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Category Archives: Writing

Anything about it, from how it makes me feel, to the differences in translating and just generating prose, to fiction and stage writing. If it’s about writing, it’ll sit here.

Crash (but no burn): prologue

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It’s been way too long since I’ve posted here. That’s because I’ve been doing some hard thinking and scribbling in my story, and how I’m approaching it, and how I’m approaching the transmedia nature of it. And I have finally understood, as I stand at the accordioned hood (bonnet!) of this metaphorical car, that I’ve been barking up at least one wrong tree. I feel a bit foolish, but in research, being wrong isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as we learn from our mistakes and missteps. My real challenge now is documenting what went wrong, and why I think it peeled off the rails. That’s what my next post (or posts) will be about. Also coming up will possibly be a flash fiction entry spurred by Chuck Wendig’s Terrible Minds blog. If you’re not reading him, you should be. I’ll add him to my blogroll linkist whatever the heck that … Read on! →

Treatments

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I’ve never really been able to do treatments. For stories, I can outline them all right; but for a treatment of a piece that’s meant to be a script, whether it’s radio or film of stage, I get carried away hearing people talk to each other. I get lost in writing the dialogue. So it’s not a treatment, it’s a rough draft of a scene. Which I suppose is all right. I mean, this whole thing is about figuring why things work, and how they work. By force it’ll just be my personal experience, because I can’t get in anyone else’s head about these things. So, in my head: treatments are hard. I feel stifled trying to keep everything to prose when I know the things I’m writing about are going to get done as dialogue. And I understand why a treatment can be useful; it gives a summary of … Read on! →

State of the state

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Finding a voice sucks. Blog writing is hard. I imagine this is the case for a lot of people, but I end up trashing most of my posts in a fit of “who really cares what I have to say?” If this blog is a kind of signposting of my experience, then I’ve forgotten to take pictures of the whole first half of the trip. To be fair, it’s mostly the same — a lot of worldbuilding on the wiki, and then refining and tuning the storyline. I have some broad strokes written out already, and depending on what platforms end up getting chosen for the second half — production — I think we’ll only be able to do maybe an episode a month, including all materials. And by episode I’m not yet sure if I mean primarily an animatic, or primarily a radio-play style podcast. There’s a conference in … Read on! →

Story structure: linear vs spatial

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I’m not the kind of person who usually outlines or plans. I start with an opening idea or scene and just run with it. This is fine if your deadlines are loose and the process is meant to be exploratory. No harm, no foul, in poking into a dead-end idea; just back up to a previous save and try a new path. This isn’t so tenable when you’re working to a deadline. When I’ve done work for hire, I’ve used an outline; sometimes those outlines were provided to me by an editor, and sometimes it was up to me to build the structure. There’s a sense of safety in having an outline. But if your deadline’s close, then veering from the laid out plan can carry some very big problems. I’ve never written transmedia before. It’s a new mode of thinking for me. Because I’m using Bakhtin‘s concept of polyphony … Read on! →