Volanis, I hope you're getting the point all these FOMs (friends of Mike's
) are making. I hope you're not too discouraged. Writing -- good writing -- is something that requires time and patience and the willingness to fail.
In fact I just told this to the nice customer service operator the other day, who, upon learning that I'm getting an MFA in creative writing, told me about her husband who wants to write a book but feels he can't write anything good. I told her that if you poll 100 people in a mall, 95 of them will say they want to write a book, but only 2 of them will ever do it, because the other 93, IF they try, will suffer performance anxiety and drop out. The 2 that do it will stick it out through one bad draft, one bad paragraph, one bad sentence after another. You have to give yourself permission to write a lot of crap, and write it for as long as it takes, before you are finally come to a point where you can say, okay, this isn't half bad, this might work. (I maintain that those who are able to say definitively "That'll work" are few and far between.) I told her to tell him to keep his sails up, so to speak, and invest in a lot of pen and paper.
Anyway...piggybacking off Rhea's idea: Some of my better stories simply came from me asking "What if?" In fact somebody far more famous than me said something similar: You keep asking the question and follow where it leads, like a crumb trail, sorta-kinda. The key is to not let your logic get too much in the way, at least not at first.
