Chapter Eleven:  The Re-write Spiral

As much as he could, he tried, at first, to toe the 'company line'. He rewrote Jasmine's whole opening chapters to give her a far clearer external goal. Not abandoning her grief, exactly, but giving it a shape that an audience could track from the very first scene. She now had a stated intention she could pursue and be blocked from pursuing.

He was, if he was honest with himself, not all too unhappy with the result. It tightened something that had been loose in the original, made the first act move with more urgency without gutting what he cared about underneath it all.

The first revision had actually improved the book.

Trent's notes on this second draft, three weeks later, were a great deal warmer. "THIS IS REALLY STRONG," he wrote in a concise, two page email. 

Localad read the message three times before discovering the word however in paragraph four.

"We just think there's more to be found in act two now that act one's moving properly. Can we please look at the knights again? Eleven is still a lot."

Localad initially cut the fallen order of knights from eleven to seven. 

He combined their histories, redistributed some dialogue and spent the next four days ensuring nobody’s moral function had vanished merely because their face had. Folding three of the knight’s arcs into one single composite character that he built carefully, trying to preserve what mattered about each of the three he was combining. It took him a further ten days, and he was, again, not entirely unhappy with the result, though something in him had started to notice the shape of the newly emerging pattern. Each new concession bought a week's worth of praise, followed by another new, slightly larger ask.

"This is a huge leap forward," Trent wrote.

Then asked for four knights.

By draft three, Localad had learnt that studio praise was not really approval. It was just the sugar coating on the next instruction.

And then came a new twist: "The writers' room starts this Monday. We'd like to bring in a co-writer. For support. To help you move a bit faster. Someone with tentpole experience, so you're not carrying all the structural load alone. You'll still be central to the whole process though."

“Yes, we’re bringing in support,” Desmond told him.

“Support for whom?”

“For you.”

“What does this support do?”

“It helps. I promise.”

Against his better judgement, Localad eventually said yes to the co-writer because Desmond, when he called to check, suggested it might be wise. "Having another set of hands on board doesn't mean losing your voice, it means having backup when the revision notes come in fast." 

By this point, Localad had already been in Los Angeles for six weeks. He had not slept more than five hours a night during most of them, and had started to feel a fatigue that went beyond the physical, a kind of internal erosion at the edges of his own certainty about what the story was even for.

The co-writer, a competent, friendly man named Ross Kettle who possessed a whole string of respected studio rewrite credits and had no illusions about what the job actually was, was an easy man to work with, considering he never argued about any given directions and Localad would come to understand, over the following weeks, that this unfaltering ease was in itself a real problem. 

Ross had no real investment in any particular version of the story surviving, and treated every note from Trent's office as simply the next instruction to be satisfied, whilst taking the fastest possible route from problem to problem solved, without any specific interest in which solutions would cost the story and which didn't.

“A note is just a note,” he'd told Localad on their first morning. “You just solve it and move on.”

“What if solving it damages something else though?”

“Then that becomes another note.”

Ross treated all stories like a kind of plumbing. If water correctly emerged from the required tap on set during the test screening, he considered the whole house to be habitable. Job done.

The writers’ room had whiteboards covering three of its walls. On the fourth hung a huge framed poster reading STORY IS CHARACTER, beneath which everyone discussed market segments.

By the fourth pass, the fallen order of knights was down to just four.

By the fifth, Jasmine's unfaltering grief for her sister, the entire emotional architecture that Localad had spent twenty years building toward that final closing scene at the Wound, had been completely restructured into something that the notes had called "a ticking clock," a magical curse with a stated deadline, because Bree from marketing had once mentioned, in a meeting Localad wasn't invited to but heard about second-hand from Callum Ash, that test audiences for similar films responded better to stakes they could physically count down.

“Can grief not be urgent without numbers?” Localad asked.

“It can,” Bree said, “but the numbers will cut globally.”

The Wound then acquired itself a villain because marketing preferred threats with real faces. And the villain later acquired an army because a single face did not provide sufficient scale. And next, the army acquired some flying creatures, purely because Trent had recently seen encouraging data on flying creatures.

Localad phoned Marjory most nights that month, later and later as the drafts piled up, and he found himself, increasingly, unable to explain what was happening in a way that made any kind of sense out loud.

"They keep saying yes to anything that shows a promising return," he complained to her, near midnight his time, sitting on the floor of the balcony that still refused to open. "Every note we get comes wrapped in more praise than the last draft got. It doesn't feel like they're changing the book. It feels like they're constantly improving it. That's the part that really scares me. What if they're right? And they are?"

“They keep ‘improving’ small parts of it at a time,” he said. “That’s why I can’t tell when it stops being mine.”

"Are they really improving it?"

He didn't answer right away. "I just don't know anymore," he admitted. "I've read my own damned book so many times in so many different versions, I don't remember what the first one ever sounded like anymore."

“Does Jasmine still keep the sword?”

“Yes.”

“Does the Wound close?”

“Not yet.”

“Is grief revenge?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then listen for that word exactly. It’s approaching with a knife. Do you still have the copy? The original one?"

He thought of the single bound copy, last seen in Desmond's hands three months earlier, presumably still somewhere in this city, in an office or a car or on a shelf in an apartment he'd never see.

"No," he said. "I don't have it anymore."

Marjory was quiet for a moment on the other end of the line. "Then maybe it's time you got it back," she said. "Even if just to remember exactly what you're fighting for."

He didn't get it back. Not then. 

He would think, much later, that this was the moment he should have insisted. He should have driven over to Desmond's office and asked for his own book to be returned into his own hands. If only to be able to hold something un-edited, un-noted, un-compromised. 

Instead, he went back to his desk and made the changes Bree wanted, because the writers' room was waiting, and because by then he had started to believe, much against his better instincts, that saying yes to everything, was simply what the job required.

The machine had discovered that the easiest way to take something from Localad was not to simply seize it. It was to keep him too busy agreeing.

Localad slept even less than he was doing before. His apartment now filled with re-written drafts, each labelled FINAL followed by a number that made the word increasingly theoretical.

FINAL 3.

FINAL 3B.

FINAL 3B REVISED.

FINAL 3B REVISED CLEAN.

Nothing was clean about any of it.

One night, when he opened up the original script, he swore he could no longer remember which of the sentences within it were his.

Thank you for reading thus far. Click here to read the full story from the beginning. Or here for the start of Act II.