I'm not sure if this is the best sub-forum, but I think the core issue is one with my plot. So here I am, needing advice. My WIP is Melancholia. I'm attempting to imagine melancholia as a place. More accurately, a plane of existence. I think I have a solid start on a setting, but experiencing great difficulty with the *story*, the *plot* to bring it to life. A large inspiration for this WIP is my personal life. But that aside, other significant ones include Dante's "The Divine Comedy" which conceptualized Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, and was the story of a journey through all of those. It's regarded as one of the greatest, classic works of literature ever written, and to this day there is still a great deal of scholarly research around it. Similarly, I'd like to map melancholia, if possible, but that is proving to be quite the philosophical and psychological undertaking. Anyway, any and all characters in this plane of existence have no memory except that "they remember they have forgotten". This remembering of having forgotten is a source of great discontent among the souls, if they can be called that, who reside here. They have lost some inexplicable part of themselves. In short, the problem I'm now encountering is a total lack of movement. Stasis. There's nothing happening. More accurately, I'm struggling with figuring out what I want to have happen. My main character is named Remy; put emphasis on the word "named" because when he first is washed up on the shore, he has no memory, no idea who he is. The Father, Arago, of the (yet unnamed) town gives him the name, Remy. The de facto leader of the town is Field Marshall Morgan. His modus operandi is to "forget the forgetting", putting him at odds with the Father and his church. The story of Remy is intended to be one of salvation. But what's making it difficult is having a character with no memory. The reason I have decided to formulate the story this way is simple: if he has a memory, then an even bigger problem is trying to explain how he got transported from the real world and got stuck in this new melancholic realm. I want to avoid that. However, I do want there to be a narrative movement of salvation. Remy holds onto remembering that he has forgotten. He dares to suffer the discontent, even though those who surrender to their present state of affairs seem to live less unhappily (as if in a purgatory) rather than a Hell.
I think I'm missing what the problem is, as I've not a mind for surreal abstraction. Or maybe that's it: the elements are too liquid at the moment, for fear of limiting their potential? Can't hurt to poke at it with my blunt genre stick: Plot generally requires a protagonist, goal, stakes, antagonist: Protagonist (Remy) Remy could always be guessing what his past was, inventing and living with a progression of backstories: each one eventually discarded after the other, not quite tragic enough to warrant his incarceration, he tells himself. Goal(s) Is Remy's goal strictly to maintain that state of conscious suffering as opposed to unconscious suffering? Is there anyone perhaps he cares about that he wants to also not sink into full-forget mode? Is there a positive he could seek of some kind, something that would strengthen his resolve or make him remember? Just because you don't want to explain his backstory doesn't mean he has to never learn it; it can be left ambiguous in the reader's eyes. In sum I would try and find a positive goal he can seek. Whether he gets to it or not, it will make plotting substantially easier. Depends on how close you're aiming towards a lit fic deal. Lit fic can be pretty light on plot and clear goals. Stakes Is Remy's current fugue state the only thing he can lose? That's fine. All that requires is stressing its importance, and perhaps it being even more at risk due to his goal-oriented undertaking. Antagonist(s) (At least the marshal) What actual power does the marshal hold? How does it compare to that of the priest? Does he have the power to exile, or force people to drink alcohol forget-it-all juice? Does the marshal have a reason for wanting people to super-forget? What does the marshal have to lose? What does he have to gain? Is he hiding some form of hypocrisy? What power do his people hold over him? I bet if you answer some of those questions for yourself, a story will begin to emerge.
Thank you for asking all those great questions, and the suggestions you made throughout. I think "too liquid" is a great way of summarizing my current hang-up... I think ultimately the story could be a bit of a tragic one, because even if Remy did find something akin to salvation, what about everyone else? It doesn't feel authentic to me to have him save everyone. The best I can do is hint at some meta-salvation narrative or path. In a sense, I think that that's reflective of the harsh reality of mental illness. Of course, I want this to be a story, literary fiction, not just a thinly disguised PSA for depression or something. But I especially do not wish to oversimplify the struggle of depression and / or suicide. That is to say, I don't want the takeaway to be "get religious bro" or something like that. However, I do think that faith is a key, no, The Key, to this story. Not *a* faith. The capacity of faith. The religion in the story is, after all, nothing more than light falling through a marble, the worship of Light and what in reality is the Poisson spot. I still have other ideas and inspirations in my head, but whether or not I use the ideas kind of changes the entirety of the story... The main town is on a shoreline, something similar to Normandy to hopefully make it more concrete. In short, there's trenches, bunkers, tunnel networks, much of which is undiscovered or unmapped. I have imagined, also as an antagonist (I think the Marshall would be the main villain), a kind of mist or fog that is held at bay by a series of fires. I don't know, something like out of the Mist. But my problem is I don't just want some "generic" kind of monsters or something in the mist. I guess, I just dunno what to put in it. The Marshall largely has his position because he has been the one who has guarded the town from that mist for so long people have forgotten. He claims to have been there longer than anyone. He hates remembering every person that slowly loses their soul and commits suicide or some kind of act of violence and must be imprisoned, killed, etc. The Marshall also, however, has the fear (perhaps hypocrisy) of being worried that there is something beyond, and that he's actually been wrong. If he is wrong, then he feels that many of those souls, countless, are on his conscience, and he is the King of Nothing. The mist, and really just existing in that place, leads one to slowly lose their soul, their Being. All who venture into the mist never return, but who is to say the reason? That's as far as I've got, but I hope that sheds some more light on the Marshal's character and the overall state of the setting. I still don't even really know what people's daily lives are like there. The best I might be able to do is show it through vignettes, no? And the mist, while at first strictly antagonistic, in my mind is something that is a key to the saving of the self. Both to destroy it, as well as to never contend with it at all, are fatal mistakes. I'm just having a hard time figuring out how, or to what extent, to reveal Remy's "true self" let's call it. I think the focus is not necessarily on whatever he has done, or has been done to him, but lost who he truly is, or at least some fundamental piece. I chose the name Remy because the message is being one's own remedy. tl;dr how do i make all this surreal Jungian abstraction concrete in a satisfactory way that represents what I want to be represented and tells an actual coherent, entertaining, and thoughtful story, pls and ty
It actually sounds like you are done. Your story is basically Lost, the television series. That is not a criticism. You've got a mysterious place on the shore (that basically sounds like an island) with secret bunkers and tunnels, and a guardian antagonist who knows slightly more than the rest, but is himself ultimately a slave to the place like everyone else. You've got the added trope of an amnesic (again, not a criticism) which can serve as an immediate hook, and a long term one if your character decides to chase his memory. Like with Lost, you never really have to ultimately give any answers about the place. Lure readers in with questions but feed them instead with drama. Setting: Lost-like town surrounded in Mist. Conflict: People want to leave, the Marshall doesn't want them to. Resolution: The Marshall is defeated. Ending: Either your MC finds peace in staying, or he decides to be brave and leave.
You might try to discover something by changing a parameter or two of what you're doing. In Dante there's a journey through Hell. Of course Dante himself isn't a lost soul, he's apparently alive or whatever and is guided through by Virgil and then Beatrice, but it seems the condemned souls themselves start off at the top and make their way downward through the inferno until they find the level where they belong, and are unable to leave it. The only way out was all the way down, to the center, where you confront the devil himself. You might even hint that perhaps Remy isn't truly a lost soul but more like Dante, just a sojourner here being shown a dreamlike vision to straighten him out from his wicked ways before it's too late. He doesn't know this, he only suspects, but when he asks other people they all say they know they belong here. You of course don't need to set it up that way, but maybe some variation. Just bring in the idea of movement. Maybe some people move and some don't, and the worst seem content to just stand and stare. And maybe Remy just has a restless quality that makes him want to see what exists elsewhere. At least it gets him unstuck and puts something like a story in motion. If fire holds the mist at bay, maybe he carries a torch. In fact, if it's some psychologized version of Hell, maybe he finds an eternally-burning torch that never goes out (barring an encounter with whatever force can make that happen), and maybe that allows him to move through the mist. It doesn't have to be a torch of course, but something that gives light and drives the mist away from its vicinity. Maybe he encounters mythological-style characters, some of whom might help him along his way, some try to impede him. They're of varying levels of strength and knowledge. Maybe it's his strange restless desire to see what else exists in this place, maybe with even a hint of a desire to escape it ultimately, and a feeling that he doesn't truly belong here, that makes him different from the most immobile ones. And there are stories that others have arrived and managed to move on. To where no-one knows. He could even meet one of the ones who moved on after a while and learn a little more from him or her. I'm just looking for ways to set something in motion.
The main problem I can see is that while the premise of a land that is the physical manifestation of melancholia is interesting, the plot that you've described doesn't sound connected to that idea. That doesn't mean it can't be, but as described the focus is entirely on the forgetting, which isn't an issue that is connected to depression and melancholia. So how does it connect to melancholia? Why does the forgetting exist in your story? Why is it when people enter this land they forget who they are? Is it a form of punishment or is it treatment? What will happen if/when they remember? You said you don't want to explain how the protagonist ends up in this land, but I don't think you can tell this story without that information. By making the story about the forgetting, remembering who Remy was before he arrived here, and how he got here, is an important plot point that if left out, will be unsatisfying for a lot of readers I don't know what you want this story to be, but I would tell the story as follows: Remy arrives at this strange land with amnesia. He is driven to remember who he was and what he left behind, expecting that he could have been someone important, or has loved ones missing him. With the help of the Father, despite the Marshall's interference, he is able to find his memories. Only to learn that he was a miserable unloved nobody, who wound up here after a failed suicide attempt. The Marshall then reveals that he also had remembered his past and its was pretty much the same as Remy's. In fact everyone here has a similar past life, and the reason the Marshall wants people to give up on remembering is to spare them the pain of realizing their life was hopeless. Now that Remy has his memories he has a choice, does he stay in this land, with its lazy comforts and the friends he's made, or does he return to his life and try to find joy with the strength he has found through this adventure. Obviously this won't be what makes the most sense to you for your story, but hopefully it can help inspire you. What sort of themes do you want to work with and how can the conflict help to develop those themes? In my take of the story, the themes would be hope vs hopelessness.
^ Excellent. Yes, it seems if everyone forgets who they were and what their lives were like, then what do they have to be melancholy about? Maybe they arrive with amnesia but little by litte memories return, the most powerful and important ones first. Or maybe a different way, I haven't thought it through yet. In fact it almost seems like forgetfulness would be a welcome end to melancholy. Possibly the area of amnesia is only an antechamber to the real Inferno of Melancholy, and when they're forced to move to the next stage there's one memory they're tormented with there that they must deal with before being able to move to the next place, which brings back another powerful memory.
Oh that's great. You already do have some elements. The fires are fantastic, because the question can be raised: should Remy sabotage them and force the mist upon others, or continue to leave it a personal choice? That's compelling, because there's no clear-cut answer to that. With both the fires and tunnels/trenches/foxholes, they are something real that can mean something more. Vignettes, or however you're going to explore it are fine. I don't know if you're more planner or pantser. For all that abstraction to happen I think it's just a wealth of real things and resource relationships that are missing. One that immediately came to mind was perhaps there is a stockpile of fuel used to keep the fires going—a guarded beating heart of the marshal's power. Doesn't have to be that, but my point more is just keep adding real things and real rules until a foundation is formed, them your ambitious abstraction can be built upon those ground up as opposed of top down. Instead of "what will represent this particular Jungian idea?" it might be "Oh, that crate of parachutes that are guarded for no real reason can represent this if I relate them with that character." Some people are saying the characters may need memories. Perhaps, but my counter to that is their behaviour could still be a constant from one life to another, allowing the reader to decipher a likely past. The game Spirit Farer did something like that, I think.
Hey, I appreciate your ideas and feedback, and I'll keep them in consideration! I just woke up, so not sure if I will explain this as best as I could. But my concern is essentially one of immersion. When one is very deeply entrenched in their depression, in their melancholia to use the more poetic term, it is as if they always were, and always will be. It becomes very difficult if not impossible to remember who or how they *used* to be, or imagine being any other way, even if you'd been feeling okay just hours before. It takes away not only today, but yesterday and tomorrow. While that's not necessarily literal, and is more an attitudinal trick of the mind + catastrophizing (in other words, easily explainable by any decent psychotherapist or psychologist), I have made it literal in the story with the amnesia. If you can remember how you were, how things used to be, it becomes very painful because the remembering seemingly does no good for changing your actual present condition. It's just further torture. Of course, I could be projecting here, but a bad depression, to me, takes your life away from you. It takes you away from the world to some inner place filled with nothing but pain and despair, and it's really difficult to see through and outside of that mental fog. I was hoping to dramatize a lot of this experience by making Melancholia a place, a setting, and transporting its sufferers there. Like the collective unconscious for the melancholic (@Xoic). I suppose you may be right that readers could find it unsatisfying to not know, or eventually learn, why Remy ended up here. I personally can neither think of a satisfactory means of revealing such information, or of satisfying reasons / background. There are a million and one ways to end up depressed, although perhaps if studied enough one could distill it and skim the commonalities, the meta ingredients as it were (ex. there's 10 billion people or whatever but we're all made of carbon, this, that and the other). I don't know, I'm a fan of Narnia, and the whole time we're aware that there is a world outside of Narnia. Likewise with Harry Potter. I guess I'm just worried of the practicality of what's going on "in the real world" to Remy's body while he's in this deep melancholic existence. In Narnia, from what I know, there's a world war and so the world of Narnia is like this grand escape, and the outside world is generally ignored. In Harry Potter, the normal "muggle" world is less ignored and the line between the two is increasingly blurred. What I really want to avoid is some cheap M. Night Shymamalan (or whatever his damn name is) trick. I don't want the reveal to be unsatisfactory, like this was all in his imagination, suddenly he awakens from some dream or something. I want to avoid something lame and cringe. I might go the route that his body in the real world is dead, and there's no going back to that, but his soul in this place is not. But *sigh* I'm just not sure yet; my mind cannot for the life of itself figure out what it wants to DO.
I do appreciate the necessity of movement, and I think turning a good amount of my focus toward that will help solve many of the hang-ups. I've had almost a schizoid degree of different visions, images, concepts and ideas for this. The trenches and bunkers and tunnels that are meant to be a John Donne metaphor of the wrinkles of the brain, the inner machinations of the mind. A creature that's some blend between Ariadne and Arachne, where following the thread leads one to her, something like that. A shapeshifting library of blank books with people searching endlessly. In other words, there is potential for a movement, in the same sense that Dante's Divine Comedy has a movement, but I would need to seriously need to uncover the meaning of each of these (and many more) and map them out accordingly. But, like the Divine Comedy, the only way out, here, is through.
Also, my conception of the story's setting (and some idea for the plot and Remy's character) is this quote: "Anxiety is the price of the ticket to life: intrapsychic depression is the by-product of the refusal to climb aboard.” - James Hollis, psychoanalyst Melancholia, in other words, is not strictly to do with depression. If no man is an island, neither is any mental illness, it would seem. The strangest thing is that I've already had ideas, and even already written an excerpt, of Remy: laying on the beach, with visions of falling off of a boat (@TheOtherPromise, this is the closest I've come to a backstory for the MC). It's not exactly what the James Hollis quote brings to my mind, but it's so strikingly close that it gave me goosebumps when I watched this video last night. It reassured me that I am onto something. My conception was slightly different, but I am figuring it out and getting closer now. Maybe it's just some shitty inner poet in me, but I really want everything that happens in the story to be symbolic, to mean something deeper than its face-value. I don't want Remy falling off a boat and him showing up on the shore and there's nothing more significant to it than that. Similarly, if we're using the example of Lost @123456789 I wouldn't want the plane crash to just be a convenient plot device to get them to the island. It's fine if it seems that way at first, though.
Here I completely agree with @Not the Territory, that I would not go the mapping route (hm... something ironic here—Not The Mapping Method?), but instead start writing with vague notions of what these things mean. This is how all my best work laid itself out. The ideas were there in larval form, and I wrote straight ahead (laying down a word at a time, with very little planning) and the ideas managed to sort themselves out. In fact this is something I've just run across in Peterson's latest book—the idea that true art takes place just beyond the boundaries of the known, in the fringes of chaos. That's the frontier, and when you write there you're capable of creating order from that chaos, at least when things go well. It needs to be there though, in other words discovery writing. You write to discover what you really believe, that you aren't quite capable of articulating yet. You let the unconscious handle a large part of the work. If you work it all out in full detail before you start it's deadly dull, you already know everything that's going to happen—there will be no surprises, and the unconscious has no chance to engage and work its magic. Let me see if I can dig up something I wrote once about writing this way. Yes—through the writing.
lol Hmm, what's interesting to me about this, is that this is the approach I've been taking. I, too, have found that anything I wrote feels dead-on-arrival to me, stillborn, if I've already planned and mapped it out. So I've been writing random excerpts that I've mainly shared in my blog. Many of them are really short, but basically I'm still taking the approach you're recommending. Also, I've been reading Either/Or by Kierkegaard. It is very difficult, a slog at times, but it turns out there are gems after all. He has spent a great deal comparing the aesthetic mediums of opera, music, and language or writing. He has said that music is the sensual while writing is the spirit. Anyway, personally I characterize planning and mapping as spiritless. I think the writing really feels alive when it was written more from the stream of conscious thought. At any rate, a lot of the "planning" or whatever is already happening in my head. Though I prefer the terms gestation, incubation, marination. EDIT: even brainstorming feels better, since a storm is rather quite chaotic, and still more representative of the actual inner creative process, I think.
Hollis is one of my favorite authors in the psychological field, especially in the area of trauma and the way it can bring out what I refer to as the Emergency Crew—a group of Jungian archetypes that become something akin to childhood 'invisible friends', that can heal the rupture and assist a person getting their life back together, or help them along the way anyway. Sort of a modern scientific view on a Virgil and a Beatrice, or some sort of a guardian angel or supernatural helper.
Then it is most serendipitous that here he is for this writing adventure I've stupidly embarked on. EDIT: some of the other characters in my WIP definitely fit that bill, of a Virgil or Beatrice kind of archetype.*
I think you have a wonderful idea here for exploring the human mind. Remy's story of salvation hinges on what you conceive salvation to be. Salvation is deliverance. So define - what is Remy being delivered from? To me, deliverance depends upon coming out of yourself to support/help/save another human being. Remy needs to find purpose outside of himself. In so doing, he discovers himself. P.S. I looked at your location. The Heaven and Hell in my mind. I can relate. All I can say is it's all you. You are in charge. Believe in yourself.
It's Vanitas, from Case Study of Vanitas. Very fun anime, two seasons. Just be warned, it has completely caught up with the source material; what little source material remains is not enough for a new season. It will likely be a couple years for there to be enough source material for a new season, which unfortunately means about two more years after that if there's any hope for a Season 3. THAT BEING SAID, this year so far has been like an anime golden age, with some anime that were thought to never see another season or be touched again suddenly being revived, like Classroom of the Elite, season 1 of which came out in 2017, FIVE YEARS AGO. So, it's premature to lose hope. Season 2 of Vanitas, *I think*, was still pretty satisfactory in terms of an indefinite ending. EDIT: Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
