So
here's the deal. The story affectionately known as "V" has reached a
standstill, and at this point its future is uncertain. Again, for me and my
writing process, this is nothing unusual. In fact, there have been many
occasions in the past when I have had to "retire" a particular story
idea that I had been working on, in some cases for years. Such a retirement is
always provisional, however. After all, I once retired the story concept that
eventually became my first novel, The
Bluebird of Happiness. It was at a point when the story idea (then known as
The Terrible Blue) was already seven
years old and didn't seem to be going anywhere... but in another six years it
would finally emerge, almost overnight, in a supernova of inspiration. So you
never know how these things will evolve. Sometimes things just have to develop
in their own good time, and you can't force it if it's not the right time.
My
story "retirements" are often conceived not as throwing out the story
idea altogether so much as "deconstructing" it. In other words, I
wish to preserve the best ideas from it for possible re-use later, either in a
revived version of the same story (as happened with Bluebird) or in another story entirely (or perhaps various ideas
from the original concept will pop up here and there in a number of different
stories).
In
any case, there is a more positive side to what is happening right now. It is
not merely that "V" has lost some of its inspiration. Rather, a new
inspiration has been slowly but surely displacing it. It is as though a
nebulous mass of low pressure weather has begun pushing out the bright, high
pressure air of "V". I sense some dark fugue arising in my
imagination, still in the earliest stages of formation, taking on
only dimly perceptible shapes, but with an undeniable mounting energy and the
promise of great power, like the low rumbling of distant thunder. Like Bluebird in its final inspiration, it
has the feeling of music and of hieratic, dreamlike vision. When I feel the
story as music and as visionary image at least as much as narrative, I know it
is mine.
One
thing I can already say about this new story concept--it does not yet have a
title, but I'm temporarily referring to it as "Rainbow"--is that it
bears strong resemblances to Bluebird
(to the point where I am wondering if it may in fact be a related story
involving some of the characters from the earlier novel). At the very least,
there are definite similarities in terms of character types, settings, themes,
and feelings. This makes me worry, of course, that writing what comes most
naturally to me, what most inspires me, will mean writing the same story over
and over, albeit in different variations.
However,
when you think about it, many great authors have carved out a niche for themselves
by writing multiple stories and novels that largely involve the same general
type of setting, characters, themes, etc.--one only need think of Jane Austen,
for instance, or Henry James, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, and any number
of other novelists whose works, despite their individual variations and unique
qualities, display an overall aesthetic and thematic unity that stamps them
with the distinctive mark of their creators.
So
perhaps being true to my muse will mean creating a canon of works that bear the
strong, distinctive mark of their author and of his peculiar obsessions,
tastes, and notions, so that someday people might say, "that's like
something out of a Steven Holland story". At least, that is how I like to
flatter myself.
Right
now, all I know is that I feel like Dorothy, having just left Professor
Marvel's house, as the first storm winds begin to blow, with the promise
of some wondrous and magical Oz waiting to be discovered on the other side of
the cyclone.
