30K

Last night, I hit 30,000-words in FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER. About a third of the way through a 100,000-word first draft. This week has been great for writing, really flowing. I worked on DEMON all this past weekend, wrapped up the rewrite and swung right back into FRANK. The momentum carried from the screenwriting to the novel. I'm a happy guy. Would've been farther along if I didn't work on IMPLANT and DEMON, but it was for a good cause.

The original FRANK screenplay, upon which this novel is VERY loosely-based, was a much clunkier animal, full of stops and starts and weird pauses and expo downloads. It was a product of the level of craft I had at the time, back when I was still in film school. These days, I just shake my head at it... but I realize that's just a function of moving forward.

Hagakure tells us we should be better today than we were yesterday, and better tomorrow than we are today. I try to apply this to the day job and the writing. That concentration -- the act of waking up in the morning and literally thinking I'm going to be better today -- has paid off in a very tangible way. Not like I'm this brilliant genius, because I'm very aware I'll always have to improve, every day of my life. But I can look back and see the road traveled. If there's any value to old writing, it's that.

In a similar way, I roll my eyes at some of the shit I worked on in the first couple of years as a producer. And since I'm talking to people every day who know a fuck of a lot more than me, I'm well aware of the vast chasm of knowledge I want to acquire. I'll always be learning new ways to be a better manager and a better producer. I always want to know everything about everything, and that makes me somewhat doomed to a career of Sisyphean unhappiness.

(As a sidebar -- if there's anything that sucks about being mortal, it's the fact that, by the time you get a decent pile of experience, knowledge and wisdom together, you're dead. If you're reading this and you're a vampire, please give the office a call. I'm usually here after the sun sets).

In this current version of FRANK, I'm applying what I've been doing in my scripts for years now, and I think I've gotten pretty good at: taking about all the boring parts. You can always tell an amateur script when the characters stop at a bar or coffee shop to sit down and trade exposition. I'm not hatin': I used that device a lot in my first ten scripts, including the original version of FRANK -- in this case, a diner.

I'm also applying a 20/80 story structure to the novel. At 30K, we're already well into the first half of act two. We've already had a fight with ninjas, a set piece with an office buiding full of robots, a couple of rad explosions, the bad guys lost a man and the main baddy's sworn revenge. I've gotten comfortable with the truncated first and third acts, to the point that it's kinda my default structure unless the story demands otherwise. For example, I tried it with IMPLANT, but the set-up felt strangled and the peeps suggested I shift it into standard three-act, with plot point one coming in the early-30s. That worked a lot better.

And the character work has been coming along very nicely, IMHO. It's a matter of threading the beats together so the character's internal journey moves forward, while making it as organic as possible so the strings aren't showing. I'm a somewhat lazy and shallow guy, so I usually use jokes as a fall-back, and try to dovetail it into a backbeat with some shading. I'm not very good at scenes where characters do nothing but chit-chat about their fucking feelings; I'm too much of a lout to make that shit ring true. I almost always have to keep stuff like that super-short, or leaven it with action (or sex, if it's a script). I'll just chalk that up to one of the many things I'll improve tomorrow... and tomorrow... and tomorrow...