Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient, uses small questions when he sits down to write his novels. “I don’t have any grand themes in my head,” he says (a statement you’ll hear echoed by other great writers). Nor does he start with an impossibly large question, such as “What kind of character would be fascinating to readers?” Instead, he takes a few incidents—“like [a] plane crash or the idea of a patient and a nurse at night talking”—and asks himself a few very small questions, such as “Who is the man in the plane? Why is he there? Why does he crash? What year is this?” Of the
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I love this idea of pulling the thread to develop a story. Start someplace mundane and traverse to the spectacular.
