Molasses: start to (almost) finish

Inspiration

Molasses began as the confluence of a few ideas. I wanted to write a story for Omnibucket’s “God’s Acre" series about a French chef who wanted to marry the daughter of an American mob boss. The chef was talented and ambitious and ran an upscale restaurant for what he deemed true fans of food. He had an uncanny knack for inspiring strong emotions through taste and smell with his foods. The mob boss used his daughter to blackmail the chef into running the kind of restaurant he wanted with traditional basic foods. Eventually the chef gets fed up and starts experimenting with his foods and ultimately kills the mob boss through food.
Meh. Not really all that compelling. I wrote a passage I loved about the chef getting scolded by the mob boss in his office while the chef just flipped the folds of his toque, all one hundred of them, staying calm by thinking of each way to cook an egg as his anger over the mob boss grew. But that’s really all I had. Unfortunately these notes are in papers that were buried somewhere before I started this site.

Inspiration & Notes

The idea sat in my head for a while fermenting. About a year later, a few things in a short time.
First, I had an odd experience with a homeless man which would end up being the introduction to Milos’s character. The first mention of this was here: http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/03/25/azas-reflection/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/03/22/photo.88/

Second, I went to a Mexican restaurant where I met a server whose face and body had such personality that I knew he had to be a story’s character. And probably an evolution of this chef character. He was thick but short, covered with dark hair, and had an enormous head and hands, but was so gentle and thoughtful about every movement. As I ate my delicious carne asada, molasses came up in conversation, and I learned from Angie that a molasses silo had exploded years ago, and the flood of sugar actually killed a bunch of people. I was thoroughly amazed, and instantly pictured this stocky mexican man angered by his boss who demanded he use molasses in all his dishes, taking a hatchet to the silo in the middle of the night and causing the flood.

I started writing a description of Chin the waiter in Milton’s voice, a description of Milton, and sketched out five characters: Chin, Rose, Elefant, Milton, and the Buzz. I’m struggling with the actual story, but there are cooking-related parts left over from the original idea. You can see me exploring the characters’ motivations, and struggling with what/whose point of view to tell the story from. A major hang-up was trying to find places to put passages previously written, such as the scolding going on in the office as the character flips his toque. These toiling notes can be found here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/03/29/photo.90/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/06/photo.91/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/08/photo.92/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/11/photo.44/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/16/photo.86/

There didn’t seem to be enough with this whole mob boss/daughter’s love thing, nor with the whole restaurant ownership/food-based thing. Struggling for some keys to the story, I introduced the idea of someone being assassinated in the end from the bullet of a single-bullet gun. This brought about the secondary, weaker character who was always threatening to kill himself. I also knew the office of what was previously the mob boss was a central image, with its large paintings of ancestors hunting, and its glass-cased hatchet on the desk. But I didn’t know why. I wrote that scene twelve different ways, without it really even being a scene. I also brought in the idea of The Rose, my little assassin character, but had no idea why. Yes, it was starting to get complicated.

So I put a halt and started asking the all-important “what if?" questions while continuing to collect lines, some of which would make it through to the real story.
Then, a couple more incidents occurred for me. First, I had a brief conversation with my grandfather in Romania who complained about being old and ready to die. Angie complained that if we didn’t go visit him this year we’d probably never see him. Around the same time, my friend Charles came to visit me. He’s Korean but he was born in Bolivia and named Carlos after the doctor that birthed him on some mountaintop that Charles’s mother heard would be good for optimal infant health. I thought of the Mexican man’s face and realized it could also be Eastern European, maybe Romanian, and imagined his name as Kim, named after a Korean doctor who birthed him. Kim became a representation of Charles, mixed with myself, as he wondered what his true family and true home might be.
These notes can be found here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/20/photo.151/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/22/photo.229/

Drafts & Notes, Iteration after Iteration

“Slow as Molasses" has a first draft (and a terrible name which I’ll eventually change), which is really just a compilation of all the ideas and lines and scenes and notes above (plus some from the original story that never got written). This note-taking and draft-sketching process went round and round as lines began flowing with no context, voices of major characters like Phantos emerge, as does the tone of the piece. I’m still trying to cram too many ideas together, which is the main struggle because I can’t settle on a point of view to tell the story from. All these notes and drafts can be found here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/23/file.96/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/24/photo.230/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/25/file.103/

Some point thereafter I read the Watchmen graphic novel. Finally. It was great, and sparked another of the conversations I tend to have with my friend Eric. He always talks like every sign is the end of days. Watchmen had that in there too. But it got me wondering about that being a social disease, or maybe trait, to sound less pessimistic. Perhaps it’s always that way and it just rolls on and on, and maybe we need it to be. A socio-biological need for a pre-apocalyptic state. So I wrote a page or two in the voice of someone wading around in a molasses flood, looking at all the stillness within the deathly scene, sounding very undramatic, as if this was the way the world was, and would always be because we needed it to be that way. It was a sort of dramatic undramatizing of an otherwise horrific scenario. I loved it. The idea of this character being an “in-betweener" here, unsure of his role, not likely to believe either side yet, seemed to fit perfectly with someone trudging through the molasses. Once I started asking myself why he would feel that way knee-deep in a molasses flood, the rest of the story and Kim’s background really started taking shape. These notes and patchwork-style “drafts" can be found here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/26/photo.231/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/28/photo.232/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/29/file.149/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/04/30/photo.233/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/01/file.158/

A good couple note-taking days for this story follow. More bullshit about this assassin thing which gets cut, but also more elaboration on Kim’s thoughts while trudging through the molasses. Getting some detail of what’s in the flood. Also, the snow shovel enters (which is actually inspired by a real life event) which always cracks me up. The “she wasn’t the prettiest" line, which ends up in Washer Woman. Phantos’s black wooden spoon (based off a gift Angie received from a Russian co-worker). Various scenes including the octopus-beating man, and general flood detail. Phantos’s “It’s good to be cookoo" line which was said to me by an old Czech man I met on a gondola in Mammoth, California while skiing. These notes can be found here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/02/photo.234/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/04/photo.235/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/06/photo.236/

Now I realized I have to trim the story down of elements. There’s too much. Start focusing on molasses, tsoika, and the three characters. Phantos and Kim get some backstory. The idea of it focusing on what each of the three has to lose or gain by the flood, and that it may contain family artifacts of each of the three main characters. The last note contains the line “If a supremely well-meaning act can lead to such inhumanity, then why not the opposite?" which is a question I love, and which drives much of this narrative, particularly when mixed with the nostalgia we give to otherwise incidental items. These notes and drafts can be found here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/08/photo.237/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/10/photo.238/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/12/file.179/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/12/photo.239/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/13/photo.240/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/14/file.206/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/14/photo.241/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/15/photo.242/

And some more notes. Scenes are forming which actually stick to the final. Tsoika and molasses, the sound of a radio. Phantos starts hitting his stride as a character. Some facts about my grandfather enter.
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/16/photo.243/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/18/photo.256/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/22/photo.285/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/26/photo.286/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/30/photo.287/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/06/02/photo.288/

A mid-stream bit of inspiration in finding some Hungarian curses:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/05/20/link.220/

At this point, everything from the original idea has been transformed. The old mob boss outline became Phantos, the de facto town leader. The assassin’s character became the dead grandfather who was called The Rose. And the suicide-threatening sidekick with the single-bullet gun became Milos the drunk. The rest pretty much came from that. A man without a family or home based identity to speak of, who visits the town of his grandfather for the first time, but the man has died before Kim gets there, and the town has mysteriously been flooded with molasses. The molasses disaster became the strange backdrop and allowed the plot of a character who didn’t even know why he was there to focus around a mystery of why the flood occurred, and those smaller mysteries of what artifacts of his grandfather’s life he might find in the flood. So I started re-writing a new draft from scratch, while taking more and more notes on what Kim and Milos find while sorting through the flood, and questioning both the grandfather’s history and the characters’s motivations. These notes and drafts can be found here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/06/26/file.347/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/09/photo.361/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/12/photo.374/

But now came the question of an appropriate ending. I can’t say what made me think of it, but everything about the feel and increasing tension of these characters demanded a unique ending. I was having fun with Phantos and the questionable nature of morality, as well as the triumverate of characters as the poles driving the story, driving each other further apart because of the importance each assigns the things of the past. “Three men attached to pasts, unable to move ahead, living through the suspended present, wondering how it happened, what it means, weighing meaning by a dead grandfather," appears in my notes. Then I realized it had to end with a joke. A killing joke, much like the Alan Moore “Killing Joke" graphic novel, but amongst three iconic personalities instead of two. It would be tricky to pull off, but this provided a perfect goal with which to approach the rest of the note-taking and drafting process. These can be found here:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/15/quote.371/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/25/romanian-curses/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/16/photo.373/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/20/photo.424/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/25/photo.425/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/07/24/file.386/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/08/01/file.408/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/08/26/file.449/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/08/27/photo.460/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/08/28/photo.463/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/08/28/photo.464/

Then came a first real rough draft can be found here, as well as the inkling that I might be into the beginning of a novel, not just a short story:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/08/29/file.455/

And here’s the draft I submitted to my writing workshop, with notes from Marisa:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/09/16/file.480/
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/10/01/file.501/

With that, I took the draft and tightened it up into a novel exerpt version:
http://www.slambridis.com/chyrp/2008/12/22/file.535/

It’s all there, and now the rest just needs to be written. So…more to come soon.