Re: Mixing
Having finally found a formula that seems to work for remixing, I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on the process. I'm not big on prescriptive Do's and Don'ts, so I've written this more as a travelogue, looking at how I went about writing " Home Fires," which is the first remix I've been really pleased with as a story in its own right
( Read more... )
But I always feel like the remixes should be, well, remixes, where you're saying, "Okay, this is a story. It's made up of all of these different parts. What story do I want to tell using some of these parts?" And the parts that I usually latch onto are the events, so my approach is typically something closer to, "What happened here?" and "Why do I care about it?" and "What do I want to tell some hypothetical reader about what happened?" Because I think within a story there should always be an answer to "and why are you, madame author, telling me this stuff?"
So the closest I've ever come to a straight ahead retelling was when I took Helping Hands and made that story the first story in a Five Things sequence.
So, for instance, for this year, the story I worked from was about Ronon growing as a person through having to take care of traumatized John and Elizabeth, and the story I told was much more about everybody dealing with the aftermath of the events that traumatized John and Elizabeth.
Reply
It seems to me that regardless of the writing process we use (and your process *does* sound different), remix stories tend to fall out into two types: those with one small change (commonly POV), or those which are re-imagined. Your Farscape remix is definitely re-imagined, even though the first of your 5-things is a simple POV change.
It's the re-imagining that I was struggling with in my first few remixes; I couldn't quite see how to get past the original author's vision. So I developed a very methodical way of extrapolating in order to try and break-out of that. It's certainly not the only way to remix, or even the best. In fact, I think yours works really well! I wish any of my remixes were half as inventive as your one Farscape remix! I may have to try your way next time--maybe it will prove even more productive than my plodding step-by-step approach.
Reply
Reply
I knew my problem was a failure of imagination, but I couldn't see how to pick the stories apart and find a new way into them. (If you're curious to see what I mean, I linked the other remixes I've done in the original post--they are short.) Now, I could take the easy way out and blame the authors I was assigned. Their styles and choices in what to write about did not match mine, and they also often used weird structures within the stories (weird to my way of thinking anyway--like sudden POV shifts). But that's a cop-out, I think.
What I decided I needed to do was find a way to re-imagine the story I was remixing, instead of just re-writing it. And I needed some method that I could apply even if a particular author's stories didn't speak to my interests. So I started trying to think outside of the box, asking musesfool's questions as a starting point, and then moving on to stuff like: where else could it start or finish; how could the central matter be flipped, or the emphasis changed; what other characters could provide an unexpected new perspective? That kind of thing. The kind of changes you are talking about, in effect.
I just asked slightly different questions in my effort to re-imagine. I think your questions seem to have more scope. But really, I don't think it matters as long as some way can be found to shine new light on some central element of the story. That's all I mean by re-imagine--moving the story away from a straight re-telling.
Is that clearer?
Reply
Leave a comment