Becoming The Overman

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....