People ask where the stories come from as if there were a well somewhere with a bucket on a rope. I wish there were. What I have instead is a habit, and the habit is mostly noticing.
When somebody dies in a small town, the food starts arriving before the family has made it home from the hospital. Casseroles, mostly. Chicken spaghetti, squash, a pound cake wrapped in foil with the owner's name on a strip of masking tape stuck to the bottom of the dish so it can find its way back. Nobody organizes this. It just happens, the way water finds the low place. I watched it my whole life without once thinking of it as material, and then one day I could not stop thinking about it. What does a person mean when they leave a dish on a porch. What does it mean to bring one back. Who in town does not get one, and why.
That is where fiction comes from. Ordinary things you have stopped seeing, seen again.
What you already know
New writers tend to reach for material they have read about. Spies, kingdoms, serial killers with elaborate hobbies. There is nothing wrong with any of it, but I notice that the writing comes alive on the page the moment they put in something they actually know. The way a screen door sounds when it is about to need a new spring. What the inside of a church smells like on a Wednesday night. How a man rubs his face before he answers a question he does not want to answer. You cannot look that up. You have it or you do not, and you have a great deal more of it than you think.
The trouble is that the things you know best are invisible to you. They are the water you swim in. So the first job of a writer is to become a stranger in your own life for a little while, long enough to see it.
Keep a notice list
Here is the habit. Carry something to write on. A pocket notebook, the notes app on your phone, the back of the church bulletin. Once a day, write down one thing you noticed. One concrete thing you saw or heard, rather than an idea for a story. The waitress who calls everybody baby except the one man she calls sir. The neighbor who mows his yard in a dress shirt. The particular blue of the porch ceilings on the old houses, which keeps the wasps off, or the haints, depending on who is telling you.
Do not try to use these. Do not sort them. Just keep them. After a few months you will have a couple hundred true things, and when you sit down to write a scene you will find you reach for them without deciding to. A character will mow in a dress shirt, and the reader will believe him, because you did.
The casserole test
When a scene feels flat, I ask myself what the casserole is. What is the ordinary, specific, physical thing in this scene that only these people in this place would do. A funeral scene with weeping and rain is a scene anybody could have written. A funeral scene where the widow's sister is writing down whose dish is whose in a spiral notebook so the thank-you notes will be right is a scene from somewhere. The reader has been to that funeral now. They will follow you anywhere after that.
Then let it turn
Noticing gets you the truth. Fiction needs one thing more, and it is the question what if. What if a dish came back that nobody had left. What if the name on the tape belonged to somebody who had been dead for years. The ordinary thing is the door. The what if is what walks through it. You need both, and the order matters. Start with the casserole. Let the strange in later, through the side door, the way it comes in real life.
Tonight, before bed, write down one thing you saw today that you have seen a thousand times. Tomorrow, write down another. Give it a month. Then go read the list and tell me there is no story in it.