WHAT DO HOT AIR BALLOONS HAVE TO DO WITH WRITING?

            When I was growing up in Colorado, the Martin Marietta plant where they built rockets for the space program was a few miles down the road.  President Kennedy had announced the race to the moon three years earlier.  We were obsessed with space.  At night I used to stretch out on the grass in the back yard and stare at the vast universe, thinking about rockets hurtling through the darkness.            This was also the era of UFO sightings.  At the University of Colorado in Boulder, a presidential commission was assembling data for what came to be known as the Condon Report, a study on the existence of Unidentified Flying Objects.
Directly across the street from my family, lived a man who, one weekend near the Fourth of July, assembled a hot air balloon in his garage.  He started after work one Friday.  When he was finished, all the neighbors gathered to watch him launch the contraption from his driveway.  We held our breath, wondering if the thing would hold air.
It did hold.  The balloon achieved altitude.  The wind caught it and carried it away.  We craned our necks to follow the small white dot across the city.  It was magical.
The way I remember this, it happened on a Saturday.  That Monday, a story ran in the newspaper.  “UFO SIGHTED OVER DENVER.”  Was it our neighbor’s hot air balloon?  No one ever knew for sure.
In the long run, it doesn’t matter whether the UFO came from outer space or from the driveway across the street.  The important thing is that our neighbor believed he could build a hot air balloon and make it fly.  I try to remember that when I’m struggling with a story.  I sit at my desk and try my best to write and hope like crazy it will fly.
When I’m writing the first several drafts, I remind myself not to worry about what my story looks like to other people.  The first objective is to give it enough substance so that it might hold air.