23 year old male slumped in a solitary armchair in the middle of a dim lighted room; his face remains in the shadows.
I have this thing you know, you can’t pull the wool over my eyes, doesn’t matter how infectious your fake smiles and personality are - I’m immune to it all. I can easily suss out any shady character, there’ll just be something about you that doesn’t sit right with me - it could be a slight expression, a look in your eyes and I’ll just know, trust me I’m never wrong .
(Sinks further back into the chair and crosses one leg over the other while forming a steeple with his hands)
One person that I continually had a problem with was my twin brother; it was all in his eyes you see.
There was always this creeping suspicion where he was concerned. I remember when we were in our teens; he thought it’d be cool to experiment with smoking, the next thing you know I’m “accidentally” locked in my room where a cigarette my brother had supposedly “stomped out” managed to set fire to my carpet - I barely escaped with my life but I’ll never forget the look in his eyes when he came to visit me at the hospital - it was then that I knew. That experience was just one of many to come; I survived them all and they only made me stronger but the scars still remain.
The last straw was when he forced himself on my fiancée, I knew what he was trying to do - he’d failed in getting to me so he got to the person closest to me – the bastard.
Like I said there was always something fishy about him
(He leans into the light revealing a mangled mass of twisted scar tissue eclipsing his left cheek)
I think it’s rather fitting that he’s presently swimming with the fishes in the river
(He chuckles deeply)
don’t you?
i know that there is much room for improvement and i have to admit that it was a bit rushed - :S
ReplyDeletesorry :]
Hi S-K,
ReplyDeleteThis is cleverly written, you manage to mix monologue and digression well.
I would think about your character's use of language though. The key word is believability, you have to really remove yourself from the process and make sure it isn't straightforward narrative, or as sometimes in this case, speech describing narrative.
Is your character purely calculated or is he emotionally driven as well? I think more the former but try to find a balance.
You give a lot of space to the cigarette incident which is obviously a defining moment in your character's life, but the one which leads to his brother's death only gets three lines, explain what happened! The situation and circumstances.
For phrases like 'accidentally' and 'stomped out' instead of using speech marks maybe insert some brief stage directions.
I think the idea of there being something 'fishy' about the character is a good one, I could easily see him as a cast member in The Sopranos, it adds dark humour, this can give a lightness to terrible events.
The hint at the mafia could be developed, perhaps get your character more involved in that world, it would certainly make the events more believable.
A good idea and really well developed though!
S.
Hi Scarlet
ReplyDeleteReally liked the developing menace in this. I think you could do with an edit and just go in strong with his observatons of his brother's behaviour. You could go straight into this monologue with 'You can't pull the wool over my eyes...'
Don't tell us he had a problem with his twin, show us that he did so by having him describe events to us that show that this was the case. Again, the setting the house on fire incident. Don't tell us about his suspicions. You can cut straight to your narrator in hospital thinking aloud about how he managed to end up there. And when you tell us that 'the scars remain...', by having this line, for me, you are weakening your visual shock at the end when the narrator shows his scarred face.
When he talks about the incident with his fiancee, you could get more narrative power if you are less direct about what actually happened. Your narrator could have a real emotional block/response here. As for the brother in the river - if you could perhaps obliquely describe where the brother now resides instead of just telling us he is in the river, and allow the listener/viewer to work this out for themselves, then that would be much stronger. And could your really strong visual ending - the scarred cheek - be stronger still if it were moved further towards the end of the monologue?? Just ideas, really! I agree with the previous comment about use of language. You should try to really imagine your narrator on stage living this in front of us. And read the thing through out loud. This will help you sort out what sort of spech you can realistically keep and what can be dumped.
Hope this helps!
ann g
A big fan of yours, nonetheless I was not so impressed by this one, I'm afraid. I love your ending, which is brilliantly droll and dark, but the rest appears disappointingly ordinary - perhaps mostly due to the speech not being as convincing as it could have been.
ReplyDeleteSo, lots of potential, but not really you at your best, I fear...
Hi Scarlet-kyuubi, I liked the set up but agree with the other comments. Watch out for telling a story as cleanly and in as linear a way; a dramatic monologue should hint at, rather than spell out the narrative. Maybe you could take a look at the Robert Browning poem ‘My Last Duchess’ for how he does it? Also, you don’t need such a dramatic revelation at the end (though you can have one if you like); it’s good to have a contrast between the monologue and the facts (here your character is claiming that his brother was the twisted one but, at the end, we see that he’s also behaved in quite an extreme way) but it needn’t entail such a big move (a murder). The tension just has to be between self-presentation or self-justification and apparent fact. Make the story a bit more messy or less obvious; don’t feel everything has to be spelled out.
ReplyDelete