The Man Flu, Book 2

As punishment for killing the six sons of King Eurystheus, Hercules was set to a task of twelve labors. The second was the slaying of the fearsome hydra, offspring of Typhon and Echidna. For every head he cut off, two sprouted forth in its place. The only way to defeat the beast was to cauterize each of its stumps with flame so new heads could not grow back.

This is, in many respects, like writing a story. Instead of heads, we have choices. Instead of flaming arrows, the author wields a pen. Instead of beginning with five heads and watching them multiply, we begin with a hundred — a thousand, a million — and we whittle down to one. However, the process for doing so is much the same. To keep the possibilities from multiplying out of control, the author must wield flame and hot metal and sear off parts of the story so it cannot grow in that direction. Choices must be made. The hero cannot both answer the call as well as forever refuse it. Bitter smoke will rise from the grave of all the ideas that could not be, because there was no room.

It's the process every author goes through when turning a story from a hydra of limitless possibilities to the serpent of a single narrative.

When I imagined the Man Flu series, I first thought of the condition itself. How would it work? What are the parameters? How frequently does it infect? How easy is it to pass along? When I had done that, I wrote down all the different heads of the hydra, so I could decide which ones to target for cauterization.

It looked something like this:
  • Someone gets the disease and then turns back to normal
  • Someone gets the disease and it's permanent
  • Someone gets the disease and turns back, but would rather change again and stay that way (perhaps they gained a professional advantage; maybe they got better treatment)
  • Someone gets the disease and now has an appearance that is disadvantageous or incriminating (eg, now looks like a wanted criminal, or has the appearance of the person they had an affair with)
  • Someone gets the disease on purpose for a short-term change (eg, an actor changes for a role; a criminal changes to commit a crime)
  • Someone is the person everyone wants to get the disease from (because they're handsome, and people want to look like that celebrity)
  • ...and so on.
I realized that this particular hydra didn't need to be cut down to a serpent, not if I could cut it down to four or five serpents, each with its own reason for being. Each hydra head could be its own story, sharing the same initial idea but each snaking in its own direction.

That is a window into my writing process. I look at the hydra and decide which of the heads will serve me best. I don't have to kill them all. I can nurture them instead.

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