This Day Has 24 Minutes
As you know, the DPCS has decided to recap the 3-Day show in the snarky style that is, it seems, the voice of this new recap genre. I think he’s kind of having trouble because he’s trying to force himself to take the proper recapping tone and be somewhat bastardly, when actually he likes everyone.
Truly, has anyone else noticed that recapping has become not just a thing people do but a way in which they do it? And I don’t think it existed pre-internet.
Anyway, he’s doing his thing, which is always gonna be a little different from my thing.
My thing is that I’m amazed that twenty-four minutes could do such a nice job of setting up the situation and showing who everyone is. It’s hard, from my perspective, to know for sure… but I think you can watch that episode and come away from it with a sense of everyone. I’ve seen a lot of reality shows where half the cast is a cypher at first and you might even confuse them with one another until you’ve been watching for awhile. Not in this case.
I was just saying to someone, via email, that I felt bad for the judges in this context. Our job, in terms of being “characters” in this story, is to wander around a bit shocked and to basically be ourselves, only with less sleep.
The judges, on the other hand, have to explain to viewers the level of difficulty involved in this whole process.
It’s easy to watch the parkour finals on MTV and say, “Holy crap! That is incredible! How do they do that?” You can see what those guys are doing. The judges on that show don’t have to sell anything. They just have to say, “Look at this.”
The judges on the 3-Day show are trying so hard to put across how hard this is going to be, and I don’t know if you can, exactly. Writers already know, and people who don’t write either shake their heads and go, “I hate writing anything. I could never do that!” or think, “Just put some stuff down on paper. What’s the problem?” Either way, they don’t really get it.
Big Bang Theory, though they’re having a weak season so far, did a hilarious bit about this a few weeks ago. They shot (and edited) two guys working on a formula the way you’d shoot and edit two guys training for a Rocky sequel or something. It was funny, but also it illustrated the problem.
Maybe the best you can do is delve into the experience people are having internally. There’s a bit in the first episode where one of the writers, Lorna, says she’s obsessed and that it’s good. That’s accurate, I think–obsession is very helpful when writing. It’s a good moment to show. And she looks obsessed, too, like she only half-heard the question and her head is somewhere else. Perfect.
There was one thing that happened that I wish had been caught on camera, but I don’t think it was. I was lying on the floor with an atlas. I’d been there awhile, and one of the other writers, Matthew, guessed what I was doing… because he does it, too. He came over and we talked about how you can get really hung up on getting one minor fact right, even though it doesn’t matter that much, but somehow you feel as if you can’t write until you get it. Even when you know you’ve played fast and loose with other facts all over your book.
I’ve thought about this since then and I still don’t quite understand it. Maybe it’s like you need that fact to be right so you that you know you got something right. Because you’re feeling uncertain about something else in your book. Or maybe it’s a touchstone to the real world–the real world and my book have this fact in common. Like the fact that this is the name of the river flowing from the former SSRs into Mongolia is now some kind of portal between your fictional world and the one you’re sitting in.
You could say it’s just procrastination, but it’s such odd and specific procrastination that I think there’s something else going on.
Either way, it’s strange. And only some writers do it.
Anyway, that’s the kind of messed-up experience writing can be and the places it takes your head. Maybe talking about that is as close as you can come to illustrating it, for people who don’t do it.
Sleep deprivation, on the other hand, is something we can all understand. Which is why I’m both looking forward to and dreading upcoming episodes. I’m here to tell you, I’m not 100 percent certain what I said or did. Also, I think Joe–the writer who was unlucky enough to get the bunk below mine–wanted to murder me over the fact that I brought a tent, because it was crinkly. And, in retrospect, she would have been within her rights. Thanks for not murdering me, Joe.
Current Bedside Reading: a thermometer.
Commentary: I’m definitely considering a mediclinic.
Comments
James Brown (Nov 12, 2009)
“Either way, it’s strange. And only some writers do it.”
On the other hand, when writers don’t do it, boy howdy can that throw the audience out of the experience when they catch it. Ask me about my “but, but … NO!” experience watching the Blair Witch Project someday.
James
Gayleen (Nov 13, 2009)
Oh, please, do tell.
James Brown (Nov 13, 2009)
Well ok, since you asked.
I didn’t see it in the theatre, but being a breathing human in north america, I saw the hype and fluster go by. So a bunch of us got together at our house to watch it after it hit video. We turned the lights low, and either promised to keep silent (for the chatty types) or threatened to beat with sticks (if the chatty types got unruly) and settled in. I think one or two people had seen it, but most of us hadn’t.
So the whole schtick with the BWP was the realism and the shaky-cam documentary and all the rest of that jazz, right? The first half of the movie was all establishing that fiction and cementing your buy in to make the second half scary instead of stupid.
So we’re watching along, and the ‘crew’ is being all goofy and ‘hey look at us, we’re filming an independant documentary’ and doing a good job of getting that buy in. And they go into town, and start asking questions about the Blair Witch and stuff, and we’re still all with them.
And they tromp out into the woods, and interview a couple of fishermen out there. They’re asking questions and getting vague stories and… Hold on.
Fly fishermen.
Fishing from the same little spit in the river.
Fishing back to back.
(Insert the sound of a screeching halt as my suspended disbelief crashes to the floor and explodes into a thousand tiny little pieces.)
I glanced around the room, and nobody else caught it; they were all still engrossed, so I just quietly got up and left.
It’s not the sort of detail you would expect anyone who’s never done much fishing to catch, but even if you’ve just seen people fly fishing, you know darn well they don’t stand anywhere near each other.
James