Have you ever had one thing remind you of another? Maybe it's a smell that reminds you of a similar smell from the past. A person who makes you think of another person you know. A line from a poem or story that makes you recall an event that happened to you…. Or it might be seeing something familiar in a brand new way. Maybe it's putting two things together and coming up with something unlike either of the two.
That happens to me frequently. Often, it's an elusive feeling or insight that disappears as quickly as it came. But sometimes it stays long enough to jog an awareness in my brain, and I make notes before I lose it.
Let me give you an example.
I've been familiar with the song "Oh, Freedom" since i was a child. Always loved it, no doubt as much because of what a good singer can do with it musically as because of the meaning behind it.
But one day, over 30 years ago, someone's remark about "freedom in Christ" started the lyrics from "Oh Freedom" playing in my head. "…And before I'll be a slave, I'll be buried in my grave and go home to my Lord and be free…"
An instant later, it popped into my mind that I needed to write a story about freedom, and that it's not, as most of us think, a physical state, as much as it is a spiritual state. I remembered Paul talking about being free in Christ while being chained in a Roman prison. And my brain began to whirl.
In the next couple of days, I developed my idea into a plan for a book about a man who was running from the physical reality of prison, but would somehow find that he was able to face a prison cell once he knew what spiritual freedom was. I developed character sketches for the primary characters, a plot, the works…. I titled my book, Oh Freedom, and went to work writing it.
I'd love to point you to where you can read it. Only I can't. Because I haven't finished it yet.
Not to go on a tangent here, but not everything you begin will get finished. Not every idea will result in a completed manuscript. And not every completed manuscript will get published.
Life happens. You lose interest. Publishers change their minds. Everything takes more energy and more time than you expect. You realize you don't have the skills to complete what you've begun as you'd want to have it.
What happened to my book? Well, it's still here. In my files. I've probably got more than a book's worth of writing done on it, but two things happened to me. When I started writing, the main character turned out to be very different from what I expected (especially his very dry sense of humour). Secondly, the story grew in various ways so that the silly thing evolved into a 5-book series. And while I still want to finish it, I doubt if that will happen any time soon.
Want to see a little bit? Okay, here's a PDF of a scene that will show you what happened to my very serious story-line.
Writing Exercise:
Take a look at your own writing ideas and see if you can remember where they came from.
