I'm still struggling a little with thinking up ideas or developing ones that I have so I'm posting a few bullet pointed ideas to show what I have so far, Feed back would be appreciated:
- The magician had been banished from his kind to live in isolation in a lighthouse with his only form of company are the objects he brings to life like the vacuum cleaner.
- The lighthouse is a place where the magician performs his secret shows for VIP guests. using magic the inside of the lighthouse is a massive theatre (kind of like the Tardis). he was planning to show off a new trick involving a Vacuum cleaner which results in many mistakes.
- a private maid who works for a magician to keep his home (Lighthouse) clean. when not around the maid looks at spells and learns a few tricks you could say she is a maid-gician in training and starts getting lazy and uses a spell to bring her vacuum to life to clean on its own which goes out of control.
- The magician lives in the light house that's still used to secure boats to land but his Vacuum cleaner has special qualities it doesn't just clean but can take colour and light from things which results in danger as the boats start to crash (like a time bomb moment) he has to figure out his mistakes and give light back to the light house for the boats to be safe.
I would go for number 3
ReplyDeleteHey George,
ReplyDeleteI think you're still keeping your components a bit separate. Ask yourself these sorts of questions:
Why might the magician be living in a lighthouse? Has he gone there to live away from people, and if so, why? What's his story? Also, at the moment, you're thinking of your magician as an actual 'magical' character, but why not make him a showman who uses illusions - this means that you can't have any magical vacuum-cleaner-coming-to-life stuff, because your magician is just a man who performs tricks.
If your character is a magician in the 'Harry Potter' sense then why not push this into total fantasy realms; maybe this lighthouse is the lighthouse the light from which guides roosting dragons back to the branches (after all, all a light house 'is' is a structure with a light at the top that stops stuff from getting lost or getting into trouble). I don't know, maybe it's the lighthouse at the edge of the world that stops ships from falling off the planet..
Why might a magician need a vacuum-cleaner? For tidying up. Tidying up what? All the million white rabbits he keeps producing from his top-hat? After all, where does everything go that a magician disappears? It must go somewhere - and if so, who cleans it up? And anyway, what would a magician's vaccum-cleaner look like? It could be enormous - it perhaps would need to be if it was hoovering up all those bunches of flowers, white rabbits, stray playing cards, doves, silk-scarves and glamorous assistants! I don't know, maybe all the crap that magicians vanish ends up making some great barrier reef of crap in another dimension that requires a lighthouse and its keeper for warning other creatures away from it?
Perhaps your story could and should begin with 'What Happens to the All Crap Magicians Disappear?'
It sort of reminds me of that idea about all our own junk which we get rid of - there are these huge islands of plastic floating around in the sea because of us: check out the 'great pacific garbage patch'. Maybe your story should derive from a) excepting the logic that magicians are really disappearing things in their acts and then b) extending that logic accordingly - what happens to all that vanished stuff? Where does it go and who is dealing with it, and why might that environment need a) a vacuum-cleaner, and b) a bloody great lighthouse?
Hey George. I like them all. They all have potential. 2 Has a feel of the Pixar short, with the magician and that magic hat and the starving white rabbit... The maid could be a very interesting sorcerers apprentice twist. And the use of the ticking clock thing could go with her too, not just the ship one. Great work George. Oh with the first idea of the isolation and the vacuum cleaner, if the magician is similar to the wizards in Harry Potter, maybe he has no notion of what a vacuum cleaner is or what it does, it being a 'muggle' invention. The story could be his experiments to see what happens to it when he enchants it and the like...? :)
ReplyDelete