Some people like to write about terrifying possibilities. Some prefer to write about troubles. Some want somebody beating up on someone else, or falling in love, or making good, or defeating some obstacle or enemy — an outside enemy or obstacle. And all of it set in the some richly draped realm of human potential. Dress up any world in something relatively familiar, stir in an arch hero or heroine, a love interst, add some adrenal rushes, and, bingo, you’ve captured an audience of wannabes. All well and good. But.
What intrigues me are possibilities of ecstasy and delight, come upon through that tingling veil of anticipation and, maybe, fear:
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The unknown beyond the door.
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The fraught with potent possibility.
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The potentials stored within the latent.
I play with these things when I write, dwelling in realms far removed from standard consideration.
What do I care whether a modern behemoth Jones, muscle-bound gadget-man, slaughters malicious bad guys toting AK47s who want to steal the world and enslave the pretty girls? That’s been written. And, by and large, it’s pretty boring.
What do I care if Melinda, a nice, hot-looking slip of a girl, pines after Jack Handsome, a rich playboy whose abiding interest is getting laid? I don’t.
There are a million-million bad guys born, just as there are a million-million horny women wishing to belong to some gallant they feature as their hero inside their fancies. Writers write about them, dwelling in teenage fantasies of being The One To Save The Day or The Girl Who Gets Her Man. Who cares? Well, certainly a lot of people do, but I’m not one of them. Books a la Cartland or Clancy don’t do more than make my mind go dry.
But what of that little gleam — that one sitting right there — twinkling from within that darkened thicket…or that face leering at you from just beneath the wall plaster? How about those twining appendages slithering toward you, grasping at your feet, intent upon taking you beneath? Beneath to where?
Recently:
- Moving is Tough on Writing Novels
- Move complete & back online…when the DSL doesn’t falter
- Offline for a week.
- The ‘I’ Proposition
- No, I didn’t get eaten by my novel.
- Scott Heim reads We Disappear at last reading at Chelsea
- Hunger in the World
- What a Beta Reader Can & Cannot Do
- A Gift for Eternity Finds a Home
- Today’s Giggle: SE vs Employee, the Benefits — Not.
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