In This Newsletter, I Plot My Next Book: "Clerks" Meets "Persona"

I Am Thou, Thou Aren't Even Supposed To Be Here Today

This week, I shall pull off a high-wire act: I will design a magic system for a book I am planning as we speak.  This could be your phenomenal sneak peek to a novel that will be published three years from now!

…or it could be another unfinished novel that doesn’t quite gel.  Or one that never sells. But I don’t think so; this one’s really coming together in my mind.  

Like a lot of writers, I get jazzed about a concept I stole from some other media and then set to work filing the serial numbers off.  I don’t think anyone will be surprised to hear that Flex’s inspiration was a magical Breaking Bad… But can anyone give me The Sol Majestic’s origin? 

You guessed it: The Muppets. 

Originally, The Sol Majestic was gonna be a roadshow where Paulius and Kenna got the band back together, but turns out that didn’t work, so I just put all the interesting characters in the same space.

When I file the serial numbers off? I file ‘em down to the bone.

Anyway, so what I’m really jazzed about right now is the Persona videogames.  They’re super-long, and that’s kind of the point; you spend a semester in school with your buddies, doing chores and homework by day and rescuing people from shadowy demons by night.  You literally have a calendar and deadlines and ordinary events like “finals exams” and “school trip” to distract you from all the supernatural gatherings. 

Joker, the lead character of Persona 5.

And I love the cast of characters – not only are they vividly drawn, but you spend so much time just hanging out with them.  Other videogames put the emphasis on getting to know someone through action sequences, but the Persona games give you a rainy afternoon and ask you: will you spend time getting to know Ryuji, the hotheaded jock, or Yusuke, the tortured artist?  Because they both have hidden depths. 

What makes me love them is those intense school friendships – the ones where you had to spend every day with the same people, so you got to know them in intimate ways you just can’t get when you’re middle-aged and scheduling a lunch with your buddies every two months. 

But I don’t wanna write about school kids. 

I wanna write about people in their mid- to late twenties, that interesting when you’re finally crystallizing who you are, that vague sense that you’re supposed to be an adult living on your own and yet you’re still discovering what makes you, well, unassailably you. 

And where are those people forced to hang out every day?

That’s right; their crappy, minimum-wage job. 

I want a book about the bonds of people who’ve become friends because they all have to endure the same insane customer demands, the same jerky bosses, the same dumb team-building exercises, all in the same darned place. 

So: Clerks.

Excerpt Clerks who work at the Quick Stop Grocery by day and fight underground demons by night.

You sold yet? 

Okay.  I need a magic system, though.

It was so damn reassuring to have a movie tell me that I was right to be outraged by dumb customers.

So a couple of things I want to consider I spin up my special effects budget:

Why are they descending into underground dungeons to fight monsters?  What lures them in?  What powers do they have when they enter into battle?  What do the monsters look like? 

What individual powers do they have?  In other words, how can I stop this from being “four mooks with magic swords”?  How can the magic they wield be expressions of their personalities? 

What’s the theme?  Every Persona game is heavily driven by a central theme, and I want to replicate that – Persona 5 is based in rebellion, students refusing to take crap from an unjust society.  Persona 4 is designed around the concept of casting away illusions to see the truth. 

So let’s start with theme.  That drives everything. 

The theme I want is breaking the chains – in part because these folks are working at gruelling, minimum-wage jobs designed to destroy their dignity, and the battles in the dungeons should fuel their increasing self-confidence. 

(And as my very clever wife has noted, “breaking the chains” could also mean “chain stores.”) 

In addition, I want the common theme among the protagonists to be that they’ve been broken by some external force – fed a crippling line of BS about themselves that they’ve internalized, and the only way to become the people they were meant to be is to shake off those old illusions and learn who they truly are.

So how’s that feed into the dungeons? 

Well, let’s say that the way they unlock their power is that they are brave enough to descent into the dungeons and discover a version of themselves – a shadow version – that is in chains.  Only by freeing this alternate-self can they reunite themselves with their true power. 

And in true Persona fashion, let’s say that to free themselves, they have to battle a monstrous version of someone who exists in the real world.  In Persona, that’s usually a bad person in authority – an abusive teacher, a murderous gangster – so I don’t think it’s too hard to leap that our heroes work at a store with some really awful bosses with literally monstrous reflections in the shadow-world.

(And also in Persona style, let’s also say that defeating the shadow-boss causes a change in personality in the real world.) 

I am rapidly coming to decide that one of the things I want to happen in this book is “the real world and the shadow world overlap the more the heroes unlock their magic,” so… what’s the shadow world like?

If we’re going by the idea that “the shadow world is a dark reflection of the real world,” then the dungeons are an easy world – if the heroes work at a Sam’s Club, it’s this great labyrinthine place with nooks and crannies everywhere.  Not too hard to say that on certain nights, those corridors extend out for miles – an IKEA version of House of Leaves, where our heroes work a late-night restock shift and discover one of those stacks of bulk kitty litter and detergent go on forever. 

What are those nights?  Eh, we’ll figure those rules out later.

But it does give us an easy excuse to rope the heroes in!  Set up their circumstances, set up that they weren’t even supposed to be here today, and then they get chased deeper into the maze by monsters until they stumble across the bizarre sight of our main character (along with shadow-versions of the other employees in the department) in some version of magical chains, being tormented in a parody of their day job by a monstrous version of the bad boss we introduced earlier in the chapter.

(Gotta be careful in this one not to step on plantation imagery, because there’s overtones of actual historical people in chains that we do not want to evoke unthinkingly.) 

So who are the monsters?  Well, if we’re going with the analog of “the store is the dungeon, the boss is the boss monster,” well…

The regular monsters have to be the customers.  Shadow versions of the consumers they’re forced to deal with during the day – a riff on Dawn of the Dead, these starving empty husks desperate to consume in order to feel anything, demanding the clerks satisfy needs that can’t possibly be fulfilled, chasing them down to tear them apart because they are inferior and they should be able to eat them alive, the customer is always right.

Okay!  So.  Flavorful.  This might even be enough to start writing a book!  But I still have a lot of questions I personally want answered:

·       What is the nature of the power they unlock by freeing themselves?  How do they fight?  How do those powers express themselves in ways that align themselves with the characters’ personality? 

·       How often does the mystical thingamajigger align to let people into the mystical underground? 

·       Why is the portal opening up?  Is it specific to these people, or this store?  Who’s giving them these powers? 

·       How does this work for other inhuman forms of minimum-wage abuse?  Does it work for Uber?  Starbucks?  McDonald’s? 

And we’re at our word limit, so… If you have suggestions for things you think would make this cooler (and freely offer those ideas without hope of compensation of any sort, because this is purely in the planning stages and I don’t want to have to worry about owing people should this become A Book What Sells), then sound off. 

But I’ll be back in two weeks, and we’ll flesh this out more. 

Signing off,
Ferrett

P.S. - As usual, my podcast is up - this one dissecting the techniques of the creepfest I’m Thinking Of Ending Things. I didn’t like this book. But it did some really interesting things, so much so that I had to process my thoughts on it.

P.P.S. - Massive, massive credit to Twitter user @MisterAnthropy, who gave me the phenomenal tagline “I am thou, thou aren’t even supposed to be here today.”