Becoming The Overman

"I have not written in the longest time..."

THESE WORDS SEEM to mark nearly every entry I place into my leather-bound journal. My soul became wretched rather recently with the solemn fear that this precious book had become lost to me. I searched where I last remember it being (the trunk of my car) and it was not there. I eventually found it buried under several layers of clothes and yellow anti-freeze containers in the back seat of this same vehicle, and although it was dirty and old there words inside had not faded, for it is a very durable book, double wrapped in leather with strips of that brown stuff that wrap around it and tie it closed. This wretched soul of mine began calling at 2 in the morning, so when I brought it into my house there was no one awake to see me. I sat down on my blue, mircosuede futon and opened the book.

It took me some time to untie the leather straps which held the book shut, and after several seconds of faliure I became frantic, finally working it open. I read. There were only about ten pages worth of writing that I had done as of yet, for I have only owned the book for, at best, two years and I write in it so infrequently. Yet when I do it seems to be important, and I enjoyed what I read of my own words from years past. One particular entry told the story of my first professional lecture on theoretical physics. The story was a very long one, though, so I eventually summarized the ending rather abruptly, only because I was physically very tired of writing in a cramped, slouched position over a rather small book I write in usually without a desk -- I enjoy the privacy found in my room, but have no surfaces to write on, lest I get onto my knees and write on my bed, which I cannot say I haven't done more than once.

I noticed that I write in my journal to be read. I do not write everyday events in it because I wish for it to be read by millions one day as a memoir to my childhood, a subject which people will soon become very interested in. I do not want the book to be filled with hundreds of pieces of useless information, but rather only have posts every several months, giving it a faster pace and something not as easily grown bored of. And even though the purpose of most journals is to place unfiltered thoughts onto paper, I still fear someone finding my book and knowing what I know...it is simply too large a risk for me to take, but I am changing my ways a little at a time.

Nonetheless, I have been trying to write a little more in this journal as of late. I have the desire to place these unfiltered thoughts away before they become as lost to me as all my other un-used thoughts have become, thrown forever into the deep abyss of Lost Memory. The thought has even crossed my mind to place some of these entries online for others to read, but this is only because I enjoy sharing my writing, no matter how confidentially it may be written. If this ever becomes a real option fo rme, it will only become such after several years from now. At this time, I am more concerned with simply writing within the confines of that leather as well as working on my stageplay, for which I already have formulated a three-act synthesis....

About two days ago, I finally settled on the basis of my play. The names I use now may or may not be the final ones, but to help the reader they are there. I don't have much time, so here it is in short:

Based in the 1940's, a wealthy and popular writer (Nicholas Creek) begins to live out the lives of his own characters in the hope of leaving his mundane life. While in disguise in a park, he meets a young woman (Alice) who shows him the error of his ways. They fall in love but never tell each other so. However, Nicholas' jealous wife (Sandra Creek) discovers their friendship and orders him to never see the young woman again. He does so, but after the trama of the event Alice dies of heart failure. Upon reaching his home to tell his wife he has done what she asked, he finds her in bed with another man (Johnny Thorp). In a rage, he leaves her and runs to apologize to his true love, Alice, but only discovers her dead. Thrown into an aweful depression, he stops writing and vows never to become so attached to one person again. After several years, however, Nicholas comes to terms with what happened by telling the story in the form of a book, which he publishes in his own way to bury the hatchet with himself. The play ends with Nicholas sitting in a cafe and meeting a nice young woman who reminds him of his old love, even to the point that she says exact phrases that Alice said when she was alive. He switches seats to move closer to her and begins an in-depth conversation. The curtain goes down.

I've decided the reason for the name of the play, as well. "A heart for any fate" is a part of an old english poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Alice uses this line to describe to Nicholas why he pretends to be other people, saying that "to have a heart for any fate is to be able to accept your future and your destiny, no matter what it may be." The young girl in the cafe at the end mentions this same line from the same poem, which is what gets the writer to move closer to her.

I'M REWRITING A Heart for any Fate (I don't know if I ever mentioned it before, but it's the personal account of my experiences with two of my female interests back in middle and high school). I originally told the story a long time ago in several poems that most people don't really like in comparison to the others I've written, but somewhere along the line I decided to make it a book.

In the beginning, I wanted it to be factual, a real-life representation of the actual events that happened, and until two nights ago I still held that belief. But after watching a series of old movies from the 30's through the 60's, I noticed all the good ones were based on plays. Like I mentioned in my last post, Me...A Playwright?, this sparked an interest in me once again to write a script for the stage. All the times before, where I brainstorm quietly to myself for just long enought o make a decision, I had decided that none of my stories were stage-worthy because they were simply too extravagant. Plays like Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, being set in an entirely different world, gave me some hope, but not enough to think of it seriously again. But then I saw those movies and thought, "Boy, I'd like to do that. I'd like to write a great movie." This quickly changed from "movie" to "play."

When it came to me to retry A Heart for any Fate, which I always knew would be a romantic tragedy, I began to take certain liberties with the story. Call it artistic freedom, I suppose, but what happened did happen to me, so the only person who could really get offended by it is me, that is unless I told everybody that the story was true, which would, after I was done with it, not be completely accurate to say.

In my desire to write an old movie, I changed the setting from current times to the 1940's. I also changed the characters ages -- originally it was going to be about and played by young people, just like in real life, but the bandwagon for teenage dramas has been ridden like a Wild West whore, and rather poorly I might add; I was in one not too far back and it was miserably corny. So, in the stead of younger kids, the story takes place between adults. In the stead of my character having a girlfriend, he is married. It wasn't detrimental to the story, but it did excentuate all the right elements, making the story, as a whole, much more emotionally poignant.

This next change came for a very selfish reason of mine, and that is that I wanted there to be a scene with tuxedos and gowns, and I wanted the air of the night when they wore these clothes to have a familiar feeling. So, not only is the setting and age changed, but I also made my character and his wife filthy rich. I am still at edge on whether Shauna's character will the wealthy or not. This is fairly important to me, because I want her to be alluring and seductive-looking, although she never flaunts her money at all, just simply has it*. I feel if she's not wealthy, it will start to look like a Cinderella story, and just about every other chick-flick where the underdog girl gets the rich, good guy. And that is definately not what I want.

I'm also changing the timeline, so that all the main events -- the climax, as it were -- occurs within the span of one night, instead of several years as it did in real life. When my character is forced by his jealous wife to say a mean goodbye to the girl, he does so, leaves, and she dies immediately. Then, when he goes to tell his wife he has done what she asked, he finds her in bed with another man, leaves in a rage and goes to apologize to the girl, only to find her dead. Like I said, this really took about two years to happen, but for the sake of climax I had to shorten all the timelines to make it really powerful, emotionally speaking.

I'm still working on adding another element, just to make the play more unique rather than just being an everyday love story. I want to make it so that when someone asks, "So what's it about?" I can give them a more definite answer than, "Oh, it's a love story." Hopefully, one that shows the story's inimitability, a trait I'd like for this play to have. Examples of love stories that have something extra that makes them special are Brokeback Mountain, where the characters are homosexual, and Meet Joe Black (originally Death Takes A Holiday), in which one of the characters is actually Death.

I've written a bit right now for one sitting, so with that I'll leave and think of that special aspect that I've had such a hard time coming up with....

I HAD AN epiphome last night at about 2:30 in the morning. It came after watching Sabrina, a 1954 oscar-winning movie about two wealthy brothers (played by Humphry Bogart and William Holden) who both fall for their chauffer's daughter (played by Audrey Hepburn). The story wasn't anything special. The direction didn't lead one into wonders of thought. In reality, the film won an oscar for its art decoration, I believe. But nonetheless there was something stricking....alluring about the whole thing that worked its way into my mind like very few things do anymore. A film 52 years old, and it took me over as something new.

But I began thinking of how I would love to write a movie like this one, where the phrases, the words, and all the things that made me want to be there melted over the screen like it was fresh paint. I realized why the acting in those older movie was so dramatic and exaggerated; these are the films that transitioned from plays to movies. Whether you know it or not, an actor on stage has to make every motion, every word, large and out of proportion. In the distance of the audinence, everything gets toned down dramatically, so to keep it interesting exaggerations are necessary. These old movies were the same way....there was not enought technology to create emotion through sets or lighting, or with beautiful set locations as we have today generated with CGI. So, the acting had to portray everything.

But this gets me off track. I began thinking which of my current stories could be adapted into a play for the stage. Soon I realized that my imagination in writing books allows them to be extravagant and very much impossible to be put on a stage. But then an older story I'd tried to write many times came to me again....A Heart for any Fate.