Choices (Cecilia Peartree)

Happy New Year!

At this time of year I traditionally make an annual writing plan. Quite often, and usually to my own surprise, I tend to stick to it, more or less. Early in December 2024, I happened to have completed and published something, and because I know I get very bad-tempered if I'm not writing anything new, I had to decide on something to start on - despite having all sorts of other things to do, needless to say. But that's beside the point.

On this occasion I already had a kind of mental shortlist of options. Having written books in four or so series so far - there's actually a fifth one but I see it as complete, for now at least - I would have been fairly content to write another mystery in one of three existing mystery series or another historical not-quite-romance in my rambling historical series. I say not-quite-romance because some critics don't seem to think they fit all the  tropes, something I have also found with my 28-strong cosy mystery series. There is also the possibility that I might randomly decide to write a sequel to my recent alternate history novel, though that would need some thought and work that I am probably not in the mood for at the moment.

I realised while considering the options that this situation was only the latest in a long line of writing and related choices I've had to make over the years. I often return to my 10-year 'career' (unpaid) of collaborative writing for a youth drama group for examples of this kind of thing. After one attempt to write something completely original, which was almost successful, we tended to stick with basing our efforts on a traditional story, usually a fairy tale. Sometimes we combined two or more fairy tales, but more usually we put a different spin on one old tale. 

Once a couple of the other adults who ran the group insisted we should write a version of 'Aladdin' and although you might think everybody knew the original story, it turned out that neither I nor my co-writer had much idea about it, so we had to resort to online sources, and after we had done that and started writing, we found that some of the group only knew the Disney version, so ours was 'wrong'. Still, it worked out all right in the end. This might have been our motto as the years went on! 

Apart from the 'Aladdin' example, which was forced on us, we used to choose fairy tales partly based on their simplicity and partly on how many characters we thought we needed in order to give everyone in the group a part and a few lines of dialogue. So one of our early plays was 'Snow White and the Seven Martians' (we were trying to avoid contravening Disney's copyright, not that they would probably have noticed our very small local production, but we didn't want to take any chances). 

Once we had a reliable core group of actors, I generally wanted to write specific parts for the group members who could manage more lines and deal with any on-stage crises that arose. One of our final productions was an adaptation of 'A Christmas Carol' - by then we had some good actors in the group who could carry off the dialogue we had lifted straight from Dickens, but there were also some smaller parts for the younger ones.

In the course of my day job - I worked for the same organisation for 30 years - I sometimes had the luxury of choosing to write about various topics related to my work - my all-time favourite was to do with options for barcoding works of art so that their locations could be recorded more reliably! I used to give presentations at meetings and conferences too, but of course, as with the children's play scripts, the list of possible topics was limited, in this case to things that were likely to interest museum professionals rather than to fairy tales, though there may have been some overlap on occasion. Sometimes I managed to combine this kind of thing with letting my imagination run riot, such as my presentation on where I thought the future of museum collections management lay - with delivery drones, warehouse robots and lots of  remote working from beaches. This last prediction was the most accurate.

Helsinki conference centre, scene of my futuristic presentation

Choosing a fairy tale or Christmas story from a limited selection of stories for a specific purpose, or selecting a topic to do with your profession is of course not quite the same as choosing to write anything you like about anything! Which as a self-published writer I have the luxury of doing, thank goodness.