On Post: Doing It Wrong

Date: January 23, 2014

Another instance of going to bed with no idea and waking up with something is what led to this entry. I had listened to the song so often before bed that it was firmly embedded in my head upon my waking and the one section in particular I kept replaying was Drake “instructing” the woman he’s dumping to “cry if you want to” and so on. Essentially, he was giving her permission to do things while simultaneously giving her boundaries by indicating he would not comfort her, stay with her and so on.

This made me think of a relationship coach, which is where the Hitch reference comes from and also, seriously, why was he keeping his identity a secret? If he had been open about who he was, what he did, and why, that jerk would’ve never been able to smear him in the first place. But whatever. One should not spend too much time gazing into the plotholes of HITCH, lest they gaze back.

Anyway, the relationship coach idea quickly became “relationship coach, but for break ups” and that’s where our POV character came together.

It was fun putting together not just the why and how of him but also the rules he’d establish to keep himself “above board” and what clientele could possibly fit into those boundaries. Trying to ground a ridiculous character often causes them to unravel but I thought he held up well, his shortcomings and self-delusions informing the character construction, not detonating it.

In retrospect I might have been better served by writing the piece in a more script-like format and that is something I did consider at the time. However, I did not want to go to that well too often (and I might have ultimately anyway) so I kept it prose. Thus, the fact that he is “talking” to us while the dumpee rage does not come across quite as cleanly as I’d like.