Killing Your Darlings
I don’t know why, but for the past few days I’ve found myself obsessing over ideas that don’t work. But not the normal “wow, this scene sucks” or “this plot point doesn’t work at all” kind of idea — ideas that work on their own, but for various external reasons fail.
I’ll give an example: in the novel I’m writing, I always thought it’d be funny to incorporate a scene that essentially spoofs the scene in Sling Blade where Karl goes to visit his father (played by Robert Duvall), who’s a barely coherent, almost immobile drunk living in squalor. It would have also spoofed a scene in the VH1 movie about Meat Loaf, where he goes to visit his unsupportive father (early in the movie, Meat Loaf leaves home because his dad comes after him with a butcher knife) and discovers a Meat Loaf shrine. Because I leave no rural social issue unmocked, the joke mainly revolved around the father (of German-farmer heritage) having a shrine to the Nazi Party rather than a shrine to his son.
I’ll tell you why I cut it (ignoring the fact that it’s not terribly funny): it has nothing to do with anything. It has no bearing on the story, doesn’t fundamentally change the character or his conflict with his mother (he blames her for the father’s death, making the big reveal that he’s still alive only function to shift his anger from the death to the hiding) — it’s what I like to call a Family Guy spoof: it’s random, it’s kind of funny, but it means absolutely nothing aside from, “Hey, look! They referenced that movie!”
If I’m going to do a spoof, I much prefer the idea of spoofing something that has bearing on either the story or the characters. When I mentioned spoofing Saving Private Ryan’s opening, it served essentially the same function as the original movie: illustrating the chaos and futility of war while introducing its characters through their actions in this particular situation. I’ve always found that to be the key to high-quality spoofing — make it about something, not just a show-offy example of all the obscure movies you’ve seen.
Here’s another example that has nothing to do with spoofing, because I’m sure you’re as tired of that word as I am by now. In high school, one of my friends and I came up with an idea, based on a true anecdote. It’s so incredibly dumb, in retrospect, but the problem that I’m struggling with is that the idea refuses to go away. Plenty of ideas, if I don’t write them down, disappear completely. This one’s almost a decade old, but it’s still there, sometimes trying to dominate my thoughts.
The true anecdote it’s based on goes like this: we were at a restaurant in Traverse City, Michigan. The day before, we had gone to a department store right across the street from this restaurant called Stages-Milliken. I honestly can’t remember why we did this. I think because we didn’t realize Traverse City is right on the edge of a giant lake and we didn’t pack swim clothes. I know we were buying clothes, but the point is the name of the store: Stages-Milliken. At the restaurant, I dropped my fork, and some random waiter — not ours — who happened to walk by picked it up. I said, “Thanks,” and everyone at the table heard him respond, “Thank you very much, Dr. Milliken.” Maybe he said something else, but I swear to you, this is what our ears all heard. “Thank you very much, Dr. Milliken.”
Within an hour, we had the basic idea of a screenplay with this weird moment as its inciting incident, where for some reason two teenagers are mistaken for mad scientist Dr. Milliken and his lowly assistant, Stages, and end up embroiled in what’s basically a Bond movie, except they’re confused for the evil geniuses bent on world domination. Meanwhile, the actual Milliken and Stages infiltrate the group of teenagers and try to manipulate them into world domination via road trip.
You can see why the idea fails. Austin Powers has been done. The “Hank Scorpio” episode of The Simpsons has already been done. The basic idea of Milliken was Professor Farnsworth from Futurama, and Stages was Kif. Why either would be mistaken for teenagers was a plot hole that I’m not sure we ever solved. The closest thing to a fresh spin on anything is the idea of two middle-aged or elderly men posing as teenagers (picture Mr. Burns dressed like Jimbo in “Who Shot Mr. Burns, Part 1”) and trying to convince them to take over the world. But face it: that’s retarded.
Why can’t I let this idea go? I have no clue, but that’s why I have the fake band blog. I intentionally had Traverse City as a tour destination for them so I can finally write this stupid idea and make it go away. And that is, in many ways, the function of that blog. I can take all the flotsam and jetsam of weirdness floating through my brain and get rid of it, opening it up for clear, focused writing.
I can’t speak to everybody’s writing process, but doing that is the only thing that works for me. I don’t think anything I’ve written on the other blog is genius or poetry. It’s just an accumulation of weird things that make me laugh, either affectionately (like the history of Guns N’ Roses) or derisively (like O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It…). So if you’re a writer struggling to focus, feeling the constant temptation to add weird inside jokes nobody but you will understand, do the reading world a favor: start a fake blog that nobody but you will ever read, and concentrate on making the rest of your stuff tighter. Unless you aren’t looking to sell out and enjoy the good life of the mainstream. In that case, by all means continue to write your stories about masturbating on subway platforms and submit them to various “edgy” publishers who claim to have more interest in HARDCORE than profit, then accuse them of going corporate when they reject you. It’s fun!
Posted by Stan on May 5, 2008 4:11 PM | Permalink | Career-Based Rambling | Digg It
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