What Do You (Like to) Write?

Peter here. It is two-thirty in the morning.

About, oh, I don’t know, twelve hours ago I sat down in the downstairs study, threw down a copy of M.R. James’ The Haunted Doll’s House and Other Stories, and rotated the spine of my wire notebook to a blank page. Two hours later I made five scribbles and one scratch. Hmph. I wiki’ed J.S. LeFanu, the guy who tailored neo-Gothic horror; and I read ‘Green Tea’: a man sees a monkey-ghost and seeks psychiatric help. In time the monkey grows more pervasive, and more malevolent.

Yes: I spent the afternoon and the evening pounding out a story, a scary one. Between coffee, a hamburger, and some spaghetti, I scribbled and scratched what I could. But I did not like what I had. Ghost stories are all remarkably simple. Take the story ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ by M.R. James. A young professor finds an ancient whistle while on vacation in the countryside. He blows into it, and soon, from his motel window, he sees a deformed silhouette stalking the beach. What happens next, well, it’s implied in the title.

Simple, no?

Yes, all too simple. Much too simple. While I get a kick out of reading the crap out of them (I stay up with them every night in bed, thanks to Stanza and the joys of public domain), the same cannot be said about telling them, let alone writing them. The one thing to know about writing is this: “Write what you know.” That’s Hemingway. Ray Bradbury would have said a similar thing: “Write what you feel.” Well, I did not feel like writing a simple ghost story. That is the reason I did not like what I had. I do not prefer to tell simple stories. M.R. James and J.S. LeFanu did good work, and I enjoy digesting them in bed like a fatty; but, brother, that field just ain’t for me.

It’s funny. All this talk of sensors and stabilizers and rigs, when the hardest thing to do is write a good script. Writing is about ideas, pure and true; you cannot hide behind technology.

Wait. So what is this crap story for? Sean and I need to be more productive. Those Halloween shorts two months ago got us off our butts and we liked how it felt. It was exercise. Stretching the muscles of our filmmaking calves or whatever. Not that we never wrote or shot stuff before. It was that we never mobilized so dang fast.

Some people sit around at home and say, “Hey, lets go to the mall!” or “Hey, lets go fishing!” Well, we’re like, “Hey, lets make a movie!” That’s how we roll; that’s how we think everybody should roll.
Two hours ago (one in the morning) Sean gee-mailed me his story concept:

Okay, so the idea behind “Late Morning” has, no doubt, been done before (kinda). It’s about a girl who wakes up to her alarm one morning, except it’s not morning. It’s still dark outside her window. Her neighbors are all outside in their pajamas, panicked and confused. The news claims scientists aren’t sure what’s happened. She lives alone and decides to go for a walk.

That’s the major premise. I’m not sure if I want it to open with this or maybe it happens in the second half. I want it to end with everyone losing 12 hours and they have to switch all their clocks from pm to am. There’s also the bicycle story. Maybe it could start with her falling asleep in a restaurant and getting locked in on a night that stays night for 12 more hours. I don’t know. Maybe that should be a separate story. We’ll see.

An intriguing idea. He is sure that he wants to shoot it, in time. I expressed my concerns over the phone: an entire neighborhood out in their PJs? Do-able, but a big-time idea for a small-time short. Sean made it clear that the story would be a low-key drama, full of ennui (you’ll have to look that word up). It will not be a sensational genre piece.
“Write what you feel,” no?

I felt like writing a story within a story within a story. The “frame” story has a group of people gathered at a table in a dining room. A man tells a story to the group. In this story a young man takes financial refuge in his parent’s house. But his parents are away on a retirement vacation, circling the globe. They forgot to pay the electric bill, and so the place is without lights. The young man has a friend come over; they sit around an electric camping torch. In particular, his friend relates a story about a glass jar. That’s the setup. The rest is a merging of the three stories, culminating in one climax.

It’s far from a complete treatment, but it will be an improvement over The Thing at the End of the Hall. I wrote that little problem child in one hour, because my other script was too long and I didn’t expect to finish anything alongside Sean’s and Drew’s segments. Yes, it was going to be just two Halloween shorts, not three. (And, y’know, maybe all three of our shorts were written, shot, and edited a little too fast. Quality and planning had to be sacrificed.)

I run the risk of writing a convoluted mess, I know, what with three different stories crescendo-ing into one. But I want to accomplish three things:

1. I want to scare people.
2. I want to tell a multi-tiered story about friends and rude confrontations.
3. I want to satisfy this Neil Gaiman phase that I’m going through.

I want to write what I feel. Ironically, all I know are turn-of-the-century Gothic horror and what S.T. Joshi calls ‘weird stories.’ So there goes Hemingway out the window. I figure I could ask Sean why he wants to do a story about a neighborhood in their PJs in the midst of a chronological cataclysm. Sorta has a ‘The Happening’ vibe to it, which he liked.

Well, anyway, it’s going on four-thirty in the morning. Expect us to mobilize this material sometime in the coming weeks (hopefully), alongside our usual stuff like, you know, episodes and stuff.