I chose this topic since at the beginning of the year, I thought I'd try to address a set of topics on a rotating basis, and this one's the next on the list, but honestly, my head is more on marketing than on writing this month. That's because May is my self-proclaimed National Novel Marketing Month (NaNoMarMo for short) and that's where I'm focusing most of my efforts. So, maybe I'll post next time about what I've been doing to jumpstart the marketing end of business.
That being said, I'm not being totally inactive on the writing side this month. While I don't have a specific project I'm working on, I have been doing research for a new work, which is more literary than my normal style. While I often hesitate to talk about projects in their formative stages, this one is too engrossing for me to be completely silent on it. So I thought I'd spend some time today talking about how a book idea goes from a germ of an idea to the point where a writer starts to write.
This started a little over a month ago, when I was reading THE TIGER'S WIFE, by Tea Obreht. This would not have been the normal sort of book I would have gravitated to, but D. had to read it for her college writing course, and so once she was done with it, I requisitioned it from her and read it myself. I was struck by a number of things about it--mostly due to her themes, and due to the setting, which was the war-torn Balkan states. The author stated in an interview at the back of the book that she was exploring how an event became history became story became myth and legend.
Okay, she didn't say that in so many words, but that was my takeaway.
The story itself was about a young woman, her grandfather, and the stories and myths that surrounded them, supported them, and comforted them during very trying times. While I read it, I couldn't help thinking about my father.
Full Disclosure: My father was partly of Austro-Hungarian ancestry, although he always referred to himself as "Heinz 57 Slavic." Since Austro-Hungary split into Austria and Hungary, and Hungary later split into a million little Balkan pieces, the myths and legends surrounding THE TIGER'S WIFE resonated with me. It wasn't so much that I had heard the stories before, as that I could imagine hearing these stories, issued from the mouths of my own ancestors.
That was the germ of the idea. It became a seed when I thought, wouldn't it be cool to take this idea and set it in a story about a father and a daughter, both of whom were in the military and both of whom went to war at the same stage in their lives?
Full disclosure: My father was in the military. I am in the military now. He turned 40 in the jungles of Vietnam. I turned 40 in the deserts of Kuwait.
What were the myths and legends and histories and stories and events that supported and comforted him in Vietnam, and did any of them overlap for me in Kuwait? This was the idea I wanted to explore.
So the germ becomes the seed (and yeah, I might be butchering the metaphor there...bear with me) and now I start to plant the seed. I am in the process now of rereading THE TIGER'S WIFE, very slowly, searching for the details she uses, and free-writing about them to see what resonates in my own story. This process turns fact into fiction. Whenever I take an event from one book, look for parallels in my own life, and then skew my parallel events into another story, fiction loosely based on truth is what results.
I also play with her symbols versus what could work as symbols in my story. Thus the Jungle Book, which features in her book, becomes War and Peace in my book. Problem? I haven't actually read War and Peace. And, in reality, I don't think my father gave a damn about War and Peace himself. But it seems to be the right book for my story.
This leads me to the next thing I need to do, which is to do preliminary research. For me, this consists of 1) Reading War and Peace, so I know what I'm talking about, and 2) mining those free-writes for details from my own life that are only half-remembered, but may have potential as more seeds for my own novel. I want to interview the other people who are still alive, who knew the story, too, to hear their version of it.
Thus events become stories of histories, which slowly but surely become my own myths and legends. And the result of all this growth, eventually and hopefully, becomes the novel of my dreams.
Recent Comments