My Big Fat Gay Drama
So what on God's green Earth am I writing?
It's great to be blogging again by the way. I had forgotten how theraputic it is! Though methinks today it's simply a diversion from a hellish writing day.
For years now I've been circling a personal story. My "coming out" story if you want to call it that. The story of my feelings for my straight mate and telling him. Telling my parents and their reaction, though they were very positive so I'd have to inject some significent oomph into it if that's the route I go. And I haven't done it for whatever reason. Starting this course I wanted to do something that was both personally rewarding and challenging. Something that would mean something to me. So of course I started to think about what that would be. 9 weeks in and I've gone through all kinds of permutations. I started with the story of a gay guy falling for a straight guy and it was all a bit Dawson's Creek. A coming out story simply isn't interesting enough and I spent weeks trying to make it work so that the coming out bit would only be step one and the character would learn he has deeper issues. I was wearing my heart on my sleeve at that point and I have to say it felt very strange to be talking about it in those terms with other people. But as I said I'm blessed with a great group on this course, highly supportive and good friends so that made it more comfortable. Somewhere along the way things changed again and currently I'm writing about a gay guy thrown out by his dogmatically religious Mother with whom he must reconcile some years later when it emerges she is dying of AIDS.
Now of course that's the very bare bones of the story. I feel like the story has great potential, certainly the emotion I wanted to create is in there, the characters are starting to get somewhere, it's just the actual story I'm missing. "He does A, B,C and D to get to E." The story, the plotting of that story, this, I'm realising, is the absolute weakest element of my writing. Each Monday we get together, people give comment and feedback and it's great. The problem is that though many of the ideas and much of the feedback is really strong and very helpful, it's all too easy to lose sight of what you were originally trying to do in the first place. That scripts change throughout their development is not only a given but the very reason scripts become great at all. Rewriting is the key. But what I feel I'm missing is the central core of what I was trying to do and this is also changing from week to week which is why I'm currently struggling quite badly. If I had a stable core idea around which stories, characters, plots could change well that would be fine. But when the actual concept changes, for me at least, the work starts to flounder. I knew vaguely I wanted to write a gay character, have an emotional drama and have it personally meaningful. Well, okay great but that's not a concept. What am I trying to say? What do I want to communicate? What do I want my characters to feel? To learn? To experience? And in turn, what do I want an audience to feel, learn and experience?
The truth is I simply don't know.
It's great to be blogging again by the way. I had forgotten how theraputic it is! Though methinks today it's simply a diversion from a hellish writing day.
For years now I've been circling a personal story. My "coming out" story if you want to call it that. The story of my feelings for my straight mate and telling him. Telling my parents and their reaction, though they were very positive so I'd have to inject some significent oomph into it if that's the route I go. And I haven't done it for whatever reason. Starting this course I wanted to do something that was both personally rewarding and challenging. Something that would mean something to me. So of course I started to think about what that would be. 9 weeks in and I've gone through all kinds of permutations. I started with the story of a gay guy falling for a straight guy and it was all a bit Dawson's Creek. A coming out story simply isn't interesting enough and I spent weeks trying to make it work so that the coming out bit would only be step one and the character would learn he has deeper issues. I was wearing my heart on my sleeve at that point and I have to say it felt very strange to be talking about it in those terms with other people. But as I said I'm blessed with a great group on this course, highly supportive and good friends so that made it more comfortable. Somewhere along the way things changed again and currently I'm writing about a gay guy thrown out by his dogmatically religious Mother with whom he must reconcile some years later when it emerges she is dying of AIDS.
Now of course that's the very bare bones of the story. I feel like the story has great potential, certainly the emotion I wanted to create is in there, the characters are starting to get somewhere, it's just the actual story I'm missing. "He does A, B,C and D to get to E." The story, the plotting of that story, this, I'm realising, is the absolute weakest element of my writing. Each Monday we get together, people give comment and feedback and it's great. The problem is that though many of the ideas and much of the feedback is really strong and very helpful, it's all too easy to lose sight of what you were originally trying to do in the first place. That scripts change throughout their development is not only a given but the very reason scripts become great at all. Rewriting is the key. But what I feel I'm missing is the central core of what I was trying to do and this is also changing from week to week which is why I'm currently struggling quite badly. If I had a stable core idea around which stories, characters, plots could change well that would be fine. But when the actual concept changes, for me at least, the work starts to flounder. I knew vaguely I wanted to write a gay character, have an emotional drama and have it personally meaningful. Well, okay great but that's not a concept. What am I trying to say? What do I want to communicate? What do I want my characters to feel? To learn? To experience? And in turn, what do I want an audience to feel, learn and experience?
The truth is I simply don't know.
posted by Garreth at 2:38 pm
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