Oh, That Would Have Been Great!

Watching the Margaret Atwood MasterClass right now and she was talking about stories and the way you can start them from different places, or different points of view and the story will be the same, just the way you tell it is completely different. She used Little Red Riding Hood as an example and one of her choices was to start it with "It was dark inside of the wolf..."

I am dying.

Dying because I didn't think of it first! Ugh.

I had never considered writing from the point of view of Grandma. I mean, how terrifying of a story is that? A wolf breaks into your house, swallows you whole and you are forced to helplessly listen as he tries to fool your granddaughter? Then the Woodsman breaks in and kills the wolf but you are like "HEY! WATCH THE AXE, BUDDY!"

Writing fairy tales from other points of view is a lot of fun. Here's one I did that you might remember. Fairy tales are so familiar to us all that seeing a different angle can be really great. Or even a total reimagining, with the bones there but some significant changes. There is the Lunar Chronicles series by Marissa Meyer for instance. It starts with Cinder so you can see what story she was invoking to start. She also wrote Heartless which is about the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland. They are all so good.

But anyway...

Thinking about that idea and about how often that happens. You hear something and think, "Oh I wish I had thought of that first!" and also how when you see something from a different perspective and it completely changes your understanding of what you are seeing.

I have both of these things battling in my head now. Along with thinking about vampires in modern mythology and if they are overplayed in current fiction. That's from the spots on my neck that look like a tiny little vampire got me. Or a regular sized tarantula. But tartantula's don't have the power to make you forget you were bit so I have to go with tiny vampire, because logic.

So what I am hoping for is that this tsunami of thought will spin a few more times until the good stuff falls out and I end up with a solid idea for a story or a blog. Right now it's too busy. That's the problem sometimes. Too much to pull the good stuff out. The other problem is when there is nothing there so I have to force something to happen.

Why do I write again?

Oh that's right. I actually really love it.

Okay, so this was sort it out blog, a writing process peek blog, and also a shameless plug for that story I linked. I really liked it and wanted it to be read again.