Genesis of a Snowflake

In my 20+ years as a writer, the experience of bringing The Curious Snowflake to life was the most unique.  No other idea ever came to me in this way, no other idea stayed with me so long before finally coming to fruition, and no other idea devoured me so completely once I started it. 

Most of my ideas are visual or auditory, not conceptual.  When I get the itch to write something, it usually starts with an image or a conversation in my head.  Some of these bounce around once in my noggin and then disappear, but the good ones stay, rattling around like marbles in a bucket until I get them out and put them on paper.  TCS was different.  It started out as an idea rather than image or dialogue, or more accurately, it began as two ideas that collided, one from my childhood an another from my spiritual readings.

My mother is a very unique woman, as anyone who has met her can attest.  She always believed in challenging me intellectually and never dumbed anything down for me.  The place where this was most evident was in her choices in my childhood literature.  Yes, I got the typical staples, Seuss and such, but from a very young age my mother also read to me from the Bible and from books of poetry and classic literature.  I enjoyed these immensely (loved the plagues of Egypt story as a kid) but one of my absolute favorites was a collection of stories by Rudyard Kipling (best known for writing The Jungle Book) called The Just So Stories.  These were stories written by Kipling that he read aloud to his own daughter, whom he refers to throughout the collection as his Best Beloved.  The stories are universally charming, but the one I liked the best was one called The Elephant's Child.  It is the story of a young elephant who "was full of 'satiable curiosity, which means he asked ever so many questions" who then goes on a journey to discover what crocodiles have for breakfast.  Needless to say, this almost ends disastrously for the Elephant's Child. 

The second idea is one familiar to anyone who reads New Age literature, the image of souls as snowflakes.  My basic life philosophy is pantheistic; I believe that All Is One, appearing separate and linear for the purpose of creating experience.  Souls as snowflakes is a perfect parallel to this concept.  All snowflakes are made from the same thing, and yet every snowflake is unique because the possible variations is equal to the number of individual water molecules in the flake factorialized.  For you non-math people out there, that would be S times (S -1) times (S - 2)  and so on all the way down to 1.  So mathematically speaking, even considering the millions of snowflakes that fall in each snowstorm on Earth, the amount of time it would take for an exact replica of a snowflake to appear is longer than the age of the universe, and that's assuming that all snowflakes have exactly the same number of water molecules in them, which they obviously don't. 

Anyway, math nerding-out aside, the ideas of souls as snowflakes and the dangers and wonders of curiosity coexisted in my mind for many years until one day about 8 years ago.  I'd been on one of my spiritual reading kicks at the time, and I was cleaning out the bedroom my wife and I share in anticipation for the birth of our daughter.  Lo and behold, I come across the old copy of the Just So Stories my mother had given me when our oldest was born.  I sat down on the bed and started thumbing through it (I am one of the world's greatest procrastinators) and I come across The Elephant's Child.  Suddenly these two ideas collide in my head and the idea of The Curious Snowflake, a spiritual children's parable was born.  I rummaged around in the bedroom until I found a spiral notebook and pen (not difficult, I keep some in every room, which drives my DW nuts) and start writing.

I get about a page in and the idea died.  Utterly.  But it still itched at me, so I filed it away in the back of my head and forgot about it.  It stayed there, simmering away, for about 4 years.

More later.