First off, the pictures were taken with my digital camera which is only a 12MP Canon that I'd bought a few years prior to that so it was not a professional-level camera by any means. And a lot of the pictures were taken out of my car windows as I drove, so they aren't centered and sometimes you get a reflection of the window or the dashboard or seat or whatever in them or part of the window frame.
And the main reason is that it doesn't really work as a travel book or as a road novel. If you watch travel shows on TV they don't just shoot a bunch of random stuff and talk about what they did; they do research on the history of the place and talk to a lot of people. Which obviously I wasn't taking time to do tons of research or doing interviews of people. I wasn't really trying to learn all about every place I passed through.
It also doesn't work as a road novel because it lacks much of a narrative. First off you need to have some kind of goal driving the journey. Usually it's someone going to a funeral or to see a birth parent or something like that. Or like The Grapes of Wrath the Joads are going to California to find work.
Ostensibly I was a one-man Joad family, but I'd never really pinned it down to, "I was going to Seattle to find work." I kept things loose without a clearly defined goal. There was no Promised Land for me to find.
And to be a novel you need more interesting characters than me. I honestly don't remember the name of one person I met besides Offutt and his friends, so it wasn't like I encountered a lot of colorful characters like you'd find in a book or movie. No great romantic story either.
And in the end the response to this retrospective was so tepid that it really doesn't make me want to pursue the idea. Thanks!
5 comments:
I'm not sure what you wanted people to comment on...most of it was pictures of random things and, like you said, no real narrative focus on them.
write it as a story of seeking a better life by going on a road trip and trying to start a new life somewhere else but failing and sell it to rian johnson since he has a thing for making failure a focal point of a film...that way you can subvert the expectation and succeed by failing lol :p
There's always the old standby: Thanks for sharing.
If I've learned anything, not every idea sticks. In the end, you gotta do you. :)
You could always come back to it in a couple of years and see if you still want to turn it into a novel
Good points but you always retroactively add trivia and notes as a voiceover. Still a possibility
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