Becoming a Battery.

I got an hours work done in the garden today between painting jobs. I thought it would help to breathe fresh air instead of paint fumes for a change. And while I was thus engaged, something struck me. No, not a local with a dislike of night-walking eccentrics, but one of these: A realisation.

I wrote a story about four years ago called When the Waves Call. On the face of it, the opening gambit is simply that a man called Liam meets a woman called Maire in an Irish pub, only it’s not that simple. Liam might be just an everyday boring Englishman, but Maire is rather more than just an everyday sultry Irish colleen.

I realised only today that when they first meet, Maire has very much the upper hand, and she uses the superior strength of her will to ingratiate herself into the consciousness of the rather more diffident Liam. But gradually things change. Maire’s strength eventually wanes and her vulnerable side begins to show through. Liam, on the other hand, rises from the mire of enervation and finds strength of his own. By the time Maire leaves the bar, their energies are in balance and they each need the other for different but complimentary reasons.

That’s a kind of structure, isn’t it? I never realised my stories had structure before; I just wrote what came into my head. And I could go further and ask whether this is an example of strong feminine energy being transferred to supplement weak masculine energy (which I’ve found from experience to be a credible proposition) in order to create a homogeneous whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. Like a battery? Nice analogy. Like a battery.

Well, this is a revelation! I’ve never been one to believe in too much analysis of creative things. I’m more the ‘you like it or you don’t’ type. Yet here I am analysing one of my own stories (and even thinking I might be right.) Is there a doctor in the house?