written in water.

Now that I've realised I was mistaken in trying to make my fictional Australian tragedy centre on a bushfire, and have it at the beach instead, my ideas are just... flowing. I remember reading some years ago that the Australian idea of ourselves as people of the bush is really just a myth, we are coastal dwellers. As a writer, I certainly seem to need water more than the other ancient elements. I can never work properly with narrative until I know precisely where it is set and have experienced and imagined all the sensory aspects of it. I worked out most of The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies while walking down the stretch of the Brisbane River that curved around my old house and am writing the backstory of my current WIP whilst immersing myself in as many memories of Australian beaches as I can conjure from a cold summer in Middlesex. Water presents me with so many images to consider that I’m glad to be working with it again.

I've been flicking through artwork of various water spirits (mainly just on Wikipedia, the good thing about creative research is your sources can be crap and don't need to be reliable at anything except inspiring you) and found a whole lot of different ideas I can use -- I'm writing in a realist mode, not horror, but it's still good to have lots of images available. One picture I found of a water spirit was so like the creepy Sadako in Ringu that I suspect one of the reasons she’s so frightening is because she represents some archetype of fear. Some archetype that connects fear to water and women and childbirth to drowning. As humans, our first practice breaths are in salty fluid, being born is in some respects like coming out of the sea -- as our long ago ancestors did. And going back to Ringu there is something uterine about the enclosure at the base of the well, where the evil spirit gestates, something natal (is that the right word?) about her exit from it that I shiver to consider this connection. Because while childbirth is amazing it is also scary as hell. At this early stage of writing I tend to make connections all over the place, or try to. I won't be using a well. But I want to be able to frighten people, so it helps to untangle what frightens me. Who knows what I'll end up using? I do seem to have caught a current of ideas, though. Yay!

(The picture included with this blog is Norwegian artist Theodo Kittelsen's 1904 painting, Nøkken -- a creepy image and archetype. Will this be useful to me?)