Laying some smack down on the page
I can fit myself into broad genres like speculative fiction, and like red spandex pants, can squeeze myself into tiny genres for fun, like ‘Marxist horror,’ a genre of one. But of course I’m always open to pushing outside my own boundaries. For instance, I’m much more ‘literary’ than I used to be, and am also prone to go on satirical streaks.
So add to this, last month’s and this month’s excellent articles from fellow (permanent) Melburnite Jason Coggins about episodic story telling, and it all got me thinking about not so much a genre, but a world I’ve explored and want to explore further, the world of professional wrestling.
Doing some 'research'
It’s something I’ve been obsessed with for a bit due to the cool flips, the characters and costumes. I dream of putting on some face paint, tight pants and entering an area flanked by fireworks and loud music. The trick to loving wrestling is to not take it so seriously because in case you didn’t realise, it isn’t real. All the moves and interruptions and so forth are scripted and what is a sad admission of how much I watch it, I’ve come to understand some of the conventions and rules and how it all fits neatly in its own kind of episodic stories.
Most story lines or ‘feuds’ between wrestlers lead up to the regular pay-per-views or PPVs, where you pay extra to watch special, extended episodes around once a month. These PPVs sometimes have special events or matches, and often preceding episodes build up to this, with cliffhangers and trash talk to make us all want to pay to see the big matches. Some rivalries can go on from PPV to PPV, with twists. It’s all very addictive when they do it like this.
Why does this matter to writing though? Am I just using a vague connection as an excuse to write about wrestling this month because I’m a geek? Maybe. But also, maybe my obsessions often fuel my writing. There have been pieces over the last year inspired by wrestling such as my spoken word piece, ‘I wish I was a pro wrestler’, and last year’s National Novel Writing Month novel about a fired office worker turning himself into a Robin Hood wrestling star in disguise.
More 'research'
The NaNo-novel was fun to write, a crucial ingredient to any novel if you plan to finish NaNoWriMo each year, but the fight scenes were kind of tough and there still seemed to be something lacking. I have had had thoughts about coming back and finishing or rewriting it.
Then at the start of last month, me and Jason were on our way to Byron Bay for the writer’s festival and he asked about the novel, which reminded me of my intentions to work on it again. Sometimes all you need is a reminder to get going on an idea. The novel has been bugging me ever since. Then Jason’s article about episodic story telling fused with my head full of the latest wrestling story lines – my favourite being rebel CM Punk set to fight the boss of the company, Triple H with some excellent capitalist versus revolutionary trash talk going on – and now it’s got me thinking about the structure for my novel.
There’s a lesson here: the conventions of the genre, if you honour them, can often help you. It can give a piece of writing structure and something that relates to the reader.
For instance, each year at Wrestlemania, the pinnacle of PPVs in the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment), rivalries over many PPVs often come to a head at this final massive event. The PPVs in the lead up can be seen as the major points in the story and Wrestlemania the climax. Often PPVs end with cliffhangers, like someone coming in and interrupting the match, creating an unexpected outcome, drawing out a fued or getting in the way of your heroes quest to be WWE champion. Techniques like this can be used to keep you watching, or turning the pages, or logging on the next week.
Jason does say though that episodic story telling is different to novels, has its own rules, so I am still not totally convinced about writing a novel with the structure of ‘special PPV’ chapters or something equally as bizarre. The other option is to turn it into my own web serial.
It’s a daunting concept. I’ve moved away from writing fiction for the web, mainly because I find I want to have my work up to a decent quality via an editor that isn’t just me. But I also like to try new things, new ways of engaging an audience and being able to write.
This is where we extend the discussion past that forth wall and bring it out to you dear readers. And with that, I’ll leave you with that spoken word piece, in the new medium, of a YouTube video…
I love this post and not just because I get name checked in it! If you’re celebrating wrestling conventions and are making this explicit I suspect episodic storytelling would work most excellently in a novelization. Of course, personally I want to see Robin Toorak join us over at Tuesday Serial … which, by the way, you could view as a ongoing Beta Read before you commit it to book form.
It’s look pretty likely that I’ll be joining Tuesday Serial with Robbin’ Toorak (perhaps under a new name). I have some questions to answer first as well as some planning to do, and then I might begin with a ‘pilot’ to see what people think.
I look forward to your upcoming article.