Stroke of Genius

Well, as for the title, it may or may not be. Writers are sometimes known for their spontaneity. At least, I am. Last night I was reading some news articles and exposés (because we don't have cable, so most of my news consumption is limited to local news and the internet). Lately I've been taking in more and more of the redundancy of this culture and seeing it for what it is - redundancy. I can't really explain it, but all of these ideas I've had for stories over the years came together and became that golden brain-mush that tends to become the embryonic version of a story.

 The problem is, it's one of those ideas that isn't a swashbuckling, fanciful romance novel. It would be dystopian and take place in the near future. If I write something, I want to make it deep. If it has to be realistic, it has to be raw. Realistic is something I struggle with - not realistic in the sense that there are a million plot holes, but I'm just better at writing stories about flying unicorns and talking hippos than I am about a girl born in 1995 or even someone living in futuristic Kansas fifty years from now. It just doesn't seem...fanciful enough. I don't know. Maybe it's not that. Part of this is that...I'm afraid of failing at it. I've tried putting stories in the real world before, and for some reason I never feel as confident about them as the ones written about lands far, far away. That's why it will be a challenge. But I want it to work.

Alright, maybe I'm better at this than I think, but just let me continue my semi-venting/insight filled post.

Renegade is a great example, as much as I cringe over it. I made it take place in the real world in he near future, maybe 120 years from now. It didn't turn out as well as I hoped, even though I (and my family) were immensely proud of it at the time. Midnight's Song was a pretty complex dystopia (even if it wasn't technically a "dystopian" novel) and I certainly can draw from the process of how I created it. But, this still has to be very different from that. Cut the magic, cut the royalty. Cut the things that make that world so drastically different from ours that it seems like another planet. It has to seem like a distant world, but a familiar one all the same. There has to be a kind of technology that dazzles, yet can be somewhat understood.

I think one of the masters of this kind of dystopia is Suzanne Collins. Scott Westerfield is also a master of a sort of dystopia with sci-fi elements in the Uglies Quartet, though it is a little more out there than Collins's technology. The Uglies certainly seems like something that could occur in the next...maybe 4 lifetimes (?) while the Hunger Games hits really close to home for some people in terms of our current fears about the government and the progression of modern culture and technology. Both of them are masters of their own fantasy worlds - as fantastic or familiar as they may be.

Realism is sometimes a challenge for me, because I love making my fiction into a sort of meaningful escapism. Food for the imagination. Something you wish could happen to you and maybe apply to your own life. Realism in the sense that something could happen in real life is a little more of a challenge. I'm not nearly as good at this kind of writing as is my close confidant, Monica. That's why, right after I started pondering these things in the bathtub last night, I jumped out with wet hair - still thick with conditioner (because my hair is thick and our water extremely hard) stuck it in the sink and wrapped an oversized towel over it.

I then got dressed, grabbed a pair of cheap headphones - for reasons of that feedback Skype loves to throw into calls - and tried as hard as I could to put them on around the towel. Monica and I talked until about midnight. We would have gone longer, too, except that both Skype and my phone died. We discussed the idea in depth, because I know that she is a thinker and has an innate talent for bringing the plausible to life. She is an INTP, while I am an INFP. When we talk it's like brain lightning.  She's studying to be a brilliant scientist by the way. And I'm not joking about that. She really is.

Anyway, I think it's been determined that we'll discuss it more as time goes by and that we might end up writing this together. Not going to let to much out about the concept, but the rough idea so far is of a dystopia in which children of the lower classes are half-knowingly sold by their parents into a kind of glamorous slavery to a wealthier - but not the ruling - class. I really would like to deal with the themes of selling your soul to wealth, with a ruling class controlling others using wealth, etc. Sort of Hunger-Gamesy (but not really at all, actually).

Those are my thoughts for now. I played a show at Potbelly today - I'm an in house musician. We had a sort of fiasco on the way there, and my finger tips are absolutely shredded. I've been playing guitar for years, so I've had calluses for a long time. But, lately I've been having a lot of problems. Problems with my fingers, to be specific. Heck, it even hurts to type. I should probably get going before my fingers fall off and I have another panic attack. I also have a date with the first chapter of Monica's new book. I'm very excited to read it : )