Mark David's Blog, page 3

Elements Introspection Part 2

Read Part 1

Part 2 Their World, Our World

The answer to the question at the end of Part 1:

How can we portray all the complexity of power games, exploitation and not least, deception in the interest of the greed for knowledge and even power?

The answer is to make that world our own  – but not at the expense of rendering that world and compressing it in the way stories usually do. Stories represent for me, a ‘slice’ of an alternative reality. It is not real, it is fiction and we abstract away from reality in the degree we smooth out contradictions and the complexities in life.

I want to go another story road: I want a story to reflect all of the contradictions and complexities in life – and bring those into an expanding story universe. So while the Elements isn’t fantasy – there are no trolls, no wonderfully enigmatic settings such as the tower of Isengard, Barad Dûr (‘they are taking the Hobits to Isengard!’) or other-wordly beings such as the elven folk of the woods – what it is is epic on the scale of scope, brought into play through the unfolding of back-plot as a gritty, real, and disturbing journey into the deeds of men setting the agenda the world is forced to play along with.

Unlike Fantasy, the real world is one we are a collective part of. My grandfather fought in the Second World War and he bore the scars of that war for the rest of his life. His memories and reflections made an impact on me as a child, as did those of my other grandfather who stayed behind in Blighty to help as home-guard. My world was conditioned by his, and my world conditions those worlds of my family and on it goes. This simple reflection on life, that we are all connected, somehow, and that connection it made manifest in how the actions of those before us condition our own actions, as a rolling wave of cause and effect, was the start of weaving in historical layering, but across many fronts – hence the reference to Fantasy.

I wanted to bridge the imagination with the ah-ha factor we know from other works of fiction such as the Da Vinci Mystery, the reader following the main character’s unravelling of a complex and intriguing historical mystery leading to reconsideration of what we thought we knew. The Elements is therefore a conceptual device where each book has a distinctive identity, but also becoming a fragment of a puzzle, an enigma whose scope and meaning grows with each release.

As the agents aligning these pieces, the characters can be understood in the same way as Mulder and Scully in the X-files, investigating a deepening world of conspiracy related to events expanding like an underground iceberg, uniting subplots and timelines through a blend of real and fictitious events, working with Archaeological discovery, the fight for freedom, the heroes and anti-heroes of the resistance, the cover-ups and games played between the Communist East and Capitalist West that while in existence, prevents truth and knowledge of the past from being revealed.

In the next part 3 I’ll look in more detail at the interplay premise, theme and structure

Elements Introspection Part 1

Welcome to the first of a 30-day  introspection period I’m writing (as an experiment) to mark the release of The Elements on 15.01.2017.

Every two or three days or so, I’ll add a few words to explain why I wrote the project, my motivations and what it is all about… in not too many words. I’m usually quite a private person, but since this project has taken so much time and effort to get here, I decided it’s time to open the doors a little on why I dedicated myself to it in the first place. … and why it took ten years in the making.

Part 1: Sources of Inspiration

The Elements wasn’t ever a conscious act of ‘now I want to write this project’ or ‘now I want to be an author’. It was more a gradual process of wanting to write the sort of book I hadn’t read and wanted to read but couldn’t get. I’ve always had an active imagination and being a creative professional, have always sought new avenues to let that creativity out.

Part of being creative was the intense interest I had for big concept books. I’ve always been inspired to write them. I began the road to writing kind of without every making the decision to do so, all the way back in 1998 when I wanted to invent a world of fantasy more like our own than anything we know from the genre. That will become a seperate project called Voyagers and Kings. I’ll start writing next year…

I gave up on the project because it was too big. I spent five years developing the universe and history but never seemed to commit pen to paper and get any story written. That project has since grown into a new project I’ll look at after I’ve got The Elements launched and sailing…

So to the literary world of activating the imagination: Whether the books that interested me was fantasy such as Lord Of The Rings and historical such as Shogun (James Clavel) and epic in the telling of places and people as we know from James A. Michener (Centennial, The Source, Chesapeake and many more). It was the idea of a central enigmatic mystery that needed solving I loved most of all, as we know from The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (not my favourite author by any stretch of the imagination, but I love the Da Vinci concept.)

I was also driven by the ‘deep dilemma’ of wanting to uncover truth, often faced by people driven to explore what is going on – as we know recently from Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy: A journalist follows a story, brought in to clear up a mystery about crime and prejudice we know from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and the rest. One thing leads to another, the stakes increase and on we go…

So I wanted to write something that touched on all these aspects – at once. Leads that enter unknown territory not really knowing the implications of what they are getting involved in, settings that were enigmatic, a mystery that above all else – touched us in a way we know from for example, the ending of 2001 A Space Odyssey, endings that really made us think:

Who are we?

What are we about?

What is important in life?

and even, what is life all about?

How could all of this be brought into a world like our own?

And how could that world portray all the complexity of power games, exploitation and not least, deception in the interest of the greed for knowledge and even power?