How to keep it fresh?

There are only so many ways to tell a story. As Christopher Booker’s book, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, “succinctly” concludes (it is 736 pages and took 34 years to write), we only have seven basic plots to choose from- overcoming the monster; rags to riches; the quest, voyage and return; comedy; tragedy; and rebirth. I wouldn’t cast such a small net myself, but the point is, there are only so many themes to work with, and all have millions of examples. It is thus left up to the author to find ways to keep things fresh!

There are benefits to using these structures. Of course, right? Otherwise why do they exist? A reader that picks up your book will have a general sense of what they are getting into, and the writer can play to that demand. A reader may even particularly like that theme and only seek out those types of stories. These themes may also give the writer a roadmap of how to organize their book. But, the trick is, you don’t want to be boring. Combining two or more themes made writing fresh for a time, but again, once a writer finds a path to success, a million others will follow until it becomes passé. So what is a writer to do? I doubt there is much room left these days to rock the foundations of literature. Therefore, and pardon my use of the idiom, the proof of the pudding is in the details.

Now, I don’t profess to be an expert. Regardless of my aspirations, I am nowhere near a best-selling author, and perhaps that’s because I haven’t quite got it right yet, but I will offer an example from my writing that I think is pretty neat.

We’ve all seen stories with crime bosses or other sorts of secretive wielders of power and puller of strings. These shady figures are my favorite, but they are by no means new. So I had to find a new light to cast on an old character. In The Power of the Heliodromus (the book I am currently writing and the sequel to The Slaying of the Bull), I created a character that plays the role of a ruler of an underworld, but to fully appreciated this character, I must first offer a bit of backstory on the petermen.

“What’s that,” you say? Awe, now that’s an exciting story and deals with a new development in the 13th century- namely gunpowder. This changer of worlds only has three ingredients- charcoal and sulfur, both plentiful and easily obtained, with the addition of an oxidizer that provides the oxygen needed for the explosive chemical reaction. This is the key ingredient and makes up 2/3 of the final product. For gunpowder, this is potassium nitrate, otherwise known as saltpeter. This salt had many uses in the 13th century, namely soap, fertilizer, and used to preserve meat, but as an ingredient in gunpowder, it became like gold.

In the medieval world, saltpeter was pretty prevalent, but that didn’t mean it was easy to get. You see, saltpeter is a byproduct of when bacteria digest organic matter. If you don’t see where I am going with this and are having a hard time picturing what I’m talking about, think of a bit of dog poo sitting in the hot sun. Saltpeter is the white fuzz that turns excrement white- and you thought delving into the petermen’s world was going to be boring! It was the job of the medieval petermen to go around and scrape it from the walls of public bathrooms, off the floors of barns, and dig through dung heaps and other such piles of waste all in the endeavor of collecting saltpeter. Yes, this job really existed and as you can undoubtedly imagine, it was a nasty business, but an extremely lucrative one.

In my new book, the petermen of medieval Baghdad have been unionized under a single figure who understands the growing importance of saltpeter in the medieval world and has become very wealthy and powerful as a farmer of s***. I don’t want to offer too much more, for I don’t want to spoil my unpublished work, but I have to say, I think that is a pretty intriguing recasting of an old theme. It shows that although the storytelling vehicles are rather limiting, the details offer infinite possibilities! History is also not as boring as many assume. Often times, you can’t make this stuff up, even if you tried.

If this has piqued your interest and you want to hear more, The Power of the Heliodromus (book 2 in the Tocharian Gospels series) is moving along nicely and will be out soon. If you can’t wait, there are plenty more exciting characters in The Slaying of the Bull (book 1 of the series), or the Island of Stone (book 1 of the Monuments of Stone series).

Cheers!