MORTAL HAPPINESS: A Blog Novel: Mortal Happiness: Narrative Outline

Monday, 15 June 2009

Mortal Happiness: Narrative Outline

This is the story of a British-American photojournalist, Michael Jones embedded with a group of Russian peacekeepers in the volatile Caucasus region, and a Russian-Georgian doctor, Enna Serpukhova, who works for an NGO.

The background to Mortal Happiness is international conflict but it’s not a political story, or a story about war. The book is about different kinds of love, the role of memory and remembering and about race and belonging. It is also a reflection on the objectives and the limitations of Western reportage.

When Michael Jones is badly injured in an attack on the peacekeeping unit he’s travelling with, he’s left for dead by the attackers. Will the strange Russian doctor who hides him in a remote mountain hermitage, save him or kill him? Does he know who the doctor is and what happened to her here in the forest? Will he survive Dr. Serpukhova’s medical care and turn his own experience into a news report, or is what happens to him too real, too personal this time? Mortal Happiness is a dark tale that brings together the furthest edges of Europe through dreams and memories and sifts the differences and similarities of individual lives.

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A Serialised Novel

Mortal Happiness is a completed work of fiction. Chapters can be posted until they're all out there, but without feedback that's not going to happen. If you want to keep on reading, then say so and the next chapter will appear.

Copyright: Hamid Z Hansssen 2009

APOLOGIES FOR PROBLEMATIC TEXT/DIALOGUE LAYOUT IN EARLY CHAPTERS.

Sept 10th 2009. Recent cut and pastes look fine, hope you find them more readable.

Remember, if you want to go on reading, you need to VOTE below! Writer always want feedback, my email address is right in front of you!

REFLECTION

Parallelling the novel itself is a history of Mortal Happiness; the concept, the writing, recognition, agents, publishers ...

IN THE BEGINNING ...

The outline of this story first appeared a long time ago during a journey from Hanoi to Halong Bay. The bus was full of tourists who didn't speak to each other. In front of me a Japanese guy slept while his head smacked off the window with every pot hole. Once some women working on the road threw stones and mud at the bus. It was January and very cold. The flat landscape beyond the windows was grey and misted. The windows of the bus steamed up and then there was nothing to see except the sleeping man's head hitting the glass over and over again. As the world outside the moving vehicle vanished, the internal world began, as it usually does, to expand. This was when the character of a man caught up in conflict first came to me, a man who was an outsider.

THEN

It was clear from the start that the external conflict, the wars, that the man would be in were almost a backdrop to the true conflict occurring within him. The reasons for these internal conflicts and how they manifested in his character emerged only slowly and changed from one plot possibility to another. At the same time, the parallel female character began to form. Without her, without each other, the human conflicts of the narrative would not resolve. The end of the story was there from the very start, a resolution of conflict and some kind of very personal redemption. How the plot would develop to reveal these things, that was another matter entirely ...

NEXT

While in Malibu, not long after Halong Bay, I was persuaded by a friend to write the planned novel as a screen-play. Being in S California the only kind of writing worth considering was screen-writing I was told. So, using a downloaded template the story began to take shape but in an entirely different form to what I'd imagined. While I pored over an atlas, trying to come up with the best location for the story, the friend juggled re-writing a script for De Niro with long conversations with Dominic Sena about action scenes. The whole experience had an unreal feel to it, which was in fact, the truth. When stumped for ways to create action I'd been put in front of the helicopter scene from Apocalypse Now.
In a few weeks the first draft was done. All along I'd known that the whole script idea was just an exercise, there was no way anyone was going to be interested in the very rough ideas sketched out in the draft. But it was fun to do and fun for a short while to feel part of the massive many-headed monster that is Hollywood. As we discussed all this one day, not long before I returned to London, the friend said, 'You realise of course that in the unlikely event your script were ever to be made it would take at least 5 years and by the time it hit the screen it would bear no resemblance at all to what you're holding in your hand. Everyone would have had a crack at re-writing it from hired hands to the producer and director.' At that moment I knew any thoughts I'd had about working on it as a screen-play for the UK market were out of the question. It was a novel, it had always been a novel. The fun was over and the real work was about to start.

MORTAL HAPPINESS: A Blog Novel

Monday, 15 June 2009

Mortal Happiness: Narrative Outline

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A Serialised Novel

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MORTAL HAPPINESS: A Blog Novel

Monday, 15 June 2009

Mortal Happiness: Narrative Outline

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A Serialised Novel

Do You Want To Go On Reading?

REFLECTION

Followers

BlogCatalog