Where Do Your Ideas Come from #3: The Face in the Clouds
The question I get most often as a science fiction and fantasy author is: Where do you come up with your ideas? In this series of daily articles I get into the thought-by-thought process of coming up with the ideas behind my daily fantasy posts about the girl who lives in her father’s dreams, The Squashbuckler Diaries.
Today’s Idea: The Face in the Clouds
I’d like to share with you how I came up with one of my favorite, and most touching ideas in The Squashbuckler Diaries.
Let me set up the scene for you, then we’ll explore how my mind got there.
Joy is 2.5 years old and she lives in her father’s dream, where they have adventures when he’s there. When he’s not there, she has a nanny (conjured from his dream) called Mary. Unfortunately, in one of the adventures Mary died, and Joy had to face death at a young age. Justin, her father, couldn’t summon up Mary again, so he wanted her to have some kind of closure. They went to the funeral (all in the dream), but he felt it wasn’t enough. So suddenly a cloud appeared with Mary’s face on it. Mary waved goodbye at Joy, and that was the closure she got.
Since most people wouldn’t have thought of that idea — Mary’s face in the clouds waving goodbye — let me open the kimono, so to speak, and explore how I came up with that idea.
“Where do your ideas come from?”
The first seed for it was around 8 years ago. A few days after I’d left one of the most stable jobs I’ve had for a new job my wife and I were driving past the building with the old job. The lights were on.
“Ha ha, suckers,” I joked, “they’re still working.” It was a joke, since the new job had longer hours.
My wife then asked me if I said goodbye to the job (I had said goodbye to the people), and whether I had closure. I realized that was something I had never done. Not to jobs, not to schools, not to apartments I’d left, not to the grandparents who had died. Everything still lives within me without having ever said goodbye.
I said ‘goodbye’ to the job and I was surprised I felt better.
Add to that information the act of looking up at a high-rise building while saying goodbye, which is what Joy will do in the story.
There’s one more piece of data before we can make everything fall into place. In a previous post of the Squashbuckler Diaries, Justin teaches Joy to count by counting flying animals in the sky. For example: three flying elephants, five flying rabbits, etc. (Maybe I’ll get to how I came up with that idea in the future.)
Now back to how I came up with the idea in the story.
The basis of the story was already set in previous posts: Mary had died, Joy took it hard, there would be a funeral to make her feel better. I didn’t need to come up with that.
I did need to decide what special thing would be at the funeral. I felt that having a grave would not be closure to a 2.5-year-old child. I wanted something that would really help her.
And so: The trigger of needing to say ‘goodbye’ brought me back to that physical feeling of looking up while saying goodbye. Add to that the similar physical feeling that’s been established in a previous post where Joy and Justin looked up at the sky to count flying animals. My mind found a solution in a spark: the idea that Justin would create a cloud that looked like Mary and that she would wave goodbye.
In Conclusion
The creative idea was an answer to a question I’d posed for myself. I subconsciously drew on two different events that had the same physical feeling, where one of them was actually about the emotion of the story. Add to that the feeling I always have when writing these posts: It should be something that could only occur in the dream or that would only happen to Joy.
And, just like solving a puzzle, when all the pieces were there, the perfect creative solution was formed.
I hope that gave you a peek into how the creative mind of a science fiction and fantasy author works.
Tune in tomorrow as I share how I came up with another idea.
