Carl Clausen: An idea for a story always means to me an incident.
Courtney Ryley Cooper: A story always starts with me at the finish—I write the rest of my story to a climax. In other words, I get the big punch of a story, and build up the rest of the structure to fit it. In a mystery story, I always get the explanation of a thing, then fit my incidents to this.
Arthur Crabb: It seems to me that a story may grow from an incident or a character, or even a trait of character or situation, which it seems to me are other ways of saying the first two.
Mary Stewart Cutting: The genesis of a story with me usually grows from some small incident or the reverse of the incident. But in an autobiographical story the character is the main theme.
Elmer Davis: The genesis of a story, with me, is a situation—invariably the same. I see financial obligations falling due. My salary is fixed; my credit distended to the bursting point. No way to meet the bills but by writing fiction.... Whereupon I grab anything that looks as if it might start a story; usually a character in a situation.
William Harper Dean: The genesis of a story with me sometimes is a single word, the title, which strikes the motif of the story; sometimes a character, sometimes a situation, or a setting. But most frequently the beginning is the climax, from which I work backward through the middle and to the beginning.
Harris Dickson: Any of these, or a combination. More usually, perhaps, it is a story, or an incident that I hear or see. For instance, The Trapping of Judge Pinkham, in The Saturday Evening Post, is approximately true, and happened not long ago at the very place described. Real incidents, however, generally begin "up in the air" and end the same way. Better beginnings and climaxes must be worked out.
It is quite rare with me that I deliberately devise a story out of the whole cloth.
I live in the South. It is a country that has attracted the attention of much enthusiastic ignorance on the part of philanthropists, and many attacks. Sometimes I do a story for the purpose of showing some particular phase of life that is not understood at the North, and try to make it so convincing as to silence these long-distance reformers who haven't an idea as to how we live, and why. For this purpose I believe temperately-stated truth, rubbed in with humor, is the most effective vehicle.
Captain Dingle: In general my story comes from a vision of a character and a situation. Sometimes only the situation. Then I make a character to fit it—usually out of material I know.