Today I haven't really troubled my notebook - this happens all too often. But in the news today and for the past few days has been the extraordinary story of a Mexican fisherman whose boat was washed up on an obscure island - part of the Marshall Islands after setting off 13 months from a Mexican port over 600 miles away ago and getting lost at sea. As one might imagine there's a story to be told here. The newspaper reports are full of spoken examples of how he has managed to survive - from drinking turtles blood to eating seagulls. This is story to be expanded on. In fact it makes one think about how often one can write a story of survival against the odds and for it to be appealing to the public. Think of Castaway, Life of Pi and so on. But a real story always goes deeper because people will be left to wonder about the experience and how they might have coped. All those empathetic emotions come into the story mix and help move it along as a reading spectacle.
Starvation, psychological madness, physical frailty, visions, health, despair, resourcefulness, stubbornness, religion, belief and faith, stoicism, regret, love hate, bravery: you can see how all these and more can be woven into a story. One character against the wildness of the world - the human spirit conquering all the travails and finally succeeding through survival despite the world doing all it could to kill him. You could certainly play with visions, interior dialogue with dead relatives, angels saints sinners all. Animals taking on human characteristics, the pathetic fallacy of the sea and storms raging in and threatening him and his survival. Truly if all this hadn't happened before with Castaway among others it would be worth a go. perhaps it's already worth a go. A poem at least.
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