Conversation Helps

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When I'm working (I'm talking about my day job in human resources rather than my writing, which is really more of a hobby at the moment, but who knows?) I sometimes come across a problem that I need help solving. Since March 2020 I've been working at home, so I can no longer perch on the edge of a colleague's desk and brainstorm the issue with them. I could call one of them up on the phone or on Teams, but somehow that's not quite the same. What I often find myself doing in these circumstances is talking to my wife.

My long-suffering and beautiful wife doesn't know my work inside out. She doesn't have the in-depth, inside knowledge of the computer systems or processes that are in play, but even so, talking through a problem with her almost always ends with one of us coming up with a workable solution. Often the solution is mine. Breaking down the issue into terms and concepts simple enough to explain to someone who doesn't have the same level of knowledge is an excellent way of increasing my own understanding of the issue. Explaining each step helps to explain the goal, clarify the processes, identify the obstacles and ultimately understand the solution.

What does that have to do with writing? Well, in the Cloud Collective, the child's parents only have to fend off the attacking aliens for a few days. Mum comes up with the brilliant idea of jumping on a plane and jetting off to the other side of the planet. If they did that there would be no way that the aliens would be able to track them down in time, and even if they did, how could they possible hope to travel across international borders with a kidnapped child?

I didn't have an answer to that. In one instant Mum completely ruined the rest of the story. Of course they should run and hide and of course getting on a plane and heading to some remote part of the world would work. It was a great idea and I couldn't come up with any way that human-alien hybrid Dad could reasonably object to it.

While I was annoyed at my character for coming up with this solution, I had to admit that it was a perfectly logical thing for her to say in that situation. I'm actually glad that it happened, because if I hadn't thought of it now then at some point in the future someone reading the story would say, "why didn't they just get on a plane?" It reminds me of the Lord of the Rings, where readers so often question why the giant eagles didn't just fly the ring to Mordor - not that I'm comparing my November project with Tolkein's epic in any way.

I decided that I would ask my Facebook friends to see if they could offer a way out of this dead-end I seemed to have started down, so I opened a Notepad window and started typing out the situation, explaining it in simple steps, ready to ask for suggested solutions. In exactly the same way that conversations with my wife generate solutions, the simple act of writing the question in Notepad triggered the answer. 

"Tara doesn't have a passport."

So now they're going to drive north, perhaps all the way to Scotland. It's not a route I'd planned on my characters taking, and this deviation may now suddenly cause my word output to drop, but hey ho, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it.

Time to pack a bag and start driving north.

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