[Caelum's Scrapbook] Use Your Words.

[Caelum]

Thanks, Jen. That means a lot. Now for the comedic relief. The following is a conversation I had via the intertubes a minute ago with my pregnant friend. me: dig't. I'll see whats what. if for some reason my game plan changes, I'll still drop off the game and maybe we can hang tomorrow or something. friend: but silver lining - we have lots of booze since i can't sit around and finish it... yea i'm sure we'll do a cookout or something sunday, we haven't really nailed down plans me: cool. and hey, yay. I'll drink for you. I'm that kind of awesome friend. friend: that's very noble of you me: I am a woman of duty. I will brave the alcohol for you. and boldly go where no mixer has gone before. this bottle is my pledge. I shall not flinch nor falter in the face of insurmountable shots. but sally forth stalwart and stumbling. friend: you should really be a writer with alla those fancy schmancy words me: inoright? friend: iz has a dikshionarie.

[Caelum]

A note on collaborative writing. Collaborative writing is what we do. By default of being Mizahar players we are, to the last, collaborative writers. So what the hell am I going to say about collaborative writing? What has not already been said by the horde of us or spoken in example within the multitude of original and creative threads we have endeavored? What can I say? Okay, well. I’ve already dared to blather on about plot structure, character faceting and setting foundation work to an audience of writers. Why stop now? The static disclaimer remains: This is a bunch of rubbish and I don’t always follow my own advice. If you aren’t enjoying it, there are some awesome scrapbooks in this forum. Go read them and take your pen pretensions with you. (Yes, I am absolutely writing a scrap instead of post. I’m thinking of this like a before dinner cocktail complete with a palate cleansing splash at the end. Hopefully. We’ll see. Onward.) ”Collaboration on a book is the ultimate unnatural act.” - Tom Clancy. Intimacy On Mizahar we often engage in very serious projects with people whom we have never met in person and typically haven’t conducted even a five minute conversation with. We have seen their name around, laughed at a joke they told in chat, heard wind of this rumor or that, admired their avatar/CS/signature design and possibly read some of their material. But we don’t know them. We certainly don’t know them well nor are we incredibly likely ever to know them well. Such OOC relationships tend to be few and far between due to the origins of our congregation and the nature of our discourse. (I can haz dictionary.) The exception to this exists In Character. We have at our fingertips all of the tools to study from toe to crown and soul out every minute detail that creates another player’s character. There are Character Sheets in which we can find the overview of physicality and summarized history, something akin to a handshake and a smile with a business card exchange. There are those who have created Plotnotes where character goals are often listed and explored, standing in for an in depth, final job interview after you have already read the results of their personality and work ethic exam. Finally, there are the character’s threads. These are, by far and large, the best character resource we have at hand. We can read in them not only what they are, but who and why and how. Read enough and you will soon know that character as well, potentially better, than you do your best friend. What does that have to do with your writing? Everything. Without at least basic knowledge of the character who will be written by the other writer into your character’s story, you are nine times out of ten going to be stuttering, stumbling and/disappointed at some point in the thread (plot) or another. While we sometimes tell stories by ourselves, we are largely here so as to tell stories with other people. You cannot tell half a story, you cannot tell a tenth of a story, whether you are the only writer or one of a dozen. It does not matter if you have it your head that in X Thread your PC is but the supporting cast or you think that the other PC’s player is a stronger writer than you. It isn’t important that the other writer laid the plot foundation or even if there is an ST running the thread. You owe the story more than one half or a tenth of yourself. You owe your character more and you can deliver the whole story, tell the entire tale in collaboration with the other writers by making an effort to become intimate with the other characters involved. Get to know them. Figure out what makes them tick. Use all of the lovely resources at hand. And communicate. Communication You don’t need to know all the details of a plot at the beginning, nor even half way through. There are STs who often like to keep some things secret so as to maintain a degree of mystery and a certain flexibility within the foundations (that’s right, beneath the force your character winds). There are others who want to plant every step in cement and grow increasingly frustrated when you break out into spontaneous dance. Talk to the player about it! Talk about the plot. Talk about the characters. Talk about what you want and what they want and tell them if you have nothing because maybe they have something and talktalktalktalk. Don’t be shy. Hell, you’re already telling a story with this person. That is about as up close and personal as two people can get. Ask them what their character goals are if you don’t know, expound upon your “getting intimate” homework and go straight to the Q & A with the creator herself. - - I’m out of time. I wanted to say a thing about transition and leave examples, et cetera. Maybe later. I will leave you with Warren Ellis. People ask me things sometimes; and sometimes I think Warren Ellis should answer everything for me. He says things and I grin. The one thing you really need to know about copyediting is the word STET. Adding STET to an edit means "run it as I wrote it, not as you have changed it." There is nothing about adding STET that does not make you feel like an arrogant arse. Proper copyeditors are almost without exception better-educated and more technically skilled in the use of the language than you. They also don't work in their underwear in a pit of empty Red Bull cans. This is the point in the book where the supremacy of the author's voice begins to matter not a single bit, because hard-working people with actual jobs are trying to save you from your own stupidity. A copyeditor isn't the enemy. A copyeditor is your own paid Jiminy Cricket, asking you if you really want to stick your unprotected cock in that beehive. (You don't.) (No, you really don't.)

[Tabarnac]

I break character wind upon your plot! Also, ow ow ow!

[Caelum]

A friend of mine wrote this for one of the corners of the intertubes that I write, or in this particular case, used to write. Following a conversation regarding scraps, I thought it apropos. Enjoy. I am writing this between Playwriting class and Screenwriting Lab, instead of doing my homework. I'm doing this both as a testament to my passion for a good rotgut discourse, but also to my passion for procrastination. My esteemed colleague here at ___ asked me to talk a bit about writing, but true to my contradictory nature, I have decided not to. I will, instead, talk about story. Which is, in fact, very different. Writing isn't so hard. Sure, beautiful language is important and multi-dimensional characters that really move and sweep through a world, those are necessary. But all of that amounts to a dictionary, a thesaurus, a few glasses of gin and a joint -- the story, though, now that's a pain in the ass. In my eight months or so of graduate school, I have been asked to write at least a gagillion (real number) stories. It always starts off well -- okay, so we have a space pirate, in space, and she gets stuck in the middle of a civil war. Good premise. But that's not yet a story. Well, the Civil War is between Earth and its Colonies, and there's this Revolutionary, right? And he's really awesome, but kind of a pain in the ass, and so the pirate gets hired to kidnap him and she decides to sell him to the highest bidder. Great, so there's a complication or two in there. But where's the story? It goes on and on like that, round and round, in circles, until you've kind of looped it all about yourself, tied your own noose and you're hanging in it, story-less, but with a really exhausted brain. They tell you story is conflict. Well, yes. But story stems from conflict. And if you determine your specific conflicts, and how they interlock and define your specific characters, and how those characters change, specifically, in order to rise to the conflict you've set before them -- then, THEN, you begin to have a story. This, my friends, can take YEARS. Draft after draft after draft -- of not writing, no -- of outlines, and freewrites, and just trying to get from point A to point Q, and how A causes Q to even happen, because your protagonist decided that A was her best choice, instead of B, which ends up being a better choice, but at what cost? The cost is D, brought about when the protagonist tripped over C, though she ends up landing in E, and from there, well...you know the alphabet. At the end of the day, is what I'm saying, you aren't writing, you are storytelling. And by the time you actually sit down to write, it's like coming up for air after diving into the deep end of a pool -- a gasp of realization, a wondrous moment of bursting, because you already know this story so well, these characters like your family, and they may surprise you, but you have constructed for them the best possible venue in which to spotlight all their quirks and flaws and glory. That's how we do it in theatre, and on screen, anyway. The actual writing is like the prize you win for doing all of the other work -- but without that work, you'll end up tearing your hair out and hurling your laptop into a wall when, at page 60, the entire story has fallen to pieces and you have no idea why. Then you figure out why -- and if only you'd seen it coming. It's because the story wasn't right, kid. It's because the story didn't suit the characters, didn't push them to their own limits -- it's because you did not spend time learning them, and how to expose them, and all their conflicted awesomeness. Conflict. Internal, external. A sense of rising conflict, and the cost of each step forward as the protagonist struggles to achieve her goal, and heal her wound. Sometimes these two things are divergent, and she must either attain, fail to attain, or alter her goal in order to satisfy -- not just her, or me, the writer, but you, the audience. I've taken you this far, I owe you one hell of a resolution. Or you'll never buy the DVD. This concludes our dispatch from the Future.

[Caelum]

This is, as well, an excerpt from an internet corner I write. This excerpt is mine, hastily typed out some years ago; but in perusing old things, it struck a cord. I'm sure I'll find out why soon enough. 'Til then: Whatever happened to me in my life, happened to me as a writer of plays. I’d fall in love, or fall in lust. And at the height of my passion, I would think, “So this is how it feels,” and I would tie it up in pretty words. I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I similed. For I knew I could take my broken heart and place it on the stage of The Globe, and make the pit cry tears of their own. [right]- Neil Gaiman writing for his characterization of William Shakespeare, portrayed as looking back over his career as he finishes writing The Tempest as one of two plays commissioned by Morpheus (aka Dream, aka The Sandman). “The Tempest,” issue #75 of The Sandman (1996), collected in The Wake Life is passion. Love, hate, rage, joy. Grief, triumph, desire. This is a list inclusive. To life but add your own adjective. Jeanette Winterson said, “If we had the courage to love we would not so value these acts of war.” A goal, then, but the writer’s goal is to improve life by portraying it; and so, in writing, I endeavor to portray passion. Passion, that is, in all of its forms. And so we come to characters. People. They don’t always begin with names or frames into which to place them. Characters, like people, when one dares to engage in reproductive acts can be born without wanting, without intent and even, sometimes, utterly against your wishes. There are in writing prophylactics, tissue thin pieces of aversion and containment that you slide over your consciousness; and, like those you slide over other, far more tangible things, they sometimes fail. Here we have a story, over crowded, and the last thing you require to reach it’s circular conclusion is another gods bedamned bloody character raising his hand and tromping all up in your plot’s business shouting, “Pick me! Pick me!” Only he does, typically while you’re not watching, eyes on the prize, the finale, the end game and when you’re entirely too involved with typing up jagged, loose ends into picture perfect bows and composing your exeunt, he inhales. And screams. Screams like church bells tolling, like winter’s wind howling, like the bean sidhe your protagonist locked securely away into his zombie mother’s basement cries while clawing at the bricks’ mortar screams and… And. You cannot ignore it. There is no ignoring it. The show, kids, must go on. And tomorrow? Tomorrow this article will go on because tonight he’s screaming, ringing down the sky in endless lines of poetry or chicanery, only the next paragraph will tell. So here we pause, but somewhere else, a window and yet a world away, I’ve a man whose name has been erased tap-tap-tapping on my veins and come hell or eight a.m., he’s going to kick against the walls of my creative uterus until I bear him to breath or scrape him out like a disease. I’m going to regret this tomorrow. And him. I just know it. Passion. Regret’s in there, in that, somewhere, right? Write.

[Tabarnac]

Still good.

[Caelum]

Mornin’. I have been receiving flak from a few corners for things said about me by other people. For the obvious reasons, this is pretty annoying. It’s also dejecting because what was said about me to begin this was flattering. I can understand why some people might take offense to it, but if this is the case please take your concerns up with the writer of the statement versus the subject of it. The subject, me, did not write it and is not at any potentially perceived fault. It is absolutely okay if you disagree with the statements made about me. I am not offended, but a little maturity and objectivity would be appreciated. I don't agree with the statements made. However, it is actually insulting to me when I receive flak for something complimentary someone said about me. Finally, to clear up the apparent confusion regarding what I do for a living, yes, I am paid to write and edit and have been published. I am also paid to hold a regular Monday through Friday job at a local company because at this juncture in my writing career I am the equivalent of a well thought of janitor who thinks she can make partner one day. Every single person who has given me flak has better things to do than concern themselves with what I do and do not do to pay my bills. I mean, seriously now. (Well, unless I’m hooking on the corner as that is just freakin’ fascinating.) I don't mind if you're interested for whatever reason. I mind if you make assumptions. Come on, guys. Leave Katie alone. - k.

[Seven Xu]

if it's any consolation, you're still my favourite wife.

[Paragon]

*hug* Love you Katie!

[Legion]

I’m running away for the weekend. It is absolutely necessary and is going to be amazing. This concludes our dispatch from the South.