Where Do Your Ideas Come From #5: Red or Blue?
The question I get most often as a science fiction and fantasy author is: Where do you come up with your ideas? This article is part of a daily series for Medium, analyzing the thought-by-thought process of coming up with the ideas for the daily fantasy blog about the girl who lives in her father’s dreams, The Squashbuckler Diaries.
Today’s Idea: Red or Blue
As I wrote in yesterday’s article, the idea for today’s daily piece of fantasy has been waiting for two weeks to be written. It was based on something my daughter did in a store, and I just wanted to copy it, beat per peat, into the fantasy blog. Yesterday I talked about how I was finally able to write it by moving backwards in time to tell that story. So two stories had to be written in order for me to write the one I had conceived of two weeks ago.
Today, when I published that story, I realized it was a metaphor about the elections.
This article will explore how a good metaphor sometimes comes to be.
So here’s the gist of the story: Joy, 5 years old, is looking for a super villain. He is rumored to be in the tallest tower in the planet. But there are two of them, equally high, standing next to each other. One is a red tower, the other a blue tower.
Her father has her choose which tower to search first. She finds it hard to make a choice, and decides to choose through a random process. Once the choice is made randomly, she’s disappointed by the results.
The story is called ‘Red or Blue?’ and it might be a good metaphor in these hectic times of elections.
So let’s explore what went on in my mind as I wrote it and how the metaphor came to be.
Where Did the Idea Come From?
It started with my daughter standing in a store, unable to choose between two items. She left it up to a game of chance and then was disappointed by what she got. I thought it was a learning opportunity, and at the same time that it would be great for a daily slice-of-life the ‘girl in the dream’, as my daughters and I call her.
So, as I told you yesterday in the article that explained why I created stories that went back in time, I couldn’t write the story straight out and found a way to tell it going backwards in time. I never gave the story more meaning in my mind than I had had that moment in the store.
Now that the story could be written, I sat down to write it.
It had to be about making a choice. So I found a planet for Joy (the girl in the dream) and Justin (her father whose dream she’s living in) to explore. I found a villain. And I found a choice: Two towers. So far, the planet, the villain, and the towers, were just random choices.
To choose between the towers, I might just as well make them identical except for their colors, I thought, since kids often prefer things according to their color and not their value.
So: What color should I give the first tower, I asked myself.
Red is always popular with kids. So I chose red.
What color should I give the second tower, I asked myself.
It had to be somewhat opposite. Blue came to my mind first. I gave that color no extra importance, certain it was random, and completed writing the daily fantasy slice-of-life.
The title was ‘Red or Blue?’. I finished it yesterday and published it today.
Only after publishing it did I realize that ‘Red or Blue?’ had a different connotation. And then, going over story in my mind, I realized the metaphor about choice for today’s voters in the U.S. is covered pretty well in the story itself.
It is a good metaphor about voter behavior. But…
Was it planned?
Was it planned?
It wasn’t planned.
Was it luck?
It wasn’t luck.
That’s the important point I’m trying to convey here. Very often, writers (and other artists) find what they wrote has deeper meaning, covers more area, digs into areas that they were not aware of when they wrote it and does it well. And yet… They were not aware of those when they wrote it. But the deeper meanings are part of their processes. If the deeper meanings were not there, the writers (or artists) would not have been happy with the results.
I have found quite often, on various types of stories and plays I’ve written, that my mind fills in many layers simultaneously subconsciously even while my thoughts are only aware of some of them.
You will hear me often say that when I write I’m smarter than I am or more talented than I am. That’s why.
It happens too often to be a coincidence. And yet, as you see in my process, it felt like one and still does.
Do subscribe and join me tomorrow as I relay to you the process behind whatever tomorrow’s daily fantasy slice-of-life may be!
