There’s a very important thing that Raven Belasco wants you to remember about the undead, and in this Big Idea for her novella collection Blood Triad, she gets into it, finding the pulse of storytelling behind some of our culture’s favorite monsters.
RAVEN BELASCO:
Blood Triad is three novellas with space-time locations ranging from Scotland in the tenth century to Haiti during the American Occupation to 1930s Philly. How could some Big Idea possibly unify those random times and places?
In this collection of stories, the Big Idea is something I think is vital in writing about vampires—who are, never forget it, just monsters who dress up nicely. That Big Idea is how the human condition is universal…but that vampires are monsters precisely because they are “more human than human,” and thus are particularly dark mirrors for what walking collections of conflict we humans all are.
It sounds so fancy when I type that, like I actually had some unified plan when outlining this collection. But I don’t do outlines except as very wide-open concepts; I’m what people are currently calling a “pantser.” But I prefer what George R.R. Martin said in an interview about how some writers are “architects” and some are “gardeners.” The latter entirely sums up my writing style. I know what seed I’m planting, and I know where I’m planting it, and what sort of botanical item to expect in the future, the general shape and size of it. But how many flowers it will have, what precise shape it will grow into, what garden pests I will have to deal with along the way…none of that gets sorted out until I’m in the moment of sorting it out.
So no, no overarching plan, with crisp lines and delicate arcs. The Big Idea for this book is there because it cannot NOT be there…
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Source: The Big Idea: Raven Belasco
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