From The Writers' Room

Joel Derfner on writing Tremontaine Ep 7: "The Swan Ball"

Oh this'll be a good idea...

Oh.My.God.At the end of The Meeting™, the three-day weekend summit of all the writers, conducted in a haze of booze and chocolate, those of us who were still conscious and not committed to a psychiatric institution had to divvy up the episodes and figure out who was writing which one. As others have said, some of the episodes went very quickly, and some of us had very specific desires to do particular episodes. I, for example, desperately wanted episode 3, since it was the first time Rafe and Will boinked. Alaya wanted episode 2, because she could make it all about Kinwiinik food. We all wanted episode 12 (insert evil cackle), but Malinda was the lucky one who ended up securing it.

Tremontaine Episode 7

By the time we’d all gotten our hearts’ desires, though, there were a number of episodes left that we all liked but that nobody felt with a burning passion s/he had been born to write. We were discussing them and handing them out slowly, and at one point I said, “Well, it would be a good idea for me to do episode 7, since it’s just a big party scene, so I can just write a lot of clever dialogue. It’ll be easy.”Now, there is a spectacularly large number of ideas in my life about the quality of which I’ve been spectacularly wrong, like the time in college I thought it would be a good idea to cook dinner for my newly ex-boyfriend and his newly current boyfriend, who was a nationally renowned gourmet chef. I thought it would be a particularly good idea to serve Peach Melba mousse for dessert, even though I had never made a mousse before. The problem with this was that I didn’t have a double boiler, which was what the recipe called for, so I just made the mousse in a rice steamer; this resulted in a rubbery substance that Firestone could have used to retread tires.Then there was the time I thought it would be a good idea to take my father and his ex-girlfriend, who was also a friend of mine (she was far closer to his age than to mine), to see a show by Karen Finley, the performance artist whose NEA grant was vetoed in 1990 after she covered her naked body in chocolate on stage, and sit between them.Let me tell you, the badness of those ideas pales in comparison to the badness of the idea to write episode 7.Because I’d never written a party scene before, and it turns out that party scenes are scorpion-whip-wielding, acid-slavering demons from Hell.Yes, you can include lots of witty dialogue, but also people have to do things, and there has to be a story. And in this particular party scene, as it happened, every single plotline of the series also had to converge. For 47 pages. Since I am terrified of people and my modus operandi at parties is to hide in the bathroom for most of the evening playing Candy Crush Saga, I don’t even know what goes on at parties in the first place, so I was particularly ill positioned to write this episode.So I called Ellen and Delia and they said, oh, just read some Georgette Heyer, she invented the Regency romance, it’s all in there, just set it earlier. So I bought and read These Old Shades and The Convenient Marriage, and while they did introduce to my vocabulary the delightful epithet “pig-person” they didn’t particularly enlighten me about party scenes. Whereas with episode 3 I had started writing almost immediately, with episode 7, therefore, since my general approach to things I don’t know how to handle is to stick my fingers in my ears and go “la, la, la, la, la!” (my husband loves this), I did nothing for weeks and weeks until finally three days before I had to hand it in I started writing. The day it was due I spent six hours in my husband’s office at the psychiatric hospital where he works, miserably typing a story that sucked. The whole experience felt like swimming the Atlantic with a manatee tied to my back. When I emailed the story in I texted Ellen and Delia, “Well, it’s done. It’s horrible, but at least there’s a patient to perform surgery on.”So I started to get feedback from my co-writers, all of whom were very gentle and positive, saying things such as, “I really like the font you used” and “Your margins were terrific.” So I started working on a second draft.Then I finished that and sent it to Delia, who very generously met with me and shared some ideas.So I started working on a third draft.Then I started working on a fourth draft.In all I think I wrote seven drafts of this story, which is more drafts than I’ve ever written of any prose piece in my entire life. In the end there wasn’t even room for all that much clever dialogue in episode 7, since there was so much goddamn plotline-converging material I had to fit in. There are parts of the episode with which I’m still not satisfied, which is also a first for me; tweaks always occur to me after publication, but I’m used to getting things into a shape I’m essentially pretty happy with before I let them go out. I’m not going to reveal which parts those are, of course, lest you love the whole thing until I point out its flaws and then you start hating them and me.Unfortunately, by the time I finished the seventh draft I was already late with my outline for episode 10, so there was, as they say, no rest for the wicked.I suppose the lesson here is that, the next time the words “Well, it would be a good idea for me to . . .” come out of my mouth, it would be better for me to get on stage and smear my naked body in Peach Melba mousse than to finish the sentence.

Recent posts