I recently watched the BBC series Lost in Austen, about Amanda Price, a contemporary London woman in love with the world of Jane Austen, who discovers, as it happens, she has a magic door in her bathroom that opens into the world of Pride and Prejudice. She and Elizabeth Bennet switch places, and soon Amanda finds herself fouling up the plot of her favorite novel, as her unconventional appearance and manners intrigue or infuriate everyone around her.
It was a frothy, enjoyable syllabub of an entertainment, a bit of Mary Sue writing on the part of Guy Andrews, taken up with zest by the cast. It’s like the make-believe games I played when I was a kid, inserting myself into my favorite books or moments in history. (Like Amanda Price, my presence invariably altered the way things were supposed to go — I think I once was an assassin who took out Octavius before he became emperor, thus allowing Cleopatra and Antony to win the war with Rome.) What was fun about this series was the facility of the plot: Andrews needed his heroine to go to Jane Austen land. A magic door to Jane Austen land appears in her bathroom. Why? Who knows. Turns out it doesn’t really matter.
It reminded me that I just need to push past the hardest part of plotting for me — getting the plot going. How will I set it all in motion? I ask myself. Will it be believable? I didn’t have qualms like that when I was nine years old and writing a story about my friends and I becoming invisible through the means of a batch of pancakes made from an improvised recipe. I can be a bit more sophisticated about it now, but what I need to remember is that the forward motion is what is important.
So now that I’ve finished the second revision of Sliver of Light, I’m going to try to plot out a graphic novel that has a premise that is a little unbelievable, just like Lost in Austen the stories I wrote as a kid. I’ve been stuck, but I’ll get myself unstuck and just get on with it already.
