In the Beginning Was the Bean . . .

Before writing Ryan's Run, the first in the Parallel War Trilogy, I was working on an ambitious series involving time travel, parallel universes, and zombies. Don't ask me how they all fit together--I barely can remember all the details. Like I said, it was an ambitious project-- too ambitious. It had multiple characters who weaved in and out of each other's story at different times and places and in different universes. So I put the story aside to work on other stories. Those didn't pan out, but something struck me while I was working on the more ambitious story: I had an image of someone looking into the Bean--the famous Chicago sculpture at Millennium Park--and seeing someone that wasn't there when he turned around. He could see her reflection in the mirrored surface, but that was it. It wasn't part of the story--just an image that came to me. For some reason that idea stuck with me, and when I returned to the story it easily fell into place. That happens very rarely.

Mostly--for me anyway--working on a story involves constant revision. The final plot of a story usually bares very little resemblance to the initial ideas. But Ryan's Run was different. Don't ask me why, maybe it was because I borrowed a lot from the ambitious story that ran wild--simplified it, and then added to it piece by piece from that first image of a guy looking into the Bean and seeing someone who wasn't there.

Down to its core, Ryan's Run is a boy-meets-girl story. Since I already had the initial idea of how they meet--and of course they don't really "meet"at all--how do you meet someone who's not there? All I had to do was answer some basic questions: Why was he at the Bean? Who does he see? How can she not be there? The answers came quickly. Since this was a YA novel involving a teenage boy, it made sense he would see a teenage girl. Love at first sight--kind of. But then came the tricky part--how could she not be there. **SPOILER ALERT**. Since I had spent a lot of time and energy working on a story involving parallel universes it seemed logical that she lived in a parallel Chicago. And Bam! There it was. Two worlds collide. Of course, there was some tricky stuff to work out. Why does only Ryan see the girl and no one else? How does he travel to another universe? Why? Those were minor questions to answer. Things fell into place and Ryan's adventure took off. Sometimes as a writer you never know where a story will go or where it will end. That can be frustrating and exciting, depending on the story and the people involved. And then there are those times when you know exactly where a story is going and where it will end. And that can be exciting as well.