It all ties in, doesn’t it…the ideas that germinate from something overheard or read get stuck in the mind and bloom (or fester!) into narrative.
I am admittedly poor at poetry, and studied it with the thought in mind of its value to writing fiction—or anything else in longer form for that matter. But it seems that I have actually been writing some poetry—good or bad—and retained it in that form. Strange how some ideas, the words themselves, come into your head set up in the format they want to be. Opening lines from a story idea will enter my mind just like that—a sentence that sets a scene or state of character’s mind and leads into the story from there. Others come in prose, and try as I might to change them into a story, prose is what they insist on being, and I tend to let them live as they want.
Discipline, and skill—attention to the elements of form and process—could surely overcome this to produce a finished piece of work that retains its spontaneity without loss of inspiration, and would most likely leave me with a lot less “opening lines.” Every now and then a writer has to sit down and realize that his pretty words are something that he will want others to read and enjoy. A writer has to learn to let go of just a bit of self-pride and satisfaction to work a little harder at the details of the craft.
A writer has to remember that there are rules here too.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology