So, my heroine is homeless at one point (well, the entire second half of the novel), and I had to work out how she would survive, and get shelter, and bathe.
“I’ll just put a water fountain in the town square,” I thought, “That will take care of bathing, she can get up at dawn and take her little sliver of soap and use the water fountain to splash her parts.”
Well, before I even got a chance to write it, I watched Mitchells Against the Machines, and amazingly there is a shot of a man using a water fountain to bathe. And I am annoyed, because in the world of TMATM that scene doesn’t advance the plot or even make sense, technically. The machines haven’t even arrived, if I remember correctly, and if they have, they haven’t been there long enough to require that people bathe in water fountains. That part is set in Kansas City, famous for its fountains, so is it an inside joke?
Whatever. It inconvenienced me.
So now I have to find another reliable place for her to bathe. The run off from the Men-only Turkish baths won’t work because they’ve been turned into a hotel by the second half. She’ll have to use the toilet in the train station.
Of course, I could just make it rain, but I already planned one rain shower for that month and it’s Oklahoma. I need to write science fiction instead, where you can just throw in a shower ex machina. Hmph.
2 responses to “Rewriting the Novel: There are no original ideas”
Do you need an original idea for what someone eats for breakfast? No? Then maybe it is okay for a homeless person in your book to do the same things homeless people do in real life. 🙂
KC – well that could be. It may be down to a phrase.