Coded in string - the ideas machine

Ideas for our stories come from anywhere, and I had a startling example of this when I was watching Dr. Jago Cooper's series The Lost Kingdoms of South America recently.

This episode was about the Chachapoya, who lived in northern Peru.  And the thing that had my writer's antennae up was the kepu.  Kepu were string necklaces the people wore.  And like the English language of flowers, or the African bead languages,  these string necklaces were a language too.

They were constructed with a main string onto which are knotted several other strings.  The dangling strings are tied on at different spacings along the main string, and each of these strings was a different length.  Then there were the knots tied in each of those dangling strings, which again had different spacings for different meanings.  And the knots might be single or double.  And they used different colours too.

Archaeologists believe that the kepu are a language, and they also believe that the knots record narrative stories.  These necklaces record the legends of the Chachapoya.  

The idea of using a knotted necklace for this kind of complex language really boggled my mind.  And then my writers' mind kicked in.  I turned to my ideas book, where I had an idea of a library and its librarians being some kind of Resistance.  I'd written a vague note about the codes they ran perhaps being in books they exchange, but when I learned about the kepu my mind gave this another twist.

An occupying force might expect messages to be smuggled in printed books, but what if they weren't?  What if instead the messages were carried by travelling librarians who wore the equivalent of kepu as part of their teacher's dress?  They could claim that their collars were ancient badges of office, and that librarians wore them to advertise their status.  If they could get an occupying force to believe that they could pass messages by travelling about wearing collars that carried their data.

This is still at the stage of an idea looking for the right story, but I love the way the ideas machine combined my fragment of story idea with this new information to make something new in a totally unexpected way.  As Elizabeth Gilbert would say, now that's Big Magic.