Pruitt Update

I had an explosively creative week this week. On more than one occasion, so intense did my conversations with myself become that I pull off the highway and write furiously into this little book I carry around, just filling up page after page without even realizing it. Notes, partial conversations, settings, plot points, all these amazing little details just kept coming at me -- before I knew it I'd find myself with five or six typed pages worth of useable material. I felt terrific.

At this point, the story has long since moved out of my control and developed its own momentum. This morning, for example, I was staring up at the sky behind my shades, sitting on a bench under a tree next to my building, having an espresso and a smoke for breakfast, and I suddenly became fairly upset about a certain turn in the story that I hadn't foreseen. "No, no, no," I thought to myself, "Don't do it, Rich." It's a bit like watching 'Revenge of the Sith,' in so far as you don't want Anakin to become Darth Vader but you know it's inevitable. In the case of Richard Pruitt, the story isn't set in stone yet, so I might be able to find a way around what was making me so upset, but I might not be able to after all, and if I can't, well so be it. It's not my call.

The genesis of this story came from lots of places, but mostly it is an attempt to capture the struggle to break free from being a cog in a wheel you don't particularly like. Back in my management classes in grad school, every dope giving a presentation would play clips from 'Office Space,' implying that that movie was an actual representation of what life is like. I would sit there and say to myself, "That's not what it's like. This is a comedic farce! Figure it out Russian chick!" The question that reality-based art seeks to address is: What is it like? What does it feel like to be in a certain situation? How will the main character navigate a given environment? How do you control yourself in a situation that is defiantly out of your control? What would life be like if everything fell into place without your knowing it until the very end? This, though, is the biggest questions I'm hoping to address: Is there still magic in the real world?

To change the topic, but not really, a few months ago I was down in Florida with my family and a couple close friends, and I was talking to my sister's best friend (and, by extension, my surrogate little sister) about the Pruitt concept, and she said, "Why does it have to be a novel? It sounds to me like you're talking about a movie." My desire to read is insatiable, and so I hope to write a book some day to contribute something back to literature, and I think I have the talent to tell cool stories. But, realistically, the way this story is unfolding in my mind, I realize that this is really a movie -- I visualize sets and settings, and I hear a soundtrack, and I can picture the types of actors I'd like to see play different characters. I started converting passages into a rough screenplay form, and it works much better. It is also entirely possible that once I have the dialogue in place, I will go back and fill in all the sight details that distinguish books from screenplays. At any rate, my uncle is mailing me a few scripts so I can see the format and presentation of an actual script, because I've never even seen a screenplay before. This doesn't mean I won't be able to do it. Hey, maybe it will be a piece of crap. I'm not sure what other people will think of it, but I like this story and I hope you do too.