|
|
Captain Cannabis::Story Structure
|
|
Since I'm still in that writing "zone" and some questions have come up, I'd like to take a moment and talk about how the Captain Cannabis feature is structured and some of the thinking that went into its creation.
Captain Cannabis is the story of a guy who gains supernormal powers smoking cosmic pot and he uses those powers to save the universe. Got that? Good. What we have here is your basic science-fiction action-adventure superhero story with a strong love-interest; myth-based using hero's-journey as it's sub-structure. A lot of care was put into ordering the magic system. I wanted to ensure the supernormal powers bestowed on Hal by smoking the cosmic pot were, at a stretch, within the realm of possibility, so research led me to the magical world of the various esoteric dimensions. What I learned there has been woven into the test-and-trials sequences [first half of the second act] so we learn along with Hal. That research also led to the boss antagonist, Dwellers on the Threshold, but more on that in a bit. Being sci-fi based means we get to play with cool gadgets, flying saucers, aliens, etc. Why sci-fi? Well that's where the cosmic pot comes from that turns our protagonist into the superhero he becomes - which is what the story is about in the first place. Take away the sci-fi and you take away the cosmic pot. Do that and there's no point anymore, is there? Action-adventure means the story moves with a purpose. And Captain Cannabis does just that. I pared things down so each sequence has a clear direction, conflict and spine and all the sequences drive to the climax. And, oh, what a climax. Superhero stories, properly done, get a bit complicated. The oldest extant example is the Epic of Gilgamesh. Written in Sumeria on cuneiform tablets pre-8,000 BCE, it follows the travails of Gilgamesh, a mortal man, who travels up "the mountain" to confront the "gods" for the misery they heap on man. There isn't a copy found yet that tells the complete story [stone tablets are broken too badly] but what we do have is the story of how he overcomes fire-breathing stone sentinels, attacks by scorpions, earthquakes, etc. [all the things the Tablet-agent is ticking off]. The climax is when he lands in hell and is confronted with his evil ways by the potentate there. He prevails, returns home a hero. If it was good enough for Gilgamesh it's good enough for us. During the telling of Captain Cannabis our protagonist, Hal, endures exactly the same things in his journey to overcoming his barriers and attaining the rank of a great hero. In many ways Captain Cannabis is a modern retelling of the original Gilgamesh myth. Superhero stories are structured in half's bookened by a prologue and epilogue. Our prologue starts our story off with DIA Remote viewers. The first half of the story has the reluctant hero go up the mountain, through a series of tests-and-trial to learn his "skills" which are tested on the antagonist's minions [a fight he loses]. Second half is him accepting his hero-dom, learning from mistakes in the first half, going back up the mountain to take on the main antagonist in the real battle. What I've done is use the Gilgamesh beats twice - protag Hal goes up the mountain twice - with battles against minion [Remote Viewers] that he loses, then with the main antagonist [Dwellers] which he wins. True to the sci-fi tradition, the antagonist is a "system" of antagonists, the boss being The Dwellers on the Threshold. Dwellers, in turn, control the terrestrial antagonists including MJ-12 and a renegade DEA faction. We find out what the Dwellers are at the same time Captain Cannabis does through the course of the story. Marion has to carry a pretty heavy load in this story in that she is both Hal's antagonist in the B-story [love interest] but then becomes a protagonist when she does what she does [no spoiler just yet] near the end of the A-story. There is a lot of love from readers for Mikey, but his story is going to have to wait. I had written some wonderful scenes exploring the Mikey/Marion bond, but they took the action off spine [Hal becoming a superhero] and slowed things down too much. But, rest assured, Mikey will have his 15 minutes, just not yet. We wanted the story to be big and epic and, according to an LA reader, we did more than that. They describe the script as massive and high concept in scope. So massive, they opined, it is too big for the Hollywood system to handle. As they say, go big or go home. Looks like we have to do what they don't have the guts for.
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|