The Crack of Dawn
9/17/23
Newsletter #461
The Crack of Dawn
The paperback of my book, Hitler in the Madhouse, is already available on Amazon -- Amazon.com: Hitler in the Madhouse: A Novel: 9798988928508: Becker, Josh, Sanborn, Craig "Kif": Books I’ve loaded the eBook, but it hasn’t appeared yet. Should anyone actually read this book, I’d love to hear your comments, both bad and good. You can comment here at Substack or on my website, Beckerfilms.com.
The genesis of that book’s idea was so complex that it took three newsletters to explain it. My point, I guess, is that getting story ideas is a strange, complicated, often lengthy, process that can die of attrition at any second. It’s an internal combustion engine with almost no oil. You get an idea that seems to have some merit. The first hurdle is do you even write it down? If so, does your idea/engine have enough lubricant in it to get you to then attempt to expand it into some known form, like a short story, a screenplay or a book? At this juncture my process has always been (and I know that most wannabe writers don’t do this), write it as a story (or treatment) from beginning to end. 10-20 pages. Those who don’t know how to actually write, but think that they know how to teach writing, will say shit like, “Never put dialogue in a treatment.” I say, throw in everything. If you have a good line, put it in. The point is to make it all the way to the end. If you can’t tell the whole story in fourteen or eighteen pages, you don’t have a story and you ought to quit. You’re trying to be a swimming instructor and you don’t know how to swim.
However, if you can actually make it through that enormous step – writing a short story, for goodness sake, not swimming the English Channel – can you make it through the next even bigger step. Can you figure out what you have wrought – knowing for a fact that as a first draft it may not be a mile from where it should be – then having the brains and balls to fix it, whatever that entails?
In the case of my next book that will be published, The Gospel According to Judas, it actually did start off as a short story that was never meant to be anything other than a short story. But what I really had was two stories: a present-day story of finding an old, sunken Roman ship in the Mediterranean that contains sealed amphorae (jars) full of scrolls; and the story on one of the scrolls that turns out to be the first person account of Judas Iscariot. In the story Judas is a paid informant working for the Romans. To receive his payment of 30 silver coins, he must dictate his story of spending three years undercover with Jesus and his followers to a Roman scribe. There is actually more to the story, and it’s all on the present day side, not the Judas side. So, it was an interesting short story, not a great one by any means, and I posted it on my website. That was probably in 1999 (back when we partied).
Twelve or fifteen years later I decided to expand the story into a screenplay. It made the transformation into script form all right, but that’s when the problem of it being two separate stories became apparent. Two stories that didn’t seem to want to work together. That’s what writing it as a script showed me. It also made it clear to me that an archeologist finding and translating an old scroll isn’t as interesting as having a first-person account of the life of Jesus. Beyond that, I wrote an 18-page section of Judas’s story – the scene of the miracle of the fishes and the loaves – as a slapstick comedy, attempting to tonally follow Monty Python’s The Life of Brian (1979).
At some point my friend Andy read the script. He said, “I liked when it got funny.” I thought, “Me, too.” I can’t say for sure, but I kind of bet I was drinking when I wrote it.
And just like the Hitler story, I once again found myself telling a first-person story. And from the moment I knew whose point of view I was taking, in both cases, I knew how to tell the story. In the case of Judas, I shitcanned the whole present-day story. It became entirely – and the joke is that it took so many years to get here – The Gospel According to Judas – its title from the beginning. And somehow, on some booze-filled night six, seven years ago, I hit a funny streak. Now those were the rules. It’s Judas telling the story, and it’s funny. Plus, I have an insidious, underlying plan to explain most of the miracles as simply early science and medicine that Jesus picked up while traveling in the east. And at first I thought being sacrilegious was funny – and it is – but only for short spans of time. Humor must come from everywhere. Humor is a high bar, and I’m glad I set it for myself, even if I don’t remember doing it. And what Monty Python-style comedy really means is smart, and silly.
I have decided to name the chapters of the book, which I’ve never done before. I came up with a joke for the first one, so then I came up with a joke for the second one. Now there are only 14 more left to do.
Chapter I – The Moab Desert: Named for Moab, son of Lot, nephew of Abraham, cousin of Vinny.
Chapter 2 – The banks of the Jordan River: Where prophets are saved.
Only 14 to go.
I stole old lithographs of Jesus from everywhere, particularly from Gustave Dore, and used them to illustrate the books. Except that I put in silly captions, like Mad Magazine. Here’s one (though not nearly Dore).
Good day.