To begin I’ll need to share some background.
As many of you already know, my single guiding project over the past
And I was right. In the end it took three years of character research and outlining before I felt I could commit to generating even a single actual page, and another full year after that to write and circulate a “friendly-reader draft” to fifteen variously willing souls. Within a month or so the reactions started trickling in, and soon afterward a clear pattern of feedback had emerged: Readers seemed to agree that there wasn’t enough point to each individual scene before a change in POV, and my characters seemed to be trapped in a series of exchanges that were too similar across actors and circumstances. Neither of these reactions was expected—but the grounds for encouragement were there for the asking, in the sheer consistency of everyone’s responses. All I needed to do was figure out how to clarify my thinking about why and whether to keep a scene, and to mix-up the character interactions, and presumably I’d have something I could show to strangers.
It's been most of a year, now, but the good news is that I’ve kept at it. And the even better—and more topical—news is that I’ve continued to “free-write” about where things stand, and where I think they need to go, every day. Even when all of that free-writing hasn’t felt as if it’s really moving things forward, I’ve made it my first-thing duty to get right back to the bottom of the hill and clasp that rock in both arms as if it were the only rock in my life.
For the past few weeks I’ve been focused entirely on the scene list, journaling about a tight constellation of how-to precepts targeted to that problem: from whether a plot point can justify its own vignette even when it doesn’t complicate someone’s situation, to how many times the same scene can be revisited with alternating POV before the whole thing starts to feel gimmicky. Some sessions of thinking about this problem have been more profitable than others, of course, and by and large the earlier ones have been more profitable than the more recent ones—also not surprising.
A few days ago, when I realized that I couldn’t think about ‘Scene 19-37’ for one minute longer without sticking a pencil in my eye, I put down both the scene list and the pencil and instead turned my attention to the other issue my readers had indicated—that of diversifying the characters’ witty badinage. But to shift my focus in this way I had to go back and consult the journaling I’d most recently compiled on this other subject, and because enough time had passed that I didn’t recall the last few things I’d written on-topic, I got to read them as if from a stranger’s perspective. Here's a sample:
The impression we form of a character comes down to whether that character has high or low capability, be it social, technical, professional, or other—I’ll call it “facility”—and whether that person is comfortable with him/herself, and highly or less highly engaged when he or she interacts with others. The character of ‘Dignan’ [in the movie Bottle Rocket] is a low-facility / low-comfort / high-engagement type, and we’ve all known someone like that, and it informs everything he does. When he pulls Anthony aside and says, “Avid? What do you mean by ‘avid’? Did it sound weird to you when I said that?” he’s evidencing all three of these supports, and the exchange happens early enough in the movie that we can form our sense of who he is from that one moment.
…Okay, fine. Maybe even true. But there’s a problem afoot here, and it's self-evident: If you’ve just gone back and re-read ten or twelve paragraphs like that, and if the original object was to make your own characters less homogenous, then a series of observations about what made them turn out so homogenous in the first place isn’t going to be terribly helpful. And it wasn't. In fact, really just about the only productive thing that came out of going back and reading three pages of this stuff is that it got me back on my own train-of-thought at the precise station where I’d most recently gotten off.
With just that much to go on and nothing else, I picked up the pen and thought of Max Cherry (the Bail Bondsman in Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch). I don’t know exactly why I was thinking of Max Cherry that morning, but with the combination of those most-recent thoughts about character as a starting-point, and Max Cherry as my guinea pig, I wrote this:
The reason Max Cherry’s non-rhetorical question to Ordell Robbie (“You ever been to prison?”) works so well as a character stroke is because it shows us what Max does when he’s got the upper hand. And he completely gets in his own way about it. I mean, he doesn’t really care whether Ordell Robbie has been to prison or not, and the answer does nothing to consolidate Cherry’s leverage. Indeed, if he’s been a bail bondsman as long as this, he must know that the answer will do the exact opposite. We’ve just spent parts of two pages listening to him get hen-pecked by his ex-wife, and now at the precise moment that he could indulge in rolling a little bit of shit downhill, he fucks it up more or less intentionally.
Then I went to the kitchen and made myself a second cup of coffee, and when I came back ten minutes later, I wrote this:
Perhaps one of the reasons my characters sound the same isn’t so much that they’re the same person, as that they keep finding themselves in the same role: an inferior rung in the power structure, and un-willing enough about it that they’re prepared to call the superior player on his bullshit as soon as he’s demonstrably wandered above his pay grade. So yes, there seems to be a three-pronged structure that identifies who a character is (“facility-comfort-engagement”) but there’s also a completely separate, two-by-two matrix of different circumstances: superior vs. inferior; and whether or not the player on the inferior rung is accepting, vs. not.
This probably isn’t a catch-all, since the easy counter-example is Brad Pitt’s character, Jackie Coogan, in the movie Killing Them Softly—who never strays from one square in that two-by-two. But perhaps this is part of a person’s core character as well: some people are adaptable to other positions on the two-by-two, and others aren’t or don’t care to be. Heck, people can even bring a resistant-inferior position on themselves, for reasons no doubt tied to their childhood or some other facet of their backstory.
At this point the phone rang and I took the chance to stand up and stretch my legs a little. When I came back to the desk about half an hour later, I wrote this:
You know what? That’s wrong. At least as far as my example is concerned. Jackie Coogan’s scenes in Killing Them Softly occupy all four squares of the matrix I’ve just described. He’s superior in a situation where the other person doesn’t like it, when he’s in the car with Richard Jenkins; he’s inferior and comfortable about it, in the bar with James Gandolfini; he’s inferior and resistant, the next day in the hotel room with James Gandolfini; and he’s superior toward someone who immediately goes along with it—at least to that extent—when he’s lecturing “the kid” about what he’s going to have to do to him.
Perhaps it’s the supporting characters in a tale who are more likely to stick to a particular square in terms of their scenes, and that indeed this is what makes them identifiable as supporting characters. They always play the same role in the scenes they’re in, and this is what makes us think of them as “broad.”
It was now 11:30AM and I still hadn’t had breakfast. Or a shower. Or fed the cats. Plus I’d lost all feeling in one set of toes. After checking the routine boxes and stealing a quick walk through the neighborhood, I came back to the desk one more time, and wrote … well, this:
Wait a minute. I think this is what makes character “surprises” work, or not work, in general. We talk in writing circles about the “unsurprising-surprise”—a character has to do something we wouldn’t have expected at first, but which makes perfect sense to us in hindsight. But the character can’t surprise in this manner if he or she isn’t first in an unfamiliar square (or at least unfamiliar to us) on the two-by-two. We meet them as inferior-accepting, e.g., and then they’re superior with someone who doesn’t accept it, and our hero doesn’t do what we would have predicted, if that was all we knew about them.
Here’s Max Cherry, a guy we’ve gotten to know in the context of being on a very inferior rung to his ex-wife, and being very unhappy about it. On that much basis, we might expect such a person to be little short of despotic when he gets the chance, but instead he completely cedes the initiative to Ordell Robbie in the first thirty seconds. And he doesn’t do it in a milquetoast way that makes us think he secretly likes being bullied: he does it in a way that conveys his true self, contextualized from both scenes put together. It’s not that he wishes he wasn’t on the inferior rung in the earlier scene; it’s that he wishes there weren’t any rungs. Rungs bore him. Max Cherry is a guy who wishes the world made more sense. And in a world that made sense, there would be no rungs.
It’s not at all what we’re expecting at first, and it rings totally true in hindsight because we’ve gotten hints of that core ethos all along. The three pillars I was focusing on before (facility, comfort, engagement) form the basic structure that will ring true when a person doesn’t do what we’d expect from a different square on the two-by-two. What I need to do to vary my characters, then, is to vary their places on that matrix and let them “surprise” us with how they handle it.
I won’t ask whether you agree with this analysis, because it doesn’t matter. This isn’t a column about literary criticism, or about how to be a better writer—neither of which would be appropriate coming from the hand of yours truly anytime soon. The point of relaying these passages here is what they represent in terms of gaining on the project at hand, whatever it may be: Even if I’m completely wrong in the quoted passages, they still represent a specific path forward—one which addresses the core criticism of my readers, and which will unambiguously improve the project even if it’s scandalously uninformed. It’s a things-to-do-list, disguised as a fitful and discursive episode of thinking out loud.
So here is what we can conclude about large-project productivity from this experience, in four bullet points:
1. Keep up the churn. Most large-scale projects would be far easier if we didn’t have lives to crop up and get in the way, but we do. And that simple fact simply and unconditionally demands some form or another of journaling. If you journal every day, you gain the obvious cliché benefit of not forgetting your present thinking on the matter before you can do anything about it, but the far more substantial benefit is the continuity of that thinking. You journal not because you want to remember it right now, but because you’ll want to see what you were thinking now, later. Do this every day. Even when your project feels difficult to face, journal about it. Indeed when that happens, journal about how difficult it is to face. And try to be as honest and specific as you can about why. Which brings us to….
2. Don’t be afraid to go meta. Writing to one’s self is unnatural enough for most people; it probably feels downright psychotic when writing to one’s self about one’s own process. But in my experience there’s no substitute. If you’re trying to finish a Ph.D. dissertation, and you’ve got this mountain of data, and it’s not obvious how you’re going to draw an interesting conclusion without cherry-picking, that’s where you are. So, write “At this point I’m just not sure how this data is going to lead to an interesting conclusion without cherry-picking.” Who knows: perhaps what comes of another paragraph or two in such a style, is that this very fact is what’s interesting about the data. Perhaps the dissertation is about how the data didn’t behave itself. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned from that. Of course such a big revision would take a lot of work, and effort on a specific task always follows a clear pattern of diminishing returns. Which is why we need to….
3. Have sub-projects to which you can turn for a cleanse, instead of stopping altogether. If you know that your grant-writing project includes a set of community demographic reports, as well as a long narrative passage about how the city intends to spend the grant money if you get it for them, then have those two things wired in your brain “in parallel,” rather than “in series.” This way when you’re ready to bang your head against the desk about the demographics, you can give yourself a break by fantasizing on paper about what the city might do with the money. And vice-versa. In this manner can you prosecute your work on the larger project continually and still fool yourself into thinking you’re taking lots of breaks. And then on that distant day when the a-ha moment seems to happen….
4. Embrace your breakthroughs whether they’re real or not. I saved this one for last because it happened to me last, but also because it’s undoubtedly the most controversial of the four. Personally speaking, I sincerely doubt whether it makes much difference if an a-ha sensation in the middle of a big project, is legitimate. Indeed I think it’s rather beside the point entirely, since embracing a new “discovery” will have the effect of impelling the creator forward through the project either way. Even if the a-ha turns out later not to have been the right way to go, the emotional lift that comes from a renewed focus will toss-off all sorts of other breakthroughs. And the more such breakthroughs get recorded, the lower the probability that they all turn out to be wrong.
So, there you have it. I promised you a long column and I delivered, but I hope in the end you’ve found a kernel or two with which to revisit that unwieldy project of yours, whatever it may be. By keeping-up your churn, not fearing a meta-discussion with yourself about process, cleansing across different facets of the work, and embracing your a-ha’s, you just may find that you’ve imbued your project with the twin benefits of renewed enthusiasm, channeled along a far more focused set of marching orders.
Imagine what you could do with that sort of lift. Imagine how much fun it would be when it paid off.
Dave O’Gorman
Gainesville, Florida
If you or someone you know faces a large project and you’d like a free consultation from me on how we might work together to see it through to its completion, please reply in the comment section of this column, or email me at cinemademocratica@gmail.com.
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