Once upon a time, I was running a D&D game. And about a third of the way through, I had an epiphany. The Muse sang to me a aria of inspiration, of clarity. I knew where things were going! I understood the plot that had been, hitherto, murky and unsatisfying. It all made perfect sense!
I started to write …
… and two games sessions later, I realized that the Muse was feeding me the plot from Star Wars. Not in a Campbellian “Hero of a Thousand Faces” meta-way, but major, unmistakable plotty bits that would have had, when revealed, occasioned at best a Cease and Desist from Lucasfilm, and, at worst scorn and laughter and derision from my players.
My left-handed right-sided brain tends to work in gestalt, long on broad concept, short on details. So I do occasionally find myself discovering that a brilliant idea is simply something I’ve previously seen with the serial numbers filed off by my corpus callosum. It’s frustrating as all hell.
I had an idea the other day that completely changed what I wanted to do with my protagonist in my NaNoWriMo novel. It made perfect sense, on several levels — but after a few hours of pondering it and running along with how it might influence the conflicts and plot lines, I realized that I was actually adopting a character in a popular TV series and making him (in some ways) my protagonist. Which is not what I was looking for.
The advantage I have here is that I haven’t started writing yet. Which means I can evaluate what that all means, and make the protagonist not a clone of the popular TV character, but someone in his own right, who shares some traits in common, but for very good and understood reasons. Or I can decide that it’s too derivative, and not do it. Or I can start that way and then demonstrate why a radical change in the protagonist is completely warranted.
But knowing is half the battle.
By the way, I remain terribly daunted by all of this upcoming NaNoWriMo stuff. Not daunted as in, “Oh, no, I am going to back out of doing NaNoWriMo because it is too challenging for me.” (I only do that in GMing games.) No, more daunted as in, “Jeez, let me fret myself into a frenzy beforehand, even though I know I’m going to be fine once I get into it, or, if not fine, then capable of handling the pressure.”
The NaNoWriMo folks actually have a lot of support group stuff in place, in terms of meet-ups in the Denver area and the boards and all of that. Being a terrible introvert, my own inclination is to depend eschew such public interactions and hunker down amidst friends and family. But I might keep my eyes open for an opportunity somewhere along the line to interact with others. We’ll have to see.