The Idea of an Essay, Volume 4

Narrative & Memoir 47 wishes. I found myself wondering what kind of story might lie behind such circumstances. Why hadn’t the authors wanted those works published, and what drove their families to deny their wishes? In life, there’s a story behind everything you hear about, and every dry obituary you read in the paper is the period closing the sentence of someone’s earthly tale. At that time, I was dwelling on the story that lay behind the facts in such cases. Suddenly, I had an idea. What if there was a compelling reason behind one such author’s desire? What if there was a book kept unpublished because its secrets were better left buried in a desk in a dusty empty room? And what if the act of publishing this book brought forth terrible vengeance? I followed the thread of this sudden flash of inspiration, and at the end I found a story. After I left the table, I sat on our couch for a while, thinking this idea through and arranging my thoughts. Then I went to my room and began to write, but not the story on my mind; not yet. I wrote character descriptions, plot outlines, and ideas, and drew sketches and family trees. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right. Early in this planning process, I discovered that inspiration didn’t solve all of my problems, or even any of them; it simply opened a door. After all, inspiration doesn’t write books; authors do. Even when the Author of Life Inspired our forefathers to scribe His Word, He used the innate talents within them to shape it. No more was this story going to write itself. In order to give it life, I had to reach deep within and far without, drawing on my own experiences where I could, and relying on my knowledge and imagination where I could not. In this way, even as I shaped my work, I was shaped by it. As I drew on my experience, bits and pieces of me inevitably found their way into the characters, setting, and plot both intentionally and subconsciously. Viewing my family as of utmost importance apart from God himself led me to make familial relations the driving emotional force behind the plot, and elements of my relationships with my own family members manifested themselves in the relations between the characters. In order to do this similarity justice, I had to consider on an even deeper level how I felt about my family and how I would react in certain situations involving them. Other comparable parallels sprang up throughout the plans. Since I grew up in isolation, I placed the setting of the