Frenzied Scripting 2: Where It All Begins

Alright, so my new script bears the working title of Swamp Opera. It's awful and I'm looking to change it to something else. I press forward in the hopes that something will present itself as the story develops. Some line, some metaphor, that's central to the plot, illuminates it, enriches it, and flows naturally from the text itself. And at the same time will look good on the posters. I'm tempted by a rather poetical line within the barebones script, at the moment, which is along the lines of “Why can't you leave us to sing our songs to each other?” I think The Songs We Sing To Ourselves could be a great title but it doesn't really fit the story as is.

But I call it Swamp Opera, for now, not only because it takes place largely within a swamp but because it's something of a take off on one of my favorite genres, the space opera. There's just something about me that responds to the sweeping epic, the cast of hundreds, the exotic places and a narrative that jumps from point of view to point of view with casual ease. Probably because it's about the exact opposite of where my own writings tend towards. They've fallen out of favor, become trite, I think, because they can be so melodramatic. So full of shlock and sentiment and the worst sort of clanking robot science fiction that it's hard to take them seriously as a medium. But I've long thought that the form could be updated with a modern take on characterization, where everything and everyone is tarnished with the brush of realism. Where cardboard cutouts and rigid archetypes break down as the reader is brought into a personal connection with the cast. As opposed to the far flung, space-age gleaming, sterile adventures of a space opera, it would have to go bellow decks, get down and dirty. Into the muck. Into the grime. Into the lives and motivations of its characters. Hence the allusion to the murky, cloudy waters of a swamp.

That human touch is the sort of thing that's been done before, of course, in the best examples of the space opera genre. Because getting the reader to care about your characters is the mark of a good writer, if you ask me (Doing it without resorting to maudlin harping along the heartstrings is where the greats separate.). But those exist in the day and age of Buck Rogers and Plan 9 from Outer Space. Creatures of their own time, trapped by their expectations and preconditions. Nothing wrong with a little creative rebranding to stand out from that crowd, to announce that I'm trying to move the goalposts a bit.

And I am, here, at least a little because although the plot of the novel involves the kind of grand, sweeping epic that would feel at home in a space opera, the scale is decidedly personal. The empires wrestling, nations crumbling, while the world is turned from its axis, that's the backdrop. That's what contextualizes the story of the people involved. The ordinary ones whose lives, whose destinies, are controlled if not determined by forces they can barely comprehend let alone control. And the assertion of self over those vast, impersonal forces is a big part of the planned story.

It's like the old “for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost”. An example of how the right person at the right time at the right place can grease the wheel of history and send the world spinning off onto an unexpected path. About how duty and responsibility can be in conflict. And, ultimately, just how far love can make someone reach to find what lays beyond their limits.

In other words, it's a huge, complicated story with a ton of moving parts that I've managed to find a nice, small angle to view it from. One that lets me deal with everything from that overarching story and at the same time push it into the subtextual background for the viewer to find while they explore the simpler, rawer, personal story in the foreground. I think.