Goodreads asked J. Guenther:

How do you get inspired to write?

J. Guenther It's largely an unconscious thing. Some what-if (concept) comes to me and won't go away. I wake up with story details tumbling around in my head--a title, a character, a McGuffin, a bit of action or dialogue. Or I find I'm resting from a bigger project by writing little pieces of the new idea. Eventually it reaches critical mass and has to be written.

One of my projects started as this: What if a psychiatrist realizes during a therapy session that the patient is a murderer and has the gun with him? This concept, once in my mind, absolutely had to be written.

Once I woke up the morning after seeing a play and thought, That was the worst thing I've ever seen on the stage. I couldn't possibly write anything worse. I started writing my first 3-act play that day.

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