Ever heard of cave lions?
Me neither.
However, I ran across an article by Jeva Lange at The Week, and suddenly, I’d heard of cave lions. Apparently 10,000-year-old cave lion cubs were found almost totally intact in Siberia. Perfectly preserved specimens of a lineage now extinct. And that got me thinking about writing. About creating. About the ebb and flow of creative ideas as they move (or don’t move) through our lives.
Consider these cave lions. They had a life. A narrative. A story in progress. But then? Well, that life was put on hold. Literally, put on ice. And for thousands of years, as the story of earth unfolded around them, they stayed frozen. But then, the story of human exploration and the story of the cave lion cubs intersected, and now their journey will continue. Not only will it continue, but it will help to write stories for generations of scientists to come.
All this prompted me to revisit some story ideas I’d been kicking around in my head years ago. I guess somewhere along the way, these ideas got lost. Frozen in time. These story stems became trapped under the snowdrifts of time, waiting for the day they might be uncovered again.
And then it happened. I actually started to flesh out some ideas on these old themes, and I’m pretty happy about where they might lead creatively.
You see, sometimes an idea we have feels right for our time in life. Very much in its element. However, for some reason, it gets lost. Stuck. It waits patiently for us to unearth it so that is can once again continue the journey. Instead of ignoring old ideas when something in us unearths them, perhaps the better approach is to dig a little. Explore a little. See if we can bring new life to something that seemed so cold and lifeless.
If you feel stuck or frozen, or even if you just have a bit of the idea explorer in you, try this exercise:
(1) Right now, no time to prepare, think of something fun from your past. RIGHT NOW! Got it? Good. Don’t judge it.
(2) Now, see if you can construct meaning around it. Investigate how that random, silly memory may have informed your present. Construct a new narrative around that memory. Bend it. Shape it.
(3) Type out the memory and your new story, and save it somewhere where you can come back to it. (But for now, let it go.)
The point of this exercise isn’t to get you to write the next great American novel because you recalled a story about sliding around on the ice in front of your house in Ohio because your dad decided to make a homemade ice rink and he almost slipped and hurt himself while you and your brother laug…wait…that’s my memory. Anyway, the point of this exercise isn’t to make you famous. It’s to show you that you are a storehouse of images. A waystation of wanderings. A vault of vestiges.
You have ideas and memories frozen inside of you, waiting for the story to come back to life. You never know which one will someday find its way into your ongoing story.
Stay open and explore. The results may just change the generations.
What memories came to your mind? What happened when you explored?