#26 - Pressuring The Whimsy (And Other Terrible Neologisms)
Morning folks,
To make up for the lateness of last time, I'm getting this one in earlyish in the day. Everyone's a winner! Going to finally feature some craft musings after several weeks of...well...me musings. It's going to be longer than normal to fit everything in but luckily you're a sucker for masses of low-to-mid quality writing or you wouldn't be reading this in the first place.
But to begin, I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge the great event of the last few days. That's right - me and White Male Theatre's Jon Brittain went to see a Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2 (1991) double bill last night. You're all cool kids in the know so you probably don't need me to tell you this but *just in case* you need to hear it...the 29th of August is Judgment Day within the Terminator franchise (shudder). Judgement Day being the day in 1997 (when 1997 was still the future) that Skynet, the AI to whom the United States has decided to hand over its nuke capability, decides to blow everyone up.
But - I hear you ask - do these old ass movies still blow our minds? Look, I thought I'd be here telling you "Terminator is a bit clunky, a bit 80s-sex-death-metal but number two is an action classic!" And you know what? They're actually both brilliant. The screenplay for the first doesn't have an inch of fat on it, and while the second one is bulkier it's also more thematically expansive like a sequel should be and feels like a quicker watch than its shorter older sibling. The first film also has these lovely, sweet, comedic moments that I'd totally forgotten. While it still is very much the origin story of Sarah Connor - Total Badass, which is how that character is often remembered, she does occasionally get to be a real person here too.
There are tonnes of little clever moments in them as well, which I think speaks to their sometimes unacknowledged sophistication. One of my favourites was in Terminator 2 when Sarah, at her hardest point, goes to kill Dyson, the man who'll bring about Skynet. As she closes in on Dyson and his terrified family, effectively stepping into the position of her usual foe, they use the same musical cue for her as the Terminator on the hunt. Theme in the story and score speaking to each other. *Chef finger kiss*
It's not all perfect - the seams in the SFX, particularly in the first film are sometimes very visible and Michael Biehn in particular is the slight weak link. Jon called him a great physical actor and he certainly is that but he struggles to carry some of the emotional heft. His "I always loved you" to Sarah got a laugh from the audience and made me wince so hard I crushed my popcorn. To be fair to him, it's a hard narrative turn to pull off but sometimes that's exactly what you need the charisma of the actor for.
I could keep writing about this for the whole newsletter but I'll leave it there and move on. But yeah. Still absolute corkers and both worth a watch.
Right.
Project density. I have hyped this up way too much simply by dint of putting off writing it and there isn't really all that much of use to say in truth but it's one of those things that tripped me up early in my career (and occasionally to this day, as you'll see) so wanted to talk about it a little.
There are projects which are obviously going to be big asks, whether that's in terms of the research load, the amount of calibration needed to find the right angle or just the sheer amount of words. These are delightful because you can more or less estimate how long they'll take you and make a rough schedule around them.
There are short, sharp projects which fill the gaps in your time quite nicely. They might take a day, they might take a week but, again, the ask in terms of your effort are quite clear.
And then there are projects that don't seem too big a deal and end up sucking in your entire life. These are dense projects. As luck will have it, it'll probably be something you agreed to do for a mate as a favour. It might end up destroying your friendship. I thought I'd gotten very good at spotting these, and it's one of the reasons I don't do short play nights anymore, but I've had two of late - a 45 minute radio play (which didn't seem too big a project when I was asked to write it), and my Doctor Who short story. The latter in particular was 4,000 words and utilised research and characters I'd already mined deeply for my episode. It's not that I was thinking "yep, I'll dash that off", just "surely this will be a fairly simple task, the pitch I made was pretty straightforward. With research factored in, a week's work, tops?
Yeah. No.
I spent more time researching and detailing that than I have some full length works I've created. It's mad and uneconomical, but the piece just ended up demanding it. I watched myself clear more and more time to finish it up and was angry with myself. You tell yourself "you should just put it down and move on" but you just know, with a bit more excavation, that section there could be better. Or the character might pop a little more. Oh look, a rare source. Exciting! It's where? It'll take how long to get there by train? Better clear the decks. Who needs to pay rent anyway?
So beware the dense projects. They're usually super enlivening and I've loved doing both that short story and the radio play but....dear lord. My schedule hurts.
To make up for the lateness of last time, I'm getting this one in earlyish in the day. Everyone's a winner! Going to finally feature some craft musings after several weeks of...well...me musings. It's going to be longer than normal to fit everything in but luckily you're a sucker for masses of low-to-mid quality writing or you wouldn't be reading this in the first place.
But to begin, I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge the great event of the last few days. That's right - me and White Male Theatre's Jon Brittain went to see a Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2 (1991) double bill last night. You're all cool kids in the know so you probably don't need me to tell you this but *just in case* you need to hear it...the 29th of August is Judgment Day within the Terminator franchise (shudder). Judgement Day being the day in 1997 (when 1997 was still the future) that Skynet, the AI to whom the United States has decided to hand over its nuke capability, decides to blow everyone up.
But - I hear you ask - do these old ass movies still blow our minds? Look, I thought I'd be here telling you "Terminator is a bit clunky, a bit 80s-sex-death-metal but number two is an action classic!" And you know what? They're actually both brilliant. The screenplay for the first doesn't have an inch of fat on it, and while the second one is bulkier it's also more thematically expansive like a sequel should be and feels like a quicker watch than its shorter older sibling. The first film also has these lovely, sweet, comedic moments that I'd totally forgotten. While it still is very much the origin story of Sarah Connor - Total Badass, which is how that character is often remembered, she does occasionally get to be a real person here too.
There are tonnes of little clever moments in them as well, which I think speaks to their sometimes unacknowledged sophistication. One of my favourites was in Terminator 2 when Sarah, at her hardest point, goes to kill Dyson, the man who'll bring about Skynet. As she closes in on Dyson and his terrified family, effectively stepping into the position of her usual foe, they use the same musical cue for her as the Terminator on the hunt. Theme in the story and score speaking to each other. *Chef finger kiss*
It's not all perfect - the seams in the SFX, particularly in the first film are sometimes very visible and Michael Biehn in particular is the slight weak link. Jon called him a great physical actor and he certainly is that but he struggles to carry some of the emotional heft. His "I always loved you" to Sarah got a laugh from the audience and made me wince so hard I crushed my popcorn. To be fair to him, it's a hard narrative turn to pull off but sometimes that's exactly what you need the charisma of the actor for.
I could keep writing about this for the whole newsletter but I'll leave it there and move on. But yeah. Still absolute corkers and both worth a watch.
Right.
Project density. I have hyped this up way too much simply by dint of putting off writing it and there isn't really all that much of use to say in truth but it's one of those things that tripped me up early in my career (and occasionally to this day, as you'll see) so wanted to talk about it a little.
There are projects which are obviously going to be big asks, whether that's in terms of the research load, the amount of calibration needed to find the right angle or just the sheer amount of words. These are delightful because you can more or less estimate how long they'll take you and make a rough schedule around them.
There are short, sharp projects which fill the gaps in your time quite nicely. They might take a day, they might take a week but, again, the ask in terms of your effort are quite clear.
And then there are projects that don't seem too big a deal and end up sucking in your entire life. These are dense projects. As luck will have it, it'll probably be something you agreed to do for a mate as a favour. It might end up destroying your friendship. I thought I'd gotten very good at spotting these, and it's one of the reasons I don't do short play nights anymore, but I've had two of late - a 45 minute radio play (which didn't seem too big a project when I was asked to write it), and my Doctor Who short story. The latter in particular was 4,000 words and utilised research and characters I'd already mined deeply for my episode. It's not that I was thinking "yep, I'll dash that off", just "surely this will be a fairly simple task, the pitch I made was pretty straightforward. With research factored in, a week's work, tops?
Yeah. No.
I spent more time researching and detailing that than I have some full length works I've created. It's mad and uneconomical, but the piece just ended up demanding it. I watched myself clear more and more time to finish it up and was angry with myself. You tell yourself "you should just put it down and move on" but you just know, with a bit more excavation, that section there could be better. Or the character might pop a little more. Oh look, a rare source. Exciting! It's where? It'll take how long to get there by train? Better clear the decks. Who needs to pay rent anyway?
So beware the dense projects. They're usually super enlivening and I've loved doing both that short story and the radio play but....dear lord. My schedule hurts.
In other craft related news, this week I also went to an event hosted by the London Writers' Salon which featured a talk with the poet and author Amal El-Mohtar, co-writer with Max Gladstone of This is How You Lose the Time War. Amal is a cheerful and sharp conversationalist who gave a tonne of actual practical advice which is rarer than you'd like to think it is. I came there effectively as a plus one but liked the evening so much I ditched my current reading to jump right into TIHYLTTW. I'm only a third through but it's gorgeous. Playful and wry and lyrical and repeatedly smirk inducing. Exactly how I like my sci-fi. It's also short enough to read in a sitting. Get on it and thank me (or rather Amal) later. I realise that there will be some Doctor Who fans reading this so I should be clear that it's not about *that* Time War although if you enjoyed *that* Time War, I think you'll enjoy *this* Time War.
Some quick take aways from the talk:
1) A reminder of Ira Glass' perennially useful definition of The Gap: How there's a space between your taste as an artist and your ability or craft. Made me consider that the pitch document is the taste and the script your write from there is the ability/craft.
2) An essay by Daniel Abraham (one of the writers of The Expanse) on how writing sucks differently at different stages of your career. It resonated a whole lot with me.
3) This poem - Moon Fishing by Lisel Mueller.
Finally, I encountered some stories this week that got me thinking about how to earn the slightly more characterful, indulgent parts of your work. There's a big thing about killing your babies in writing (metaphorically) but the man, the legend, Russell T Davies once said "Why would you kill your babies? You love your babies!" and I'm with him on that more than I used to be. Obviously you need to be hard-nosed sometimes, just it can be easy to suck the life out of your projects if you file off every edge. The edges are you too after all.
So if you're determined to keep your whimsy, how do you keep the audience onside if it's not their bag. I think it's something to do with pressuring said whimsy. For example, without trying to spoiler it too much (and very much not intending to call it whimsical), in This Is How You Lose the Time War you have the story of these opposing time agents playing a game of cat and mouse and falling in love. I adore that. It's exactly up my street. The chapters are just so tightly focused on them and their budding infatuation, it would be easy to let the narrative drift off. But there's this device of the seekers - they turn up (so far) at the end of each chapter, starting from the first one, and their actions are described in this lurid, horrifying manner. Very much signalling Something Is Not Right and gives a disturbing accent to the rest of the goings on.
I also saw Once Upon A Time In Hollywood which has a similar quiet antagonism operating in a different, subtler way (which is not something I thought I'd say about a Tarantino film). The threat of the Manson Family and the horrors they inflicted upon Sharon Tate lingers throughout...though only if that's something you come into the movie with. My throat closed up watching Tate enjoy an audience enjoying her work. It was characterful and slightly ugly in a truly human way. It slightly reminded me of my own experiences watching my own plays. If you don't know what happened to Tate in real life, it must seem meandering (although the film meanders a fair bit anyway) but if you do, it's Hitchcock's bomb-under-the-table. It gives those scenes - a young woman enjoying her burgeoning success and why the fuck not? - emotional weight and a growing narrative tension. The film itself doesn't really make the direct connect between Tate and the Mansons until the end, which I guess somewhat undermines the whole gambit and I've had friends who don't know the story for whom this doesn't work which meant their experience of watching it was getting a face full of whimsy. But again, if you do know it...ugh. Every time you see her just living her life, you're reminded of what's to come. The 'bad guys' suffuse every frame she's in without being physically present and in that way, Tate herself is the reinforcement of the pressure. We know she doesn't get to go on, so when will it end for her?*
Basically - a little sprinkling of the forces of antagonism, especially in narratives that don't follow a classical dramatic model, goes a long way. It says to the audience: "Relax, enjoy the quirks, it's all going to build to something, I promise."
That's all from Patel for this week, I think. I continue to play football, I continue to suck but I am running more and that's not nothing. See you next Friday, lads xx
(*Small aside: When we were making Murdered By My Father, this was a tension we absolutely did not want. It felt cheap in that context and helped informed the choice to make it clear the circumstances around the death right at the start.)
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