Earlier this week, someone in a writers group I attend asked me where do I get the ideas I write about. My answer was a paraphrase of something Hemingway wrote to Fitzgerald. Here’s the exact quote from his letter in 1929:

“The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life–and one is as good as the other.”
–Ernest Hemingway

He also wrote something to the idea that he learned to write by examining the simplest of things.