From Conception To Conclusion: The Life of an Idea
by Kevin Kilgarriff
Writing can sometimes be a little like having a baby – although, I imagine not as uncomfortable and normally without any physical pain. Random thoughts converge inside your mind and, in an instant, an idea is conceived. That idea becomes a part of you, growing inside your mind as you nurture and care for it until it’s ready to be born into the world.
Maybe you’re lucky enough to have someone want to publish your baby and you get the opportunity to cut the cord. You hesitantly make the decision to let go, kind of like sending it off to college, hoping that its editor won’t be a bad influence on it. It’s a tough time. But soon enough you learn to live in an empty house and find other things, or topics, to help fill your time.
Eventually, the date of publication arrives. This is akin to your baby’s graduation. All of the hard work, the late nights, the study breaks and the parent-teacher meetings are paying off. But then it ends. It’s off of the newsstand. Your baby is on its own.
So you concentrate on having more babies. If you’re lucky, you’ve already got more kids in school and another bun in the oven. Your oldest babies have moved out of the house and you’ll probably never hear from them again – except maybe if they start a family of their own, i.e. re-prints.
Sometimes, though, you find out that your baby has actually been working all along to do what babies like to do – please Mommy and Daddy. Simply put, your baby spoke to someone!
This is the moment that validates your existence as a writer. When you find out that, while you felt substantiated simply by completing your piece and finding out that someone other than yourself found it to be good enough to print, people are reading it and actually listening to what you’ve got to say.
I recently had one of these moments. A few months ago, I posted an article on GoArticles.com entitled “A Word of Warning For Expectant Fathers.” It’s a feel-good piece about how wonderful fatherhood can be. A guy’s friends might tell him, “You just wait until you have to change diapers, wait until you have to get up in the middle of the night.” I said, “Yeah, you just wait!You’re going to love it!”
I wrote the article from the heart after it was conceived in my mind. I nurtured it and cared for it until I thought it was ready for public view. Then I sent it off to college! I posted it online and it started getting read. It was graduating. So I didn’t think I’d hear from my baby anymore. I quietly moved on to different things.
Then one day I received an e-mail from a twenty-year-old man who had read my article. He and his girlfriend were expecting a baby and he’d been hearing all of the same “warnings” from his friends. He was happy to read my article and it gave him some hope that the future was brighter than what he was being led to believe.
I replied to him, offering my congratulations and some kind words for him and his girlfriend, reinforcing what I had said in my article. Then I forgot about it, thinking once again that I would no longer be hearing from my baby.
The other day I received another e-mail from that same man. Their baby was born – a daughter! He wanted to follow up and let me know that I was right and that he did love it! He said that everything I’d written rung true for him, and he thanked me again. In essence, my baby helped him prepare for his baby.
The first e-mail, to me, seemed like a fluke. It’s easy to see an e-mail address at the bottom of an article, type up a message and click send while the article is fresh in your mind. I’ve done it myself.
Don’t get me wrong. I was flattered. But, it was the second response that floored me! It was two months later and he had still remembered what I wrote! I had touched someone’s life, in a place deep in his heart, and left a lasting impression during a time of his life that should, by all rights, vastly overshadow the few paltry words that I put on paper.
It reminded me of why I began writing in the first place. Certainly, making money is an important part of writing for many people. When you’ve got mouths to feed, receiving that paycheck can be very rewarding. But to be able connect with someone you’ve never met and know that you’ve made an impact on their life, that is the kind of reward on which you cannot place monetary value.
Writing is a gift. So wrap it up in a big giant bow. Then stick a tag on it and leave the “To:” line empty. Whoever finds it gets to unwrap it and find out what’s inside. You never know. It might change their life.
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Kevin Kilgarriff is a writer and Recruitment Advertising Account Executive. He’s been writing forever (Yes, since the beginning of time!), but didn’t choose to share his work until mid-2004. A virtual novice in terms of writing professionally, his goal at Writers Remember is to share his experiences with other writers, and to hopefully help them through the trying times that a writer can encounter.
Recently Kevin started his own freelance writing business, Londontown Writing Services.
He blogs at Aspiring Adult and enjoys reading and writing in a variety of genres. His childish jokes are unrivaled and his vast collection of useless information, which he swears will one day be fully utilized, continues to grow exponentially.
Kevin lives in Warrington, PA, just outside of Philadelphia, with his wife and their 2 year old daughter.
