Writing epiphanies come from the damndest places sometimes, and at the oddest moments. I have a thriller I've been working on; it's very high concept and high tech, which are two things I rarely do. What facinates me about this thriller is the people, though, and why they're in this tight jam they're in, and what they'll do to get out of it.
Still. That tight jam. I've been thinking about this idea for years. I think close to six years before I finally had a small series of epiphanies about how to make it work, how the mechanism functions and how to show it and build that tension. I could never even bother to start writing until those things fell into place, which just happened this past December. I was, however, missing a rather vital piece, and I had been trying out and discarding dozens of possible pieces, and nothing, absolutely nothing, was working.
And then tonight, as I was walking through the living room, someone had left on the TV and a show was on with a bunch of forensic type of stuff (I think it was on Discovery channel -- it was more of a case file for something, but I missed the majority of it). And I saw something on there that had abolutely nothing to do with the thing I'm working on, and that thing I saw had no way to interact with what I'm working on. But as I carried the image with me from the living room to the back of the house (master bedroom area), that image suddenly jigsawed its way into the answer. It changed, morphed a bit, but it was sooooo simple, once I saw how it worked. Elegantly simple, and in this very complex thriller, it has to be so simple, people would overlook it.
I can now write the rest of that story. Weird.
Posted by toni at February 22, 2004 12:23 AMI love epiphanies - those little snaps and bursts of ideas that force their way into your thoughts and somehow tie up loose ends or spark new tangents. My problem is not taking advantage of them and RUSHING to at least scribble them down. Sometimes I remember them, other times they are lost and all I have left is the memory of having had the epiphany. Tsk.
Posted by: Amanda at February 22, 2004 03:45 PM