So many ideas… so little time.
I have so many ideas that I don’t know where to start… I need to finish my second novel and get it ready to send to the publisher. I also want to start planning a novel for Nanowrimo. I have three ideas. One of them is a novel that’s been ticking over in the back of my mind for ten or twenty years. A contemporary medical romance. The next idea is what I think of as my PhD novel. The third is a new idea based on the story of Hosea from the Old Testament. All different.
I will, God willing and time permitting, write all of them. But which one next? The PhD novel is the one that needs most research and has the potential to have a sort of integrity about it; but integrity doesn’t always make for a cracking good read. I think the next story might be the one based on Hosea.
It has been said that Shakespeare has already got all the best stories, and that people love fairy stories because even if the reader doesn’t always recognise the story consciously there is still something that resonates. Willa Cather, in O Pioneer, said it best when she said, ‘Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.’ Christopher Booker spent 34 years writing ‘The Seven Basic Plots’ and would argue with that. He believed that there are seven basic stories. The Writer’s Journey. Mythic structure for Writers takes a more classical approach to the elements of story and says that the best stories all work along the same themes and contain the same integral features.
It would be easy to jump into the footsteps of successful story writers to write another Cinderella story. I have always liked Cinderella stories, but my favourite stories are Beauty and the Beast. Jane Eyre is Beauty with her studious love of books and Mr Rochester is the Beast. Pride and Prejudice uses the same formulae. Elizabeth Bennet and the rude and condescending Mr Darcy who loves her in spite of himself.
I think, so far, that my novels use a formula that resembles classical structures more closely. In This Place of Happiness Rabia and the women in her family have journeys and challenges, and there are heroes who sacrifice themselves generating change in everyone else. In my second novel there are similar elements. The third novel could be a Rapunzel Story perhaps. A child is taken from her parents, and many year is found by the handsome prince. But where do I go next?
Tomorrow I am going to take a very large sheet of paper and look at the plots that are swishing around in my head and decide which one needs to be told first. In the end I suspect the story will chose for me.
