Original fiction project – week of 03/20/2011

1829 words this week. And given that I had to work two 12-hour days at work (8 hours the other days), I am trying to figure out how I did that without collapsing. I remind myself I clocked nearly that many words on a daily basis during NaNo, but I’m still kinda impressed with myself. Especially since my story has been less inspiring to me of late.

But see, last weekend, I took some time to try to figure out why.

The problem, I think, is that my story has gotten very prosaic in tone, like it’s hardly a fantasy story anymore and more a scientific take on fantastical concepts, like you might see on Star Trek. So this week, I’ve been brainstorming ways to bring the “sense of magic” back into the story.

It was time well spent, because even though it felt like I wasn’t accomplishing anything poking around the internet reminding myself of the stories I found “magical”, or researching legends and fantastical creatures I felt had nothing to do with what I was writing about, voila, a week later, almost 2,000 words.

A lot of that, of course, is me just giving myself writing exercises that may not ever become part of the story, but that forced me to “write outside the box” I’ve shoved my story into.

And it gave me an interesting insight that is relevant to my story.

Much of the “prosaic” feel of it, I think, comes from me being conflicted about what point I’m trying to make in the story, and this goes back to a conflict in me as a person. I am one of those people who wishes every day that magic were real and that I could live a life where magic things happened. But I never see any evidence of the supernatural out in the world, and that frustrates me. I am not the sort of person who takes things on faith; it is in my nature to believe only in what can be proved, and withhold judgement on what can’t.

But more than that, there’s another part of me that doesn’t actually believe in the supernatural at all, and I guess that is the closest I get to an article of faith. I think there are plenty of things out there that cannot be explained by science, but that doesn’t mean they never will be; it just means they have a natural explanation that’s beyond our present level of scientific knowledge.

So on the one hand, I want magic to be real, and on the other hand, there is a real sense in which I don’t believe any magic could be real. And that’s where my story gets muddled. I can’t write about the supernatural and not have this urge to make it just “the natural that’s beyond our present understanding.” And that takes the “magic” out of the magic in my story.

I have no problem enjoying the supernatural in somebody else’s fiction: Buffy, Dresden Files, Harry Potter. But in my own?

I need to figure out a way to encapsulate my own conflict into my main character’s conflict, because I think that’s what I’m struggling to say in this story.