A Slight Case of Block

One of this year's resolutions is to write more. That's all very well, but the issue with writing is that you sometimes write yourself into a corner and then can't work out what to do next.

Late last year I rather foolishly set myself the task of creating a fanfic that describes the Time War from the viewpoint of people who aren't involved in it. So far, I have a couple of ideas bubbling away and I've even done some work on them.

The first is done, and describes the Dalek raid on Goth. It introduces us to the Torchwood Array and to three characters who will be important in later episodes. It's due for revision, because it's two stories in one and they don't mesh very well.

Part two is called something like Shrapnel and is at least planned if not actually written.

Part three is called Distant Guns, and it's this one I'm currently stuck on. It deals with Dhiren Koduri, the archivist from the first story, and the direct effect of having a Time War go on around you without your being aware of it. The issue stems from a conversation or two that fandom has had over on the DWF about how you would show the effects of the war. My problem is that those conversations have been limited to talking abou the battles and the ways in which you would depicted them without a squillion dollar budget and the good offices of Industrial Light and Magic.

My first thoughts were that a writer could mess with the narrative structure. You could repeat paragraphs, you could make sudden jumps or alternations in what was happening, swap major characters around as the Time War changes the past and present at the same time. I tried it and the result is an ugly mess with no real sense of a story being told.

Then I thought that perhaps I could play games with tense and perspective; I could shift from past tense third person to present tense, and then to future tenses. Again, all this really achieves is garbling the story.

I thought about format. I could split part of the narrative into columns and tell the same story three different ways. Once more, while this might be an interesting idea it just makes for confusion and mild annoyance on my part.

I think in the end it's going to come down to a major re-write and the thing I am least good at: attention to detail. I've already decided to take a relaxed stroll to the Edge of the Idea and see what the view is like out there; my suspicion is that you can create the awareness of a major event - like the destruction of a planet - by altering a minor detail or two. Here's an example: let's say the action takes place on a colony world, somewhere you have to ship specific items to. You could have a character comment that a foodstuff is fresh from Doomed Star IV, and then later on that foostuff can be gone and the character can explain that there simply aren't any worlds close enough to grow it and ship it before said foodstuff spoils.
All this attention to detail means I need to go back and set the scene properly, and try to break my habit of staring things in media res - which I assume has become a habit because I'm too impatient to start the story with the beginning and prefer to walk in after all the introductions have been made and everyone's sorted out where to sit. Mind you, that goes back to my general belief that you never start at the beginning of anything, that everything happens in the middle of something else, and while I'm sure that's true it doesn't necessarily comprise the best way to tell a tale.

Either way, I think it's time I did some reading and got some sleep, and I absolutely refuse to spend any time playing with the bizzare vingette that I spontaneously started on which goes some way to explaining how the grey Daleks you see attacking Goth become the Bling Daleks of the TV series, and for some reason it wants to be written without the main character ever speaking a single word. I need to finish Distant Guns first, and then do Shrapnel, and then revise Goth, and then find something for Tom the Posthuman to do (which is going to involve me reading about what Larry Miles thinks posthumans are, and what today's Posthuman movement thinks it is).

And so to bed. Night all.