by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
The Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind is really two genres fused perfectly to such an extent that you can’t really tell where the scifi story ends and the romantic “dramady” begins. It takes a scifi conceit — what if you could erase bad memories? — and runs with it in the context of a failed relationship.
Meanwhile, I have a scifi conceit that I realize won’t have any heart if I don’t really make it a love story of sorts. And, sense I don’t really have any love stories floating around other than the bizarro story arch of what happened between me and Annie Shapiro in Seoul about a decade ago. I have to be careful that the story doesn’t devolve into me simply bitching angrily about how poorly I was treated all those years go.
I’m no Charlie Kaufman. I am simply not that good a writer, but I do have a really strong concept to work with and as such I think if I can get anywhere near the interesting romantic story told in The Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, I’ll have accomplished something. What happened with me and Annie was really, really interesting and if I manage to shoehorn that general story into the scifi novel I’m writing then it will hopefully be a lot closer to The Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and a lot less like, say, The Martian. (Even though I love that book / movie.)
But only time will tell, I guess.
