- How do you make a family whole when everyone in it is broken? Hollywood will pay big bucks for a compelling answer to that question.The PIX-JOCKEY (visual fantasist) / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Officious rulings:
1. Liberty Island Magazine is having a writing contest, kinda like an amateur contortionist’s exhibition. That much interests me not at all. Casual writing is not that much different from casual sex, in my estimation, hugely likely to cost more than it’s worth and not to my liking in any case. But, while the idea Liberty Island is promoting is dumb and counter-productive and wasteful of whatever talents the entrants might have, I have an idea for a much more substantial, beneficial writing contest.
2. Speaking not of farce or satire but of the plot structure in which events move from worse to better because the hero learns, deploys and masters new ideas, comedy is the only art that will redeem Western Civilization. In that light, I see Liberty Island’s means as being opposed to its ends. Conservatives and libertarians will only get what they want when many more people live up to middle-class ideals and values, hence the only art that can move them toward their goals is an art that makes people better over time. This is how the plot of comedy writes itself into individual human lives. Preaching to the choir will change nothing, except to make the choir more dour and despairing over time.
4. Hence, my argument would be that the editorial philosophy of Liberty Island is wrong, if the goal is to change minds, change lives, change the world. If the objective is to infect the catalogs of pulp and genre publishers with putative non-Marxists, thus to put on display the righter side of blood, guts ’n’ gore, they might be on the right track. My take is that good art is about real people striving to overcome the real problems that afflict real life, but we don’t see eye-to-eye on that notion – and I have the rejection letters to prove it.
5. Ergo: My writing contest.
6. Start with the set-up of Pammy and Dan I did in Sunday’s church service: Pam and Dan meet and marry. She’s 25 and he’s 27 when she throws the bouquet. She’s been riding the carousel for eight years, as has he, both less so than their friends, but by now she sees all men as lying losers and he sees all women as conniving sluts. Even better, he fathered a son with one of his past bedmates, who, it turns out, was a conniving slut.
7. That all sucks, don’t it? So let’s complicate the story. It’s eight years after the wedding. Pammy and Dan have a six-year-old son, who is simultaneously resentful of and in awe of his older, rebellious step-brother, upon whom his baby-mama has given up. Dan has checked out of the marriage and Pammy is doing what she can to take control of The Runaway Minivan that is her family.
8. Your challenge: Work it out. Find a happy ending. Each one of these characters will have to change to make the story resolve, but that interaction, the conflict among competing motives, will be riveting. This is a real story that is almost too real: It is everywhere. But that suggests that people might want to try to find a way out of this kind of mess, doesn’t it?
9. The judging? It ain’t me, babe. I might write this story, but chances are I won’t be reading your version. But if you can actually win this contest, the judging is easy: Sell it to Hollywood. They’re dying for rom-coms that plausibly overcome the ravages of misspent youth. I would love to watch your rendition of this yarn on the big screen. But even if you don’t get to cash a seven-figure paycheck, you’ll still be a winner, because you will have worked through a real story – real drama involving real people. Even if no one reads your story, even if you never sit down to write it, you will be better for responding to human life as it really is.
10. Rinse and repeat. The essence of the romantic comedy form is the romance that shouldn’t work but somehow does. Meet-cutes and contrived incompatibilities can be fun, but the world of Pammy and Dan is why some marriages work and most do not. If you want to write about real life, this is where it is. If you want to write about real people, they’re all around you. If you want to make art that changes lives, write about lives changing for the better, over time, in response to better ideas.
