“Can’t be as bad as Dots.”
Whenever I start a new project, or I’m struggling in the middle of one, I focus on the above six words. That usually gives me the push I need to keep moving forward. But to explain what Dots is, we need to go back a whole decade, to the year of 2013. We’re jumping into 2013-Barnaby, a high school senior going to school in a town in the middle of nowhere.
By then I’d already decided that I wanted to be a writer (note the emphasis, it’ll be very important in a bit) and had told anybody who’d listen. I can still recall what happened next as if it were yesterday. I was standing in line at the cafeteria when a friend of a mutual friend, let’s call him Ivan, tapped me on the shoulder and asked, “Hey, man, you’re a writer, right?”
“Yeah,” I lied, both to him and myself.
“Cool. Hey, there’s a film competition coming up. You think you could write a script or something? It’s supposed to be a short film.” He gestured around us. “After you’re done writing it, we’ll shoot it here after school.”
“Uh, sure,” I answered. “I can do that. What can it be about?”
“Anything you want. Don’t worry, I’ll make it work.”
I look at him skeptically.
“What if I want to blow something up?” I ask.
“We can build a small version and blow that up.”
“Okay. Cool. How much time do we have?”
For the first time his reassuring smile faltered. “A little over a month. Is that okay?”
“Yeah,” I lied again to both of us. “I’ll work on the script tonight and try and have something for you tomorrow.” Smiling with gratitude and excitement, Ivan walked off. I watched him go, and only then did the reality of what I’d agreed to slam into me like a semi-truck. Because this is 2013-Barnaby’s terrible secret: Outside of a few short stories that never got beyond maybe two or three pages, he’s never actually finished anything.
But hey, you can’t make diamonds without pressure, am I right?
So after school I sit in my room at my mom’s place, staring at the destroyer of many, MANY aspiring writers: the blank page. By some miracle, I did do one thing right. A very basic thing, but still. While I struggled to come up with a story concept, I did research on how to write a script. The correct formatting, looking up vernacular, calling out types of shots, etc. And then I think, This is easy. I don’t have to describe the setting or even the people, really. I just gotta make ‘em talk and do stuff. I can do this!
I then think something along the lines of, Hey, I like superheroes. And Pulp Fiction! Especially when they talk at a diner or in the car. So what if I get two guys talking at a restaurant, and…and one of them’s psychic! He’s trying to convince his friend that his powers are legit by repeatedly guessing cards or reading his mind. AND THEN robbers bust in! But the main psychic guy beats up one ‘cause he can read his mind, seeing his attacks before he can do them. And then he’ll fight the second guy and, uh, grab his face and psychically attack him. This’ll prove to his friend that the powers are real, and they’ll walk off together into the sunset, arm in arm. Because to defeat crime you need to be ABLE TO CONNECT THE DOTS! AND ‘DOTS’ SOUNDS LIKE ‘THOUGHTS’! IT’S SYMBOLIC BECAUSE HE CAN READ THOUGHTS!
I’m exaggerating.
But not by much, sadly.
That’s the general plot of the student film Dots. I muscled through and finished the script that night. I remember going to sleep very proud of myself. I’d finished something! But before going to sleep I had one last thought, I want my story to be told right. I should tell Ivan that I want to act in it, too. Yeah, the main superhero guy. That should be me.
So I met up with Ivan at school the next day to deliver the pot of gold. He read through the script quickly (it wasn’t even ten pages long) and he liked it. At least, I think he did. The single setting made it doable, especially with our limited budget (most of it coming from his own pocket) and the small number of characters meant that we would have to ask too many people to be in the movie. Me volunteering to be the main dude (who has nearly 80% of the dialogue) meant we didn’t have to worry about someone who could remember the lines. That just left the parts of the best friend, the two robbers, and the waitress who gets held hostage.
A few mutual friends did us the solid of joining the cast, and one teacher allowed us to use her…special dining room area at the school? She was the cooking teacher or something, I think? I don’t know, I didn’t take her class. But I do remember that life was harder than it had to be thanks to Valentine’s Day coming up. The dining room was decorated top to bottom for it, meaning that before every shoot we had to spend thirty to forty minutes redressing the place and then thirty to forty putting it all back up once we were done. Mind you we only had two hours after school to shoot anything. Incredibly annoying, but hey, her dining room, her rules.
To contrast this, the video tech teacher gave us unlimited access to his equipment as long as it was on school grounds. The people on the crew knew what they were doing as far as the camera stuff went, and none of the actors were really struggling much to memorize their lines. The movie eventually almost became fun to shoot.
Why “almost”?
Ask the guy fantasizing about this project winning an Oscar for best short film one day.
I wish with every fiber of my being that I was kidding.
2013-Barnaby became that guy. The guy taking everything way too seriously, getting pouty because the other actors weren’t taking this seriously, micromanaging everything, not letting Ivan be the director without getting his every two cents in first.
Also, side tangent, but I’d decided to give myself the crappiest superhero costume imaginable. It consisted of a white sweater over blue torn jeans (because edgy teen), bright red gloves (both marked on the back with the symbol for “mind” with black sharpie), and bulky headphones that my character “uses to block out other people’s thoughts.” All that, plus me being a much heavier guy back then, made me look like, to put it scientifically, as if the American flag was a tryhard hobo.
BUT, despite how he was dressed, 2013-Barnaby was dead set that all of this was a serious drama. By the end of the shoot, no one was really having any fun anymore, and Ivan was struggling to put something coherent together. Seeing him struggle made 2013-Barnaby think, not Hey, I should dial it down to make things easier for him, but instead We wouldn’t be having this much trouble if I’d been the director, too.
You wanna punch him (me) yet? I know I do!
Eventually the shoot wrapped, and Ivan managed to cobble together something to send to the competition. The tech teacher offered to drive everybody in the class to attend the event. We arrived at the movie theater the competition had rented out to show the submitted films. There were plenty of other teams there, all high schoolers like us. Ivan and I took our seats, sitting side by side, watching through all of the other movies, waiting for Dots to start.
And we waited.
And we waited.
And we waited…
And then the lights came back on, and it was time to go home.
As we enter the lobby I vividly recall the tech teacher telling the team, “Let’s just linger for a bit. We don’t want it to look like we’re running away.”
The drive after that was a mostly quiet one, with a few people discussing some of the films that were shown. I didn’t talk much, and nobody tried to talk to me. Ivan and I stayed friends for a few years after that, and we’d discuss remaking Dots from time to time. We could make it bigger, better, add more characters. But we never did and thank God we didn’t.
A decade later, I’m so glad that Dots wasn’t played at the competition. Because it wasn’t a movie. It’s to a movie what a crayon drawing is to the Mona Lisa. But looking back, I learned more from Dots than any college writing or English class I ever took. I learned that if you make crap, the real world isn’t going to coddle you and tell you it’s otherwise.
Another lesson is Finishing the story doesn’t mean you’re done. It just means you finished the first draft.
I handed Dots over to Ivan nearly as soon as I finished it. There were minimal edits, with nearly all of them being typo related. I was so distracted by the fact that I’d finally finished something that I paid little mind to the actual product. I didn’t know anything about proper pacing or establishing character motivation. I literally just dropped the audience in this confusing scene following two strangers, including a fantastical element like psychic powers just “because I like superhero movies.”
And poor Ivan’s wallet just couldn’t handle those elements. If I could do it over, I’d sit down with him first and get a detailed list from him that includes our potential resources and our budget. I would then build a story around that. I would also take at least a few days to do several drafts of Dots (or whatever it’d end up becoming), going over all of them with Ivan for comments and concerns. That leads to my next point: partnership prevails.
Here at Tabletop Tea Party, the guys and I try to communicate as clearly and frequently as possible. The majority of these updates are about scheduling our game sessions or character or story ideas/requests. But we do sometimes discuss art for the Instagram (which can be found here) or the novels that Poldaran and I are both writing. Sure, we’re not making a movie (yet) but this is a partnership, and one that we’ve invested time and finances into.
And that’s the thing. I didn’t lose anything from Dots’ failure. Everything came out of Ivan’s pocket. If I’d had some skin in the game, I definitely would have taken things more seriously. Well, seriously in a less pretentious pricky way. More “Business” serious, and less “Behold-The-Beauty-Of-My-Writing-Genius!” serious.
It’s fine to take your work seriously, to have pride in your projects. Honestly, compared to my behavior on Dots, the pendulum might have swung too far to the opposite direction to compensate. I now tend to overanalyze every little thing and struggle to see the worth of my work. The fear of “making shit again” makes me do something worse: make a big stinking pile of nothing.
You can’t sell nothing.
You can’t support yourself or a company with nothing.
You can’t build a community with nothing.
Dots was something. Dots was the beginning of me becoming a writer. A terrible, egotistical, self-deluded beginning. But a beginning, nonetheless. And now it’s a safety net. When I’m struggling to see my self-worth or feeling that the story just isn’t coming together, I say to myself, “Can’t be as bad as Dots.”
And I keep going.
You could even say that thinking about Dots helps me…connect the dots.
Eh? Eh???
0 Comments