The Telling Of My Marching Band Story

THE TELLING OF

MY

MARCHING BAND STORY

by

Will Todd

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Copyright 2011 Will Todd

Smashwords Edition

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Table of Contents

Prologue

ACT ONE:  Fresh Man

Scene 1:  Orientation

Scene 2:  Registration

Scene 3:  Audition

ACT TWO:  Hell Week

Scene 1:  Fire Up It's Monday!

Scene 1a:  The Lock

Scene 1b:  The Challenge

Scene 2:  Fire Up It's Tuesday!

Scene 3:  Fire Up It's Wednesday!

Scene 4:  Fire Up It's Thursday!

Scene 4a:  Fire Up It's Girls!

Scene 5:  Fire Up It's Friday!

ACT THREE:  GAME DAY

Scene 1:  Fire Up It's Saturday!

Scene 2:  Rituals

Scene 3:  Entry

Scene 4:  The Truth

Scene 5:  The Theme

Epilogue

BONUS:  SCREENPLAY

All About Todd

Prologue

I gotta tell you... actually, I don’t got to I suppose; for one thing, there’s nothing really forcing me to sit down and write this, not even any oh-my-god-I-just-gotta-tell-this-story sort of thing; for another thing, I probably shouldn’t have used gotta like that instead of got to even though that’s more like what I talk like, and you gotta decide how you’re gonna write, like you talk or like something else, like maybe a compromise for easier readability in which case I probably should’ve just used the grammatically more correct have to though – to tell The Truth – it’s really more of a want.

So.

I want to tell you (actually wanna, but I’m gonna-- going to compromise) this is the trickiest part you’re going to have to deal with.  Dangit - except you’re not supposed to end a sentence with with.  For some reason I’ve never really understood, it’s bad to end a sentence with with, a preposition (before the position), another grammatical thing, like words like with and to and... several others, though I couldn’t tell you why.  I think it’s an east coast thing.  But since this story is going to take place in the Midwest, maybe I can ignore it.  Though you still want people on the east coast to read your stuff, so I don’t know.  It is a rule.

Though if a sentence is understandable, why not use it?  Besides, you don’t want your sentences to be just like everybody else’s sentences, do you?  It’s the thoughts behind them that count, right?

This is gonna be harder than I thought.

You need a good first sentence.  Everybody says so.  Something to lock your audience in right away.  (You’ll understand just how clever that lock reference was when you get deeper into the story.)  (If you remember it by then, which you probably won’t.)  (Okay, forget it.)  Ideally, your first sentence should suck people in, keep them reading.  About the worst way you could start a story is just to ramble.  Which, I know, I know, an excellent example of which would be what I’ve been doing so far.

But.

My story hasn’t really started yet.  That’s what Prologue means, before the story.  And the reason I wanted one was to explain before the story really starts about the two Is.

So.

When an author (I’m not real comfortable with that word author)  (for obvious reasons) (at least to me)  (you’ll see why)  (think parentheticals); When a writer uses the word I in a novel (I’m not all that comfortable with the word novel, either)  (for not as obvious of reasons)  (though there’s some debate (or is going to be) as to if that’s what this really is anyway)  (a novel, I mean); When a writer uses the word I in a work (I’m not real thrilled with that either)  (Okay, how ‘bout this?):  When a person uses the word I in a story, there’s a couple of things.

There’s the I that means whoever actually wrote the stuff is talking – I did this, I did that - in which case you assume what’s being said is true or non-fiction, as it’s called.  Then there’s the I that means a character is talking, which is in the area of fiction, or made-up stuff.  The tricky part is that in fiction there can actually be two Is, too.  The first always appears in quotes and indicates that some character is talking – I did this (made-up thing), I did that (made-up thing) – it’s dialogue, really.  But there’s another possible I that doesn’t go in quotes.  It’s not always used, but if it is, it means the story has a character called a Narrator, and everything is told from this one person’s single P.O.V.  Meaning point of view.  Which I guess I could’ve just used instead of the abbreviation.  But you have to make decisions and a lot of times you’re not sure which is better, even depending on how you figure your audience.

I’ll just use perspective next time.

Maybe.

Probably.

I don’t know, the problem is I tend to overanalyze.  And every time you start a new sentence you have to pick out just what you wanna-- want to say.  (And how to say it.)  (And what not to say.)  (Like that last parenthetical – I decided to put it in even though it was definitely iffy.)  (That one, too.)  (It can get out of hand.)  It can get out of hand.  So as a general rule, I’ve decided on something.

This.

The Truth.

I’m gonna let The Truth be my guide.

Well, as much as possible.  I’m remembering most of this story, not making it up, and it was a while ago, so it’s not going to be exact.  Like those books where the person supposedly remembers entire conversations and whole honkin’ blocks of things that people said years ago.  No way.  I can’t remember exactly what I said five minutes ago, let alone five years ago.  So just to let you know that I’m aware of that kind of stuff, and I’m going to try not to do any of it because it would bug me if I were you.  And so for the most part, you can assume that most of what you are about to read is true.  And where it isn’t...

I’ll let you know.

Now back to the I.  I need to decide which I to use.  The first kind of I would be Me, the Storyteller, and would make this non-fiction.  Which isn’t entirely The Truth.  The second kind of I would be a character being a Narrator and would make this fiction.  Which isn’t entirely The Truth, either.

Sooooo...

The heck with it, I’ll use Third Person.

See, using any of those I approaches I talked about before is called telling a story in the First Person, which means telling everything from a single... perspective.  But there’s also something called Third Person, which means telling a story from a third party perspective; a – and this is key – infallible third party perspective.  All-knowing.  That’s why it’s also called using the omnipotent voice, like some god-like revealer who knows about everything and what everybody is doing and especially thinking all the time.

You know, the more I explain about this, the more I like it.

So!

Third Person it is.

Besides, it’ll give me another take at a First Sentence...

Act One:  Fresh Man

Scene 1:  Orientation

Like most things worth telling, this one started out a little unusual.

Will was all by himself.  This, alone, wouldn’t have been all that unusual since Will spent a lot of time by himself, even liked it, except that he was all by himself right smack in the middle of one of the largest college campuses in the Midwest.  True, it was still mid-summer-stasis, weeks before the start of fall semester and another school year, but where was everybody?

Normally, there’d be thousands of students in the general vicinity getting matriculated, maybe even educated, and hundreds in particular trafficking through this very spot, which was called The Diag because it’s where two major campus walkways crisscrossed to form an X and because every college needs landmarky nicknames to sound cool and be even more exclusionary though Will didn’t know any of this yet.  He just thought it was unusual to be walking around this big open square surrounded by big empty buildings all by himself.

Not even any of the other kids from Freshman Orientation were around, though technically, they should all have been heading in the same direction right about now, which didn’t make Will feel any better about being On The Diag All By Himself.  And so for the umpteenth time in as many seconds, he looked down at his campus map.

But, of course, the wily framers of the Freshman Orientation program knew they only had two days to strip all incomers of any semblance of self-confidence, and one of the very best ways to do this was to design a campus map that would have made Lewis and Clark late for Freshman Chem.  So Will, who had never been great with directions to begin with, gave his own map a quarter turn.  And then another.  And then returned it to its easily accessible hiding place (so nothing could tag him as a newb) and stepped off toward one of the big empty buildings, still guessing but at least striding with confidence, just in case anyone might be watching.  But the only ones really watching were the campus squirrels, who were alarmed less by a lack of navigational savvy than a lack of proffered peanuts.

Though even they could spot a Frosh.

For Will had recently made the biggest mistake of his young life.  He had graduated from high school.  He had then compounded his error by enrolling in the college of his choice, reverting to that state he had spent four long years evolving beyond, downgrading his classmen prefix from upper to lower and totem position from top-most to get-off-me-I-can’t-breathe in the hope of securing some undefined and unguaranteed Better Good and now found himself paying for this hubris (more on this later) by wandering all by himself in a vastly unfamiliar space armed only with a map whose function, if you could figure it out, was to lead you away from its central X.

And it was hot out, too.

Sweaty hot.  Though the heat alone couldn’t account for all the beads now forming rank on Will’s brow.  At least it looked cooler inside this building.  From where Will was standing.  Which was outside.  Inside anywhere looked better as far as Will was concerned.  So he quickly shored up his irresolution with another glance at his already thoroughly glanced-at map and then tucked it away again to put his hand on the handle of the glass door and pull sharply and...

Now even the squirrels gave up on him – or maybe it was just the sudden CLUNK! of the door refusing to open which caused them to flee, followed by the rat-a-tat rattle of the lock.  And the next door was no better.  Yielding the same result.  That being that it wouldn’t open.

Yes, it seemed that things involving locks were going to be a big problem for Will.

Since no one else was around, it was left to the symbolically-verdant (meaning green) trees to witness Will’s reluctant retrieval of his near-useless map, his journey to yet another glass door, and his sudden surprise (not to mention sheepish surveillance for campus security) when it opened.

The saplings must have thought it odd, if they could think, that someone would be trying so hard to break into the Natural History building.

There, almost, not quite, just down the hall a little actually, Will quickly found the room he had been looking for.

Double-checking its number against a slip of paper and finding the door handle mercifully rotatable, that is to say, not inhibited by a lock, he settled himself with a deep breath, getting as full of it as he could, certain in the knowledge that he was not about to swing open a mere door but sort of like be turning a page if pages opened this way onto a new chapter of his life; that he was about to metamorph (which is a lot like metaphor rearranged with an extra m or M thrown in which doesn’t mean much right now but will later) yes, metamorph from the warm but waning assurance of childhood’s cocoon to the gossamer ascendance of young adulthood – with its promise of caveat faux zeitgeist and elegiac Ur-horizons and other things literary – that he was indeed about to enter...

Scene 2:  Registration

Nope.

I’m going back to First Person.

For good.

For one thing, that Third Person stuff requires a certain facility and even familiarity with technique in order to achieve some semblance of flow, which is often called prose.

Put another way, Third Person takes writing talent.

So for another thing, it’s way hard to fake.  You tend to want to get a little showy as you go on and end up pretentious and irritating, which is about as good a definition of omnipotent as any, I guess.

And finally, and this is probably the most important thing, at the end there, when Will was opening the door, remember? I was going to have him discover that he had spent all that time and effort tracking down – are you ready...?

A janitorial closet.  Sort of a comedic reversal sort of thing.  But besides being weak, there’s an even bigger problem with that.  Namely:

It never happened.

I was just going to throw that in as a joke, something to counteract the effect of words like Ur, which I don’t even know what it means but I’ve seen before in books written in the Third Person because nobody would ever use a word like that in a real conversation and I sure as heck have never heard it spoken out loud and if I did I’d assume it was a stammer.

In other