Quote and inspiration from Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar.
I’ve written about this before, in the last iteration of kel.zone, I think. But now I’m pondering it as the theme for my next novel. This is the evolution of an idea I’ve been noodling for many years and that’s where that whole GRG post came from, too. How to write a really compelling love story? (BTW I did write a GRG story for the writers group and they skewered it completely!! ha!)
So now I’m crystalizing around a fictionalized version of the relationship between my grandparents. It has to be fiction because I have no idea what the truth is about that union other than what I witnessed as a child and very young woman but what I saw stands to this day as a role model relationship. It’ll be about them and about a female protagonist – a physicist or maths professional – who has become obsessed about love because I also, somehow want to bring in this theme of LOVE being more than a feeling. More than an overused word. And I keep going back to Interstellar as a seed thought…
- Cooper: You’re a scientist, Brand.
- Brand: So listen to me when I say that love isn’t something that we invented. It’s… observable, powerful. It has to mean something.
- Cooper: Love has meaning, yes. Social utility, social bonding, child rearing…
- Brand: We love people who have died. Where’s the social utility in that?
- Cooper: None.
- Brand: Maybe it means something more – something we can’t yet understand. Maybe it’s some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can’t consciously perceive. I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen in a decade, who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t understand it.
Last night I was watching A Trip to Infinity, a documentary on Netflix (a very excellent doc – i highly recommend it) and Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist said, “Love is certainly infinite because when we are overwhelmed by love, we have this constant sense of breaking the limits and the boundaries.”
It’s a huge topic. It’s been done hundreds of thousands of times. But like love itself every story is unique and everyone has their own experience of it. I am excited to get into the lives of my beloved grandmother and the love of her life and to see where these themes take me. I’ll be doing lots of research in physics and maths that gets into the idea of “Love” as a sort of … what, omniscient law, power.. not sure yet. It’s starting to gel, though. I’ve already started working on the character backgrounds and general outline of the story arc (I used SCRIVENER for that) and then during NaNoWriMo I’ll go all out on it. November isn’t that far away. I may even start with a short story that I use as my entry into the BAWL 2023 Anthology that has the theme of SPACE this year.
You saw it here first. Stay Tuned.