Continued from Background #1 (May Archive)

So…I am riding the Max for 40 minutes each way from Gresham, OR to downtown Portland where I was working.  This is during Feb – April 2005, and I start taking yellow legal pads and joting down ‘conversations’.  Remember, I am thinking about writing this for my kids, so I am searching for a good vehicle to communicate through.  I figure a good story would be great…but I didn’t have one.  So I started with what I did have…conversations.  So, off and on, for about three months I wrote down conversations; conversations that I was having with God mostly, but which often included friends or family. 

You gotta understand something…I had not plan here.  In fact, when I first even thought about this project, all I could think about was doing a sort of dictionary of rambling opinions…you know, ‘A’ for Astronomy, and Art, and Aristotle, and Anarchy, and Adultery, and Absolutes, and Anti-nomianism…anything that I had an opinion about…don’t laugh.  Actually, it is quite funny…looking back.  But I was pretty serious about trying to do something systematic and organized…make my kids proud.  :)

But as soon as I got into these ‘conversations’ all that systematic stuff fell away.  I became enamored with these unrelated and intriguing conversations.  At one point I was going to call this little book for my kids, ‘Conversations with God’, but then I found out somebody had already written that book and even turned it into a movie.  For me these conversations were alive and I found myself waking up in the middle of the night and writing down scraps of dialogue.  More often than not, when I looked at those bits and pieces in the morning I couldn’t make heads or tails of what I had written down and it usually made no sense at all…but I remembered vaguely that it had been soooo cool! 

So, in May, 2005 I had a few yellow pads pretty much filled up and a whole bunch of scraps of paper; edges of newspapers, parts of napkins (serviettes for you cultured folk), backs of grocery store receipts etc.  I was a little concerned that a good wind could blow it all away and so I decided that I needed to input my notes into the computer.

The first Saturday I started working on inputting was the first time I decided that a ’story’ would be the right vehicle for these conversations.  I didn’t have one (a story), but I thought it was a great idea.  So I began to create characters in situations that would allow my conversations to occur.  These conversations were very ‘real’ to me, buried in the experiences and processes of my life…mostly over the last fifteen years.

This ends this particular background blog…I am actually going to pick up the story, sort of, in another blog called "Is the Story of THE SHACK true…is Mack a real person?"  Then I will come back and pick up things where this and that blog leave off.