When you just have to write

I love it when writers are excited by the power of their stories, by a desire to tell tales, when they are grabbed by an idea so compelling they just have to write about it.
I believe that, to make a story work, you need three things. For a start, you need a good strong story, one that will sustain the narrative without losing the reader’s interest.
Then you need a strong sense of being, characters that are real and take over your story. If you are writing well, those characters should be speaking to you, writing their own dialogue, twisting your plot their way.
Then there is the third corner of the triangle, a sense of place. Your reader needs to know where the story is happening, to feel you take them by the hand and walk them into your world.
Once you have got those corners in place, everything else flows from them - narrative, drama, pace, tension, depth and the like.
 

John Dean