How to write a story

There are many ways to get an idea for a story.

You can find an idea in an old newspaper story. A man was murdered in a fight in Victorian England. It was a brutal, vicious and utterly pointless murder. Today it would be called a race or a hate crime.

I have the detailed press reports of the time and I could take the factual article I wrote and published some time ago and turn it into a short story, or perhaps a novel, or a play? Maybe even a film/TV treatment?

Sometimes an idea comes into the mind of a writer fully formed, with the beginning, the middle and the end all neatly packaged up. It's then just a case of putting down on paper.

Once I had the last line of a story come to me. It was an intriguing last line, I had no idea where it had come from, it just arrived.

This story took a while to write, as I had to work out why the situation had arisen, why nobody had foreseen the situation arising and how they had arrived at the situation.