drowners - ongoing script
Since a few days before last Christmas I've been writing a play (provisionally called Drowners). That's over seven months. For a project that's always been 'live', meaning I haven't ever put it down to concentrate on other things, that's an unprecedented length of time for me to work on a single piece.
At times it's been a glacial process, but I still feel invested in the play and excited for how it might turn out. I've also spent some time editing the bits that have been completed so far, and will return for further drafts. There are sections that I want to tighten and clarify.
This again is unprecedented. I'm a reluctant editor of my own writing at best, for the same reason I generally don't work on projects over several months. I get bored. The interest for me is in the process of creating a piece, not in how I dress it up.
At present it looks like Drowners will have around 19 short scenes, of which eight are still to be written. I know broadly what's going to happen in those scenes; I've had a scheme in mind for the play since early on. There are just a few points I need to sort out before I complete the final scenes.
I feel like I'm gaining momentum again, and the end of the first draft is in sight. With this in mind I wanted to explore some of the ideas informing what I'm doing.
I'll look mainly at what I'll broadly call the technical considerations. These are questions of character, narrative, staging etc. where I have strong opinions. Over more than 20 years I've found myself in deep disagreement with most of what I've been taught about writing fiction and drama. Some commonly accepted 'rules' aren't just found in creative writing courses and textbooks, but in much online reviewing of films for example, and more widely in the culture. Despite this I'll try to present my ideas as the positive choices they are, rather than as just a reaction against something.
Narrative
The seemingly most widely discussed theory on narrative is the three-act structure. It isn't universally accepted or utilized, but it has a ubiquity in popular discourse that sometimes makes it feel that way. A reasonable primer, including criticisms, can be found at Wikipedia.
In broad summary the first act establishes the setting and characters, then confronts the protagonist with a situation they attempt to address, leading to a turning point that creates a new situation to be overcome. The second act follows the protagonist's attempts to resolve the new situation, and struggling to do so. This usually requires them to learn the skills they will need to complete the task; this is part of the 'character arc', which I'll come to later. The third act is the resolution, where the situation is resolved (often dramatically) and the protagonist comes to a new self-realisation.
This is not a structure I'm interested in pursuing for Drowners. The principal reason for this is that I want to emphasise other elements than plot and character. I explore these other elements below, though you'll notice I actually include character as one of those 'other elements'. This is because while I dispense with plot entirely, my approach to character is a little more ambivalent. The conventional approach mentioned above is one I reject in favour of attempting something different.
The narrative structure I follow is one of interweaving thematic threads. These are: water in many of its aspects, including various drownings; music as a listening experience; dance; domestic locations, tasks and relationships; and meditation and altered mental states. The other elements I detail also feed into this in different ways.
Realism vs stylisation
This is not a realistic play. Several characters die, then continue to be part of the action without their death ever being mentioned. One of these characters is supposed to be centuries old.
The lack of realism extends to the staging which I feel should emphasise the artificiality of the play; to the characters who are minimally differentiated from each other; to the language which is purposely unnatural and stilted; and to the way time is treated more as a series of moments which repeat through a person's life than as a linear progression. The thinking behind all these is dealt with in more detail below.
I feel that plays are an inherently unnatural form, and that it's better to emphasise their artificiality than pretend to a verisimilitude that can't be delivered. TV and cinema are better at projecting an illusionistic image of the world.
Another aspect of this is the crucial question of what I call 'framing'. In all art you choose what to foreground, what to put in the frame. At the present moment, at least through the filter of the critical media I tend to consume most, it seems that the most important things for an audience are story and character. And subsidiary to these any broad themes or messages the film, series, or novel puts forward.
I find this too narrow and uninteresting, and dismissive of the distinctive character of each form. In film and television there is a wide and varied visual vocabulary established over more than a century to draw from. In a novel it's possible to stop the action altogether, or step outside of the narrative. You can give insights to characters' thoughts that aren't possible in the same way with other media. On stage there's the sense of something happening now. There is also the ability, shared with the novel, to travel anywhere and have anything happen with no need to actually create those places or events.
Staging
As indicated above, I have no interest in a naturalistic or illusionistic staging of the play. My preference is for minimal or no scenery or props, no special clothing. In this play they're a distraction, and would overdetermine certain scenes.
So, for instance, when a character sinks to the bottom of a canal and continues to talk there's nothing to be gained from having the actual water on stage. Imagine the same scene filmed; an element of ambiguity and openness has been lost. The viewer is pushed toward reading it as a dream or fantasy sequence, or the speech as the character's thoughts externalised.
But there are many more possibilities. We can take it as a literal event in a world where such things are possible; a representation of physical and/or psychological states by way of metaphor; a confusion of the sequence of real events by the character or an observer; and more. It's my view that the stage is better suited to maintaining this ambiguity than the screen.
It also allows for a cheaper, more inventive and nimble production. It helps put the focus where it should be - on the actors, their performances, and the words. I make no great claims for the words. There are better writers, and more complex scripts. But at the same time while terse and simple my language is still quite difficult, full of ellipses, elisions and gaps.
And the scenes in Drowners are very short. Changing costumes, scenery and props between each would be impractical and time-consuming. Better to use minimal means to indicate each new location.
Character
I mentioned the 'character arc' earlier. For me this is one of the worst, most unnecessary, elements in contemporary writing. It embeds a fundamental untruth about human experience at the heart of fiction.
Yes, children change and grow. Yes, teenagers and people in their twenties explore their identity and come to at least provisional self-realisations. Yes, the midlife crisis appears to be a real thing. Yes, traumatic experience and injury can affect personality. But on the whole people don't grow and change in the way the conventional character arc suggests.
People fail to learn from mistakes. People sometimes repeat the mistakes of their parents, even while carrying anger and resentment at those failings. People persist in ineffective strategies in difficult situations despite failure. People allow desire, anger, ideology, personal preference to overcome good sense. All of which may lead to a less satisfyingly neat and simple conclusion, but better reflects lived experience, and is more dramatically interesting.
Character arc as conventionally structured is also a primarily individual endeavour. I'm autistic and have always struggled with personal relationships, and even I realise that there's a strong social element to identity. Our personality is to some extent shaped and defined by other people. Part of how we see ourselves derives from how others see us. Any character arc or character change we undergo relates to our social context (and I include in that extreme isolation).
More radically, as I mentioned earlier, in Drowners my characters are minimally differentiated. Many of their conversations might be aspects of the same individual testing out different ideas around a single subject if it wasn't that they sometimes contradict each other, don't anticipate what others say, and have some faintly delineated individual characteristics and interpersonal relationships.
They're not just passive vehicles to parrot my own ideas. Though I'd be lying if I said that wasn't a risk, or that I'm not concerned about it. I'm not even clear quite what it is I'm aiming for. I don't want to create the broadly-drawn individuals of mainstream cinema; nor am I interested (in this script at least) with subtle shadings of personality, and how these minor differences generate friction.
I think what interests me is a small group of characters that in some ways reflect each other, but still have elements unique to them within the group. Perhaps part of the script is that struggle to work out what it is I want with regard to character, and how to create a compelling piece without resort to traditional drama and conflict. This is something I'll return to later.
Language
I stated earlier that my language in Drowners is terse and simple. Which is not to say that it's plain or without imagery, nor that it's always direct. Rather, it's brief. I use brief sentences, brief paragraphs, brief conversations, and extremely brief speeches in what are generally brief scenes for a stage play.
The language is unnatural and unlike everyday speech. It is often unclear what a given character is discussing and the subject may change abruptly. The redundancy and clarifications of normal conversation are removed, meaning it's easy to miss or misunderstand parts of what's being said.
In that sense it's a heightened, almost poetic language. There is frequently consideration given to the rhythmic aspects of the language, and beyond that to the sound of the words, sometimes privileged over the sense. Or at least privileged over immediate understanding.
So although the language is terse and simple it's also impressionistic and allusive rather than striving for clarity and precision. This is intentional, part of the planned unnaturalness of the play. It's aimed at focussing attention on the struggle of characters to engage with, understand and describe their experiences. The purpose of this being an attempt to engage the audience, to relate it to their own subjective experience, rather than hand them a set of neatly polished descriptions they can easily ignore.
Time
Drowners, at present, is intended to be a linear progression of events over a short space of time. Though truthfully that's largely irrelevant. However, underlying the events is a conception of time as a series of repeated experiences. So swimming alone might be seen as the same chunk of time that happens at different stages through someone's life. Likewise feeling a particular strong emotion, or contemplating the same problem.
I'm deliberately vague about dates and timespan, though the whole play is supposed to take place in winter. Whether that's the same winter is open to interpretation. There are other deliberate gaps left: for instance, when a character is awoken from the bottom of a lake after centuries how are practicalities such as national insurance and identity documents sorted out?
As with the minimal differentiation of characters, I'm not wholly clear as to why this approach to time is so important to me, but it is. There's the notion of repeated moments already sketched above, and there's the way our perception of time is affected by music, by dance (or absorption in any task), by meditation, and by a range of other experiences. Essentially, though not identified as a theme, it is a crucial part of the play's scheme.
Precursors
I have two models in the background which influence most of my decisions. One as a model to react against, and one as an exemplar of an alternative approach that works. Both are films.
The model I react against is James Cameron's Titanic. It might equally be any of a number of expensive, formulaic blockbuster hits such as Disney's Marvel superhero films or the Transformers franchise. What matters is that huge amounts of money are thrown at the screen, conventional plot and character beats are hit where you'd expect, and the whole experience ends up curiously hollow and unaffecting.
The exemplar of an alternative approach that works is Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbour Totoro, conceived as a story without conflict. The film is compelling without the need for conflict.
My argument with Titanic isn't that it's a bad film, it's that it's a profoundly predictable film, based on well-known events, that ends up relegating the protagonists to a supporting role to their own backdrop. It's a story I've always felt could be more effectively told with a couple of sock-puppets in a sandpit, given a halfway decent script and a convincing performance.
It's my belief that without a coddling architecture of music, costumes and special effects our attention and sympathies are more effectively engaged. Drowners is an attempt to put this theory into practice. While also rejecting conventional structures of narrative and character. Which might be a little over-optimistic.
My Neighbour Totoro is, of course, a film with much more charm, far wider appeal, a more identifiable narrative, and more sympathetic characters than I am attempting. But the influence is there. It proves that you can eject characteristics of storytelling widely accepted as essential while still producing something wonderful.
Drowners will have far less appeal, success or influence than either of these models. And it isn't intended to. But they form part of the ground from which my script grows.
At times it's been a glacial process, but I still feel invested in the play and excited for how it might turn out. I've also spent some time editing the bits that have been completed so far, and will return for further drafts. There are sections that I want to tighten and clarify.
This again is unprecedented. I'm a reluctant editor of my own writing at best, for the same reason I generally don't work on projects over several months. I get bored. The interest for me is in the process of creating a piece, not in how I dress it up.
At present it looks like Drowners will have around 19 short scenes, of which eight are still to be written. I know broadly what's going to happen in those scenes; I've had a scheme in mind for the play since early on. There are just a few points I need to sort out before I complete the final scenes.
I feel like I'm gaining momentum again, and the end of the first draft is in sight. With this in mind I wanted to explore some of the ideas informing what I'm doing.
I'll look mainly at what I'll broadly call the technical considerations. These are questions of character, narrative, staging etc. where I have strong opinions. Over more than 20 years I've found myself in deep disagreement with most of what I've been taught about writing fiction and drama. Some commonly accepted 'rules' aren't just found in creative writing courses and textbooks, but in much online reviewing of films for example, and more widely in the culture. Despite this I'll try to present my ideas as the positive choices they are, rather than as just a reaction against something.
Narrative
The seemingly most widely discussed theory on narrative is the three-act structure. It isn't universally accepted or utilized, but it has a ubiquity in popular discourse that sometimes makes it feel that way. A reasonable primer, including criticisms, can be found at Wikipedia.
In broad summary the first act establishes the setting and characters, then confronts the protagonist with a situation they attempt to address, leading to a turning point that creates a new situation to be overcome. The second act follows the protagonist's attempts to resolve the new situation, and struggling to do so. This usually requires them to learn the skills they will need to complete the task; this is part of the 'character arc', which I'll come to later. The third act is the resolution, where the situation is resolved (often dramatically) and the protagonist comes to a new self-realisation.
This is not a structure I'm interested in pursuing for Drowners. The principal reason for this is that I want to emphasise other elements than plot and character. I explore these other elements below, though you'll notice I actually include character as one of those 'other elements'. This is because while I dispense with plot entirely, my approach to character is a little more ambivalent. The conventional approach mentioned above is one I reject in favour of attempting something different.
The narrative structure I follow is one of interweaving thematic threads. These are: water in many of its aspects, including various drownings; music as a listening experience; dance; domestic locations, tasks and relationships; and meditation and altered mental states. The other elements I detail also feed into this in different ways.
Realism vs stylisation
This is not a realistic play. Several characters die, then continue to be part of the action without their death ever being mentioned. One of these characters is supposed to be centuries old.
The lack of realism extends to the staging which I feel should emphasise the artificiality of the play; to the characters who are minimally differentiated from each other; to the language which is purposely unnatural and stilted; and to the way time is treated more as a series of moments which repeat through a person's life than as a linear progression. The thinking behind all these is dealt with in more detail below.
I feel that plays are an inherently unnatural form, and that it's better to emphasise their artificiality than pretend to a verisimilitude that can't be delivered. TV and cinema are better at projecting an illusionistic image of the world.
Another aspect of this is the crucial question of what I call 'framing'. In all art you choose what to foreground, what to put in the frame. At the present moment, at least through the filter of the critical media I tend to consume most, it seems that the most important things for an audience are story and character. And subsidiary to these any broad themes or messages the film, series, or novel puts forward.
I find this too narrow and uninteresting, and dismissive of the distinctive character of each form. In film and television there is a wide and varied visual vocabulary established over more than a century to draw from. In a novel it's possible to stop the action altogether, or step outside of the narrative. You can give insights to characters' thoughts that aren't possible in the same way with other media. On stage there's the sense of something happening now. There is also the ability, shared with the novel, to travel anywhere and have anything happen with no need to actually create those places or events.
Staging
As indicated above, I have no interest in a naturalistic or illusionistic staging of the play. My preference is for minimal or no scenery or props, no special clothing. In this play they're a distraction, and would overdetermine certain scenes.
So, for instance, when a character sinks to the bottom of a canal and continues to talk there's nothing to be gained from having the actual water on stage. Imagine the same scene filmed; an element of ambiguity and openness has been lost. The viewer is pushed toward reading it as a dream or fantasy sequence, or the speech as the character's thoughts externalised.
But there are many more possibilities. We can take it as a literal event in a world where such things are possible; a representation of physical and/or psychological states by way of metaphor; a confusion of the sequence of real events by the character or an observer; and more. It's my view that the stage is better suited to maintaining this ambiguity than the screen.
It also allows for a cheaper, more inventive and nimble production. It helps put the focus where it should be - on the actors, their performances, and the words. I make no great claims for the words. There are better writers, and more complex scripts. But at the same time while terse and simple my language is still quite difficult, full of ellipses, elisions and gaps.
And the scenes in Drowners are very short. Changing costumes, scenery and props between each would be impractical and time-consuming. Better to use minimal means to indicate each new location.
Character
I mentioned the 'character arc' earlier. For me this is one of the worst, most unnecessary, elements in contemporary writing. It embeds a fundamental untruth about human experience at the heart of fiction.
Yes, children change and grow. Yes, teenagers and people in their twenties explore their identity and come to at least provisional self-realisations. Yes, the midlife crisis appears to be a real thing. Yes, traumatic experience and injury can affect personality. But on the whole people don't grow and change in the way the conventional character arc suggests.
People fail to learn from mistakes. People sometimes repeat the mistakes of their parents, even while carrying anger and resentment at those failings. People persist in ineffective strategies in difficult situations despite failure. People allow desire, anger, ideology, personal preference to overcome good sense. All of which may lead to a less satisfyingly neat and simple conclusion, but better reflects lived experience, and is more dramatically interesting.
Character arc as conventionally structured is also a primarily individual endeavour. I'm autistic and have always struggled with personal relationships, and even I realise that there's a strong social element to identity. Our personality is to some extent shaped and defined by other people. Part of how we see ourselves derives from how others see us. Any character arc or character change we undergo relates to our social context (and I include in that extreme isolation).
More radically, as I mentioned earlier, in Drowners my characters are minimally differentiated. Many of their conversations might be aspects of the same individual testing out different ideas around a single subject if it wasn't that they sometimes contradict each other, don't anticipate what others say, and have some faintly delineated individual characteristics and interpersonal relationships.
They're not just passive vehicles to parrot my own ideas. Though I'd be lying if I said that wasn't a risk, or that I'm not concerned about it. I'm not even clear quite what it is I'm aiming for. I don't want to create the broadly-drawn individuals of mainstream cinema; nor am I interested (in this script at least) with subtle shadings of personality, and how these minor differences generate friction.
I think what interests me is a small group of characters that in some ways reflect each other, but still have elements unique to them within the group. Perhaps part of the script is that struggle to work out what it is I want with regard to character, and how to create a compelling piece without resort to traditional drama and conflict. This is something I'll return to later.
Language
I stated earlier that my language in Drowners is terse and simple. Which is not to say that it's plain or without imagery, nor that it's always direct. Rather, it's brief. I use brief sentences, brief paragraphs, brief conversations, and extremely brief speeches in what are generally brief scenes for a stage play.
The language is unnatural and unlike everyday speech. It is often unclear what a given character is discussing and the subject may change abruptly. The redundancy and clarifications of normal conversation are removed, meaning it's easy to miss or misunderstand parts of what's being said.
In that sense it's a heightened, almost poetic language. There is frequently consideration given to the rhythmic aspects of the language, and beyond that to the sound of the words, sometimes privileged over the sense. Or at least privileged over immediate understanding.
So although the language is terse and simple it's also impressionistic and allusive rather than striving for clarity and precision. This is intentional, part of the planned unnaturalness of the play. It's aimed at focussing attention on the struggle of characters to engage with, understand and describe their experiences. The purpose of this being an attempt to engage the audience, to relate it to their own subjective experience, rather than hand them a set of neatly polished descriptions they can easily ignore.
Time
Drowners, at present, is intended to be a linear progression of events over a short space of time. Though truthfully that's largely irrelevant. However, underlying the events is a conception of time as a series of repeated experiences. So swimming alone might be seen as the same chunk of time that happens at different stages through someone's life. Likewise feeling a particular strong emotion, or contemplating the same problem.
I'm deliberately vague about dates and timespan, though the whole play is supposed to take place in winter. Whether that's the same winter is open to interpretation. There are other deliberate gaps left: for instance, when a character is awoken from the bottom of a lake after centuries how are practicalities such as national insurance and identity documents sorted out?
As with the minimal differentiation of characters, I'm not wholly clear as to why this approach to time is so important to me, but it is. There's the notion of repeated moments already sketched above, and there's the way our perception of time is affected by music, by dance (or absorption in any task), by meditation, and by a range of other experiences. Essentially, though not identified as a theme, it is a crucial part of the play's scheme.
Precursors
I have two models in the background which influence most of my decisions. One as a model to react against, and one as an exemplar of an alternative approach that works. Both are films.
The model I react against is James Cameron's Titanic. It might equally be any of a number of expensive, formulaic blockbuster hits such as Disney's Marvel superhero films or the Transformers franchise. What matters is that huge amounts of money are thrown at the screen, conventional plot and character beats are hit where you'd expect, and the whole experience ends up curiously hollow and unaffecting.
The exemplar of an alternative approach that works is Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbour Totoro, conceived as a story without conflict. The film is compelling without the need for conflict.
My argument with Titanic isn't that it's a bad film, it's that it's a profoundly predictable film, based on well-known events, that ends up relegating the protagonists to a supporting role to their own backdrop. It's a story I've always felt could be more effectively told with a couple of sock-puppets in a sandpit, given a halfway decent script and a convincing performance.
It's my belief that without a coddling architecture of music, costumes and special effects our attention and sympathies are more effectively engaged. Drowners is an attempt to put this theory into practice. While also rejecting conventional structures of narrative and character. Which might be a little over-optimistic.
My Neighbour Totoro is, of course, a film with much more charm, far wider appeal, a more identifiable narrative, and more sympathetic characters than I am attempting. But the influence is there. It proves that you can eject characteristics of storytelling widely accepted as essential while still producing something wonderful.
Drowners will have far less appeal, success or influence than either of these models. And it isn't intended to. But they form part of the ground from which my script grows.
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