The following feedback come from the stupendous Steve Pirie, a fellow young writer (Albeit far more experienced.) which has been particularly helpful in deciding what direction I'm gonna take with DM.
I managed to have a read of a few of your aside posts, and what I'm the most curious about is your vision for Drake. As I've read through, I've noticed that your aim to make Drake the ideal male has maybe come at the cost of tension throughout the work- because he's so capable and so good at what he does, I didn't find myself fearing for him much, an as such, wasn't as engaged as I would have liked to have been.
Yeah, Steve pretty well hits the nail on the head here. Right from the inception of the series, my intention was to create a character who is basically an amalgamation of every action-blockbuster hero ever put to celluloid. A hyper-competent, Alpha Male type who will only fail if it's comically convenient for him to do so. Even then, he'll still snap back faster than James Patterson churns out "best-selling novels."
Obviously, it doesn't take Wonder Woman's lasso to tell I'd be lying if Drake wasn't also a subconscious projection of how I would like to be in real life, what writer doesn't live vicariously through their characters?But this wasn't my only reasoning for making the series the way that it is. I have mentioned before that DM is less about making a protagonist that an audience can identify or empathize with and more about letting my imagination run wild. I wanted just drop a character into an implausible (but awesome) situation then get him out in an equally implausible (and hopefully still awesome) manner. And yes, Steve is absolutely right, because everyone knows that he's going to come out on top, people aren't really going to be worried in his personal safety. While this is what I was going for, it really does prevent readers from becoming emotionally invested in Drake and thus the series as a whole. That should be what keeps the readers coming back week after week.
I never intended the DM to be anything more than popcorn flick fun, my justification being that I'd save my more serious writing for other projects. The trouble is that this series is the only thing at the moment that I've actually been sticking with. A majority of my work just doesn't get past inception; I'll come up with the idea and maybe a few plot points and characters, and that'll be it. Not only have I been working on Drake Mandible for a solid two years or so, it's pretty much the only writing that's actually getting out there and being viewed by actual people. Basically, this series is my only real representation as a writer. (Woah, I like only just realized that a couple of minutes ago. Is that one of these "epiphanies" I have heard about?)
So maybe, just maybe I should be considering moving in different directions with this story? Admittedly my audience is small, but it's still an audience and I should be doing what I can to keep them interested. Popcorn-flick fun is all well and good (hell it's my favourite style, but more on that later) but after 52 weeks of it, it'll probably get old. I'm a popcorn addict, but even I know that you need something more substantial like a nice chicken parma or a juicy steak. And again, since DM is my most prominent project, it makes sense to start adding depth to this series instead of faffing around with other projects that aren't gaining traction for now. I've said this in earlier posts, but it wasn't until Steve's feedback that I decided to act on it.
As an exercise, maybe write an episode that deals just with this. Kill drake off in the worst way possible, make him lose everything, anything you like or have thought about. This is an exercise just for you to see how the extreme inverse of what you are currently running with may affect what you are doing now. You don't need to make it dark and gritty, but going to that extreme may help you to balance the light and shade that we all work towards.
At first, I thought Steve was suggesting go all Chris Nolan on the series, making it all gritty and (w)angsty. But that's not the case at all, it's an invitation for experimentation. How am I gonna win best in show if I'm not constantly looking for the best fertilizer? (Incidentally chicken manure is a good way to go for vegetables) DM is a project I have invested a great deal in and thus I am protective and resistant to change. When I read this suggestion I was (and still am) incredibly reluctant to do anything that would impact majorly on the series.
BUT THEN, when I reread the feedback, I realized that I didn't have to change the current continuity in order to do this. The changes could be temporary, just to get a feel for things, then restore the status-quo. So the first question is how to go about this? Parallel world? Hallucination/Dream sequence? Clones?
Eventually, I decided to with the Flasback option. It's a bit of a cliché, but it's one that works. My reasoning is that this way, I can put Drake through a proverbial wringer. Obviously a retroactively younger Drake can't die, but he can have a different personality, he can be put thought a lot of emotional/mental/physical stress that breaks him. This becomes the catalyst that triggers Drake's transformation into the man that we are already familiar with. This way, I can keep Present Drake mostly the same with some gradual changes to reflect the actions of Past Drake, meanwhile, the audience has this back-story that adds a little more depth to the character. Drake CAN be vulnerable and he HAS failed in the past-, which is what drives him to be the hero he is now. (*cough cough* batman *cough cough*) If my faithful readers decide that they don't like this new direction, I can justify ignoring the changes by writing them off as history and irrelevant to the DM cannon. Hopefully I won't have to. Now that there is SOME precedent of failure in the past, the audience will believe that it's possible for it to happen again in the future and this will draw them in.
How I'm doing this "darkening", I'll go into later, but it IS happening.
I'm starting to get the same excitement I had when I was first creating this series and had (without realizing) lost as it progressed.
That's about it for this entry. Thanks to Steve for his awesome feedback!
Stay Tuned, Ladies and Gents ;)
Nate.
