I don’t know what stage my book is at. (Except that it’s before all the other ones).
I’d use the phrase “brainstorming”, except I think “barnstorming” is far more accurate – all I’m doing is filling a notebook with lofty ideas, blue-sky thinking and as many pointlessly dangerous Immelmans as my imagination can handle. (I also strive to push metaphors to their structural limits). At this stage, my plan is simple: I let my mind run free. With a bit of luck it will stay within the confines of my head, but you never know. Meanwhile, everything goes in a notebook I made at work from scraps of unwanted paper, bound in 160gsm card bluer than a Simpsons sky.
I’m heading up to Orkney in a month, and barring some exploring and drinking and thigh-slappery with friends and once-colleagues, it’ll be a week where I can read through my bulging notebook (how much bigger do notebooks get when you write in them – truly big enough to bulge?) and pick out what works and what doesn’t, and start stringing my tale together.
I discovered something interesting this evening, on a phone to a friend: it’s very difficult to explain your unwritten comic novel to a friend in a way that makes it sound funny. The problem is that your source material is currently unwritten, so you have to make up both the material and the delivery as you go along. It’s having to be funny twice and at the same time, and quite frankly I have enough bloody problems being funny once with extensive preparation. In future, I’ll just tell people to trust me when I say it’s witty and amusing. This will be a harder sell with folk who know me, but I like a challenge.
There’s an alternate explanation – that my idea isn’t funny. But quite frankly, both my normal personality and the manifestation of my inner creative ouvre* are convinced the idea is solid gold. You could say we’re of one mind regarding this. So I’m going with my instincts, and writing from the hip.**
In short – it’s fun.
Image: eggman
* I think this is French for “egg”.
** I don’t mean it’s a work of pornography. Not yet, anyway.
