Plot Notes
i want this available so that I can use it to see how well i’ve done what i set out to do, and how much that matters.
Ok so I’m not telling a straightforward story, but I have to find a way to keep it interesting.. I thought I would do it by making each little moment of text stand alone. A single image, a single event, a single impression for each one. That has proven much more difficult to do than I had thought at first, and you may notice that some of what I have posted in the draft strays quite far from that. I want a kind of nonlinear effect. Its arranged all funny, but once its over, you know what has happened. So what’s going to happen? I’m going to break my rule and talk about it, because you are a suitable audience. If you don’t want the entire thing spoiled, I completely understand. Skip this paragraph and tell me you skipped it. I’m kinda afraid to tell you and I’m kinda afraid not to, so I’m leaving it up to you. You better decide in the space between this sentence and the next, however much time that takes. From the very beginning the whole thing splits into three parts, rock paper and scissors. We all know that rock beats scissors, scissors beat paper, and paper beats rock. So, rock is the story of how the subject of scissors is ultimately crushed. Paper is the story of how the setting of rock is subsumed. And scissors is about how paper is divided. The story rock is modeled after the Orpheus story. You probably know that one, he goes to hell to get the girl, succeeds, but cant look back in doubt on the way out. He looks back. Game over. He is crushed. That’s a fairly straightforward story but the nice thing about those old myths is that there’s plenty of room in them for digression, as everything else has a story of its own too, if not several. Orpheus used to hang out with the Argonauts for example. Persephone makes a guest appearance. Rock is set in this place called Mecklenburg. Paper is the story of how it is changing, becoming engulfed by another culture. This is me sticking it to the yuppies once and for all, but I’m not sure exactly how to portray that. I think this one will be the most of the single moments. Places all over town, things happening, over the course of a long enough period of time. Slowly the portrait changes from a self-sufficient isolated place to another kind of place a dependant sub-place. Will I use a whole host of characters? Only a few? What’s going on? Is there something to think of that takes a whole year or something to complete? What is interesting and takes a long enough period of time to complete? Is there a story about a place that goes to hell, so to speak, that I can use for my frame here? Going to hell is a major theme. Paper needs a main character yet, I’m thinking I might cast the good reverend in the part, he would do nicely I think, who better to be in paper, as it wraps the rock, and as he is split, conflicted, ripped in two between two things, two worlds. Scissors needs to be about a strong dividing factor, and that division must be occurring within the wrapping element in paper. Or maybe the thing that the main character of paper is divided about has absolutely nothing to do with the wrapping element. I wracked my brains on this one, really I did. I almost had to abandon the whole idea once I got to scissors what would divide a person so much? I thought about dividing the character between the two cultural extremes but then scissors would end up being a story just exactly like paper was and that would get boring. Then, it came to me. The person in paper can be conflicted over a romance: you know the deal involved with one and interested in the other. I promise, the names will be changed to protect the innocent and the guilty will be made out to look even worse. I just couldn’t think of anything better to use. Suggestions? Comments? I’m afraid to even bring this up to you. Anyway, since it has to be the character in paper that’s split, and since it has to be a romance, and since there’s already a romance over in rock, I think that the main character of AT LEAST rock and paper have to be the same person, which was not my original intent. This leaves room for another main character in scissors. Somehow some element in scissors has to end up crushed as a result of some element of rock. It would make sense to make this element the interest, to contrast the involvement portrayed in rock. I don’t know about scissors really. I may end up going in an entirely different direction with it. I’ve had so many ideas about it now that I don’t know what to do.