As some of you know, I recently finished the first draft of my second manuscript, 47 Ways of Cuteness. It took three years, but I finally got the story out.
While working on 47, I began writing a third manuscript, tentatively titled I Have No Clue What I'm Writing and This Manuscript Still Sucks.
Just kidding.
In both stories, however, I knew something was still missing.
I pride myself on being a levelheaded person who doesn't sweat the small stuff, and that's often how my writing comes out: rational. But who the fook wants to read that?
Think about Facebook. Whose Facebook do you always check up on? It's the person whose life is a total trainwreck, right? They have the most entertaining status updates, the juiciest blogs, the best pictures.
They're so irritating that you'd delete their asses in a New York minute if they weren't such a good time. It's the break-ups, the tears, the ambiguous statuses like, "Why?..." begging people to comment so that we can all be dramatic together.
So that's when it hit me: My stories were missing drama.
I was desperate to make the characters perfect people: calm, collected, and always one step ahead of their emotions. So, I went against the grain of my desire to be levelheaded and made one major change: I completely screwed with them all.
Now, their lives are hard. They're not rational people. Sometimes they fly off the handle. Some of them are ticking time bombs. And it's perfect!
It's a valuable lesson for many of us in the industry of entertaining (in any capacity): This is a form of escapism. People read, watch movies, etc. because they want to see something that they can't see in real life. They want extremes: hilarity, depression, love, hate. They want drama, heartbreak, magic.
As soon as these barriers came tumbling down, I felt this immense release: I had finally found what I needed. And the words came pouring out.
I'm sitting here tonight still feeling the creative flow, avoiding falling asleep because I'd rather be awake and writing. Maybe I've been wrong all along trying to avoid the drama.
Thoughts?? Leave a comment!
While I can appreciate your excitement and I understand where you're coming from in this blog. I think that the we are ultimately saying the same thing. what you call drama, I call conflict. We all enjoy stories of people that have this seemingly perfect level headed life. They then have to take what they know about their life and learn how to overcome something in someone else's world. Something like a know it all in math has to learn how to survive with jocks. Great post
ReplyDeleteHi, thank you for your comment! Very well said, and I can totally see what you're saying. I do agree that we're saying similar things, and I might use the word "conflict" instead of drama -- and as we already know, no story is complete without conflict as you described it. Very nicely put! :-) Thanks again for reading.
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