Reverse Engineering (or, more Darko blather)

Yeah, so despite appearances, I’m actually not one of those weird crazy Donnie Darko fans. I do not have a Frank the Bunny outfit in my closet. I do not know the rules of time travel. (I do, perhaps, have a bit of a crush on Jake Gyllenhaal, but then again, I feel responsible for “discovering” him, as I wrote once, in a review that my newspaper forced me to do on Bubble Boy, that the kid was going places.) Honest, it was not my intent to have two successive posts about the film. BUt I found the commentary to be fascinating from a writer’s point of view.

I was so intrigued by the bit where Kelly explained his creative process. He came up with the storyline first, and then reverse engineered the worldbuilding, the rules of time travel, the La-Jetee style (or Twelve Monkeys, depending on your perspective) “technology” (in this case, a series of radio talk and a few grid-like graphics in the director’s version) later on, in order to make this weird story about a disturbed teen and a demonic bunny make sense. I was riveted, listening to this.

That is so not how I write a story.

My storylines spring from my research, my experiences, my world. Sometimes I’m doing research and in the midst of it, I discover some facet of the world I’m studying which seems to fit so perfectly, seems to be part of the story, liked it belonged there even before I knew about it. The more real stuff makes its way into my stories, the happier I am. I’ll change the story if I find something real that I like better.

I loved that the world of collegiate secret societies was so rich that I got to put so many real elements into my novel. (Actually, a couple of people have gotten on my case about it being too real, and I’d tell you about those instances, but then I’d have to kill you.) Especially with the initiation, it seemed as if the real details fit in so perfectly with the theme of the story I was telling. All those amazing tableaux and skits and vows and names with their layers of history and meaning. There wasn’t anything to make up. (I’ve yet to see the fan who, Donnie Darko style, sits down to analyze each of the initiation tableaux for the hidden meanings, but whenever you want; have at it. As I expressed earlier, I’m sure your explanations would be just as cool as the real ones or anything I could make up.)

And it makes sense in the context of societies; after all, they invented the stories, so of course there are strong symbolic elements and themes that run through any of their rituals. Naturally, the course of the initiation fits into a textured, multi-layered whole.

It might be a fun exercise to try to write like Kelly sometime. Come up with a really out of control storyline first, then invent all kinds of crazy rules to make it make sense. But I don’t know if it would work for me. Inventing the reasons after the fact might make the reasons seem as outlandish as the facts themselves. (For instance, now I’m wildly curious why metal and water are so important to time travel.) It feels very odd, but, hey, experimenting is good. It gets you out of your comfort zone and stimulates the brain. However, I do have the memory of my first attempt at a novel, where I made up the most outlandish reasons in the world for getting a chick into a bar, so maybe not.

Of course, all writers are reverse engineering to some degree. Dropping clues, conveniently writing cell phones out of chapters, beefing up a backstory to establish motivation… it’s all the same idea, on a lesser scale. In certain cases, the reasons behind a particular development have to be reverse engineered, and it’s this very process which makes your story unique. Say you are writing about an established myth — say, Vampires — but you want a new reason for your vampires to exhibit a trait we all know vamps have: aversion to crosses. What do you do?

a) Decide that vampires actually have aversions to all symbols of religions, be they pentacles or stars of David or Jain hands or hamsas or itty bitty statues of Shiva.
b) Decide that actually, vampirism causes a side-effect that manifest itself as an aversion to anything previously beloved by the vampire. So if they were very Christian, as many folks in medieval Europe were, they would hate the cross.
c) Decide that vampires have a defect in their eyeballs so that when their visual field comprises right angles, it short circuits their brain.
d) any of the above.

The answer, of course, is D. Each of these have appeared in books as a new take on the old cross-hating vampire myth. And there are some that just forget the cross thing altogether (Anne Rice, for example).

So yeah. A lot of food for thought in that one DVD.