Audrey Niffenegger

Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife (strongly recommended by Julie, by the way), has a nice essay at Powell's about creativity and the writer's life.

In 1997 I was sitting at my drawing table when a phrase popped into my head: the time traveler's wife. I wrote it down on the sheet of Kraft paper that covered the table, along with all the other ideas and song titles and lists of Things to Do. It was a generous phrase. It assured me that there were two characters, a husband and a wife, and that the husband was a time traveler. I started to think about the wife. It would be hard to be the wife, I thought; you'd spend a lot of time waiting for your man, and he would be the one having all the adventures. I felt sorry for her; I could see her, sitting at a table, drinking tea, waiting. Why does he leave her alone? I wondered. Another idea plopped down: time travel is a disease, it's a genetic disorder. By now this little cluster of ideas had my full attention. I wasn't interested in anything else now, and I began to build and ponder and worry them into being.

All of us, writers and non-writers, have such random thoughts pop into our minds. The difference between writers and non-writers is that a writer will obsess on that thought and see where it takes them, while the latter shifts their attention to something else (and probably maintaining their mental hygiene in the process). The difference between good writers and bad writers is that a good writer can translate that escalating line of thought into entertaining and intelligent prose, while the latter...sorry, I could easily jab some dubious bestselling author here, but I'm trying my best to be polite.