I’m reading more these days. And I’m writing more.
When I reread stuff I’ve written a while ago, I can see the influence of what I was reading at the time. This, for instance, what you’re reading right now, is my attempt at a David Sedaris. I just finished another volume of his memoirs, so my head is full of it.
As a novice writer, as I read more, I’m more conscious of the devices and mechanisms used by actual, real life writers to make a story work. I’m thinking about the craft. Its impressive, and I often shake my head in wonderment.
Brilliant. That’s Just Brilliant.
So, I steal it, and copy it.
I read a Jackie Collins novel in the summer. Just for a laugh, really. My wife and I wanted to read the same book together on holiday. To share the enjoyment of discussing it on the beach, or over dinner. So we picked the cheesy, best-selling, 1980s Hollywood Wives out of cheeky amusement.
True to expectations, it was filled with glam LA types, with the super-rich women spending their time either shopping, meeting for expensive lunches, gossiping, unjustly firing their housemaids, or having affairs with each other’s husbands. It was so bad it was funny.
But a hundred pages in I saw a device Collins was using that I was not expecting. Something creatively interesting. I suddenly realised the alternating chapters were a mix of the real story of LA and a fictional story within it. The play within the play, if you like.
The primary storyline showed us a horrible, morally vacuous landscape of greed and vanity, within which a single likeable character, a beautiful actress, surprised everyone by writing a really clever screenplay. She was fighting to get it made into a film in an industry of arsehole producers (all men) and arsehole proto influencers (all female, and often married to the arsehole men). As it developed, her script gets critical recognition, and the cast of vulgar characters all end up fighting and double crossing each other to try to get parts in the final film.
The alternating chapters told a very different story. An east coast twenty year old, down on his luck and still living with his controlling mum, has found love with an unsuitable prostitute, and entertains visions of a new, idyllic life together. If only his mum would approve of her. It’s grim and a distinct contrast to the west coast glamour.
So a third of the way through the book, it clicked.; the film the Hollywood lot are all fighting over IS the gritty east coast story. Now that is clever. The screen play is being set out for us in parts, in between the ongoing story of the fight to get it made. Which is the primary tale here? The east coast kid in the grimy, kitchen sink drama? Or the glitzy west coast production challenges? I even started fitting the LA players with the parts they will eventually get cast in. Who would play the lead? Can the writer get cast in her own film? How much would the credibility of the script get compromised?
What fun? This book is truly undervalued. I always thought Jackie Collins was seen as a joke, but in fact, but is this actually a modern classic?
Brilliant. This is Just Brilliant.
I doubled down and devoured the second half of the book.
But as we reached the final act, it turns out that isn’t what Collins was doing after all.
It turns out it was, in fact, a straightforward west coast melodrama, combined with the growing threat of an east coast serial killer, who finally heads to Hollywood to confront one of the characters, linked by the most ridiculous and weak connection, for a pointless and stupid shoot out finale.
Weak. Really weak. Rubbish, in fact.
So how come my idea didn’t occur to Jackie Collins? My idea is much better.
Did she get steered out of it by the publishers? Or did the multi-million, best-selling, millionaire wordsmith Jackie Collins not even think of it?
So last summer’s disappointment crossed my mind when I was listening this month, to multi-million, best-selling, millionaire songsmith, Bruce Springsteen.
On Bruce’s critically acclaimed 1982 Nebraska LP, he has two very similarly titled songs, back to back, on the same LP: Highway Patrolman and State Trooper. This troubled me at first, but on the 3rd straight listen it had me declaring out loud:
Brilliant. Just Brilliant.
His 6th studio album is best known for diverting from a full production, full band, full on wall of sound to just a stripped-down voice and guitar. It surprised everyone, and was a technique that would become mainstream ten years later when the MTV Unplugged series showcased the acoustic talents of most of the biggest bands in the world
It’s a great listen, but those two songs in particular, Highway Patrolman and State Trooper, irritated me. How come these two titles, which appear to be the same thing to me, in my limited understanding of American policing, are side by side? It irked me. It shouldn’t, but it did. I was led to believe this was a masterpiece, and I was enjoying being part of it. Forty years late to the party, but discovering its rich beauty was really rewarding. But this was a flaw. And it was spoiling it.
Highway Patrolman, followed by State Trooper. Too similar. At least put them either ends of the record.
Then, after multiple listens, I realised, it was actually brilliantly scheduled on purpose. With a glorious smile on my face, I realised they were a pair. Highway Patrolman and State Trooper actually complemented each other perfectly. They were in effect, parts one and two of the same story. I played them over and over again.
Highway Patrolman was the lengthier story of two brothers, from a poor farming family, who after serving in the army, one became a police officer, and the other, in the words of the song, ‘went bad’. It is a story of brotherly love, even though the officer was routinely called to pull his brother out of a scrape, a fight or plain drunk, and take him home.
The song concludes with yet another call to a roadhouse where bad boy brother has got himself into a brawl, only this time it sounds real serious. A girl is sobbing and a guy is lying on the floor with his head bleeding badly. Our Highway Patrolman heads out and catches his brother leaving the scene in his Buick. He pursues him through the night at high speed across the state of Michigan, furious that he is running away, even from his own brother. But then as they near the Canadian border, he drops speed and lets his brother escape into the darkness. Family, after all, is family.
State Trooper on the other hand is a short, two chord, throbbing rock and roll song, with the beat of a V8 engine and race tyres on a highway. It tells the story of a young man, with the world against him, who feels he can’t do right from wrong. He’s being pursued by the police, and repeats a despairing chorus – ‘State Trooper, please don’t stop me, please don’t stop me, please don’t stop me..’ The tone of it suggests he is planning an exit of some kind. Perhaps just escaping back home, or perhaps to a new life, or maybe to end it all.
Wow, I thought. I get it. What a brilliantly paired couple of songs. Contrasting styles, telling two sides of the same tale.
That is Brilliant. Just Brilliant.
But then I hunted out the lyrics, and found bloody Springsteen didn’t do that at all.
Highway Patrolman is set in Michigan, yet State Trooper describes a New Jersey man. There’s no actual suggestion of a link at all.
Oh.
Didn’t anyone at the record company say anything? How come it takes me to suggest a much better idea. Set them as two halves of the same tale? It’s not rocket science.
Honestly!
And while we’re on about it, what about that Game of Thrones thing a few years ago? Million selling George RR Martin and the whole god damned production team at multi award winning Home Box Office
So you’ve got a fortified capital city. A huge fortress overlooking a vitally strategic port and harbour, and you hear the baddies are coming. An armada of ships. The battle to end all battles is set to happen, as the grand, season finale.
Huge, unscalable walls are topped with hundreds of cannon, and archers. A thin strip of beach below the impossible defences borders the lapping waves of the sea.
This is going to be. Just. Brilliant. Actual old school, castle warfare played out in high definition on my TV. It’s going to be Troy, Carthage, Sebastopol, even. Bring it on. Just. Brilliant.
The attacking naval force are spotted miles away, so the city is prepared, poised to pick them off at distance before they can even shoot back, then decimate them as they attempt to land, and massacre them on the beach, even if they manage to reach the foot of the hundred foot walls.
But they don’t. They wait until the ships run up onto the beach and land an attacking army of foot soldiers and cavalry, and then they open the bloody castle doors and race out to fight them toe to toe, on the beach.
Oh.
The defenders give up every advantage they had, running out of the hugely protective shelter of a big, bloody castle and an odds-on victory, to level the odds to an evens, fifty-fifty in a straightforward street fight. Who would do that? Who wrote this?
The castle designers and building contactors must be standing aside aghast, realising they hadn’t left sufficient operating instructions of ‘What to do in case of attack’. I can see them looking at each other, questioning ‘wasn’t it bloody obvious? Don’t go outside. Instead, repel the invaders from the safety of your bloody big castle’
Surely every viewer with even the slightest understanding of basic warfare, or even visited a castle with the kids on a bank holiday, would be, like me, shouting at the TV, ‘No!!!! Get back inside, you idiots.’
So how come this made it onto our screens. How come I know more about castles than hundreds of people in the telly industry. And George bloody RR Martin?
I get it. A lengthy siege perhaps isn’t so televisual, unless you were doing the Masada mass suicide thing. But even so, come on!
Did no one, either in production or in the cast really, at any stage, not say ‘This. Is. Nuts’?
So, perhaps I can write a multi-million best seller, after all. I seem to better at it than some of them.
I’ve got lots of ideas. Perhaps a little bit more to learn yet, I’ll grant you.
Punctuality, or is it punctuation, for one.
And grammar.
And I’ve only got an O level, level vocabulary.
So what if until recently I thought hubris was just another version of humility? So I made a bit of a fool of myself? But they both sound the same. Well, they start with an H anyway.
So what if I thought they were the same.
I reckon they should mean the same. Hubris?
It would be just brilliant if they were.
I’m usually right, after all.
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