I needed a place to talk to myself but I needed somewhere no one knows the stories I'm talking about. Just remembered that we have blogs here.
I was just thinking about the end of my previous story in this series I was writing. A friend who's read it all commented on how the title - "Instant Noodles and Beer" suddenly got applied back and made the whole story make sense in the last chapter. I quite intentionally meant to do that - in the opening scene, the 2 main characters are shown one eating noodles, the other drinking a pint. Then I went several thousand words without mentioning both at the same time - either beer, or noodles, but never both. Finally in the last chapter I threw in a ridiculously blatant title drop which pointed out, "Er, that guy's Instant Noodles, and that guy's Beer."
Not, really, you know, the most deep and thought-provoking metaphorical messages, when you read stories where characters are called, like, Contradiction, or something else that *means* something. But it works for my story. In a way it's good that they don't have deep metaphorical meanings. No one else would bother with spending 76,000 words trying to convey a point so simple as that. And I'm pretty sure the characters are deep enough in themselves that they don't need any more conventional personality archetype to wave around.
(alright, maybe I might have laden more meaning on the food and drink than initially appears - you'd have to read it to know. )
Anyway, now I'm writing the second, and was re-reading the first scene just to see how it was going. In this novel, I'm going for a much more disjointed timeline, and subverting pretty much everything I did in the first one. They both start with a very basic scene: characters, food stuff, a conflict of interests, and neither of them come out of the encounter as well-balanced as they entered it. But I figured with Fries and a Milkshake, the 2 romantic leads weren't going to be Fries and a Milkshake themselves. Maybe one of them is. Maybe they're BOTH Milkshakes, or they are Fries and a Milkshake, but not the Fries and a Milkshake that go together.
I need to work out the emotional significance of those two foodstuffs. I know fries are warming, and milkshakes are cold and, in this scene, spilled and replaced. I'm assuming from this, Katie is the chips - surprisingly nice, though actually awful for you. Caro is the ice queen, and I plan on her and Mora breaking up at least once in the timeline, so probably spilled & replaced.. though it's Lin who spills it, and Mora who brings the replacement.
Eh, I already had an extended metaphor about marble cake that broke down when I had to start personifying the cake back into Caro. I don't think I'm doing the literary world any favours writing these sort of things, but they looks smart on the surface.
LIKE MILKSHAKES.
Wait, that really doesn't work.
I think I've managed to sort it out in my head a bit, anyway. Caro and Katie have this big non-romantic character friction going on, so I could do the ultimate subversion on my themes from Noodles&Beer and make it a non-romantic food pairing.
Thanks for giving me space to type. I can only sort this sort of stuff out if I address it to someone rather than just to myself.
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