Like 28 Days Later this one has a happyish ending. (Sorry if that spoils the
movie for you, but any one with a taste for zombie movies really should have
seen it by now, and any one who hasn't may be reassured enough to watch it).
The realization that I was so many weeks behind my own schedule, and no where
close to a solution precipitated a magnificent "Lost Weekend" - hangover, sofa,
movies, the penultimate episode of Heroes, long into the night, followed by a
few hours of staring into the darkness, desperate to sleep. I mean by that
every sane cell in my body screaming at my stupid skull to switch off and let us
rest, while the skull entertained lurid yet banal fantasies of failure and
starvation and a wasted life. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Even my misery was proving
uncreative and dull.
I ended up re-reading Edward Rutherfurd's London: the Novel, which is one of
those books which is shockingly bad and thoroughly entertaining. It has to be -
it's XXXX pages long. The research is impeccable (and reproduced in bleeding
chunks every 80 pages or so - how to build a coracle, what a kiddle is and why
the king banned them from the Thames, the origins of the whores of Southwark,
etc, etc), and one has to root for a historical novelist who names his 13th
Century heroine "Tiffany" (it is an authentic name, but what cohones!) Tiffany
is 15, oval faced, slender and small breasted. As are the majority of
Rutherfurd's heroines from 55AD to the present day.
So that's the bad place. I realise that the story I have been trying to tell is
probably untellable after all, and because I am 3 miles cross country from the
nearest pub, drown my sorrows in pulp fiction rather than booze.
This is just a long way of saying that crucial breakthroughs always seem to need
a few day of despair.
It didn't come in a flash of inspiration. It came from 8 hours with a note pad
and pen, scribbling, working out, tearing up, pacing, more tearing up (good
firelighters), more scribbling...
By 10pm I thought I might have a solution, but off course, I was delirious from
sleep deprivation, and wasn't sure if any of it made sense, or, if it did, I
would remember it in the morning. I made one last page of notes - in capitals -
that I hoped I would be able to interpret the next day, and fell in to bed.
That was a week ago. The solution I had been seeking for 5 years is in sight,
and the story is falling into a meaningful pattern at last.
So what was the key?
Well, turns out it was the scene that I have never been able to write – for all
those years I have scribbled a placeholder ("X questions Y, Y doesn't break, X
holds Y for further questioning"). What would Y say to X that would convince Y
to X her live it relative freedom for another 5 days? I always put that off,
for the time when I had the rest of the script working. Dumb, huh?
When I finally wrote it – having nowhere else to go – I realised that whatever Y
told X was a lie, and the audience would know it was a lie (because they already
knew what had happened to bring Y to that point.) and at that point the whole
story became a yawn. Everything else I had written to cover that was melodrama
and co-incidence, and could now been seen through. It was trash.
Hence the melt down.
The solution started in exactly the same place – with that troublesome
interrogation, and what each participant thinks they know before and afterwards,
and the story unwinds from there….
It took me another 24 hours to get the spine of scenes down, and now I have to
write or edit them into the step. All the melodrama has melted away. All the
improbable skills and co-incidences are ashes in the fireplace.
It may not be a brilliant piece of writing, but at last it has a beginning, and
middle and an end, and an interesting way for my poor characters to get from one
to other without becoming ciphers or puppets.
