More ideas for the ambitious novel project

Thanks for the comments on my dream project. At least I can now tell Rizal of Cafe Salemba that I'm ahead of him: he's still reading and pretends he's an intellectual, while I have moved into a whole new world: writing a novel! (even though it is just in a dream).

OK, back to this would-be-the-first political-economy novel with Indonesian setting. One commenter suggested that it might as well be a non-fiction. Ehm, that's an interesting idea. Except that I don't feel like doing factual investigation with interviews and all that. So let's keep it fiction. That way, I can escape any accusation or allegation of defamation or things like that (or can't I?). Right, maybe I should not name my president character SBY. I'll try SBX.

But still, SBY is my very inspiration, I confess. So I'll keep this SBX guy as a president who is so indecisive, boring, yet warm-hearted. He, the character, will always have hard time whenever a decision making is due. By the time he announces something, things have changed. Right, that was all the description of our protagonist character at this stage. I'll update you as it grows.

What about the antagonist? Of course it's the evil politician. I haven't got a name, so drop me any suggestion, if you have. Think about someone who is trained in economics but everything he says as a politician is economically nonsense. He is also a teacher, maybe. He teaches economics at one big-name university but that's is the only place where he can be identified as certified and sane economist. Everywhere else he is a socialist: parliament, newspaper, TV talkshow, you name it. So, if Ayn Rand is famous with her character's "Who's John Galt?", our antagonist here will be known as someone who always says "Theoretically, economics bla... bla... bla... But, in reality bla bla bla".

But of course I don't want to make this end up like sinetron where the characters' attitude and behavior are either black or white. You can choose to be a total evil (who will die with face full of maggots) or an extreme angel (who has no heart to kill a stinking mosquito), but never in between. While I want something like Jekyll-Hide persona. Or at least a good person who sometimes slips, like a normal person. Or a bad guy who loves children and flowers. In short, I want the readers to be confused whether or not to like SBX or the politician (note that I have dropped the adjective "evil" now). In fact, the terms "protagonist" and "antagonist" should later be irrelevant.

Any ideas? Next time let's talk about plots and possible major scenarios.