I have a regular joke with my friends that if the police or FBI suddenly take me away in the middle of the night, tell them I’m a writer and that anything in my search history is for research.
When you’re a writer, everything becomes fodder for a book. Conversations with friends. News stories. Dreams. Sometimes I’ll start a movie and with the opening scene, I start thinking about where I would take the story or the characters. The great thing is that even given the same starting information, every writer will take the story in a different direction because their experiences and their writing process are going to be different.
When I started writing contemporary romance, I wrote suspense. I switched to contemporary romance I still wanted to include elements of a mystery. Even my first romantic comedy started with the heroine finding a body behind her car!
Real life is often unbelievable so take it and run with it. The most innocuous incident can be twisted and turned to be funny, scary, romantic, unromantic or whatever you need it to be to fit your story. Don’t be afraid to make it your own!