nanowrimo_lj | any ideas?

Hi, all.

During last year's NaNo, I tried to write a really cool idea (appropriated the tower of Babel from the bible and put it in the context of a post-drought world where people outside of the city walls were languishing/ fighting/ dying to get in, and people inside were living a strictly controlled existence (with a single, dominant tongue of course) so the city would thrive and they would all survive. the point was that everybody was human at the end and the city, like the biblical city, couldn't function; the broader point is that the novel was never finished, thanks to my inability to have an idea, choose it, and see it through to completion). okay, well, I thought it was a good idea--so good, in fact, that I'd like to finish it one of these days (although maybe in the form of a short story--that's where i usually live. but i digress...)

This year, I don't know what to do. I have all these BIG PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS swirling around in my head (what is death, and what are the implications of life just stopping so that your image and your existence go from continuous to suddenly stagnant? culture shock, reverse culture shock, and how people deal with both--how interesting it is that, even though two people from two different places can be very, very different, they can still be the same? and how you can feel so isolated from people who have grown up in an environment almost identical to yours? what's up with sex and infidelity, anyway--all cheaters aren't bad people, and all faithful people aren't good ones. what's with that? and all of these things sort of tie back into that creepy truism of all my writing that memory/ experience are a series of snapshots taken along this creepily circular pattern that we're all living. we're all archetypes, and we're all living and re-living these same old archetypal experiences, but in different settings with more or less technology, and more or less emotional involvement. the endings are all foretold.) and I just don't know what to do about them. How is a girl to choose with so many BIG IDEAS and so few actual concrete plot points?

I had been thinking about just writing the old standard "person travels to a foreign country. person lives in foreign country. see what person learns while living in foreign country, and what it's like to come back home" story (i've spent a lot of time abroad in the past year or so, so it's near and dear). But I feel so silly writing something that I have already read before. If I've seen it on a shelf, chances are that I don't want to read it again. And if I'm writing something I've seen on the shelf... well, chances are I won't want to keep writing past 7500 words or so.

Does anybody have any advice about turning big, swirling, abstract ideas into manageable pieces of ideas? Or would it be better to just leave the big ideas to ferment for another time and focus on some mundane event or other that can be twisted and turned into an epic-lengthed novel?