Writing popular fiction

some of my science fiction pieces, and has been published in Spain, France, and Japan. The muse had been reluctant that day, but I tickled her feet with a mental feather until she got to work!
    For many reasons, you should keep a notebook full of ideas—mine is unorganized, chaotic but full of rich little bits written in at random—titles, scraps of dialogue and character sketches, so that you may return to these at a later date to get a sluggish imagination going again. But if you use the playing-with-exotic-titles game to get story ideas, you'll find a notebook
especially
valuable. That morning I spent coming up with "Soft Come the Dragons" has provided me with two additional stories. Months after that session, perusing my notes, I struck on the title "Dragon in the Land," which had not intrigued me at the time, and wrote and sold a story with the title as the jumping off point. A third title, "Dragon in Amber," inspired yet another story which I am presently completing. Three titles using the same key word is the limit for one writer, lest the similarities confuse his readers, Yet, none of these stories would have existed today had I not begun to tease my mind with this little word game.
    Other stories and novels I've generated in this manner include A
Werewolf Among Us, Dark of the Woods, Island of Shadows, Cold Terror
, "To Behold the Sun."
    "The Temple of Sorrow," and "The Terrible Weapon."
    Science fiction and fantasy, because of their predilection for unusual titles, are the best genres on which to work this word game, though it is applicable to any category and has worked well, for me, with Gothics and suspense novels.

METHOD TWO: PLAYING WITH THE NARRATIVE HOOK
    This game is similar to the first, though you begin with a narrative hook (a sentence that will grab the reader's attention), not a title You sit at the typewriter and, without a great deal of cerebral exercise, type an intriguing opening sentence or paragraph. It is not necessary to know where the story will go. The idea is to present yourself with interesting and challenging beginnings out of which, when your free associations begin to jell, you will be able to construct a completed work. Write one new beginning after another, no matter how wild they seem, how impossible the development of a reasonable piece of fiction may appear to be from them. Shortly, you will find yourself so interested in one of these hastily jotted openings that you won't rest until you've carried on with it.
    The first piece I generated in this fashion was a novelette titled "Where the Beast Runs." After its magazine publication, I incorporated it as the middle section of a novel,
Fear That Man
. It begins:
Long ago, shortly after my mother's blood was sluiced from the streets of Changeover and her body burned upon a pyre outside of town, I suffered what the psychologists call a trauma. That seems like a very inadequate word to me.
    The bizarre circumstances of that off-the-top-of-the-head opening spurred my imagination into working up a story to explain them.
    In a short story, "Shambolain," I introduced several characters that caught my fancy—just by the nature of their names—and continued to write what I feel is one of my two or three best short stories:
Four days before Christmas, I had my first of two troubles with the Creep and Delia grew ill and Shambolain arrived—and nothing was ever quite the same after that.
    As an extension of this muse-kicker, you sit at the typewriter and work up paragraph after paragraph of character descriptions, until one of them interests you enough to build a story around him. This happened to me with the short story "A Third Hand," which I eventually expanded into the novel
Starblood
:
Timothy was not human. Not wholly. If one included arms and legs in a definition of the human body, then Timothy did not pass the criteria necessary for admission to the club. If one counted two eyes in that definition, Timothy was also ruled out, for he had but one eye, after all, and even that was placed in an unusual position: somewhat closer to his left ear than a human eye should be and definitely an inch lower in his overlarge skull than was the norm. Then there was his nose. It totally lacked cartilage. The only evidence of its presence was two holes, the ragged nostrils, punctuating the relative center of his bony, misshapen head.
    There was his skin: waxy yellow like some artificial fruit and coarse with large, irregular pores that showed