Beats
Happy’s Job:
- Gets job at same place as Daddi
- Dad cries the day he is signed up by Mummi
- Happy starts stealing from the job
- Happy gets caught & charged and/or fired
- Daddi is laid off shortly afterwards as retribution
- Family gets into serious financial trouble
- His puberty turns him hairy but also into a monster (ugly and moral-less)
- Flashback to getting baptized in India
12JUN23
- a used phrases list: snappy phrases stay in your mind. readers find them busy the 1st time and lazy the next time
- a post-writing outline: tracks the variations of the story you’ve written
- a calendar: every mention of time is put here so you’re not tripped up
- a tie-up later list: this list prevents loose ends. “explain why security guard passed out in chapter 3”
- a target length offers a structure (80k, 120k max)
- Scene Definition: a segment of story action, written moment by moment, without summary, presented on stage in the story now. it is not something that goes on inside the character’s head. it is physical and could be acted on the stage.
- desire: to be respected
- start in grade 9 end in year 1 uni
13JUN23
- The basic action is not the gang, but becoming a man
- Amit - a mix of Ali, Ramnik & Sonny
- likes the same girl as Saad & Happy
- Jug starts hanging with Amit as part of his downfall
- starts the rival gang and joins with Inderjit
- Also allied with Bunty, which is how Daddi gets embroiled
- Nanak becomes Billa - a model of someone who got out
- He treats Happy nice, but isn’t concerned with the battle for him
- The fathers:
- Saad is nurturing to abusive
- Amit is abusive to absent
- Daddi is absent to nurturing
- Daddi’s absence is the inciting incident
- Jug & Shera are analogies to Happy’s journey
- Ram is also a father figure, but early on. Along with Uncle. They are minor rivals
- Mentors
- Daddi, Uncle, Ram, Saad, Amit, Billa
- Jug is subplot with parellel but death
- Shera is subplot with parellel but no growth - he has good dad - ironic
- Tom Hagen is mentioned. He is the figure to be compared to. The premise is essentially ‘what if Tom Hagen was the main character’
18JUN23
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Happy doesn’t just advise a gang. Calling it a gang may be an overstatement
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He flirts with a girl
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He works part-time
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He struggles with doing his and Saad’s homework
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He deals with an alcoholic dad
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He deals with a controlling mom
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He deals with a overly prescriptive religion
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33. Shopping Cart Theory:
- Returning a shopping cart is considerate, quick, and easy, so it’s an extremely low bar of unselfishness to clear. Therefore, someone who doesn’t return shopping carts without good reason (e.g. disability) likely has the principles of an alley cat, and is only being kept in check by laws.
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when I accidentally gave the propane cylinder away and Ali told me to be careful. Instead i became a thief. Character flaw
29SEP23
- In India, have a scene at a turban dying man’s cart. Definitely a punjab phenomenon
Title Meaning
“For each and every person, our Lord and Master provides sustenance. Why are you so afraid, O mind? The flamingos fly hundreds of miles, leaving their young ones behind. Who feeds them, and who teaches them to feed themselves? Have you ever thought of this in your mind?”
― Guru Nanak, Sri Guru Granth Sahib
Story Crafting
Themes
- Hip-Hop
- Alcoholic Fathers
- Alcoholism
- Abused Mothers
- Sikhism
- Misogyny
- Gangster Cinema
- Gangs
- Sociology
- Limitations of traditional education
- Immigrant Experience
- Race
- Class
- Colourism
- Brotherhood
- Sex
- Comedy
- Internalized Racism
- Violence
- overcoming the monkey mind - Happy thinks to himself all the time about things no monkey mind, no narrator
Here’s what I’m working on right now:
- Working from John Truby’s book Anatomy of a Story
- Exploring different Story Structures
- Settling on some combo of Truby’s method & snowflake method
Tell the story of how Manveer fell into alcoholism like his father. How I tried to keep him clean and failed. How I made mistakes myself/ How the dynamic between the four of us was (Aaqib & Rockey).
Overall Arc: 11th grade until 1st year of university. Flash forward at the end.
Inciting incident: The story of The Door
Journeys: Jug - Addiction Shera - Conspiratorial Thinking Saad - Crime Happy - Anxiety
Beats:
- Dating guyanese girl
- Interventions
Setting: 2000s - Wikipedia
- Asian Show as penultimate event, protag is performing & dad giving his ticket away instead of attending
- Talk about salvia being legal for a bit in gas stations and people having the worst 5 minute high of their lives
Scene - Ramneet’s birthday party where he sent everyone home after his cousins bought him a game and wanted to play with him. A perfect example of the type of behaviour Happy saw modelled by his current friends.
India Trip - chance to act like a kid again
Threads:
- joining gang
- getting corrupted
- Saad’s friendship
- growing turban & beard
- hoarding apartment
A boy must shed the prescriptions put on his life & become his own
Minder and Happy have parallel journies. They are both pushed into normative roles they don’t feel they want. Happy to be a nerd, Minder to be married. They are both derailed, perhaps happily from this. Minder gives up and gives up his agency. Happy fights to get it back once he realizes it is important, but still loses it.
Ending:
2 gangs both want Happy under their thumb. He disobeys them both and holds the blackmail to keep them both at bay from him. Happy takes over the apartment if his uncle for cheap and moves out. his mum knocks on his door and gives him saad’s gift in the last scene.
| Step | Content |
|---|---|
| Premise | A meek Sikh boy must survive a tough Toronto neighbourhood to grow into a brave man. |
| Designing Principle | What happens when the Sikh & Western coming-of-age paths collide? |
| Basic Action | A Sikh boy comes of age in a tough Toronto neighbourhood. |
| Moral Choice | Between loyalty & independence. |
| Character Change | From meek to brave. |
| Moral Choice | Between loyalty & independence. |
| Step | Content |
|---|---|
| Self Revelation | Happy realizes he needs to put self-respect ahead of respect from others. |
| Psychological Weakness | He lets others control his future. |
| Moral Weakness | He pleases some at the expense of protecting others |
| Psychological Need | To become confident in controlling his own future. |
| Moral Need | To stop victimizing people for respect. |
| Initial Error | Happy thinks the solution to meekness is lawlessness. |
| Ghost | He’s been raised by an absent dad & a controlling mom. |
| Story World | Happy’s apartment, NACI & Rexdale on the mid-2000s. A reflection of his desire for lawlessness as a path to respect. |
| Problem | Happy is at the bottom of the social hierarchy at school. |
| Inciting Event | Saad invites Happy to hang with the gang. |
| Desire | To graduate high school, escape poverty and be respected by those that matter. |
| Allies | Saad, Jug, Shera, |
| Opponent | Amit, Mummi. A hierarchy of opponents. |
| Fake-Ally Opponent | Saad |
| 1st Revelation & Decision: Changed Desire & Motive | |
| Plan | |
| Opponent’s Plan & Main Counter-Attack | |
| Drive | |
| Attack by Ally | |
| Apparent Defeat | |
| 2nd Revelation & Decision: Obsessive Desire, Changed Desire & Motive | |
| Audience Revelation | |
| 3rd Revelation & Decision | |
| Gate, Gauntlet, Visit to Death | |
| Battle | |
| Self-Revelation | |
| Moral Decision | |
| New Equilibrium |
Opponent: Saad - fighting over control of Happy’s future. Plan: Happy’s plan is to advise the gang on how to best achieve their criminal goals. Battle: Happy goes against the plans of both Saad and Amit and beats them both. New Equilibrium: Happy in independent and alone.
Use the Iceberg Opponent
Genre Blend
- Coming-of-Age, Gangster
| Beat | Content |
|---|---|
| Weakness-Need | Hero is enslaved by a sense of self that makes him believe he is not free. He thinks through a rigid ideological lens or accepts the values of the larger society without question. His sense of self is limited and determined by others’ expectations. He pities himself and blames others for his situation. |
| Self-Revelation | The moment of growth when Happy sees himself in a fundamentally different way. To experience growth, Happy must see clearly who he really is take responsibility for his actions, and see how he can have a positive effect on others. |
The Values of Larger Society
- Sikh culture’s deference to authority
- His parent’s control
- Rexdale’s hierarchical social structure
- The pressure to conform
Creating the self
- Confronting internal slavery and realizing one is responsible to be oneself
- HAMLET: indecision of a young adult entering the moral complexity of the social world
Child to Adult
- The process of taking responsibility for his actions and his life
- Psychologically, Happy no longer maintains the false image of himself and his world
- Morally, Happy no longer blames others for his misfortunes
- Instead, he takes actions to right past wrongs
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- America’s premier Coming-of-Age story, based on its national sin of slavery
- Mark Twain flipped the form and made literary history by having a boy create the moral self of the American nation
- If Tom Sawyer represents America’s utopia, Huckleberry Finn shows its dystopia, in brutal detail
- Huck’s journey down the river has the classical Myth story structure
- But his stops are not those of an adult male warrior conquering one monster after another
- His stops are complex moral battles, based on money and race in the young nation, expressed through personal drama
- By making his hero a boy on a journey through America, Twain identifies the nation as a child just as devoid of morality as the young hero
- Huck struggles to create a moral self
- Surrounded by overwhelming venality, corruption, and racism, this young boy can only learn what true morality means from the decency and friendship of a runaway slave
To Kill a Mockingbird
- Extends America’s original Coming-of-Age story about its national sin of slavery to 1930s Alabama
- Structurally, what makes it unique is that it tracks a double coming-of-age, of six-year-old “Scout” Finch and her attorney father, Atticus
- For Scout, growing up means seeing the limitations of adults, even in her godlike father
- For Atticus, “growing up” means seeing the inability of the law to control the darker angels of our human nature, in both his neighbors and in himself
Moonlight
- The hero is a young Black boy who comes to accept he’s gay
- This is revolutionary for American popular film
- True “coming-of-age” doesn’t happen in a moment of grand self-revelation
- It happens in fits and starts; two steps forward and one step back
- Or in this case, one step forward and two steps back
- The script structures the boy’s journey into three sections, which is really three connected short stories
- Each section highlights one of three big challenges the hero Chiron faces: he’s young, Black, and gay
- Because of this “perfect storm” of challenges, Chiron is constantly bullied
- The beautiful irony of the first section is that this nine-year-old’s father figure is the crack dealer who sells to his perpetually high and neglectful mother
- In section two, teenager Chiron has his first sexual experience with his best friend Kevin
- But Chiron’s bully pressures Kevin to beat on him
- The next day Chiron experiences his biggest success of the film when he smashes a chair over the bully’s head
- But this moment of freedom only leads to greater slavery when he is arrested and sent to juvie
- In section three a grown Chiron has a meal with Kevin, now married with a child
- Chiron admits he sells drugs for a living and hasn’t been physical with anyone since Kevin touched him years before
- The film ends with the possibility of a self-revelation for Chiron as a gay man
- But if so, it is slight step forward for a man with so many barriers that will never go away
Gangster
- In the Gangster genre, society itself is criminal
- Every story of gangsters is the story of kings
- Every story of a bad king is a gangster story
- The direction is Up through society
- Our hero can only succeed by being part of the gang
- It is now organization vs organization trying to succeed in modern life
| Beat | Content |
|---|---|
| Story World | The corrupt city. Extreme wealth disparity. Traditional social ladder is gone. People turn to crime. |
| Inciting Event | Petty crime i.e. shoplifting, quitting school |
| Desire | Money and Empire. |
| Allies | Gang members. Tightly hierarchical team |
| Opponent | Gang boss, rival gangs, cops. Great variety due to brutal nature of gang life. Inevitable act of betrayal. Goes beyond typical 4 or 6 point opposition. |
| Gang Boss | Hero wants his job |
| Gang Family | A vice that won’t let the hero go or avoid his debts |
| Other Gang Members | Competition for money and power |
| Cops | Rep normal society and enfore the trad path |
| Rival Gangs | Competition over turf |
| Family | vs father or brothers |
| Plan | Deception and Violence. |
| Fake Ally | Gang Members. |
| Reveal | Betrayal |
| Drive | Accelerating Violence |
| Battle | Mass murder or massive destruction |
| Self-Revelation | None |
| New Equilibrium | Death or death of the soul |
Gangster Ideas
- Happy is looking for a trad male hierarchy as his father is absent.
Cover
28MAY24
- A momma’s boy joins a gang and becomes a man
- Momma’s boy: Mummi
- Joins a gang: Saad