Second Drafts

I’ve got through my rewrites and now have a second draft of the first part of my Thrutopia narrative. I have entitled it ‘The First Years’. There will be other sections – which are already forming in my mind – to take the narrative forward.

I am pleased – dare I say even proud – with how ‘The First Years’ has taken shape. There is more to do. For instance, I have fragments headed: ‘notes from the archives’, which are set a hundred years hence from the main story. I want these parts to be about how we memorialise – or not – our past and the construction of history. They certainly require more teasing out.

Famously on writing The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood said she based it entirely on what humans have done, are doing or could start doing tomorrow. I am basing my story on the same idea, only coming to a very different conclusion: that we can build a more sustainable future where humans are living more in harmony with each other and nature.

The writing of this ‘magnum opus’ is taking me on a journey of discovery in many ways.

In her substack, Unmapped Storylands, Elif Shafak suggests writing – and reading – is a quest, as personified in the ancient Greek notion of ktisis. Shafak explains: ‘The face of a woman appears in various ancient mosaics, spread across a vast geography from the lost cities of North Africa to Athens to Istanbul to Antioch to Cyprus. She has big, brown, soulful eyes. A calm and pensive expression. Dreamlike ethereal beauty and yet resilient, grounded and balanced. She is not a goddess exactly, never was, but more like an underlying principle of life, a foundation as well as a quest. [Ktisis] symbolises creative energy, the act of building something new, word by word, image by image, idea by idea. She represents the love of storytelling.’

Shafak promises: ‘In hard times, tough times, confusing times, words are our companions and stories our loving guides.’

Unmapped Storylands with Elif Shafak | Substack

Guides come in many forms. I have been fortunate to be recommended The Measure of Progress counting what matters by Diane Coyle, along with Beyond GDP: A compendium of regional feminist perspectives - Oxfam Policy & Practice Both, in their different ways, demolishing GDP and other economic tools. I wish they’d been around when I did my A Level Economics in the early 1980s, as they express what I felt (and feel) more articulately than I ever could, about why GDP is such a useless measure to make policy by.

Then there are other Thrutopia writers. Here, for example, are three sources that I enjoy from Substack:

Welcome to Thrutopia | Substack

Bending The Arc | Bending The Arc Magazine | Substack

Climate Fiction Writers League | Substack

What creative endeavour are you proud of this Spring?