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After a conversation and some more thought I have finally managed to narrow down the mind maps into two story ideas that I think I can work with. I'm happy that I managed to draw away from the setting being in a prison that I felt made the idea feel generic and easy, whereas with these ideas I feel I can manipulate the layout or the tone to see how it effects the final piece, although I still have a way to go with characters, conflict, story layout and ending. Feedback is still appreciated.
OGR 24/01/2019
ReplyDeleteHi Odette,
So - yes, this is basically there - but I think you're 'over-writing' and it's throwing up some complexity your story doesn't need and I'd also argue your ending is not somehow visual and emphatic enough in terms of the impact.
So - you've got this nice idea where the main character is modelling himself on the security guard; this is good, but I also think the world in which all of this is taking place is again too complex: your premise doesn't change if your two characters are night security watchmen who work alone in an empty building; you've got the body-builder one - huge, imposing, arrogant, bullying - and you've got the skinny one; the skinny one is new in the security game, and the big guy takes the piss out of him, and chucks the leaflet at him - A Bigger You etc. You could do this really fast in a limited environment and nothing about your story changes - except in all honesty, your audience is arriving at your set-up more immediately... To be honest, you could make both these characters prison wardens, the idea being that the skinny one wants more authority and respect from both staff and prisoners, and I think that would work nicely and more practically make use of your prison component.
So the 'skinny' one is always comparing himself to the 'big guy' right... the big guy takes 3 pills, the skinny guy takes 3 pills and so on... at the moment, your ending is all 'internalised' - your skinny character looks down at himself and 'thinks' a lot of stuff about his predicament. My instinct is this just isn't going to convey visually - it's too internalised. It would be more visual if you set things up so at the end of the story, we're shown that the big guy takes a dozen pills... fine, and then we're shown the ex-skinny guy doing the same... and then in the next scene, we're shown that the big guy died: maybe the prison doctor is there, and the ex-skinny guy says 'What happened?' and the doctor says - 'Overdose - apparently he was taking these pills he'd bought from some terrible firm on the internet. He was complaining of sweating...'
cut to our ex-skinny guy sweating
'... then there were the nose-bleeds...'
cut to our ex-skinny guy getting a nose-bleed...
'... and after that...'
etc...
So my view would be 1) shrink the world and focus instead on the immediacy of the rivalry between the two characters; setting it in a prison establishes a number of things very quickly: authority/control associates with overt-masculinity for obvious reasons; 2) look at your ending; it's too 'inside your character's head' in terms of communicating his growing realisation at what he's done to himself; I think you need to exteriorise it and 'show it'.