Fucking gimmicks.

I can always tell when a creative idea has struck a big nerve with me, a nerve that will compell me to follow that creative idea through. It's when I start thinking of gimmicks. Yeah, it's weird, but it's true.

When it comes to plays, the gimmick usually involves music. Once I start researching music to some ridiculously deep degree, it is then that I realize that this is, in fact, a play I want to direct. With "Some Things You Need To Know Before The World Ends: A Final Evening With The Illuminati" the gimmick moment was either the decision to end the play with "What if God Was One of Us" or -- more likely -- the realization that I could use the Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem against the final scene of Reverend Eddie's basketball game against death (which is probably my favourite moment from the play). With "Welcome to the Monkey House" it was the moment that I realized that I had spent two hours researching the marches of John Philip Souza looking for something that I could use for exit music.

But it's not just theatre. I ended up working on a collaborative comic book project with someone a few years ago where my decision to tackle the writing chores of the project was based, almost entirely, on the gimmick that, in this fictional world, none of the super heroes could fly. And that flight would represent a child's hopes and dreams for everything that a hero could be, and ultimately wasn't. And that, at the end of the story, he would have to rediscover that hope when everything seemed at its worst, and put his faith in a pathetic, malfunctional rocket pack in order to escape certain death.

Today, I was challenged to write a play in the next few months (a very, very, very short time frame). I laughed and dismissed, then started to consider it, then started to consider it somewhat seriously. I did some research on the topic tonight on returning home, and have now, much to my dismay, stumbled upon a gimmick: Opening each of likely three acts with a sound-effect in darkness. The first, a girl screaming in terror. The second, a rifle shot. The third...

Well, that's the problem. I don't have the third sound effect yet. All I know is that, ideally, to mesh with the other two, it should be sudden and sharp and violent.

I also have little doubt that I'll manage to figure out what sound effect to use here. Because I hit two out of three without even breaking a sweat.

I really don't think I have the time or the energy to pursue this project, but I'm also wise enough to know that, having stumbled onto a creative gimmick, it'll be hard to keep myself from at least dabbling in the project.

And so I say, "Fucking gimmicks."