We Interrupt This Break...

So we're in Florida. Our vacation plans were timely; I needed the escape, and the disconnect.

Yesterday we went to Disney World's Magic Kingdom. It was the perfect day with the perfect crowd. Prime people-watching, you know.

Near night's end, we rode It's a Small World After All. And by rode, I mean braved. Because it's a long, repetitive horror of a ride. But you do it for the kids.

Which is why I was intrigued by the woman who sat in front of us. She was in, I'd say, her mid-fifties. And she rode with no one but herself. Naturally, I was curious about her circumstance. Had she come to the amusement park by herself? Or separated from her family or friends for just a few minutes, to cruise the ride no one else dared go on?

I concocted a whole story, of course: She was a writer, on the premises for research. To see, to feel, to listen with intensity. Because she was writing the next big scene in her novel--where say, a child goes missing from the ride's line, or a man, romantically frozen for years, proposes to his girlfriend in the least likely of places--and she needed to build her reservoir of experience.

Because I do that. Put myself somewhere for the sake of the craft. To build on my experiences, to write about or pull from later. Have you done that?

What have you done to build your writer's (or life's) reservoir?