Sometimes a story idea pops into a writer’s mind while writing. Sometimes it comes from out of the blue in real life. Here’s what happened to me just twenty minutes ago.

As I was walking along the Great Highway path next to the ocean, I saw a man enter the path carrying one of those iron bars that lock a car’s steering wheel in place. “Why would he be carrying something like that?” I asked myself.

Ten seconds later my question was answered: a man on his bike stopped, got off and faced the man with the iron bar. I stood about 10 yards from them.

The man with the iron bar raised it above his head.

“What the hell are you doing?!” said the guy with the bike. “This is San Francisco, we don’t do things like that.”

The man lowered the iron bar. “I didn’t like what you said to me.”

“You almost ran me over,” said the bike guy. “What did you expect me to say, you stupid ass?”

The man lifted the iron bar above his head again. “Hey,“ I shouted, “stop that!“ He turned toward me, shaking, and dropped the bar. Then, getting into a boxer’s stance, he said to the bike guy, “Put ‘em up!”

“I don’t want to fight you!”

“You swore and yelled at me, man! You just called me a stupid ass! Come on, put ‘em up!”

Since the man didn’t have an iron bar in his hand, I stepped closer to them and asked, “What’s going on around here?”

Each man told me his story. The car guy said he didn’t see the bike guy and made a mistake by almost hitting him, but he didn’t like the way the bike guy got mad at him. The bike guy said he was riding down the street when the car guy made a turn and almost ran over him. He stopped, swore at the car guy, then rode off.

I thought the bike guy’s reaction was normal and that the car guy took what happened much too seriously. I thought things had cooled down a bit, but the car guy started raising his voice again. The bike guy responded in kind. All the bike guy had to do was stop defending himself in front of a semi-crazed macho man who wasn’t about to listen to anyone. I looked at the bike guy and said, “Don’t argue with him, you’re only making things worse.” Thank goodness he listened to me, and this had a calming effect on the car guy.

The car guy picked up the iron bar and started for his car. The bike guy got on his bike and rode away. As for me, I rushed home to write a story that came from out of the blue.

Where does a writer get material to write about? I can’t speak for other writers, I can only speak for myself. I get my material from my ongoing journal of 40 years that I’m writing in at this very moment.

Most of the time when I start a journal entry I have no idea what I’m going to say. I might begin writing about the weather or how I feel or what’s going on in the world or what’s going on outside my window. Just by putting words on paper or my computer screen, an idea or incident might enter my thoughts. If I think I can make something meaningful out of that idea or incident, I’ll write as much about it as swiftly as I can before I go back and do the rewriting. Today is a rare day for me. I don’t have to stumble across something to write, I know exactly what I want to write: about a humiliating incident that took place last night at AT&T Park where the San Francisco Giants play baseball. I always treasure writing about meaningful incidents, even those that reveal my flaws.

My wife Joan and I weren’t at the ballpark for a baseball game, we were there to watch the Donizetti opera, Lucia di Lammermoor. It was San Francisco Opera’s twice-a-year presentation of “Opera at the Ballpark,” where all of San Francisco is invited to watch a live simulcast from the War Memorial Opera House on the ballpark’s jumbo scoreboard–for free.

After Joan and I got off the streetcar, we came upon a line that was three blocks long. We went to the head of the line and found that only one entrance was open and only one security guard was checking bags. It was the height of poor planning, which meant we were in for a long, long wait.

I wanted to kind of melt into the front of the line, but Joan was totally against it. “That’s not being fair to the people standing in line,” she berated me.

“I’m only trying to get us in before the opera starts. You don’t want to stand out here longer than an hour, do you?”

“It’s not right,” she said. “It’s rude. I’m going to the back of the line. You do what you want.”

I followed Joan to the back of the line because it was The Right Thing To Do. For ten minutes we barely inched along. All of a sudden the dam broke and within a few minutes we were inside the ballpark. The one and only security guard had stopped checking bags so that everyone could get in on time to see the beginning of the opera.

As it turned out, the two of us, along with 25,000 others, had a grand time watching the opera on the giant ballpark screen.

A lot of beginning writers wonder if they’ll ever discover their “voice.” I surely thought the same when I began my writing career. “Will I ever find my writing voice?” I asked myself. “All the great writers have it. I wonder how they got it?”

As I was taking a streetcar downtown last night, it occurred to me that what I was observing was different from everyone else’s observation on the streetcar. I’ve known about seeing things from a different perspective since I was a young boy, but somehow it really sunk in last night.

From where I was sitting, I could see what was going on in front of me. But a person sitting in the opposite direction or sitting across from me or standing up was observing a different scene altogether.

It struck me that we humans see only a part of what’s going on (a part of reality, a part of the truth), we never see ALL of what’s going on. Because of our varied experiences, because of where we sit, stand, live, who we know, how we were brought up, what we read, because of all these factors and many, many more, we can’t help but see things differently than other people.

What does this mean for beginning writers? It means that every human being is unique, and if a beginning writer is willing to write what he observes, thinks, feels, imagines, a distinct voice will emerge onto the page. So don’t worry about discovering your own voice–it’s already there. All you need is the willpower to write, to keep on writing and publish it for the world to read.