Truth in Dr. Horrible

After watching Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog for the first time, I sat for several minutes, trying to absorb everything and saying things like "That was really weird.... I don't understand..." A few years and a couple re-watchings later, I can identify the parts that make it a story I love as well as one that leaves me unsatisfied. And I think that's the point.

It's about a man who, disillusioned with the appearance of "good" in the world, has decided the best way to fix things is to become an evil genius. The problem is that he's got too much good inside of him. He falls in love with a girl who helps the homeless. He won't have an evil showdown with someone in a park, because there might be kids there (also, because Johnny Snow isn't actually his nemesis.) His real hatred is concentrated on the face of "good" that only masks a bully. By the end of the story, we're left wondering who's really the hero (if there is one), what constitutes good and evil, and whether people can actually do anything about it.

My favorite song in the show is called My Eyes/On the Rise. It shows the world through the viewpoints of Billy, also known as Dr. Horrible, and Penny, the girl of his dreams. To him, everything is crashing to the ground. To her, it looks like the world might finally be changing for the better. Neither of them are right.

What am I getting at? The story is meant to leave people hanging. There's not a happy ending, though you could say that Dr. Horrible got everything he wanted. I think the point at which the story turns for me, where a lot of the conflict lives, is in that song. Some people see good everywhere. Some people see evil everywhere. But people accomplishing both good and evil live alongside each other. Sometimes they're mistaken about which side they're actually serving, maybe because they don't fully understand the world.

There are so many viewpoints and so many arguments that some call what is good, evil, and what is evil, good, and can get away with it. Perceptions of truth are so warped that people can't see what's actually happening. They're blinded by ambition, or a mission, or even love.

Dr. Horrible, in a humorous way, calls attention to some of these things. There's not an intended Christian message, but I think the story can give Christians a lot to think about. We believe in good and truth. Why can't others see it around them? It's a broken world. Lots of evil has been done trying to fix it. What can we do about it? Since we claim to serve good, let's do good. Let's give reason for hope. And let's stick close to truth, or we may find ourselves pursuing something lesser.

Outlining... sort of

After resolving to outline my story, I decided it was time to do some research and reviewing.

I turned to one of my favorite writing resources -- Writing Excuses. It's a fifteen-minute (or eighteen-minute... or twenty-minute) podcast by writers Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Tayler, the guy behind my favorite webcomic, Schlock Mercenary. Each 'cast focuses on some aspect of story writing. I picked out some helpful episodes and got to listening. I also perused Dan Well's blog, because I remembered there had once been something on there about plot structure.

That led me to a really cool series of videos from a presentation he did on the structuring system he uses. So far, this has been my most helpful tool. Now I have beginnings and endings and midpoints and plot turns for the major character's arcs and the biggest plotline of the story. So, basically, an outline.

The reason I dislike outlines is from some unsubstantiated-but-still-strong belief that as a creative person, I don't need an outline. Obviously my thoughts and ideas are much too free and can't be constrained by such a rigid system.

This is stupid because I've never really used an outline before.

And I still don't think I can do a precise outline like other writers do -- chapter-by-chapter, scene-by-scene organization. Once I get to the point where I can picture it like that, I don't think I'll need an outline anymore. But right now I have a framework on which I hope I can start building my story.

But that's not the same thing as starting.

Writing as Work

I consider myself to be a very hard worker. If I've committed to do something, I will do it, and I will go above and beyond the generally accepted minimum. This is how I get things done at school. I'm working on someone else's time, doing things they expect me to get done. How can I possibly fail them?

But things are a little different if I'm working on my own time. I finished NaNoWriMo, but it wasn't a walk in the park. It was something I wanted to do, but it's easy to put wants aside for needs. Sometimes once all the needs are finished, it's hard to balance the wants.

For me, this is what makes writing hard. I have no limit to willpower if I need to get something done. But when working on my story, there is no one else telling me to finish it -- just me. And at this stage of revision, I'm unsure enough that I don't know when to give myself deadlines, let alone how to make myself meet them.

Another difficult thing is that writing takes time. Sometimes, you need to give it a rest instead of working a piece to death. Sometimes you need to get away from it so you can come back to the story with a fresh mind. And if you leave the story for a few days, it's easy to let those days be a week. Or weeks. Or more.

For fear of this happening again, as it did to my previous NaNovels, I'm proceeding blindly into the revision process. I'm great at revising papers. I can revise short stories. I can analyze someone else's story and clearly point out the good and bad points. Right now I can't do that with my writing, because basically my story's not written yet.

Sure, I have a NaNoWriMo draft. But in the past few years, NaNoWriMo has been a way for me to spew the ideas in my head onto a document. I find basic ways to make them fit together. I touch up a character portrait. And I finish -- something. But not the thing it has potential to be. Taking a rough draft and making it into something great is not yet my area of expertise, but if I'm going to be a real writer, I have to make that weakness one of my strengths. To do this, I think it's time to turn to a tool I've previously hated an feared: the outline. Perhaps if I had one of those going in, I wouldn't have so many problems now.

I love the ideas in my story. I've got a government that's outlawed all technology, a secret underground organization, an immortal beast who was once human, and a nine-year-old-boy trying to find out the truth about his family. The big pieces fit together, but as I'm refining it, I'm having trouble making my character's motivations align with the action I need.

I'm home in Iowa for the rest of January. My parents and siblings are at work and school, so for the majority of the day I'm by myself. I'm going to make this into writing time. I can't let what I have go to waste. For the next day or two, I'm going to be brainstorming and taking notes on how to put together my broken pieces. Then it's time to tame the beast. The deadline I have for my finished outline is January 11th. I have no idea if this is reasonable or not, but it's definitely more reasonable than me spending the entire month of January sleeping in and playing Wii.

Resolving is making me feel better, though it hasn't changed the fact that I don't necessarily know what I'm doing. Feel free to offer advice. It looks like I'm going to need it.