For those who read my fist blog posting, you may notice that I changed the blog title to, “The Evolution of a Story”. I’ll explain.

Being the inquisitive sort, after enjoying an entertainingly unique story, whether written for a book, TV show, or screenplay, I often wonder how the writer came up with their story. I believe “Kennison’s Gifts” to be both entertaining, and rather unique. So, I invite you to follow along on the more than ten year journey I took to get from here to there.

In my first posting, I wrote about how this story came to me, in what I thought to be such a strange and enchanting way, that I felt the convergence of events that spawned the original idea might be worth telling.

After explaining those events, I told about playing the “what if game”, and from that stroll through the “what ifs”, I said that the idea for the story was born.

However, I mistakenly said that the idea for the story was born. I’ve since thought about that, and what I really had at that time was only the conception for a story. My dictionary defines “Conception” as, “the beginnings or origin of something. In my case, something conceived in my mind, as a result of pondering the divergence of events I mentioned earlier.

Next step: How do I get this concept, something I had only imagined as a broad abstract idea, and one that I had only the most basic understanding of, and make a story out of it? Or, in biological terms, how do I get from embryo to fetus?

The first story idea I had, began with the conversation between a cantankerous old man as he lay in a hospital bed dying, and the spirit of the unborn child, who will take his place among the living. Thinking about the first line of the story, I imagined the unborn child spirit calling out the name of the old man, and automatically, I wrote the name, “Kennison.”

If you haven’t yet guessed, that is the name of the late comic, Sam Kennison, a stand-up comic that I liked at the time. Sam Kennison’s coarse stand-up routine character fit my dying man character’s outward demeanor perfectly. The title I came up with was “Kennison’s Foil”, a foil being one that by contrast underscores or enhances the distinctive characteristics of another—ergo, the innocence of the unborn child spirit being the contrasting foil to the gruff old Kennison.

The story was to be told in back flash, where we would learn that the gruff old character had been a good man in many ways, had gone through the many hells life can dish out, and in the end would pass on some of his life’s lessons to the unborn child spirit.

The idea seemed great, I had gotten from embryo to fetus, and I was excited! But remember, I began to write when I was traveling four days a week, and bored when my wife suggested that since I was always telling stories, that I should try to write a novel.

Easier said than done! And after mounds of inked paper had piled up, I finally realized that I didn’t have a clue how to write a story. So I put Kennison’s Foil away, and set out to learn how to write fiction.