Getting Burned Out on a Character
In mentioning the notecard theory the other day, I started rambling about a novel I’m in the process of revising and editing. It’s in pretty good shape in a general sense — nothing huge to rewrite — but it had enough flaws that I needed to get organized on it.
I neglected to mention that, until a day or two before that post, the novel had been sitting, lifeless, while I distracted myself with easier (and potentially more lucrative) screenplays about people beating up Nigerian 419 scammers. I spent much of last summer revising it, then I decided, “I need to get on that novel again” and put it up in the little status sidebar, thinking if I let all my shame hang out, I might do something about it.
Well, I am doing something about it, but not because of its shameful flaccidity as it flaps in the wind. I just got burned out on this particular set of characters.
These particular characters have been with me since around 2001. I don’t want this to sound like a pretentious artist thing, like these characters have invaded my soul and I love them like I would my own children, because it’s really not. The progression of the characters is very practical: first, I invented them to exist in a feature film I planned to shoot with a tiny, tiny crew and my friends as actors. When that failed, I…took the route of lying my ass off.
I took a 100-level screenwriting class that was divided into three related parts: documentary, narrative, and experimental. The syllabus was set up as a domino effect: you get a subject for your documentary, you write a narrative film based on the documentary, then you write an experimental film based on the narrative. Tasked with interviewing somebody both real and interesting, and being both unable and unwilling to complete that task, I elected to “interview” somebody interesting…but not real.
This is actually when I knew he had potential. I made up a person. He does not exist. He never has, he never will. Yet, when I pitched this “person” as the documentary subject — people were amused by this eccentric rocker they’d never heard of. They were amused when I brought in an interview that read like an episode of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. And they laughed out loud when I brought in a 15-page script about this fictional character and his friends.
After dabbling with an unsuccessful attempt at a website (what I know refer to as a “dry run”) dealing with the characters and their band, I let it rest for a few years…
…until I went to L.A. and was forced, as part of the class I took out there, to bring in three fully formed ideas. I figured, since I had a clear idea of the characters and a short-script draft, it couldn’t hurt to scrawl down that idea as one of the three, even though I had a ringer that I thought would wow the prof so much that he’d support and encourage that one.
He didn’t. In fact, his reasoning was that my eyes supposedly “lit up” when talking about the washed-up rocker idea. Huh. Maybe it is a pretentious artist thing.
A few months after writing this script, I decided maybe it was time to attempt to take my career seriously. Maybe I could latch on to the viral marketing bandwagon and make a second attempt at a website. The hope was to get it to a point of “Internet sensation” — cult popularity that would give me enough traction to tell production companies, “Hey, look, this script has potential!”
Despite the 10,000 friends the fake band has on MySpace (nearly 50 of which aren’t spambots), it’s not something I’d call an “Internet sensation.” Half of the people who have paid attention seem to think it’s legitimate, and the other half don’t quite seem to understand the joke. Mostly, though, people don’t pay attention. I’ve accepted that, in the hopes that maybe someday some person who’s just as warped as me will stumble across the sites* and get hooked. It costs me nothing but time, and for awhile it was an amusing diversion…
…until, like I said, I got burned out. I planned an entire story arc on the blog, but I wrote one or two entries before I just, simply, got too bored to continue. Not because I hated the story or the characters. I’d just written so much about these people, it started to feel repetitive. How many times can he get conned out of his money? How many times is his wife going to leave him? How many times will the band quit? What started as running jokes stopped being funny.
What do you do when this happens? How do you get the mojo back, especially when you have to do something major like, um, finish rewriting a novel? I could have always just ditched the blog for awhile — nobody but me reads it, anyway — and pick up again. In fact, that’s pretty much what I did. I’m in the process of catching up, which is why my blogging here has been a little erratic lately. (If you look on the band’s blog, all the posts from the past six weeks — around 25 — have been written by me over the past couple of days.)
First, I tried to pick it up again with a new character — one who has yet to be introduced, but she will parody my arch-nemesis Diablo Cody and become incorporated in the next major story arc, which parodies this guy. The operative word here is “parody.” That helped a little bit, but it didn’t give me the desired level of enthusiasm.
In my earlier post, I write, “I picked up on one moment in a related story that made me rethink the characters’ backstory.” This sentence pretty much inspired today’s entire post, and what I refer to very vaguely there is the exact thing that inspired me to continue working on these characters.
I went back through some old stuff and stumbled across possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever written, a structural and stylistic parody of O.J. Simpson’s classic “fictional” tell-all If I Did It… The concept fits perfectly with the established backstory, but because I went through O.J.’s book sentence by sentence and grafted Girth’s life onto it, I had to create some strange backstory surprises. re-reading it, I discovered one of the surprises, and it gave me a whole different outlook on his career. In fact, reading one small paragraph of this goofy thing fixed every problem with the “flashback chapter” in my novel, and the alteration of the backstory made him more interesting to me.
The advice you can draw from this is — well, if you’re anything like me, you’ll end up forgetting small but vital chunks of what you’ve written if it’s more than a year old. No matter how bored you are with a character or a story, go back over the material until you find something new and surprising. It doesn’t have to be literally on the page, as it was in this case; I’ve had similar moments of clarity just by looking at individual scenes with fresh eyes. You’ll see something new and different that will invigorate the writing. It’s how Dying Proof went from a love story to a story about sibling rivals (Freud would love it!).
*Yes, plural — part of the fun of viral marketing is trying to assert your artificial reality on the real world. So far, this has caused me to accumulate over 20 MySpace accounts and create five different websites. [Back]
Posted by Stan on April 30, 2008 4:24 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Career-Based Rambling | Digg It
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