Where Do Your Ideas Come from #2: The Elephant Snot
This is the second article in a series that goes into the thought-by-thought process of a fantasy author as I create daily stories in a fantasy world.
Today’s Idea: Elephant Snot
Yeah, you’re not going to like it. It’s disgusting, right? But, still, the whole idea of creating the Squashbuckler Diaries blog is to blog the daily life of Joy Shelley, the girl who lives in her father’s dreams. ‘Daily’ means I show the ordinary, the sad, the tragic, the dramatic, the funny, the silly: Everything.
Let’s move to what the idea is, then explore how it came to be.
Joy and Justin in this episode were saving elephants and other safari animals in Justin’s dream. Once it was over, Joy pet the elephant, then accidentally stepped in elephant dung. Justin told her that now she needs to take a shower. Joy, now only 3 years old, refuses.
She wants to be dirty, she doesn’t care that she’s dirty — she’s not even dirty, she claims.
Since this is Justin’s dream and he controls most of it, he subconsciously gets the elephant to sneeze on Joy and cover her with snot.
But Joy still insists that she is not dirty at all.
The elephant sneezes again, covering her completely in snot.
Joy still insists she is not dirty. But since she clearly needs a shower, she bends down, rubs her finger on the ground, and, showing that finger to Justin, says that now she’s dirty and needs a shower.
“Where do your ideas come from?”
Let’s explore where the idea came from.
It started with real life. My youngest daughter, 3.5 years old, has begun to claim on a regular basis that she does not want to take a shower. She wants to be dirty. In fact, she’s not dirty. She wants her private parts red, she screams at me, when I remind her why taking a shower is important.
On the third day of this behavior, as I was talking to her, I said to myself that this has to be a post for ‘the girl in the dream’ as we call her around the house. I wanted my daughter’s exact behavior mirrored in the story.
But I wanted a trigger. I wanted something about which her father would have to insist.
The idea of stepping in elephant dung jumped into my head.
That made it to the story — it starts with her stepping in elephant dung after petting the elephant. Everything that comes later from Joy’s behavior is beat-by-beat how my daughter would behave.
And so, stepping in elephant dung did not get Joy to agree to take a shower.
Dramatically, I wanted an escalation. I wanted something she could not say ‘no’ to.
Since we’re in the dream, the elephant could sneeze and mountains of snot would cover Joy. This mirrors me trying to escalate my explanation to my daughter.
The elephant sneezed. But Joy, being much like my daughter (and myself when I was younger), still insisted she did not need a shower.
Again, as the parent, I had to escalate my argument. I mirrored that in the story: The elephant sneezed again and this time covered her entire face.
This time Joy changed her mind. How could she not?
But what would my daughter do (what would I have done when I was a kid?) after she insisted so much that she was right? She would have to find a way to make it her own decision and insist she was right the whole time.
So she put some dirt on her finger and, voila, claimed she needed a shower.
In Conclusion
In this Squashbuckler Diary post, the idea came from trying to mirror my daughter’s exact behavior within the fantasy framework of the story. In the context of a dream, Justin, the father, made his arguments by manipulating reality rather than just with words.
And that’s how that idea was born.
Tomorrow I’ll have posted a new idea and a new article in this series.
