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Bad Motives

Show notes for "S01E08 "How to Rise Above It All"" :

This is actually a Season Two episode, moved up and tweaked to make it fit. As with yesterday's outline, there's one major change to the villain, and one minor change to a supporting character.

In the IRL episode, the Vulture starts by trying to take down the Wake Riders, but at the end of it they flatter him into joining the gang as their leader. I thought this was a cheap way of pulling down a character who had little reason to fall and who was very sympathetic up until that point, so I changed it.

Also in the IRL episode, Miles is already a second Spider-Man and partners with Peter, so for this one his knowledge and interest in the situation had to be reoriented.

And with today's entry, we hook up to the "preview" treatment ("S01E09 "Mark of the Jackal"" ) that I posted awhile back.

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I worked pretty hard yesterday at a new treatment, but I only got it outlined, and even then I'm not certain I've got it nailed down. I was bothered throughout by the sense that the plot was turning into just a lot of hoop-jumping: Peter has to go here, so let's invent a crisis for him; now he has to go over there, so let's invent a new crisis for him. It all felt arbitrary.

I worry that it is still arbitrary and hoop-jumpy, and I spent the day fighting toward a deeper understanding of what Peter wanted and needed in the story. I also had to shake free of a belief about writing that was starting to harden into a prejudice, to wit:

In any scene, you should be able to identify what a character wants and why he wants it, and his desire should be for something concrete and specific: for a particular jewel or armored shipment of cash, say, and not just for "money"; for the love of a particular girl and not just for "a girlfriend."

So I have spent the last two days fighting in the trenches, trying to figure out which particular person Spider-Man had to fight, and for why and when, trying to nail down the specifics. And that, I eventually realized, was why it felt like so much hoop-jumping. I was giving him a reason to jump through a particular hoop, but there was no reason for him to go "hoop jumping" in general.

So I backed up and figured out what kind of psychic itch he was scratching by doing what felt like a lot of busy work. That's something for me to remember from now on: the character needs both specific motives and a general motive that is realized by the specific motives.