[Montaine's Scrapbook] The Cellar Door

[Cascade]

Ignoring the obvious spoiler title -- what... what is this.

SHOW YOUR FACE, YO.

Also, nice hair.

EDIT: Oh, hey. Page seven.

[Please insert something inappropriate here.]

[Echelon]

Sexy face palm. Which brings me to my topic for page seven. As tempted as I am to ask more inappropriate questions I feel the need to maintain some level of decorum, and more precisely relation to Mizahar in this post. And so, I want to ask about character creation. Not just PCs, but also characters for books. Specifically their appearance. I ask this not just to you monty, but everybody, allowing us to hopefully move back to montys desired high brow seriousness slowly, together.

So, officially my question is. How do you build the appearance of your character? Do you own attraction play part in character creation? Is there any appearance you absolutely do not make, for whatever reason. Does appearance work as a code to personality? Or is appearance unrelated to character personality?

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

Frankly, I just picture the person in my head, and describe them. When I write a character, I see them in my head as if they were real. Describing them usually involves closing my eyes to focus on that image, and trying my best to put it into less than a thousand words.

[Pash'nar]

I'm pretty confident my own personal biases play a part in the PCs I create, though, of course, not necessarily the NPCs I have created in the past. I tend to think like Min, though—I end up with an image of a character in my mind long before I write down and describe them—but I am a very visual person. Seeing things is important to me, especially when it comes to character development. Perhaps that's also a reason I prefer to draw my characters ... I never can find some equivalent person, famous or otherwise, to represent the people I create in my head because they are unique, separate, from the real world I live in.

Do I focus on making hot people? Uh, no, not really. I think that sort of thing just happens or it doesn't with me—I have characters in the past who were far from dreamy in my imagination, and not just because of scars or disfigurements. There is more to appearance than that, I think. Personality and internal workings also shine a light into appearances, though they are more like icing than the cake. If the cake is tasty, but the icing is bad, I still won't eat it.

That metaphor makes this pregnant lady hungry. Silly me.

Mizahar-specifically speaking, I wanted there to be a contrast between Pash's ethaefal form and his earthbound one. In my mind (and this is perhaps why I struggle to draw Pash's ethaefal form still), his appearance under Leth's sway is by far more attractive than his Svefra form. There is definitely a great divide there, in my mind, in wow-factor. However, I also see the celestial nature of his appearance to have one of two effects: a charming one or a distancing one, depending on the personality of his audience. There will always be those who Pash can charm because of his ethereal nightly form, but there will always be others who relate with the salty, earthbound one closely and without intimidation. I don't necessarily picture him as entirely swoon-worthy as a Svefra regardless of his face, tan, tattoos, or body. He just doesn't always have that winning personality. People who step on your toes and piss you off on purpose aren't always the most attractive people, in the end. However, buried under all the "arrgg!" is someone who is probably handsome when they bother to be nice. Bothering is the hard part, though, as time goes on, maybe not as hard as I thought.

So, I guess I wrote all of this to say that for me, in character creation, personality ends up taking the drivers' seat to appearance, and yet I struggle to separate the two. One compliments the other, form and function are hard to pull apart in a final design.

Ugh. That was long-winded.

[Montaine]

Right, I'll comment on this whole shabang in my next proper Scrap, when I get my next thread graded. A couple are nearing completion now, so it shouldn't be too long, but will probably be after season change and I'm planning something different for then.

You'll all just have to wait and see.

[Pash'nar]

Good day, my friends. Today, in honour of my first season change in our magnificent Mizahar, I'm trying something a little different and handing the keys to the Cellar Door over to a guest speaker. I chose this season's speaker for a number of reasons, she was one of the first on the site that I really got to know and is integral to Monty's plotlines, she's also a brilliant person and I'm sure will have something insightful to talk upon. So, without further ado, I present to you the first guest speaker at the Cellar Door, the indomitable object of all our affections, our own enigmatic ethaefal and suave svefran sailor combination, yes, you know it, I give you...Pash! -Monty

Why Role Play by Writing? So, I'm really excited that Monty asked me to guest post in his scrap book. It's sweet. I might have totally agonized over what to write about, but then I realized why not write about writing? I mean, everyone here on Mizahar is here to do that very thing. However, I think the more curious factor is that we're all here to actually role-play and interact with each other through writing. Cooperative writing. We're not all writing short stories for each other to read, but, instead, we're writing little pieces of a larger story together. For me, I grew up role playing. I remember being a little kid, pretending to be someone else, someone usually fantastical in some way. I mean, we may all have memories like that, but I can honestly say that fantasy has been a big part of my life for as long as I can remember. I've had one friend since I was 5. We met at summer camp and didn't know we lived down the street from each other until our mommies met almost six months later during a school function. We lived out very epic things in his back yard. We still remember them, and joke about them, and my friend is writing it all into a book. Or several. We did some collaborative writing about it, too, before I went off to college. I have promised to illustrate it. When I was 12, my father introduced me to table-top gaming. He drove me to the library and I began playing AD&D with men and women mostly twice my age every Saturday. This was our thing. I still enjoy pen-and-paper gaming, but I still loved writing more. In middle school, a friend and I had a notebook that we'd pass in the hall between classes and write our collaborative stories in instead of taking notes. Especially in math class. I still have all of those notebooks, and, for some reason, I have yet to let my husband read them even after 6 years of marriage. I'm not embarrassed. They're just … still so precious to me. I don't know. We have some epic tales. I suppose I fear he won't understand how important that stuff was for me in middle and high school when I had like 2 or three friends and everyone else made fun of me. Writing was my solace, and my characters were ways of expressing what no one else would let me. It was a beautiful thing. Some writing continued into college with a friend or two until real life clobbered us and we had to focus on our studies. I missed it. Art school was intense, but something was always missing. I did some more pen-and-paper gaming in college. It was fun, but again, it wasn't the same. Finally, in grad school, I discovered forum RP for the first time and finally felt like I found something that had been missing for me for years. It was a beautiful thing to be able to write with others again. Why, though? All that introduction to say I'm not quite sure. I think that writing is a very pure form of expression, and it allows us to really put our thoughts out there. It's a universally acceptable vehicle for using our imaginations, and so perhaps lends itself well to role-playing, even in the context of collaboration. It's a way of experiencing different styles, perspectives, and thought-processes all within the safety of grammar rules and spellings that we recognize and are comfortable with. Words are powerful things, spoken or otherwise, and there's something about collaborative writing that has a real presence. At least, in my life. I don't know if I exactly answered why for myself, but I'm curious about all of you. How did you stumble into role-playing through the written word and what do you love about it so much? Word of the day: wejack (n) a fisher, which is a dark-brown or blackish marten, Martes pennanti, of northern North America. This is the word my nephew had to spell in his first round at the National Spelling Bee in Washington, DC this week. -Pash

[Cascade]

I love your scrapbook so much, Monty! And Pash, your guest post is amazing.

I think it's really cool that a twelve year old girl played AD&D with grown men and women. I think if I ever get a kid, I'll introduce her/him to games as well. I want to be a cool parent, hehe.

Collaborative storytelling has been a hobby of mine ever since I can remember. I used to remember making stories with my friend using barbie dolls... we would act their lives from birth to death(hahaha!). I also used to do notebook RP during classes, but that was done through art. When it comes to RP via the written word though, I was introduced to it during highschool, by a friend who was obsessed with it. I enjoyed it, and years later, here I am.

[Montaine]

Alrighty then, let's give this commenting deal a go.

And yeah, I wasn't doing anything interesting at that age. I mean, I used to do the crossword in the morning like a good little old man, but that's about it. I think I prefer my girls nice and nerdy, I don't have all that many female friends in real life, but of the two I'm really close to one's a massive board game fan and the other's one of the biggest Whovians I know.

I think there are a number of reasons I write, but not so many why I've elected to do so collaboratively here. I've always idolised people like David Mitchell and Jennifer Saunders, who collaborated to create great works of comedy television, but my style has always been erring more to the soloist. I think for me, the collaborative quality here is less about the writing and more about the location. I feel so nervous if I ever show my work to someone I know in the real world, but on this grubby, little screen I can show my work and receive comments and criticisms without fear of much reprisal. And because it is collaborative, responses tend to come thick and fast.

Anyway, that's my two bits. I just want to thank you again for doing this, Pash. I think I'll do it every season change.

[Montaine]

Skin Deep Okay, so I'm cheating a little. No threads have been graded, I know, I know, naughty Monty! This post is instead brought to you by Hunger Pangs, a single post entry to dear Eche's famine thread. So first, let's just quickly address it. Thanks Eche, for not being too harsh about how I may have gone slightly, majorly awry from the mission brief. I figured that everyone would be doing your standard starvation deal and instead took the opportunity to show how the other half were faring. I regret nothing! Except, perhaps, feeding the poor glassworker that mouldy apple. In other news, further thanks and congratulations to Pash for being gracious enough to lend me her talents as guest speaker, and for earning feature. Right, now let's get down to business. A few of you have already spoken on the topic so here is my angle: for Monty I thought very little about his appearance. In fact, when I first arrived on Mizahar's shores I was terrified by the prospect of finding a model for him, as all the writing I had done previously involved nothing more than imagining a person and describing them on paper, or screen as the case may be. With Monty I needed an appropriate avatar which meant that his face pretty much already had to exist, as I didn't possess the artistic talents of say Pash or Eche. What I did possess, however, was half an English degree and enough shameless pretension to select one of my favourite poets (and that's a very small category). Keats was young, sickly and artistic, pretty much everything I wanted Monty to be. He was the logical choice. As it so happened there was a film called Bright Star chronicling the tragic romance between Keats and Fanny Brawne that ended when he succumbed to tuberculosis aged twenty-five. In this film Keats was portrayed by a man called Ben Whishaw whose sole attractive photo, in my mind, can be viewed to your left. As such, Monty's physical appearance was not so much up to me, but to the casting director of a 2009 biopic of one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century. Now, the interesting question lies in how I come up with appearance of my NPCs, those people without faces, without avatars. I shall draw your attention to three figures from my brief tenure here. The first is a colleague of Montaine's by the name of Mory, the second an old drunk called Bogh and the third the delightfully stingy Johann Calbert. All three of these men are not traditionally attractive, Calbert is an overweight, overbearing middle-aged man, Mory is a greasy, untrustworthy cretin of indeterminable age and Bogh was a tongueless one hit wonder found only in the depths of The Sailor and the Child. I think it's telling that I am immediately drawn to describing unattractive, often rather old people, rather than those that might appeal to me personally. I've had a chance to think over it during the last couple of days and have reached a number of conclusions. One, they're damn fun. Calbert's money-grabbing stinginess just emerged naturally, and it's always fun to put him at odds with Monty's slightly more generous nature. Mory and Banden's frequent disagreements generally occur only as asides but always amuse me, and Bogh's deliciously creepy revelation of his muteness was entertaining to write from the perception of a young child. Two, disgust is more interesting to write, and easier to inspire in others. I think the reason I refer more often to bent over crones than dashing gentlemen is for the same reason I spend so much time describing the various stenches that Monty encounters. Who wants to hear about six foot, muscle-bound hero when they can watch the crusty, spitting, toothless man wipe his snotty nose on a sleeve? The old medieval writers used to believe that outward imperfections revealed inner sin. Obviously this is is a statement of questionable politic in today's society, but as both a certified unattractive and general rude curmudgeon I'm not exactly one to argue. But sin and imperfection are so much more interesting to write and read than their respective counterparts. Why write a beautiful angel when you can create a flawed devil? Why did Milton write Paradise Lost from the perspective of Satan? I feel as though I have gone wildly off topic here. What was this about? Ah yes, physical appearance and how to create it. Well, I honestly think that without an image to go to we all imagine written characters differently in our heads. One of the greatest aspects of reading, one of the reasons I think literature is such a unique artform, is that it requires you to become so involved in the creative process. The book, the page, the sentence, they're all simply instructions to you, vague descriptions as to how you create the world they discuss. Let's take one more look at my exemplar trio and how I have described them in their stories. Bogh is toothless and old, I think I said Calbert was overweight once or twice, and red in the face maybe? Mory, I think, might have bad teeth. If you look at what I actually write, it's all incredibly vague. Okay. That's enough from me. For my next post I'm going to do one of the following titles: Fear and Loathing, By Any Other Name, or My Second True Love. Take your pick. Word of the day: stadia, plural of stadium because weird pluralisations don't get enough love. -Monty

[Pash'nar]

Okay. So, 75% of my senior year AP English class was practically devoted to Keates. My senior class helped save Keates' house because my teacher was obsessively in love with the man. Obsessed.

Anyway, we have that connection now.

Your avatar still distracts me.

It could possibly distract Pash. I don't see how it couldn't. All, "How you doin'?" in that little square box.

Ugh.

Anyway, I agree that without an image, it's just our nature to define a person in our heads. That will always be why I enjoy books over movies, though I will happily imagine Aragorn as Viggo every time I read it. *rawr* Ahem. Everyone else is whoever. I think for me, that's always been why I've tried to draw my characters instead of find photographic equivalents. I have to draw as I see them, not find the next best thing. (Not to say that it's a bad thing, I think that photographic equivalents totally work. I just can't do it. LOL. I fail.)

Also, your ugly mean people are fantastic.