Fallen Sparrows

When I finished writing To Every Thing a Purpose, I knew I wanted to keep writing, but I had no idea what I wanted to write next.  I had ideas for different things I wanted to try, but when I sat down to try to flesh them out I just couldn't get them to work.  On a couple occasions I tried brainstorming, writing down whatever ideas came to mind.  For several months, nothing captured me the way the initial idea for TETaP had.

One thing I really wanted to write was a Christmas themed story.  I had tentatively titled it Christmas Eve Mary, and it was about a man who notices a young girl who visits a particular coffee shop on Christmas Eve of every year.  She comes in only on that day, and always sits at the same table by herself.  The man is intrigued by her and eventually desires to try to help her, only to end up being helped by her to understand what is really important.  The girl's back story was that her father had died a few years previous on Christmas Eve, and her yearly visit to his favorite hangout was her way of honoring his memory.  I had actually wanted to write this as a play, but the one scene for every year structure never worked for any format.  The idea was shelved, but I hoped to revisit it eventually.

The idea of the man helping the young woman came from an earlier brainstorming session.  The theme was the impact people have on each other's lives.  The central story was a man who sees a woman he works with who is struggling to make ends meet and sets about to try helping her anonymously.  It was never a love story, but the idea never really developed past this initial concept until adapting it to the Christmas themed story above.

Another concept I had a desire to try was a series of novels about a youth group and the different situations they faced.  One of my best friends is the youth pastor of my church, but even then I had been out of youth groups for so long that I knew too little about them to write about them.  As a single man in my early thirties, I am in a much better position to write stories about singles and the unique situations they face, as well as the unique ways God can use them to accomplish His purposes.    A series about a singles group seemed a natural progression of that idea.  I loved the idea of being able to not only have stories that would be contained within the space of one novel, but at the same time develop characters and larger stories over the course of several novels.  A challenge to be sure, but a fun one.

Since the members of the singles Sunday School class from To Every Thing a Purpose worked so well, they were a natural starting point to launch such a series.  Even then, I had yet to settle on this, since starting with a fresh batch of characters had its advantages, too.  The problem was I still had to come up with a story.

The breakthrough came when I was leafing through stories I had written back in my high school days.  I found one that I wrote during my senior year called The Avalon Brigade that, while the overall story was unrealistic and not all that great, there was one character who's storyline worked extremely well.  It was a young girl who had been forced into a tragic accident which subsequently scarred her and hampered her ability to relate to people around her.  In this story, many of the implications and consequences were never fully thought through, but when I mentally transplanted it into a Christian atmosphere, I found what I was looking for: a story that wouldn't let me go.

It was settling on this as my main story that caused me to decide to bring back many of the characters from my previous novel, even though as of this time it is still unpublished.  One of the characters who ironically had never been in the original conception for that novel was the ideal person that my new character would be able to relate to better than anyone else.

At this time, I still wanted to use the coffee shop story, but hadn't yet figured out how.  One of the elements of that story was that the man's engagement with a different woman would break apart in that coffee shop and she would give him back the ring.  When he learns that the young girl named Mary is poor and cannot celebrate Christmas like most people, he decides to give her the ring so she can sell it and have such a Christmas.  Both of these characters were originally going to be new to this story, but one day I hit on the idea of replacing the man with one of the characters from the previous novel, everything started falling into place.  The coffee shop even stayed, but instead of being a visitor, the girl became an employee.  Her father was still gone, but the dynamic it presented became much more important.

As time progressed, I proceeded to write a three page outline to see if all these story elements could work together as one cohesive, intertwining story.  To my surprise and delight, it did.  Many of the ideas that intrigued me but didn't work on their own suddenly made more sense when viewed as pieces of a larger puzzle.  As I am constructing this web page, I am three chapters into the novel, and the overall structure of the outline has remained largely intact.  I have the whole thing in my head, and I feel myself bursting at the seams to get it all out.  I thought To Every Thing a Purpose was my best work ever, but that, it turns out, was just the warm up round.

Ideas can come from anywhere and everywhere.  Good ones stay with you.  The best ones grab hold and don't let go until they are fully realized and can take on a life of their own.  Fallen Sparrows is a conglomeration of the best story ideas I've had, and I can't wait to see the final result.