Wyman Brantley (who apparently noticed me on an INTP list) reports:
[Robert E] Howard said that the Conan stories came to him after a period of writer’s block, and that the stories went from brain to paper almost as if he were taking dictation.
I’ve had similar experiences, but my muse is more terse, dictating a total of nine words on the two occasions that I remember.
I may as well recount the two occasions.
My then wife was walking around at a Renaissance Pleasure Faire after hours, wearing her morris-dancing gear, which includes a collection of jingle-bells on the shins. A voice came from the darkness: “Is that Rudolph?” I heard myself reply, one word following another like cars in a train: “No, it’s dasher [a former handle of mine] and dancer.”
On BART, there was a passenger wearing a spiky yellow mohawk. When he left the car, my seatmate (a woman of color) remarked: “Can you imagine doing that to your hair?!” I said I can imagine plenty, and in fact I had thought of painting my own hair green [and have since done so a couple of times for Halloween]. She rolled her eyes: “I think I’ll just keep mine black.” I thought: The rhythm of conversation now calls for a joke. But the first one to come to mind is potentially offensive. And so’s the second! What am I going to do?! I had a vision of gears turning until a cue-card popped out of a slot: “It goes with everything.”