I once read an author interview in which she - the name is forgotten sadly - said she varied how she wrote to avoid any one method getting stale. The idea struck a chord in me. As such, I like to deliberately change how I go about writing from time to time, trying new ideas and methods. Today I'm going to change how I communicate about what I'm writing.
That's something I've changed from time to time in the past too. Sometimes I get an idea through talking to people and riff a lot with them. Sometimes I get a bunch of ideas and pitch them at people to see which I should do. Sometimes - again based on something I read - I don't talk about the idea at all, trying to force it out of me by giving it no other outlet than the page. That's had a lot of success but I'm not in the mood for that. So this time, I'm going to try talking about the project as much as possible by keeping a public diary. Hopefully it'll lead to people getting excited for it (which will make me excited) and bouncing ideas off of me. At the very least it should give me some accountability. But if all else fails, it's a new idea tried.
So speaking of new ideas, let me tell you about Project Transformation.
A lot of ideas come to me. And I mean a lot. It's probably my strongest suit as a would-be novelist. I went looking for Project Transformation. I have a number of half-finished projects I could be working on but they all had various flaws that I didn't feel able to tackle while also doing an edit side-by-side. I wanted to do something totally new. I did have an idea but I found it drowning under a) uncertainty of where to start b) uncertainty of how all the personal conflicts and interpersonal dynamics would actually turn into a great narrative. I thought and thought and thought about it but nothing was coming to me and as that project is an experiment in doing a very clean, rolling revision, one and one draft, I wasn't going to just fling words at it. I didn't just need a new project, I needed one I could fling words at. But what?
Nothing was occurring to me. No image, no 'what if', no characters. Instead I went searching for the idea in a very different way for me - what do I want to write? What would be something I'd be proud of? What would the fantasy I want to read be - a very pertinent question when deep in a reading slump where I was questioning whether I'd simply had my fill of the fantasy genre.
Little ideas dribbled through. I wanted something that felt really classically Fantasy. I think in authors' quests to reinvent the genre, they sometimes chuck out the baby with the bathwater (to my tastes at least). I wanted something that built on the idea of modern-feeling Fantasy as done by Pratchett and Gladstone and Jackson Bennett. I wanted to reach back to that idea of invented myth and powerful magic, and tell it in a style that fits the world I know. A series that really exemplified that to me was GGK's The Fionavar Tapestry; hugely mythic, yet rooted in the world view of people from our own world. People becoming myths - that's an idea that is somewhere in every idea I have, but I wanted to dial it up. I also wanted to build on the idea of rebellion and building a better world I was getting from my Xth re-read of The Invisibles. I wouldn't go as far as Moorcock, but there is a tendency for Fantasy to lionise stories where authority fights the enemy without over the struggle for a better future and the confusion of enemies within our culture. I was getting what I wanted to do (albeit in a form a lot less crystal than these words) but I needed a vehicle.
Then it all came together while listening to Dead Can Dance's Ulysses. Read the lyrics (third comment down on the video) and I think you'll see hints of what I was talking about but something particular about it gave me a half-formed idea. What's more, listen to it and you'll get a mix of eerie rhythm and elegant melody, yearning nostalgia and determination to create from chaos; that mood is strong in what I want to do.
This gave me the idea of young normal people, yearning to make a difference, and in their eagerness agreeing to take on mythic personas giving them great powers for a rebellion (against what?), but in doing so putting themselves in great internal peril as well as external. There was something there. I teased and tugged at the idea for a few days - part of me is still wondering if this should be a portal fantasy - but couldn't get it to really sit anywhere. So I said screw it and started anyway.
Now I've got 6k words about a young man named Sooley. He's a doctor employed by a city state of great power to offer enough care to the poor to keep them quiescent but his sympathies are with the unquiescent rebels. Currently I'm following him around his everyday life, establishing his world and seeing what his deal is; he wants to join the rebellion but they say no. Their reason is they need people like him to keep his neighbourhood together - no point winning the war by turning the city into an even worse place than it already is. But Sooley is restless. He is taking daft risks. He's scared. He's going to do something daft. I mean, you know the young hero of a fantasy story is going to get mixed up in something, right?
Right now the idea is very under developed and the prose is frankly atrocious. I like to think I've got different accents as a writer, and when I'm writing discovery style is defaults to a very disjointed tell-heavy 90s-tastic style that bears distinct resemblance to my 14 year old self's writing. This project is very much about get it down and revise later.
But one thing that is developing is a little something about the culture and source of power. The ruling power makes heavy use of alchemy - lethal weapons, super soldiers, and so on. Reason A - I like magic that echoes real world occultism, and medieval-esque alchemy has been impinging on my radar for a little now and is little done in fantasy. Reason B - putting some solid restrictions on how their magic works will make for a better story. Not that it's gone further than "alchemy!". The rebels are trending more towards a pseudo-shamanistic point of view, summoning spirits and weapons imbued by magic. What's important about that? They're indications of different world views. There's a clash of ideology here. And that clash is giving me some ideas about Sooley (name liable to change).
My plan is to get this story to about 20k words and take stock there. I'm hoping that this will be around the moment that Sooley's power is emerging and that we've established his character. There's a lot of questions along the way about how that 20k will go, not least whether this story is just following Sooley (probably not).
And that's about all I've got to say without spoilering everything majorly. I'll hopefully update this in a fortnight.
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