Depth of Lore

If I had to guess, the primary difference between the creative types that manage to bungle their way through life without tripping over their own shirt collar (looking at you, self), and a normal, sane, rational human being, is that creative types never manage to learn how to properly manage expectations.

            For, like, anything.

            But, mostly for creative pursuits, naturally.

            Here’s the thing: I’ve worked corporate jobs for (thinks in sad) more than a decade at this point. Resource allocation and shifting goalposts based on the ‘reality on the ground’ are things I am intimately familiar with, and when it comes to the world of business travel, I have, more or less, a ‘meh’ mentality about it all. The company couldn’t roll out this dashboard to clients because an underlying SQL query is referencing a data schema that was managed by a team we just let go and only one of the engineers on that team had access to the pickle file feeding the query? Meh. We’ll get ‘em next time, tiger. I’ll go softly manage the client’s expectations for delivery.

            When it comes to creative work, though, I expect infinite resources, flexibility and capability. What the fuck do you mean I can’t have a twenty-foot-tall animatronic yeti ripping a prop hiker in half scored to Dimmu Borgir out front of this theme park haunted house? Don’t tell me it's a matter of not enough nightly fake blood for the hiker corpse: The Evil Dead bought out an entire town’s supply of chocolate syrup for simulated gore, and they made that movie in a cave with a box of scraps! Still no? -Sighs- Can I get a ten-foot cardboard standup and some LED lights for his eyes? Great.

            Theme Park haunted house isn’t a random reference. It goes to something that actually happened to me recently I want to vent about but also work through the lessons of calculated creative restraint and how much it matters to a polished final product.

            I have a really good buddy I’ve been performing and producing music with for the last twenty years now. He runs his own indie entertainment design company that creates boutique, turnkey stage shows and experiences. It’s a super cool gig and he’s getting past the grindy startup days into a place where clients come looking for him because he has such distinctive output and products. To protect the uninnocent, I’m going to call him ‘Jack’ in this essay since he and I both used to perform as Jack Sparrow in the days of yesteryear when we were employees of the illustrious double you dee double you parks and resorts. 

            Anyway.

            Jack came to me a few weeks ago with a project. He occasionally taps me for creative development and a writing credit, but since his shows are more music than story, I don’t often get to do a lot of ‘hard’ writing for him. This was a different circumstance. He wanted actual, scripted writing for a show he was approached to produce. Like, ground up, “pitch me a story, show me an outline, deliver an alpha script by this date, what’s your hourly rate that I can bill, we’re going into business together” writing.

            Now, I got super excited about the premise. It combines a ton of shit I love: spooky locations, scary folklore ties, an underpinning of damnation… the whole kit AND the caboodle, too. Jack has read a ton of my work going back to when I was first learning to write and vomited up a fantasy saga, and he’s someone that saw the markers for me to land in horror early on. Given the show he was contracted to write was specifically a Halloween show, he didn’t ask anyone else. He knew I’d go fucking nuts over the premise.

And I did.

            Enter the dick-swinging silverback gorilla, ‘managing expectations.’ The show was contracted to him by a major theme park, and it needed to fit in with pre-existing thematic elements. It narrowed the scope a bit, but not so much it felt like someone handed us a tourniquet instead of a belt. It also slightly reframed the kind of show I was going to write. There’s not a lot of room for subtlety in performance or delivery in theme park shows. You’re contending with a distracted audience (sometimes a drunk one) and a ton of other background commotion that drags focus. You often have to come out and say ‘the thing’ rather than doing restrained storytelling the way you would with a novel, or even a powerful short story. 

            So, we’ve moved beyond the infinite universe of ‘haunted folklore, musically dynamic stage show,’ into the slightly more constrained galaxy of ‘mostly family friendly theme park entertainment.’ BUT! This is still a galaxy with billions of stars in it! There’s tons of opportunity to dive headfirst into this script and write something rich and engaging!

            I spend the weekend working on a six-stage outline, thematic arc, character profiles for the performers, story lore, and I even wrote the lyrics to an original song called ‘Ballad of the Rougarou.’ By the time I was done, I’d crafted a story of brotherly love and betrayal that explored the liminal space between passion for your craft and having to perform it on a nightly basis until it becomes creative white noise, WITH a twist ending where it turns out one of the musicians has been the devil in disguise the entire time oh my god it was awesome it was a whole vibe and I could not wait to write the full script because dammit this is going to change the way people think about theme park shows.

            Now. I’m not sure where the wires first got crossed, and maybe it was my own creative exuberance filling in gaps that weren’t necessarily there to begin with, but the first sign of trouble came when we moved from outline to script. There was an immediate shift in energy when some clarity was introduced around the show structure. That is, it was not one single show, but rather multiple show sets. Okay, no problem, the six-stage structure still plays nicely, we can do this, we just have to be accurate in our scripting to craft the appropriate leans and pulls between set transitions. If anything, we can set the cliffhangers just right and it’ll keep the audience even more engaged.

             Then came the first true tightening of the screws.

            This was not sixty minutes of total showtime with dialogue stringing together a setlist of swamp music to tell a story. It was three, twenty-minute musical sets, each to be bookended by audience engagement. My direction was changed from ‘write a script for a show’ to ‘write a script that delivers this story in six, two-minute segments.’

            Not sure if any readers out there have ever written a script or know much about writing a script, but a general rule of thumb is one page of a script is usually equal to about one minute of show time (assuming no stage direction). That meant, as the show was presently organized, I had fifteen total pages of dialogue to deliver a rather sprawling story. 

            A typical episode of a sitcom has a script length around fifty pages.

            Oh… okay. Well, so maybe this story can’t be as sprawling (the flop sweat is starting to hit, this whole fucking thing needs to be delivered in two weeks with an alpha script in four days), that’s okay, we can make cuts.

            WE CAN MAKE CUTS!

            That’s my internal panic yelling at me to do the most logical thing. Editing always has its place, and if you ask pretty much any editor, they’ll rather consistently tell you to reduce your work by 10-15%. (25 – 30% if you’re an overly cinematic ape of prose like I am.) I was still a little heartbroken looking at the six thousand word short story of swamp horror I’d cooked up to inform the script and thinking to myself:

            But… but this is the good version.

            Why doesn’t the theme park understand?! Just give us more resources to go bigger!

            Sidebar, I know there’s at least… four… of you out there going ‘how is he in panic mode over writing a twelve-page script when he’s already apparently found time to write a 6,000 word short story for the vibes.’

            Mind your business, that’s how.

            Anyway, I write the script, and it’s fine. Honestly, for a theme park show, it’s probably the better version of what was needed for the moment: straight to the point, not a lot of subtlety.  And, like I’ve said, you can’t really do subtlety in that atmosphere. The restriction forced me to craft a deliverable suited to the project needs. That’s an important lesson.

            Except the story doesn’t end there.

Because of course it doesn’t.

            I get a call a day after delivering the alpha script to Jack wherein he asks me, ‘how do we get this amazing story distilled into only the most necessary parts?’

            What the fuck do you think you’re holding, Jack?!

            To be fair, he would have used a fifty page script if we could have written a proper show, but this wasn’t that. And the theme park team had basically come back to say ‘we love the effort, slugger, but, um, no, none of this thank you, the show format’s is just the music and some banter.’ 

            Jack and I spent two hours on the phone agonizing over how to draw down ten minutes of script into component beats that the performers could deliver nonchalantly to ‘hint’ at the story we’d spent weeks developing, without it being a performance. I eventually threw up my hands (not uncommon when Jack and I are working together) and said, ‘Hey, man, remember when we were Sparrow and they gave us that giant novel of lore to memorize in case kids asked us about why the button on the left pocket of our jacket was different from the one on the right? Did we ever use any of that? No, but we knew it and that let us carry the knowledge in our bodies for our performances. Give your performers the original script. They don’t have to perform it, they just have to know the story, and they can improv banter based around that.’

            You know what I’m realizing? This essay isn’t about creative restraint. We’ll do that one another time! This is about something else.

            Subtlety is an iceberg. When an author offhandedly talks about ‘Of course, no one walks down Copperhead Drive after the sun goes down,’ and then moves on, it creates an instant mythology without saying another word. The audience sees that peak of ice bobbing in the sea of the story, and they know, they know, something real bad happened on Copperhead Drive. And they’ll be on edge every time a character comes to the crossroad at twilight and has to make a dangerous left hand turn onto that cursed boulevard.

            But you know who knows what really happened on Copperhead Drive?

            The author.

            You may not know it, but the author has actually written the mythology of Copperhead Drive. They know the name of every person slashed apart by the Copperhead Maniac back in 1929, how he pretended to be a hitchhiker and then murdered them all with the same carving knife his mother used to slice a cross on his forearm every time he took the lord’s name in vain. They know that the Copperhead Maniac’s mother was born from a father who fled Salem, and maybe was the real witch those townsfolk were looking for all along and he set up Sarah Goode and George Jacobs to take the fall. 

            The reader may never get the full story. It might not be necessary. It probably isn’t. This is where that creative restraint comes back in for a moment: sometimes holding the lore back is better. But when the author knows in their soulwhy a place is the way it is, why a person acts the way they do, why an object has that one strange chip on it… that knowledge creeps into their work all the same. Copperhead Drive becomes a sinister place that reeks of dark supernatural power without the reader being explicitly told why its scary.

            And that makes it all the more frightening.

            Come to think of it, maybe I should have just handed the performers a couple subtle lines that went along with the original script I was contracted to write but ultimately had to shelve. Even just the occasional ‘we only have enough to pay the ferryman,’ well, that could mean anything in a haunted swamp setting. Could be an airboat captain taking them to their next show.

            Could be the boatman on the River Styx waiting for his silver coin. 

            The audience doesn’t need to know. The performers do. They’ll deliver it with the proper gravitas.

            And the right people will understand.

            I’ve said it before, horror is a thinking person’s genre. When subtlety is demanded, it requires the author to do a lot of additional background drafting that will never make it to the page. But the better they understand the lore and mythology behind their own material, the better the chances it has to slither out of the shadows in disquieting ways to nest in the minds of unexpecting readers.

            Where did all of this begin? Creative restraint and corporate resources, some tangled metaphor or something like that.

            I probably need to edit this like, four times.

            Maybe I won’t. Sometimes the chaos is good.