Origins - Brackets

Neil Gaiman famously said that people don’t really have origin stories, and while that’s likely the case for you and me, it’s most definitely not true for stories.  There’s usually a single moment, a flashpoint, where the contents of one’s brain mesh with some outside stimulus and whamo!  An idea is formed.

Ever wondered where writers get their ideas?  This is how it happened for Brackets.

The story behind Brackets actually begins a few years ago at my day job.  It was one of those periods where nobody in the department was getting along with anybody else.  Happens in every work environment.  Not a day goes by that someone didn’t want to strangle someone else. 

But here’s the weird thing about it.  The conflicts were very specific.  Person A hated Person B.  Person C hated Person D.  Person A didn’t care about C or D and vice versa.  It was all very one on one.

Now, I have a lot of time at my job.  It’s just the way the task I perform is structured.  So one day, bored out of my mind, I came up with a brilliant way to solve the departmental angst: a fighting tournament.

I made a little bracket on a sheet of paper, lining up the combatants.  We even had a nice open dock area in our building where the bouts could take place.  It was a goof, a kneeslapper, something to acknowledge what everyone knew was going on as well as take the edge off.

I showed it to my then boss.  He thought it was hilarious.  I showed to everyone in the department.  There was much jocularity.

And then I tossed it in a desk drawer and forgot about it.

Until one day when I was doing the dishes.

No, seriously.  I was doing the dishes.  I’ve read that Agatha Christie got her best ideas while doing the dishes, so I got that going for me.

Anyway, I don’t remember how the wires connected, but I do recall having the thought about tournament brackets, “Hey, that’s what they should do in high school.”

Wham-BLEEPing-o!

And it all pretty much came to me instantly.  The basic characters, the structure of the book, the tone, the whole nine.

This is what people mean when they say things like “Write what you know.”  No, they don’t mean write reportage about your day to day life.  What they mean is take something you know and place it in another context.  Use the raw material you have and turn it into something greater than itself.

There was just one tiny problem with the “fighting brackets in high school” idea: I didn’t believe it.  I mean, I thought it was a fantastic idea.  But something that came together so effortlessly had to have already been done.  Not that I was a thief.  But sometimes you read something, forget about it, and then the brain dredges it up later as an original idea.

So I sat on it for awhile.  I wrote down what I had, but I continued to search for wherever I had cobbled the notion from.  Yes, there was Battle Royale.  And The Hunger Games had come out, but I wasn’t aware of it at that point.

Besides, this was a contemporary story.  The way I saw it, it was Fight Club meets A Clockwork Orange in high school.  Fueling the idea, bullying had become a cause célèbre with It Gets Better and other anti-bullying efforts.

Eventually, I gave up trying to find where I had seen the same story before.  I hadn’t, at least not the way I wanted to tell it.

It was finally time to write, but that, of course, is a whole other story.