By R.A. Avalon
“One little question becomes twenty more.”
That line from I Write Fiction probably explains my writing process better than any sensible description of it. A name sends me towards a language. A symbol leads to a myth. A familiar story raises a question about the version that came before it. Somewhere along the way, a character begins to take shape.
Music is another way I explore those connections. I use Suno to create songs around my writing, giving the ideas, characters and questions behind my stories a rhythm and a voice. I Write Fiction brings that process into the music: the curiosity, the humour and the frustration of trying to explain how my mind gets from one thing to another. Listen to the song on Suno.
The finished story rarely shows every step. The reader meets a queen. I remember the window, the word and the historical footnote that helped me imagine her.
“You see a rose in cathedral glass,
I see a queen with a fractured past.”
Geometry gives me something to think with. A circle might suggest belonging, repetition or confinement. Symmetry might inspire a character who needs everything under control; a broken pattern might suggest the event she cannot fit into her understanding of the world.
The connection becomes a story when it starts affecting someone’s choices. What happens when a person mistakes order for safety? What would make her break the pattern herself?
J.K. Rowling offers a particularly clear example of how older symbolism can become character. She has explained that Albus Dumbledore and Rubeus Hagrid were named with alchemical white and red in mind. She connects them to contrasting qualities in the father figures Harry needs: Dumbledore’s intellectual distance and Hagrid’s practical warmth. An older symbolic vocabulary becomes a relationship the reader can feel. Rowling’s explanation of alchemy.
Remus Lupin works differently. Remus recalls the child raised by a she-wolf in Roman legend; Lupin draws on Latin lupinus, meaning “of a wolf.” His name quietly prepares the reader for a revelation. Recognising its roots changes the experience of reading him. The origins of Rowling’s character names.
I recognise that pleasure in my own naming. As I explored in A Name Before a Face, Sirelia’s lotus gives me a way to think about resilience after the loss of status and security. Revana’s deliberate echo of Revan opens questions about identities built around opposing ideas of good and evil. The association starts something. The character’s choices complicate it.
“Straight to the root—etymology;
What did that word mean before you and me?”
Even the words used to describe these interests carry histories. Occult reaches back through Latin to the idea of something hidden or concealed. Esoteric comes through Greek language concerning what belongs within an inner circle.
Those meanings immediately suggest stories to me. Who is allowed to know? Who decides what an image means? What happens when an outsider learns to read it?
Dan Brown makes that act of interpretation central to his Robert Langdon novels. In The Da Vinci Code, artworks and ciphers become clues that move characters through the mystery. What attracts me is the invitation to examine something familiar again: a painting or building suddenly demands closer attention. I want that sense of discovery in my writing, while keeping track of where research becomes invention. Brown’s introduction to the novel.
The historical questions matter just as much as the fictional possibilities. Learning where a tradition became established does not necessarily tell us where its imagery or stories began. We may have entered the history halfway through.
The flood narrative in Genesis, for example, can be read beside older Mesopotamian flood traditions, including the account preserved in the Epic of Gilgamesh. That comparison places a familiar religious story within a wider ancient history of storytelling about catastrophe and survival. It opens questions about transmission and reinterpretation that disappear if we begin and end with the version we already know. The Flood Tablet and its interpretation.
Research can also challenge an appealing claim of great antiquity. Tarot’s documented beginnings lie in fifteenth-century European card games; its familiar occult associations developed centuries later. Its images acquired further layers of meaning as people reinterpreted them. For a writer, that process of accumulation is fascinating in itself. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s history of tarot.
Following roots means asking what changed, what travelled and what somebody added. The earliest surviving record may still be far from an actual beginning. Similar images can emerge independently. A word’s older meaning also does not make its modern meaning invalid. These complications are part of the discovery.
“Who taught that story to dress like truth?”
The chorus has teeth because familiarity can feel like authority. “That is how it has always been” closes a conversation precisely where I usually want to continue it.
Anthony de Mello includes a revealing parable in The Song of the Bird: “The Guru’s Cat.” An ashram’s cat interrupts worship, so the guru has it tied up during prayers. His followers maintain the practice after he dies. When the cat also dies, they obtain another to preserve the custom. Centuries later, scholars write accounts of its religious significance. De Mello’s story.
A practical solution has become a ritual, complete with an explanation that conceals how ordinary its beginning was. The action survives while its purpose disappears.
The parable stays with me because it also challenges my own search for hidden meaning. Sometimes the elaborate symbolism belongs to an interpretation added afterwards. The original explanation might have been as ordinary as a distracting cat.
That leaves useful questions. What need did a practice serve? Does that need still exist? Has the custom acquired a worthwhile new meaning? Or are we defending it mainly because questioning it feels uncomfortable?
Those questions bring me closer to home, to Sinterklaas and Christmas. Beneath the costumes, presents and sweets, I want to know what people were giving, to whom, and why.
Sinterklaas centres on Saint Nicholas, traditionally remembered as a bishop of Myra whose legends celebrate generosity. NPO Kennis describes an early account of shoe-giving at Utrecht’s Sint-Nicolaaskerk, reportedly in 1427: wealthier people contributed money which the church distributed to the poor. Later domestic customs included children leaving shoes for treats. Help for the vulnerable and pleasure for children both belong to this history. Dutch pakjesavond falls on 5 December, the eve of Saint Nicholas’s feast. The history of Sinterklaas.
In America, the Dutch name Sinterklaas became Santa Claus. Writers such as Washington Irving and illustrators such as Thomas Nast helped shape the figure associated with Christmas. That catches my attention as a writer: stories and images can help build the traditions later generations inherit. The development of Santa Claus.
Christmas has its own calendar history. Its celebration on 25 December was already established in late antiquity, centuries before the modern Santa. Historians debate why that date was chosen: explanations include the influence of Roman solar celebrations and Christian calculations placing Jesus’s conception nine months earlier, on 25 March. Andrew McGowan on the date of Christmas.
For me, the seasonal image is compelling. After the winter solstice, daylight begins to lengthen again in the Northern Hemisphere. The winter solstice. I can read that turning point as a birth: light returning when darkness seems to have claimed almost everything. Set beside the birth of Christ, it becomes an image of renewed hope. The symbolic connection gives me something to write with, while the historical question remains open.
The virgin birth has a specific meaning within Christian belief: Mary conceives Jesus through the Holy Spirit without sexual intercourse. The account in Luke. My imagination follows a further image of new life emerging from what is hidden. A child grows beyond sight; a seed begins beneath the soil. Light can suggest life, goodness and hope, while darkness can suggest fear, loss and death. Yet darkness can also shelter a beginning.
That tension matters to my characters. Someone who fears the dark might discover that it has protected something precious. Someone certain she represents the light might become unable to recognise the harm she causes.
The winter imagery also brings me back to care. A shared meal. A gift given quietly. Someone whose hunger the community refuses to overlook. Beneath the presents and sweets, do we still recognise the people who need us?
In a story, I might imagine a kingdom that preserves an annual feast for centuries while forgetting who was meant to be fed. The plot begins when someone notices an empty place at the table. Like the person asking why the cat is still tied, that character discovers how much can depend on a question nobody has asked for years.
Religion, tradition and folklore can carry belonging, moral imagination and ways of living with loss. They can also carry assumptions about whose voice matters, what obedience means and which questions are welcome. I want to examine how those meanings formed, and what happens when later generations inherit them without their context.
A claim can become so familiar that questioning it feels stranger than believing it. That is the unease behind the song: I invent fictional worlds while wondering how many inherited stories shape the world around me.
A repeated claim still needs evidence. So does my correction of it.
That tension belongs in the song’s more personal lines, too. I can start explaining a connection and notice the conversation becoming a conversation about me. Autism. ADHD. “Enlightened.” “A little crazy.” The labels arrive while I am still trying to explain how the idea became a scene.
“I wasn’t recruiting a coven for tea;
I wanted you curious, sitting with me.”
There is humour there, but also a wish to be understood. A simple answer can leave me with more questions because I want to understand how someone reached it. Writing gives me room to make those connections visible at a pace another person can follow. I can let them meet the character before explaining everything that inspired her.
The bridge keeps me honest:
“I can fall for a theory, then find I was wrong;
A beautiful pattern can still make a song.”
An interpretation can be creatively useful without becoming a historical conclusion. A fictional kingdom can make grief recognisable. A monster can reveal how fear becomes cruelty. A character can discover that the story she inherited left somebody else out.
That is what I want to write towards: stories that make their readers feel something, then leave them curious enough to follow a name, an image or a question further back.
Perhaps the next footnote contains another beginning.
song link: