Due to overwhelming apathy, I have decided to cancel my workshop over the summer. One or two people posting on this site is not enough to warrant the time I would spend on it, and the time Dean would spend setting it up, quite frankly.
I am going to continue writing over the summer, of course, and if you have anything you would like to workshop or just looked over then feel free to contact me.
-Red
It’s a dog-eat-dog world, but who knew they were so damn hungry?
We Book.com is offering a grievous disservice to writers all across the globe. On this site, you can make a profile much like on facebook or other social sites, but the catch is that the interaction is based upon rating books. Not actual books, though. The first page of books. So your entire body if work is going to be based on the first few introductory paragraphs.
Why not just scan the covers and talk about how good or bad the stories are according to that?
My story for this semester was a great, big experiment. I was testing things out. It isn’t my norm. My norm is blood, violence, philosophy, and deeply embedded plot threads. Like my story from last semester. I want to go back to my norm now that the experiment is concluded, and I want you to join me.
This is directly inspired by Tim’s story for the semester that we just workshopped, Every Place is a House. The plan is to take a folk song and make it into a short story. But the short story has to stay true to the form and theme of the folk song, and it has to be done in a way that you wouldn’t expect.
Why folk songs? They’re already fully fleshed out. They absolutely ooze character, plot, context, texture. They’re waiting to be molded into another form.
I will give an example, the song that I chose. I picked Froggie Went A-Courtin’, which is actually a pretty old folk song that has crossed oceans and national boundaries. It was made popular by Chubby Parker and his creepy banjo. His version of the song is named King Kong Kitchie Kitchie Ki-Me-O. Here’s a video of some random guy performing it live on youtube:
King Kong Kitchee Kitchee Ki Mi O
I am going to be specifically focused on the rather violent portion near the end, of course. And the little twist is that I am going to make this a steampunk story.
Why do this? It keeps you in the practice of writing and also gives you the same resource we had in our fiction class to get a sounding board for what is and isn’t working. This class is damn valuable, isn’t it? There is also a pretty good challenge attached, especially if you are changing the setting. For instance, I have to fit the nonsense from my song into my story somehow, and have it fit naturally, blend in. It gives you the chance to really focus on a piece of history, what surrounds it, why it is there in the form it is in, and make it into something new and refreshing while retaining that same charm and power. And it’s supposed to be fun. :p
What are the rules? Not many. No point. You have to pick a folk song, preferably one that is well-known (or as close to well-known as a folk song can be today) and write it in a way the reader would not expect. This can be done through setting, time period, whatever. But you have to stick to the lyrics of the song as much as is feasibly possible. The best part of a folk song is that there is no copyright because it is oral tradition, so we don’t have to worry about that. They aren’t attributed to an individual. There will be a deadline. Your work will be due before the fall semester begins. There is no limitation on who can join–if you know someone who would really like this, then by all means, pass it along to them!
How will it work? I am either going to run it through email, google docs, or I will make a site similar to this one to share as a resource for all of us to post the work and we can ask for opinions or edits. After we are done, we may even choose to make it into a compilation and put it up somewhere or see if someone is interested in it.
If you want to join, just contact me or leave a post here with what song you have chosen. You can always pick later. We’ll start sometime after the semester ends. When you post or email, please include the title of the song and I would really like to see a performance of it, the one you picked that you have in mind, and the lyrics to that version as well, because they vary pretty wildly.
Resources:
American Folks Songs ordered chronologically. Check out Katy Cruel, one of my favorites! Warning: bad midi music will play on this website. But it’s a good website.
“Celtic” folk songs. “Celtic” referring to Scottish and Irish. These are usually rich in pastoral images, a bit sadder than some. Closer to blues than American folk music.
Folk song amalgamation site. European and American.
There are many other types of folk songs from all over the world, too, if you’re interested. If you want to join, send me a private message on straylight (or litspot), or leave a post here with the requested information. Thankya!
I’ve always had a philosophy about editing that I’ve shared before. I’m fond of sharing it.
I write my story first. I then go in and add in details, links, thematic threads. After that, I go over the story section by section (even if a story isn’t broken up into obvious sections, it is still sectioned, whether it is a scene or a transition). Sometimes I find that entire sections can go. And then I look at each individual sentence and I can often chop many of those too, or take them out entirely. I look at each word, and I ask myself if it is serving a purpose, if it is functional. I always strive for clarity and purity of purpose. I am fond of saying that some people edit their story with a surgical blade, while I get my butcher’s cleaver.
Well, I finished my story for class, and I took the butcher’s cleaver to it, but it is still too long. I took it from 46 pages to 27. I took out entire scenes. I took out atmosphere that detracted from the over-arcing plot. But there’s still too much. It’s not “too much” as in the assignment was 20 pages, it’s “too much” as in I do not want to draw out a story with the ideas and concepts that I used. It shouldn’t be long because I have to sustain an effect and a very specific environment. I’ve never been blocked like this before by the editing process. Quite frankly, I’m frustrated. Hell, this post is too long.
The reason I am posting this is for you to keep it in mind when you read my story. My skin is thick. Very, very thick. It’s quite likely that if you dislike my story, or if you like it at all, I will hate it with a burning passion until I convince myself otherwise. It is the nature of the beast. It is a very nice thing to tell someone that you liked it, but if you are only pointing out things that you like, you aren’t fulfilling the objective of the class, and you aren’t learning how to edit someone else’s work. That is very important to a writer. If you cannot edit someone else’s work, you certainly won’t have the perspective necessary to edit your own. You owe it to your fellow student, and they owe it to you.
Hello all,
There’s a new page on Freak Thoughts devoted to research on our creative space. You can click the link or you can click on the creative space tab at the menu on the top of the site and it will take you there. This is mainly for the 407 students, but if there is something you’d like to see on there, then leave a note in this comment or contact me (red) or Dean and action will be taken.
Severe action.
I apologize for how long this took, but we began making it right before spring break and, well, spring break woo! I forgot about it. But now the info is assembled into one source. Hurray!
I can smell your excitement.
Today I borrowed Dean the first portion of a comic named Transmetropolitan, written by Warren Ellis in 1997. I think it’s a cyberpunk story. I’m not quite sure, and I don’t want to stick my foot in my mouth again. :p
This story features a gonzo journalist named Spider Jerusalem, who goes through a nasty, gritty future and reports the news with a gun and an attitude, basically. I was thinking about that, the fact that it is in a visual medium, and I also thought about the discussion on horror in class. We found that the scariest monster a writer can put onto paper is one that the writer doesn’t describe, because then the reader will fill in that blank with whatever fits the best to them. It’s a very effective strategy, but this doesn’t only apply to monsters. This applies to technology as well. You’ll see instances of this in steampunk books, books like The Difference Engine or Boneshaker where machinery is described in function, but not necessarily in form. As a writer, we do this when there’s a specific effect we’re going for and don’t want to lose the reader in details they won’t connect with. We have the advantage over the visual medium in that respect, don’t we? (Note: It’s worth a mention that the difference engine was an already-existing machine and had a distinct form, but if you didn’t know that when you read the book, you’d have filled in that gap anyway. It’s just an example.)
Warren Ellis in Transmetropolitan had his vision and he executed it fairly well, but he does depend upon an artist. This artist makes a physical depiction of the events, characters, and setting for the reader to see. Around this time, laptops were not very common. They were pretty new technology. In the comic, Spider uses a laptop to transmit a story that he was writing live, and this feed was given out to the city for everyone to read. It scrolled across electronic billboards, but it still looked like a typewriter in a way. In 1997, that laptop was sleek and badass technology. Today? It’s common. Tomorrow? Not so much in the impressive category. Not exactly what you would envision for a futuristic story. So they lose longevity in that respect. It’s going to age, and it’s going to age quickly.
The writer of the novel or short story or whatever, we don’t have that deficiency. That drawback, disadvantage. We don’t need to spell out what a laptop looks like. We can just say it was a high-tech interface and describe how the character interacts with it, and we alone are responsible for the delivery of the image. We shape it to our needs, and let the audience do the rest of the work. It ages well because it’s malleable.
The point: I always write from a cinematic stance, as I’m sure many of us do. I write my stories like a script. I write like my story is being filmed, not told. I try to keep in mind what things would look like in motion, how they would age, how redundant and future-proof it is or could become. I’m fully cognizant of that every time I introduce some bit of technology or pop culture into a piece (which is why I cringed a little bit when Spider asked for a 2gig camera device. Never mention specific measurements of memory or computer speed!). But if it was made into a movie or a comic or a cartoon, I lose that power. I can no longer control my great vision.
I had a grand thought about converting one of my favorite stories to a screenplay a long time ago and that drive is still within me, but after today I have doubts because of this. I mean, I’m sure it wouldn’t get greenlit and sent to 20th Century Fox post-haste or anything, but it was a great idea, and I have a lot of vision for it. Then I lose the power. I lose the suspension and I lose that connection to my darling, lovely reader in this common space that they enable and help me to create. But I look at the movies that were already made, based upon this great story, and it makes me want to cry because they’re just so damn awful and miss the mark by a wide margin that I find it insulting. I want a glorious tribute to a story written by a great writer, but there seems to be a cost that is perhaps not worth it. And that is the story of how I learned to respect Alan Moore, the things he did, and the decisions he made along the way.
Yes, I’m posting this at midnight with all of my homework done. These are things that actually keep me awake at night.
I’m a 407 student, and one of our criteria is that we have to write within a specific space. This space is going to be a mining town, and I figured that since I don’t know anything about it, really, I should do some research. Naturally.
I’ve read stories, biographies, histories, I’ve watched documentaries but I don’t feel like I’m really connecting with it at all on a creative level. It isn’t “doing it” for me like it always does. So, for the first time, I’ll be doing what I suppose you would call “in-field” research by going to a couple mining towns in Pennsylvania next week. The only problem is, I don’t really know what I’m on the lookout for or how to properly notate such a venture. When I think about things I should watch for, “everything” is all that comes to mind.
Anyone else have experience in this type of research and wouldn’t mind sharing some tips or advice?
Recently I’ve been reading As I Lay Dying by Faulkner. It’s a book about how much Dean hates me. I figured out that I need to have some kind of reward system in order to complete it. Read certain amount, reward myself. That kind of thing. So I picked up Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker.
This one is interesting if you take into account the Gardner chapter we just read about “jazzing around”. It is reported as a steampunk book but, generally, in order to be a steampunk book you have to meet a couple basic criteria. One of them is that it has to take place in victorian London, or victorian England. It’s usually London, though. And it has to have, y’know, steam.
This book, however, takes place in the united states, although it is still during the victorian period. Yet we still call it steampunk. Priest is jazzing around with the genre but the reason she will likely get away with it is because she added zombies into the mix. That seems to be the recent trend lately where if you want to do something different, something bold, to cross barriers and boundaries you just stick some zombies into the book and call it a day.
Now, this isn’t to say that adding zombies to a story makes it a bad story. I just feel that it may take away from the long-term appeal of the story or it may detract from some of the more useful elements that will let the story live a lot longer than it otherwise would have. That’s the danger of working within a fad. It’s over-saturated, and you don’t know if your story has what it takes to actually stand out. Is it worth grabbing the attention of mainstream readers? I don’t know. Just a thought.
I’ve been looking at a lot of writing rules books. You know the type. 101 Rules to Writing and all that kind of stuff.
Prior to taking English classes, I used to read a lot of these as an amateur, inspired writer. I still have some of them and I was looking them over on the toilet to pass the time and I’ve noticed a trend within them. All of these “golden rules” are incredibly selective to a certain person’s criteria of “comfort” and “ability”. For instance, in Stephen King’s On Writing, he gives out a gem of advice that turns out to be nothing more than a cubic zirconia, no matter how much he polishes it to make it seem like a diamond. He says that the correct working environment for a writer is a sunny room with a wood writing desk with a rug underneath, and even goes over the proper schedule to do “your best” writing. Maybe I don’t like writing in the sun. Or, better yet!, maybe I don’t want to be maladapted and unable to write in any kind of environment. You don’t always get to choose your environment. Sometimes, where you live or where you write, there are car horns and motorcycles, airplanes, trains or screaming kids outside. What do you do when your precious sanctum has been compromised?
These rules do nothing but limit you. They connive you into thinking that the lucky sock actually exists and that will cripple your ability to work. There are no golden rules and there is no lucky sock. You cannot depend on a sunny day, you cannot depend on inspiration, and you cannot depend on every wind to blow in your direction. You need to be able to adapt and not depend on outside criteria to define when you can and cannot do something. Maybe someone doesn’t work well in total comfort. Maybe there’s a writer out there who sticks pin tacks in their scalp because the pain helps them focus. To them, should that be a golden rule? No.
There is no perfect song to swing you along. There is no specific wood grain that jives best with your creative juices. There isn’t a wallpaper that speaks to you and inspires you, and there is no lucky sock.
Personally, and I’ve said this before, my only golden rule is that when my final product is finished, it should contain two things: clarity and purity of purpose. But maybe that doesn’t work for you. That’s okay as long as you are able to adapt to things that do not work for you. That is all. Dismissed.
I was hoping to get some input on the format of my story for a revision.
I wrote The Cylinder, about the old guys who blew up people. The story contained phonograph cylinder recordings which were time-coded in a transcript-like format. Tom had asked me in class how/why such a large amount of time would elapse between each piece of dialogue in the transcripts, which were coded like this: [1:36] Alistair: Dialogue.
I think I was running under the assumption that people would know it was Minute: Second and not Hour: Minute because of the fact that people don’t pause between sentences for minutes on end. I actually recorded every piece of dialogue to my computer and then I checked how long the files were and that’s how I made the time stamps. So they’re accurate, but if the reader isn’t going to understand this then it’s fairly useless.
I was thinking about doing it where the time stamp is Hour: Minute: Second but it looks kind of convoluted.
[0:13:46] Alistair: Dialogue.
Is that better or worse? Any input would be great because this is a pretty big flaw. Well, that and the fact that you couldn’t even record on a cylinder for more than a few minutes but that isn’t exactly common knowledge. :p
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