From SRP author Mark Posey:
I’ve learned that a writer’s mind rarely travels in a straight line.
Give it a quiet moment — washing dishes, staring out a window, standing in a kitchen half-awake — and it wanders. Not toward plans. Not toward logic. Toward possibilities.
It starts innocently enough. A small, personal wondering. The kind everyone has but doesn’t linger on. What if I’d made a different choice back there? What if that one turn in the road had gone another way?
That’s just memory with a little imagination mixed in. But the mind doesn’t stay parked there. It starts layering.
What if those other versions of our life didn’t just vanish? What if they continued somewhere, out of sight, like alternate drafts of the same story?
Then the thought shifts again.
What if dreams aren’t nonsense, but bleed-through? Glimpses of those other tracks we didn’t follow?
Still harmless. Still theoretical. Interesting in a late-night, staring-at-the-ceiling kind of way. Until the next step.
What if the barrier between those tracks isn’t as solid as we assume? Not in a dramatic science fiction way. No machines. No portals. Just small glitches.
A moment where you sneeze, lose a second, zone out — and when you come back, the world is still yours…but slightly off.
You don’t notice at first. Why would you? The changes are microscopic. A different arrangement on a shelf. A color you don’t remember choosing. A detail that doesn’t match the version of events stored in your head. Easy to explain away. Memory’s unreliable. People misremember things all the time.
Right?
But what happens if the differences stop being small? If you walk into a room and the life you remember living isn’t the one waiting for you? If someone from a closed chapter of your past is suddenly still present — not as a memory, but as part of the current scene? Everyone else moves through it like nothing is strange.
Only you feel the seam.
This is where a writer’s mind goes when given space. Not because we believe these things are happening. But because we’re wired to follow a line of thought past the point most people turn back. Where someone else says, “Huh, weird thought,” and moves on…we stay.
We test it. Stretch it. Ask what it would feel like to live inside that uncertainty. And somewhere along that mental drift, a story begins to breathe. Not from research. Not from planning.
Just from letting the mind wander far enough that reality starts to look negotiable.
–Mark
Mark Posey
SRP Author and thriller writer.
Mark writes thrillers for readers who don’t mind a little dirt under the nails — stories with emotional weight, lean prose, and characters who rarely do the right thing for the right reason. His work lives somewhere between noir, revenge fantasy, and literary grit, though he avoids calling it any of those because that sounds like marketing.
When he’s not writing fiction, Mark also works as a professional editor and story consultant. His editing blog offers straight talk for indie and traditionally published authors alike — especially the ones who are tired of being told to “find their voice” by people who can’t define what voice is.
He believes in clarity over cleverness, clean narrative over trend-chasing, and that semicolons are fine, but you probably don’t need as many as you think.
He lives in Canada, which explains the politeness, but not the sarcasm.
You can find him online at MarkPoseyAuthor.com, where he blogs about writing, editing, story structure, and whatever else is on fire this week. His books are published through Stories Rule Press, an independent publisher of genre fiction with strong characters and sharp writing.
