Originally published on Substack
AUG 25, 2026
Well, hello there! Thanks for coming back…or dropping by for the first time. I’m so glad you are here. I love working with writers – and anyone with a strong, positive, insightful message to convey to build coalitions and make the world a better place.
Let’s get started with this week’s topic: How do you come up with your stories?
For any writer, this is a question you have asked and answered many times. Adults staring down at you, trying to encourage your childlike storytelling skills about a duck or dinosaur (although maybe sounding a bit too perky and therefore a little condescending, but I digress…). Family who sincerely want to support you and your mysterious craft, while worrying that you are writing about them. Friends hoping you are writing about them. Literally anyone who finds out you are a writer.
How do I come up with my stories?
Short answer: Observe life. Take notes.
Longer answer…
I’m the rare extrovert-with-situational-shyness and a photographic memory, or had, before my TBI. I love being the life of the party, but in situations where I do not know anyone there, I tend to be a wallflower. Quietly observing. Taking notes – either mental or physically writing snippets of scenes, dialogue and characters into my phone notes or a paper notebook. The habit of always having a way to jot down ideas was engrained in me in high school (long before smartphones) with my creative writing teach extolling the virtues of always having pad and pen at the ready. With my iPhone I can now appear to be the important person responding to texts or emails, instead of the weird girl in the corner with the notebook.
I have always had a gift for observing everything. In case you are wondering, it does not make one popular.
This habit of observe and write down, was further instilled in me during college. I was not just taught to carry pad and pen with me (still way before smartphones, kids), but as a journalism major, also how to sit and observe and write everything down. To be a good writer is to be part creative wild imagination dreamer, of course, but also part anthropologist, part forensic scientist, part journalist.
I had class assignments to go and sit in one spot for an hour and record everything. Then to slice and dice what I was looking at into all the various scenes, systems and possibilities my mind could conjure up. Sometimes we were sent in teams, sometimes alone. How to write it like a journalist filing a report; like an anthropologist studying a foreign society; like a forensic scientist looking for the granular details. Write it all down. What is fact and what is inference? Write it down again. To use all five senses. What did the air smell like? Feel like? What was I hearing behind me? In front of me? What was I seeing and what was I perceiving? And write it down again.
We studied literature, movies, television shows, songs, the evening news. What did they include? What did they leave out. We wrote detailed reports of the evening news – minute my minute reporting of the stories, but also the reporters, how they looked, sounded, reacted, tossed a story back to the anchor. The commercials in between. The intro and ending. Writing again and again. Drilled into my brain so that it became second nature. Writing for the college newspaper added another layer. Straight news stories, sports stories with more color and adjectives, editorials that made me well known (and not always liked) around campus. I had a sports column which was terrific fun. I became Editor-in-Chief and oversaw the whole paper, which was not fun.
These skills served me well as a reporter, giving my articles more depth and punch…if the editor appreciated it and let it stay in. If he deemed it too flowery or unnecessary my articles were returned dripping in red ink with a, “great article, just make these few changes and you’re ready for publication.”
Observing everything and seeing the story in everything helps me think in a “three-dimensional-chess” way so that I could see and pitch stories others missed. It served me very well on one particular day about 24 years ago.
How do I come up with my stories?
Short answer: Observing life + Hard Work + a little Serendipity.
In the spring of 2002, I was working for CD Publications, based in Silver Spring, Maryland in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. We covered federal and other grants – how to get them, how to keep them and what others were doing with their grant money. One day, I was sent to cover an excruciatingly boring conference hosted by the U.S. Department of Justice for their grantees at the old Marriott Wardman Park hotel across the street from the National Zoo. It was a beautiful old hotel in the grand belle epoch style, already a little shabby chic by 2002, but still a good place for a conference and lots of architectural eye candy for when the presenters droned on and on. I came up with two book ideas that day.
Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, in its’ heyday.
One was a premium product for our subscribers. I had just been tasked with updating our premium product Grant Tips. Because I had done that task well, and taken it very seriously, I was primed that day to see the potential for a follow up sequel Tips for New Grantees by doing two simple things: listening and talking to the people around me. My editors loved the idea, and I was able to write it myself. (Sadly, CD Pubs was sold in 2013 and most of the newsletters and none of the premiums are now available online.)
I also came up with the idea for my novel, Click. During the conference lunch break I went outside to get some fresh air and walk around. There’s only so much recycled hotel air and uncomfortable chairs even a 25-year old can handle. I walked across the street to a hot dog cart in front of the zoo, bought my humble lunch and started walking up the street to find a bench. A shiny object on the sidewalk caught my eye. A roll of film lay in the crevice between two concrete squares of sidewalk. The silver DX code – the silvery, foil looking squares on the outside of the roll – was glinting in the sun. (anyone Millennial and younger…here you go)
I looked down, examined it, and felt sorry for the poor tourist who lost their panda photos. I kept walking. Yes, everyone then and now asks me why I did not pick up the roll of film. I have no good answer…Let’s continue.
Again, serendipity as I found no bench, I went back to the hotel lobby. There, as I sat surrounded by elegant furniture and accessories, Very Important Washingtonians in black suits, silk ties or pearls, and dozens of hushed conversations, ideas began to percolate.
→ What if it wasn’t pandas on that roll of film?
→ What if it were lurid photos? Of a member of Congress…and an intern? (This was after all shortly after the era of Clinton & Lewinsky; Congressman Condit & Chandra Levy.)
My mind was bubbling with ideas. I set aside my lunch and just started writing. I wrote down every last detail of the hotel lobby and guests, the sights, sounds and smells. The intrinsic electricity in the air of a place where important people are discussing serious ideas. Many of these details became the groundwork for the opening scene and first chapter of Click.
However, it’s not just the ability to be observant that leads to good stories. It is also conversations with people of all backgrounds, walks of life, and worldviews. In the spring of 2002, we were still a city under siege and at war. We were all still shellshocked and trying to make sense of what had happened the previous September. There were still heavily armed guards in camo, and in plain clothes, all over town…including the entrance to my suburban Bethesda grocery store. Everyone in town was having conversations – public discourse and private, shared moments – to try and figure out why. At that time, I was volunteering with teenagers and one night, one of them asked probably the most poignant question I have ever, or will ever hear, “Do you think the people who died on 9/11 had a chance to get things right in their lives before they died? Whether they knew that was what was happening or not?”
And just like that I had the core of my novel.
Gratuitous inclusion of my book cover…
I’ve never been a big fan of mystery novels. I find them a bit formulaic and hard to relate to. In that one moment, out of the mouths of babes, so to speak, I understood instantly why. The stories of the lives left behind – those of us who have to keep on going, keep on living, keep grappling with the unknowable why, while still putting one foot in front of the other. How do people make sense of tragedy and their own lives, their own choices, when the world is falling apart and there are no answers? That is the story that grabs me. The one that compels me to keep reading past my bedtime. The story that I recommend to everyone I know.
Coming up with fantastical stories, with big epic story arcs and complex plots are great – especially if you are in the movie business. But, unless there is also heart and soul, small moments and deep insights on what makes us all human and connected, it will flop. (Ishtar, anyone?!?)
So, how do I come up with my stories?
It’s not a formula. It’s not even really a recipe. It is the sketches of places, people, bits of dialogue I pull from the air around me. The questions that touch a deep nerve within me. Feelings, smells and sounds. An ache. A longing to understand something. A longing to change what has happened in real life and make it better or whole or simpler or more interestingly complex through fiction.
It is the things that I have collected and squirreled away that in the right moment becomes kismet…becomes a story worth telling.
Visit me every Tuesday on Substack for a new article about the writing life and my framework Your DRAFT Plan…
Cheers, Carrie Ann
My mission is to guide emerging writers and aspiring authors through their journey, while coaching them to see that their story worth telling could lead to an entrepreneurial business of their own.
I truly believe we all have a story worth telling. For me, it’s not just a cute tag line or catchy slogan I whipped up. I’ve seen the power of storytelling to convey important information in news articles and deep human truths in novels. We all have something valuable to contribute. We all deserve to be heard. I started The Stories We Tell to make the writer life less solitary, more communal, and provide athletic-style coaching to help you reach your artistic and entrepreneurial goals & dreams. Let me know how I can help you too.
Still here?! That’s amazing! Want to check out my novel? You’re in luck…the 20th anniversary of its’ publication is right around the corner and AuthorHouse has it on sale for $11.99…or get on Amazon - for free as part of Kindle Unlimited or a paperback.
