How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?

At some point, everyone who writes gets asked this question: Where do you get your ideas? Stephen King talks a lot about where his ideas come from, I think mostly because some of his ideas are so horrifying/strange that people really want to know. Nick Hornby, who writes books that are less strange than King*, probably doesn't get this question quite as much. But no matter what type of writer you are, I think this is a common question: people who don't make up stories always wonder how people who do make up stories do it. I can't speak for anyone else, of course, but what happens to me sounds pretty similar to what happens to King or anyone else, so I wanted to provide an example of how an idea came to me, recently.** I read a website called One Sentence , which is a place where people try to tell stories in one sentence. Pretty self-explanatory, right? Sometimes the stories are funny , sometimes they are sad , sometimes they are bitter , and sometimes the writers writ