Wednesday, August 24, 2005
MY BRILLIANT CAREER: Somewhere in the attic of the house in which I grew up, probably in the box where I stuck the comic books I drew on pilfered paper in the sixth grade, my next of kin will probably find a bundle of spiral-bound notebooks which may or may not still have their covers. These are the "novels" I tried to write in high school, "novels" being in quotes because there was precious little novelty in them. If I have anything to do with it, you'll never read them, but I might as well expose myself to embarassment by giving you the rundown.
I think the reason I took up writing in high school to give myself an excuse to not talk to people. When you're sitting in a school hallway, pen rolling across a blank page, people either know what you're doing or think they know, like when they tell you to wake up when you're meditating in the library. Quite a bit of what I put down was nothing but surface, since my survival mode in high school was to go into denial about how miserable I was, as opposed to now, when I can say that if somebody put a hole in my head, the wind whistling through it as I collapsed would tell you to kiss my ass. That would be now, though; back then, I was suppressing myself in a way that would make Queen Victoria proud. So I poured myself into a dazzling string of superficial crap, usually based on what I caught on TV the month before. All of these are comedies, by the way, because I thought I was a frickin' comedy genius at the time. I probably misunderstood everybody who told me I looked funny.
My first attempt at the long form involved twin girls whose father faked his own death, and the road that led them to the exotic Baltic country of Oxagonia. Yeah, that was the name I came up with, which should show you the state my sense of humor at the time. That was the road I had in mind for them, anyway; they never left the home counties before I picked up my pen and left them stranded. Their dad probably got shot by a firing squad because I fumbled the ball.
After that came a story about another young lady who got frozen in a block of ice in the 1940s, got thawed out in the 80s, and zany hijinks ensued. As my fumbling idea of "clever", this girl ran into a guy who kept a cat in the unused real estate of his stovepipe hat before the car accident that somehow turned her into an Otter Pop. Five pages and out she went.
Somewhere in there was a concept I never even got around to writing down until now, a charming bit of treacle about the souls of dead kids from the 1920s and 30s coming back to earth in physical form to help get some modern kids straightened out, and to show them how to swing dance long before that came back into style. No earthly idea why the hell I thought that Depression era kids who never got a chance to mature would be any more clued in than my group, the first wave of the MTV Generation, but I wasn't seeing a lot of things clearly back then. I called it "The Young Fossils". That's entertainment, bub.
My magnum opus, the writing project that tied into a big chunk of my junior year, and the one in which I had the most emotional investment (which proves nothing, on reflection), was my high school book. I actually made it a good way into this one before it ran off the tracks. This was going to be my masterpiece, my ticket out, the first in a string of staggeringly brilliant (or at least commercially viable) books, to be spun off into movies and television. When I finally volunteered to pull the plug, the final show would put the "who shot JR" episode to shame. I'd be a legend, get enough in the bank to live comfortably forever, and net a lot of lady tail as a Christmas bonus. Even better, I'd panel with Carson and throw a pencil through Letterman's fake window.
Okay, I'll put you out of your misery: what I ended up with was a string of tripe built on cliches, stolen ideas from better stories, and overripe scenes that screamed "This will look great in the movie." It was based around an odd clique of "cool kids" who did cool things like play chess and music, and treat people with sense and sensibility, even the cheerleaders...so you can see how I was in trouble already, but we'll get to that in due time. The head guy was nicknamed Tracer, for his ability to place any dialect within 50 miles of origin, a contrived "uncanny" hook I stole from Radar on MASH. There was a subplot where a girl finds out, thanks to a misplaced diary, that some guy she didn't even know killed himself over her, which was combination of a MASH lift and one of those overheated motivational speakers we got to see at least once a year until they did away with school assemblies. Another mercenary girl was trying to deprogrammed a tripped-out vegan sunchild who had recently arrived from California...a direct lift from a crappy SNL sketch at the time.
There was a lot of what I thought was my mature-but-cheeky writerly tone, which tried for Mark Twain but never even reached the level of Mark Trail. Thanks to Police Squad, I threw in a few inappropriate fourth-wall breaking lines, just because I thought it was cool. God help me, there was even a chick who was bitching at Tracer over ditching her over the summer break in the tone of John Cleese telling Michael Palin that the dead parrot wouldn't voom if you put 5,000 volts through it. And forgive me, baby Jesus, I did it on purpose.
In retrospect, I'm glad I never reached the end, since I was planning a setpiece which aped the anti-Klan hazing at the end of (please shoot me) Porky's II.
After a half a dozen false starts, I got 50 pages filled before I surrendered. One of my classmates pointed out that "cool kids" who acted like geeks probably were geeks, which took the wind out of my sails. Deep down, I knew I was full of crap and left my baby on the hills of Sparta to die of exposure. Hope the silverfish enjoy it.
I think the reason I took up writing in high school to give myself an excuse to not talk to people. When you're sitting in a school hallway, pen rolling across a blank page, people either know what you're doing or think they know, like when they tell you to wake up when you're meditating in the library. Quite a bit of what I put down was nothing but surface, since my survival mode in high school was to go into denial about how miserable I was, as opposed to now, when I can say that if somebody put a hole in my head, the wind whistling through it as I collapsed would tell you to kiss my ass. That would be now, though; back then, I was suppressing myself in a way that would make Queen Victoria proud. So I poured myself into a dazzling string of superficial crap, usually based on what I caught on TV the month before. All of these are comedies, by the way, because I thought I was a frickin' comedy genius at the time. I probably misunderstood everybody who told me I looked funny.
My first attempt at the long form involved twin girls whose father faked his own death, and the road that led them to the exotic Baltic country of Oxagonia. Yeah, that was the name I came up with, which should show you the state my sense of humor at the time. That was the road I had in mind for them, anyway; they never left the home counties before I picked up my pen and left them stranded. Their dad probably got shot by a firing squad because I fumbled the ball.
After that came a story about another young lady who got frozen in a block of ice in the 1940s, got thawed out in the 80s, and zany hijinks ensued. As my fumbling idea of "clever", this girl ran into a guy who kept a cat in the unused real estate of his stovepipe hat before the car accident that somehow turned her into an Otter Pop. Five pages and out she went.
Somewhere in there was a concept I never even got around to writing down until now, a charming bit of treacle about the souls of dead kids from the 1920s and 30s coming back to earth in physical form to help get some modern kids straightened out, and to show them how to swing dance long before that came back into style. No earthly idea why the hell I thought that Depression era kids who never got a chance to mature would be any more clued in than my group, the first wave of the MTV Generation, but I wasn't seeing a lot of things clearly back then. I called it "The Young Fossils". That's entertainment, bub.
My magnum opus, the writing project that tied into a big chunk of my junior year, and the one in which I had the most emotional investment (which proves nothing, on reflection), was my high school book. I actually made it a good way into this one before it ran off the tracks. This was going to be my masterpiece, my ticket out, the first in a string of staggeringly brilliant (or at least commercially viable) books, to be spun off into movies and television. When I finally volunteered to pull the plug, the final show would put the "who shot JR" episode to shame. I'd be a legend, get enough in the bank to live comfortably forever, and net a lot of lady tail as a Christmas bonus. Even better, I'd panel with Carson and throw a pencil through Letterman's fake window.
Okay, I'll put you out of your misery: what I ended up with was a string of tripe built on cliches, stolen ideas from better stories, and overripe scenes that screamed "This will look great in the movie." It was based around an odd clique of "cool kids" who did cool things like play chess and music, and treat people with sense and sensibility, even the cheerleaders...so you can see how I was in trouble already, but we'll get to that in due time. The head guy was nicknamed Tracer, for his ability to place any dialect within 50 miles of origin, a contrived "uncanny" hook I stole from Radar on MASH. There was a subplot where a girl finds out, thanks to a misplaced diary, that some guy she didn't even know killed himself over her, which was combination of a MASH lift and one of those overheated motivational speakers we got to see at least once a year until they did away with school assemblies. Another mercenary girl was trying to deprogrammed a tripped-out vegan sunchild who had recently arrived from California...a direct lift from a crappy SNL sketch at the time.
There was a lot of what I thought was my mature-but-cheeky writerly tone, which tried for Mark Twain but never even reached the level of Mark Trail. Thanks to Police Squad, I threw in a few inappropriate fourth-wall breaking lines, just because I thought it was cool. God help me, there was even a chick who was bitching at Tracer over ditching her over the summer break in the tone of John Cleese telling Michael Palin that the dead parrot wouldn't voom if you put 5,000 volts through it. And forgive me, baby Jesus, I did it on purpose.
In retrospect, I'm glad I never reached the end, since I was planning a setpiece which aped the anti-Klan hazing at the end of (please shoot me) Porky's II.
After a half a dozen false starts, I got 50 pages filled before I surrendered. One of my classmates pointed out that "cool kids" who acted like geeks probably were geeks, which took the wind out of my sails. Deep down, I knew I was full of crap and left my baby on the hills of Sparta to die of exposure. Hope the silverfish enjoy it.
|| Eric 10:19 PM#
