Getting Off The Gear

There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up. Stephen King

‘….He himself was lately dodgy rather than just dodgy because the gear started to make him throw up and he had somehow heeded the Dire Warning from a guy called Cragan whom he met in the Black Bull.

Cragan – a strange, uneasy sort of man - turned out to be a doctor and it was he who got Tegger off the gear. Cragan convinced him that he didn’t have an addictive personality. He’d just been having a really bad time and was self-medicating. They only ever met in the Black Bull but in those months Tegger got himself clean. He’d even shown Cragan some of his writing. There was trust between them. That last time they met Cragan brought him a pile of novels - battered paperbacks - and said he was going away to America, where he’s got this job in a psychiatric hospital.

Tegger never saw Cragan again. He read Cragan’s books, line by line and as he read them it was as though he were in the Black Bull with Cragan, arguing the toss. In the stories were people he recognised. There were even people like himself…’

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