Writing Mormeck
Tomorrow I'm going to post one blog entry that has the entire text of The Journals of Mormeck, my serialized story project, to date, before picking up the story on Saturday.
It's been an interesting experience, and I can't even really tell you where I got the idea for Mormeck, except that I'd been wanting to use the name for awhile and a still-born story with a character named that had gone nowhere. But suddenly I was looking at some random notes for a new fictional universe and I remembered the name Mormeck and then this Japanese comics character popped into my brain and I knew Mormeck was a huge, mountain-large creature with a laboratory resting atop his head. On a distant planet. Observing a hundred or more alt-Earths.
How I got it into my head to post the entries here, I'm not sure, but the diary form has been instrumental to doing it as a rough draft serial on my blog. It creates a kind of closed-vessel situation where even though I know the parts have to fit together, I can just concentrate on what's right in front of me, compartmentalize the task at hand.
One result is that you're seeing the kind of questing stop-start common to a rough draft but not usually in evidence in public. Granted, there is progression but the pacing is not quite what I'd do for the final and story-wise it's two steps forward, one back, and repeat. While each section on the micro level screams for some kind of miniaturized closure…giving the illusion of a more standard progression. Still, the diary entries also allow for a certain amount of acceptable digression that might stick out in a more traditional structure.
But in terms of sitting butt in chair to write it, I've set aside any idea of doing much research on Stalingrad, with the result that the specificity of detail about the "winter city" will be lacking until the rewrite. I actually studied the Siege of Stalingrad extensively a few years ago, but I have to brush up on the city itself before I can fully imagine the alt-world Stalingrad I'm positing here. It's also less densely populated with human characters than it will be in final. There needs to be someone for the avatar to talk to, and frankly that will probably be inserted prior to the avatar's encounter with the King Komodos, and then carried forward.
What I am interested in maintaining through this rough draft is some sense of the inner life of Mormeck (Mountain) and, to a lesser extent, Mormeck (Avatar)—after all, what else is a diary for? Mormeck Central/Mountain in particular is going off in unexpected directions with his introspection and his reactions to things. Which led to some nice brainstorming today about the plot.
Unexpectedly, too, reading Moominpapa at Sea renewed my interest in lighthouses—I've been searching forever to write a story centered around one. The odder moments in Tove Jansson's book have sparked an idea, and Mormeck (Mountain)'s next assignment will involve a lighthouse.
I'm also not caring much about hoarding ideas. I'm just throwing them all in there. Inter-dimensional komodos. Sure. Luna moth surveillance devices. No problem. Being devoured by blood-thirsty bears as a way to travel between alternative realities. Yeah, baby! Angels resurrected from their own ashes. Absolutely! I'll worry later if it gets too crunchy and not people-y enough. That's easily adjusted, at the same time as the pacing.
The images I'm picking are helping a bit, too, in terms of deciding on the final style for the story, which looks to be somewhere between practical and lush. Creating ever more distinction between Mountain and Outpost entries will also be a function of revision.
I don't think that every story would benefit from being created in public at the rough draft level—most definitely not—but something's working because not only am I scribbling down, every day, all of those little bits of image and detail that mean the story's alive in your head, but today up popped the ending, and the ending in this particular case clarifies some of the rest of what's ahead.
Normally I wouldn't talk about a story as I was writing it, but something about the compartmentalization of the entries also allows me to cordon off the bloodless analysis of process from the passionate pursuit of the rough draft.
Writing Mormeck originally appeared on Ecstatic Days on June 23, 2011.
