Everything is a story idea

Last month, I read a news story about the discovery of a toxin that has no antidote, a toxin so deadly that the scientists who discovered it had to withhold its DNA sequence for fear of it falling into the wrong hands. So did I panic? Was I worried? Of course not! When faced with such information, my first response is naturally going to be, "How can I turn this into an awesome story?"

It's not just news of killer toxins that spur my imagination into action. Almost anything that I run into in life, it seems, triggers the fiction writer in me, even something as mundane as my kids talking about their day at school. Some questions that I inevitably ask myself include:

• What if some aspect of the event was different?
• What if this event happened under a different set of circumstances or a different universe?
• What happens next?
• What could have happened in the past to one or more of the characters that led to the event?

Even before I became a published author, my imagination ran wild, but it admittedly happens more often now that I write regularly. So which came first? It doesn't matter, because the two feed off each other, and hopefully, the ultimate beneficiaries will be my readers.