writing

December 18, 2013

Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D

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-Or The General Narrative Shifts in Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D –

“I hope they cannot see

The limitless potential

Living inside of me

To murder everything

I hope they cannot see

I am the Great Destroyer.”

– The Great Destroyer, Nine Inch Nails

“I hope they cannot see

Living inside of me

To murder everything

I hope they cannot see

I am the Great Destroyer.”

– The Great Destroyer (Modwheelmood Remix)

If there is one thing I could probably talk your ear off about at this point, its the narrative shifts between Year Zero and it’s companion album, Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D. Since I didn’t have room for this analysis in my Academic Webtext for Writing and Digital Media, I figured I would put some of my thoughts on the remix album’s narrative qualities here.

First off, if you start Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D like I did, and you look through the track listing, the first thing you will notice is that the songs are in a completely different order. Secondly, you’ll notice that The Good Soldier is missing and Hyperpower! has been renamed Guns By Computer.

Why is this important? Well, the construction of albums, especially those that set out to tell a story, is incredibly important to the narrative flow of the music. The tone of each perspective in Year Zero shapes the story, yes, but God Given might not have been half as powerful the first time around if it hadn’t followed up The Warning. Having the songs placed in a different order completely changes the feel of the story as we listen through it. The Great Destroyer feels more like a protest song. The Warning feels soul shattering and terrifying. But, more than that, we are presented an image in Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D of a future actively in chaos. The Beginning of The End doesn’t come until after the riot of My Violent Heart, and it only goes downhill from there.

In Year Zero, on the other hand, we have a sense that things are going poorly, and that The Warning is the tipping point into chaos.

The fact that The Good Soldier is absent from the remix album also speaks volumes to the narrative arc of Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D. Year Zero is an album chiefly made up on perspectives – as illustrated in the dual-perspective of The Warning – and leaving out the soldier’s perspective changes the focus of the story.

The Good Soldier presents listeners with a globalized view on war; a soldier fighting for his country, which fights for a cause they don’t believe in. Leaving that song out makes Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D a domestic album, chiefly, focusing on the chaos that America has fallen into, and silencing the voice of the soldier forced to war. I’m not sure if this was intentional or not, this silencing of a voice that is so often ignored (at least after they return from war), but it is a very powerful omission to make.

The story of Year Zero is a powerful one, and I like to think of Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D as yet another perspective on the tipping point. Perhaps, to the content, Year Zero represents the reality – a build up to chaos – when, on the other hand, the reality is that the world is falling apart, and chaos is the norm.

It’s all up to interpretation.

October 7, 2013

About The Process

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-Or Visualizing the Writing Process–

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While reading through Toward A Composition Made Whole this week (it will never be finished. I will be blogging about this book until my dying day), I became enamored with the idea of visualizing my writing process. Perhaps it was because Shipka provides such an excellent example of a process map – done by a non English-y person, no less – or because it illustrated the idea that multiple things could impact your writing process, and that those things should be acknowledged, that I latched on to the idea.

So, here it is. Above is a scanned image of a hand drawn process map of my very own, tracking the vague writing process of a project I had in my Fiction class last semester. Now, to the explanations.

The project described here, a short story entitled ‘She Was,’ was one of the more difficult writing experiences I have ever put myself through. The drawing of my desk at home as the ‘production space’ was included because the idea was created there. I had been playing quite a bit of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and listening to the band Murder By Death at the time, so ghost stories and human augmentation were on the brain. I drafted a quick character study and left it up on my blog (warning: this post is an early draft and actually quite bad). Then, I forgot about it.

A month or so later, I started rearranging the character study and adding to it so that I could talk to my creative writing professor about it. He….was not impressed with my second draft. So I went back and, using his mark up, rewrote almost the entire piece in a night. Music was ever present, and tea was plentiful. The draft was finished at 4 a.m. on the due date.

The draft was read by my classmates. They critiqued it; later, I sat dow with a story that was too complicated and needed an extra 2000 words for my final portfolio, with critiques that were going to be of no help very rapidly. I put on a rap album on repeat and plowed through a fourth, and soon, a fifth draft. I rewrote that story from scratch about four different times over the course of the semester. I sat in plastic chairs and arm chairs, at desks and on the floor, and listened to rock, rap, and soundtracks over the course of 14 weeks, trying, desperately to get that story written. It makes me proud to see, visually, the conditions and places and things that helped me get through that particular project. It reminds me of how much work I put into that piece, and how much of myself is in it. It reminds me to be proud of it, even though (as I discovered today) it is riddled with typos.

Seeing a process is different than remembering it. I think it’s important to remind yourself of everything that goes into writing, and how not all of it is writing.

October 3, 2013

Silence is Golden

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– Or How Stories Can Be Written Without Words –

The end of ‘Hush,’ the tenth episode of season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the most brilliant endings to a television show I have ever seen. It seems sort of obvious, but it’s fantastic.

But let’s start at the beginning.

There are a lot of ways to tell a story, but when someone mentions writing, society has taught us to think of text. Everyone recognizes that Television, Movies, Plays, and even Oral Performance involve writing because it is understood that the actors had to read a written script, or the performer is reading off of a written piece. This leaves out quite a bit, if we are only considering what is written out as dialogue, stage direction, or flavor text (in the case of multimedia presentations, including video games). It leaves out game mechanics, for example, and simple silence. This definition of writing leaves out musical cues, the absence of music, the cinematography decisions, and a myriad other things.

“But E,” you say, “those things aren’t writing.”

No, they aren’t writing in the traditional sense. In the case of ‘Hush,’ nearly the entire episode is silent. No dialogue. Yet, there was undoubtedly writing involved. It may have been in the form of direction on the page, which inevitably gave way to direction on set. Then, at the end, when all the characters have their voices back, Buffy and Riley sit down to have a conversation. There is no music, and, after the initial ‘I guess we need to talk’ conversation starter, there is no dialogue. This is brilliant, and was possibly barely written down (I wouldn’t know for sure, since I don’t have a script).

But let’s go to a more extreme example – the game Journey by That Game Company. Journey is a multiplayer experience in which the two players involved cannot speak to one another. There is no dialogue, flavor text, or reading involved in this game, which provides an interesting challenge to the players. They have to communicate through the game mechanics – drawing in the sand, or ‘chirping’ at one another.

The game itself is based on The Hero With A Thousand Faces  by Joseph Campbell, and is a silent exploration of the stages of the Hero’s Journey. At first glance, it is easy to say that That Game Company did not employ writers in the development process. Yet, at the end of the game, you have most definitely experienced a story. So where are the writers? They are the programmers, artists, character designers, sound designers, composers, engineers, and so on. Each person on a development team must have been aware of the story and feel that the game was supposed to have, and, though they did not have a writer, they wrote metaphors into their mechanics, cut-scenes, graphics, and music.

They told a story.

Writing, I think, becomes synonymous with story telling, but, like most things, we have to think about it more complexly. Writing words is on thing, but people also write code, scripts, directions, etc. and you can convey a story without any written words. Storytelling is more than just text on a page – it is action in a movie, metaphor in game mechanics, silence on the TV screen, and it’s time we recognized the writing is not the sole driver of these things. It’s the story.

September 22, 2013

Mind the Tech

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– Or How To Properly Acknowledge Your Tech –

“Once [technology] becomes ‘woven into the fabric of daily life’ every once-new technology seems natural, and therefore somehow ‘inevitable,’ and it becomes tough to imagine living in the world without it.”

-Jodi Shipka

We’re back, ladies and gents, to talking about technologies and how they impact writing. Specifically, I would like to focus on the fact that we don’t really ‘see’ the technologies we take for granted, and how lecture-like this post is sounding.

Let’s change that.

So, while struggling perusing through Jodi Shipka’s book, Toward a Composition Made Whole, I was struck by the above quote. Do we really not notice the technologies we use once they become common place? Certainly, it does become harder to imagine a world without, say, desktop computers. But how can we not be fully aware of the technology we use and how it limits or improves the way we work?

Shipka provides a compelling example to back this statement up: If you were to call one of your friends, you likely would simply describe the event as “I called up El and screamed about space for an hour” (well, maybe not that dramatic, but, hey). You would not sit down and list out the reasons that call was made possible. For example, you likely would not say, “Thanks to electricity, phone lines, cables, a dial tone, ring tones,a numbered key pad, etc., coupled with the fact that the person I was calling and I are both fluent in the English language…” and both have an appreciation for space and functional knowledge of it’s basic structure, as well as both being invested in space, I was able to call El and scream about space for an hour.

So, quite literally, you would gel over the fact that electricity and technologies that go into phones helped you accomplish a task. In that sense, I do believe that we have a tendency to forget about the role of technology in our day to day lives. I do think it’s important to realize this, and maybe spend some time thinking about how each technology we take for granted affect our ability to function in the world we live in. I also agree with Shipka’s observation that, were we to take the time to think about how we use technology, and how it affects not only our writing, but how our bodies are involved in our writing, it can help us imagine new ways of thinking about ‘texts.’

There is one thing I disagree with, however, and that is the idea that technology completely fades into the background. Now, I am speaking mostly about writing ‘tools’ – pens, paper, word processors, mobile devices – and not the things that power them, so perhaps my idea is a tad limited. But I feel as though I am constantly reminded of how technology influences my writing. When I write with pen and paper, I am always aware that my chosen tool is slower and less precise than my word processor. When working with Microsoft Word (and, therefore, procrastinating on the internet), I feel as if I can’t write anything and am wasting my time. Perhaps I do not notice the tool itself, but I do recognize it’s effects; I think everyone, in some way, recognizes the effects of a tools they use when producing texts. Or, perhaps, I am simply optimistic about the amount I think about the technology in my life in relation to how others think about their own tools.

September 16, 2013

Scripting Woes

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– Or Why I Have Never Taken To Script Writing –

Filming something is incredibly hard. Coming up with an idea and writing it out, complete with a visual component is possibly even worse.

I am a ‘visual’ writer by default – I thrive on description, which has a tendency to affect other aspects of my writing. My character development takes several drafts to get past the ‘shoddy’ phase, and my dialogue is…well, it’s getting better. So, one would think I would be an excellent script writer. I’m great with scenes! All the scenes, give ’em here.

Except not. My scenes – at least the way I envision them – are a bit….grandiose and hard to film on a handheld sort of budget. So, when preparing to shoot a short, 2 to 4 minutes film, I ran into some trouble.

Okay, a lot of trouble. I still don’t know how to shoot some of the shots I need, and I think I am probably going to need to come up with alternatives pretty quickly so that I don’t burn out/lose film quality. My storyboards were super ambitious, so I may need to face the music and re-storyboard.  I have at least four more ‘scenes’ to film on my own and then I will just have to see what I have and if it fits the mood of my script.

I am a bit overambitious, I have found, with large creative projects. Perhaps this is why I am almost never happy with my output. I simply need to ‘keep it simple’ {stupid} and relax on the ‘do all the things’ drive. But it’s so hard. I want this to be good. Really good. I’m afraid I’m going to flounder and screw something up.

Perhaps it’s time to start re-storyboarding, because the due date approches.

September 11, 2013

Writing Priorities

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– Or Yet Another Excuse for Procrastination –

I have been thinking recently about how ‘new technologies’ – computers, tablets, cell phones, etc. – have affected my writing. The conclusion I have come to is this; computers and the like have made it so much easier and so much harder to sit down and write, and the difficulty of the task is directly tied to how interested I am in what I am writing.

As an example, over the summer, I wrote a 2000+ word essay on a pair of episodes in the podcast Welcome to Night Vale (if you venture off to read that, be warned; it is long and also has Spoilers). I was not required to write this essay – I just felt like it. ‘Incoherent Babbling’ was composed in about 2 hours, possibly 3 due to locating quotes.

By contrast, in freshman year I had to write a 500 – 750 word essay on the Scientific Revolution. That particular essay took me 4 hours to write.

I’m not proud of that, but it’s a good example of how inspiration or drive affects my ability to procrastinate. In the first example, I utilized the internet in order to locate quotes and discuss the topic with a few friends of mine. By contrast, in the latter example, I spent much of those 4 hours on Facebook, Tumblr, and YouTube, doing anything I could to avoid writing an essay that, frankly, bored me.

The problem lies when I am uninspired, but still need to write, like when I am working on a novel or a short story, and get distracted by videos of cats for three hours. New technologies have made it so much easier to do research for more creative pursuits, but they have also created the perfect procrastination tool. “One more Reddit post” or “Just one more video” are phrases I frequently tell myself when procrastinating, until I run out of time and have to do a rush job on whatever I am working on.

It’s a habit, and a bad one. But I am working on it.

September 4, 2013

Technology

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– Or Thinking About What Multimodal Writing Means –

We need to consider what is at stake – who and what it is we empower and discount – when we use the term [technology] to mean primarily, or worse yet, only the newest computer technologies and not light switches, typewriters, eyeglasses, handwriting, or floor tiles as well.

– Jody Shipka, Toward a Composition Made Whole

It’s hard, I think, to think about technologies in a manner more complex than the computers we’re accustomed to using. Growing up, I remember being taught about ‘new technologies,’ but somewhere along the way, that term was shortened to ‘technology.’ I distinctly remember and instance in high school when a teacher made the radical statement that a desk was technology.

“No, it’s not,” said some, “it’s just a desk.”

Our teacher said that, at one point, people didn’t have desks to write on, and that a desk would have been just as revolutionary as a computer is to us. (Thinking about it now, I would say that the very act of writing was at one point new and is, by this loose definition, a technology as well.)

I try to think about multimodal writing more complexly than just ‘digital’ or ‘audio-visual’ writing projects, but after reading the introduction to Jody Shipka’s book Toward a Composition Made Whole (and talking to Dr. Warnick, my Writing and Digital Media professor), I realized that I wasn’t. Not really. I’ve talked in the past about how writing in other genres (for I will contend that video games and movies are, in fact, genres) requires thinking more complexly about what it means to write, I have never really considered how technologies (pen and paper, computers, apps, mobile devices, desks) and environments (classrooms, the out doors, and the sights and smells and noises involved in each) affect my writing. Is it easier for me to blog on a computer, and write novels by hand? How does writing on a computer affect my sense of ‘writer’s block’? What about where I work?

These are questions I hadn’t considered before, but I believe they are essential to thinking about how you prefer to write, and what we consider multimodal. Because, as Shipka states in her exploration of the topic, multimodal writing is so much more than simply digitizing our words.

March 19, 2013

Dialogue and Characterization

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– or In Which Emily Links You To Many Videos, Part 2 –

BACK TO VIDEO GAMES. Or, at least, back to Extra Credits.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vO-HhDrN2_g&hl=en_US&version=3

This is an excellent video in the context of video games, but it also an incredible resource for writers in general. There is…not much I can say by way of improving this argument, nor do I really have an opinion on it besides the fact that it’s excellent.

I guess the only thing I have to say is that dialogue should sound like someone is talking. That sounds obvious, but really, your characters should feel like real people. In this video, the presenter talk about acting out your dialogue. This makes sense for video games, but I would also argue that it’s vital to any writing process.

If you write a really elaborate and vital piece of dialogue, and just leave it, you have no idea if the dialogue sounds natural (especially if it’s expository). I frequently have trouble with this, so, I read my passages out loud. This helps, but I really think acting out what your characters are saying, even doing, can help you determine what is natural, and what seems a bit off. It will also allow you to see how others interpret things. For example, say you wrote the following piece of dialogue:

“I can’t believe you,” Amanda said angrily. “What, did you think I wouldn’t find out?”

If you have someone else read through this, you can hear what tone their voice takes on for ‘angry.’ What expressions do they make? Are they gesturing? How? You can describe this character and her dialogue so much better if you have an idea of the gestures and expressions that convey anger. So, you revise:

“I can’t believe you,” Amanda growled, throwing her hands up in the air. Her mouth was set in a harsh frown, her eyebrows furrowed, and her teeth looked on edge. “What, did you think I wouldn’t find out?”

This conveys so much more emotion than just the word angry. Of course, this requires you to have super enthusiastic friends, who get into acting things out, and you shouldn’t over describe, but it can be such a useful tool to have in your tool belt.

With that said, please, please watch the video in this post (it may bleed out of the margins again, for which I apologize) and go check out Extra Credits. If I haven’t said it enough, those guys are awesome.

March 17, 2013

On Transhumanism

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– Or The Individual Dystopia –

I am just going to make this disclaimer now: I am probably full of bulls*** regarding this topic. I’ll be making references to materials that explain Transhumanism and the like, so it’s best to go there for more accurate information. Most of this is just referencial knowledge and brainstorming that I am using to write a story. Thank you for indugling me. 

Today, in my creative writing class, we had a discussion on what it meant to be human, and…sort of, what it meant to be a woman, because of a short story I rewrote a couple of weeks ago. The story that I put up and took down almost immediately. It evolved into this fairly philosophical debate about the world I was creating and the social situations I had put my character in (much to my dispair – I actually wanted feed back on how I wrote the piece, more so than my content). So, I thought of a question – had I displayed the dystopia I was attempting to adequately enough?

“No” was the definitive answer (from my own inner critic) so I went back to the drawing board. What was so ‘bad’ about transhumanism, at least in this character’s case, and why does it isolate her?

So I started with transhumanism – or H+ – which is the idea that, at some point, humanity will have the technology to enhance our strength, senses, minds, to previously unheard of heights. [For more info go here, here, here, and here.] That affects my character in this way – she didn’t choose to augment herself, and so she is having trouble adjusting. She has a tendency to blame most of her psychological problems on the tech that’s keeping her alive, which causes the people around her much frustration. She also is now faced with prejudices she previously didn’t think much of.

This is why the universe around my character isolates her. She is judged harshly almost every time she leaves her apartment. It’s difficult for her to do rudimentary tasks with out breaking things or taking too long to execute them. This forces her into a corner she had never previously been in, and sort of distils her natural sarcastic personality into this sort of cynical one.

I want to show this, and the story in its current form does not do an adequate job of really defining the world and my character’s problems with it. So, it will require another round of rewrite-your-story-from-scratch, but it will be worth it.

February 27, 2013

Taking The Criticism

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– Or Emily and the Criticism Sandwich –

I have problems with criticism, but not in the way that you might immediately think. I fear it because I imagine every worst case scenario, every terrible comment, everything bad about my story, and I beat myself up with it.

I am extremely insecure about my writing, especially when I take risks with it. For example, I have to workshop a piece that I spent an agonizingly long time rewriting (for more info, see my last blog post). I wrote it in third person, something I don’t frequently do, because I felt like I needed to give the reader (and myself) some distance from what my character was going through. I made this decision, mostly because I became disturbed by what I was having to write about.

This was a terrible idea.

I didn’t get specific enough. I didn’t outline relationships enough. It wasn’t good enough. Better than the first draft, but not good enough. So, naturally, I began beating myself up about it. I started geting defensive about the first two forum posts about my story. I was becoming a rage monster over critiques, which is a things I hate in myself and dislike in other writers.

So, I prepared myself by saying “I tried something new. It didn’t work. My peers will suggest ways to fix it.” And I started reading the critiques – most of which started of very nicely. I read through four or five poorly disguised ‘critiques sandwiches.’

Critique sandwiches are what I call peer critiques, because I frequently sandwich the critique between two strong compliments. Like, I found something truly interesting and uniques about your piece; here’s something you could work on; but, over all, I thought it was pretty good here. That is the basic structure of the critique sandwich.

Unfortunately, you have to use this structure, even if the story is not so good. And I can tell when people bulls*** because I do all the time, though I try to be sincere in my compliments as much as possible. I realize that I did not write my story as well as I could have, and that disappoints me. So, when I read critique sandwiches that sound forced, I sort of lose resolve to work on anything ever again.

This story, however, matters too much to me. I have ideas of how to fix it, and I hope that maybe, just maybe, critiques on my piece will lean in the direction of ‘here’s how you can salvage this’ rather than ‘here’s how you can duct-tape this garbage heap and pretend it looks good.’ And I hope that these critique sandwiches are sincere, and not just there because my peers are trying to say nice things about the crap that I feel I handed them.

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