Saturday, September 17, 2011

Music While Writing, 2nd Playlist

Here's another playlist I put together for myself, ten songs fitting the mood of:


Sadness, loss, separation:

The pitch the singer uses really pulls at my heart. Even without knowing the story behind the song or the show, I think this song can really evoke longing and loneliness.
This song works with both lyrical content and melody. Heather's voice and pitch really moves me. The final verse is extremely moving, and has inspired a lot of scenes for me while writing.
Another of Heather's songs, from the Arthurian mythos. The tone of the song doesn't quite inspire melancholy, but there's one point in the song that nailed it into my playlist: “It was white as angel's raiments, but when feebly he begged her, fairest Blanchemaine softly told him, 'Tis of Night'.” The song builds into this crescendo of hope and love and overcoming a great trial, only to be stabbed in the heart with that simple phrase from the jealous wife.
This could probably fit into the Love category, as well, and another of Vienna's songs will be there. But the tone of this song really draws up more lonely images, like someone trying to cope with being alone.
Most anyone who knows this song would put this on a list of sad songs. For good reason, too, as it has the perfect tone and lyrics to drum up very sad, lonely emotions and images. I've used this song many, many times to hone in that feeling.
I absolutely love Train, and the majority of their songs are so fun and upbeat, but this song, after I paid attention to the lyrics, created such a sad image in my head. Sung in the POV of a man who's lost his wife, remembering the good times and what it's like to move on.
Another favorite band, the lead singer having one of my favorite voices in rock. Their ballads are my absolute favorite, and this song never fails to evoke some melancholy emotions.
This movie was one of the first times I learned about orphans and orphanages as a little kid. There is a very soft and sad tone to much of the movie, and both of these songs drum up some nostalgic emotions connected to the film. Their tone and the pitch of the singer's voice should make it relate-able whether you've seen it or not.
I'd never heard this song before Britain's Got Talent. I loved it then, but after finding this version, the original version, I fell even deeper in love with it. The popularized version cuts out what became my favorite verse, so I just have to go with this version. I also think Ruthie's emotional performance, being trained in theater, evokes a stronger response in me.
This is well done in both English and Japanese, and listening to the English lyrics really emphasizes why it's such a sad song. But by listening to the Japanese, I'm able to focus on the tone and melody of the song and embrace the raw emotion it drums up.
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Thursday, September 15, 2011

What Works for Me Might Work for You

Music while Writing

Who doesn't play music while they're trying to write or draw? When you ask an artist what really helps them find inspiration, the most common answer has to be listening to music. There are any number of reasons as to why that is, but there's no doubt that it's a powerful tool when trying to be creative.

For me, music helps keep my mind relaxed. Even when I was a kid, I couldn't do homework without music playing or the tv going in the background because my mind would wander and I wouldn't be able to concentrate on what I was doing. So, by having something in the background for my mind to focus on, it would keep my thoughts from wandering. It's the same when I'm writing or drawing; without the background noise, I get distracted and start thinking about other things, things that usually lead me to looking something up on the computer, which leads to clicking other links, which takes me away from what I'm doing for hours at a time.

How can someone take the power of music one step further? Rather than just use any random music or your favorite song to find inspiration, I propose we create a series of playlists. Have a really sad, emotional scene to write? Pull up a playlist with appropriate songs, songs that tug at your heart strings or make you tear up, something that evokes the emotion in you that you're trying to convey to others. The same goes for a thrilling action scene, a love scene, a joyful reunion, or bursts of anger.

Don't let those playlists get stale, either. If one of the songs on the list just doesn't evoke anything in you anymore, can it and replace it with something new and fresh. I know my music tastes rotate, getting hooked on a song or set of songs for a few weeks, then on to a new set the next, to another new, until I come back around to that first set and find meaning in them again.

I've set up playlists for myself to use for a variety of different emotions or scenes; I'll list the first one here, then follow up with one more each day until I run out. It's comprehensive, with a brief explanation after each song for why I chose it, so I don't want to bog you down with all of them at once. There are ten songs in each list, expressing my own personal tastes in music, and all drawn just from my YouTube favorites list.

A lot of the songs I chose based on their tone and not necessarily the content of their lyrics. Melody plays a lot with my own emotions, allowing me to draw not only from English pop songs, but from classical music and foreign music, as well. Not all of these songs will work for everyone in the playlist I've chosen. Everyone's emotions work differently; this is merely an example, illustrating the range each playlist could have.

To start off, we'll go with something fun.


Happiness, joy, victory:
Who can listen to this and not smile and start tapping their foot? Two friends just having a good time; it's easy to be happy and express happiness while listening to this short little piece. Setting it to repeat while you try to work out a particular scene may be worthwhile.
I know, I know; I just love Heather's voice. This song has always seemed very uplifting to me, while not being overly joyous. It has a 'coming home victorious from war' feel to it.
I absolutely love Takada's voice, and the whole tone of this song is very victorious and happy. She sings with so much power and purpose that it pulls me into the music and I feel energized and ready to keep writing.
Another song that just screams energy and joy. 'I'm Alive' no matter what you say, and I'm happy to still be here. It's a great, high-energy song that lifts the spirits.
Another feel-good song with a different tone. Fell in love with this the first time I heard it.
These guys will probably be up here again later, too. This song is just so much FUN, that I can't help sticking it on this list. I just want to dance every time I hear it, and again it inspires the feel-good happy emotions I need when writing a happy and joyous scene.
Another upbeat, foot-tapping song that always makes me smile. The show is a favorite for both myself and my boyfriend, so it holds some nostalgic and sentimental quality as well. Plus, who doesn't love a touch of bagpipes in all the right places?
  • Through Heaven's Eyes, from the Prince of Egypt - http://youtu.be/s2Ow2yPkAbM
I first heard this song in high school upon seeing the movie for the first time, and was forever captivated by the melody and instrumentals. The lyrics themselves don't mean too much to me, if they did this would lean more towards the romance category, but just for the melody it always gets me energized.
I have to admit I never looked up what this song was about, and probably never will. All I know is that it put a smile on my face the first time I listened to it and has never stopped doing just that. I love this song, and its high energy wakes me up when I'm starting to feel sluggish.
There's much more to this song in the Japanese, but I have loved the english version ever since following Kenshin on Toonami back in high school. I would sit on the edge of the coffee table as soon as it came on and just start belting out the theme at the top of my lungs. What's not to love about this great little song?

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Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Why Purple Prosers Don't Make Good Novelists

For those of you who don't know who the Purple Prosers are, you probably weren't a roleplayer ten years ago. I first encountered them a few years after I started roleplaying in AOL chatrooms. I joined during the heyday for chat rp, where people would actually play in the public rooms instead of just standing around making a fuss or talking about nothing. There was one room in particular everyone went to find someone new to play with, simply known as the Tavern. This was the first room the Purple Prosers hijacked.

Always writing in purple (for whatever reason, not like they would tell you) these people would flaunt their expansive vocabularies, or at least work the heck out of dictionary.com. What would take you or I ten words to get across, they had to do it in twenty-five. It wasn't good enough to say 'She made her way to the bar', they had to say 'Delicately placing one pedicured foot in front of the other, she silently sauntered between the other patrons through the slumberous, smokey tavern to reach the sticky walnut bar.' And that's putting it lightly.

They became annoying to the regulars for two reasons: Their expansive posts would instantly flood the screens and knock anyone else's posts off into oblivion before anyone could reply, and they would often refuse to play with anyone who couldn't match their post length. Character doesn't have anything to say or do in your post? Well, start talking about other useless things or else you're getting the boot. Where these people came from or what they were thinking I don't know. Where they wound up, well, I can tell you one thing: They're not writers.

Writing isn't an exercise in showing off your vocabulary. You're trying to tell a story efficiently and accurately to your reader. You can't do this if they're getting bored by your three paragraphs on how your character eats soup. What's more, Purple Prosers very often used words that would have some of the most well-read people scratching their heads. Long descriptions or not, if you're using words that the general populace don't recognize, then they're not going to want to read your book. No one likes to feel stupid. This is why normal people don't read legal documents, or medical textbooks.

This is the reason why I tend to hate those 'Word of the Day' apps. When are you ever going to use those words? And when is anyone going to know what you're talking about when you do? Now, I'm not saying we dumb down everything we say and use only the most basic words in what we write. There are a lot of rarely-used words that people easily recognize in context. But if you're making your readers pull out a dictionary in order to read your book, there's a problem.

One of the main reasons the Purple Prosers will never be writers, big words aside, is the word count. Giant books are not uncommon or unliked anymore; Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, they're all huge books that people are devouring. The difference between J.K. Rowling and a Purple Proser, however, is that Harry Potter isn't a thousand pages because she's using twenty words when she only needs five. She genuinely has a long story to tell and she does so efficiently. It's because of that efficiency that people read it. The pace of the story moves quickly, and the things she does sit and describe are things we enjoy reading about, such as the Quidditch games.

So, people, please. You may genuinely have a large, expansive vocabulary that makes you great at Scrabble. But read a few lines of your novel to your friends; if they sit there and stare blankly at you, you've got a very Purple problem that may hold you back in your writing career.
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Friday, September 2, 2011

How to Write a Great Query Letter

     So you want to be a writer. A published one, specifically. How do you go about it?

     To get published, you have to be able to write a good query letter. This is a letter you'll send to a publisher telling them about your novel, and about yourself. It's basically a resume for writers. A lot of writers think this is the first step to becoming a published writer. They come up with a great novel idea, write up a query, and send it to some publishers hoping to sign a deal and get paid while they're writing. This, however, is pure fantasy for the average writer. If you're Stephen King, or James Patterson, of course a publisher will pay you to write another book, because they know they're going to make an amazing return on their investment. But how many companies do you think will pay Joe Schmoe who's never published a book in his life? Who's going to bet on a pony with no stats?

     That means your first step is to write your novel. You might be able to get away with a first or second draft, but more often than not you're going to want to have a near-finished product by the time you approach a company to publish. We writers are fickle creatures; how many movies or tv shows reveal the procrastinating nature of writers? Publishing companies can't stick their necks out on the line for unproven writers. So, prove yourself and your work to them by giving them a finished product by which to judge you.

     Alright, so, novel's done, now what? Now comes the query letter. The typical format for a query letter involves a brief paragraph about yourself, a few sentences saying who you are, where you're from, how long you've been writing, any schooling. Following that should be a concise, thrilling, exciting synopsis of your novel. Don't focus so much on back story or setting things up. You should be able to give the setting, time period, and basic back story in one or two sentences. The publisher will get the full back story when they read the book. Instead, dive right in to the juicy parts.

     The problem I've found while reading most query letters is that authors seem to treat them like teasers to the general public. You try not to give too much away in order to keep the big twists a surprise. Well, the publisher doesn't care about reading your spoilers. They WANT your spoilers. They want to know what they're getting in to, and they want to be impressed with your work. Does your book have a killer twist that could make it Thriller of the year? Don't hold back, tell them! Is your character revolutionary because of some trait or event that's meant to be a surprise within the book? This is your chance to prove to them that your book is something special. Don't squander that chance by being coy. Let it all out.

     The summary of your novel shouldn't last more than a few paragraphs, one page at the most. You're not writing them an outline of your novel, you're just throwing them the juicy bits, those parts of your story that you're madly in love. It may take some rewriting over and over, to boil down a 300 page novel to one page, but this is worth it. The editors reading these queries likely go through dozens each day, and if they don't like what they see within the first page, they're not going to keep reading your three or four page summary. Hook them right away, and keep their attention to the end, with another hook at the end to entice them to contact you for more. Think back to the best trailers for movies you ever saw, the first thing they showed you, and the last. What about them made you want to see the movie from that day on? Emulate that for your query letter.

     Lastly, finish up with a paragraph describing the stats of the novel. What genre is it, how many words, is it finished (tell them! It's important!), is it a stand alone or are there plans for sequels or a series? If there are plans for future installments, it's a good idea to tell them a little bit about what you have planned. If the novel you're sending them is a complete story with or without the sequels, that's a good thing to tell them, as well. Publishers don't like risks if they can help it.

     So, go ahead and give it a try. Even if you haven't finished your novel yet, it's a good idea to write up some mock query letters. There's a great blog - Query Shark - that helps writers make better query letters. They even have a list of letters they helped with that were picked up by publishers. Reading over some of their edits on other queries could certainly prove useful to making your own even better.
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Tuesday, August 30, 2011

The Effects of txt spk on this Generation's Literacy

      I was around twelve when my family first got AOL and we had internet in the house for the first time. I was baffled by the chat language, and it took a few months of sheepishly asking 'what does that mean?' before I started to get a handle on it. In those days, though, it seemed like every other day a new bit of chat slang entered the lexicon. I was a hunt-and-peck typer back then, as are most people unless they took their typing class in high school seriously. Being that way made it difficult to keep up in a chatroom with people who were abbreviating every other word, so, I joined the masses in practicing poor-man's stenography.
      I was at the age when I even thought it was cool to be able to type that way. I distinctly remember admonishing my dad for being so punctual in his emails to me. I taught him some of the slang and told him he didn't have to capitalize the appropriate letters or be so formal with his punctuation. Funny how only a few years later, when my opinion of chat speak changed, I found his relaxed, unpunctuated emails to be grating and irritating.
      In those days, chat speak was mostly invented out of laziness. No one wanted to learn to type faster or wait around for those slow typers to finish their thoughts, so abbreviations and slang ran rampant. These days, with the dawn of Twitter and the popularity of texting over the phone, the limited number of characters one is allowed to send has made chat speak, or now text speak, imperative. The problem? Most people can't seem to understand there's a time not to abbreviate. It has affected the average person's ability to write or type intelligently, and has limited our vocabulary to a more condensed lexicon of everyday words.
      This, of course, isn't true across the board. There are still some of us out there who will spell out 'tomorrow' or 'see you later'. A few people know the difference between an email between friends and a resume for work. But more and more it's becoming apparent that the two areas of life are blending together in the minds of the young. Is it laziness? Or is it pure and simple illiteracy? If aspiring writers don't know the difference between 'to' and 'too', what chance does the layman have?
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Saturday, August 27, 2011

A(n in)Formal Introduction

     I've loved to read ever since I was a very small child. I had that iconic childhood of my mom reading me bedtime stories every night. Mother Goose, Aesop, Disney Classics; my shelves were filled with all of the childhood staples. In first grade, Mr. Simone, a teacher I had the biggest, most blatant little-girl crush oh, started reading books to us on Fridays. One book in particular grabbed my imagination: the Boxcar Children. It was a children's chapter book series chronicling four orphaned siblings as they solved mysteries of all sorts. I read the series all the way through elementary school, and still have the volumes I collected. I devoured books from then on, joining book clubs and children's magazines, spending hours each week at the library. But by middle school books like the Saddle Club or the Boxcar Children weren't enough.
     I began to pay attention to what my mom read, asking her what was happening in the books while she was reading them. I would spend hours flipping through her extensive fantasy and science fiction collection, and had my imagination captured again by the Hobbit, and the Dark Elf Trilogy. But, in those days, writing wasn't all that interesting to me. I had a vivid imagination, but I exercised it while playing outside with my friends, telling elaborate, heart-throbbing stories that turned my little Baltimore suburb into Middle Earth or the Wild West.
     I was always very active as a kid. I played sports with the boys, loved to get dirty, the typical tomboy. I had dreams of going into the Air Force like my dad, with my sights set on NASA. I did karate, and even worked on a horse ranch the summer before high school. At the end of that summer, I went on a riding trip with a bunch of other girls for a week. The first night, I was playing around with one of the other girls who did karate, teaching her a thing or two I'd learned in movies. She wasn't the greatest student, and a kick that was meant to sweep my legs instead dislocated my knee. It righted itself as I fell, and neither I nor the adults could see that anything was wrong, so they let me make the decision to stay and ride.
     That decision changed my life.
     I destroyed my knee during that trip and throughout the rest of my childhood, continually dislocating the knee. In the process, as anyone with a knee injury will tell you, my other knee deteriorated as well. I could no longer run or play sports, and chronic pain left me not wanting to do very much outside.
     It was around that time that my parents bought AOL, and we had internet in the house for the first time. I discovered roleplaying, and before long I'd found a new channel for my bottled up imagination. I roleplayed every second I could, and before long characters began to come to life. Soon enough I was writing on and offline, sharing the stories with anyone who would read them and enjoying every reaction they got. It was my senior year in high school that did it for me. In our English class, we were told to write a dialogue to perform in front of the class. For extra credit, I did a monologue by myself. After finishing the performance, I was met with a heavy silence as the other kids gaped and stared at me. Just when I was starting to get nervous, they broke out into applause, one girl telling me she got goosebumps.
     That's when I knew I had to write.
     I dove headfirst into the study of language and how to write fiction. I was fortunate to meet some published writers who mentored me and who I still look up to. I continued to devour any book I could get my hands on, learning various styles of storytelling in various genres. I continued to roleplay, as well, painting elaborate stories with other novice writers. It was for these people that I learned to be a better writer; if they weren't enjoying the story I was creating, then they weren't going to keep playing.
     Energized by the companionship of another dedicated writer, I'm diving into my own writing, in the hopes of polishing my skills into something worth putting on display. This blog will, hopefully, be a roadmap for those who follow my blazed path, detours and setbacks clearly marked so you don't make the same mistakes I do.
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