Answers to 2 more memes...
Over here, geekgrrllurking asked me for my "Top 5 Laura Roslin moments".
In no particular order, and without having gone back to look at eps...
Way back over here, trancer21 asked me What's your writing technique?
Hmmm... That's a good question, actually.
My writing technique's been modified over the years. When I started writing, way back when I was like 7 or something, I just wrote whatever came to mind: fanciful little fairytale-type stories mainly.
When I hit around 13, I started writing what can only be described as a huge piece of craptastic Mary Sue AU to beat all craptastic Mary Sue AUs. *heh* It was originally handwritten and the main bits I cringingly remember now included Dallas, Knots Landing, Fleetwood Mac, Days of Our Lives...and a lot of RPF/adolescent fantasy thrown in. Okay, for y'all to mock [because I mock it and I fucking wrote the shit], the big thing about it was Pam and Bobby Ewing adopting me at 13yo and then letting me marry Lindsey Buckingham. Like I said, totally fucked up adolescent Mary Sue craptasticness that I would SO mock now if I ever came across such a thing. Thankfully, all of those handwritten-then-typed pages have been rotting/composting in the dump outside my hometown for the past 2-3 years now. I have only the horrid memories of that first big craptastic epic. But it gave me the basic bones of writing fiction, particularly with a rather large cast.
And yes, trancer21, shatterpath, ardvari, and anyone else who wants to, you can begin the merciless mocking of me over this story now. Particularly because there's an infinitesimal part of me that wishes I still had that behemoth so I could do something proper with it. *shrugs* I R DORK, YO!
But I think that my writing technique really started to gel in high school and college. That's when I got so seriously into English lit and writing. I devoured any kind of writing/English classes I could get my hands on. I even had one prof in college [when I was a sophomore/junior], who graded my papers as if I was writing my thesis. She did wonders for my latent technical abilities.
For the most part, my technique is that I tend to wait for inspiration to hit before I start writing a particular story. When I write it, I write from beginning to end, usually. I always used to do that. I think it came from writing all of the papers I was assigned in high school/college. The only problem with that was when I would get stuck. It could literally stall a story/paper indefinitely. That always sucked.
I think it was in college when I finally acknowledged that I didn't have one Muse, rather I had/have several Muses. For the most part, they take on the personalities of the characters I'm writing about, canon or original. They really are quite distinct entities, almost like having a whole crowd of alternate personalities living in my brain, and they feel quite real. Not corporeal real, but as real as any spiritual/ethereal entity. There are days that I swear if I tilted my head and squinted just right, they'd appear right in front of me, as plain and real as any other person I could be talking to. They create whole "movies" in my head of stories for me to write. And of course, none of the finished stories are anything like what I see "in the 3-D IMAX of my mind", to borrow a phrase from Jonathan Larson. *veg*
What's truly scary about the whole Muses thing is that I share almost all of them with shatterpath. The whole joke about us brain-sharing really isn't a joke. It happens A LOT. Muses will travel between our brains. And we have some different/multiple version of Muses. For example, there's SG1 Janet and Sam and LWM Sam and Janet. Completely different Muses, in style, speech, etc.
And yes, you can say "Wow! ariestess is kinda freaking me out with all this talk of Muses as almost real" because I think the same thing many days, and I have lived with this for years now.
But back to my writing technique. For the most part, the Muses tend to drive that particular bus, not me. There are times I'll set the pace and "force" them into submission to work with me. I can be inspired by pretty much anything: "what if" or "fix it" situations in episodes, a song, a sensation, a quote, some visual image I've seen. It really can be anything at all. Dreams have shaped a lot of initial ideas for stories, too.
Once I'd met shatterpath, I began experimenting with jumping around in a story, using alternate POVs, and working in present tense. Now, I pretty much write in first person POV present tense. I still have serious issues with second person POV, but every time I've attempted it, I've received a lot of positive feedback. I think it's the fact that it's such a different way of looking at things.
I never used to believe in beta readers. I can admit to a certain amount of snobbery and conceit that I didn't need a beta for my fiction because I was a WRITER and ENGLISH MAJOR [both in all caps for a reason]. I had no issues being a beta for someone else, but I was above mistakes in my stories. Yeah, I grew out of that in the past 5 years or so, and now rarely feel comfortable posting a story without someone taking a look at it first. Even if I get told there's nothing wrong or needing to be fixed/tweaked, I still feel better with that second pair of eyes.
I'm not sure this exactly answered trancer21's question as she posed it, but it's certainly been a long explanation of me and my writing, I suppose. Or rather of the genesis and journey of my writing, I suppose is a better way of putting it.
In no particular order, and without having gone back to look at eps...
- The red dress on New Caprica in Season 3 [because that dress? FTW]
- The vision of all the snakes while at the podium [because really, snakes fucking rule!]
- "I'm not ready yet" from the Season 4 ep "Faith" [really, all of her scenes with Nana Visitor]
- Taking her oath of office to become the President [she looked so torn]
- The Opera House visions she shares with Six and Athena [because really? How can she NOT be a Cylon or somehow involved with them if she has those shared visions/dreams? And I'm not sure that Hera's blood is a good enough excuse for this either]...
Way back over here, trancer21 asked me What's your writing technique?
Hmmm... That's a good question, actually.
My writing technique's been modified over the years. When I started writing, way back when I was like 7 or something, I just wrote whatever came to mind: fanciful little fairytale-type stories mainly.
When I hit around 13, I started writing what can only be described as a huge piece of craptastic Mary Sue AU to beat all craptastic Mary Sue AUs. *heh* It was originally handwritten and the main bits I cringingly remember now included Dallas, Knots Landing, Fleetwood Mac, Days of Our Lives...and a lot of RPF/adolescent fantasy thrown in. Okay, for y'all to mock [because I mock it and I fucking wrote the shit], the big thing about it was Pam and Bobby Ewing adopting me at 13yo and then letting me marry Lindsey Buckingham. Like I said, totally fucked up adolescent Mary Sue craptasticness that I would SO mock now if I ever came across such a thing. Thankfully, all of those handwritten-then-typed pages have been rotting/composting in the dump outside my hometown for the past 2-3 years now. I have only the horrid memories of that first big craptastic epic. But it gave me the basic bones of writing fiction, particularly with a rather large cast.
And yes, trancer21, shatterpath, ardvari, and anyone else who wants to, you can begin the merciless mocking of me over this story now. Particularly because there's an infinitesimal part of me that wishes I still had that behemoth so I could do something proper with it. *shrugs* I R DORK, YO!
But I think that my writing technique really started to gel in high school and college. That's when I got so seriously into English lit and writing. I devoured any kind of writing/English classes I could get my hands on. I even had one prof in college [when I was a sophomore/junior], who graded my papers as if I was writing my thesis. She did wonders for my latent technical abilities.
For the most part, my technique is that I tend to wait for inspiration to hit before I start writing a particular story. When I write it, I write from beginning to end, usually. I always used to do that. I think it came from writing all of the papers I was assigned in high school/college. The only problem with that was when I would get stuck. It could literally stall a story/paper indefinitely. That always sucked.
I think it was in college when I finally acknowledged that I didn't have one Muse, rather I had/have several Muses. For the most part, they take on the personalities of the characters I'm writing about, canon or original. They really are quite distinct entities, almost like having a whole crowd of alternate personalities living in my brain, and they feel quite real. Not corporeal real, but as real as any spiritual/ethereal entity. There are days that I swear if I tilted my head and squinted just right, they'd appear right in front of me, as plain and real as any other person I could be talking to. They create whole "movies" in my head of stories for me to write. And of course, none of the finished stories are anything like what I see "in the 3-D IMAX of my mind", to borrow a phrase from Jonathan Larson. *veg*
What's truly scary about the whole Muses thing is that I share almost all of them with shatterpath. The whole joke about us brain-sharing really isn't a joke. It happens A LOT. Muses will travel between our brains. And we have some different/multiple version of Muses. For example, there's SG1 Janet and Sam and LWM Sam and Janet. Completely different Muses, in style, speech, etc.
And yes, you can say "Wow! ariestess is kinda freaking me out with all this talk of Muses as almost real" because I think the same thing many days, and I have lived with this for years now.
But back to my writing technique. For the most part, the Muses tend to drive that particular bus, not me. There are times I'll set the pace and "force" them into submission to work with me. I can be inspired by pretty much anything: "what if" or "fix it" situations in episodes, a song, a sensation, a quote, some visual image I've seen. It really can be anything at all. Dreams have shaped a lot of initial ideas for stories, too.
Once I'd met shatterpath, I began experimenting with jumping around in a story, using alternate POVs, and working in present tense. Now, I pretty much write in first person POV present tense. I still have serious issues with second person POV, but every time I've attempted it, I've received a lot of positive feedback. I think it's the fact that it's such a different way of looking at things.
I never used to believe in beta readers. I can admit to a certain amount of snobbery and conceit that I didn't need a beta for my fiction because I was a WRITER and ENGLISH MAJOR [both in all caps for a reason]. I had no issues being a beta for someone else, but I was above mistakes in my stories. Yeah, I grew out of that in the past 5 years or so, and now rarely feel comfortable posting a story without someone taking a look at it first. Even if I get told there's nothing wrong or needing to be fixed/tweaked, I still feel better with that second pair of eyes.
I'm not sure this exactly answered trancer21's question as she posed it, but it's certainly been a long explanation of me and my writing, I suppose. Or rather of the genesis and journey of my writing, I suppose is a better way of putting it.