tuesday de

[inlovewithwords]

What form of writing have you found best suits telling your character's story? Drabbles, 1-sentence, short-fic, extended epics, OOMs specifically for length/style, scripting, first vs. third person...?

Comments

[bjornwilde]

For me, it depends on the character. Some of mine want me to tell their stories, some don't. I think a lot of it also depends on how much of the character's story is part of canon or if they're a side/support character and not the main focus of the narrative.

Ahsoka: It's interesting, because with her it depends on what age she is. CW-era, I just want to make gestures at canon or allusions to events in the EP text, or very brief OOMs. This is more to do with my feeling like I can't really improve on Clone Wars than anything else, though part of it is the fact there is so much canon for CWs. I also struggle with the question of why writing canon OOMs when people can watch the show?

Post-CWs Ahsoka and Fulcrum are more interesting to me since there is little that is shown in canon. I have room to play and she's a "new" character in a sense, with lots of wiggle room, so she tends to get longer OOMs; or at least would if I'd make the time.

With Sabine, I am having a similar challenge as padawan Ahsoka, but also I really need to rewatch canon for details and I freely admit the work Hera and Kanan-muns are doing is so amazing it's intimidating. In the past, I'd make beat sheets of events or scenes I wanted to do with Sabine and then refer to it from time to time and see what fit with what I was writing or in the mood for.

Hank should be a more scripted narrative as I've a lot of ideas I want to put him through. Again, time is my antagonist. Also research. There are things I'd like him to learn and events and people I'd like him to encounter, but I don't know the 60s well enough to make sure I get the facts straight. I was also being held up by worry that my plans would make him too out of character to the narrow view of Hank that Singer seems to have, but I've decided to say screw it and work with my plans and see how I can later fit the changes to Hank within Singer's narrative.

Sam is another with vague waves towards canon. Civil War might change this, but at present I have a vague idea of where he is and what's happening and maybe he'll bring it up in conversations in bar.

Tybalt is wordy and loves being a center of attention, which means he gets long canon OOMs which usually end up longer than I'd intended. I usually will refer to a canon scene, then let it sit for a while in the back of my min while I try and shift the perspective to how the same scene might look from Tybalt's POV. Liek what events are going on in Tybalt's life that we are not seeing from Toby's POV.

Izana is another who gets longer OOMS. The show's narrative has them as a support character with very little focus on them aside from when they interact with Nagate. The manga has more Izana centric scenes that don't involve Nagate, which I mean to weave into the anime's narrative. So I guess another with a beat sheet, though I wonder if an outline might not work better so I can get the timeline right.

With Danny, I haven't really started canon yet. He's had vague waves at canon in posts and conversations, but I think he'll get short OOMs with in between scenes or reactions to canon scenes. I don't want to just rewrite what the show did, though digging deeper into Danny's psyche is tempting.

ETA: Oh, and I usually write in at least a limited omniscient third person. Sometime I should try some first person, but not yet.

[inlovewithwords]

Eriond: I honestly don't have much to write about him, he's just fun to have talk to people! Would definitely be third person OOM form, though.

Lois: due to switching her to the YA novels by Gwenda Bond, she's rather unique in that I do actually write stuff for her in first person when not tagging! Script-form works well for conversations with Clark, short-story format for other things, and I have a long idea or two I should get to.

Evelyn: Third person, definitely, and for now OOM-style works really well! Maybe one day I'll do something longer.

R2: oooh lord he gets third-person for sure and currently only as adjunct and not POV character, even in tags, unless Ani's not around, because let's just say that writing that sentient trash can is hard. Also, see below.

Anakin: "I mean really he works best in movie-or-TV-not-written-by-George-Lucas" but anyway, also third person for him, I need to do OOMs but those or short-shots work really well. I'd need to do AUs to start writing longer form for him, I think.

Tavi: tl;dr third person but not always his POV, any format, OOMs are really drafts of short stories, I have some THOUGHTS about AUs and future-fics that would be good for longer narratives.

Okay, so! Tavi's canon is definitely third-person limited POV. But it switches around, between about four (sometimes five) primary people, the occasional single section from another. One of the really fascinating things about this is that there's a lot of story about Tavi directly that's not through his eyes at all--there's a lot of outside views of him, not just inside his head. So one of the things I have discovered is that a lot of my OOMs are not actually written from Tavi's point of view, which I feel may be unlike a lot of OOMs? Also, frankly, my OOMs are rough/first drafts of what will likely at some point be a series of short stories.

Other than that, stories about Alera really lend themselves to long narratives with core of POV switching, as is evidenced by the post-canon police procedural saga I need to work on, and the massive pre-canon stuff I've been building, and the AU based on gratuitously refusing to kill off women pre-canon. (Literally, gratuitously. I can't even justify all of it, but I just decided I'd had enough.) There are Many Problems with my canon, but I will say that Butcher really nailed the storytelling format for it.

[angry_friendship_wolf]

For both Yamato and Eden, I actually have a lot of fun working their canons into OOMs that cover most of canon and most of their stories. But the reasons I started doing that are different for each (apart from just generally liking writing them).

For Yamato, 01 is kind of scattershot over several different mediums. The TV series covers the essential story, but a lot of the deeper worldbuilding details are embedded in the novels, which don't adhere as strictly to the same 'we're only showing the story from these eight kids' point of view' philosophy that often makes the television show's story a little murky (like, the major plot detail of 'all the villains are pieces of Apocalymon' never comes up in 01, and is instead buried somewhere in the second novel). And the PSP game has a lot of character moments that are basically 'cutting room floor' stuff from the show. So, I get a kick out of drawing from the television show, the novels, and the PSP game, and combining them together for OOMs.

(Although it's worth noting that even with all three of those, Digimon's storytelling can still sometimes be, er ... a little impenetrable. It's been twenty years, and we still don't know what that black orb Piedmon shoved in Gennai's back is.)

Tri, meanwhile, is a complete entity in its own right, but it's also riddled with problems that I really want to fix. So, fixing them I am, expanding the story in places and simplifying elements in others.

For Eden, meanwhile -- his canon's actually probably even more awkward to navigate than Yamato's. Even taking out how it sits within a wider story that is itself bordering on grotesquely convoluted, it has an even bigger problem of dealing principally in implication, and atmosphere, and imagery, and the format of 'sixteen hundred missions and then you might unlock a two minute scene of Gula reading some cryptic text' means that its narrative is incoherent.

Which is great for me, because I love taking incoherent narratives and trying to piece together a cohesive story out of them, so I'm having a whale of a time there.