I wrote this for a morning talk during our recent Venice writing retreat. There's something about Venice – the light, the water, the sense of discovery around every corner – that makes it the perfect place to explore how we summon stories from nothing.I want to trace the birth and evolution of a single paragraph in a story that hasn’t yet emerged. It begins with an initial half-glimpse of a poor thought and ends with what might be called a dramatic possibility. Here’s that first, poor...