I’ve completed my first draft for In the Penal Colony.

I suppose I should explain. When I was younger, my father suggested I read a story by Franz Kafka titled In the Penal Colony, and lent me the short story collection he had that contained the work. I read it, foolishly late at night, and had nightmares for nearly a week.

The story, as I read it translated from the original German, tells about a Traveler who has been invited to watch the execution of a man for desertion of duty on an administratively conservative island. The Officer, who is judge, jury, and executioner, guides the Traveler through an explanation of the sentence and the apparatus used to carry it out, a medieval-reminiscent machine that painfully inscribes the Condemned Man’s sentence upon his back over the course of twelve hours, before finally killing him.

Needless to say, I loved it.

Then, this year, for a project in Directing & Scriptwriting, we were asked to take a short story and adapt it into a script of some form, be it a screenplay, stageplay, or something else. I chose In the Penal Colony, and, on my brother Alin’s suggestion, decided to write it as a radio drama, and, more particularly, in the style of a radio documentary.

Listening to radio documentaries made up a big part of my time growing up. When I was young, CBC Radio had a show called Dispatches, which, once a week, brought stories from around the world into my radio. The stories were at times dark, and other times light-hearted, and they were almost always ones that the media, wrapped up in the 24-hour news cycle, tends to ignore. Freelance and assignment journalists from every country in the world (Dispatches called them Correspondents) sent their five-to-fifteen minute documentaries in and Dispatches would play them, often following up a few months later to hear how things had changed and what had stayed the same. From war-torn countries to cross-border dentistry, it was radio that I have rarely heard since.

Alin also had been wanting to do something audio-related for his first IDS, so we decided that we would work on this radio drama together. I would write the script adaptation and voice one of the characters, and he would build the documentary, sound-by-sound, recording-by-recording.

Franz Kafka’s writing is, of course, difficult to do justice to. While adapting the story, I have to be careful not to change too much of the meaning, even while I change, or often even remove or add, lines. Parts of the original lend themselves very well to a journalistic documentary, while others don’t at all. Often times I’ve found myself having to write a line completely dissimilar to any in the original in an answer to a question posed by the Journalist, my replacement for Kafka’s Traveler. Yet I’ve done my best to make sure each of these lines comes from the character presented in the original, and is loyal to their personality and beliefs.

Like I said, I’ve finally completed the first draft, and I’ve given it to my brother to look over and make suggestions on. My second draft will likely add in a second character to be interviewed, though who that is is yet to be seen. It will probably include numerous other additions, such as directions for sound effects or speaking style, and will likely also involve the paring down of some of the longer lines.

Oh, and here’s the PDF of this first draft, in case you wanted it. 🙂