The Other Idea
So, Monday I had a great new idea for a book. It doesn’t often happen this way, but this time, it jumped in as an almost fully-formed entity. I got a title, a main character, a secondary character, a setting, a core problem… the whole deal. Well, almost, and this is where it gets interesting for me. (And we’ll see if I can talk about it, without talking too much about it, which has a tendency to kill stories for me.)
The first problem, of course, is that I have mentally committed myself to projects through probably the middle of next year. When to write this was my initial overriding concern.
But then, the second set of problems kind of takes care of the first, because I quickly realized that a) this is not the sort of story I think of myself usually writing, which means I need to put a lot more thought into it and b) I need to decide if the core problem is enough to carry the story on its own. This is one of those ideas that’s pretty intimate and personal-not to me, that is, but the main character-and I need to decide if that on its own is enough. And I think that’s going to depend on what genre I choose to lump it in, because it’s the sort of story that could go anywhere. Fantasy, urban fantasy, near- or far-future science fiction… the possibilities are actually endless, and I’m kind of excited to explore them.
But each one brings along its own baggage. I could probably get away with the personal problems of an individual in urban fantasy or near-future SF, but it would be harder as an epic fantasy or high fantasy or the sort of science fiction I’m used to reading. A lot of readers, it seems to me, expect there to be larger implications to the struggles of an individual hero, no matter how interesting they might be. A young boy can never just discover he’s a wizard, he has to also be thrust into the struggle against some great evil. An old man can’t just rediscover youth in the artificial body of a soldier, he has to uncover the sordid truth of planetary colonization along the way. And so on.
Absent the larger implications, I think I could also make it work if there was another idea to complement the main character, whose concept otherwise has to carry the story. Something else, maybe even two somethings else, could make it work. So I’ll let it percolate in the hindbrain for a while, and see what comes up. Thankfully, I’ve got a lot of other stuff to occupy me in the meantime.
Mirrored from Bum Scoop.