I’m starting to figure out the way I work. Which is weird, considering. But I was writing FD in my head for years before I ever cracked the first issue open. Right now I’m starting on a couple new things, and I’m explicitly thinking about how I suddenly went from agonizing over every single minute detail to just letting the shit pour out of my brain onto the page. And the work got better, at least in my estimation. A big part of that came out of working on the book for so long. Spending so much time with it meant I had time to process influences/ inspirations rather than just slather them on, to understand character motivations, to get the tone of the thing and intuitively know what doesn’t work. Another reason I sped up was just after the halfway point I listened to some David Milch seminars where he talked about how outlining (and any pre-writing at all) killed his process, and I stopped doing it.

I think generally all the stuff I write comes out of character and theme, and the structure and tone  action sequences and everything else is done in a more haphazard, in-the-moment fashion. I tend to do a lot of research and list-making and then abandon it when I finally start writing.

Developing characters, I kind of have a process where i get very specific visual or idea, or sometimes a real person. And I strip it down into it’s component parts and build something around it. From what I understand this is how James Cameron wrote Terminator – the robot skeleton walking out of a wall of fire came to him in a fever dream. He painted it in a blackout while on location (shooting Piranhas 2 in Italy).  He woke up days later and THEN he came up with a story to match the visual. One of the leads in FD was just a jumble of contradictory ideas – the recurring female counterpart in action-based fiction, Emma Peel’s fight scenes, the super-early appearances of Elektra, late 60s photos of Jane Birkin, Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, a real person I knew at the time – but they didn’t coalesce into a real character until I saw clips of PJ Harvey at Glastonbury in 1995:

Just the wrath of god in a catsuit. And then once I got all that in my head, with the visual, I abandoned it and treated the character as a character. And then the stuff David is talking about in the comments of the same post happens – the character develops and starts talking in it’s own voice, begins acting on it’s own ideas. That’s when it gets fun.

For theme, a lot of this stuff is trial and error. My topic of choice is usually, as Steve Zissou would say,  “REVENGE”. But normally I have a vague idea of what I want to talk about – FD was originally going to have a large element of ominpresent surveillance that fell by the wayside almost immediately. But theme is a weird aspect to writing. I remember reading an article on David Cronenberg where he denied there was any misogyny in his work. And he was vehement, saying that he couldn’t see any of that and didn’t understand where it came from. Which, if you’ve seen Rabid or The Brood, is kind of a bizarre statement (sure, he might have written Geena Davis’ great role in The Fly, but c’mon). In the same interview/profile, Martin Scorsese says in his defense that he believes him. “You make the movie to figure out why you made the movie“.

Which makes a lot of sense to me. Story as excavation. You find out what’s really going on simply by keeping at it. A combination of the character’s problems and internal struggles mix with whatever’s going on inside your head. And I think that’s where the pre-writing kills things. The appeal of a lot of the pulps and silver age comics and weekly television and science fiction paperbacks – because those writers had no time at all to plan ahead. They were getting paid by the word or the page, getting paid next to nothing, so they needed to produce constantly. So when the pressure is on, you see the artist head start to spill out into their work (ie. Michel Gondy offhandedly turning his childhood nightmares into videos for the Foo Fighters). I’m reading the 33+1/3 book on Highway 61 Revisited, and there’s a good chunk about “Like A Rolling Stone”. The definitive Dylan single was written out of distraction and boredom – a chunk for Dylan’s prospective beat novel Tarantula that got away from him and became something else. It was subsequently chopped down, transferring his one style for one medium into the other, and becoming this great stylistic leap forward. The man who wrote Highway 61 is a far more resentful angry young man, but he’s also someone who’s developed an apocalyptic sense of humor – laughing to himself and taking the time to tell the fuckers around him what’s what. Someone who can’t take anything seriously, even the Boschian nightmare world he sees around him. And while artistic development has a lot to do with it, the jump from measured folk to stream-of-consciousness is a permanent one.

It’s very interested in the allowing this crap to act on it’s own. Because the story isn’t writing itself, the story is just an outlet to let your unconscious talk. Yeah, the idea of art as therapy is nice, I guess – but it’s not nearly as interesting a concept as art functioning as a kind of other voice. William Gibson has talked about how he doesn’t write his books. Or at least he does it in collaboration with someone we’ll never get to speak to. Milch talks a lot about habituation, and he avoids pre-writing to stop himself from obsessive perfectionism. Stuff like writing the same ten sentences over and over again. I like the idea of it forcing me to write like those pulp guys, those silver age guys, Coppola on the set of Apocalypse Now… basically people under deadline. People who don’t have time to think. There’s no time to let things crystallize. Where creativity becomes a psychological release, rather than a formal game (This is also a reason why I think any person in a creative field should avoid psychoanalysis at any cost — barring an inability to function, all it’s ever going to do is hurt the person’s work.). This way might result in a messier, less finished final product, but it works. I’d pick unchecked and unhinged vomit over staid controlled any day. The work should be compulsive. Writing a story isn’t always a fun thing, but it should be a necessary thing. It should be something that you can’t stop doing. And yes, I’m writing this as much to myself that to anyone reading, as have all these pieces. This shit works a lot better than a daily affirmation. Being unsure and uncomfortable with this stuff, forcing myself to blindly explain things I don’t fully understand. This is way more interesting.

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The title comes from Burroughs’ “Cut into the present and the future leaks out”. Yes there will be more of these. When and on what, I don’t know.