One or the other

A few days ago I wrote that I'd had some good story ideas while in Boston (riding the T, reading Invitation to a Beheading, frightening commuters).

Maybe I'm just not trying hard enough, but when my ideas are for characters, I always have a hard as hell time writing them into a context, revolving a plot around them. When my idea is a conceit, a fablistic moral, or a plot idea, I always have a hard as hell time creating suitable characters to put in these situations.

Easy solution: take a character and meld it with a plot.

Yes, that would be easy. Except I don't feel like any of my characters fit with any of my plots, like having been fired in separate kilns of inspiration, none of these can ever be joined. This is either very high-minded and uncompromising of me, or lazy. Maybe I just need to get over my idealized conception that each story and character has a particular and specific end--and end that is obviously unbeknownst to me. Maybe writing is messier than that.

The latest idea--the thing I think I really like--is, conceptually, a melding of some fairly disparate influences with my disillusionment with current geo-political trends. Like the others, it has no solid central character.

Influences:

• Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Magic Realism--his brand specifically--is, for lack of a better word, the shit. I think this might be a semi-conscious backlash against my own hyper-scientific worldview, but there's something about chronicling with journalistic objectivity the movements of ghosts, mystical banana groves, brutal and senseless murders, family curses, etc that just hits me right where it counts. Garcia Marquez taps the part of me that hopes to God there's more to the universe than I think there is.
  

• Hesse's Fairy Tales

  Thanks again Ben. Hesse, in this collection specifically does many of the things that Marquez does with the addition of an Aesop's fable-like moral to each story. It's magic realism in a modern (not to be confused with contemporary) context. Each story, though wildly different, still feels synergistic because of the underlying worldview that informs each. It's very dire and frank about human nature while managing to be optimistic somehow.
  

• Kafkan distopias

  I know, every angsty high schooler and self-discovering College student falls in love with Kafka. Fine. Maybe I'm immature. There's something viscerally enthralling about hopelessness for me. Anyway invitation to a beheading is along these lines, but an order of magnitude more absurd and somehow less sinister but all the more hopeless because of it. It's really pretty brilliant.
  

This thing feels like it should be written, and, maybe for the first time, that I have the resources to write it. I feel like if I do write it, it will flesh out for me some of my feelings on politics and human freedom that aren't totally clear to me right now.

Easy solution: Just write the damn thing.

I would, I swear, but every time I try to flesh out the main character, nothing really comes. I have the situation, most of the plot. The conclusions, I think, will flow out of the plot, but I just can't bring detail to the text without deciding about a character. Often in Kafka the central character is transparent, more or less a placeholder for the reader. This could work, but I think I need him to be more active than those particular characters.

All of this is to say that I feel better about my prospects of finishing this thing than I have previously, because the nature of the plot itself beckons a certain, and fairly specific, character. So maybe I'll be able to pull the trigger.

Sorry for the vague rant.

The desire to disappear, yet remain here--ape self prevails in me still.