Friday, December 18, 2009
Story Idea
This is a brainstorming session that developed into a LONG synopsis and story outline of a project I originally envisioned as an alternate history/fantasy-allegorical super-epic released in a series of books made up of connected short stories. It's very long, 2800 words, even after I've cut a lot out already so don't hesitate to skip around. This is probably the only thing I've written that's not totally derivative (even though it totally still is) so it's SUPER TOP SECRET and you have to forget it and wipe your computer clean after reading it. Also, I apologize for posting it in its entirety here because it is grossly long, but I have to because this blog is private and mine is not. I will hide it in the comments, so to read it click on "Story Idea" above and read it from its' own page. Ok, now, without further ado...
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BREAD STORY IDEA
ReplyDeletethe story is about the history of a fictional village over the course of roughly 400 years. the village maintains a single sourdough starter throughout this entire epoch, and the flavor, growth, evolution, and health of the starter mirrors the dramas endured by the village. The village is challenged as it grows into a town, then a city, then shrinks again, and as it endures war, occupation, resistance, social upheaval, civil strife, and eventually exploitation and ecological destruction and salvation. The starter is unique in that its particular microfauna not only produces the greatest bread in the world, but also has an [amazing nutritional quality] or [active metabolite] which [endows those who eat it with special qualities] or [gives the eater a unique or heightened perception of reality]. Many people come to culture the starter and it spawns lines in other villages, which mostly fail to replicate its super-nourishment. The town may not realize that the microecology which produces these amazing results depends on environmental conditions unique to the village, its countryside, and its water, wheat, salt or honey.
The secret of the bread is in its micro-ecology – while normal sourdough starters contain two types of microorganisms, this bread has a whole ecosystem of bacteria, fungi, and single-celled plants that interact with the dough ingredients and each other. By eating the bread, and therefore the spores and cysts of the microorganisms, this ecosystem can be transferred intact into the human gut, where it interacts with existing gut flora, adapts to the conditions, and through horizontal gene transfer induces other bacteria and fungi to accomodate it. (this really happens, btw, every day in your body) Maintaining this culture in ones gut is the mechanism of the bread's power, as it improves the efficiency of digestion and produces various nutrients and chemicals for its host (all necessary vitamins, essential fatty acids, amino acids, etc – the stuff you need a varied diet to get (which also actually happens in your body, to a lesser extent), plus stimulants, painkillers, steroids, hallucinogens, etc as needed). The people fed on this bread are essentially being pumped with a stew perfect for their health from the inside from an early age, and this causes them to grow up particularly strong and remarkably intelligent.
[this concept may even be extended further, to include the total colonization of the body by the sourdough culture. the fungi present spread mycelia throughout the entire body and eventually are woven into and become a working part of the host. This represents how the categories of 'civilized/domesticated/wild' are really a continuum and that we ourselves are constituted of wildness]
The span of 400 years is broad enough to show the last vestiges of the Middle Ages still surviving in the countryside and the gradual but immense change that comes with the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and eventually, the collapse of the global society and ecosystem. Such a length of time will allow us to see how the understanding of nature is perversely inverse to the quality of its treatment and how the dominant philosophies of civilization have made their biggest and most drastic sweeps. The most important themes should be man falling from cooperation into competition with and exploitation of nature, the power of tradition and superstition versus the development of science and the accumulation of understanding, the decay of the state of self-sufficiency into interdependence and the subsequent decay of interdependence back to autarky, the willingness and ability to change oneself, possibly irreversibly, and the individual effects of political and social strife, with a particular emphasis on the struggle for self-determination and the rejection of larger powers threatening to absorb the village.
The character list has a few requirements and will likely end up being vast as we track families and travelers over the course of so many generations. At the center is the family of bakers who maintain the starter culture and provide the village with bread. Peripheral to them but equally important are the farmers who raise the wheat and rye, the beekeeper who produces the honey, a man or family that prepares and sells the sea salt, and a landowner who jealously and sometimes greedily controls and manipulates the mineral spring from which the bakers get their water. A tertiary class of characters is composed of the requisite townspeople [doctor, whore, professor, barkeep], especially those who support these families as customers, as well as the government actors that change with the political climate [tax men, politicians, police], and business interests from faraway cities [spies, union busters, theives, investors, developers, multinationals].
ReplyDeleteThe main conflicts will occur between those related directly to the bread with tertiary characters, who generally represent larger forces like movements or ideologies. Secondary conflicts will arise between the bread families as they struggle to cope with the challenges placed before them by the tertiary characters. Naturally classic interpersonal conflicts will arise between bread characters such as love interests, blood fueds, backstabbing, alliances, etc.
I see a central theme among the bakers' family being the growth of what seem to be weak, ineffectual, or traitorous sons into wise, just patriarchs that culture a family that is fiercely loyal, proud, intellectual, pugilistic, and stoic. The fathers of each generation are disappointed by their sons and suffocate them under their expectations, but after a healthy history of rebellion the sons eventually become great men on their own terms, which are usually antithetical to their fathers', although they ultimately take up the same trade as their father due to their expertise and its stability. This family also produces the main lineage of fighting and intelligence men, as most of the boys grow particularly strong from hours of kneading the tough dough every day.
The beekeeper should be the wild card character - a loner, an instigator, usually destitute, he lives a meager and transient life as he must transport his hives to follow the blooming of various orchards and wildflower fields, as well as to avoid harsh winter snaps, which could destroy his livelihood completely. He will be tested in maintaining the hives by a love interest which he longs to stay with. She is bound by either her profession, her family, or the secrecy of their relationship to stay where she is while he must choose between abandoning the hive and therefore his independence in exchange for domestic comfort, financial security, and a life of living on his wife's terms. She will be the baker's daughter, wife, or the salt widow [probably all three over several generations - he begets bastard children and leaves them his bees on his deathbed, repeat]. The ultimate effect is that the beekeeper's honey is integral to the quality of the bread and if he stays they are both ruined.
I see the salt-panners as three daughters and their widowed mother who turn to producing salt as their only means of survival after the father dies. They discover [or maybe they inadvertently cause it - the parents making love on a cliffside that gives way and exposes the spring] that the salt in their particular bay is gifted with some mineral component - maybe from the other end of the landowner's spring draining into the ocean - that makes it perfect for baking, or just particularly delicious and sought-after. But they are clever; instead of crediting the waters from which they get the salt they invent an elaborate, Rube Goldberg style extraction process and claim that is the source of their quality. They do this to prevent the landowner from exploiting them and to protect them from those who would imitate and poach their waters. This misdirection is tragic, however, because without some motivation the town sells or is bullied into giving polluting rights to some factory which threatens the quality of the salt. The women, caught in a catch-22, become saboteurs and attempt to derail the construction and eventually to destroy the factory.
ReplyDeleteThe landowner will represent a capitalist ideology and is generally regarded as a money-grubbing, back-stabbing asshole by the townspeople. In addition to renting land to the farmer, extorting passing freegrazers, or leasing to ranchers, he more importantly owns the mineral spring that feeds the whole town its water supply and is the key to both the salt and the wheat's special qualities. [it may even be integral to the microflora's evolution - maybe it percolates through some uranium or something]. He and his offspring or proteges will alternately free the water to the people or keep a stranglehold on it, which will affect every class and family. The landowner's only real vestige of productive work is operating a still in his backwoods. However, his greed will eventually guarantee the safety and purity of the spring waters, while his amassed wealth will finance a military resistance that saves the population and frees the town [country?] from tyranny. This plot will represent the contradiction between private and common properties and the conflict between altruism and self-interest. At its peak of corruption and greed [or after his restorative saving of the town], this 'character' - actually a series of distantly related cousins and random opportunists who buy out or are conned into buying the spring - will produce a rapist who will victimize one of the primary female characters. He will be murdered in retribution for his crime by a hired third party [probably the beekeeper], and this will represent how the sacrifices made for justice, even those that endanger the community [by threatening the stewardship of the spring and inviting interest by his absence] are absolutely necessary for a healthy body politic.
The farming family will be the biggest, in keeping with the need for lots of manual labor around the farm and the ideal that the middle class ought be as inclusive as possible it will be a patchwork of orphans, runaways, love children, aunts, uncles and cousins. Even with that help this family employs much of the town for at least a portion of the year, demonstrating that people phase in and out of the middle class, mostly at the behest of the landowner, who is contantly tightening his grip on the farmers by way of limiting or putting up for auction the waters emanating from his spring, which also power the mill the farmer built to grind his grain. As the landowner squeezes the farmer's margins, so the farmer is seemed to be squeezing the pockets of the townspeople, and when and if they import cheaper labor many will resent and revolt against them. [Unions may organize against them]. Although conservationist, the farmers will eventually struggle with and fall to the allure of growth and big business, taking with them the health of not only their land but the livelihood of the town. The farmers will also provide the bulk of the manpower when it comes to assembling a militia in the course of a resistance movement, and their vast acreage includes many dells and glens which will provide hideouts for various accused characters throughout the history of the town. But, they are also the most likely collaborators with outsiders, and in times of war and economic hardship their shortsightedness and dumb nostalgia will make them grasp at false opportunities which endanger the village. These are plain reflections of the middle class' real contributions to society, as well as the moral compromises and the complicity in horrors required to keep them in their comfortable state.
ReplyDeleteThe different families will represent different social classes - the salt panners are the poorest, and therefore work in primary production of natural resources. The farmers are the middle class, big and broad and healthy in the best of times, and they represent the secondary production of harnessed natural production and occasionally they dabble in markets and arbitrage. The bakers are the intellectuals, artisans, warriors, and represent the upper class, or more accurately the intelligentsia. The landowner represents the real upper class, with a large portion of the towns wealth concentrated in his hands alone. The beekeeper represents an alternative economic model of subsistence directly from a healthy, cultivated ecosystem, an ideal which the town benefits from unknowingly and ultimately derives its salvation from.
Unfortunately, the beekeeper's lifestyle leaves him yearning for social acceptance and relief from the stress of alienation; he turns to drawing opium from poppies (grown by the farmer for sale to the baker) and becomes an addict. His addiction and his various failed love affairs lead him to orchestrate machinations to cultivate and sell the opium to a nearby syndicate, which becomes entwined with the town's businesses and politics. His apparent weakness (in reality coming not from his poverty but from his alienation) draws the criminals to predate on him as a way to get to the farmer and landowner. But he and the landowner, outcasts and addicts, are able to join together to flush the criminals out.
Perhaps as the story passes through the present day and into the near future the bread will assume its biblical role as the agent of salvation whose miraculous awakening from the dead grants everyone eternal life. The health of the ecosystem will affect the health of the bread, and as the town becomes more paved and less clean the bread deteriorates. It would now be being kept alive by only a few, if that, or more likely by a single individual, kept alive beyond normal years by the power of the bread. As he or she prepares for death there is the calamitous realization that there is no one to give it to, no one competent enough to take care of the whole range of needs of the starter and no one interested enough to appreciate its unique and brilliant perfection. Even if there were, the bread is no longer perfect in flavor, although its nutritive qualities are still powerful. Without the proper constituents and a clean wilderness to draw fertility from the bread is only a shadow of its former self. But, microscopy reveals that the culture is still very much alive and that the species diversity is still quite rich, the product of meticulous and dedicated care despite almost two centuries of continued environmental degradation. When at last he can no longer obtain honey - not for lack of money but for lack of commercial bee species, he knows it is time to seal his fate. So the last living keeper of the bread prepares its tomb and mummifies it, hoping that with the proper incantation before burial or the proper inscription upon the tomb someone in an unknowable future will discover and revive the bread, if possible. To better his chances he decides to propagate as much of the starter as he can. Instead of eating for weeks he uses his [rations?] last flour to grow out dozens of jars of starter. He hopes that the lack of honey can be overcome, but he soon realizes that the starters are not healthy and in balance without it. In his grief he sets about walking and finds a small colony of bees living under the cover of a patio grill. When he investigates further he discovers a sizable hive. He feels he knows what he must do, so he goes home to start his plan - to preserve the dried starter in honey, the ancient way, knowing that upon rehydration he would have the right amount of honey to restart a proper culture. He also knows he cannot kill the bees to get to the honey, as they are so scarce and precious now. He prepares his dried samples and goes back out to harvest the honey. In the process he is mortally wounded despite his primitive protective gear. He limps home wincing, swelling painfully and gulping painkillers (a callback to the beekeeper, his ancestor). He knows he cannot call an ambulance until he has packed all the samples because they would never listen, never not ferry him away by force. So with his last breaths he crawls to his door and manages to slip his stack of wax-paper envelopes containing his rice-paper/honey starter samples through the mail slot just as he dies there on the rug in the front hallway, knocking over an umbrella stand in the process. The letters are mailed away to famous bakeries, many of which were old closed-down legends by that time, and a few scientists. But the starter lies patiently in a few different spots, as refuse in heaps or buried in red, lifeless, salty dirt waiting for moisture. Eventually the envelopes leak, and rot, and a world that was once condemned to dry out like a husk and whither away is saved by the very staff of life which had already dried up and died. Risen again, the microbes who were so accustomed to the harsh acids and salts of the dough flourished and spread in the failed soils of the Earth and restored her to life, but only after the tragic fall of humanity. The few remaining humans, subsisting as scavengers in the trash heaps, get their deliverance back to the Eden of our primitivity, and the bread gives its life for us all.
ReplyDeleteTHE END
Wow,James, this is an incredible saga. Lots of relevant topics for today and recent history. Environment and politics are prominent throughout. I think this is too much for one book. I have read books with so many characters they were either not fully developed and/or I couldn't remember who was who. If you start developing this into a book, maybe you should divide it into time frames and choose certain families/characters/events/issues to focus on to fully develop in each book. You have lots of work ahead of you. Cheers, Judy
ReplyDeleteJames, Love it...but I lose it in the complexity of your telling here. Just some thoughts that you can take or leave.
ReplyDeleteI love the image of the "starter," and all of its connectivity w/humans and nature. Can this starter organism have a character of its own that moves, responds, ebbs, recoils, feels, needs,cries out throughout the story? Maybe it even "speaks," through various characters.
The reason I ask this is because I read so much "action," of what might be developed here re: history/social upheavals, characters, etc., that I lose sight of the power of "image", the power of this wonderful organism that can only interact within us and possibly be the Utopian answer for our relatioship with nature, the cosmos, and hope for a higher consciousness as truly supreme beings. The "starter" might even be contained in an asteroid blast from someplace else in the universe. It might be in search of the perfect "environment" to work its "magic?"
What might be the ultimate power of what you so wonderfully suggest here that has its own character seeking to be revealed?
Just some thoughts. Fantastic mind you have.