The night was……
Originally published at Rapid City Script Blog. You can comment here or there.
With each story I am trying out a new style or technique which I am not used to using. The issue that I am currently working on is going to employ heavy narration and be in a noir style.
I think that noir is so full of tropes and cliches that it is easy if are ok with doing a crappy job at it.
Really, the same is true of superhero story. You just familiarize yourself with the basics and come in like a tourist, snapping pictures and buying t-shirts and pointing out all the crappy stuff that is just there for you to gawk at. Then you go “yep, I’ve been there. It was fun.”
But that is the crappy version.
I know what good noir looks and feels like, but making it is a different story. Literally. Literarily, literally.
So I was thinking about what parts of my overall Rapid City story can be best served with a noir story. I found a few characters and situations that will be well served. There is still work to be done, but I have a starting point.
As I sat, right here on this very couch, with my creative wheels spinning…. I reached over and picked up one of the Criminal trades I got at the Boston Comic Con last weekend. In Criminal, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillps GET noir to the point that they seem to intentionally cast off the obvious tropes in order to really get their hands on the heart of it. I opened “The Dead and the Dying“, read one page, and went “Oh, yeah. That’s how you do it.”
I closed the book and blurted the following into my laptop.
The world is full of facts.
Night. Day.
Here. There. All just facts.
People have a tendency, though, to string those fact together into stories.
Character is how a man bears the disappointment when his facts no longer match his story.
These are my facts…..
Maybe a bit cliche, but it is my first draft and my first try.