So you may have heard that, for several years now, I have been working, a bit at a time, on a script inspired by my experience in a college theater department. It is a story that, even back then, I knew I wanted to tell, but I waited over a decade to write even a single scene of it, because I wanted a) the distance, and b) the storytelling muscles, to do it the justice I felt it needed. Basically, I waited until I couldn’t wait any longer.
The script is called The Ghost Light and for its sake I have broken a great many of my most sacred rules. I did not do a traditional outline. I blocked out no scene order. I didn’t even write scenes in order, I just picked a random place on the canvas, started writing bits, and watched the world of it take shape while I discovered it.
This has asked for levels of creativity that are beyond sane. I have had to populate a fictional theatre department with fictional people – faculty and students both. I refuse to just port myself and my friends over onto the page, I think it’s lazy, not to mention rude. Sure, I took some real incidents and Benihana-d up some people I knew for raw materials, but all of the major characters in this thing have grown into their own identities in that frightening way characters can to writers.
I have to remember what year the students are in, what their specialties are, I have to watch the calendar of the school year that the story covers and track what shows they would be working on and in what jobs.
I have had to program a full imaginary season of college theater, including mainstage shows, student-directed black box shows, auditions, special fundraisers, and class exercises. There’s one Shakespeare play involved – Twelfth Night – the rest of the plays that appear in the script, for rights reasons, are all made up. I had to invent plays from different time periods, title them, name their authors, write excerpts that would sound authentic from their era and school of drama. I’ve written fake audition monologues, fake song lyrics with melodies that only exist in my head – all wheels within the larger wheels of The Ghost Light.
I am pretty sure this is the craziest thing I have ever attempted, writing-wise, and it is far from done. Long ago, it mutated far beyond screenplay length. I don’t want to turn this into a book, I am burning to tell this story in script form, because I don’t think that anyone has before without falling prey to the impulse to pump up the prettiness and ambition and turn it into Fame. The theatre kids at my mid-sized University in the Midwest were the freaks and geeks – hell I remember a notice from a nationwide casting call for the ACTUAL Freaks and Geeks on the department bulletin board. But we were beautiful, and I was so in love with the crazy, metamorphosizing agony and ecstasy of all of it.
So far I have written 173 pages; which is, again, beyond sane. But finally, in recent months, I have allowed myself to start thinking about how to sort this material and structure it in a way that accounted for presentation. I started to think of it as a miniseries in chapters. TV is evolving rapidly, and series that go direct to Netflix have demonstrated an astounding ability to stretch the old time limitations that used to be imposed by commercial slots.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m under no delusion this gets made any time soon, even if it actually turns out to be brilliant. I will need a hell of a lot of fame and clout to even propose this, because the idea of breaking this story, this particular story, into a traditional 22 chunks of comedy in 21 minutes each hurts me almost physically. So far I have followed the story where it has taken me, and I am determined to continue that, and do it the way it needs or not at all.
But, I have allowed the idea that it splits into things that the audience can digest at an easier pace. Questions then follow…how many things? And of what length? In recent days I finally tried to articulate an “Episode 1” based on the material I have written. I did so…SO much cutting and pasting and rearranging scenes. I wrote new linking and bookending material. I settled on the themes for the episode and the central characters from the massive ensemble that we could focus on for telling that story, while setting up as much of the world and its population as I could get away with.
When I was done slapping and gluing all that, I had 68 pages that formed a cohesive opening chapter. 68 pages is just such a stupid number to try and apply to any conventional formatting whatsoever. And yet it feels like the first chapter of this story; and it feels like, if I had to guess right now, that there would be about three more chapters, maybe at more like 50-60 pages apiece.
A miniseries of 4 50-70-minute episodes. I’ve never heard of that – then again, I don’t think anybody had heard of a “season” of television consisting of three 90-minute movies before Sherlock came along. Media just keeps evolving.
In the meantime, I’m not going to worry about it. I’m going to tell my story. And I guess finishing a chapter counts as an accomplishment, although one that I am struggling to categorize. I can’t dwell on that, though, there is a lot left to do – and for the first time EVER, another human now has some pages for The Ghost Light and will be reading them.
I wonder if it’s just crazy and awful and I’ve chased a mirage? Maybe I’ll never know. But hey – a script! Or, a partial one. A sub-script. Accomplishment!