Preparing for Episode 10

I go into the studio tomorrow morning to record my last episode of the Masterwork Experiment with Shawn Coyne. 

This afternoon, I sent Shawn my draft of the Brokeback Mountain-derived novella (which I’m still calling Danebury Hill till I get a more apt title). It’s running 10,000 words so far, and I’m about halfway through it. It’ll definitely be longer than Brokeback, but I’m constrained by the parameters of the Experiment to keep it within the range of a long short story or short novella.

Rather than trying to keep it to 15K or 16K as I write, I’m giving myself permission to over-write then cut. 

Here are my findings from the ten-week experiment:

Stumbling blocks:

• Over and over again I got lost in the weeds, trying too hard to match every beat exactly.
• I spent too much time trying to mold my period story perfectly to Brokeback Mountain, resisting abstracting the beats a little further, trying to get it exactly right. For instance, how could I replicate the beat where Ennis abandons Alma to run off to the motel with Jack? My characters don’t have wives. But look! I brought in Betsy, the little scullery maid, because she’s my POV narrative device, and bingo! I have Josiah breaking a promise to little Betsy in order to get upstairs with Matty. That choice cracked the problem open for me and helped me loosen my hold on exactitude.
• Changes to the story timeline–total duration and the sequence of events–have proven very hard to wrangle, and I’ve often felt like I have no story map.

Technical tools: 

• Several streamlining passes through Brokeback Mountain got my beat list down to 83, and I can see that some of them are way too micro.
• On the other hand, some some of the micro beats I found gave me great prompts.
• I numbered the Brokeback Mountain beats sequentially and put them in a list, stripped of all story text, leaving only my title for the beat. This is to help me innovate and not get stuck on 1963 American Cowboy events that I can’t replicate.
• I dumped those into my manuscript as headings, and that created my outline. Now, each time I sit down to write, all I have to do is jot down a few ideas under the next heading in the list. Pretty soon I’m writing whole scenes.
• I do plan to account for every beat in Brokeback Mountain. Either I’ll have replicated it closely, altered its meaning, or consciously crossed it off as untranslatable to my story (or too micro to begin with). That way, I’ll be able to show on paper that I’ve met all the terms of the experiment.

What’s the same as in my past writing efforts:

• I’m still a discovery writer–I write my way to my story–but I’m discovering so much more, so much more easily in this process.
• I’m still a long writer. Even with the brevity of Annie Proulx to guide me, my word count at present says that my story will be twice as long as Brokeback. I hope to pare it to 16K words at the end of the process.

Transformations:

• My draft is way draftier than anything I’ve ever let out of my sight before. I’ve resisted all temptation to go back and even READ what I’ve written, let alone start fixing it.
• It’s okay to be messy. This early draft process is shoveling sand into the sandbox. I’ll sculpt the sandcastles once I have all the sand I need.
• I’ve been able to throw in a TK and keep moving. I’ve been willing to work with placeholder names, a placeholder title, placeholder geography–all kinds of placeholders. It’s a totally new experience!
• Influenced by Proulx’s sparse prose, I’ve just skipped and skipped and skipped things that I would normally include in my stories. It’s amazing how much connective tissue you can do without and still have a story.

Biggest achievements or changes:

• I’m writing again.
• The project has knocked me off dead center, where I’ve been stuck for two years trying to invent a brand new “original” novel without a masterwork to follow. I’d still like to write that novel, and I feel like maybe I can now.
• I swore I was never going to write Regency again, but writing about the servant class has opened up whole new avenues of research and interest.  I’ll never turn out a book a year, but I can see myself creating one or two more novels set in the period.
• I’ve started analyzing a new love story, Wolves of Karelia, published this month in The Atlantic. Why? Because it struck me the way Brokeback Mountain did, like a mysterious miracle, something I could never comprehend or hope to replicate. But now I know the secret for reverse engineering a great story.
• And all I can see are scene and beat types in movies now. Once you see them, you can’t unsee them. How to innovate on them may not be clear yet, but the need for innovation is right in my face. So many clichés out there!