Friday, Cathy and I had to make a stop at our local post office. Cathy pulled into a parking space as an elderly man in the space next to ours was getting out of his Cadillac. He was wearing a gray sweatshirt and darker gray sweatpants. His walk was a shuffle. He had to take a step up onto the sidewalk in front of the post office. He didn’t get his foot up high enough, caught his toe, and pitched forward. His face hit the concrete.

Cathy didn’t hesitate. Her years of nursing experience kicked in. She got out of our car, went to the man, and assessed his injury. He was bleeding profusely from his face. He tried to get up, and Cathy, not knowing how badly he might be hurt, told him to stay where he was. A young man brought what may have been a rolled-up towel or a hoodie and told Cathy she could have it to place under the gentleman’s head. She told a woman to call 911. The ambulance was there within minutes, and we left the gentleman to the EMTs’ care.

Fortunately, he turned out to be all right, just cut and a little shaken. After receiving treatment, he was able to drive away from the scene. The whole incident left me thinking about how calmly Cathy acted while tending to this man. Although she hadn’t been a floor nurse for several years, she knew exactly what to do. She was the right person in the right place at the right time.

I’ve also been thinking about how often narratives begin with the wrong person being present at the start of a sequence of events. My former writing teacher, Bill Harrison, has a story called “Under the House.” It’s about a plumber whose biggest fear is having to crawl under a house to make a repair. The story opens, of course, with the plumber having to do exactly that. The narrative has immediate conflict and tension. It requires a choice, and that choice leads to action.

This might be a good strategy for our own stories or memoirs or personal essays. If you’re a nonfiction writer, maybe you could recall a time when you or someone you knew had to do something they were ill-prepared to do. Can you craft a narrative that dramatizes their inadequacy or fear? Is it possible that they rose above whatever stood in the way of their acting? Did they surprise you by demonstrating something that you never could have imagined? Maybe they refused to act, leaving it to someone else, and maybe that confirmed what you’d always suspected about them. The key is to use whatever action they decide to take, or refuse to take, to deepen their character and your relationship to them. Quite possibly, their choice will create consequences that will require other scenes to explore.

The same approach could work with invented characters in our fiction. What do our characters fear or resist? How can the narrative open with a situation that requires them to step out of their comfort zone?

We walk through the world thinking we know who we are, or who someone close to us is, and then some situation comes along to show us more than we can imagine. Such situations can spark a narrative.