NaNoWriMo - Before The Start

This week, then, I'm going to attempt something stupid and pointless. Well, more so than any other week, in any case. As November begins to kick in, and the nights get darker and colder, I find, for about the first time this year, less things to occupy my time than at any other point in the last twelve months. Of course, now that we all live in the future, and that, there are various things to conquer and destroy any feelings of boredom I may have been considering having. There is, of course, the whole growing a moustache thing for a month, which isn't so much a boredom-thrashing activity (you'd have to be pretty damn bored, wouldn't you?) but a charity awareness thing, which I'll be coming back to later in the week. 

I'm holding some improv workshops, the first of which is tonight (Sunday 28th). I'm a bit nervous that nobody's going to turn up, if I'm honest. Facebook has long ago ceased being a reliable indicator of how many people are actually going to turn up to your event. I have had a few people saying that they'll be there, and I think it will be the sort of thing that simply needs to be going for a few weeks before it catches fire. Not literally, I hope. 

But none of this is the stupid and pointless thing. Every November, thousands of people around the world attempt something called NaNoWriMo. In case you're not already familiar with the concept, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. The aim is to do - to achieve - exactly what that name suggests: to hack out a novel in 30 days. The novel is a reasonably short one - the suggested aim for a word count is 50,000, which is - very roughly - the size of The HitchHikers Guide To The Galaxy, for instance, or Of Mice And Men. The real aim behind the whole enterprise is to get those people who are constantly telling themselves that one day they'll actually get around to writing a book .. to actually get around to writing a book. It doesn't even really matter about the quality, just getting the word count down. It averages out at about 1,500 words a day. This, I figure, should be just about manageable,even if we include the inevitable couple of days throughout the month where I only produce 500 words, or don't even get around to writing anything at all.

I'm deliberately only starting on November 1st, which is Thursday. Obviously, I could try and get a head start by starting now, but somehow it doesn't seem in the spirit of the whole adventure. I rather like the idea of starting this fool's errand at the same time as thousands of others all across the planet. I haven't even made any planning notes.

What I do have is a title and a vague plot line. A couple of years ago, a local publishing company was asking for submissions to an imprint they had, called Pulp Press. The stories they wanted were exactly that - pulp fiction, the sort of grimy 5 cent paperbacks you might have had in your back pocket in the 1940s or 50s. When men were bastards and women all wore Bettie Page bangs. Sex, violence and six inch heels. Needless to say, it's not exactly the sort of writing I normally do, but nonetheless, an idea did present itself. I was doing some stand up at the time (more than I do these days,anyway), and the stand up scene in Brighton, where I live, is sometimes quite insular. I began to have these ideas about various comics on the scene being bumped off in Brighton (it may have even been inspired by the old line about 'dying on stage'). However, as with many projects, I never actually got round to writing it, particularly as - even though I roughly knew who was going to die, and how (the last two deaths have been fairly fixed in my head now for the past two years), I've never really been able to work out why these deaths are occurring. Not being able to work out the reason for the catalyst has stopped me starting. Now, however: I'm going to put faith in the expectation that if I write enough of the story, a solution will eventually present itself. And even if it doesn't, it didn't stop other classic pulp writers. I think it was someone like Raymond Chandler - he'd finished The High Window, or maybe even The Maltease Falcon, which starts with a body being discovered. It's that death that's the catalyst for the entire story. But when the story ends, the murderer isn't revealed. It's the ultimate Macguffin. When asked by a fan what the deal was with the dead body, Chandler reportedly repiled: 'Oh, him. I forgot about him .. '

So, hopefully, as long as I can get a fairly entertaining story down, then logic can go hang. For the first draft, anyway. The story is going to be called Set Up, Punch by the way. I'll try to post a daily report on how it's all going, with a wordcount. Obviously, at the moment, the wordcount is exactly zero. I'm hoping it won't stay that way .. 

This Blog, Part 2

I went to see The Bourne Legacy this week, which isn’t a sequel to any of the other Bourne films. It’s not even a prequel, or what’s clumsily referred to sometimes as a ’midquel’, which is when the action takes in between the narrative of two previously existing films. The events of this one take place in a roughly parallel timeslot to the third Bourne film, so we get to see Paddy Consideine running around Waterloo Station again, presumably in footage lifted from the old film, but still earning the actor a few dollars like Marlon Brando did for doing nothing new in Superman II. So, while the events of the third Bourne film are unraveling, the events of this film kick off, giving a whole Russian Doll effect to the plot, as one story exists inside another. For this reason, (certainly no better reason), we’re going to call Bourne Legacy a ‘in-quel’, or ‘Inkwell’.


In fact, if the plot of Legacy resembles anything, it’s Terminator 2 – good version of bad guys is relentlessly pursued by newer, souped-up version of himself – but it’s at least the second film this year (after Prometheus) that is a ‘inkwell’ - very clearly not a sequel type sequel, but rather a film that ‘inhabits the same universe’. With a dearth of original ideas out there, and audiences increasingly reluctant to take a chance on anything they feel they don’t already know, this could be a future waggling thing in cinematic pop-corn shifters.
The concept has loosely existed for years in slasher movies: the casts of Halloween and Saw were sliced and diced with each new installment, to make way for the next group of soon-to-be-dead teens. Of course, in those cases, there was still a clear connecting factor: the psycho wearing the scary mask, until Final Destination went one further and dispensed with an actual physical killer. But still, the sequels came across like badly Xeroxed copies of each other, where, even if we didn’t have familiar characters to invest in, we at least knew pretty much how the plot was going to play out.
Prometheus was an interesting but flawed film that by and large was able to stand on the shoulders of the iconic Alien franchise to (un)invent a world we thought we already knew, while Bourne Legacy spends a great deal of its time reminding us that it isn’t about Jason Bourne. It does this largely by the method of having lots of people point furiously at a photograph of Matt Damon (something that the three films that were about Bourne did), and have worried government officials declare that Bourne is off the grid, and definitely not about to turn up anytime soon (again, something the other films did quite a bit). It surely can’t be too long before films manage to be set in the same ‘universe’ while not having an obvious character or narrative connection. In his novels, Stephen King has already achieved this, with characters making some blithe reference to some dog that went rabid/that hotel that burned down/that novelist who writes all the scary books, and it’s sort of already happened in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, although it’s possible that having two brothers in separate films is not quite creating the wide-reaching universe I’m talking about.
So there’s quite possibly a future here. Once a film has hit big, audiences are likely to pay more attention to anything that comes from the same source, even if it has nothing to do with what they’re familiar with (hence the massive amount of interest in JK Rowling’s forthcoming book, and, more depressingly inexplicable, the point of re-jacketing loads of soft bondage porn that’s been gathering dust on WHSmith’s shelves for the past ten years, confident that it will sell, simply because it now looks like Fifty Shades Of Grey. And of course, they’re entirely correct.

You have to be careful with Inkwells, however. They’re an entirely different beast from spin-offs, with which they could be easily confused. Therefore, no Adventures Of Moneypenny, in which our favourite secretary, still living in the 1950s, has a series of ‘Jane’ type adventures before being plonked demurely behind her desk to flirt coyly with an unsuspecting Bond. Likewise, UNIT is out. Apart from having a similar title to a Dennis Haysbert drama, a series depicting the adventures of Doctor Who’s favourite paramilitary team would inevitably suffer from not having copyright access to many of the villains that fans fondly remember them fighting. They might be able to get hold of the Yeti, but that might be a bit of a stretch week after week. And anyway, no-one would be able to agree if it should be set in the seventies or eighties.
No, an inkwell, if well written, inhabits the same world as whatever more famous film or TV programme has inspired it, but rarely, if ever, resorts to using the same characters or situations. That’s why, despite it seeming like an obvious choice, any incarnation of CSI falls at the first hurdle. Since I’ve brought this up, it probably falls to me to make the first suggestions, all of which will fail to impress miserably like an over-excited host of a party that suggests to a grim group of guests that they should try that game involving Rizlas, which briefly excites, before everyone realises that it doesn’t involve smoking them.
The Apartment At The Top: As Friends was one of the most popular series of the nineties, it seems reasonable that we should try to eke an Inkwell out of it, as long as we don’t attempt to base it on the further adventures of the original cast. As Joey proved, this will only prove to be a costly, horrible mistake. The Apartment At The Top is a chilling psychological nightmare as newly-wed couple David and Marion move into a top floor apartment that is significantly out of their price range (apparently the previous tenants had rent control), and fail to connect with any of their neighbours while slowly coming to terms with the implausible reality that despite living in the middle of New York, they are the only black couple within a ten mile radius. Shades of Rosemary’s Baby.

Blake’s Nation: Never mind the upcoming almost certainly about to happen re-boot of Blake’s 7, this continues directly from where the original left off, despite most of the cast having been killed off in a bloodbath. A new cast arrives, keen to start up a new civilisation dedicated to the ideals of their glorious leader. The series name is a cheeky in-joke referencing the 1970s serial’s creator. Actually, this one sounds quite good, BBC, if you’re around, I can get my BACs number to you as soon as you ask.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace: Oh, yeah. Never mind, as you were.
Psycho House: Norman Bates dies while still in a pyscharic hospital, but before he does so, bequeaths his motel to an equally deranged patient who is then released and discovers all manner of weird goings-on at Chez Bates. Improbably, this one actually happened.
Elephant! The Musical: Briefly seen as a RSC money spinner during The Tall Guy, we get a few glimpses of this musical based on the tragic life of Joseph Merrick, but a full version doesn’t exist. Actually, with songs like Packing His Trunk and Somewhere Up In Heaven (There’s An Angel With Big Ears), I’d pay good money to see this.