From Lost To Found: The Origin

[There are some mild spoilers of the actual book :)]

Before I named my book From Lost to Found, it was called The Mystery Of The Missing Mentor. 

It was a book that was supposed to be about a simple kidnapping: person gets kidnapped, kids hunt for clues, person is found, happy ending. Right?

Nope.

Five years of sporadic development changed this book into something I had never pictured. It was still a story about a kidnapping; the kids still hunted for clues and found the person. But the story didn’t end there. It continued. And even while they were searching, while they found the kidnapper, while their story continued on, a question emerged that thrummed under the surface of every line.

How do we move on when we’ve lost something, or someone?

I was going to make the kidnapper a villain. Fully. Unequivocally. But something gave me pause. He was a person, too. He, in his own mind, had justified his actions to the point that he no longer thought they could be wrong. I was still barely starting to figure out how to write a book, so when I realised this, I didn’t want my book to be flat.

Motivations matter.

The character can’t go on a journey, or do anything “just for plot”. They have to feel that inner desire, actually want to do the action, to achieve their own goal.

So I made my kidnapper have history with the person he kidnapped. And accidentally made him so good that I had to invent another villain. This villain was a villain, yes. He did bad things, yes. But he like the kidnapper in the story, like the main character, like the father, like the mother, like so many people, had lost something too.

And he couldn’t move on.

Grief makes people do things they never could have imagined. All because it couldn’t be processed in a healthy way. I did not start this book hoping to make it deep and meaningful; I did not steer the book onto this path. This book wrote itself the way it needed to, and I hope that whoever reads it who has felt loss—of any kind—feels comfort from this story, and knows that they are not alone.