This is kind of a companion to my last post, where I was talking about how it is difficult to write subversively if you're not paying attention to detail and doing things with specific intentionality.
I've been writing a lot more within the past month. As I've alluded to in other posts, I'm in a pretty emotionally vulnerable place overall in my life at this time, and picking up writing more often again has helped tremendously in processing and handling all of it. While I write about my actual experiences, I also have found that I'm interested in writing original stories that pull individual elements from my life.
My best friend has also been in acting classes this semester, and so I've been doing a lot of script reads with him. This has exposed me to some interesting stories as well, and more than anything has inspired me to want and complete something film-related, since the past few years have seen me exploring my graphic design and illustration capabilities more than anything to do with film.
As a result, I ended up sitting there with an intense amount of motivation to write something really powerful and impactful, matching the intensity of my own feelings. So I wrote a new story outline. Like always, I intended for it to be a short story at first, but it quickly ballooned into enough content a film.
But the story is dark. Many of the characters are meant to be bad people for each other. I never explicitly spell this out. There's teen suicide, and while it's certainly not romanticized, I didn't shy away from treating it how it would actually be treated. The girl who commits suicide is not "angelified" in her death. I wanted characters making big, extreme actions. I wanted it to be powerful. It's written to make you feel something first and foremost; that was my intention. Still, as much as I knew I was channeling very dark energy, I was and am very proud of what I came up with.
I showed my best friend and he was initially pretty impressed, but by the time he got to the end, he was concerned how it would play out if I wanted to really make this. I don't remember specifically what he said, but he got at the idea that this is bold and risky. "You've got to think, your name would be attached to this", that kind of thing. But I told him I wanted it to be the way it was, and that I was happy it was controversial. I may not always be courageous in every day life, but I sure am courageous in art. Many things that were controversial at first ended up normalizing steps towards progress that society was making at the time, such as Bonnie & Clyde with realistic violence in the mid-60s.
I think the adage of good art being controversial definitely rings true. All that being said, I was still very careful about how I wrote everything. If I didn't write with nuance, then everything I just said wouldn't hold up. But for me, if I'm not challenging people's beliefs and perceptions, and doing my best to make my audience feel ways they've maybe not ever felt before, then what's the point?
