NEW PARIS BOOK IN PROGRESS IN 2024: THE CITY AND THE DRAGON – Blog # 2.
The new fiction book that I’m starting in 2024 – let’s just call in the New Paris Book – is obviously set in Paris. So, I need to set the scene about how the main character (semi-biographically me) arrived in Paris.
Without going into detail just yet, I arrived in Paris after three months in Central Asia – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan – a week before Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, announced the first pandemic lockdown in France in March 2020. I had been in and out of Paris well before that, but for a manageable story plot, I’ll set the timeframe from 2020.
Since this novel aims to be an epic adventure, I’ll equate it to The Dragon and the City story plotline. This is appropriate for me because I love a good dragon story, such as St. George slaying the dragon. I like this because it reminds me of Tbilisi, Georgia, and the wondrous golden statue of St. George slaying a Dragon on top of an impressively tall column in the middle of Freedom Square. I lived right on Freedom Square with the symbolic “slaying the dragon” literally on my doorstep for over ten years. Therefore, the motif and the meaning resonate with me.
The City and the Dragon in my new book is the City of Paris and … well, who or what is the dragon? Perhaps there are several dragons.
So, from 2020, there’s a dragon outside the city walls of Paris. The story will have dragons inside the city walls too, as readers will discover later. Let’s first think about the dragons outside the city walls.
The main character’s world is no longer safe (i.e., due to the pandemic). What should the main character, the hero, do? There are three options. In fact, the number three will feature prominently throughout the new book, and certainly in the writing process. The three options are: escape, defend, or attack. More than three really, if you include freeze!
Freeze: assess the status quo, the state of being too overwhelmed or too sick to do anything
Escape: find a safer place to live
Defend: strengthen the city walls
Attack: take on the dragon before the dragon gets the main character.
Each option has risks and rewards. The city is maybe safe but with unknown challenges and limited options; restricted and with consequences for breaking the government emergency, health, and safety rules. The dragon is threatening, but is it too early to hope for silver linings, potentialities, and success?
I need to ask myself more questions as I build my story.
What is the city? What does the main character offer Paris and what does Paris offer the main character? Are they mutually supportive of each other? What is good and valuable in the status quo? What is challenging or unfair? Who does the main character need to contact to take action or to act on her behalf? How much control of the situation does the main characterhave?
What is the dragon? How many dragons are out there? Where are the threats coming from? How much information does the hero have about these dragons (mentioned in blog #1: the pandemic, Brexit, and the health of the character’s mother). How big and bad are the dragons going to become? Is there gold in the coal, is there light in the darkness?
Freeze: What are the penalties for doing nothing, and outstaying the statute of limitation, given that Brexit from 2020 is about to make the hero’s British passport irrelevant?
Escape: If she could leave Paris, where would she go? How would she go? What permissions are required to be able to escape? What is the cost of abandoning the city?
Defend: What is worth defending in the city? How can the character strengthen the city walls to keep out the dragons? Walls protect, but they also limit freedom – what is the cost to health and wellbeing in defending global, regional, and personal dragons?
Attack: What is the best line of attack in this foreign city? What are the character’s chances? What’s the reward and is it worth the risk? What would Napoleon Bonaparte do?
These are merely the initial questions to build my story.
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