Dispatch From The Quest: Christian Fontenot
Over the course of the 24 weeks I am working with the writers in The Quest, each will write a weekly dispatch to share with the GITS community. There are several reasons for doing this, the main one educational: Hopefully you will learn something of value for your own understanding of the craft from the experiences of the Questers. I should also add they are a great group of people, so I expect you will enjoy getting to know them.
Today: Christian confronts the emotional maelstrom caused by confusion:
There are three little words that will crush a writer’s soul like my Uncle T-Boy with empty PBR cans against his oversized forehead. (There was this one time when the beer can wasn’t empty and who knew a head could bleed so much, but that’s another blog post.) This life sucking string of words that you hope to never leave your reader’s lips is “I am confused.”
At home, effective communication is the key to my survival. Being the only owner of a Y chromosome in a house full of X’s, I only get a small allotment of words per day, and I must make them count. I also dabble in youth sports coaching and over communicate by strategy. You don’t want parents getting time wrongs for practice or games, and you don’t want blank stares from players at half time. Just ask my daughter what happened when I yelled “sit on the ball” to her in the final seconds of a very close basketball game.
At that thing that helps pay the bills and the taxman, misunderstandings can cost you millions of dollars. We must be as explicit as possible with everything that we do, because confusion equals failure. All of which leads me to…
This week’s Quest was all about the SCENE — begins, middles, ends; structural goal and emotional goal; character purpose; main conflict; and theme. Our exercise was to write a scene from our stories identifying all of these scene elements.
As with all my past assignments, I put on my “Mad Scientist” lab coat and decided to experiment. My goals were to identify all the elements of the scene before I wrote it. I also decided that I was going to try my hand at a “Walk and Talk” as well as incorporating other tropes found by hitting the random link on TVtropes.com. As an Act 1 “Walk and Talk”, I would have 2 characters walking through different rooms and hallways “gun hanging” while crazy sight gags (rhyme alert) went down in the background (yo).
On the positive side, my fellow Quester said my scene was “fun”, “crazy”, and “very visual”, but on the more important side, each one said it was “confusing”. Wah-oh Shaggy! Few lessons learned: #1. Translating from your head to the blank page is hard, and maybe that’s why I find writing dialogue easier. #2. Never submit something until it’s ready. I knew that it was confusing but was so proud of this new born 6 page sequence that I wanted to post it’s baby pictures to the web as soon as possible. #3. Smash beer cans on your head only makes the pain worse.
Okay, another blog down. Did that make sense? Are you confused yet?
Someone once asked me to describe the process of writing a story as succinctly as I could. I answered with this:
“Wrangling magic.”
We can try and make a formula out the process. Come up with repeatable strategies and patterns. But the simple fact is stories are mysterious… as they should. That’s where surprise comes in. Twist and turns. Big reveals. And magic. How in some unfathomable way, if we keep working at them, they come together in the end.
But to approach the story-crafting process, we have to embrace the reality of confusion. Think about it. The very first moment you come up with a story idea, you open up a floodgate of big fat question marks about a seemingly endless array of issues: characters, plot elements, themes, scenes, tone, atmosphere, place, and on and on and on.
It’s a whole lotta shit to deal with! And that can be confusing.
But if we can embrace that dynamic as a natural part of the process, then we are tacitly accepting the fact there is magic involved.
Confusion means we don’t know if there are answers out there.
Magic means there are answers.
So the next time you run into a confusing situation in your story development, take a deep breath, do like Christian did and admit you’re confused, then acknowledge this is all part of the process of wrangling magic.
Hopefully that little shift in attitude can help see you through the confusion.
If not, well… there’s always a can of PBR directed at your forehead.
Tomorrow: Another Dispatch From The Quest.
About Christian: From Louisiana, now in Seattle. Turns off street lights with his mind. Regrets not learning the tuba — TUBAS ROCK! Storyteller. @cmfontenot.
Comment Archive