I sometimes shake my head at how badly I fumble even the basics of writing.
There’s old writing advice that goes, essentially, that you should let the story be what it is. Meaning that whatever the story wants to be, let it be that. Don’t try to force it to be something other than what it should be.
And I’ve known that for a long time. But sure enough…
Back about a year ago, or so, I got an idea for a story. It felt like it would likely shape up to be a novel, although maybe a screenplay and maybe a comic. But at least a book, for sure.
It was a post-zombie apocalypse setting, but with some twists that I hadn’t heard before. Or at least, if I’d heard a version of them, perhaps they hadn’t been done quite this way. (Another bit of old advice for writers: It’s goddamn rare that anyone ever writes anything genuinely original; the ideas you get are almost guaranteed to be an amalgam of bits and pieces you’ve gathered from other stories and bits of conversation and dreams and songs and whatever else you may want to throw into the blender of your unique brain, and pureed into the smoothie of something that hasn’t been done quite that way before).
The thrust of the matter being, at its heart, this story was part dystopian and part action and part heavy drama.
And so of course, my brain took all that essential core information and said… er… “But what if it’s a comedy?”
Now here’s the thing about that: There’s absolutely a place for flipping the script on old standards, even horror, and making them other things, like comedies, instead. It’s been done before and will be done again, and when it’s done well it’s excellent. But I suspect–and the likes of Nick Frost and Simon Pegg are welcome to correct me as needed–that ideas like that which work really well are probably thought of in terms of “How can we make old horror movie elements into more of a comedy?”, and not “Well, here’s a really heavy dystopian idea with horror mixed in… how can we add in some chuckles?”
Which is what mine was, y’see.
I even tried it out. After doing some initial leg work on the heavier, sombre version of the idea and getting kind of bummed out by it, I figured I’d take a crack at the more… y’know… upbeat, quippy approach.
Spoiler alert: It didn’t work.
At all.
At all.
So let this be a lesson, kids: Let the story be what it is. If you don’t like what it is, that’s a whole other thing. No one says you have to like what ideas your brain cranks out so often–so… so often–and of course, play around with the ideas you get. Look at them from different angles and see what new approach you may be able to take with them and how they look if you twist something about them (or each idea entirely) one way or another. Don’t be afraid to take them for a spin around the parking lot and test out what happens if you do one thing or another with them. But once you realize what each idea truly is–what it’s got to be–it’s a fool’s game to try to make it something else.
Suffice to say, the idea of mine is back to being the heavy version. Or perhaps to put it more aptly: It is what it always really was.