Alex de Campi: Gojira!

***

WHO

FILM & TV

COMICS & BOOKS

14.4.05 Notebooks, Little and Large

I write in two hardback notebooks: a large, lined one, British A4 size, and a small, plain paper one, A6 size. Both are red. They're cheapies from WH Smith's, a British newsagents. I don't subscribe to this theory of writing in expensive, hard-to-find notebooks like Moleskines. Yes, I know Bruce Chatwin wrote IN PATAGONIA in a Moleskine. I am not Bruce Chatwin. Yes, I know that there are laptops and handhelds infinitely more capacious than my 90-page red notebooks. But I also know that I can doodle on the covers of the notebooks, or drop them on the ground, or leave them on the pub table while I go buy a pint. I can also draw in them when my attention begins to wander. Below, from the big notebook, are sketches of Robert McKee's hands, from a lecture about the genre of thrillers.

Hell, I'll write on the back of a bus ticket if there's nothing else available. Some early notes for SMOKE exist on the back of a RESERVED card from Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club, written during the opening act of a Menlo Park gig. One difficult, long-growing story had its structural breakthrough scrawled all over the title page of Colin Wilson's THE OCCULT. This is slightly problematic, as that book is in London, and I am in New Hampshire, and I remember that the breakthrough was great, but not exactly what it was. But this particular story will be slow in coming, and I'm content to let it lie fallow for a while.

I had left my little red notebook at home that day, which was stupid, as its purpose is to be carried in a pocket wherever I go. It contains ideas, interesting quotes, phone numbers, bad sketches, rough page layouts, taped-in newspaper articles about memorable crimes or interesting obituaries and, last but not least, a photo of John Dillinger's corpse (it's beautiful, like a Caravaggio). Once a bunch of ideas reach critical mass, miraculously untangling themselves into rough harmony, I begin to write story outlines in the big notebook. It's not pretty:

I'm telling you all this because a few days ago I finished the latest volume of the big notebook. I'd been plotting a detective story, and I got so carried away I wrote right onto the endpaper. This particular story, an OGN called THE QUEEN OF SPADES, started as a few rough notes in the small notebook sometime in November last year. I ignored it with intent for a while, and then one day I woke up and knew where it was going. I spent a few days in March teasing rough notes onto the laptop, then printed them out to work on in America. I now know not only what this book holds, but the titles and content of the next two in the series. They sit in the notebook's biro-scrawl nest, like crocodile eggs, waiting for their time to hatch.

My next step is to put the outline back on the laptop, and shore up its structural flaws, the inevitable inheritance of any first draft. The scripting? That's the easy part. Fiddling with meaning, structure, character and conclusion is a toil of many months. Writing dialogue is the happy two-week harvest at the end.

( 2:23 PM )

1 Comments:

I love hearing how writers works, which is probably boring for a non-writer, but it's funny how different we all are. I often start with titles, that helps me with direction and structure (weird, I suppose). And dialogue, I let the characters talk to each other, tell me the story for a while in my head before anything gets written down. I forget much of what's said, figuring the stuff I remember is the story worth hearing.

By The Hammer, at 3:17 PM