Mozart with the entire symphony in his mind before writing down a note. J.K. Rowling on the train imagining the whole Harry Potter narrative arc in a flash of inspiration.
Perhaps certain artists conceive of their works whole and entire, if that’s possible, before setting down to actually create them. I tend to think there’s a lot of mythology surrounding the origin stories of certain artworks. In any event, the origin stories surrounding Mozart and Rowling do not match my experience, and perhaps not yours either.
In my experience, a piece of writing gets started with some kind of fragment: the excitement of an influence, a scene or situation, a compelling character, an image, even a title. Then, over what is usually a fairly lengthy period of time, other fragments accrue, not always very complementary with one another. There is very little sense at first what the work is going to be. One has to push forward through the uncertainty to find out what it is one is working on.
A valuable creative concept is not (often) something delivered in a flash of inspiration and then put into words or some other medium. A valuable creative concept is something discovered, realized in the process of tracking it down.
The origin story is thus, for many of us, a quest.
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