Creating Stories

People have asked me over the years about where I get my ideas from, and I have told them I don't really know, but that's a little less than truthful. The truth is, I see something or hear something and there's this kind of click inside my head. An image forms and begins to roll around until it takes shape. For The Hollow, it was totally like this.

One day while up in Connecticut, I was driving around Manchester and came upon a swimming spot from my childhood. I parked in the parking lot and just sat there looking through the fence until an image slowly form inside my head of a body floating in the pool. I spent the rest of day with that image taking up space inside my mind until I could feel the absolute loneliness of dying like that and nobody noticing. It wouldn't go away until I wrote it down in a notebook.

Over time, the story started to take shape. The idea of Bruce Westman was brought out from the depths of stories forgotten and rebuilt into a very broken man with so many demons and issues. You see, in a prior writing, Bruce Westman was a private investigator of the strange and unusual. He spent most of his time chasing vampires and monsters. It made for some good stories, but I never did anything with them, but this story idea, The Hollow, seemed perfect for the rebirth of Bruce. The other characters just seemed to take shape and fill in the mix until I had a whole world formed.