Click here for Big Finish Limbo #1
There is a chasm between intention and actuality. I’m sure readers who intended to enter the competition and didn’t end up doing so, know this very well. Although I had every intention of writing a short story for the competition, and entering it, this presumes I had an idea worth writing up and also happy with the final draft.
Morbius started writing three different stories before he hit on the one that worked. And there were other concepts that didn’t make it to the writing stage because he could already foresee complications. These were usually the result of his ideas being too complex for such a short word count (2500 words – more on that in the next entry). Mine came together a lot more easily than that.
When I started writing my story I did not have blogging the experience in mind, so the actual steps of creation are a bit fuzzy now. What I am definite about is that I had only one idea. I wrote it up. Yet I can piece some of the earlier steps together relatively easily, and a lot of it comes down to me being strategic.
The first thing I knew is that I had to come up with a story that would be different to other entries (although originality is overrated – a well-written story will appear fresh, whereas a collection of new ideas will seem dull if written poorly). It also needed to talk to a modern audience, have a theme greater than itself. It had to fit with the rest of Big Finish’s output. There were two pivotal points to achieving these things; how was I going to approach the competition brief, and what Doctor was I going to use?
Morbius and I discussed the brief first. The premise of each story needed to work from "How the Doctor changed my life". We decided that the use of the determiner ‘my’ would probably lead to a lot of first person narratives in the vein of ‘Love and Monsters’. Both of us like that story, so that wasn’t why we wanted to avoid that style – it was simply that we could see a lot of other entries written like that, as well as the fact that Big Finish work, while it does experiment in narrative style and structure, generally does not come from this perspective. We could also see people taking the brief too literally and writing a piece based on themselves, which we also decided was a no-no. We also decided that we had to be quite creative with the brief as the premise could be applied to every Doctor Who story – he does change people’s lives.
So what could we add that would make this premise a new force rather than a run of the mill story? Me being the morbid soul that I am, eventually picked on the Doctor changing someone’s death. This was not fixed in stone – if I had come up with a different idea that would not fit I would have happily discarded the premise, as it isn’t that brilliant, but it did hold up with my other choices.
The choice of Doctor was easy. The third Doctor is my favourite, and strategically also made sense. In all of the BBC, Big Finish and Virgin output the third Doctor is underrepresented. On the Big Finish site they had example short stories, and none of them came from the third Doctor. If we now take the 110 entries mentioned on Outpost Gallifrey as a representative sample of the 1072 submissions, it would appear that this strategy was not as successful as I thought it would be; there are less submissions for the fifth Doctor, and about the same amount for the first and second incarnations.
Having picked the third Doctor, a lot of things fell into place. I wanted the story earthbound; the short word count means there’s no real space to indulge in world or culture building, and an earthbound story suits the third Doctor just fine. This Doctor has always had stories that reflect on the ‘bigger issues’ in society, and given my political bent, it was quite clear I could write something that would fit both the Doctor and my own need for a social message.
I toyed briefly with global warming, but quite frankly it sucks as a narrative device. That’s probably why it has had little impact on our collective psyche even though we’ve known about it since the days of Kit Pedler. I also toyed with heavy metal poisoning of fish, and the dumping of industrial and nuclear waste in the ocean, both being contemporary with the Pertwee era, and still having resonance with today. But these did not really grab me. I decided to focus on the setting instead, and see if that generated any plot ideas.
I’m pretty pleased with the setting I picked. I am pretty sure, after questioning some of my walking encyclopaedic friends, that it is one that has not been seen in professional Doctor Who output before. Go me. So excuse me for keeping it fairly close to my chest – I may want to use it again. I feel safe enough to drop a hint though; Morbius and I have always discussed the merits of the claustrophobic space and inherent value of a small cast in creating a tension-laden narrative.
At any rate, with the 3rd Doctor, a claustrophobic space, me wanting an earthbound story in the 1970s (although again, I could have moved it if it hadn’t worked as well as it did), and a change of death, I picked the 3rd Doctor favourite of ‘radiation’ as my form of social commentary. I must have still had poisoned fish on my mind, although I should also acknowledge how prominent the Litvinenko Polonium-210 poisoning case was at the time.
So about two weeks into December I am ready to start writing. So I start up the PC, open OpenOffice Writer, crack my knuckles and look at the fresh, unlimited possibilities offered by that big blank rectangle on my monitor…
And can’t write a single word.
My story is set in the real past, and I’m about to write about real issues. I need this story to hang together both historically and scientifically. There is no point writing it all just to find out it is fundamentally flawed - especially if I got it to the point of being publish-worthy.
Damn! After all that strategy, now I had research to do.
Coming soon – Big Finish Limbo #3: The murky land of Wikipedia.
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