Week ending 18/08/2021 ( and a post script 07/10/2021)
Progress 🙂 ‘Ka Ching’. ‘Suddenly for no apparent reason…’ I had a ‘light bulb moment’. To complete the cliches I have been ‘banging my head against a brick wall’ – for a few years, and though it didn’t seem as if the problem was just one problem I can now see it was; I always wanted to write ‘contemporary and gritty life-like’ stories about the issues of the day.
In many ways the adult thriller series didn’t have a problem when I wrote it – it wasn’t a Political thriller in a Current Affairs sense; but the YA series was definitely having problems with wars. This occurred because I had two main characters’ father and mother be serving officers in the British Army ‘at war’ – and that war was whatever ‘we’ were engaged in, about 1990 when I started writing the series. In order for those ‘absent parents’ to be in danger and on ‘active duties’ and not be too old to serve I kept re setting the story as I, slowly when wars were won and lost and new ones started, rewrote it – fine for one book but I also took the ‘write a series’ advice and wrote a series – two series in fact.
War it turned out was just the start of the problem – the YA books are country-side set and were written as an antidote to the absence of children on farms – but then of course there was HSE to get around safely and then BREXIT which means that a young character working on the story farm looking to the future might not see a way forward at all – I can’t see one for their farm either now or see how he could get the finance to go forward with it – and then came COVID!
Suddenly, as with every other writer of contemporary fiction, there was a dilemma – write about something un-ignorable ‘as if -‘ only to find out things didn’t work that way or deal with the change of attitude required by setting the stories in time. That sounds simple but a million words into something you write from instinct and heart based on one set of values is hard to ‘just change’.
It is physically hard to know where to begin even if you decide to adopt that mindset. COVID hasn’t gone away. It is worldwide. Like it or not it is ‘a line in the sand’ and not, we hope, interchangeable, like the wars we make are.
I decided to set up a My World Story Bible – I realised that everything I had ever written was set in my fictionalised version of the world outside – I had maps etc and that basically the adult and the YA characters were in the same space; but the question was when?
Using Scrivener files and paper notebooks and the Search function I looked for detail that I could use. I set up a new Scrivener 3 file with each piece of work – and any piece of work. I timelined them and I cross-referenced any cross-over characters I can now not only set the stories in real-time but I know how old the characters would be now in the times we live now.
This seems enormously liberating and frees me from the tyranny of war though with our troops on the ground in Afghanistan again I had come full circle… And then even this is out of date as we ‘just’ upped and left Afghanistan 🙁 .I also realised all the material I have and have already imagined as future stories all fit in before 2020 if I live long enough to write past that then COVID and BREXIT will be known in their effect at least with the benefit of hindsight from some future point.
Can I still think the books are Contemporary? Probably they are ‘contemporary’ to me and the times I live though and I suppose that is all I can think as any more revelations remain, as yet unknown. I have to accept that, unless I go into journalism, that Contemporary will always be ‘fictionalised’ and always after the fact in whatever I write and there is no way around the COVID line so I will have to accept that and sort myself out or I will never publish anything at all…
I feel less depressed about the YA stories’ relevance in the food and farming situation we are in today as I can take in what is happening and process it and then use it and I can write about that character’s hopes and dreams but I can look ahead beyond his remit and genuinely add in a layer of emotion that I feel about our rural situation and economy today and the insecurity of our food supply in the face of creeping Metropolitan bias based on interest group funded science and disproportionate access to power and lack of actual experience or knowledge. Jane Austen at work again ‘Sense V Sensibility’ and ‘Pride V Prejudice’ with a dollop of self-interested ‘Persuasion’ behind every feature. My characters still have things to say I need to get them across their lines in time of ‘Before’ and ‘After.’ If I have not been beaten down by the system and time…
Post Script 07/10/2021
Though since writing most of the above pig farmers are facing killing their stock due to lack of workforce across the processing sector and we have had a ‘fuel crisis’ and the PM was quoted/mis quoted as shrugging off the former as ‘is the pig not dead when you eat it?’ THAT’s THE FUCKIG POINT YOU MORON – they won’t be eaten! They will be burnt! And when there is starvation in the world that is despicable not to mention the effect on the individual farm business’ – no one will recompense them for their loss there is no furlough for the furrow ploughed out by this clash of Metropolitan carelessness and reality of feeding the world. It is fine for the PM not to care about prices but he won’t ever have to worry about the food on his plate and choosing between that and heating his room.
🙁
Light bulb off… 🙁
I don’t think I am ‘quite ‘there’ yet in terms of being able to write through and on with this situation I find myself in – a month ago I thought I could set the books in the recent past but the fact is I can’t get my head around that – for 20 years I have been endeavouring to write ‘contemporary and gritty fiction’ and nothing I have written about to date is relevant now. Not sure where that leaves the Blogs either. It’s not as simple as writing something else.