If you had to write a book, what would it be about?
No genre restrictions, so a tell-all memoir is as valid a response as a high-fantasy tome. Maybe you want to dive in deep on an anthropological topic, or maybe you want to pen a full book of contemporary political commentary. Any and all options are on the table, with the only caveat being that you'd have to write enough to fill a book, so it would have to be an area of knowledge or passion for you--likely both.
Also, for those here that have already written books, feel free to talk about those if you like, or one you hope to write in the future.
For those that haven't, don't feel constrained by real-world concerns/inhibitions. Pretend you have the time and resources to adequately devote to the book to fully see your vision through.
Make sure you give us:
- A summary of what the book would be about
- An explanation of why you'd want to write that specific book
- And, most importantly, a good title!
I'd probably write mine about my experience with brain cancer. I've fought it twice and feel like I'm constantly looking over my shoulder waiting for it to come back. I feel like writing about it would really help me process it, even if no one ever reads it.
As for a title, I'm not entirely sure. I think maybe "Stubborn Survival", but I'm not overly fond of that title.
When I was younger, I had grandiose ideas of writing my autobiography, but I got over that. I finally had the impetus to write, I wrote furiously about my teenage years, I reached the age of 18 in my writing... and came to a dead stop. It seems that I had mostly just wanted to record and process my adolescence (which was a difficult time for me, for various reasons). Having got those events out of me, the urge to write stopped. It was a fairly cheap form of therapy, all things considered.
My great unwritten book would have been a historical romance: the life-long love story between the first Roman Emperor Augustus (né Gaius Octavius) and his right-hand man, Marcus Agrippa. I haven't come up with a title, but the vague ideas I've had are fairly unimaginative, such as "Augustus and Agrippa: a love story".
Most biographies I've read about Augustus gloss over what clearly appears to be a homosexual relationship. I know the perils of retrospectively applying modern-day standards to historical people, but it seems obvious that there was something more between Augustus and Agrippa than them merely being close buddies. They were both married during their lives, but Augustus produced only one child by his first wife and none by his second, and Agrippa married... Augustus's daughter. Also, they were literally life-long companions, from when they met in their teens until Agrippa's death about 60 years later. Maybe they weren't actively lovers for that whole time, but I believe their friendship included a component of romantic love.
And I've never read a serious historical treatment of that personal relationship which formed the Roman Empire. Augustus could never have become Emperor without Agrippa the soldier winning his battles, and he could never have remained Emperor without Agrippa the engineer converting his plans into reality. Meanwhile, Agrippa could never had risen from his working-class origins to become the second-most important man in the Empire without Augustus's political savvy and ambition (and the wealth he inherited from Julius Caesar). Separately, they couldn't have conquered and revitalised Rome; together, they created the Roman Empire. Their relationship was one of the most important relationships in European history, and I think their personal story needs to be told.
Then I looked around last year, and found that this has been done before. It's not an original idea. I found a few books about this story. They all seem to be self-published, and the occasional samples I've browsed have shown a less-than-exemplary writing standard. But they exist. And my book would likely be just one more of those unknown self-published books written by yet another unprofessional hack with an agenda to push - which pretty much put me off the project.
Currently I'm working on a graphic novel with my brother, about the first intergrated school of humans and fae, and everybody trying to pull it apart. Our leads are a mixed lineage magical girl who is kind of a mess after her brother died and her resurrection attempt went... odd, and her protege, a human champion of destiny born of a long line of fae, and has no interest in bringing about the end of days or being offed to reincarnate into someone more willing, much to the frustration of everybody invested in those sorts of things. They battle cultists, an older sister, fae supremacy, the working world, anarchists, geese, themselves and the expectations and systematic injustices of society, in "Arcadia Mages."
This is the untitled Trashfire Magical Girl concept I've been poking away at in the Creative Progress thread, and I'm working on it mostly to get it out of my system, my job bores me and my brother wanted to draw something. Also I want to get into Screenwriting, Hollywood is expensive, and Novel writing is difficult because I have a hard time mixing dialogue with action without listing out what people are doing while they are talking, so I might as well play to the format that specifically plays to that, so graphic novels are a good compromise.
Full disclosure I am still mad stoked for this. Glad you're still plugging away at it!
I'll do you one better and tell you about the books I AM going to write!
I've mentioned it before but Traveler's is something I've been wanting to write for awhile. It's meant to work as an intersection of my two passions: literature and music. Each chapter will be titled after a song and involve that song in someway, thereby creating a sort of soundtrack for the book as a whole. For example, the first chapter is called, "Black Water" and features the namesake song by The Doobie Brothers skipping spookily on an unplugged stereo.
Valeria 2199. The story of how one of the highest and poorest neighborhoods of my city remains above sea level after most of Brazil is submerged by global warming, and how the rich gentrified it, forcing the original population to live in subhuman conditions and creating a serious social problem. There’s a lot more to that. It’s a big universe.