Attendees: FB, JT, AH, CF, TC, LS (new members! heppity heppity!)
Read: Ridiculous, Outrageous (CF short story); Dark Out (second draft of an FB screenplay)
Ridiculous, Outrageous was the story of a potentially senile, certainly sinister older lady, and the trials and tribulations of her every day, mundane existence. Lurking beneath it was both a desire and an inability to reach out to her estranged son, and a fascination with the past, with detail. It was a most excellently controlled piece, with a clear, humorous narrative voice and a meandering, engaging style perfectly suited to the protagonist's own confused manner. We discussed how it was structure, how speech and narration worked together, the effect of lists within the piece, and more broadly about character and development. Hopefully some of it was helpful... maybe...
Dark Out went through the grinder a little bit to try to incorporate more of a sense of Pierre, his childishness, his isolation and strangeness to the rest of the bunker dwellers. However, it quickly became apparent that fixes FB thought had worked did not, and through a very useful discussion, he was left... oh, I'm writing in the third person about myself. Odd. Anyway, I realised that while all the disparate elements of Jess's idea were still there, in one form or another, they were not working in unison to provide an atmospheric, impact-laden piece. Instead they were just confusing. And I need to scrap it and go back to the original, very very good idea, of a boy's fear of large spaces giving him privileged information and providing him with the means to survive where other, more obvious candidates fail. Separating him, a tad, from the assumptions that others make. But even things that seemed a given, such as apocalypse, threat from outdoors, fascist regime, missing parents, were all questioned, and that's probably a good thing. Thank you all for your comments!
