Method Writer

Happy birthday Mikey Way!

This seems like a good day to talk about how I did some of the writing, especially because Mikey’s voice was probably the hardest one to find. Seriously, he talks a lot less, especially in older clips. He does seem to be a little more talkative now. Though, I think maybe when Gerard is your brother, it could be easy to let him do the talking.

Anyway, I was playing the music a lot, mainly because I wanted to listen to it, and often bringing the songs up on Youtube if I did not have the appropriate CD with me, or if I wanted to listen to some of the other songs. Often I would see little interview clips too, and I would click on those, too, which is where I really started to like them as people, as well as musicians.

At the same time I remembered reading about an actor who was covering for Alison Sweeney while she was on maternity leave. And no, I am not using “actor” as a gender-neutral term. In one of the most creative ways of covering a maternity leave ever, they had Sami disguise herself as “Stan” to wreak havoc.

The only time I have watched “Days” on a regular basis was in my first year of college, when my roommate was really into it, but when I was subscribing to Digest I would read about it a lot, and I read an interview with Dan Wells where he was saying that he would have tapes of Sami playing in the background while he was doing stuff so he could pick up her speech patterns and everything. I did tune in once, probably just to see him, and it was uncanny—he was crying like Alison would have cried.

Anyway, I made it a point to have MCR running in the background a lot. Previously, I would start a writing session by playing any pertinent songs, and then I would just play other songs too because I was still writing so I might as well still be listening, which could have led to some overlap, but I started focusing on the interviews more too, just to hear them speak.

One thing I have out of that is that there was a clip where they were talking about their “Danger Days” characters, and they said Kobra Kid has a kind of a short fuse; he’s misunderstood, and that directly influenced the character.

Because there is kind of an immersion thing going on, while I am doing other things, probably a lot of it is unconscious—that maybe I heard one thing that registered and another thing that registered but I did not realize that I put them together, but there are also things that I totally know why it went that way.

For example, I listened to Pencey Prep a lot for Frank, and his backstory is basically somewhere between 8th Grad and 19, which I guess is why he is 16 when his backstory really kicks into gear. Those two are right next to each other on “Heartbreak in Stereo”, and they are also the two songs that are really associated with specific times of life, so that could be it, but also, yeah, that’s just how it worked out. It felt like it fit.

Ray also could be a little more talkative in interviews, but his was actually the first voice that I really heard, because there’s a bit at the beginning of the “I’m Not Okay” video where he is talking to Gerard:

“You like D&D, Audrey Hepburn, Fangoria, Harry Houdini and croquet. You can't swim, you can't dance, and you don't know karate. Face it, you're never going to make it.”

Now, that seems a little negative, and he does end up being kind of the naysayer at times, but at the same time, it’s sympathetic, and so Ray just ends up kind of being the voice of reason. Sometimes that involves being negative, but it is also often being conciliatory, and practical, and he is the one who is going to hear you wake up from a bad dream and be there to talk about it.

(Actually, I really like his voice, both for speaking and singing. I find it soothing. Also he is my hair twin.)

I think it has made the writing better, but it was also a good listening experience. There’s worse company you could keep, and I found things I didn’t know about. For example, one thing that kept coming up as a related video was “Safe and Sound” by Kyosuke Himuro. It was coming up because Gerard Way is featured on it, but also, related videos let me realize it was a song from Final Fantasy: Advent Children.

Some of my favorite things in my early Youtube days were Final Fantasy Fan Videos, and actually the very first that I found was an Advent Children one for “Rest in Pieces” by Saliva. Actually, I like both videos for Safe and Sound. The live one makes me want to dance in the rain, and the clips one makes me want to fly. It looks completely impractical, but I guess gravity works differently around Midgar.

Also fun was finding their Yo Gabba Gabba appearance. How can anyone not love them? I do not get it. And that led to finding out that they had done “All I Want for Christmas is You”. Frankly, I’d been looking for another version of that, beyond Mariah Carey. I am starting to feel guilty about being down on specific artists, but just because you can yodel doesn’t mean you should do it on every single song. One of these days I am going to write about my frustrations with Ballroom Blitz, but I’m still analyzing it.

Anyway, good times happening, with good music in the background, and learning more about the band, and now I am dreaming about them. I think it’s just temporary. I’m kind of doing the final push to finish, and usually I am writing until midnight and then crashing, so it’s on the brain. I’m currently at 322 pages, and I sort of have page goals (330 for today), but it is more that I have scene goals, where today I want to cover the backstory on Mitch, Jacob, and Lastri, and get up to where, well, actually this will make no sense if you don’t know the story. Suffice it to say, I have a goal, and I have been pretty much meeting my goals for the past week or so.