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First off, happy father’s day to all you dads out there. Having been raised without a father it was never a big deal to me as a child. We’ve done our father’s day lunch with Mary and Art, and now I’m waiting for tea to finish brewing. Trin is with her father. She and Jon celebrated the day on Saturday morning before she left. I grew up without any father, and she has two. Very different.
Jon is off on an errand and I’m going to go up to work when the tea is ready. Must have tea.
I have been fighting with a scene in DANSE MACABRE for about a week, maybe a little less. Okay since Tuesday. It is, of course, a Richard scene. I’ve offered the character every alternative I could think of: a fight, sex, a fight then sex, moral indignation, not so moral indignation. I’ve mapped up and discarded version after version of this one blasted scene. Finally last night just before the lights went down for the movie, the dam burst, and I knew what the scene needed to do. I have been keeping the nose to the grindstone on this scene and it was like beating my head against a brick wall. I tried on Wednesday to not work at it, and let my mind play. That was the afternoon that Trinity and I got our mother-daughter day. Still no break in the scene. So back to the grindstone. I had given up for Saturday. I’d made some notes and they weren’t working. As Jon put earlier in the blog for yesterday we’d decided to go see Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the movie. It was as the lights went down for this that I understood what the character needed out of this scene. It wasn’t necessarily what I, the writer, needed, but Richard can be very stubborn. In many ways he and Anita are well-matched. But can two people this stubborn really survive in a relationship? I don’t know. If they just wouldn’t keep being stubborn about opposing view points we might get somewhere.
No sex for this scene. No big fight even. Richard just needs room to go away and think about things. Okay. I think sometimes I get the subconscious views of my characters. The things that they won’t really do, but they think about. I get to see inside their heads at the things that they think about but know would destroy their lives, and those around them. Or at least cause major problems. Strangely the two scariest heads to see too deeply into are Richard and Asher. Very different reasons but both of them have random impulses that would bring our little relationship arc crashing down. Tea’s done, gotta go.