I had a dream. Not a world-turning, society-changing inspirational one, but the sort of dream you might have any given night, complete with inanities, insanities and impossibilities. And, me being me, I thought 'there's a story in that'.
This was about eight years ago and still this particular dream never has been transformed into a complete work of fiction. Not that I haven't tried; I've made a couple of abortive attempts to turn it into fantasy. I've even made some notes (that I've subsequently lost).
Thing is, I'm working on something entirely new at the moment – when opportunity presents itself – and I've been turning ideas over and around and trying new fits on for size. And it has occurred to me that this whole dream-idea from eight years ago might fall right into the heart of it.
This is both exciting and a little bit scary. I mean, my current project is nothing like the idea I originally held close to my heart. The original idea was for a rather earnest adventure, possibly young adult, set in an isolated (enveloped) kingdom struggling to maintain its independence. It was to be set entirely in fens and would have been called Waterland, had Graham Swift not stolen the title.
I will lose all this. I will be gutting the idea, taking only one or two aspects and ditching the rest, possibly (or possibly not) including the setting. That's quite a wrench.
But it does illustrate what I'm trying to say this week: that nothing good is ever lost.
Artists are the great recyclers. We get ideas, we turn them over, maybe produce a few sketches, then get distracted by the next shiny thing. Only a few select projects ever get translated into words, and only a proportion of those get the full multi-edit treatment. But none of this work is wasted.
Aside from anything else, everything we produce is practice, that goes to sharpen our skills. That little paragraph on life in a 13th century Breton monastery that went nowhere? That helped you become a better writer.
More pertinently, every single drop of ink that went into an undeveloped project is yours for the mining. You might never need to dredge up your lonely scriptorium-ite, the dreamer who's searching for real meaning in his isolated existence – but he – or someone remarkably similar – might be perfect in the role of astronavigation engineer second-class in your sparkly-new space opera. And that lonely monastery might be a psychic ringer for that desolate space station stuck off the shoulder of Orion.
As I've probably said many times, a lot of writing is thinking, and a lot of thinking is about picking up different, diverse concepts, rotating them and setting them back down again in the hope that they'll add to the ever-growing pattern. Sometimes – mostly – they don't. And even when there is a partial match you often have to hacksaw off offending protuberances, bodge together a join and then spray-paint the whole thing an entirely different colour.
Writing. It's not easy. But even the bad bits, the 'failures', or the never-quite-made-it-to-paper's – they're useful too.
Now I just need to work out what my damn McGuffin is. I've been working on this for eight bloody years, people, and I've still not worked out what's so important that it can raise a whole population in rebellion.
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