Hoorah!

So yesterday, after blogging-on-the-go and doing a bit of thinking and reflective writing, I did some more drafting and it was a lot more effective/easier. I'd hardly call it "easy", but relative to the other day? Lord, I might actually keep some of the stuff I wrote this time.

The reflective writing touch on some of what the blog post had. Not wanting to be redundant, and wanting to maximize the writing's usefulness (?), I focused more on what I hoped I'd be able to do with that bit of writing and what I liked about what had come out of the previous one.

So I figured, as I wrote that reflective/focusing bit, that one thing I should probably do is set the scene/story a bit more. Frankly, I don't care too much about setting the/this scene. Kind of like Oliver, but hopefully more gracefully/effectively, I want to move on from the accident thing quickly. In his case it's because he's shit at dealing with normal things, nevermind trauma. Me, it's all for plot reasons.

Another note I made to myself, something I actually liked about the rough drafting the other day, was the way I ended up opening it.

"He'd never finished his fries."

In Oliver's mixed up/fucked up brain, he just can't let go of that. That he never got to eat his french fries before the accident struck, and that they're probably cold by now (nevermind covered in broken glass, etc). Yeah, the man survives an interstate pile-up and he's primarily fixated on french fries.

(You know how McDonald's fries are delicious but briefly, then they start to go cold and turn nasty the longer they go uneaten.)

What I really liked about it, though, was I'd already been considering ending it along those same lines. I'd had him worry about his fries near the outset in other early draftiness, but more recently I could tie it together by, despite so much of the story taking place in a fast food restaurant, he yet again doesn't get to eat his fries, and they've probably gone cold.

Hoorah for potential bookending!

Also, as I've just remembered, one strongly considered and highly likely way I may initiate Oliver's freakout/breakdown in the restaurant/restroom is with his trying to get some ketchup and the dispenser not working. This gets him thinking, obliquely, about codependence and what he's doing here at the restaurant at all.

You know, somehow it makes perfect sense to me to hang up a story about codependence and loss and trauma and coping on a scaffold of french fries. Hey, Arthur Miller opens Death of a Salesman with cheese as a blunt alleghory for the American Dream/Willie Loman's hang up(s).