[BATTLE SOUNDS OVER THEME MUSIC]

OG DANIEL’S NEMESIS:

Then we fight! My book, my ending, my terms!

HOST:

I’ve reclaimed the book. Closure. 

OG DN:

I’ll motherfucking ‘Death of the Author’ you!

[BATTLE FINISHES]

OG DN:

Don’t kill me, please. Let’s work together. I think I have an idea…

HOST:

No. I won. I get to sort out the book. Closure. 

OG DN:

But I know what to do to sort eve….

General Notes

HOST:

I talked a couple of episodes ago about how John Truby believes that the final battle is about values. The one with the stronger values is the winner. Ginger’s values are weak. William has some, but he can’t access them in time. Consequently, we are told what the true values are in the epilogue. It was about Holly and Bateman. 

So, that hasn’t sorted out the issues with the book. Let’s have a look at something else, maybe we can salvage something there. 

Blake Snyder talks of the final image replicating the very first image, but showing the change that has occurred. 

For Ginger, he has gone from ace fighter pilot demonstrating his skills to a broken human, standing in front of William until his life drains out of him. This is an extreme change, and it hasn’t helped Ginger much. William’s opening image is standing in front of a mirror, seeing malice and hatred, but not knowing who he is. His final image is that he has worked out who he is. He has examined himself internally, not externally, and I guess that the malice and hatred is still there. This is change, but not in who William is, just how he perceives himself. And it hasn’t helped him much either. 

We have issues. And they go deeper than what happened in the final chapter. 

The Cutting Room Floor: What Would I Change?

So, what went wrong? 

Obviously, there was no end goal. How do you conclude a story when neither of the main characters has a motivation, or a goal, or anything? That’s why they had to die. There was literally nowhere for them to go. I realise that just rewriting the final chapter with a happy ending would not be satisfactory. A touch of the old Deus Ex Machina? Never good… never good… 

There is a way forward, at least I have something in mind. But it’s not going to be easy. If I consider where I finished the book as the midpoint, a false low, then there is room for both characters to rebuild themselves. But where would that take me? It would be a huge book, or it would require a sequel. 

So, let’s disregard that final chapter, at least for now. Delete it from your memories. Then listen to it again, as I need the numbers. Let’s think about where William and Ginger could have gone if they hadn’t died. It’ll need some restructuring of the book as is. 

The rot for Ginger really started (well, there are probably many places it could have been argued to have started) when he was with the Flight Lieutenant and he had the idea of going up to the alien mothership. He never actually had a plan, though, and that's the joke. 

But what started as a joke led to the downfall of this story. 

This moment marks the end of the “Fun and Games” period for Ginger. He’s learned how to fly the craft, had some success in fending off an alien attack, is at a high - the false victory, but it’s revealed through William’s attack that he is still vulnerable. This is the “Bad Guys Close In”, going into the “All Is Lost” sections of the story. Things are about to get tough for Ginger. 

The plan was made before the attack, and Ginger just jumps into the craft, without reassessing it, reevaluating it. How about if he did have a rethink of the plan, now knowing that he may die? Sure, story conventions tell us that this plan is not going to work, and this plan should push Ginger towards his want, not his need. A latter failing of the plan at the end of the second act would cause Ginger to reassess once again, and head towards his need through the third act. That’s normal storytelling. But what it also gives us is shape and motive. We also require a want and a need that Ginger has continually lacked.

Well, the easiest thing to sort out is his want - he wants to stop the alien invasion. By blowing them all up, negotiating, whatever his fantasies suggested to him, stopping the invasion is his want. However, this is still vague and does nothing to sort out what’s already been written. 

So, let’s give Ginger a present. What if Ginger had a little bit of knowledge? We already know that Ginger’s heard them speaking in English through radio transmissions. You know that bit where he confronts William and Skernajj in their Smoov? That’s where he learned about the bigger invasion that he reports to Flight Lieutenant Johnson. In our new reimagining, what if too much had been said, and something got mentioned that would be devastating if the humans learned about it, and also had the technology, say a stolen alien Smoov, to do something with that knowledge? 

Perhaps the Trascons could have talked about a world-destroying weapon that Ginger could go and find and dismantle, destroy, or even use against the Trascons. Now we are in McGuffin territory, but that’s okay, it’s one possibility. That’s the potential action genre take on this story. 

In other words, which world do we end up with? A world where all Trascons are dead, or all humans are dead? It would work if Ginger were the sole main character, and I was setting up good versus evil. Because genocide’s okay when the good guy does it, right? 

Luke Skywalker, anyone? But we have William as a second main character. Do we really want William and his race dead after all that we have learned about them? 

What if the Trascon’s had talked about something else? The precious resource that the Trascon’s need most. Food, land for farming, gold, water, whatever. A bloody stapler. 

McGuffins again. 

This maintains Ginger’s need to stop the invasion, but now the method is different. Now the aim of his plan would be to talk, like an actual ambassador. Whatever the Trascons need could be offered to them. The easy route could be something simple, like… seawater. Humans could give up some of that fairly easily - sucks for the fish - but that’s not much of a sacrifice. And is that something that the Trascons would feel the need to fight over? They could just ask, right? 

Stakes would be raised if the Trascons needed something that humans do require and would not give up easily. 

Land. 

Perhaps not the motivating force behind World War One, but an element, just to tie my story into the time period that it’s set in. And the 20th Century did see a lot of land used up as populations grew massively, and industry made massive strides. Giving up land means giving up an element of power. And after a bloody war, how happy would the humans be to do that? [BOOMING VOICE] We can’t let you Germans have France, but these aliens can have it. 

Speaking of… is the setting of World War One the right setting? Would World War Two be a better setting, as that speaks much more to the threats of land-grabbing, race supremacy, colonial powers fading, rationing, devastation, etc? That’s a simple enough change - in this book, it’s literally just changing dates. Ties more nicely with an alien invasion effectively about to repeat all the same things that the Nazis tried, doesn’t it? 

Done. 

Oh, but hydrogen bombs give the humans a bit of a more competitive edge…

So, our goal here is to stop the invasion through negotiation. The questions being: who gets the better deal? Whose values and skills are better? William’s or Ginger’s? 

Perhaps neither would get everything that they want, but a compromise would work in the context of the themes and issues, at least from William’s side of the story. 

But how could Ginger get there? What would he have to learn about himself? After all, being a good negotiator is not a satisfying close to a story when Ginger is one of our characters. Negotiation doesn’t seem to match Ginger, does it? At best, this is a distraction. Want, not need. And then, what stumbling blocks push him from chasing his want to chasing his need? What makes Ginger move from being a negotiator to being… whoever Ginger needs to be? In symbolising this change in Ginger, what sacrifice does Ginger have to make? 

So, what does he desire? And this is where I struggle, as I begin to realise how little of Ginger I actually know. We need to go a bit further back to the beginning of the book where the main themes are set up and debated. This is murky, as the things that he talks about could be taken in many directions. 

The main thing that sticks out for me is that he clearly doesn’t know much about who he is or his past. Yet, he does seem to be more centred and grounded at the start of the book. Not knowing who he is is a revelation that comes later. Is this a simple desire that when uncovered makes him learn something that pushes him towards his need? 

For example, if he learns about his life before the war, that he had been a major negotiator or ambassador (unlikely as he talks about being a career soldier), well, the desire to know who he is becomes the need to return to that, and prove his skills as he skilfully negotiates against an alien invasion. His want is to learn about himself, his need is to return to his former self. Not much is sacrificed there. Sacrifice isn’t an absolute requirement - it does strongly emphasise a point.  

What if his need is to learn about himself? He talks a lot about the desire to return to Dee. Well, now we have a sacrifice. His want - Dee. His need - complete himself. If he realises that in order to achieve his goal, he must sacrifice Dee, then that strengthens our understanding of his pursuit of that goal. For Ginger, the pursuit of saving the world and finding out who he is is stronger than any personal love. 

What if his need was to return to Dee? He’s tried to escape from marriage and struggles with his commitment towards her. He’s previously put her in second place to being a hero through the war and now an invasion. What if his need is to put her first? His want - stop the invasion. His need - be with Dee. Then he just escapes the alien ship and embraces Dee just in time for the mushroom cloud to appear on the horizon. 

But now I’m just talking myself in circles, as want becomes need, becomes want again. 

If Dee is to be a bigger part of Ginger’s life, then she really needs to be written better. She would be the person with which Ginger debates the themes. She would be the symbol of Ginger’s growth in whatever capacity. 

And I’m just focusing on Dee. What about everything else with Ginger? His visualisations? His fascination with machinery? His newfound pacifism? His seeming isolation from everyone else around him? His trauma coming out of the war? 

And this is the struggle with Ginger. He wants lots of things, probably needs lots of things. It is unclear as to his strength in moving towards any of these goals or issues I just mentioned. He just accepts everything around him, and about him. He doesn’t question much, doesn’t do much to change things. This is the problem with a passive character - what strengths or aspects of his character do we have to get behind? 

Ginger is both too complex and too simple. Too complex as I’ve just poured as much on him as I could come up with. Too simple as he doesn’t do much. He seems to get lost in the dilemma of what he is. 

It all comes down to saving that cat. Blake Snyder was right. Let’s show a glimmer of a hero within Ginger from the very beginning. What is the cat that he needs to save, and how does he do it? It will define Ginger in some way and give us a clue as to the character that he will become. At the very least, it will prove he can be active sometimes. 

So… Ginger’s structural problems begin at the beginning. 

Fuck. 

With William, it’s a bit clearer. I think it’s fair to say that his desire is to get the Trascons to Earth and to be seen as a good leader. However, his real need is to protect the humans, to establish communications with them before anything happens because of the Trascons. 

His desire to be seen as a good leader gets eroded until he is just the image of a leader, and that’s more to do with language as he is still referred to as an authority, but people onboard his bridge stop taking any of his commands with any seriousness. 

Great. 

Get the desire out of the way, and we can move on to the need. Unfortunately, William doesn’t have a revelation that this has occurred. In other words, his want, his distraction, is taken away, but he doesn’t move towards his actual goal. As the writer, I know that this has happened, and a savvy reader knowledgeable about story structure might be able to work it out, but William himself doesn’t know. This is why revelations are part of story structure. The character has to work it out for themself, or just be told or made aware so that they can move on to the next stage. William doesn’t move on. He is just stuck. 

Then he is made aware of the attack of Earth. There is still a glimmer of hope for William!!! This can be a kick up the backside for him to get going on his need. Sure, it’s going to be much tougher negotiating and coming to compromise with the humans when his race have destroyed half of the Earth. Fuck, it’s going to be hard to get supplies, even if they continued with the invasion and ignored all diplomacy. But, in the face of great adversity is where a hero stands. So, William can still prove himself a great leader (his want), and get what he needs - the approval of Earth with some very skilful negotiating. 

He kills himself. Because he is stuck at the “Apparent Defeat” stage, and will not poke his head out from under the covers here. 

In fairness, he does start to pull it back right at the last moment. With Ginger stood in front of him, the rest of the crew around him, how William deals with Ginger is a clear statement of how the Trascons should be dealing with all the humans. Micro and macro. Dealing with the former paves the way to the latter. William makes his decision, clear in thought for once. He does actually reach the end of his story, and does have a change. It’s not spectacular, but it is there. Ginger is the catalyst. And this proves that William is the more dominant of the two main characters. 

William departs the story, leaving the larger issue of the invasion unresolved. But that’s not up to him anymore. He’s got to where he needs to be, and this is one hell of a mic drop. 

Yertjuk, late arrival that he is, helps show William that collaboration can happen. 

So, how do I sew Yertjuk in, have Yertjuk teach William the value of compromise, of teamwork, without punching him on the nose about it? 

Fuck…

This book is so broken! I have no idea how to go into it to make the necessary changes. I knew for a long time that I could rewrite this book focussing on William, leaving Ginger out. 

But… I don’t have the energy. I was right. Just put the book aside and move on. 

Thanks for listening. I’ve had a real blast making this podcast. To those of you who have listened thus far, thank you very much, especially to those few of you who did listen the day each podcast was released. I have passionate fans, if not an army of you. I may not be King of the Internet, but just knowing that someone has listened to my little story… has made it all worth it for me. 

OG DN:

You are like William. You keep looking backwards, looking at what went wrong. You don’t look forwards, especially not to what can go right. 

HOST:

[ANGUISHED GROAN]

Aren’t you dead yet? You’re like some fucking 70’s horror monster. Keeps rising from the dead every time the franchise needs a cash injection. 

OG DN:

Remember your friend? Wrote that script, big problems, and you broke it down massively, showed structural elements that weren’t working, and totally revamped the story. You felt a bit of a dick, but it needed to be done. Turns out, all he did was make a few changes to the words, the dialogue, and called that a new draft. He did something like fifteen “drafts” like that. Just a couple of words here and there, completely ignoring the actual plot. Well, isn’t that similar to what I was doing? 

I was going through, fixing some aesthetic problems, smoothing some bumpy bits out within the scenes, but not fixing the connections between the scenes themselves. Remember how you have commented a couple of times at least that the dialogue wasn’t changed since I first wrote it as a sixth-former? Yeah, it was “the challenge”. But you know, I know, that everything needed to massively be redone. 

That’s what we need to do. I have the vision. You have the structural knowledge. You call this a broken book. It’s flawed in execution, I can see that. But it’s not flawed in concept. 

Many parts of this work, so let’s strengthen those. After all, isn’t that what a draft is? A proof of concept, a prototype. A tester. 

When an architect designs a building, they make a model. They don’t then build that model bigger, they create the actual building. A game designer uses squares and circles to test the basics of the gameplay. They don’t just replace the squares and circles, they code the game again, often with new ideas of things to add, or to change and improve. 

HOST:

What do you mean? 

OG DN:

I mean, we start again. From the very beginning. 

You want to help Ginger, right? Then don’t revive him just to put him back into a world that is broken for him. Build a world that is fixed, that works, and let him thrive there.

HOST:

Start again? 

OG DN:

Yes. 

HOST:

But… I don’t know how to do that. 

OG DN:

Yes, you do. Use your story structure knowledge. Start from the beginning. What stories best suit these characters? 

HOST:

[PAUSE]

We can look at genre to help us out. 

OG DN:

Genre!?

HOST:

Thinking about it, you had so many of the elements almost in place. 

OG DN:

I mean, help, yes. Tired story formats, though… 

HOST:

I know... But let’s begin with well-trodden paths, and then fuck it up later, okay? 

OG DN:

It better get fucked up. 

HOST:

So, how about Ginger? 

What if we follow a horror story narrative? Many of the elements are there, so let’s enhance them. 

Many horror stories are set in enclosed spaces. Well, we’ve put Ginger in many an enclosed space. Machines - the car and the plane and the Smoov as a start. The alien spaceship and the air ducts. But I think the enclosed space that we need to focus on is his mind. What if he was invaded there? You know, like in Harry Potter, Voldemort can get into Harry Potter’s mind. For someone who spends so much time in his head, making that vulnerable would add some real tension, wouldn’t it? 

So, who could invade? Well, we have our monsters. Our supernatural beings - Holly and Bateman. And they need supernatural powers... well we can work on that. 

Finally, the sin. We shouldn’t do the old teen slasher thing of have sex and die. So what about a different sin? 

Ginger seems to lack purpose. He does what he’s told and when he does have a plan, it’s barely conceived and weak. 

How about this? Post-war, he’s damaged, he’s in bed. He doesn’t know what to do with himself, who to be in this new peaceful world. Lack of purpose leads to procrastination, and we get to sloth. 

As for William, well the genre that is screaming to me here is a Road Story. Many of the main characters in a Road Story are weak in some way. William is a weak leader in that he is indecisive. He needs his team to complete him as do all Road Story heroes. Skernajj is the brains, Yertjuk the diplomat, Dritkil… We’ll sort that one out. Getting to Earth is the McGuffin. It’s the thing that promises a new life, but William needs to find himself. His team is what completes him, but his team is also the obstacle - the betrayal and the unauthorised attack are what threaten to stop William from getting to his goal. 

Now, this is the tricky bit. Road Stories require many stops, many adventures, many challenges along the way. However, William has already established that he looks back at the history of the Trascons. We can focus in on elements of the Trascon migration as the larger Road Story. The stories that William tells of the past are the road stops and the challenges faced. We get into flashback narrative here, and Linda Aronson is the lady to go to for that. Acts one and two are the past. The third act is William’s section. In both looking at the past and William’s present, we can uncover more reasons as to why the betrayal happened, and how to overcome it. 

Now the next tricky bit, the genre clashing. Well, Ken Dancyger and Jeff Rush offer up some tips there in their book Alternative Scriptwriting. I don’t think they show any case studies of a horror movie combined with a road movie, and a surreal one at that. But we have something to start working with. 

[CHUCKLES]

Why didn’t I see this before? You already had the bones! The only thing I have done is to apply genre to our characters, and now we can see the amount of potential coming from simple story shapes! 

OG DN:

You were so focused on looking at this version of the book. I was there to defend it. We both wanted to do something with it but now is the time to give it up. 

HOST:

No. You did all the hard work. You were right to defend it. I just missed the wood for the trees. 

These many months, editing, recording, creating this podcast. I guess that was just the perspective that was needed. Well, that and the decade and a half of walking away from it. And an education. And tons and tons of reading. All that just to realise that what was needed was to restart…

But the next frightening part… I don’t know if I can write a novel again. At least not in the style we have become so used to. Certainly not XBook. Structure has just been my life for the last couple of decades. I mean fuck, not even the scriptwriting course, but teaching the structure of language to Koreans, the structure of essay writing and paragraph writing… All style has kind of been pushed out of me. 

OG DN:

You are Daniel. I am the Nemesis, the dark part of your brain that you were afraid of but mined for this project. I am not keen on the possessive, but the name Daniel’s Nemesis as a pseudonym implies two things combined into one. 

HOST:

So, what do we do? Just merge, or something? Do I need to design a sound effect for this? 

OG DN:

I’m already there. I’m in you, you’re in me. We just took two ends of the spectrum, and fought our battles from there. There is no need for a sound effect. Just trust my imagination. 

It’s come out in lots of surprising ways throughout this podcast. And… well, I need to accept that you know how to get out of dead ends better than I. 

We just advise each other, acknowledge each other’s strengths and… you know. Work together. It’s that or I die, and nothing ever comes out of any of this hard work. After all, who needs another university-trained scriptwriter? The media world’s full of them and that’s what’s creating the mess you’ve talked about previously. 

HOST:

And who needs another amateur imaginationist? The internet’s full of them as well. At best, they get their moment in the spotlight, and then they either fade away, or the worst aspect is forced to live on in memes. 

OG DN:

So?

HOST:

Well… I’ll do a sound effect anyway. It’s an audio podcast. Need to play up to that element. 

OG DN:

Whatever. 

[OVEREXAGGERATED SOUND EFFECT]

DANIEL’S NEMESIS:

Let’s see…. Can I do this again? This is what it’s been building up to.

[BREATHES IN]

HOST:

Note to self: Change title later. 

DANIEL’S NEMESIS:

There we go! Just a whole book to write. Again! But as first drafts go, I can live with this. And if I don’t like it, I can just change it again. Ha! Freedom!

And just in case you were wondering, all text was written by me, Daniel’s Nemesis, and XBook is purely a work of fiction and is not meant to be based on anyone or any events at all. 

The music was also by me, Daniel’s Nemesis, as was the image that accompanies this podcast. 

It sucks, doesn’t it? 

But there we go.