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I took this picture a few years ago. It's one of the trailers I grew up in (in Cumberland, WA). My bedroom was on the side nearest the road. 
Cumberland only had a gas station (without pumps) and a tavern when I was growing up there. Population of about 200. A guy named JP, a merchant marine and one of the tavern's hardcore regulars, lived just down the road from us.
Most nights I'd lay awake in my bed, which was maybe a car's length from the edge of the road, wondering if tonight was the night JP would crash his truck into my bedroom on his way home from the tavern.
JP would be out at sea for months, then he'd come back to his family for what seemed like a week or two before heading out again. I don't recall seeing him sober. Sometimes he'd take his son, at about age ten, to the tavern with him to be his designated driver.
Crashes seemed to happen regularly. Late one night, JP's son crashed their truck through my grandparents' clothesline, barely missing their house. So I'd lay in my bed each night, right next to the road back from the tavern, waiting for JP's truck to come crashing through.
I could see and hear the imagined crash so clearly, it was like watching a movie in my brain. I would see every way that JP's truck could come crashing into the room, every twist of bad luck that'd lead to the crash, every narrow improbable escape that'd result in my survival.
Nowadays, when I write a scene for a script, it's kind of the same thing: I let the scene play out in my head, from every angle possible, and then I write down what I see and hear.
So I suppose you could say that every script I write, one way or another, begins with my desire to escape that roadside room. And I guess that also means that the happy ending to each script, for me at least, is that I did.
