Chapter 1: The Concept Behind My Unfinished Novel

During my final year in law school in the fall of 2007, I shared a novel concept with my then-girlfriend (now my wife). The narrative was envisioned on a Pacific island, inhabited by people who believed theirs was the only land amidst endless water. Their leaders imposed a strict ban on sailing beyond the island's reef in their small fishing boats.

The plot revolved around a boy, the chief's son, and his friend, a girl who, just before her untimely death, would unveil a secret depicted in cave drawings: that numerous islands existed across the ocean and that their ancestors had migrated from them long ago. After the girl’s mysterious demise, the boy would set out to uncover the truth about his world, his people, and the reasons behind their aversion to the outside.

However, life events—such as a new job, marriage, children, and shifting interests—prompted me to shelve the novel.

If you're a parent, you might see parallels with Disney's Moana, released in 2016. With a simple change of gender for the characters and a few magical beings, the core of my story bears resemblance to Moana's plot.

Around the time of Moana's debut, I was listening to NPR while driving home from grocery shopping. An author mentioned in an interview that she had previously outlined a novel but abandoned it. Surprisingly, not long after, another writer published a book that mirrored her idea closely. This led her to ponder the extent to which our ideas are genuinely ours, or rather, floating in the collective unconscious, waiting to be discovered. What are the chances?

Of course, the published book wasn't an exact replica of her original idea, just as Moana diverged from my initial vision. In my story, the boy would learn that the inhabitants of the new island were distantly related to his own people, and that his island was just the last settled in a vast archipelago of explorers.

My narrative aimed to deconstruct and reinterpret our myths by tracing the lineage of our ideas through the genealogy of our ancestors. Ultimately, I intended to explore this theme in a nonfiction format.

This is why I never considered incorporating supernatural characters like Maui or Te Fiti. My focus was on exploring disenchantment, and including demigods would contradict that aim.

Yet, the fact that both the creators of Moana and I arrived at such similar narrative vehicles begs the question: why this story, and why at this time?

Both narratives embody what Joseph Campbell terms The Hero's Journey, and Christopher Booker refers to as The Quest. They are stories of self-discovery, allegorical memoirs that every generation must create to make sense of their reality.

Sometimes these tales are literal, as seen in memoirs. However, I argue that analogy is fundamental to creativity. By linking our own journeys of self-discovery to literal adventures, especially those aligned with well-known myths, we provide audiences with a cultural reference point, while aiming to surprise them with our unique interpretation.

One of Moana's creators had profound knowledge of Polynesian mythology before pitching the idea in 2011. In contrast, my familiarity lay in Greek, Roman, and Norse myths from my middle school years, where I even excelled on the National Mythology Exam. While each mythology has its uniqueness, they share common threads.

So why did I choose Polynesia as my setting? Reflecting on it, my choice appears less arbitrary, which might explain the similarity to Moana. I sought to convey feelings of isolation I experienced as a teen, grappling with the beliefs of my family and community. The island represented that isolation, while the prohibition on leaving symbolized the enforcement of religious and political orthodoxy in the small community that felt confining.

The existence of other islands, seemingly distinct yet part of a larger whole, suggested an archipelago. I needed a tropical island within a larger chain, each capable of sustaining a community but isolated enough to avoid outside contact. The vast number of islands in Polynesia seemed like the perfect fit.

When viewed this way, the resemblance between Moana and my story concept seems less mystical. Perhaps both my mind and that of Moana's creators were led to a similar idea through a form of statistical inevitability.

Chapter 2: Reflections on Ideas and Their Origins

The first video, "Companies That Will Buy Your Invention Ideas," discusses various companies that offer to purchase innovative concepts. It explores the process of how inventors can commercialize their ideas, emphasizing the importance of knowing the right companies to approach.

The second video, "What to Do When You Have an Invention Idea?" guides viewers through steps to take upon having a novel idea. It highlights the importance of research, planning, and seeking professional advice to transform ideas into tangible products.

In his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, philosopher Daniel Dennett invites us to envision a future where we could preserve ourselves cryogenically. To ensure our safety, we must create cryogenic containers capable of withstanding unforeseen future events, avoiding disasters, and securing alternative energy sources.

This leads to an intriguing analogy: our bodies and identities serve as those cryogenic containers, safeguarding our genes. However, we are much more than that. Our DNA represents one end of a spectrum, while the realm of ideas occupies the other. Our physical existence acts as a junction between these two realms. Our genes require us for propagation, just as our ideas do.

What if we possess as little agency in being vessels for ideas as we do for our genes? Ultimately, we are composed of matter, inheriting biological and cultural legacies that shape our comprehension of the world and how we convey that understanding. Our communication efforts succeed by capitalizing on that shared heritage to disseminate our ideas.

Ideas, like The Quest or The Hero's Journey, can manifest in limited ways. In a world with eight billion people, I would be more surprised if no one else arrived at a similar story concept.

Yet, this may oversimplify the matter. Rather than viewing ourselves as mere vessels influenced by genetic and ideological forces, I see us as occupying a pivotal transitional space between various forms of emerging causality.

Terrence Deacon posits that "when new forms of dynamical organization emerge, they result in new causal consequences." As we navigate the spectrum from the concrete to the abstract, dynamic systems offer greater creative possibilities.

Thus, the more compelling question isn't whether we are unwitting carriers of "mind viruses," but rather how much our evolution as a species is propelled by material necessity and drawn forward by the power of ideas.

If this is true, then the flexibility at the abstract end allows us to choose to unfurl our sails and harness different winds. The freedom to think and speak, along with the ability to translate the outcomes of open dialogue into actionable policies, is crucial to overcoming the inertia of concrete forces that influence us.

If, as I argue, good ideas are not merely discovered but also re-discovered and re-purposed, then we must recognize that the only distinction between us and animals, who are purely driven by their genes, lies in our capacity to engage in that transformative process.

Ironically, this was the moral of my own Quest narrative all along.