"I need to go visit my old Tae Kwon Do school soon," said my friend Anjiko-Z (not her real name, duh) this morning in stray conversation. "I haven't been there since June."
My immediate reply: "It'd be cool if you got there only to find that your old instructor had been replaced by a new, EVIL instructor, who was teaching the kids to win at all costs and was using the students to run drugs, prostitutes and pirated DVDs. Of course you'd have to go in and bust some heads, and do you have relatives who own a restaurant?"
"No," she replied, "but I have an uncle who woks for a restaurant supply company."
"Naturally he's being forced by the evil new instructor to use the supply company to distribute pirated copies of Little Man and Stomp The Yard. You gotta get down there and fix this, fast! But be careful because the new instructor is one of those hard-hitting NYC types, and he brought along some muscle -- "Slow Pony" Martinez, the dangerous Spanish TKD/Kickboxing champ, played in this movie by Benny 'The Jet' Urquidez."
Then I called my wife to check that yes, indeed, she does have some martial artist characters ready to play.
Because that's how I do things now -- I leave myself open for inspiration. Why struggle to grab the brass ring when you can just sneak up on it when it's not looking?
