More Mad Scientist's Son

MAD SCIENTIST 4

I’ve already expressed my diagnosis for this manuscript. Needs more heart. I think it feels thin. Sometimes you get mostly through a draft and you have the sneaking suspicion that something is wrong. You aren’t sure what. You have to listen to that obnoxious and unwanted voice though.

I need to push through to the end even though my inclination is to go back to the beginning. But I’ll have a nice, short, beginning to end draft if I push through. Then I can go back and do heart surgery. I’m sure it will need lots of other work, too. This whole making something out of nothing, breathing life into characters, isn’t easy.

MAD SCIENTIST 5

There’s a big difference between wanting to fit in and wanting to know why you don’t fit in. Frank wants to know why he doesn’t fit in. So in a sense he wants to know the truth of his situation. This has to be clearer from the start. It has to be in there from the start. Part of this must be that he feels something beyond him, something withheld.

So I need all of this PRESSURE in his situation. There is the echo of life in it if it’s done right. There is something going on that is withheld and beyond us all. Why are we here—and then there’s that bitter and inescapable truth: no one gets out of here alive.