10 years with Zack and Cammy, part 1
In the beginning, the story of Zack and Cammy looks like a complete inversion of Romance novel stereotypes. Instead of the most masculine of men, a chiseled Adonis, pursuing a ravishing fiesty beauty, the epitome of femininity, I have a couple of band kids: a quiet, nerdy boy and a girl who is charming and outgoing, but homely.
I rarely date my notes. I believe the first set, three pages of binder paper with the words “Zack and Cammy” written on the top, is from some time in 2008. In these notes, Camille was a freshman and Zack a sophomore. They both played the trumpet in their high school marching band. (Like many of my other characters, Zack and Cammy go to Cooper High in my fictional town of Peace Valley, California.)
I note that Zack is “anonymous, lost in the crowd.” To heighten Zack’s sense of inadequacy, Camille’s brother, Bud, is a star football player. Zack’s friends tease him about Camille, because she is not pretty.
Despite being younger and homely, Camille takes the lead in the relationship. She is the one that initiates the physical intimacy between them. There in the notes is a scene that carried forward into the final novel. One of Zack’s friends tauntingly asks, “Does she give you head, at least?” Zack reacts angrily, and he is still angry and flustered when he tells Camille about it later. He is shocked when she says that she would, in fact, give him oral sex.
Camille speaks in the frank way young people express their truth. I don’t compose dialogue so much as record what my characters say, and what Camille told Zack haunted me. It showed the pressure she felt, and the weight of the insults she had received through the years: “I know the score. Us ugly ducks gotta put out.” She is afraid that, if she isn’t intimate with Zack, he will leave her.
On the last page of these notes, the story darkens. I write, “Cammy is forced to have sex with a friend of her brother.”
\\
The next page of notes is dated November 2010. (This date was added later, but let’s assume it’s accurate.) I have at this point written my first Liam Wren story, “The Dangers of Black Cats,” but I have yet to post it at HPFF.
This is a one-page handwritten draft of the story’s opening. In the novel, this scene is seven pages long, but it’s essentially the same. Zack comes home for Christmas after an undetermined number of years. He admires his mother’s Christmas tree. The notes state the tree bears “mementos of a happy childhood. Comfortable lies instead of hard truths. Growing up here was miserable.” Zack’s mother mentions that she saw his old girlfriend recently. She is working as a clerk at a drugstore downtown. (The draft explicitly says “Walgreens.”) In the passage, Mom says, “You probably haven’t thought of her in years, have you?” Zack answers, “No, I haven’t.” At the bottom of the page, I write, “But this is another lie.”
Two other pages follow, briefly summarizing the course of the novel, the course I would eventually follow. Zack and Camille break up, and there is a period of time when they are out of contact. Zack has a relationship with another girl. “Though prettier than Cammy, [she] lacks her charm and skill at lovemaking. He appreciates her [Camille] in retrospect.” Zack and Camille meet again at the end of the novel. The last words of this section of notes: “[The] novel should end ambiguously. Will they get back together or go on their way? If they do reunite, will it last or lead to another breakup?”
\\
Another piece of paper, torn from a different notebook than the above draft, contains a single paragraph. It’s as if the novel is already written in my head, and I was just giving myself a little teaser. There is no context, only the header, “excerpt from Zack and Cammy”, but I know that Zack is reflecting on the experience of Camille giving him oral sex.
I write: “All Zack could recall from that first experience was the blinding pleasure. It was only much later, at the hands of a less accomplished lover, did he fully appreciate Camille’s grace and skill, and comprehend her experience. There had been other boys before him. There must have been. But, who they were he never learned. They vanished from her past like dry leaves into earth.”
Six, maybe seven years later, I wrote that paragraph almost verbatim into the novel.
\\
Finally, we have three pages of typed notes. The benefit here is that I have the MS-Word metadata, which states this file was created on April 19th, 2011. I started writing Liam Wren and the Dragon Wand around the same time. This is a typical experience of writers. You start on one project and suddenly your brain starts telling you about something completely different.
The notes are detailed and interspersed with dialogue. The story begins with Zack returning home at Christmastime. After his mother mentions meeting Camille at the drugstore, Zack begins to reminisce about her. The plot moves back and forth from the present to the past, from College Zack to High School Zack.
I’ve made some changes from the initial concepts. For one, Camille is older. I have moved her to the saxophone. In the typed notes, she is a junior and Zack a senior. Zack is now a virtuoso trumpet player, a soloist hoping to get a music scholarship to college. He is not just shy, but painfully so. Zack will not speak in crowded spaces or on the phone. He only opens up to Camille when the two of them are alone. He now has an older sister, Saffron, who encourages Zack to pursue Camille.
The plot has darkened considerably. Zack and Saffron are coping with verbal, physical and sexual abuse. Christmas is particularly painful for Zack. He is burdened with painful December memories, and the false cheeriness of “the happiest time of the year” makes him depressed. Camille coaxes the whole tragic story out of Zack. The tale leaves her in tears. She says, “Oh Zack! You are so shy. It is so hard to get you to say anything at all. And then, every time you speak you break my heart!”
I remember hearing those words in my head for days before I wrote them down. In the notes, they are in bold:every time you speak, you break my heart. I knew right then, that was the title of my novel.
To be continued . . .
I rarely date my notes. I believe the first set, three pages of binder paper with the words “Zack and Cammy” written on the top, is from some time in 2008. In these notes, Camille was a freshman and Zack a sophomore. They both played the trumpet in their high school marching band. (Like many of my other characters, Zack and Cammy go to Cooper High in my fictional town of Peace Valley, California.)
I note that Zack is “anonymous, lost in the crowd.” To heighten Zack’s sense of inadequacy, Camille’s brother, Bud, is a star football player. Zack’s friends tease him about Camille, because she is not pretty.
Despite being younger and homely, Camille takes the lead in the relationship. She is the one that initiates the physical intimacy between them. There in the notes is a scene that carried forward into the final novel. One of Zack’s friends tauntingly asks, “Does she give you head, at least?” Zack reacts angrily, and he is still angry and flustered when he tells Camille about it later. He is shocked when she says that she would, in fact, give him oral sex.
Camille speaks in the frank way young people express their truth. I don’t compose dialogue so much as record what my characters say, and what Camille told Zack haunted me. It showed the pressure she felt, and the weight of the insults she had received through the years: “I know the score. Us ugly ducks gotta put out.” She is afraid that, if she isn’t intimate with Zack, he will leave her.
On the last page of these notes, the story darkens. I write, “Cammy is forced to have sex with a friend of her brother.”
\\
The next page of notes is dated November 2010. (This date was added later, but let’s assume it’s accurate.) I have at this point written my first Liam Wren story, “The Dangers of Black Cats,” but I have yet to post it at HPFF.
This is a one-page handwritten draft of the story’s opening. In the novel, this scene is seven pages long, but it’s essentially the same. Zack comes home for Christmas after an undetermined number of years. He admires his mother’s Christmas tree. The notes state the tree bears “mementos of a happy childhood. Comfortable lies instead of hard truths. Growing up here was miserable.” Zack’s mother mentions that she saw his old girlfriend recently. She is working as a clerk at a drugstore downtown. (The draft explicitly says “Walgreens.”) In the passage, Mom says, “You probably haven’t thought of her in years, have you?” Zack answers, “No, I haven’t.” At the bottom of the page, I write, “But this is another lie.”
Two other pages follow, briefly summarizing the course of the novel, the course I would eventually follow. Zack and Camille break up, and there is a period of time when they are out of contact. Zack has a relationship with another girl. “Though prettier than Cammy, [she] lacks her charm and skill at lovemaking. He appreciates her [Camille] in retrospect.” Zack and Camille meet again at the end of the novel. The last words of this section of notes: “[The] novel should end ambiguously. Will they get back together or go on their way? If they do reunite, will it last or lead to another breakup?”
\\
Another piece of paper, torn from a different notebook than the above draft, contains a single paragraph. It’s as if the novel is already written in my head, and I was just giving myself a little teaser. There is no context, only the header, “excerpt from Zack and Cammy”, but I know that Zack is reflecting on the experience of Camille giving him oral sex.
I write: “All Zack could recall from that first experience was the blinding pleasure. It was only much later, at the hands of a less accomplished lover, did he fully appreciate Camille’s grace and skill, and comprehend her experience. There had been other boys before him. There must have been. But, who they were he never learned. They vanished from her past like dry leaves into earth.”
Six, maybe seven years later, I wrote that paragraph almost verbatim into the novel.
\\
Finally, we have three pages of typed notes. The benefit here is that I have the MS-Word metadata, which states this file was created on April 19th, 2011. I started writing Liam Wren and the Dragon Wand around the same time. This is a typical experience of writers. You start on one project and suddenly your brain starts telling you about something completely different.
The notes are detailed and interspersed with dialogue. The story begins with Zack returning home at Christmastime. After his mother mentions meeting Camille at the drugstore, Zack begins to reminisce about her. The plot moves back and forth from the present to the past, from College Zack to High School Zack.
I’ve made some changes from the initial concepts. For one, Camille is older. I have moved her to the saxophone. In the typed notes, she is a junior and Zack a senior. Zack is now a virtuoso trumpet player, a soloist hoping to get a music scholarship to college. He is not just shy, but painfully so. Zack will not speak in crowded spaces or on the phone. He only opens up to Camille when the two of them are alone. He now has an older sister, Saffron, who encourages Zack to pursue Camille.
The plot has darkened considerably. Zack and Saffron are coping with verbal, physical and sexual abuse. Christmas is particularly painful for Zack. He is burdened with painful December memories, and the false cheeriness of “the happiest time of the year” makes him depressed. Camille coaxes the whole tragic story out of Zack. The tale leaves her in tears. She says, “Oh Zack! You are so shy. It is so hard to get you to say anything at all. And then, every time you speak you break my heart!”
I remember hearing those words in my head for days before I wrote them down. In the notes, they are in bold:every time you speak, you break my heart. I knew right then, that was the title of my novel.
To be continued . . .
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