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For the past month, I have been getting inspired by real life people as I walk to metro station. I kept seeing a dad who is always pushing a baby trolley with his baby. I did not know if the baby is a boy or girl. That kind of got me into writing a fictional story.

As the days went on, I kept seeing him with the trolley. And one night as I walked home, I saw him with his wife. Not surprised but spoiler alert: the main male character, in which he is the muse, is a single dad, which kinds of ruins my creative flow as to what happens as the fictional story goes on. Writer’s block definitely happened and will keep happening. But some romance tropes might help. That is probably what I would add and learn more about next. Fingers crossed.

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It is the first time ever that I have gotten inspired by a real life person to tell a story. As I wrote the story day after day, I also noticed a few things in real life as I bumped into my fiction muse. To be honest, he is not tall but seems like a cool dad. What a pity that he is a single dad in the story. I might make up for it.

That is probably what goes on in a writer’s brain as they walk and people watch?

[Donna] Tartt consents to reveal a bit about her process, which is layered with elaborate stages of research, one of the reasons it takes her so long to produce her books. “The mood is important to me first. With The Little Friend, even before the story took shape, there was that dark, dank Mississippi mood. And The Secret History was much the same: It began for me with winter, cold. Moving from Mississippi to Vermont was a big change for me; Vermont was a haunting, snowy place. That part of the state”—the area around the Bennington campus—“is a little eerie and uncanny.”...