Well, shit. Novels take a lot of time to write and forever more than that to think about. I find myself constantly revising the draft version in my head and twisting the cogs of plot and character and sequence and style every time I come to write another word.
Poetry is a short punch of writing. The short story is a small idea which can be shaped and polished over a few days. How on earth does one keep perspective chisseling out the Colossus of Rhodes? There are so many variables to try and get absolutely perfect. Which begs the question, should it be perfect? Or does the first draft even need to be?
It would seem like an awful waste of time to write out an entire novel and then decide to change elements of it and require re-writing the whole thing.
Every time I think the story over, I add another layer of complexity to it. Which in turn, only means there are more working parts to consider and think over and add other lays to.
It is time to strip away the layers and ask myself: what is the story I want to tell? What is the most bare bones version of that story?
Once I can answer those two questions I can write it.
So, what story do I want to tell?
I want to explore the grit and awfulness of heroes in history. The strongest heroic warriors of the ancient world would rape women and burn villages to the ground. They would do monstrous things, consider Hercules who completed his labours as a pennace for murdering his wife and children.
What is the price of greatness? What is the moral cost of heroism?
I love the study of history for the complexity, the humanity and the mistakes of real people. The other factor in history is that everyone I'm reading about has died. It sounds morbid, but nothing humanises a person more than them dying.
I like character fiction. I like fantasy. This ramble is generating ideas. One thing I like in my stories are a large cast of characters, but I hate the glossary-lists, the diagrams and family trees you need to constantly refer to in order to know what is going on, who is talking and what their agenda is. I think that switching perspective on the chapter is what makes following it difficult.
I suppose creating a world, sections and slices of history; then dedicate books or parts to lifespans, or major historical events like a record of history. Secondary characters and minor characters would be characters from previous or future novels. Mysteries set up backward and forward across characters and confusion, misremembering of events and potentially reading the two sides of the same conversation across two different books. I really like the idea of that.
Ok. I'm back on track. The reason I'm posting this is to show that when you can't think of anything to write; just start writing and the writing will come.
