The Second Apocalypse
Miscellaneous Chatter => Writing => Topic started by: What Came Before on June 02, 2013, 01:17:10 am
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As there are at least three of us who wish to improve our craft, I thought I'd start this series of weeklies - how exactly punctual I will be, I don't know.
The good thing about the paragraph exercises I was telling sciborg about is that they force you to write, within a constraint, with a limited degree of creative freedom.
I hope my teacher doesn't mind me sharing his wisdom. I'll try and make up some of my own writing weeklies rather than just wholesale jacking his, admittedly loose, curriculum.
Start with endings:
I can remember for years and years of studying writing, takes classes, courses, contests, there has been the prevalent attitude about beginnings. Instructors always seem to latch onto the idea of the perfect opening lines - literally, a hit-list of "great opening sentences" runs through my head thinking about this.
However, my latest teacher turned this assumption on its head and advocated taking our epic one-liners and making them endings.
You'd be amazed the patterns and ideas that suddenly emerge when your scratching your brain to work towards a goal, rather than constantly inventing material to top yourself.
We can discuss more of the class insight after as it comes up but I feel like the experiences speaks volumes.
Cheers.
These two paragraphs are off the top of my dome. The ending sentences are from a common phrase - though, I strangely think I've ripped this version from Neuropath - and from a epigraph I have for a fanfic piece I've been writing for TPB. I figured a week was good to do two, online, for criticism and chatter to develop. We did one a day for homework in my class.
1. Death always comes a stranger.
2. Revelation is simply another flavor of ignorance.
1. The sword point rested against his neck. He turned, feeling numb. His eyes followed the shining length of steel, not bronze, to an armored figure framed by burning sun. The figure removed her helm and dropped it to bloody grasses atop the mound. And he knew that he looked at the mask, that the face from a thousand memories, cast in innumerable molds, were all versions of this lie that was her truth. He found himself on his knees, looking up the folded blade to the face of a woman he'd once loved. The face of a stranger. Death always comes a stranger.
2. The sounds are discordant, reverberating the plaster chipped walls around the Grand Piano. I struggle to move my fingers in time to the relentless metronome but my hands simply fumble across the cold ivory keys, aping the beautiful symbiosis of harmony, of finesse. They seem crabbed strangers, creatures who've come to taunt and remind of yesterday, always yesterday. I pound these arthritic claws across music's yin-yang. My mind is clear. Purposeful. Obsessive. Until they relent. Until the slip and crunch of sounds becomes the flowing voice of melody. Until my fingers, my hands, become the very instrument I am playing. Until I remember that I will forget. Revelation is simply another flavor of ignorance.
Edit: The sounds were discordant -> The sounds are discordant.
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ETA: Both piece are intriguing, I can see them being poignant finales, just hard to gage endings divorced from stories.
I'll confess, both last phrases seem to be going for a Zen koan "paradox", and in both cases I'm confused as to what they are supposed to explain in context of their paragraphs.
I'll think of more to say but also note that "crabbed strangers" feels awkward, as does "music's yin-yang".
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I think the ambiguity of the sentences and context is part of the experience of writing in paragraphs like this. The sentences as endings are automatically meaningless until framed by the paragraph.
Start with endings. Make up your own if you like rather than using mine. The point is to see how your writing is shaped by working towards one particular sentence rather than from one particular sentence.
I'll think of more to say but also note that "crabbed strangers" feels awkward, as does "music's yin-yang".
It's things like this that I think are ultimately important to our discussion. These are actually both parts I spent time toying with different metaphors and analogies. I wanted to suggest rigidity and the music's yin-yang was an unsuccessful play off the colour of a piano's keys.
Thanks, sci. I will take a look at your stories. I've read them through but I feel so ill-prepared to give criticism. You made it seem effortless and tactful, though.
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For some reason it reminds me of how the first star wars movie to come out was actually the 4th. The whole of a new hope was kind of the big ending of three other (at the time, unmade) movies. That also reminds me of how much prior history Earwa seems to have before the PON series. I'm wondering if that's a writing technique as well - a whole lot of story that just isn't shown, it's simply the build up - an ending upon which the latter published books are entirely about.
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Madness - Gotcha. I'm curious, is it supposed to be Death always comes [as] a stranger? (I do think I remember that in the parts of Neuropath I did read.)
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The line from Neuropath is "Death always comes as a stranger," I think.
My teacher did this exercise twice.
And it was the exact colour of her scarf.
Dean felt shame, but resentment more.
It really certainly changed my perspective shaping my words towards a goal rather than this directionless beast raging away from the "great opener."
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You know, for whatever reason, I'm having trouble coming up with anything to fit those endings. :-)
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Lol, the prof picked some of the better ones in the class and read them back to us at the time. Just unbelievable what people come up with. I tried to showcase the versatility of the strategy by doing a "literature"-like paragraph and a "fantasy"-like paragraph.
Another thing he stressed was transmitting only one thing in a paragraph - something I'm terrible at. That topic was actually a number of assignments in their own right but re-contextualizing communicative datum into things like a single emotion, symbol, word, evocation, and spending one paragraph on them transforms your writing.
Start off like that, sciborg. An emotion, an object, or a place, and a sentence. After that it's as simple as the five W's - shit writes itself.
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Okay, thanks for the clarification! Will attempt to incorporate each ending into the next four Story a Day posts (which everyone should feel free to post in).
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Heh, that didn't end up going anywhere. I think I messed up by trying to drive into the last sentence instead of working backwards.
I kind of think...the scarf one isn't some kind of dramatic ending? The fates of mortal lives do not hinge upon it. I'm not sure It's a good idea to try really hard to fit something before it.
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Yeah, I think that one was trying too hard. My first thought was the scarf was the color of blood.
Looking back on it, I think I'd have written a story where the scarf represents something more mundane, perhaps the first gift to an ex after a break up?
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I'm critiquing the end line itself ("And it was the exact colour of her scarf."). Something more meaty like 'But I'd killed too many, there was no turning back.' seems like something to build up to. To me trying to build up to the scarf sentence is trying to add life to something that lacks life? To me it seems a lifeless sentence, not a poignant one. I dunno how to describe it, but some sentences seem to have life in them, then you can add more life to that core in the build up. Others are skeletons - I'm not sure of the purpose of trying to add life to those?
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I think what makes it interesting is that it offers more possibilities than the phrase you mention, because the scarf could be a piece of evidence in a murder, the last gift given in a relationship now worn by an ex, the clue that makes someone realize the time stream hasn't been healed and their enemy is out there, and likely other shit I can't think of at the moment.
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Yeah, I get you can add that life to it.
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You know, there might be a way to connect the scarf's color to justice -as the POV percieves it- without utilizing intimations of physical violence...
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Madness, I'd be interested in seeing what you did for the other two endings you mention.
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Scarf was fantasy and Dean was sci-fi. I'll post them tonight after work. I only have hard copies and I'll need to transcribe them. Thankfully, they're only paragraphs.
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Of course they'd be my longest paragraphs. Definitely near the start of that course.
And it was the exact colour of her scarf.
She had worn his favorite scarf on the day she'd been taken from the courtyard. He imagined it now, the rare silk fabric from Dijan, stained a deep red with dyes from Leban. He knew he forever sullied the image of his love, to think of her as he crept through these sewers, dripping wet with sludge to hunt her captors but he leaned on the sweet memories, felt propped by the weight of their emotion. The scarf was a mark of their power in the Greater World but more importantly, it was the very mark of their love. In a land gouged by ignorance, their love shone for all to see. He thought of this as the first of the bandits, sighted him crouching behind some barrels, yelled across the shallow waters, splashed towards him, an axe brandished at his head. He heard nothing of the cries, had only the colour of her scarf in his soul's eye as he ducked the swinging axe, separated limb from shoulder, torso from legs. Others were approaching him now, one dragging his bride before him, knife piercing her throat, blood lazily falling across her fair neck. She looked at him with horse wild eyes and he tried to reassure her, never breaking her gaze. Two more bandits fell into the brown wastes at their feet, weapons falling in dismembered splashes. And they fell around him. Until one grabbed the shaken girl, cut deeply through her throat. He stretched his arm towards her, saw the sword through his chest before he felt it, and stared numbly as it sank back through the torn flesh. The waters around him turned a deepening red with their blood. And it was the exact colour of her scarf.
This might have actually been our first writing assignment of the course, actually, reading the date on this. Obviously, the critique I got was that clearly this is a number of paragraphs wedged together.
Dean felt shame, but resentment more.
The Training Game was the staple of the Academy. They didn't publicize it but every cadet heard rumors of mortal violence. The officers were always quick to quell such whispers, claiming that the Academy couldn't suffer the negative publicity of such flagrant untruths. Yet as a rising Officer himself, Dean soon learned that the Officers played at dropping hints to the young cadets, murmurs of blown skulls and dripping bodies in the Training Game, sometimes as often as any of the older cadets, who enjoyed toying with their younger counterparts. These thoughts brought to his mind the pulsing flashes of las fire, the fleeting sound of pulsar grenades exploding, and klaxxons whining. The memory was a vague as any childhood moment yet seized him as deeply. He clutched his chest, steadying himself on the bulkhead, breathed deep the sterile air of the Academy dock. Visions of Ian twisted against the edge of a training obstacle, bloody and torn, missing legs below uneven shins. Laughing Officers. And him. The General. Dean felt shame, but resentment more.
Cheers.
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Scarf - I like the action in this one, but time feels disjointed.
I thought she was already dead, because recalling her while running through sewage didn't make sense to me as "sullying" their love. (I'd also avoid using the word love, IMO better to convey this emotion than to state it unless it's in a character's speech or thought process.)
What the Greater World could be is intriguing, though it made me think he might possess some supernatural powers.
The challenge, it seemed for both of us, was to make the scarf relevant enough so that the last line would be poignant. I was thinking relating the color of the scarf to blushing after being insulted, where a male character might insult a female one he finds himself having power over (say as a tutor).
It allows poignancy without sliding into hyperbole, where I think the blood == red scarf may have led us both.
Dean - Another good one. I like the cadence in your writing. Here I couldn't connect the feeling of shame what came before. I think the cruelty of the exercises - kids getting blown up? - is also hard to accept without surrounding context, so that would depend on where this paragraph was placed in a larger work. Maybe Ian shouldn't be have severed limbs, but rather just serious injuries and a sense of failure?
One thing that might help is to interweave the cruelty of the place with the desire to do well. Dean knows its a sham, but he also wants to "win" the "game" and have the accolades that go with "winning". I sort of got this, but more due to the emotions conjured up by the hoop jumping of high school and vague memories of Ender's Game.
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Thanks, sciborg. I considered editing these today when I posted them but thought you should see the uncut versions. However, I'm in need of a break from philosophy reading so I thought I'd come freestyle another one right now.
Sometimes I go there. Sometimes I just sit, listen, holding the last piece of her. Trickling sounds mark the creek's slow passage over small rocks and draw my gaze to the clear waters. She dances into view, twirling, twirling, falling, rolling, laughing in the vibrant grasses. She sits and I watch her raise eyes from the creek to the grassy hilltops and their headdress of trees. She stands and lifts her arms like a preacher before the masses, like Atlas before the Void Sky. I notice the tears then, feel the rising tide within and its streaming across my cheeks. I look down and remember remembering, the Void Sky most of all. And it was the exact colour of her scarf.
As an aside, Greater World and Void Sky are two terms I use a lot in my writing, specifically a novel setting. In reading your comments, I wonder if those associations come through in my writing - it certainly seems to me that I use those terms in order to compensate the lack of context in my own mind, while writing these paragraphs.
Also, I was channeling Ender's game at the time of writing the second paragraph lol. Glad to see it came through. Love that book and series. Speaker for the Dead is probably one of my favorite books ever.
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Changed "Another could one" to "Another good one". Yikes!
I like the new one as well, though I think the "And it was..." last line feels a bit forced here. The "And" I think makes it more of a challenge.
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Ah Madness :) I meant to start a post like this myself but I hadn't be able to get around to it. However, since you posted a few of our original prompts, I'll rummage through what I managed to save and add to the conversation.
For the ending the exact colour as her scarf I had written:
The sun was beginning its long, laborious climb into the midsummer sky above the plain as the calling fire gasped its last dying breath, tossing sparks and ash into the air as it collapsed in on itself. Still she danced on, her feet trampling the long grass as she kept time with the drummer's frantic rhythm, circling and spinning around the now spent fire. Sweat sheened her painted body, the smell of it and the cloying scent of smoke clung to the ceremonial dressings she wore. Her doeskin vest and the scarf wrapped about her arm had long since been soaked through with her ceaseless exertions, the endless revolutions that caused her long skirt to bloom outwards, and the antlered crown upon her head swayed precariously with her every move. In response, a thunderous stampede could be heard in the distance, racing towards them above the plain. Heavy, dark clouds began to coalesce on the horizon, the exact colour as her scarf.
Not one of the ones that managed to make the cut to be shared infront of the class but there it is