mark_asphodel | On original 'fic experiments (Reply)

Had a lengthy talk with my most excellent spouse about long-term aspirations and the like. This occurred during our drive home from scenic Port Austin, which is a good time as any to be contemplative. Basically, two-plus years after discarding my latest draft of an original work, I have the bug to WRITE SOMETHING (not fanfiction) again, but I don't know what to do about it. For years, I was working on one project that mutated and spawned sub-projects and got very muddled, but there was a vision lurking in there somewhere. And there was one cast of characters that I had great investment in. Now, there are all these possibilities, but no coherent vision... and no characters. I don't feel comfortable repurposing the old ones, and inventing new ones seems... exhausting.

Basically, I don't know who I need to tell a story if I don't know what that story is. My failed NaNo project last year was a thinly-veiled autobiographical account of life in southwest Detroit (entitled Nice Things, as in "this is why we can't have nice things"), and my thoughts are going in that direction again, except a little less autobiographical.

So, I've started an experiment. I threw together a couple of characters based on a) personal experience b) my next-door neighbors and c) two media characters I already use as springboards for things their creators wouldn't recognize. And I plopped them down in Detroit and I'm going to play with them a while. We'll see what, if anything, develops.