remixy meta
Yay! remixthedrabble authors have been revealed, so I can indulge in my favorite thing ever: nattering about my stories and the writing process.
There are two basic types of remix. One takes the events of the original story as "truth" and presents another perspective on that truth; the other builds a new story around what the remixer considers to be the essential core of the original story. Each type has its own advantages and pitfalls (in terms of working toward the goal of a story which both stands alone and can be read as a meaningful companion to the original). The neat thing about the structure of remixthedrabble is that by imposing a length limit and encouraging a fixed structure, I think it naturally steers writers away from these pitfalls.
The first type of story is, I think, the most natural to write, but it can also lead to what I see as the worst sort of remix ever, where the events and dialogue are all a rehash of the original, and the new POV fails to add new insight. Requiring a minimum of 100 words rather than 1000 words encourages writing styles and changes of form that don't work as well in longer stories. For example, getting rid of the dialogue altogether is reasonable in a very short story, while I, at least, can't stand reading more than a page or two without it. The form lends itself to expanding an alluded-to scene, or playing with the timescale and plucking out only bits and pieces of the original.
The second type of story has to walk a fine line in order to be both a totally new story and remain true to the core idea of the original. The great thing about very short forms is that at their best they concisely express one single idea. A true drabble has to encapsulate set-up, crisis, and punchline in a mere hundred words. So it's a natural transformation, I think, to take a story and distill it into its essence, when one has only a few hundred words to work with - I think it's easier to get sidetracked when you need to write a longer story.
In both cases, I think that the encouragement to stick to round-numbered wordcounts makes writers think about their word choices and pay attention to refining the story into a sharp, punchy morsel. I should add that I think that it's tremendously difficult to transform one hundred-word story into a different hundred-word story, and I am impressed by those who can do this!
Okay, my stories. None of them are over PG-ish:
due South: Space and Time (The Two Axes Remix), RayK/Fraser, from nos4a2no9's original story Space and Time
Of the remixes I wrote, this is my favorite. It's mostly the second type of story, because for the most part I discarded the bits of narrative, the actual story about Ray coming to Canada with Fraser, about his interaction with the people there, about Fraser's adjustment to having Ray with him. But I don't feel as though I took the core of Nos's idea and built a whole new story around it; I kind of see it as - you know how a sculptor talks about freeing the statue that's already within the rock? I could see another story that was at the heart of Nos's story, and I stripped away the words until I found it.
The thing is, Nos is a different type of writer than I am (which we notice when we beta each others' stories!). She is amazing at imbuing the characters with real emotion and motivation that spills out onto the page. Her stories ramble and swell with detail that pulls the reader along. Me, I have to be reminded to put any description at all in, and I write in a much more tightly-controlled way.
I adore formal structure, so the instant I read (well, re-read) her story, I thought, "ooh! this would be so cool as parallel sections!" and immediately the whole space-time imagery was clear, the idea of intersecting axes, which is a bit of a pun, of course, on dS canon. I decided to pare things down to 100 words on each side, because that way I could avoid working with the actual narrative events, and just focus on the single, shining idea at the heart of the story.
I started each section with Nos's words, and pulled a lot of imagery (as well as cadence and style) directly from her story. I think the only real thematic difference is tying it together with the last sentence on Fraser's side, which in retrospect, maybe I should have finished with some nod to her "history" line, and then used my sentence as a last line spanning both columns, mirroring the title. But I wanted a perfect 100+100 words!
I think this is a really good story, and I'm very proud of it; but I also know that I would not have and could not have written it without the inspiration of nos4a2no9's original.
Wilby Wonderful: Lifeline (The Louder Than Words Remix), Buddy gen, from nos4a2no9's original story Quiet in Drowning
When I got my assignment, this was the first story that sprung to mind, and this was the first remix I wrote for this challenge. I beta-read this story, and so I felt as though I knew it intimately. The slight hint of Duck/Buddy bothered me a bit (this is one pairing that weirds me out a little) and so I had thought about Buddy a lot in the beta process, trying to decide if his behavior overall made sense to me. (Nos correctly guessed I'd written this, which didn't surprise me at all, because so many of the things I said in beta came out in this drabble.)
This is the first type of remix story; I treat Nos's story as the truth of what happened. This is a perfect kind of story to remix this way, because the character whose POV I chose is not actually present for most of the events of the story, and therefore I could avoid the dreaded rehash. Plus, I adore Nos's narrative of events: it's painful and wrenching and visceral. The big trick for this story, for me, was to convey the sense of what Buddy knows about what's happened, and the sympathy and understanding he shows in the last scene of Nos's story, in just a drabble's worth of words. Especially since I felt the need to use up the first eight by using her first line, verbatim, to ground the story within hers, and because I wanted to use the ending to bring the story back home to Buddy, to make it about him. It took a lot of rewriting and refining, but I'm pleased with the way it came out.
due South: Temptation (The Iambic Remix), RayK/Fraser, from malnpudl's original story Evidence
I wrote a sonnet! Which drove me nuts, but I'm mostly happy with it - it comes in second, just behind Space and Time. In fact, trying to come up with something of malnpudl's to remix was driving me nuts. I started out playing with Duty Calls (in which Ray molests Fraser while he's at work) but got nowhere after three different false starts. I really wanted to write something awesome for Mal, 'cause I love her so much. I wandered through her stories and found Evidence, and - I'm not sure what it was. Maybe just the lovely, luscious imagery. But it made me think, hey, wouldn't it be cool if...?
This is the second type of remix story, because there was no way I could possibly get the whole plot of Mal's story in there. So I ditched the whole aspect of the ice cream being evidence, of Fraser holding back, of Ray admitting his sensual pleasure in the way his bracelet slides on his skin (mmm) and just went for the central image that stuck in my mind, the image I think of when I think of her story: Fraser licking melted ice cream from Ray's wrist, his tongue flicking around the beads of the bracelet. YUM, right? And that's what I made into a poem.
I love sonnets. In particular, I love what is called the Pushkin (or Onegin) sonnet, which is iambic tetrameter with the somewhat odd rhyme scheme aBaBccDDeFFeGG, where lower-case letters represent feminine rhymes (like stronger/longer) and upper-case represent masculine rhymes (like skin/sin). It's cool because each quatrain has a different pattern of rhymes. Um, I didn't hold strictly to this verse form, because tetrameter's kind of sing-songy and I wanted the extra syllables of pentameter, and I kind of punted on the masculine/feminine rhymes because I got stuck. But I still adore this rhyme scheme. And although one of its advantages for story-telling (it was devised for Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, and Vikram Seth used it for his novel Golden Gate (which I liked except I thought the ending sucked)) is that it can be parsed in a variety of ways, I kept the classical structure of the quatrains setting a problem, describing it more fully, a thematic turn, and then a summary couplet.
In summary, this was a pain in the ass to write, and also incredibly fun to write. It made me want to run a "remixthesonnet" fest in which participants must remix their stories into sonnets. Okay, maybe not. :-)
SGA: Iced (The Competitive Remix), John and Rodney gen, from malnpudl's original untitled double drabble
Turning 200 words into 200 different words was an interesting challenge. I wanted to do a second story for Mal, and I wanted to do a different fandom. All her SGA stories came from a McShep drabble tree, so they were all tiny. Because there's special recognition for preserving the length of the story, I decided I wanted to try that.
And it wasn't easy. Unlike distilling a longer story into a drabble or double-drabble, a story that's already that length already tells the core story. What I ended up doing was taking the ficlet that I could see with a different punchline and writing it that way. So it's a type 2 story, built around the core idea "a winter storm inspires Rodney to bring hockey to Atlantis," sharing a few dialogue elements, but taking it in a slightly different direction so I could use my punchline instead.
The other thing I want to say about this one is that as the original ficlet was written to use a line from a previous ficlet in the drabble tree, I felt it important to preserve that line. One of my favorite books is Douglas Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau de Marot, in which he discusses translation of poetry, and the question of: what is important to preserve? The meter? The rhyme? The literal meaning? Before I read his book, I believed that the best translation was the most literal one, but now I understand translation much better, I think, and I agree that with e.g. poetry, structure may trump literal word meanings. So because the original ficlet was written around a specific line, my "translation" needed to also use that line.
Firefly: Fowl Balls (The Ain't Nobody Here But Us Remix), Jayne gen, from lyrstzha's original story Fowl Tempered
I thought this would be an easy way to write in a new fandom. Hah. Firefly has such distinct voices and such an idiosyncratic style that even starting with someone else's story, it was still really difficult.
I picked this story for several reasons. Animal transformation is a well-worn trope in SGA (to the point that it has become, for me, boring cliche), but seeing it in Firefly amused me greatly. The original was a fun story, and I could see that turning it around would yield just as much humor. And I like Jayne, and because I recently recced (and read about a zillion times, because I loved it!) Jayne Eyre, I felt as though I had a better handle on him than on any other character.
This is pretty much the first type of remix, although I stayed faithful to the spirit rather than the letter of the dialogue. I figure, a chicken ain't exactly your reliable narrator, if you know what I mean. And also, I am absurdly happy with the sly pun of the title, plus the perfect scansion of the funky remix subtitle that popped into my head.
Anyway, I think all my stories achieved what I consider to be my personal remix goal: they all stand alone, and they all can be read alongside the original without being simple rehashery. (Okay, the last one is a sequel to another story, and so it doesn't precisely stand alone unless you start from the premise that for reasons not explored at this juncture, Jayne is a rooster :-)
Finally, although I made only three guesses as to who remixed what, I was right about all of them. Go me!
There are two basic types of remix. One takes the events of the original story as "truth" and presents another perspective on that truth; the other builds a new story around what the remixer considers to be the essential core of the original story. Each type has its own advantages and pitfalls (in terms of working toward the goal of a story which both stands alone and can be read as a meaningful companion to the original). The neat thing about the structure of remixthedrabble is that by imposing a length limit and encouraging a fixed structure, I think it naturally steers writers away from these pitfalls.
The first type of story is, I think, the most natural to write, but it can also lead to what I see as the worst sort of remix ever, where the events and dialogue are all a rehash of the original, and the new POV fails to add new insight. Requiring a minimum of 100 words rather than 1000 words encourages writing styles and changes of form that don't work as well in longer stories. For example, getting rid of the dialogue altogether is reasonable in a very short story, while I, at least, can't stand reading more than a page or two without it. The form lends itself to expanding an alluded-to scene, or playing with the timescale and plucking out only bits and pieces of the original.
The second type of story has to walk a fine line in order to be both a totally new story and remain true to the core idea of the original. The great thing about very short forms is that at their best they concisely express one single idea. A true drabble has to encapsulate set-up, crisis, and punchline in a mere hundred words. So it's a natural transformation, I think, to take a story and distill it into its essence, when one has only a few hundred words to work with - I think it's easier to get sidetracked when you need to write a longer story.
In both cases, I think that the encouragement to stick to round-numbered wordcounts makes writers think about their word choices and pay attention to refining the story into a sharp, punchy morsel. I should add that I think that it's tremendously difficult to transform one hundred-word story into a different hundred-word story, and I am impressed by those who can do this!
Okay, my stories. None of them are over PG-ish:
due South: Space and Time (The Two Axes Remix), RayK/Fraser, from nos4a2no9's original story Space and Time
Of the remixes I wrote, this is my favorite. It's mostly the second type of story, because for the most part I discarded the bits of narrative, the actual story about Ray coming to Canada with Fraser, about his interaction with the people there, about Fraser's adjustment to having Ray with him. But I don't feel as though I took the core of Nos's idea and built a whole new story around it; I kind of see it as - you know how a sculptor talks about freeing the statue that's already within the rock? I could see another story that was at the heart of Nos's story, and I stripped away the words until I found it.
The thing is, Nos is a different type of writer than I am (which we notice when we beta each others' stories!). She is amazing at imbuing the characters with real emotion and motivation that spills out onto the page. Her stories ramble and swell with detail that pulls the reader along. Me, I have to be reminded to put any description at all in, and I write in a much more tightly-controlled way.
I adore formal structure, so the instant I read (well, re-read) her story, I thought, "ooh! this would be so cool as parallel sections!" and immediately the whole space-time imagery was clear, the idea of intersecting axes, which is a bit of a pun, of course, on dS canon. I decided to pare things down to 100 words on each side, because that way I could avoid working with the actual narrative events, and just focus on the single, shining idea at the heart of the story.
I started each section with Nos's words, and pulled a lot of imagery (as well as cadence and style) directly from her story. I think the only real thematic difference is tying it together with the last sentence on Fraser's side, which in retrospect, maybe I should have finished with some nod to her "history" line, and then used my sentence as a last line spanning both columns, mirroring the title. But I wanted a perfect 100+100 words!
I think this is a really good story, and I'm very proud of it; but I also know that I would not have and could not have written it without the inspiration of nos4a2no9's original.
Wilby Wonderful: Lifeline (The Louder Than Words Remix), Buddy gen, from nos4a2no9's original story Quiet in Drowning
When I got my assignment, this was the first story that sprung to mind, and this was the first remix I wrote for this challenge. I beta-read this story, and so I felt as though I knew it intimately. The slight hint of Duck/Buddy bothered me a bit (this is one pairing that weirds me out a little) and so I had thought about Buddy a lot in the beta process, trying to decide if his behavior overall made sense to me. (Nos correctly guessed I'd written this, which didn't surprise me at all, because so many of the things I said in beta came out in this drabble.)
This is the first type of remix story; I treat Nos's story as the truth of what happened. This is a perfect kind of story to remix this way, because the character whose POV I chose is not actually present for most of the events of the story, and therefore I could avoid the dreaded rehash. Plus, I adore Nos's narrative of events: it's painful and wrenching and visceral. The big trick for this story, for me, was to convey the sense of what Buddy knows about what's happened, and the sympathy and understanding he shows in the last scene of Nos's story, in just a drabble's worth of words. Especially since I felt the need to use up the first eight by using her first line, verbatim, to ground the story within hers, and because I wanted to use the ending to bring the story back home to Buddy, to make it about him. It took a lot of rewriting and refining, but I'm pleased with the way it came out.
due South: Temptation (The Iambic Remix), RayK/Fraser, from malnpudl's original story Evidence
I wrote a sonnet! Which drove me nuts, but I'm mostly happy with it - it comes in second, just behind Space and Time. In fact, trying to come up with something of malnpudl's to remix was driving me nuts. I started out playing with Duty Calls (in which Ray molests Fraser while he's at work) but got nowhere after three different false starts. I really wanted to write something awesome for Mal, 'cause I love her so much. I wandered through her stories and found Evidence, and - I'm not sure what it was. Maybe just the lovely, luscious imagery. But it made me think, hey, wouldn't it be cool if...?
This is the second type of remix story, because there was no way I could possibly get the whole plot of Mal's story in there. So I ditched the whole aspect of the ice cream being evidence, of Fraser holding back, of Ray admitting his sensual pleasure in the way his bracelet slides on his skin (mmm) and just went for the central image that stuck in my mind, the image I think of when I think of her story: Fraser licking melted ice cream from Ray's wrist, his tongue flicking around the beads of the bracelet. YUM, right? And that's what I made into a poem.
I love sonnets. In particular, I love what is called the Pushkin (or Onegin) sonnet, which is iambic tetrameter with the somewhat odd rhyme scheme aBaBccDDeFFeGG, where lower-case letters represent feminine rhymes (like stronger/longer) and upper-case represent masculine rhymes (like skin/sin). It's cool because each quatrain has a different pattern of rhymes. Um, I didn't hold strictly to this verse form, because tetrameter's kind of sing-songy and I wanted the extra syllables of pentameter, and I kind of punted on the masculine/feminine rhymes because I got stuck. But I still adore this rhyme scheme. And although one of its advantages for story-telling (it was devised for Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, and Vikram Seth used it for his novel Golden Gate (which I liked except I thought the ending sucked)) is that it can be parsed in a variety of ways, I kept the classical structure of the quatrains setting a problem, describing it more fully, a thematic turn, and then a summary couplet.
In summary, this was a pain in the ass to write, and also incredibly fun to write. It made me want to run a "remixthesonnet" fest in which participants must remix their stories into sonnets. Okay, maybe not. :-)
SGA: Iced (The Competitive Remix), John and Rodney gen, from malnpudl's original untitled double drabble
Turning 200 words into 200 different words was an interesting challenge. I wanted to do a second story for Mal, and I wanted to do a different fandom. All her SGA stories came from a McShep drabble tree, so they were all tiny. Because there's special recognition for preserving the length of the story, I decided I wanted to try that.
And it wasn't easy. Unlike distilling a longer story into a drabble or double-drabble, a story that's already that length already tells the core story. What I ended up doing was taking the ficlet that I could see with a different punchline and writing it that way. So it's a type 2 story, built around the core idea "a winter storm inspires Rodney to bring hockey to Atlantis," sharing a few dialogue elements, but taking it in a slightly different direction so I could use my punchline instead.
The other thing I want to say about this one is that as the original ficlet was written to use a line from a previous ficlet in the drabble tree, I felt it important to preserve that line. One of my favorite books is Douglas Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau de Marot, in which he discusses translation of poetry, and the question of: what is important to preserve? The meter? The rhyme? The literal meaning? Before I read his book, I believed that the best translation was the most literal one, but now I understand translation much better, I think, and I agree that with e.g. poetry, structure may trump literal word meanings. So because the original ficlet was written around a specific line, my "translation" needed to also use that line.
Firefly: Fowl Balls (The Ain't Nobody Here But Us Remix), Jayne gen, from lyrstzha's original story Fowl Tempered
I thought this would be an easy way to write in a new fandom. Hah. Firefly has such distinct voices and such an idiosyncratic style that even starting with someone else's story, it was still really difficult.
I picked this story for several reasons. Animal transformation is a well-worn trope in SGA (to the point that it has become, for me, boring cliche), but seeing it in Firefly amused me greatly. The original was a fun story, and I could see that turning it around would yield just as much humor. And I like Jayne, and because I recently recced (and read about a zillion times, because I loved it!) Jayne Eyre, I felt as though I had a better handle on him than on any other character.
This is pretty much the first type of remix, although I stayed faithful to the spirit rather than the letter of the dialogue. I figure, a chicken ain't exactly your reliable narrator, if you know what I mean. And also, I am absurdly happy with the sly pun of the title, plus the perfect scansion of the funky remix subtitle that popped into my head.
Anyway, I think all my stories achieved what I consider to be my personal remix goal: they all stand alone, and they all can be read alongside the original without being simple rehashery. (Okay, the last one is a sequel to another story, and so it doesn't precisely stand alone unless you start from the premise that for reasons not explored at this juncture, Jayne is a rooster :-)
Finally, although I made only three guesses as to who remixed what, I was right about all of them. Go me!