Copping my buddy Joe’s title scheme …

For #14, and to help reduce the stress or pressure on both of us to finish, I suggested that we get together and actually collaborate, since we’re supposed to sort of, you know, work together anyway. You can read on Joe’s blog about the kind of weird free-association that led to our setting and subject matter (the Portuguese “Carnation Revolution”). The interesting part to me has been the difference in how we work.

I tend to think in character first, and my best work has always been just telling a story about a character. I learned this from Catch-22.

Even though creative writing teachers dredged up the old chesnut that “character is story,” they don’t really explain it and often don’t assign reading material that demonstrates it in the best way possible. Instead you read lots of short stories that are often “slice of life.” A lot of “modern” writing (the kind of hyper realistic [boring] stuff descended from guys like Raymond Carver that permeates “academic” literary fiction) simply creates characters that have some character and having them do some stuff and then calling it a story. Sure, they might have some sort of conflict, but when I think back on a lot of the stories like that I had to read, I’m always struck by how oblique and bleak it was, and that the point of the story was more often to have “just some guy” doing “just some stuff.” The characters are often lonely, or at least alone, or nearly so. There are rarely antagonists, and the characters therefore don’t even rise to being protagonists. People think this is realistic. It is. It also makes for very … unimportant storytelling. And you can have an almost infinite amount of it, because the little problems of the world that don’t add up to a hill of beans are almost infinite.  So there’s tons of it out there. It’s ironic how much of it is upheld as being important writing.

Catch-22, which I read after college while working on the first draft of a novel, did something completely different that, for want of a better phrase, blew my mind: it had the same plot and situation for lots of people, and threw them all against the same problem and against each other. All the chapters are named after a character, and it follows that character through some part of the story that might be told elsewhere.

It was so much more life-like. Sure, plenty of people deal with little situations in life, but real conflicts arise from the clash of characters against characters. The more important their desires, the grander the story, because you start to find the true worth of people. It no longer matters if the conflicts are real or anything like that, as long as they follow internal rules. the characters are exaggerated, but that’s the point. When you go back and read the great literature of centuries past, there aren’t “little” stories. Everything is grand, and larger-than-life.

Or at least, that’s my opinion.

Where was I going with this? Well, I knew I didn’t want to finish with a story that was small, everyman type of stuff. Even if my characters were everymen, I didn’t want them to be in a small situation. So when Joe brought up the Portuguese revolution, it was a pretty good opportunity to brainstorm character ideas.

Joe’s writing process was very different. He seems to work in imagery and brainstorming until he finds a phrase he likes. His lyrics tend to be more musical, and word-for-word are denser than mine, because he doesn’t focus as much on making sense in a story, just of conveying an image or feeling.

While I was working on the story, he was writing stream of consciousness based on the concepts from which I was writing the story. Then he organized them into things that matched up: rhymes, categories of images, etc. It was interesting to watch and also interesting to see where it had come from.

Anyway, after a bit of this, he sent me a message on Gchat that there was one particular image and phrase he liked, about explosions and the blooming of flowers, and said he was taking a break.

It was particularly interesting, because it’s not an image I ever would have come up with in my writing process except through a great deal of more forced thought, and it was pretty much a perfect analogous image about two diametrically opposed things (peace [flowers] and war [bombs]).

I went back while he was taking a break and recomposed it into a story, with a rhyme scheme and structure, and I’m pretty happy with how it ended up being so completely different from the song idea we started with.

We’ll be committing it to tape tonight. Still composing the music in my head.