Help with novel, academics needed

[something2say]

Hi

I'm writing my 3rd book, 2nd novel and I need some help with my protagonist.

Helen went to Oxford or Cambridge and was very bright but lacks confidence. She had a brilliant idea but has not yet followed it up.

She married another brilliant academic, older than her but competitive, patronising and sexist. She is going to leave him and follow her idea.

There is going to be an older female academic who guides and encourages her.

I dont even know what her idea is, but I can see her working on it....
I don't know anything about the life of an academic either.

The help I'd like if possible would be around, what is your life like? If you do something ground breaking, is it easy to break through?
What's it like writing a thesis? What happens?
What might a successful trajectory look like?

Any real life experiences would be really helpful please.

Thankyou

Make her study something really sexy like mycology. Or one of my friends spent her post doc smelling meat at different rates of decomposition each day and rating the odour. He can study agricultural notes from mid century, mainly in Hampshire but with one project Sussex based- he’s pretty excited about that but it’s obviously a big stretch for him

OMG @Pogmella I couldn't cope with that sort of excitement in my research!

Mycology might actually be a plan, because it would explain what she is doing in Kenya. Only thing is, she would have her nose to the ground and far too taken up with tiny fungi and spores and things to notice any lions other than as an annoying distraction.

OP, I think your musical idea is probably better.

Not all academics need to do field research or empirical research tied to a specific place. I am a philosopher, I would work anywhere. I know of colleagues who have taken a cruise to write a book. She could be on research leave, i.e.. has won a competitive process for a grant which covers her salary so she can take time out of teaching to write. She could then go anywhere to write.

The only snag is that philosophers do not tend to have highly popular, profit-making ideas...on a good year I make 50 quid in royalties from my books...

I do know of a couple of colleagues who are taking sabbaticals to work with Microsoft on AI ethics so maybe she has a great idea on how to 'code' morality - you'd really need to know what you are talking about here though, otherwise you risk writing something really stupid.

Maybe she's doing embodied performative research into Karen Blixen.

I reckon at this point it's a race to see who gets published first - the OP, who's off writing her musician storyline, or the MN academic collective.

Maybe she's doing embodied performative research into Karen Blixen.

I'd read the hell out of that. Especially if it involved the OP's Helen wearing a pith helmet and channelling Meryl Streep's 'I had a faaahm in Ahfricaaaah' to interpretive dance, and ended up with her being offed by the vengeful spirits of 'her' Kikuyu. Who also pointed out in Greek chorus that Denys Finch-Hatton was a balding, big-nosed playboy, not twinkly Robert Redford.

(I do like much of her fiction very much, but the 'my natives' approach makes me want to hit her on the head with a copy of The Empire Writes Back.)

Awww, lovely twinkly Robert Redford.

And he washed her manky safari hair sexily.

Denys Finch-Hatton was a balding, big-nosed playboy

Who shot lovely elephants, what's more.

Whatever about portraying academia, will you be able to write a plausible portrait of life in Kenya? I lived in Nairobi for several years, and I have to say that I've never communed with a lion. I did stare an occasional monkey in the eye.

Good idea re musician, OP. Apart from it being something you know, almost any other 'brilliant idea' would have to be credibly described - and it seems somewhat unlikely that would be possible. Whereas with a piece of music you don't actually have to be able to deliver on it. (Although it would be a problem should anyone want to make a film of your masterpiece.)

Probably a moot point now, but the obvious discipline in which you could make a groundbreaking discovery in Kenya would be in paleoanthropology. It wouldn't be at the desk itself (although you can develop hunches there). She'd have to get herself invited on someone else's dig, because she hadn't been able to get an academic post and was working as a lowly dig assistant, but all along she'd had a theory about X and then her trowel hits something....

It's worth having a bit of think about the use of Africa as a backdrop to a Western woman's personal drama. A Kenyan writer called Binyavanga Wainaina wrote a very good piece about it here.

That is a brilliant piece, bibliomania, hadn't seen this before.

There are some links to other articles by him, too cory - I really rate him as a writer. He's not a big international name - it seems to be female African fiction writers who're doing well at the moment (more power to them) but I think there's a lot to be said for his kind of memoir/think-pieces.

Absolutely, @bibliomania. It didn’t end with Karen Blixen by any means.

Though Elizabeth Gilbert of course managed to reduce the entire world outside America to a theme park backdrop in which a privileged woman ‘finds herself‘ in the explosion of Western narcissism that was Eat, Pray, Love.

Isn't that why she chose countries starting with "I", Scatter? Someone said she should have tried Iraq and Iran, which might have yielded some different conclusions.

Haha. She should do a sequel: Iran, Iraq and Ingushetia.

I'd read it!

Isn't that why she chose countries starting with "I", Scatter? Someone said she should have tried Iraq and Iran, which might have yielded some different conclusions.

In fairness, it would probably just have involved 'oppression tourism' and her swanning about with her blowdry slightly covered, under the impression her mere presence in EYE-ran would inspire Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.