Mutations

I started out in September with some ideas sketched out as twenty-nine bullet points on one and a half sides of A4 paper.  These ideas are as much to do with time and place and tone as anything else although there are some key ideas there too. Essentially they reflect an idea of a slightly whimsical and light-hearted set of linked short stories.

Right at the beginning I had a notion that one part of the story would involve my protagonist listening to a gruesome after-dinner tale and I made an effort to write that tale. This taught me immediately that I had a way to go to learn how to write although I did kick it into a shape that I am happy to let sit on a flashdrive until I can come back and re-write it.

Of course this after-dinner tale immediately set off a train of thought - how did my protagonist come to be listening to that story? Who is telling it?, What is the bigger picture? How did my protagonist get to this particular geographical place? Can he get out again? Who else is there? and so on. I played around with ideas on this in my spare time for three or four weeks until I read an article in a Sunday paper that slapped me around the chops a few times and dropped a complete and fully formed McGuffin in my lap.

Eek! The McGuffin changed my idea of gentle whimsy into something deeper and more substantial and this immediately provoked fear that I don't have the skills to handle it. Aargh! How does it now look? Well, it looks familiar to be honest. They say that there are really only seven stories and this was recognisably one of them. Great, I can relax again, sorta. Maybe.

Next step was research - how could I get the McGuffin from one location to another in a way that sets up the underlying plot dynamic? Flashback time. A random news-report set up a remembrance of something that a tutor mentioned in passing at University in the early nineteen eighties which had interested me at the time! I realised that the flashback gave me the basis of a backstory for the McGuffin as well.  By now I had -and have- ideas that felt "right" but which were not obviously latent in those bullet points except with the clarity of hindsight.

But that backstory gave rise to a dilemma - how far to research it? On the one hand there is the approach which the late, lamented Bob Ross used to take to his painting - if you want to put a little fluffy cloud or friendly little tree in right there then do it, make it up (although Ross also paid a lot of attention to form and structure). On the other hand I need to write a piece in a given historical setting in a reasonably authentic voice from that time and the anal part of me wants to get it as correct historically as I  possibly can. This does not mean writing an academic essay: it means having enough period detail and colour correct  to frame the narrative convincingly. For me this means doing quite a lot of research and following up on offshoots and intuitions, almost all of which will never go any further than my notebook.

To do this I asked my character write his story for me in the first person. There is a falsity here as this character at that time would not ever have considered doing any such thing. Nonetheless he is doing it at my request in some other place while I am writing this blog because that's the kind of guy he is. And it has proven very valuable to help him in that effort as I have had to think hard not only about obvious stuff, like synchronising his particular story with the historical record and making him recognisably a man of his time, but also about how to structure that story and put in place the narrative dynamics I want it to set in play for the main story.

Also I am using all of these early efforts as practice pieces. At present I am just trying to get the narrative and some character elements down and blocked in to really work up in the second draft. However in one important respect that autobiography is working some magic - the man behind the character is starting to live in my head.

There are five more characters in my mind at present at different stages of introducing themselves.

The first character is the geographical location itself which is important to the story I want to tell and also in setting up a deeper dynamic. At the moment I know something of its character but still need to put on my boots and go for a walk of discovery through it, learning its little ways, how it looks in all weathers and the importance of its flora and fauna. I need to understand its geology and how deep time has shaped it and formed it; what once crawled and walked there - and what still does.

The second is my main protagonist. He has recently become much clearer in my mind as a result of my thinking about some of my reactions on re-reading Paramahansa Yogananda's "Autobiography of a Yogi" and encountering Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri's "The Holy Science". The protagonist is in some ways me as I might have been had life taken different turns. I look forward to reading his autobiography when he writes it for me.

The third character is fundamental to the story, including the bigger backstory, and closely tied to that of the location. She drives a second set of research that I'm going to have to do. I know her name, though, or at least the one she is currently known by, and I have caught glimpses of what might or might not be her past. She intrigues me and she probably looks like Pat Tallman.

The fourth is the character who tells that after-dinner story I mentioned up there in the second paragraph.

The fifth character is, for want of a better descriptor, the baddie although he wouldn't characterise himself as such. He is still lurking in the shadows although I have once or twice caught a reflected gleam in his eyes which glare malevolently from his encloaking darkness.

And that is pretty much where I am right now in terms of character and story - I know the direction of the story I want to tell, my time at the moment is engaged in meeting the characters and working to put flesh on the raw narrative.  However that raw narrative isn't the be all and end all of what I want to write and that will be the subject of my next and final post for today.