Purple Dragon Prompts are amazing. I am just so impressed with all these creative people writing prompts and sharing them with the world. Purple Dragon Prompts are the brain child of Kayleigh Gallagher author of the book Defy. According to her website, she picked the term Purple Dragon Prompts, because of course dragons are purple. As a fellow dragon fan, I like the way she thinks.
I picked this prompt from her collection, because as authors, we sometimes wonder what it would be like if what we wrote was real. Imagine writing a story about an author who found out, it all really was.
It doesn’t say what genre this author wrote or if they all stick to earth, only that the stories the author wrote were actually about things that happened to them in a past life. I can only imagine learning that the character I just killed off, really was a person who died in just that way and worse still if the main character was the one who killed them. Knowing that the emotions the main character felt were actually ones that I had felt in another life.
Now, I don’t actually believe in past lives. I know some people do and I won’t go into that, but believe it or not, as a concept I find it interesting and have on occasion used it in my writing.A specific case I recall is a character who was certainly not the good guy of the story when she ran into someone whose past life was someone she cared about. This particular character was long lived and thus had actually been the one to know the past lives of these people. She had, on multiple occasions, fallen in love with a man whose soul was always the same and had been forced to deal with his murder at least twice. Now she was faced with someone who she knew would be around him. Suddenly she goes from wanting to fight and aid her family to unsure what she should be doing and ready to lay down arms if only in the hopes that maybe this time she’ll get her happy ending.
I don’t know how I would react if I learned that past lives were real and that my stories were of my past lives. Considering the settings of a lot of my stories, that would open a great deal of questions. What about you? How would you react and what kind of story do you think an author discovering this would lead you to?
