush. That story was just suddenly
THERE, with very little cranial activity on my part. The other totally astounding moment was when I was writing
Reversal, and John suddenly began fighting and killing everyone in the hangar bay. I never envisioned that or intended for it to be in the story. I was happily pounding away at the keys, and all of a sudden he went into motion.
"Hey!! What the heck are you doing!?!?! Cut that out! You're John Crichton! You don't kill people! Stop that!!!" <Crash checks under her keyboard to see if there is a cable leading back to David Kemper's computer.>
And he just kept on fighting.
Those moments are so rare and so much fun because the writer gets to experience the story as a surprise and enjoy the unexpected moments the same way the readers do.
Let me toss out that I believe imagination can be developed and nurtured. Stephen King's book 'On Writing' was a revelation to me because I was stunned by some of his imagery, and because it revealed so clearly how he continues to take ordinary, mundane moments in life and turn them sideways to create ideas for his stories. It was after reading his book that I began exercising that mental process. If you spend enough time looking at everyday sights and events and asking "How could this fit into a story?", it eventually turns into a habit and an at-your-fingertips kind of tool that you can use for creating stories.
I work a couple of days a week at a video shop -- the type of place that rents out DVDs. Yesterday, a woman came in with a 4-5 year old boy. The child, Riley, proceeded to absolutely trash the shop while his mother did almost nothing to stop him. It took me about 3 hours in between customers to find all the DVD covers and tags that he had misplaced and put them back where they belonged. I never got upset because 1) it's just DVDs, not airplanes; and 2) because from the moment it started, I realized I had a great background character for a story. I was getting a bang out of watching this thoroughly undisciplined, energetic child be just that ... a child. He's
exactly the sort of person that a writer wants to save up and plug into the scenery when the story can stand a little not-central-to-the-plot mayhem somewhere.
Seeing stuff that way takes time, practice, and a routine of storing up notes whenever you see a studendous personality like Riley's.