16 September 2020 stories
So I have a story idea.
In my head it feels like a movie.
Obviously, it will never become a movie, nor a comic, nor anything really.
Disclaimer: I’m a really bad writer so both the below and the potential story will display those skills, or lack there of.
However, throughout “The Quarantine Times”, I’ve been tinkering with the idea in my head. A lot. Some of it has even been written out in either outline form or chunks of scenes. It’s nowhere near complete and to be honest, there are still a lot of unknowns and blank spots in my brain let alone on the page.
To give a little bit of the backstory here, the idea originally came about while watching Eraserhead on the Criterion Channel back in April. I didn’t actually like it as much as I thought I would. What I really wanted was a bizzaro movie like Eraserhead, but a little more mainstream and with a score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. It seemed like those ingredients together would make something beautiful. It wouldn’t even need a lot of plot; some Lynchian visuals with his attention to sound design and then the Reznor score on top of that would please the senses no matter what. I laid all of this out originally in my wiki (RIP) here. It was originally called Mercury Tom because I didn’t really have any sense of anything.
Since the original inception, I’ve since decided Drew Goddard (from The Cabin in the Woods fame) should actually write the script based on a Lynch outline, and should star Michael Shannon as… Chilton Fuller (no longer is the main character named Tom).
My plan is to write out chapters, of which the form it will take is still up in the air. In my head it’s a movie, but I don’t know the first thing about script formatting. It’d be cool to publish in chapters as an actual script, but will probably be more like chapters of a book. This all requires me to actually write it, which when it comes to writing, I am quite lazy so the couple of bits above and below might be all I ever release publicly. I hope not, but…
With the actual story, I have two goals:
First, is to give you the sinking feeling I get whenever I think about how small we really are in the grand scheme of the universe. There’s a rising anxiety I get when seeing those animations that show Earth and then bigger planets and galaxies as Earth gets exponentially smaller basically becoming a grain of sand compared to even a planet like Jupiter1. A similar feeling, if your total insignificance doesn’t resonate with you, is the movie Gravity when shit hits the fan and everything is going crazy… but it’s in the vacuum of space and just silent. This story never reaches these highs of adrenaline, but for me, it was a similar feeling of breathlessness and anxiety that is almost paralyzing.
Second (slight spoilers ahead) is to divert the audiences attention by leading them down one path a lot longer than expected when the actual story ends up being something completely different. One idea I’ve had forever is to have an hour long TV show with a big star, advertise the ten episode season as some huge event and then seven minutes into the third episode, you just kill off the main character and completely end the series. Right there, it’s over. It’d probably drive people furious (if the show was actually any good) and this thought thrills me. With Never a Fuller Sky, the idea is in the same vein but vastly different. The plan would be to have you follow one character for thirty minutes or so, only getting a glimpse of our main character in the background. This first character would actually be like some chosen person who is supposed to serve some real greater purpose in the universe, like what you�d expect a main character to be. But then they die. And we follow the actual main character, a schlub of a person, down a mundane road. Mundane it may be, but still some shit gets a little psychedelic maybe he’s an alcoholic or takes some drugs, visions happen, aliens are involved (but barely), and in the end the aliens realize the character of greater purpose has died, which will result in catastrophic ends for the aliens. This also results in the end of Earth, but this barely even registers because to the aliens Earth is nothing more than a marble.
Well that’s the introduction for what I’m planning to do. It�s not some epic story, the plot will look more like Dazed and Confused than Interstellar, but it�s more a feeling I�m going for here.
If you’ve ever subscribed to my newsletter, you know I don’t follow through on shit like this, but now that it’s out there I might actually try to write something a little more than a sparse outline.
this may be inaccurate, I can’t actually remember at which point we go from ant to sand to basically nothingness.↩︎