I had a strange experience last night as I was working on my latest comic and listening to The Secret Garden, a musical that has been among my favorite things for as long as I can remember. My parents took me to see the show when I was very young, and Mom decided to buy a cassette tape of the original Broadway cast recording as she left the theater. The tape primarily lived in the minivan, and we listened to it on countless road trips.
My freshman year in high school, I got to be in the show. I was part of the chorus, a ghostly group in white. I sat through all of every rehearsal, often long after the chorus had been dismissed for the night, and memorized every word.
While I was away at college, the old cassette tape was replaced with a cd, and the first time one of my parents came to visit me in the dorms that’s the one thing I remember asking to have brought to me. I burnt it onto my computer and copied it to my ipod. Since then The Secret Garden and I have rarely been apart for long.
So listening to it last night was far from strange. I was digitally editing the inked pages of my comic, and it was slow detail work that didn’t require a lot of brain power. I needed to keep my brain entertained if I wanted to resist the siren call of netflix, so I needed a narrative and listening to a musical was the best possible choice I could make.
What is strange is that for the first time, listening to this musical where every word and note is seared into my brain, I started to think about how the story worked. How it was written, how information was being conveyed. I started thinking about what someone coming to the story for the first time would know at any point along the way, how characters and concepts were introduced, how suspense and surprise were built.
Nothing about this musical has surprised me in more than fifteen years.
It was strange to appreciate it in a new way after so many years of comforting familiarity. To meet characters all over again and get a glimpse of what it might have been like, that first time I saw the musical and was too young to remember more than scattered images.
Two summers ago I talked with video game writer Nik Blahunka about ways to become a better writer, and one of the things he told me was not to worry about playing every video game or watching every film, but instead to pick my favorites and play them over and over again until I figure out how they work and what it is that makes them my favorites. I was not setting out to do that with the Secret Garden, but I think it may be what’s happening. As I’m working to be a better story teller, my brain is responding to analysis drilled into me in writing classes and reformatting to try and understand the media I’m taking in, so that I can learn from the things I love. And I think it’s a positive shift, a small breakthrough, perhaps, in coming to better understand the art of storytelling.
And no, Mom, this breakthrough does not mean that I will be watching the Making Of the Lord of the Rings with you over Christmas break. Those films are still and may always be a form of magic that I don’t want to dispel by knowing how the trick was done, and I don’t care how much I might learn from it. For the the rest of you, allow me to write a post about that beloved piece of media some other time. As the first installment of the Hobbit approaches, I’m sure I will be spending time reflecting on how powerful a force The Fellowship of the Ring was in my life. For now, enjoy the rest of your evening or whatever time of day it is when you read this, and check back in later this week for a comic with a corgi.