Man, sometimes I think about how much things have changed just in my lifetime and it’s astounding. Like the fact that the term Man is no longer the catchy slang of hip youth, or that we once wore our socks all the way up to our knees while also wearing shorts and thought nothing of it.
Also, the Internet. I was there, kids, when the Internet was literally turned on, and it was … kind of boring. I remember my roommate Ken had a 386 PC with a 14.4 modem in it, and we used that to connect to a pretty bare-bones, text-only network, mainly to access newsgroups. Newsgroups were sort of like Reddit, organized around specific interests. People would post and respond, sharing knowledge and having a very long text-based conversation.
Going back to the early 1990s, my discovery of newsgroups coincided with a broadcast of the old 1960s TV show The Prisoner. Being an impressionable youth, I became obsessed with the show — if you’ve never seen it, you simply must, because it is delightfully weird. A British secret agent played with admirable paranoia and twitch by Patrick McGoohan tries to retire, is abducted by mysterious forces, and wakes up in The Village, a place apparently designed to discover whether his retirement was sincere or if he’d defected to the other side. Or possibly it is the other side, trying to get him to reveal secrets. The agent’s name is never given — in fact, no one’s name is used. Everyone in The Village has a number (the agent is Number Six). The mysterious nature of the place, along with its trippy psychedelic 1960s vibe, is definitely part of the charm. Heck, Iron Maiden wrote a song about the show:
To say my friends and I fell into a rabbit hole on this show is an understatement. It’s almost genetically designed to be the sort of show you obsess over. It’s filled with strange details and odd references, it’s got strange inconsistencies and a very specific design sense. We spent hours and hours coming up with theories and arguing over the true meaning of everything. Then I discovered a graphic novel, Shattered Visage, that was a direct sequel to the series (though not written by the original team).
That’s when I got inspired to write pretty much the only fan fiction I’ve ever written: The Return of The King: A Story of ‘The Prisoner’.
Live Wire Act
Which is a long-winded intro into the point of this essay: I wrote my fan fiction, all 18,000 words of it, live, direct into the newsgroup alt.tv.prisoner. Meaning, I would fire up the old computer, connect to the newsgroup, and literally type a chapter into a post. No saving. No editing. No cutting and pasting. Just a burst of creativity, hitting POST, and walking away. 17 Chapters were written this way, off the top of my head, by the seat of my pants.
If you’re curious, you can read the thing (PDF | EPUB | MOBI). Be warned: It is not great, even if you’re a Prisoner Super Fan. The story I’ve posted here has been cleaned up a little — typing directly into the Internet doesn’t bode well for typos and spelling mistakes — but it hasn’t been edited or revised in any way. So, no, it’s not good. But you know what it is? It’s finished.
The lesson I took from the experience of writing directly to publication in front of a (small, but real) audience was simple: When writing a first draft, getting it done is more important than getting it right.
To this day I follow this approach. I write my first drafts (or perhaps more accurately my zero drafts) as if I’m typing them directly to the Internet like The Return of The King. I don’t go back and fix things. I don’t re-write. I don’t worry about continuity when I have an inspiration that breaks something I’d written earlier. I just keep going until I hit THE END.
Then I go back. Then I fix things. But in the mean time, I have a finished story. A finished story can be fixed-up. It can be revised, massaged, tweaked, edited, and perfected. A story you haven’t finished because you keep starting chapter 3 over and over again can’t be any of those things.
NOW, here we are thirty goddamn years later and I’m posting this piece of fan fiction for you to mock. Which leads to the real point of this essay: Am I drunk again? Dammit, I can’t tell any more.