I was sitting on my couch looking out my window at the trees and the houses across the street, and I started to mentally write a description of what I was seeing as if it were a scene in a novel or short story. This is a typical thing for me to do.
Then, I got on my computer and typed the description, and since I am a fiction writer, I included characters in it. I wrote it as if it were a scene in a novel. I decided to make the “character” who was looking out the window the editor of a magazine, and then I decided that the occupant of one of the houses across the street was a writer for the same magazine; the unnamed editor sitting on his couch and looking out his window had hired her.
If what I was imagining was the opening paragraphs of a novel. Where would it go from there? I thought that from there it could flash back twenty or twenty-five years to when the editor first met the writer who now lives across the street from him (and his wife and children, whom I hadn’t yet thought of). So I wrote the beginning of whatever it might become—novel or short story. First, the editor describing the view from his window and mentioning the writer, and then a flashback of twenty or twenty-five years to when the editor was himself a beginning writer, before he met the woman who now works for him and lives in a house across the street.
And then, before I even got out of bed this morning, I imagined that in the opening scene when the editor is looking out his window and thinking about the woman across the street, he suddenly thinks: Who is she? How do I know her? The editor has Alzheimer’s.
So this is, perhaps, the opening scene of a new novel. If I actually write it, it will be my thirteenth.