Wendy Sue Maggio

Where Did the Story Begin?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where stories begin.

Not the ones we write, but the ones that start inside us.

I think mine may have started when I was about nine years old.

I was in fourth grade, riding in one of those old 1970s-era Volkswagen wagons with my friend Tanya and her family. You know the kind. No seatbelts in the back, windows down, the hum of the road louder than the conversation.

We were headed to the Seattle Center, home of the Space Needle, rising into the sky like something out of the future.

It was supposed to be a fun day.

We parked along a side street just outside the park and started walking.

And that’s when I saw it.

An outline of a body on the sidewalk.

Not chalk, though I didn’t know that at the time. It looked permanent. Real. Official.

I stopped and stared.

And my mind did what it still does today.

It filled in the story.

Someone had died there.

But how?

I remember looking up at the Space Needle and wondering…

Did they fall?

Could someone fall from that height and somehow land all the way out here?

In my child’s mind, it made perfect sense.

The world suddenly felt bigger. More dangerous. Full of stories no one had explained to me.

No one around me seemed alarmed.

No one stopped.

No one explained.

But I never forgot it.

Looking back now, I realize something important.

That may have been the moment I started thinking like a suspense author.

Because I didn’t just see what was in front of me.

I imagined what happened before.

I filled in the unknown.

I created a story where there was only a shape on the ground.

And maybe that’s what suspense really is.

Not just what we see…

but what we can’t explain.

Today, when I write stories like Mistin Lane, Ashes & Honey, or my next novel, Beneath the Fault Line, I realize I’m still that little girl standing on the sidewalk, asking questions no one else is asking, trying to understand what happened, and turning quiet moments into something more.

Maybe we all have a moment like that.

The moment where imagination meets mystery.

The moment where a story begins.