My day job is in advertising, and when I take on a new client, my first step is to research their business. This step really takes patience and discipline: the human reaction is to jump right in and start writing and creating. But the work will be stronger if you do your due diligence, developing that background knowledge that will only be indirectly used in the final work. David Ogilvy, the most famous adman of all time, made "Research" one of his four pillars of advertising success. I don't remember the other three. (Didn't have time to look it up.)
For PRANK THE MONKEY, I had a vague idea of some areas I wanted to explore: corporations, government, celebrities. But I spent months reading up on these various areas: everything from the royal family to utility companies. I watched as many Ashton Kutcher movies as I could without vomiting (three). I made a notebook, filing away interesting articles that I found on the Internet. I went to the Boston Public Library and spent hours poring over old books on pranks and practical jokes. It feels really cool to go into the "special order" section of a large metropolitan library, where they keep the rare and out-of-print books, and reading through these old forgotten volumes.
Slowly I began to develop a structure for PRANK THE MONKEY: I landed on five sections, each with five sub-sections (except for the last chapter about faking my own death, which I felt should stand alone). I wanted the book to begin with my birth and end with my death. I wanted there to be three interactions with the police. I'm mildly obsessed with the number 3 and the number 5, since "comedy comes in threes" and "structure comes in fives." Also, I have OCD.
(Note: I do not really have OCD.)
(Note: I do not really have OCD.)
(Note: I do not really have OCD.)
All told, I probably spent six months just thinking about the general outline for the book, preparing rough ideas for each chapter. About 20% of my pranks never pan out -- my targets don't fall for them, or I don't end up with funny material -- so I had to do a lot of re-pranking on the fly. But the basic structure remains just as I envisioned it.
I was rigorous about keeping notes. As I mentioned earlier, I had a three-ring notebook that I used to file any printouts, correspondence, or other physical items, which eventually grew to the stack of binders pictured above. But whenever possible, I stored everything digitally: notes, prank phone call audio files, etc. Rather than printing out a Web page, I'd save it to my computer. That way, I could do global searches for specific bits of information, rather than thumbing through my binder.
In terms of my computer files, I always worked on things in chunks -- not until PRANK THE MONKEY was complete did I create one master Word doc containing the entire book (fellow author nerds can feel free to steal my directory structure). Microsoft Word is terrible about handling large files, and although there's supposedly a way to have one master file point to many smaller files, you need an advanced degree in assembly language programming to figure it out.
One other note: I kept the entire book on a 1GB Flash drive, which made it easier to share between my Mac PowerBook and my desktop PC. (I'm bisexual.) As I explained in an earlier post, I eventually broke my Flash drive, losing a good deal of work, even though I was careful with backups. The moral of the story is that you should constantly back up all your data to a triple-redundant RAID array that's co-located on multiple continents, with a satellite uplink just in case the Earth itself is destroyed. Only then will your book be safe.
So armed with an outline, a few half-completed pranks, and an assload of research on my targets, I began the pranks themselves. That's coming up next.
Next: Original Pranksta!