"Where do your stories come from?"

Ok, one of my test readers saw the blog and sent me a question via email (he's too young to have an account on blogspot so his parents forwarded me the question). 

"Where do your stories come from?"

It's a pretty simple question, and one I planned to get to eventually, so here goes...

I can't speak to how other writers get their ideas, but for me at least, the stories have always kind of just "been there". I'll see something like a cool picture, or even an ad on TV, and BAM!  The story is there.    

I do have some control over how things play out (the sequence of events for example), but major plot elements (a tiny house on the outside with a huge inside, who lives there, a magic birdcage, and a warning) are all "written in stone" for me so to speak. I’ve tried changing them but it just never works. 

When the salesman walks into a room, I know exactly what it looks like. I can see what color it is, what the furniture looks like, how many windows it has, and so on. I even know what it smells like. Same with the characters. I know exactly what they look like, what they sound like when they laugh, etc.

You might also be surprised to learn that even though I don't give the characters names, I do know their complete histories. I know the backgrounds of every character I've ever written about, even if they only appear in the story briefly. I know how many brothers and sisters they have, did they grow up rich or poor, how educated they are, etc. The whole she-bang. Again, all this information is just "there" for me. I do get to pick and choose how much of it to tell, which is a good thing I suppose because if I included everything I "know" about all the characters I'd never get to tell the story!

One last thing - I'm always learning new "stuff" about the salesman's world from the stories. It's probably the part of the writing process that I like best. For example, if you asked me last year "How do gargoyles have kids?" I would have said, "What the heck are you talking about??" But now that I'm writing a story that includes a bunch of gargoyles, I know *exactly* how they have kids (in case you're wondering, they have litters of 4-6 offspring like cats or dogs, but only once every 10 years). Now that bit of information might or might not make it into the story you read, but it's a "fact" about the salesman's world I know nonetheless.

Well, that's it for now. I hope I answered your question B----.