A friend was telling me a story this week, and she was doing it in the way you can when it’s writer to writer: there doesn’t have to be a beginning yet, certainly not an ending, it’s really anything but a story, yet you get what it is going to be. You get why the writer is so sure they’ve got something with punch.

I obviously can’t tell you the story because it’s hers, not mine, but the key part was a spooky idea and I was appropriately spooked — but then I thought I had a failure of imagination. Where she was happy to have created that moment and to just see where it could take her characters, my head was treating it like reality, my head was coming up with questions. I was coming up with quite smart ways of explaining away the idea.

Fortunately, I didn’t tell her those, I just skipped to the next part and confessed to a failure of imagination. I think I convinced her that I got the idea and that I understood why she was so pleased with it, I think I convinced her that I was as spooked as I really was. But I’m not sure.

I was automatically using same parts of my head that listen to an interviewee and even as I’m nodding away, even as I’m saying yes, yes, I see, those parts of me are thinking right, why’s he lying and what’s he lying about and how can I prove it?

A failure of imagination and a cynic.

Only, she wasn’t the only one of us with a story where there is a spooky moment. In my case, I know, I can feel, I can taste that it will make you shiver if I can just position it at precisely the right spot in the story.

I told her this and she nodded politely and tried to convince me she was appropriately spooked.

Maybe I’m wrong about my failure of imagination. Or I’m wrong about writers being able to tell other writers this kind of unfinished, gauzy thread of an idea.

Either way, there are now two stories with shivery bits in and they won’t write themselves, so.