Current WIP: Robin Hood reimagining
This project sometimes feels like kind of a long slog. I first had the idea for it in early September 2016, just a couple weeks after I wrapped the first draft of “Arthur.” At that time, I was essentially brainstorming new ideas, and came up with several concepts that I may write eventually if I have sufficient time and motivation. But then I chose to work on my Greek myths retelling first.
I began working on my Robin Hood project about a year and a half later, in the first week of April, 2018. Ten and a half months later, it’s still shy of 70,000 words.
A basis for comparison
That feels slow to me because I began the first draft of the Greek myths project in the last week of September 2016, and despite taking a couple months in the middle to focus on my “Democracy” poem, that project was already well over 150,000 words by the end of 2017. So I look at that, and I look at this, and I’m like, dang, this is taking forever!
Not so far behind after all
However, a while ago I went back and reviewed my interim progress for the Greek myths project, and I discovered that the word count for Robin’s 10-month mark was only about 5,000 words shy of where the Greek myths word count had been when it was at the 10-month mark. In other words, I wasn’t as far behind as it seemed. Much of the bulk of the Greek myths project was not even a central part of my original concept for the project, it was added during “Camp NaNo” in July of 2017.
What’s the difference?
That said, the Greek myths project felt like it ran much more smoothly, overall. There are several reasons for this.
- I knew the Greek myths source material better. In addition to reading (sanitized versions of) the Greek myths to my kids as bedtime stories, I also studied The Odyssey in college; and frankly, the imagery of Greek mythology permeates our culture. The story of Robin Hood is less ingrained. Sure, we all know the basics: he’s a bandit who robs from the rich and gives to the poor, and he’s great at archery, and he dated Maid Marian, and hung out with Little John and Friar Tuck and some others. But other than that, what is his story? The problem is, there isn’t a single canonical narrative to the Robin Hood legend. Instead there’s a collection of disparate narratives, most of which seem to involve Robin running across a stranger in the woods and starting a fight with them. (Seriously, that is the plot to the tales of Little John, Friar Tuck, Alan-a-Dale, the beggars, and more.) So turning that into a novel-length story structure took some doing.
- I had a clearer concept of the Greek myths plot when I started. I am an inveterate pantser (meaning I rarely write anything resembling an outline) but even so, when I began the Greek myths project I had a clear concept of how the story was going to go. I could see it in my mind. Not so with Robin. I ended up having to do a lot of editing as I went, rearranging sections and rewriting sequences to make a coherent storyline.
- I foolishly decided to write this Robin Hood story as a novel-length poem. The logic behind this decision was somewhere in between, “The greatest and most lasting works of literature are often written in verse form,” and “Nobody’s ever going to read it anyway so I may as well entertain myself, lol.” Keeping in mind, of course, that as poetry, this project hardly counts. The language is coarse, the dialogue tends towards the vernacular, and the imagery is frequently more appalling than transcendent. The form is nominally blank verse: unrhymed roughly pentameter-ish most of the time, in the places where I have versified it. But the rough draft which preceded the first draft was written as prose, and once I decided that the final product would be a poem, I had to go through and convert it, line by line. I still have a long way to go on this conversion process.
But the good news, in terms of someday eventually completing the project, is that I have no intention of making my Robin Hood reimagining as long as my Greek myths reimagining. With Greek mythology, I wrote well over 150,000 words and felt like I had omitted more sub-plots than I included. With Robin Hood, I’m going to call it good at about 75,000 words and I will have pulled in a lot of sub-plots that were not present in the original material.
The Twist
There is, of course, a twist to my Robin Hood reimagining. Because I work so slowly and I don’t want to get scooped, I’m not yet saying what that twist is. This is me trying to build a sense of mystery around this work-in-progress project, can you feel it?
Thanks for checking in. I’ll post another writing progress update someday. In the meantime, be well!
