The bloody basics

It is, of course, the most fundamental rule of story-making-up that you work out what your characters want from the outset. I say story-making-up rather than story-telling, because if somebody else has made your story up that's a lot easier to get a handle on. As John Finnemore just tweeted "They're slippery buggers, made-up people". His hero's called Martin too. But yes, that's the thing, what if you get what they want wrong?

Two weeks ago I suggested that actually, excitingly, my Martin was juggling a double wish, to be a hero and to be a scapegoat, and while I'm very happy with that as an idea, I've realised tonight it's not THE THING. I only think this worth recording because for the last two weeks I've felt, well, powerless and I've now realised it was because I'd lost all sense that I had a right to tell this person's story, and that felt terrible. It felt terrible not least because the Real World during those two weeks was pitching Sci Fi left, right and centre: Iranian space monkeys...

Excellent work as ever, people!

Russian Meteor Showers...

Shadows! Car alarms! Wheee!

The screening on BBC4 of this superb, level-headed, Wells and Kafka-quoting documentary on Google and the World Brain...

And then there was also the sad, but happily much-commented-upon passing of The Daddy Of All Martins.

But tonight I think I've remembered now what my Martin really wants, which is not to be hero, or to be dead, but simply to go back. Around that, everything else at this hour now seems to fall into place, as it did when I was first making it up however many years ago that was, when it seemed to come so naturally. It seems there, but then that's what I said a fortnight ago. Still, I am writing.

While I'm here, and continuing my sci-fi kick, I found James Burke made an excellent (and crazy) history of the world in fifty minutes back in 1989, if you're interested here.
And John's knowledge of his onions is very much to the fore in this post on cliffhangers. I should get some post-it notes.