We are fortunate in the weblogging world to have writers willing to share their experience.
From Joe at The Word Foundry, in Fertility (Joe, this is why permalinks are good things!) brings us an entry into the mind of a writer as the idea hits, and where it goes from there.
Joe starts out his post with the idea:
“I don’t know which side you come down on when it comes to the big cosmic accident.
Me, I’ve been thinking it over a lot lately. And I’ve got some questions that I can’t quite answer.”
This, and the short follow-through may end up as a story because he was able to write down what started as “Voice and all, the thing dropped into my head and started festering, stealing a bit from my personal history” on his morning commute. While laptoppers are never caught without their laptops if they’ll be seated and otherwise bored for longer than fifteen minutes, for drivers carrying a voice recorder is a good idea. Many times that opening sentence or line of poetry will stick and actually be edited in the memory process until it gets down on paper or screen, especially if its a good one, but sometimes things get lost if we’re diverted by the intrusion of reality.
So, I guess the lesson here is open mind, open laptop.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology