What lies beneath

Finally for today, having sketched in where I seem to be with the process of putting together the core narrative and getting to know the characters, there is something else that is filling my notebook and that is the underlying meaning to me of what I am trying to do.

I'm being vague here because ideas are still developing and haven't even got to first draft stage yet. It should be enough to say that the characters I am encountering and the situation in which they find themselves is developing according to something else that is going on in my head.

The Russian formalists used to say that the secret of all good fiction is to make the familiar seem strange and that seems to me to apply equally to the subtexts and themes.

This brings up, in a lateral sort of way, some of the fundamental issues I referred to a couple of posts back about motivations and particularly the question of for whom one is writing. Honesty means saying that I would be disappointed to write something and for it not to speak to anybody apart from me; but far worse, I think, would be to produce something which doesn't even speak to me either.

In that sense I am my own first audience and to speak to me the book has to raise issues that engage me in a manner I want to read. My personality is such that these are fundamentally philosophical and ethical issues and so what I want to do is to explore issues for which I have no fixed views, the questions which make me wonder, and do so in a way that makes the familiar seem strange because it is strange.

One of the key bits of advice for writing novices is not to lose sight of the story and that seems to me to be right, but my current novice thinking is to ensure that applies to the whole story, not just the surface narrative.

Anyway, there is a rich irony in having spent a couple of hours writing about writing rather than actually doing it. I plan to come back round here from time to time to deliver despatches as to where the story is going. My current project plan is to

1. Keep working at this story until I have it at to the stage of first draft and then print it and put it away in a box for a while;
2. Take one of my earlier "crap" stories (which is almost pure Moorcock-style fantasy), brainstorm ideas around it and then try and get it right through to the stage of a complete first draft and preferably beyond but explicitly as a "limbering up exercise" before
3. Taking my draft story out of its box, reviewing it and then writing the real novel that I want to write.