The Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind In The Context Of The #Scifi #Novel I’m #Writing

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

As this concept evolves, I find myself taking inspiration from some unusual places. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve got a lot of inspiration from the latest Mission: Impossible as well as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. But these days, I find myself mulling the emotional beauty of The Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind.

The crux of that story is that it’s really a love story that just happens to have a scifi element. Given that I pretty much just have one plot in my head — what happened to me and Annie Shapiro in Seoul working on ROKon Magazine, when I got to the end of the first act the last go round, I was struck by the fact that not only did the story not really have any character development — there was no main character, if you will, but it still didn’t really have any heart.

That’s why I now find myself starting all over again — in a way — to lean into what I love about The Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. As such, I hope to make the first half of the second act pretty much the same dynamic that existed between myself and Annie in the most eventful part of the ROKon Magazine mini-saga. That’s where I’m going to get my character development, at least. And it’s also where some of the more interesting aspects of this story are going to shake out.

To put it another way, the characters are beginning to take shape and as such the things needed to make them believable and interesting are beginning to change the structure of the novel. So tonight is going to be a lot of rewriting — again — to get the scenes to jibe with some much needed character development so we have some sort of setup for what happens once the two main characters find themselves in the “special world” of the second act.

Hopefully I will soon finish a new scene summary and be able to start writing the actual novel again. I hope, at least. I’ve been reworking the scene summary for months now and I think it has more to do with how bad the original scene summary was and less to do with me just not wanting to take a chance on writing a really bad first draft.

Author: Shelton Bumgarner

I am the Editor & Publisher of The Trumplandia Report

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