| | Remember, these are just notes written to herself to brainstorm about a plot and themes. And if you read further in journal, there are other sections where she talks about wanting to write about what would motivate a society that uses the crime to explain or to justify their outrage, an outrage which is really not about the crime but about a person that refused to conform and is coldly indifferent to their wishes.
She is thinking about something much like another story she proposed - one where early on an industrialist seems to be the bad guy, but the deeper you get into the story the more you see that judgment is only because of societies perverted viewing glass. In the end he is the hero. In the story where she used Hickman for ideas, she let the character be someone that did wrong, yet still ends up as a mirror for the cultural perversion of altruism. And, you can see the early seeds of Howard Roark - who instead of being a bad person, is someone who did a 'bad' thing - by altruistic standards, but in fact was exhibiting the highest morality.
Notice how much this is like the out of proportion outrage directed at Rand from this trashy writer and the knee-jerk morons who posted comments. They use misrepresentations, out of context quotes, and fabrications to damn her for crimes that either aren't crimes except through their twisted viewing glass, or are made up altogether. When the real crime they hate her for is refusing to be a sacrificial animal - for refusing to put on the altruistic yoke.
She also wrote that the person in her proposed story was only modeled on Hickman's exterior and specifically said her character would not have the same "degeneracy" on the interior. Further she was looking a the story having a theme where someone's fierce sense of independence and intense sense of life as a child were turned against him by a society that hated him for those qualities and he became warped and twisted in his reaction to the culture's hatred.
Look at her approach. She held tightly to the theme - egoism versus altruism - while casting about for extremes of story line to bring that battle out in bold, naked form with no compromise and no hiding from the heart and soul of the issue. And notice that she kept struggling with identifying and then representing the principles of that theme till she finally got all of the key elements in just the right place with Fountainhead. The Fountainhead was so true to what she loved - it went beyond her key theme (without neglecting it in the least) and painted the portrait of a heroic man - and in doing so, spoke more closely to her sense of life, her first and last love, that vision of the heroic man.
This young girl who had been here in the states for about 2 years was struggling with finding the most powerful way to identify and dramatize the conflict between an individual's glorious pursuit of happiness and the vile hatred it arouses in an altruistic culture. About 8 years later, she began writing the Fountainhead. And, now 81 years later, the toxic, blindly irrational eruptions on that web page prove she was clearly on the right path and the right side and that we still have a long ways to go.
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