Whenever I get deep into my writing projects, I get an itch to return to Michael Macbeth. Originally conceived thirty years ago (yikes), Michael took a lot of (undisguised) inspiration from Dirk Gently, and to this day is a character I greatly enjoy—but for whom I have a very rough time coming up with ideas. I did manage to write one short novel featuring him, as a NaNoWriMo project, but it was… thin? There was some genuinely good stuff in it, but the whole was definitely lesser than the sum of its parts.
On a related note, the topic of the Brigid and Greg Fictionlets comes up in conversation periodically; Multiclass Geek recently pondered what a story about that dynamic duo now would look like, compared to their heyday of the early 2000s, but that idea would by necessity take the story places I wouldn’t really want to go (Isadora’s age being just one example). Like Jeeves and Wooster before them, Brigid and Greg are inhabitants of a particular moment, and letting time pass for them would force them to change into something else.
The biggest obstacle with both Michael Macbeth and B&G, I think, is that they are both about “a vibe.” Michael Macbeth is “creepy and kooky on a rainy afternoon in a college town.” B&G is “what if Jeeves and Wooster were Gen-Xers?” But a vibe is not a story, a vibe is just… a vibe. When I go to write about these characters, I get hung up on trying to think of things to actually happen, because part of the requirement is that it shouldn’t significantly change their status quo. A Michael Macbeth that doesn’t live in his shabby little apartment always just a few dollars away from broke, isn’t Michael Macbeth any more. The goal for Brigid and Greg in any long narrative would be “get out of whatever is going on and go home.”
In writing The Sky Pirate’s Prisoner, I had the freedom of characters who could end up anywhere as long as the journey was interesting—if anything the whole premise of that story is that the status quo is untenable and must be destroyed. How do you send heroes on a journey where the goal is to remain mostly unchanged by the end?
Obviously it can and has been done, many times over. Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise, just about any superhero you can name, all have long and serialized careers that consist of resetting back to starting point at the end of each story. And those work by focusing on the plot, the series of events, rather than on character development. As somebody whose strength is primarily in character development, I suppose it’s no surprise that I flounder there.
But I keep trying! And I will probably continue to keep trying, as long as I can put words together.
