The Boy Who Ran—A few sources of inspiration
The Boy Who Ran is a narrative tale and a parable. Besides its main purpose of telling a story, which I hope people find interesting, it also tries to inspire young readers with the principles of dedication, and also to show how taking this virtue too far can lead to inflexibility and destructive behavior.
The original inspiration for The Boy Who Ran came form a theme rather than a story. For some reason, I was thinking back to a theme from a book I’d read in 1976 called “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” and the theme was “seeking perfection”. I recalled the single-minded determination of Jonathan, a rather unusual seagull, to fly ever faster. Seagulls are not especially constructed for fast flight, but Jonathan was an exception. In the end Jonathan travels as fast as light. While not exactly realistic, the story demonstrated the application of a singular determination to be perfect. I wanted to imbue some of this characteristic into the boy, although I also wanted the boy’s needs and desires to be more complex than this.
The origin of the boy’s character was the event that changed his life, and the near unbreakable spell (of sorts) that his mother cast on him at the time. She hoped this would make him safe. The tragic event, and what followed over the next few days, forged his character in a way that would hard to duplicate, but it also wounded him, much as his alter ego in the story had been wounded at some time in the past.
There was another character with a similar level of dedication to perfection. Red Sky was initially inspired by Kyūzō, one of the seven samurai in Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film. This samurai constantly dedicated himself to swordsmanship, to the exclusion of all else—although this also made him somewhat inflexible. But The Boy Who Ran is as much about change and anything else, not about inflexibility. Red Sky had already begun to change at the beginning of the story and the softening of his attitude was a harbinger of the changes to come for the boy, although (I hope) it was done subtly.
Some of the other characters had initial inspirations as well, but these inspirations only serve as a starting point. The characters immediately evolve into his or her own unique selves quickly. The inspirations are only an initial picture in my mind when I think about a character.
There are other less-obvious themes in the book, although the constructive use of determination did emerge as an obvious theme. The focuses on things he wants to happen, tirelessly and with dedication. In my experience as a physicist and program manager, this focus is important if you are to accomplish anything that’s difficult. I’ve said something like this to young leaders before: Complex problems don’t solve themselves and the barriers to success are countless. There is always a reason for why we can’t get something done. There is only one reason things get done: because you, and everyone working with you, are determined that they will be done and you each make a decision that you will find a way to make it happen.
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