XVIII: The Other Side of Eden
Give your dead to me, leave them unburied, let me tell their story.
This is the seventeenth edition of The Voice In Your Head Is Mine. The date is September 15th, 2020. If you're receiving this email and have no idea what's going on, well, fuck. I guess I blew it. Or maybe you blew it. Either way, you're here and this is Zac Thompson's weekly newsletter.
It’s the late afternoon on Monday. I’m writing this newsletter a little later than usual in anticipation of some news. The past year has been insane and this whole experience has made it even more surreal. Over the last few days I’ve been trapped inside with all the windows closed, boiling water like a madman trying to purify the deeply polluted air from all the wildfire smoke. It’s a strange and surreal time to announce something like this. But here goes…
UNDONE BY BLOOD ON AMC
We’re making a fucking television show. Early this year, shortly after Undone By Blood #1 came out - Lonnie Nadler (my co-writer on the book and the best fucking writer I know - go follow him) and I get this call saying Norman Reedus from The Walking Dead (or perhaps more importantly Death Stranding) wants to talk to us. We proceed to get on the phone a few times and see that Norman is absolutely crazy about westerns. And he’s drawn to them for all the same reasons we are. Undone By Blood completely captured his attention.
So, without further adieu - you can read more about at DEADLINE here or over the Hollywood Reporter here — but the long story short is that Lonnie and I are involved on the creative side of this. We’re credited as co-executive producers on the series. We’ve been welcomed into the creative process for developing the show and we’re now wrist deep in making a television show on the same network that created Breaking Bad. I don’t know how this happened, I feel so lucky and so incredibly fortunate, beside myself really.
When I came out to Vancouver to go to film school the idea of succeeding in television felt like a pipedream.
Not so much anymore, I guess. I promise we won’t fuck this up.
Writing Craft: Ask A Question
So I’m trying to qualify sections of my newsletter going forward. Everything to do with writing craft will be labeled as such. Hopefully that’ll make it easier for the folks who are just here for that. Yesterday, Lonnie sent out a newsletter that was chock full of important information on pitching comics. I’m not going to rehash any of his amazing post. You should just go read it. As you can imagine, we both think about pitching comics in much the same way.
However, I wanted to hone in on one thing in particular when it comes to crafting a good story: Asking a good question.
For me, this is just a simple way to think about plot. But it’s a key mechanic in thinking about what makes your story work. What are you trying to say? What is something in society that bothers you? What is something you think needs to change?
Take The Dregs for example. The key question at the heart of that book was What happens to a city that literally consumes its homeless? Or in a less pointed way - What does the way we treat homeless people say about the cities we live in?
We wanted to create a book that talked about gentrification, life on the street, drug use, and the wealth gap. But we wanted to create something easy for publishers and readers to understand. It wasn’t even something that we were going to necessarily answer in the context of the book but it was something that showed we were thinking about a complex issue and trying to present it from a variety of different directions.
You want to craft a simple theme that you can then reflect in dozens of different ways like a prism. The idea being that you can create characters who represent one answer to that question or craft scenes that provide a completely different answer. The point is that you’re creating a multifaceted look at something that you can layer throughout your work in subtle and not so subtle ways. The goal is to give readers a complex understanding of what you’re scratching at without ever coming down definitively on a single mode of thinking. Or at least that’s how I prefer to do it.
Think about that next time you’re pitching something. What questions are you asking? What answers are you providing to that question? What are some things you can do to strengthen that central question throughout your book and your world. And finally, when all is said and done - Why should someone care?
You don’t need all the answers to succeed but the more you’re thinking about these things the better idea you’ll have of what type of story you’re trying to tell and who it’s for.
The Lost City of Z
I just finished David Grann’s amazing novel The Lost City of Z which chronicles the many journeys of English explorer Percy Fawcett into the Amazon rainforest. The book details both Grann’s journey to retrace Fawcett’s expedition and the many others who tried to follow in his footsteps. The novel spends its time recounting the activities of Fawcett who, in 1925, disappeared with his son in the Amazon while looking for the ancient lost city. For decades explorers and scientists have tried to find evidence of his party and of the "Lost City of Z". Grann build a meticulous tapestry that serves as the account of Fawcett’s journey and it’s really something else.
The book is an incredible look at obsession and the colonial impulse/undying need to conquer the unknown. It works as a look into the past but also functions as a commentary on basic human drive. The Amazon is a harsh and awful place that is inhospitable to human life. It doesn’t want us there and everything in this book is a stern reminder of how insignificant we all are in the face of nature. The horrific conditions of the rainforest will live in my mind forever. As a reminder that I don’t have the sheer force of will needed to do something like this. (My camping trip was enough thank you very much).
There’s a reflexive approach to the material in the book where you already know the ending from the first chapter and yet it doesn’t diminish the journey whatsoever. Because so much of Fawcett’s search for Z was caught up in the idea of pursuit, of journey being its own reward. The unending desire to keep going and throughout the book you see stories populated with real people who somehow (despite all odds) escaped from the rainforest only to long to go back in. We all have those vices, I suppose, the things we can’t let go of even though they may kill us.
Because at the end of the day, to live in pursuit of a fever dream is better than dying on your knees.
Also, the book was made into a phenomenal movie that I can’t recommend enough.
Tiny Scabs
Rumors Spread on Social Media… is necessary reading in the face of the upcoming American election. A staggering deep-dive into the systems of misinformation that keep us clicking and engaged on social media.
William Hope Hodgson’s The Voice in The Night short story is on wikipedia commons in full. It’s a great/short tale of fungal horror from 1907. Read it and enrich your brain.
I just ordered from Iron Dog Books in Vancouver. Iron Dog is an Indigenous-owned bookshop in my neighborhood that was special order anything and deliver it right to you. If you’re in Van, I can’t recommend them enough.
This weeks playlist right here:
Goodbye For Now
Another week slips through the cracks and the world grows more weird. Be kind to one another, find a pocket of peace and hold onto it. Focus on what empowers you and lift others up wherever and whenever you can.
Z