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The Deliberately Bad First Draft
Orbital Operations for 28 August 2022
Warren Ellis
August 28, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes
TRIFFIDS RIPPED MY FLESH
Hello from out here on the baked and desertified Thames Delta. And hello to the new readers. This will be a shorter note than usual, but soon enough you will be subjected to the two thousand word rants that tens of thousands of your fellow readers have somehow learned to survive.
This week, the heat finally broke and work progressed. I am still moving slowly, but this was all good news.
And also a tentacle of supposedly dead fascist wisteria came to life and tried to rip my leg off. Gardening in England is fraught with triffid threat.
In the communications to this newsletter that I have seen, there has been one persistent question: am I okay? So: I don't go out. I don't see anybody. I receive very little contact from the outside world on any given day. But I have writing to do, I'm working on myself, I have a whole garden to reclaim, I'm learning new things all the time, and there are still somehow never enough hours in the day. I'm doing okay. Thanks for asking.
For those just joining me: I have a longstanding habit of sticking vague PROJECT NAMES on projects that are in train but which I can't talk about in detail, just so I can talk about them at all.
PROJECT WRITTLE has been my main focus for the last several weeks. It now comes in three phases - three stories, in fact. So now I'm breaking it down a bit. WRITTLE 1 is into its rewrites phase, which is all of the coming week. WRITTLE, in its entirety, is a medium that I haven't, strictly speaking, worked in before, so there was A Plan for WRITTLE 1. The plan was: Deliberately Carelessly Bad First Drafts. In this method, the goal is to just get to the end while having everything make some kind of vague sense. Once you see the script as a whole, you can fix it up, but you have to get to the end of the script first without constantly second-guessing yourself as to whether you're nailing it or not.
Ideally, you should never show those drafts to anyone. But I have two trusted co-producers, so I sent them on for notes, which help clarify the rewrite goals. Sometimes you want to be left alone to sort it out yourself, sometimes you know that it's Wrong in so many particulars that you want extra eyes on it to catch all the Wrongs.
I wrote WRITTLE 1 with a particular collaborator in mind. On Thursday that collaborator confirmed that they were on board. So I need to get these scripts rewritten now now now, because that collaborator's role was the major switch that needed throwing.
We are really, really close to talking about WRITTLE 1 in more detail now.
So that's daytime work for the next week set. Night-time work is writing the full outline for WRITTLE 2, which has been agreed in principle but requires an extremely detailed and tight outline. It's a crime/thriller thing, and I can't wing those. I need to attend to the machinery of the plot and the fullness of the characters. Can't leave much to chance: in that kind of story, the cogs all have to turn smoothly and in order when you crank the handle.
I'm also finally picking through the Kindle publishing process - longtime readers know that I've done both digital publishing and self-publishing in the past, and this autumn I'm planning to take the plunge and enact some of the digital experiments I've been thinking about for the last six years or so. It's too bloody hot to do it right now.
I think there's gonna be another WATCHTOWER style piece in the offing before the end of the year too.
My name is Warren Ellis, and I’m a writer from England. These newsletters are about the work I do and the creative life I try to lead. I send them every Sunday to subscribers. Feel free to send your friends to orbitaloperations.com , where they can read the most recent letters and subscribe for their own.
I’m represented by Angela Cheng Caplan at the Cheng Caplan Company and David Hale Smith at Inkwell Management. Please add [email protected] to your email system’s address book or contacts.
BOOKS
CURRENTLY READING
I'm across several books this week. You can probably tell that there's a lot of work-related research going on:
Zimbardo’s conclusions didn’t take into account a crucial aspect of the study: how the participants were recruited. To find prisoners and guards, researchers placed this ad in the local newspaper... Just by including the word prison in the advertisement, they ended up with a disproportionately sadistic batch of students.
The grey zone is not some blurred line between war and peace; such a thing has always existed. The real grey zone is epistemic: blurred lines between what we know, what we do not know, and what we think we know. The novelty in all of this comes from the fluctuating space between covert action and public knowledge, the decline of state secrecy and the rise of multiple competing narratives churned out across a kaleidoscopic media landscape.
...the landscape of Britain is scarred with the relics of vanished places, their haunting and romantic beauty so often at odds with the violence and suddenness of their fate.
A ‘shadowland’ can be defined as ‘an indeterminate borderland between places or states, typically represented as an abode of ghosts and spirits’; the word captures the haunting quality of these zones.
The Butor book comes from a small press, and you can find details here.
WRITING
When you listen to your collaborators:
I think I can get away with posting this bit of script from CASTLEVANIA 301:
I'd been working with James Callis, the actor playing Alucard, for a little while when I wrote this. I was in all the recording sessions. I knew his playful side, and I caught a bit of him doing an impersonation of someone between takes. (Not as extensive as Titus Welliver doing an entire Al Pacino bit from SCARFACE when I was describing how I heard one of his character's lines: one of the many amazing moments we had on that show.) So I had a feeling he would do a fucking funny Richard Armitage and Alejandra Reynoso. James is a bloody good actor with serious range, and finding out that he had that in his toolbox too let me create this scene.
By the way, never ever do run-on sentences like that unless you're damn sure your actor can do it in one breath. (Which, especially in the case of the Sypha line, is part of where the joke emerges from.)
(I got called out for run-on sentences years and years ago by no less a personage than Tom Baker.)
The writing lesson: listen to your collaborators. You'll learn things about them, learn what they can do, and then you can put it in a script, take all the credit and see your network put you up for Emmy consideration off the back of it.
GOT MORE TIME?
KEEP READING
You will, as ever, find many other links and notes posted pretty much daily at warrenellis.ltd.
Well. Shit is weird all over, and we're all feeling it. I'm off to sow some crimson clover in the dead patches of my garden, of which there are many. But it does mean I get to sit down and just look at the light and be where I am for five minutes. You're allowed to get five minutes to be where you are and take a breath, so please try to do that this week. Take care of yourself, see you next week.
W