Nalbro Bartley: It, the genesis of a story, could spring from any of the suggested things—an idea for a story to my mind suggests a theme such as capital versus labor, love versus money, etc.
Konrad Bercovici: I will be hanged if I know what the genesis of a story is. I only know I do not sleep well a few nights before I write one. And after a headache or two a story comes. As a boy, it broke my heart never to be able to see the actual breaking through of a plant. I always found it broken through in the morning,—if you get what I mean.
And then pictures begin to rise before me. Pictures of things I have seen and others that I wanted to see. And then the men and women in my stories walk through those pictures and stay where they like and see what they want and I stand by and watch them and agree most of the time with each one of them and sometimes say what I would say under similar circumstances. But, like "Mr. Saber" of If Winter Comes, I can see his point of view. When the whole thing has come to an end in my mind, I sit down and write.
Ferdinand Berthoud: I usually pick on an incident from some actual happening to myself or to one of my old-time friends. Then tack on other incidents of which I have heard. Once or twice a story has come from a peculiar expression or the manner or speaking of some man I have known. Or some man's way of looking at life.
H. H. Birney, Jr.: Ideas. Some situation or idea possessing possible dramatic value will come to me; I will lie awake the best part of a night or two nights thinking it over, and put it on paper the next day. Sometimes the whole story seems to unfold itself instantaneously before me; again I will work it out detail after detail mentally. Some ideas for stories have come from remarks of friends, from some anecdote, or an experience that was personal and of which the dramatic value was unrecognized at the time.
Farnham Bishop: The wedding of a newly-discovered fact to something already in mind, followed by the swift begetting, birth and growth of a story. Example: "Carranza to Blockade Mazatlan. Mexican Navy to be sent through Panama Canal, against Stronghold of Revolution" (newspaper head-line, sometime in summer of 1920). That, plus British naval officer's book (which I had recently read) containing description of the Scooter or C. M. B., developed within ten minutes into fairly complete mental outline of The Rest Cure.
Algernon Blackwood: The genesis of a story with me is invariably—an emotion, caused in my particular case by something in nature rather than in human nature: a scrap of color in the sky, a flower, a sound of wind or water; briefly, an emotion produced by beauty.
Max Bonter: Anything that stirs my emotions is likely to furnish the idea for a story. It may be an incident, a character, a trait of character, a situation, a setting, a title. It may be any one of them, a combination of several of them, or all of them. An idea embodying all of them, of course, would really be more than an idea; it would be practically the story itself—either a true story in which I had figured, or one that I had heard related—and would require at my hands little else besides an amalgamation of the attributes specified.
Pure fiction, in my case, seems to have its inception in a contrast, or in a sudden break of continuity—something irregular or freakish that draws a quick focus of the mental faculties and demands of them why, how? My mind immediately struggles to paint the significance of the contrast, or to splice the broken threads of circumstance into a tissue of normality. In other words, it is my mind's tendency to give balance to unbalanced or opposing conditions or things.
For example: In a quiet little community of soft-spoken, well-civilized males I find an old barbarian—the boss stevedore of a freight dock—who chews, swears, drinks, and lives with a common-law wife. Their little household is practically in a state of ostracism. My emotions are aroused; my sympathies enlisted in an endeavor to place in a better light this old pariah whose chief fault seems to be the carelessness wherewith he persists in being human. I bring the opposing standards together and after the clash the stevedore's chief detractor—a prominent church-goer—is found to be a sly old rake; whereas the dockman's tough hide covers a heart that had kept him true even to an unsanctified union.