I’ve been enthusiastically re-watching the Australian series Seachange since I unpacked a box containing my old videos – if you don’t know it, it ran in Australia from 1998-2000 on the ABC, starring Sigrid Thornton as big-city-lawyer turned small-town-magistrate Laura Gibson.
In any case, towards the end of Series 2 there’s an episode called Not Such Great Expectations where leading man Max Connors is trying to write a novel. I sympathise. But I’m grateful to have fewer problems than he seems to in getting started. Throughout an entire episode, he chases poor Laura around with new versions of his opening line. At one stage, he changes just one word – Colombia instead of Argentina, or something similar – and expects her to have a positive reaction. As a lawyer, her mind refuses to make a judgement until she hears a lot more than just one line, so they both get utterly frustrated by the process.
What’s the lesson here? First of all, the age-old truth that you probably shouldn’t be asking your friends and family for feedback on your fiction writing. I’ve got that one pretty much under control, although perhaps to the extreme that I don’t really share my fiction with anyone until it gets sent off somewhere – I do keep meaning to explore an online writers forum of some kind. Secondly, poor Max should really just give up on getting an opening line and plunge into the story anywhere that he has the inspiration to do so. Hmm, is that a lesson for me too? Now that I’m trying to rewrite and simultaneously restructure my novel draft, I seem to be stuck doing it in a linear order. I might have to explore that further.
