The Sentence Fest
sara_holmes and I had a brain child last night: we're the proud parents of a fledgling baby fest. I'm scrounging around to see who else might be interested in joining us in any capacity.
The idea is a sentence. How many different ideas can be born from a single sentence? From a few sentences? We've called it, aptly, The Sentence Fest.
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As for the survey question "When sentences are posted..."... well, if the prompter is open for releasing their slutty little sentences to the greedy masses, they can just say so in their squicks/preferences section. ;) Whereas it also allows those who are particular to be particular! There's nothing saying offering boundaries means those boundaries have to be used.
"and am not just clicking the radial buttons for those things because they sound cool" ← -giggle-
"We're thinking about conducting a vote for which sentences make it to the writing stage. Does that seem fair?" ← There should be a "No, I passively object but will not whinge about it in the comments" option. =P
I pretty much go with what phoenixnoor says... if it's a babyfest, pick anything, write anything, low stress! Your and Sara's job would then be mostly presentation and compilation, maybe weeding out anything that seems spammish, but otherwise it's lighthearted fun. And if it ends up being crazy, well, ya'll can remedy that with more structure the next time around, yeah?
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I find that people have big problems when their squicks are not observed. That's why I put the tabula rasa method out there. If we go that direction, prompters would at least understand that once they submitted a sentence, it was in the hands of the writers to execute their own unique vision. Not all people are comfortable prompting this way. It's better for the spirit of this fest, though. The fewer restrictions writers have, the more possibility there will be for wildly different directions and more varied outcomes. That's what we'd be looking for--stretching the idea, rather than staying within a certain boxed-in area.
I put podfic up there because some people in my circle, including myself, record. I would for this fest, especially for a 1k one-shot. If we can pull more podfic people into this, especially writers who podfic their own stuff, that could be a load of fun. I also had the idea of podcasting the results of a sentence every couple weeks as a way for folks to keep up.
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"find that people have big problems when their squicks are not observed." - Well, yes. :P Who wants to put out a request for something they'd be highly uncomfortable reading the result of? May as well not request at all rather than get a turnout that is distinctly discomfiting. People who don't have squicks can just say they don't have squicks. XD Being asked not to write an mpreg with graphic abortion ending as a deathfic for a fluffy sentence doesn't seem like it's really boxing in the prompt to a crippling fashion so much as acting as a general limit for politeness' sake. ;)
Podficcing is basically reading the story aloud, yeah? Making an audio file? I can't for the life of me stand to listen to such things-- can't pay attention at all when I'm being read to-- but I love the idea behind podficcing for those who can do it. :)
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But the idea of the fest is taking one or two sentences and giving your own context as a writer. For me, if you tell me not to go someplace, my mind travels there just to spite us both--the seed has been planted, so to speak. If someone says "no penetration," I'm immediately going to be thinking of ten ways that sentence could come up during intercourse. The idea is to take the hinges off of prompts, distill them down to a sentence or two or three, and see what changes and what remains the same. It would be cool to have a fluff fic and an abortion fic come out of the same prompt.
I think we need to have the two categories: prompts with rules, boundaries and limitations, and tabula rasa sentences which can be molded any which way without influence or direction. The idea is to take away as many of the railings as possible, creating free-range writing. I'd be curious how differently results would turn out, if the same sentence were given with and without squicks. It would be interesting, to say the least.
And yeah, podfic is reading a fic out loud. It's great for people who like to listen to their fics while they're commuting or at the gym. Or for occasionally bedridden people like me, who would get sick looking at the computer for too long. It's not for everyone. But for the people who use it, it's lovely.
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Oh, no, I totally get the usefulness of podfics, and wish I could enjoy them. My best friend loves them. :) I just can't seem to keep my focus on them... I'm not an auditory person by any means. Le sigh.
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I'm really not one to talk about ratings, with all the NC17 I handle in a day. I'm a big advocate of writers tagging their own work for squicks and content. So long as we patrol the age statement side of things, we should be okay. It's also looking more and more like this should be a comm.
Looks like the bit about "write all the shit and flood Trey's inbox" is going to be spot-on. ^_^
WRITE ALL THE SHIT.
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Since the hope is that one prompt will spawn multiple creations, I think it matters less if one or two are not to the prompter's taste. If one squicks you out (and hopefully you'd know form the warning!), skip it and go on to another that doesn't.
As for how to encourage people to respond to the same prompt, could there be a way for people to say which prompt they are working on so that others can try that one too?
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