Where do stories come from?

Bren and I are working on some writing projects together. We're not co-writing; we're both working on different similarly-lengthed fiction projects, and we had an interesting conversation the other night that still has me asking myself a few questions.

She identified a HUGE difference in our approaches to storytelling. She prefers to come up with an overarching story - she referred to it as the "fiber" of the tale - and then she'll start to flesh out the pieces inside that "fiber," tackling things like character, setting, etc.

My approach has evolved over the years. For a long time, an image or a visual would pop into my mind, and I would try to build a story around that. (My early movie-making efforts are filled with stories like this. "Wouldn't it be cool if I set myself on fire?" "Wouldn't it be cool if my friend Mike's face melted?") These days, I find myself building characters, and then finding scenarios in which to plug these characters.

I don't know if one approach is better than the other, but it certainly speaks to what might be a problem I'm running into with my own writing project. I've got a character - a character whose entire life story I could tell you over a few cups of coffee, a character I've been spending a lot of time with as I sketch his history and build his relationships with the world, a character whose been swimming in the murky depths of my dark imagination for years - and I want to take him out for a spin . . . but I'm finding myself questioning just WHERE I'd want to take that spin.

We spoke further, and Bren and I both think that maybe this approach to character-building-before-fiber-building comes from my history reading superhero comics in which the characters are typically reactionary as opposed to proactive, as well as my background as a tabletop role-playing game player, even though I haven't thrown the dice in years.

So to you few readers of this new blog, I pose to you a question - what comes first for you? The fiber or the character? Or something else all together?