Private obsessions...

Private obsessions, small and large, are the door to originality and the key to unlocking it. Forget about what seems like good material or what experiences should have affected you or what your friends say you should write about. Instead, begin with the images and memories that won’t leave you alone. Logic or reason isn’t a factor, and you may have no notion of why certain pictures replay themselves in your head, though you’ll almost certainly discover why as you write. Become like our family wolf, Cochise, who has a rawhide bone that he carries around and drops and chews on for a while, picks up and hides in our bed, and soon retrieves to carry around some more. What details and scraps of memory do you gnaw on and buy and unearth and gnaw on again?

Meg Files, write from life, p. 16