Megastory

Comes the news that David Lynch plans to shoot the Twin Peaks revival series as one massive movie, and then chop it up into episodes afterwards.

Oh, yes.

I am interested in this news not merely because I am a Twin Peaks fan of enduring passion and unhealthy obsession, but also because the artistic process fascinates me so. Especially this sort of “megastory.”

I find this tidbit of behind-the-scenes info particularly interesting because it’s a technique/tactic/stratagem I’ve considered in the past and, indeed, am still considering.

See, there’s a series I’ve always wanted to write. Even before my first novel was published, I was working on this series. It began as a lark, a fun little open-ended series that would spark the imagination and take you to another world for a few hours with each book.

But as I worked on it, it grew into something else entirely — a massive, sprawling epic with a complicated backstory and an interlocking continuity of its own.

So, as I’ve noodled with it over the years, despairing that any publisher would ever buy in based on the first book and my promise that “It all connects, trust me!”, I’ve considered doing the crazy, the mad, the insane: Writing the entire series as one enormous book, then cutting it up into book-length “chapters.” This way, I could be certain everything lines up properly and falls into place, and potential publishers could be sure I’m actually heading somewhere without just taking my word for it.

It would probably only be somewhere around 4,000 pages. *gulp*

Truthfully, I’m not sure y’all will ever see this series. It’s a huge undertaking and it’s a lot for any publisher to commit to, even if I took four or five years of my life and did nothing but write it.

Still, it’s heartening to see that David Lynch and I are thinking alike. I’ll take that.