The last post resulted in an idea for a short story that riffs on Camus' interpretation of the myth of Sisyphus by implanting his logic of the absurd and the notion of the infinitely looping, self-aware though it be, existence of man into a story about a medic who spends everyday tending to the mundane and the dramatic, and ends everyday trying to wash the blood from his hands but failing to do so.
The problems are as follows: 1) Balancing an appropriate level of detail with the overriding allegorical elements (hence "realistic allegory") which of course implies...
2) Research. I have to get my facts straight and my ideas concrete and my situations realistic (there's that word again), which in turn leads to...
3) Blood. The bookends of the piece are him trying to wash the blood from his hands but, failing to do so, giving up and finding a way to live with the blood on his hands. At the beginning, we don't know whose blood it is. At the end, he's washing the blood of his best friend off...The problem: blood doesn't stain...
5) But does iodine?
6) Place/time: How to root it in a particular level of detail sufficient to be richly evocative without embedding it in a specific conflict that has specific contexts...
7) Which brings us back to #1 (how appropo!): Balance the story's allegory with it's need for credible detail.
Anyway you swing this axe, it all comes down to research--which is exactly what I'm about to commence.
No comments:
Post a Comment