For those unfamiliar, I often write an appended Backstory for longer posts as behind-the-keyboard view of the process.
Read the limited series: Episode One | Episode Two | Episode Three | Episode Four
“The butcher, the baker, the grocer, the clerk are secretly unhappy men because…the butcher, the baker, the grocer, the clerk get paid for what they do but no applause.” - Irving Berlin
Produce, Me? is not like anything I’ve written before. Why? Well, to crib from James Carveille, “it’s the journey, stupid”. This story is a travelogue of the mind, and what fame might look like from the center. It’s also about trying on different frock of style – which we should do from time-to-time – on a platform that isn’t quite built for forking storylines.
The idea for came from two places —
I’ve regularly imagined an orchestra on a flatbed truck following me, composing music as I go about my day. Grandiose, much?
A terrible couple of pages I wrote in 2016 about a guy who buys himself into the big time with money from an inheritance.
Let’s focus on #2 for a few minutes — the story dates back to December 2016. I know this because my go-to app, Evernote, says so. It was called “Regular Joe” and centered around Phil, a drummer in a bar band. Like a lot of musicians I knew in Nashville, Phil wanted more but its just not in the cards. As he tells it in that early sketch:
“I’m just some shmo. My band, think of us as the world’s worst SKA turned ROCK turned PUNK turned CLASSIC ROCK trio ever to bathe in the obscurity of an occasional club gig. Our setlist is tailor-fit the bar tab we're given. Music was a diversion from our soul-sucking khaki lives.”
The story starts with him sitting behind a drum kit at a stadium rock show, the lights are down and the show is about to start. He’s having doubts about what he’s done…used money from his inheritance to buy himself a seat (literally) at the big show.
In that version I thought I’d attempt to set up the story at the end, then go back in time to when the inheritance arrived. The goal was to build to where we met him at the beginning. He was to get some notoriety, be discovered, but it all felt a bit “paid for” and couldn’t quite reason if the people around him were just sycophants. Or if any notoriety was real. The writing was, um, uninspiring so I just left it there.
A couple of years later I picked it back up but decided to rewrite it. I called it the “Fight Club Edition.” As in, “I am Jack’s inflamed sense of rejection.” It flowed much easier when I wasn’t trying to tell a 360˚ story but one that narrowed to just the stream of consciousness of the main character.
In this choppy, glitchy method I felt free to skip time, freeze it and let the character berate himself (or others) with wild abandon. In some ways it felt truer to how thoughts roll through my head when I’ve had too much coffee, not enough sleep. Maybe you, too?
This version was about 3 pages but far from a whole story. In it, the big set piece is a movie car crash where the narrator is playing Frogger across a busy intersection, with a live orchestra hiding behind some shrubbery:
Traffic at the crossing. The rhythm pauses but the higher notes continue. Fuck it, I’m crossing. Plastic bumpers and ugly drivers. I’m Frogger. The rhythm is back. It’s less suspense more action. I stop and start to cross waiting for a cab to pass. I take a dash to get another lane or two across. The violins are louder now. And there’s a drum matching the rhythm. Almost across the road. Race the next car or not? The music says do it. My laces are untied and I trip. I’m dozens of feet from being flattened. Time takes a pause. The tires are wet—the car is gonna slide if they hit the brakes. I’m in a yoga pose: downward bum. Ass in the air.
The Fight Club version ends with a vague mention of the future from Al:
“I’ve got all kinds of stuff planned for you!” he says and pulls me along. I feel the dry heaves again.
From the Fight Club version forward I wanted the unevenness of the narrator’s thoughts to be relatable but unreliable.
As we get further into the story I want the reader to start suspecting the narrator might just be delusional.
Minus the car crash scene I’ve taken a majority of the Fight Club version and reworked it into Episode One.
Episode Two | Yoshimi or Bayhem?
Episode Two is pure hubris. My own ego, really, to create both an action piece and a musical piece for a story.
Life imitates art in that I love both musicals and action movies but couldn’t decide which direction to go. So, why not a try a choose your own adventure story on Substack? I wish I could say it started out that way, that I had some Machiavellian plan but, no.
The action piece came first. I think, in another life perhaps, Michael Bay and I would be nemesis. We’d always be trying to upstage one another with our outrageous action set pieces. I see you MB…I’m coming for you, someday.
In any case, the action sequence was, by far, the easiest and gave me time to think about the musical version. And, it allowed me time to create characters I could use later: the supermodel and sunglasses man. Note: the Yoshimi character couldn’t appear in both…I tried but it just wouldn’t go. There is, however, a thought in my mind she’s a reference from the owner of the Pho restaurant. You decide.
I couldn’t figure out what music I wanted. Fortunately, musicals don’t have to be narrative like West Side Story — they can be more abstract. Baz Luhrmann does this in Moulin Rouge by pulling songs together into a theme. The Elephant Love medley is a good example.
While I had a framework of a street musical I wanted something absurd. It had to be something extraordinary, maybe out of this world. I love the podcast Song Exploder and listened to a recent episode on The Flaming Lips. Bingo!
Thankfully, stories like this don’t have to adhere to logic. Like, for reals, who has a 50 foot pink robot just sitting around that can be used at a moment’s notice? Maybe Al is simply one resourceful MF’er?
Episode Three | Just Go With It
If Episode One & Two are essentially the first act of the story, Episode Three is the second act…the one where it all goes downhill. It starts just after the big musical/action sequence and ends with the narrator in the hospital. He’s about to be outed for funding his new stardom. That is a topic I’d like to explore in the future: can faux heroics also be marketing? I think it happens all the time in politics but does it happen for people who were recently everyday folks?
It’s in the second act where we cover the most time territory. I do it abstractly because I’m inspecific about how much time has elapsed after the music/action scene or after the narrator has been in the hospital following the baby stroller accident. What we do know by the end is he’s unable to stop the events that have transpired.
If we’ve learned anything from Syd Field (and others of his ilk) it’s to put a character in a low situation they have to climb out from. Will he be found to be a fraud? Will anyone care?
By the time we get to Episode Three the reader should be uncertain which elements might have been cooked up by Al and which were real. For the narrator there’s no difference so I tried to thread the needle. You tell me if it worked.
Episode Four | Yo me enfrio o lo soplo?
Episode Four takes us to the final scenes. The hubris of writing two different pieces for Episode Two was not my last dip into those waters. If the protagonist is, at best, unstable, why not create 3 different endings that mirror his choices: Lie Like A Dog, Spill The Beans or Run Like Hell.
Since each ending could take a different turn the reality of the situation could as well. Is the narrator sane or not? Does Al actually exist? It’s up to the audience to figure that out.
On a side note, while writing them I did consider the Oregon Trail ending: “You have died of dysentery.” Just that, a single line. And, maybe one of the endings does stink like dysentery might – I’ll let you decide.
Music
I said we’d come back to #1 above at some point.
Everything I write has, to me, an inherit soundtrack. Sometimes, like the Luhrmann version of Episode Two, it’s explicit. Other times, not. It’s just how my brain works. My years as a video editor taught me that I need a feel, a cadence, in order to get into a rhythm of the edit (or words).
Often a track appears to me as I’m thinking about a piece, maybe within the first few sentences. Other times I have to scour, creating random “stations” and listen for hours while driving or doing the dishes before a track piques my interest. In many instances I’ll have two or three tracks that could suffice but the gravity of one will ultimately lure me in.
Below you’ll find all the music I’ve referenced in Produce, Me?
Al, the movie producer
The character of Al morphs throughout the story – both by design and necessity. When we meet him he’s still recognized, beloved even, by some groupies. He’s what I imagine the old Hollywood producers to be like, in the vein of Robert Evans.
But he’s cranky. In Bill Sammon’s book Future Noir there’s a story about how upset Ridley Scott was that American movie crews didn’t just take direction and respond “yes, guv’nor.” I imagine Al to be like that x 100.
Lessons Learned
This piece, as a whole, is the longest I’ve written for Substack, roughly 8000 words. And it was written over several months with last minute edits right before publishing.
Here are a few thoughts about the creation —
Character — This is by-far the hardest to nail consistently. I wanted the narrator to have a subtle shift over time but reworked the copy again and again. I’m still not 100% happy with some areas but, as they say, “It’s good enough for government work.”
Perspective – First-person stream of consciousness is difficult. Writing in a choppy way as if we’re witnessing what the narrator glances at (or stares at) eschews the normal patterns of prose: reveal/describe/contemplate. It’s all-at-once or doesn’t work. And with a character who may/may not be sane you can’t linger on a topic for too long, unless it’s part of the character’s malady.
Format — Serialized episodes were the way to go. At a final read-time of ±30 minutes few online readers would stick with me at a single go. I did several drafts of the chapters in order to be a cliffhanger or to start quickly in order to catch the reader. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t. You tell me.
CYOA -
is a wonderful platform but isn’t equipped for choose your own adventure stories. Basic HTML (circa 1991) with anchor tags would have been helpful. For the layperson: anchor tags are a link that brings you to another part of the document/page.
I played around with doing the story via footnotes but the prose formatting is lost and it’s burdensome for the reader. So, I opted for publishing linked episodes for the various story forks.
Would I do another? Not without some under-the-hood technical changes to how stories are formatted.
Fin.
I guess that’s about all I have to say about Produce, Me? I hope you enjoyed it.
If there’s something else you’d like to know, just ask.
Thanks for reading!
-j.
Song List
Episode One
Sing! Sing! Sing! - Gene Krupa
Breakfast Machine - Danny Elfman
Episode Two
Luhrmann version
Do you realize?? - Jesse Daniel Smith
Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Pt. 1 - The Flaming Lips
Bayhem version
Summer Samba - Ramsey Lewis
SUV Chase (Hancock OMPS) - John Powell
Downtown - Macklemore
Episode Three
Thorn In Your Side - The Postmarks
Somebody’s Watching Me - Rockwell
Queen Bee - Grand Funk Railroad
The Great Gig in the Sky - Rockabye Baby!
Episode Four
Should I Stay or Should I Go - The Clash
Lie Like a Dog ending
Walk Of Life - Dire Straits
Spill The Beans ending
Heaven - Talking Heads
Run Like Hell ending
Come In Come Out - The La’s
Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head - B.J. Thomas
The poll closed before I could vote - Run like Hell!