rainbowlounge | Writers' Salon!

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writer's salon

Writers' Salon!

All right, guys, let's get this started.

This is a post for members to post their burning questions to each other. They can be simple, like "when is Character X's birthday," or not so simple "how would you define the relationship between Character X and Character Y?" If there's a story you want that author to talk about, throw in the title (and some points you'd like covered!) and if said author's willing, they can write their answer in a separate post, since I have no idea what the comment word limits are.

Here's how it'll work: an author who's up for answering questions/writing commentaries about stories will leave their name in a comment. Readers who want to ask questions or request stories reply to that comment, and hopefully we'll have some good conversations going!

If you guys request stories, it may be best if you limit them to

rainbowfic for the time being, unless the story you've got archived outside the comm is in a public entry.

EDIT: If it's not already obvious, you can ask authors more than one question in however many comments you like. The point is to have a discussion, and it wouldn't be very lively if it stopped at one question per author! Just give the author a chance to finish answering your previous questions, of course.

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And I will tell you some /things/.

I would love to hear the creation process behind Pip and Roa.

Pip? Pip's easy.

Hah. I'll keep telling myself that. You may want to reference BB's question: http://rainbowlounge.dreamwidth.org/21077.html?thread=952149#cmt952149

Pip aspect one: the creepy little girl's a trope of the trashy action show genre. Every trope I add, I got to play with, so I put that one in my shopping basket as soon as I started outlining.

Pip aspect two: I actually did that the first time I dealt with the assassins around a table idea. So, if I was going back to that, it felt like she needed to be there. When it comes to telepaths- which I adore dealing with in prose -they're more fun in groups. Now, historically I've done siblings or odd relationships that it takes goddamn telepaths to parse in the first place. I had never done a parent and child. So, a certain portion of her personality evolved as a compare/contrast with Zephyr. In fact, they're creepily self-aware in that regard.

Now, honest to crap I was not trying to torture Zephyr with how Pip came to be. It looks that way from certain outside perspectives, but really, the first thing I saw them do was the scene at the window in "When The Dogs Do Find Her". And it was just- how did they come to that? Which I answered with a little more brutality than I expected of myself given that I'm a proponent of telepaths being the ones who mess with other people, not vice versa.

Pip aspect three: there's something she says eventually that was the first thing I heard her say ever. I don't talk to my characters, but I can do something that's almost like watching them on film. And this just threw me so hard. It's a way off yet, but it made me take this mental step back. Kid, who are you and WTF are you doing?

And damn right I am pointing it out to you.

Good lord, you played with the creepy child thing a great deal, then--Pip has that otherworldly sense about her, even without her backstory, but at first glance she really doesn't seem all that scary. Every time I think of her I think of Jolly Ranchers and bright T-shirts, like an every day little girl, just with a lil' something special.

I can't wait to see what she says, unless it's already been written and I didn't catch it.

Hey, if you're going to have a trope, you might as well mess with it a bit. Or, a lot.

Case in point (know you totally didn't ask).

In any other assassin yarn, Duclos is a straight guy. Tian's a head shorter than her and wears high heels and serves coffee on demand.

The line hasn't come about yet. But, it will. It needs to.

Oooh, interesting to know! Duclos is an interesting lady herself (I still think of her, looking at that shawl, but only because I don't know of anyone else that might wear it).

'I don't talk to my characters, but I can do something that's almost like watching them on film.'

This is fascinating to me, because I do BOTH. When I'm writing, I'm essentially watching the story on film and writing it down; I don't necessarily know what the characters are thinking or why they do what they do, first off, and because I don't "hear" the dialogue very clearly I don't always get lines in the right places. I'll often have to rewind the film and watch a pivotal point two or three times. Sometimes there's also an element of... choose-your-own-adventure; the story will go in different directions depending on what dialogue I put in, and I have to pick the option that's most in character to keep it on track.

But I also can talk to my characters, and when they throw me off track like you mention, I often HAVE to in order to get stuff to make sense. I'm kind of curious how you work out tricky scenes without that? *interested face* Is it just... like getting to know a fandom character, you have to watch more of their "canon" inside your head and see how it goes?

When I'm writing, I'm essentially watching the story on film and writing it down; I don't necessarily know what the characters are thinking or why they do what they do...

OMG I have been able to do this since I was about six. Are you the first other person I've met? Well, no. But it's been a long time and you're the first one I know of at RBF. Next, you're going to tell me you pace too (although, my pacing is somewhat compulsive and I wouldn't wish that aspect on you).

Everything in my head is animated- second generation otaku here -I should mention and I generally have access to nonvisual sensory input as well, which is part of the reason I tend to overdo it with such vengeance.

More to the point...

A lot of tricky or important scenes require a certain degree of what you could call editorial intervention. Say, I have to sit there and think: "If I do X, what Ys will open up and which ones will run screaming to the hills?" Deciding between Ys comes down to equal parts of what would further the point of the story and what I want to do. Concerning the former, JoR has been problematic because the point shifted while the story was in production. The latter's why I'm so interested in other people who do converse with their characters. I can only just barely fathom having that happen and it sounds pretty damn spooky, honestly. Getting that final say yanked away by some lippy little bastard from the ethers.

Anyway, maybe that's similar to your chose your own adventure situation in a way.

The rest of how I manage that comes from my somewhat eccentric manner of drafting dialogue. Yes, I can hear conversations, but let's suppose my mic isn't working and I don't always get everything that's said. Time to improvise/synthesize/do odd stuff. It's not uncommon for me to have conversations from pivotal moments sitting around getting poked for weeks. And when I write conversations regardless, they always start out looking like this. One of my drafts from my slush box saved wrong. These do not survive the writing process in this form.

She a good doc?
Yes. She took excellent care of the mission and of me. You really should have given her the, ah. *looks at the sideboard* Festive consumables.
Who says I didn't? Which one are ya gonna knock back first?
I'm trying not to think about that until I'm allowed to drink. By which I mean the almond sake.
Yuck! That one's all yours, far as I'm concerned.
I really was trying to cut back at some point.
Bein' sober's for quitters. [-] OK, so like. Text me if ya need anything. Books, blow, Piers Anthony. 's all good. Know ya totally /won't/, but hey, still gotta offer.
*nods and isn't quite looking at her*
Comes over and stands all close, her hands behind her back, gets all whispery. "What'dya want?"

Or, worse than that, if they start off in my handwritten notebook, they have tildes instead of line breaks. But, that is basically a script. When the conversations look like this, it's easier to refine the speech patterns, regulate how much is said, change the tone- all that good stuff. So, a lot of the messing around part of tricky scenes comes in that form. Say, "Everything Has A Word" that I just ran. It wasn't just the Siebenkas and Pip conversation that took five drafts. I was over and over and over the dialogue in that. That bit changes everything. It had to be dealt with just so.

Finally, I'm not averse to heaving tracts of prose out the window if I don't like how a scene is progressing.

Roa was always supposed to be the quiet, sweet one the readers didn't expect to be any good at her job. In fact, the first Roa wasn't.

In the original under the bed draft, she was also a mathematician and a masochist who did her best thought experiments while tied up. She didn't do so much of the killing.

Now, another interesting thing. Jealous of Roses starts at a different place in time than I first thought of. Originally, it began when Vier showed up and the introduction was him trying to grope his way around the manor. And here you are going "Who the devil is Vier?"

Not a very good person to narrate introductions, it turns out. Is his perspective valid and interesting? I hope it will be. But it isn't big on /why/ anything happens. So, I decided to backtrack a bit and set up the manor a bit more so the audience could have some dramatic irony when he showed up. They would know what was up. So, they needed to hear from characters who cared about /why/ and rather a lot.

And because of that- it is damn hard to up and shove the audience into the perspective of someone who mentally plots bell curves while hanging upside down. Plus, I started to feel that if I was going to have more women around, damnit, they were going to actually kill people and it was going to be awesome.

Enter the pink switchblade. Who dares pluck up such a thing and be terrifying with it?

Really, she is the pink switchblade, probably on more of a level than the other characters are their weapons. She's charming and deadly and really kind of out of place in the city where she lives.

I wanted her to be an outsider, but a curious outsider.

Maybe that's why I love her; I think out of the courtiers, she lacks that city polish, but there's that natural instinct of hers that is just lovely to behold whenever she takes up the page. And I love the idea of the pink switchblade, because if anyone would be able to take it and make it formidable, it would be Roa.

*blushing all over the plaaaaaaaaaaace*

She was never as engineered as some of the rest of the cast, I don't think. Maybe she didn't run off into the wild, blue yonder like Seb but... more went down an unfamiliar street to see what was there.

I think Imma bump up the last Lawn Green so we can get some more of her. I'm starting to miss her myself.

She is that sort of awesome in that when reading, your eye is immediately drawn to her, just for being the pink switchblade. I almost want to picture her as a relative of Revolutionary Girl Utena's Anthy, without any dark past.

Fun fact! I am almost finished showing Utena to one of my writing buddies. She shrieked at it like I did once upon a time. It made me so nostalgic for the first time I saw it.

I would be flattered to death if you pictured Roa as Anthy.

Roa's past is... complicated. Not that dark by a long shot.

I'm waiting until winter to write it because it's mostly set on Meloe and I want to think about beaches when it's cold out.

IR shallow riter.

I just wanna know where Jealous of Roses CAME from. I mean, it's so... like nothing I've ever read before, and I love it. How did it arrive in your head?

I'm going to tell you. I don't care how embarrassing it isssssss.

I love trashy action anime. It's not on my interests lists as a joke. I genuinely love it. I have two favorites.

/Black Lagoon/ which involves people dancing on boats while killing each other and gets so meta I don't get some of the jokes and I've seen the whole thing through about five times.

And /Weiss Kreuz/ which is one of the worst things ever put on film. I mean, there is NOTHING right with that show. It was a vanity project for a voice actor. And it's just... you could not be that bad on purpose if you tried. Ever.

Here's the thing. I am 50% responsible for one of the longest Weiss Kreuz fanfics ever written. Why's a long story in and of itself. Short version: I sublimate my romantic feelings in odd ways.

I had more fun doing that than I had writing anything else ever in my life. Because you know what I wrote? Pages and pages of the characters, oh, say, sitting around the table and eating chocolate while chit-chatting about how to kill each other. Also not a joke. I will send you the scene if you want it.

They never got much characterization on screen. I had to get them into some downtime to establish the personalities they didn't have. Also, I thought it was funny.

Afterwards, I tried for years to make myself not want to write that anymore. I was going to be a serious writer! Really! Although, every so often, I would scratch bits of assassiny outlines and then hide them under my bed in shame.

/Jealous of Roses/ comes from one of those outlines. But, it also has influence from /Black Lagoon/. See, I cry at the end of /Second Barrage/. Every time. I honestly wonder if the story arc concluded there isn't some sort of splodey killy commentary on the nature of love. Not spoiling but it's moving in the strangest way.

And also JoR is meta as all getout. There are references to late 90's action anime through the whole damn thing, beyond the fact, it's identifiable as Weiss Kreuz if you know about how I set up and maintain parodies/pastiches/being a jerk. Step one is start gender swapping. Somewhat disappointed to live in a society where that works so damn well, but anyway.

The main cast would be Schwartz. You know, the bad guys who had a shot in hell at being interesting. And managed to hot the neighbors' car instead.

I am still friends with people who read the fanfic in question, and when I send them JoR installments, it's with the note: "Warning: Vaginas" (the only women in Weiss Kruez are canon fodder)

Siebenkas has no equivalent character. He does however have his own goddamn essay: http://rainbowlounge.dreamwidth.org/20490.html because... I really have no idea the hell he's doing sometimes.

OH my friend Kaitlin almost showed me Black Lagoon yesterday, but I got distracted by SciFi's Alice. Next time I go to her house I will get her to show it to me because it sounds FAB. And I would love to see that scene. In fact I think you should post that scene. Because I would LOVE to see how Zephyr and Pip would murder everyone else sekritly. With parrots.

And Seb's just all, "uh-huh. Sure. You'll just wake up dead one morning see if you don't."

Seb is doing his own thing. I've had characters do that (JOY) and I just... just go with it. Seriously. Let them do it, it makes your life better.

Quick note about /Black Lagoon/. There's some, ah, forcible strip-bowling in /Second Barrage/. And the OVA (Roberta's Blood Trail): keep in mind for a second I'm ambivalent come warnings when I say this but TRIGGER WARNING.

It hurts to watch, but it's good. (And the director started dicking with the plotline from the manga so the cannon is debatable at this point but ANYWAY...)

Also I have to be a snob and suggest subtitles. The script for the dub is inaccurate to the point of causing confusion.

Ahem. Fangirl mode: disengaged.

I know right where the sitting around the table scene is. Do you want an intro for it or should I just send it as is for maximum surprise? Erm, it's also about ten years old >_>;.

I'm really REALLY not used to characters doing that at all. It's unnerving at times, but it's oddly endearing too. I'm trying to get used to it, I swears.

I generally dislike dubs; the only one I prefer to the subbed version is Howl's Moving Castle and that's because the male lead doesn't quiiiiiite understand that Howl is a giant drama queen and plays him straight at inopportune moments (green slime, anyone?)

ANYTHING. Whatever you choose.

I'm interested in some back story. How did the courtier thing come about? Who was the first lord?

IRL, "courtier" was just an incidental terminology from the outline I fished out from under my bed. I don't recall exactly why I picked that word, just that I did want to use something besides "assassin" on account of the fact courtiers do things besides assassinate. Manor, Lord, Second, Court of the Manor and such all stemmed from having that word around in the first place. So, oddly enough there are no lords without courtiers. I've been operating on the assumption Doc started out as a term of endearment and isn't called that or perhaps even discussed in The Book of Venom.

And speaking of making weird references, The Book of Venom is a real thing, although much different than the one seen in the story. Google it if you want a LOL.

In much the same way there were no people with othersense before there were wights (yep- that's a cannon factoid), there were no lords before any attempt at reconstructing some sort of government, post-war. I know that much. Someone, somewhere got pissed about the way that was handled. Hence, The Book of Venom which discussed ways to subvert the new system.

The Book of Venom and its unsubtle title were somewhat styled after The Book of the Courtier, although the text is quite a bit angrier and goes into digressions about romantic philosophy.

The oldest lord I have named at this point is Lindersfane, who initiated Aetheon (Duclos's father), but she was definitely not the first lord and did not write The Book of Venom. I would also offer the possibility said author was not emself a lord and may not have been serious about the institution ey invented. Then again, ey could have been ABSOLUTELY DEAD SET SERIOUS. No one knows. That person is lost to history.

Personally, I imagine the author as a daydreaming soldier, perhaps a would-be literature major, scratching eir manuscript away in a foxhole and sighing.

Didn't the Book of the Courtier have digressions about romantic philosophy too? I mean, it was a Renaissance text, how could it not.

I meant more 1800's denial of rationalism than how to flirt.

Most people who become lords already know that second thing.

Kildeas: *hiccup*

Most.

Oh, THOSE romantics.

*judgyface*

Re: Sit on the couch with SWL.

shipwreck_light - 2012-07-20 03:47 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Sit on the couch with SWL.

bookblather - 2012-07-21 03:53 (UTC) - Expand

I'm interested in hearing something about your writing process, because from what I can tell, it sounds vastly different from mine, and that's intriguing. Share whatever you'd like.

You bet! But, you so totally have to tell me back then.

You know how in the postscript to The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco was all "I woke up one morning and I felt like killing a monk"?

That's how all of my stories come about. I wake up one morning and I feel like doing a thing. The original impetus for what I'm posting here was "write slice-of-life about assassins". It developed a point beyond this, which doesn't usually happen, but anyway. I like to have a point I can reference in times of directional confusion.

A lot of the plotting takes place in my head. Oh, I'll gather notes and scrawl down ideas, but the mental film of what happens has to stick together or coalesce internally. My "outlines" are these rambly OneNote dumps of conversation fragments and evocative phrases. Inadequate to some standards? Wouldn't doubt it. But, I've written three novels this way. Two of them are pretty OK XD.

Mostly, I let them hang out and do their own things until I need them, so to speak. It's rare I have to rush one along. "Contes Barbares", I basically stuck my head in a bucket of chillout music for an evening and scrawled for a few hours, running with the bare bones idea of "Seb and Roa go on a mission; this is entertaining for about 7K words".

Fun fact: you can usually tell how long I was planning a thing by how many scene cuts it has. More scene cuts = less planning. If I let things sit around, you see, they develop more bridge sequences.

When I sit down to write, I throw all of my notes either onto their own page in OneNote (if it's long) or right in the document file (if it isn't), put them in order and start filling stuff in. Usually, conversations first since I like to poke those a lot. Sometimes, I talk to myself to accomplish dialogue/scare the 'rents.

But, I don't talk to my characters. I think about them about the same way I think about my BJD collection. They're interesting, they're fun, but they're /things/. You can still love a thing all you want, but a thing it remains.

I just sit my butt down and start describing what I've seen happen. My drafts tend to be very impressionistic. Sometimes I can edit that out, sometimes I can't. My goal with prose is that the words themselves should fade away, leaving the audience with as little space between what I've seen and they see now as possible. Stupid words. Get out of there! No, seriously. That's my ideal when it comes to revising.

I don't think you could say I go from beginning to end, it's more a question of sticking the parts I have together.

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Writers' Salon!

Sit on the couch with SWL.

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