My idea evolved throughout the year, until I finally got it in it's final form early this term.. (With about four weeks left).
The initial spark came in August last year, (I can remember the moment, having gotten home early from the Athletics Carnival, I was reading...) I was thinking about utopias (For some reason), and about how it seemed that many dystopias were technocratic societies.. Which was going to lead onto an essay about the backward-looking nature of utopias. (This is where the 'Looking Backward' title first came in.)
However, upon researching, and reading utopic texts, I realised that to say as such was a vast generalisation. Having already done research, I decided to stay with the topic of utopias, writing generally about their evolution. Unfortunately, being able to do so using twenty or so texts wasn't working, so I ended up having to modify the essay to discuss my three 'key texts', The Republic, Utopia, and Brave New World, framing it with discussion of various aspects of the literary utopia. So while it was finalised relatively recently, the spark had existed for over a year.