Where does this all come from? Origins of ideas (sort of)

Where does all this come from?

Starting in grade school, but especially in high school and even college (shout out to Dr. David Lynn at Kenyon!) I wrote fiction, short stories. But after college and especially during grad school I stopped writing. Too much “real” writing to be done.

Then I had kids. My youngest loves stories, funny stories, silly stories. One day I began to tell him about a boy and his dog who go under a boxwood bush (they can grow to be twenty feet high around here) and meet a bunch of (regular sized) talking bunnies.  The dog now also talks. The rabbits, the boy and the dog all fight off the mean “germmies” who try and get the rabbits.

My son was not impressed, he would rather hear about silly things Mr. Frumble does.

Then, sometime later, I was think, day dreaming, about making movies. I had an idea for a cheap slasher type film, albeit one with deep social commentary. Then I thought about what other genres lent themselves to cheap, fairly easy to do movies. For some reason Medieval Knights came to mind. No idea why (I am pretty sure that those types of movies are not cheap…) But I imagined a story where a guy tumbled down a ravine into an alternate world, where it was full of knights and sword play etc.

Then, in a process that I have no idea how it works, I thought it would be cool if he met giant rabbits. That’s it. I wish there was a better story about where that came from.

Of course there is in a way. After I started writing the story during the summer of 2012 I sat down one night with my kids and watched a Disney film on Netflix, Alice in Wonderland.  It hit me like a ton of bricks; I had ripped off Lewis Carroll! And probably not a little from the Wizard of Oz too…

My process of writing is to not write a lot at first, but to play the story over and over in my head, usually as a means to get to sleep at night. It is a great way to lay out a story and also iron out problems. The process often goes like this—“Wouldn’t it be cool if character A did this? Yes!” but then later I will think “OK, but why? Why would they do that?” and then I trace back to a reason, which involves adding a new scene prior to the current one. I will often do this over and over. I think if I had to write it all out this way it would drive me nuts. I would have to constantly go back and “fix” things.

I still have to do that. One example is the knife that Riley gets in the first scene. At first it was just a prop, a reason for Riley to talk to the older Eric. But then I had a problem later on with the “girl” Eric will meet. And the Knife worked well to fix that problem, but only if I made it a special knife. So, back to the beginning to add more about the knife. A minor tweak, but still something I had to work through.

 

So, there is a little bit about where it all comes from. Except, not really of course. I have no idea where most of this comes from.