Past time

So I'm reading my little book about story structure and it's mostly stuff I've read before, but I guess I never really paid attention to it. It is hitting with more impact now.

There's a neat section of the book that talks about the reasons why people are drawn to bad story ideas. "Truth" is one of them. People are drawn to write about stuff that's true.

A bit later on, the book mentions one of the most important things in a story, which is an active character.

I have written a story about a passive character. Why'd I do that? Because it's True. There've been plenty of times in my life where I just let stuff happen to me, so I thought, what if? and hell yeah, the fact that if you just let stuff happen you end up somewhere you don't want to be is one of the truths of life.

It just didn't occur to me -- and I guess it doesn't occur to many -- that a truth so powerful isn't a good candidate for a story.

The whole Keith Wright story is about the narrator's passivity. That's the bone and muscle of it. Which means that to make the story into something salable, I'll have to completely change it, make it about something else. Change the character and I change the plot. Instead of the narrator being a repressed, mostly harmless intellectual frozen by consuming passion, make her a repressed, Machiavellian intellectual spurred into action by consuming passion.

Which, incidentally, makes me less passive a writer. I will choose the story to tell, rather than just letting it happen.

But I'm still going to finish up the final part as I originally planned, so you [who?] will see how, exactly, someone could shoot for a man and hit the moon instead.

I'm still stuck with the fact that I chose the moon as a metaphor rather than a natural offshoot of the story. But I may as well stick with it, since SF is easier to sell than regular fiction. Write it as "the story of the first psychologist on the moon."

I must put this passive saga to bed.