I just counted the bricks in my fireplace....

I counted the rows of bricks and the number of bricks in each row on each of the three sides of the firebox.   I studied the andirons and the hand tools.  I looked carefully at the screen, noting how the mesh was affixed to the frame and the footings that kept it from tipping over onto the floor.  I considered the decorations on the screen, two fleurs de lys that were approximately one fourth of the way across, horizontally, and about sixty per cent up the screen, vertically.

I thought of the men who had carried the bricks into the house to build the fireplace.   They were short, stocky men, very muscular, and their clothes were worn and stained with mortar.   They wore thick leather shoes with rubbers soles and carried pouches for their stone chisels, spall hammers, and trowels.  I wondered if their fathers had been masons as well, or if they had learned stone work in a trade school, or in prison, perhaps.

Did they have children and wives, and what did they look like?  Swarthy?  Short or tall, and with dark hair of no hair at all?  Would their children finish school?  Would they become masons also or move to another city, or another state, because they followed a girl there?  Did one of them marry a girl he had courted, or did he lose to her a soldier returning from Iraq?  Or did he marry her because her soldier did not return?

I thought of all of these until I knew that I was thinking about people, and places, and things, and how they might fit together, of characters and the events that would string together in their lives, images that I believe I need to experience.  I could see them, in my mind's eye.   Then I turned on my word processor, and began to write.

I had done it sooner, I would just have been typing, and not typing about anything I had given much thought to.