Like most other creatives, I have a lot of ideas, all the damn time. Some are good, some are great, but the overwhelming majority fall into one of two camps: interesting but not going anywhere, or just bad.
The worst part is that some of the best ideas are the most ephemeral, and if they don’t get written down, they simply disappear into the ether from whence they came. So I end up with all kinds of notes, all over the place, spread across a ridiculous array of sketchbooks and notepads of various sizes, shapes, ages, and provenances. Some of them are in themes, and these get collected and organized in hopes that they’ll eventually coalesce into something usable, something that is worth making. For instance, I have a post-it on my monitor’s edge with a short list of original ghost story seeds, some autobiographical in nature. I have a collection of ideas for paintings of the things that gnaw at my sense of security, a distillation of the things that go bump in my nighttime hours. Half a dozen long-form fiction stories that may end up as comics or as prose are lurking in my PC, and those are the ones that have survived all my idea culling sessions to date.
Then there are the ideas that spin out of conversations like the whorls of lesser storms calved from their hurricane progenitors:
Begin with an assumption – souls, or anima, or ka, exist. Now, intersect that with the concept that time may not be a physical phenomenon. Causality (the fact that things happen in sequence of cause and effect) is a physical phenomenon, but time may be just our own method of perceiving and interacting with causality.
So now we assume further that souls may not be subject to time in the same way that physical phenomena are.
What, then, are possible conclusions of souls not restricted by the dimension of time? If we permit reincarnation or commutation of souls, then we can also permit that multiple incarnations may happen in parallel – simultaneously – rather than in series with the soul hopping from one lifetime to the next. If a soul is only subject to time when incarnate in a body, then perhaps it can exist in multiple lifetimes that, to a human observer, occur simultaneously, but to the soul they occur in a kind of subjective sequence.
The next iteration is this: what if there are only so many souls shared across our species? Let’s take a number – thirty-six – as our idea of the pool of souls. So there are really only thirty-six human souls in the world, experiencing all of the lifetimes humans are experiencing. Look around yourself in a crowd: one thirty-sixth of the crowd shares the same soul as you, in different incarnations. These are your brothers and sisters, your parallel incarnations.
So why thirty-six? A reference to the Hebrew belief in the Tzadikim – thirty-six holy people for whose sake alone God does not destroy the world. Not entirely in the spirit of the original belief, but not inappropriate either.
A summary of the basic idea is thus:
The Thirty-Six Souls
All of humanity shares thirty-six souls, existing in parallel across our world. The souls are not spread thin, because their existence is outside of the order of time – they simply exist simultaneously in multiple incarnations. It is for the sake of these souls that our world as we know it persists. The human drive to multiply is out of our desire to ensure that all thirty-six souls are always incarnate somewhere in the world.
Interesting, yes, but where’s the story? Stories grow out of conflict. This is an interesting idea, but it’s not a story. No protagonist, no antagonist, no crime and no motivation. Just world-building. It’s not a story until it’s about specific people.
Here is a story seed: Every murder ever committed in human history has been engineered to end the incarnations of a single specific soul, one of the thirty-six. Now only a handful of incarnations of that soul remain…and someone is hunting them down. When the last one dies, that soul dies with them, and the world will end.
Armed with that, I’ve got ideas for a protagonist or two, an antagonist and agents, the crime, the motivation, the mechanisms and machinations that make a plot go. I’d tell you all that…but it’d be letting the cat out of the bag, wouldn’t it?
Now the biggest question I’ve got is what my word count will eventually be on this sucker. I’ll let you know when I figure that out.