Recently, I was asked this question.
What better source of writing material than observing life’s
vibrant cycles? Children are a great source of undiluted behavioral material.
When my son was four years old, he said something that
floored me and prompted me to write something around his unforgettable words.
Strapped in his car seat on the way home, after I dropped off my then six year
old daughter at school, he said in his limited vocabulary:
I remember when I was
big, and I crossed the street and a car hit me. I turned into a butterfly and flew up in the
sky.
Where did that come from? To this day, I have no idea. It
could have been a TV cartoon show or a story book that prompted that image in
his head, though I am aware of none. If I believed in reincarnation, I could
have found a place for his words in my mind, could have accepted them and filed
them as old soul memories. But I don’t have that belief, and I don’t subscribe
to that school of thought. Hence, if I
Believed in Reincarnation short piece found a place on paper, and
eventually on my blog.
Dreams are another source of inspiration for me. I tend to
remember many details about my dreams, and though bizarre like every dream
there is, they filter through to my writing. I like to think they add flavor,
seasoning, to the details of a story. In my book Shadows of Damascus, I included a couple of dreams I had before I
started writing the book. I used one for the female character, Yasmeen, with
slight variations, and another for the male character, Adam. Both fit nicely in
the plot and I think both deepened the characters.
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