My Hands, Don't Wanna Start Again, My Hands, No, They Don't Wanna Understand, My Hands, They Just Shake It, Try To Break Whatever Peace I May Find

--"My Hands", Leona Lewis

Of all the writers I know I'm probably the one who gets the majority of his ideas from other pieces of entertainment rather than current events. Somehow I find it easier to crib ideas from something that has already worked once rather than to crib ideas from something from a more news-related source. Perhaps it's my anti-news media basis, but I just find stories more entertaining that news.

That being said, I never exactly translate what I read or see into its literal doppelganger on the page. My process has always been to take that initial spark of a plot, of a scene, of a vignette and meld it with something personal out of my own life. I don't know if the split is exactly 50/50, but I'd suspect it is rather close to that ratio. Every story I write whether or not I'm writing it as something out of my own life or something with the guise of fiction ends up being something along the lines of a hybrid. That's the way I operate. I mean--I believe that's the way most writers operate. Everybody who has written something resembling a story, biographical or not, manages to contaminate some of his truth with fiction, or vice-versa. There's no story under the sun that doesn't reveal a bit about the author AND a bit about what types of stories he likes. It's the nature of the beast. We're both a product of our lives and the lives of these imaginary others.

I used to try to fool myself into thinking that the stories I wrote were all my ideas, but the more I wrote, the more I realized that with every sentence I write I can recall something similar happening in a movie or novel I read once upon a time. The human experience doesn't change from person to person. The particulars might change, sure, but the underlying motive and results pretty much fall along the same guidelines. That's why I don't really distinguish between sources any more. To me it doesn't matter if something happened to a person I know in real life or a character on Avonlea. The way I see things, all people--imaginary or not--are characters and all stories--whether they happen in public or just on the page--are plots of one sort or another. Now I realize that I'm never going to write anything new, per se. The most I can do is repackage in a way that says something of me and of what I believe. Not only that, but I can produce a work that speaks to people about what I think is an interesting story, what themes I like and what kind of characters I like.

Take, for instance, the story I'm currently working on concurrently with The Carisa Meridian. It's been ruminating in my mind for a few days now. In actuality, though, it's been percolating for almost twenty years now. Ostensibly, the plot of the story will be:

A wiseass twentysomething male "talent" or person born with special abilities, escapes his handlers at a private military company in order to free his much younger brother from a state mental facility, where he is being experimented on. What the guy doesn't know is that his brother is being groomed to be a state-sponsored assassin and that the military company he works for is actually hell-bent on bringing down this program. He escapes with his brother in order to bring him back to his parents on the other side of the country.

Meanwhile, the government hires out a bounty hunter to track down the boy and the handlers pick up the scent as well.

Along the way they meet a female talent, outside the system or government, who agree to help them get to their parents in exchange whatever little cash they have left.

In the end they find the boy's talent has manifested already, making him a very dangerous weapon without the maturity to control who it's used upon. By the end of film it isn't exactly clear if the boy would be better off in the mental facility where they can control him (even while they take advantage of him) or with his family, who have no hope of giving him the help he needs, or with the private military company whose only goal is to destroy the weapon to make sure it doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

However, in actuality, the whole basis of the movie stems from my stated goal of wanting to remake The Wizard. Wrapping it up in a sci-fi/superhero concept just sounded like a decent idea because, frankly, doing a straight-up remake would work these days. However, I still believe that a story which basically boils down to a hero's journey except with three people could work. It doesn't matter whether if the forces that are chasing them draw their power from their positions of authority over the trio (as it was in the film) or if the forces that are chasing them draw their power from actual powers; the result is the same. It's still going to be about three people searching for some type of answer at the end of the road and, once they get there, they're going to find the answers that they were looking for can't be found that easily. Granted, that theme doesn't have the Nintendo-colored gloss that the movie does, but that's what I've always believed was the heart of the film. To me, as my favorite film, it always had more subtext than people gave it credit for. I can only hope that when I write up my idea it'll possess the selfsame qualities.


And I see diferent shades now
And I, I'm almost never afraid now
but when I think I'll be ok
I am always wrong cause

More than that, I'm hoping to infuse it with a level of dramatic flair that was somewhat lacking in the source. As such, I'm not planning on making it easy on any of the characters. There will be no taking it easy on my characters, no hand-holding, which is just a fancy way of saying that I have no intention of taking it easy on the audience. Whereas The Wizard had as one of its unstated goals to make children and teenagers redefine what exactly constitutes a family as well as take a long hard look at how grief and loss can be overcome, my story is going to reflect more of what I think has been a central journey for me.

Rather than ideas such as family and repairing the bonds of family, I've always wanted to write a story about a person whose whole life just seemed like it's been out of his hands the entire time. Everyone I've ever talked has felt like this at one or another, but I haven't seen too many movies or novels dealing with this conceit. The closest I've ever seen would be movies like The Truman Show and novels like The Tenure Itch, but even then the quest has always been used for comedic effect. It's bothered me that I can't find anything of import dealing with the idea head-on. Rather than complain about it for the next few years, I decided to try and sketch out something more along the lines of Blade Runner, where man's search for control over his own life is translated into a more substantial plot and given the heft that it deserves.

After all, if the stakes don't matter, then you're not really risking anything. And I can't think of anything more risky than trying to gain control over your own fate when the whole world is telling you who or what you're supposed to be and who or what you're not supposed to be. It's not supposed to be an easy quest and you might just find out that you were simply never meant ever to have control over it.

At least that's been my experience.

But, if anything, if there's one thing I learned, it's that you can only hold onto somebody's hand for so long. You can only be lead by the people around you, by the circumstances around you, for so long. Eventually you've got to learn to let go of most, if not all, of the things you were taught to hold dear. You can't ever be sure of who are until you're sure of what you want, and the only way that happens is if you start fresh from square one. Sometimes the journey to discover who you are really does start with walking out of who you used to be and seeing what's left.

It's been a motif of mine that literal journeys can often become symbolic journeys. It's why I take drives up PCH when I'm wrestling with a personal crisis. It's why I usually travel once a year when I'm feeling especially lost. It's also why I somehow associate living somewhere else as being synonymous with some kind of epiphany because doing that would mean letting go of most of the people in my life. And letting go of the people in my life really would mean letting go of most of what makes up the person I am today.

And for now that's not a journey I'm brave enough to take.

Except maybe on paper with a story about a boy whose broken out of mental facility by his brother and then taken on a journey by him and a redheaded stranger they meet along the way.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers