Last night I finished Gardner’s The Art of Fiction. The following passage, from the last chapter on plot, set my creative intellect aflame:
I have said that a writer may also plot a piece of fiction by working his way forward from an initial situation. Say he gets the slightly lunatic idea of a young Chinese teacher of high-school English in San Francisco who is kidnapped by Chinese thugs because they want him to write their story, of which they’re inordinately proud.
Gardner goes on to flesh out more possibilities, but this is enough of a situation for me: my love of nested stories urges me to write something like this. That is, I would both write the tale itself, the tale of the captive, the bard, but also the tale written by the bard. What are his filters, as opposed to mine, in stitching together a narrative? How would he tell the story, organize the events, and so on? And I can already think of my subject matter: Alexander the Great. We know that he carried along an official historian, along with poets and such. And there exists the Alexandrian Romance, in many versions…I would have numerous models to write from, but also I would be obliged to read a great deal in preparation. I would want to read Xenophon for background, all of the Iliad in Greek to steep myself in it (since Alexander was a lover of Homer), &c, &c.
I am very excited about the possibility of writing something like this!
