Funny how life works...
I was biking around Peaks Island here in Maine while chatting to my wife on the mainland. I told Mikella I wasn't feeling any new story ideas and might take some extended time off, that I needed to wait till something smacked me in the face. I didn't want to write until the words were wild beasts hurling themselves up against the bars of my cage.
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That’s hard to do, friends, when you are the sole breadwinner in the family. It’s a strange place to be in to not have a new project in the works, to have itchy typing fingers with nowhere to go. If you’re not careful, it can be unsettling.
It’s also an exhilarating position to be in, where you expose the marrow of life. That same feeling you get when you leave a job you don’t love to chase a dream; or when you loosen the grip on your easy life and pack your bags and move to a place just because life is short and you’re craving an adventure.
I wasn’t telling Mikella my idea of taking a break out of a sense of fear. I was sharing it with her as I would any breakthrough, as an artist who’d remembered I’m not alone. In creating. In making art. There is a higher power that wants to assist. As Paul Coelho wrote in The Alchemist, “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” Why would I want to go on without such potent guidance?
As an Individualist, #4 on the Enneagram chart, I couldn’t possibly subscribe to a particular belief system. My spirituality is my own and no one else’s. I’m not even sure I could communicate it properly if someone pushed. Words and images couldn’t possibly capture what gets me going in the morning, what pushes me to want to be a better man, a better human.
That said, my belief system is likely similar to yours in so many ways, no matter if you’re religious, atheist, agnostic, or somewhere in between.
What I mean is, there’s a powerful energy surging through the multiverse, through all of us, through every cell that surrounds us. I certainly can’t tell you what it is, but I bear witness to it whenever I take a moment to let my ego subside.
There’s a spot on Peaks Island, a section of road that runs along the rocky coast that’s one of the most awe-invoking on earth. A dazzling amount of cairns decorate the shore. A few woody islands—as Maine as it could ever get—stand in the distance. Lobster boats and sailboats pepper the cool azure sea. Two lighthouses steal the show on the horizon, beacons bringing us home. Oversized seagulls squawk from the sky. And the heady smell of salt and seaweed pushes through in a steady breeze.
This is where I was biking as I was speaking to my wife, confessing my creative surrender. No, I wasn’t afraid. I was more alive than I’d been in a long time, putting all my trust in the vibrant energy intoxicating me with wonder.
Even now, chills prick my skin as I recall the source flowing through me on that day.
Seconds after we hung up (I’m not kidding), a premise smacked me in the face, nearly knocked me off the bike. A fully intact premise. I’d been teasing at an idea, allowing a few characters to rap on the door, seeing them walk an island like Peaks. I felt some of what they were feeling, a fresh start after something bad happening, but I wasn’t sure where I was going.
The following settled into me, word for word:
When the cushy life of a family of three implodes in California, they retreat to an island house in Maine that they inherited from an aunt, whose only stipulation was that they can't sell it. Can the island and this house be their salvation?
It was as if someone had whispered it to me.
I skidded to a stop and wrote the idea down before I would forget. Where had it come from? Was my surrender what had shimmied it loose? Is it when we finally let go that God speaks to us? Or when the energy runs through us? When the wind finally whispers? How is it that a fully intact premise struck me in that exact moment?
My theory is that we’re not alone when we’re creating at our best. In fact, when we’re at our best, we’re nothing more than conduits, right?
I guess it's time to open up a blank document and tease this baby out let the source tease this baby out. There's nothing like pure surrender to get the juices flowing.
Kind of feels like the wild beasts just broke one of the bars.
I suspect someone in my life might say I shouldn’t reveal a new story idea, but I’m okay with it. It may or may not stick. Who knows? But as I share my process in the coming months, it seems only right to use a real-life example. If someone out there wants to steal my idea, give it a go. Would love to read it; I suspect it would be totally different from mine. Might I even call it fan fiction?
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