meganbmoore | Prompt me!

Those of you who have known me long enough may remember that around 2000-2001(maybe as late as 2002) I tried my hand at writing. Not fanfic-I gave that up at around 17 or so-but original fic. But then the perils of being an English major with philosophy and psychology as double minors (full minors, not a split minor) took over my life, and I was, at any point in time, working on 2-3 papers for school with no time to write anything for myself, and when I finally graduated two years ago, the thought of writing when I didn't have to gave me hives. (For that matter, I had no time to read. A Regency or category romance could take me a week and a half, if not longer. I remember that it took me a month to read an Elizabeth Peters book at one point. Probably why I started reading so much manga. I could squeeze in time for manga and comics. I also remember that it took me a week to watch the first disc of Wolf's Rain.)

But back to the point!

The last few weeks, I've been kind of wanting to write again, but having trouble thinking of anything where I thought I'd actually be happy with a result.

So, anyone want to give me prompts to see if anything can get me motivated? If fanfic instead of original fic, I doubt I could write anything but canon based gen or crackfic.

~~Somebody could also try to get me to write that Saiyuki crackfic I keep not being able to start where Kougaiji and Sanzo learn that Gojyo taught Goku and Lirin strip poker.~~

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OTOH, someone who's blind would be able to get in somewhere and not be suspected, because she's blind. And if you look at Japanese history, blind women were traditionally given jobs as masseurs and (koto, was it? or biwa?) players/singers/storytellers. Both of which could be invited into someone's home without excessive suspicion. They'd be able to lurk around areas in the home and out of it where people talk, they'd have access to both areas of a household - servants' areas because they're of lower status than the inhabitants and would be fed and housed in those areas and higher areas because they'd be taken there to perform their services. Especially if it's a society like Heian Japan where the women were sequestered, and so entertainment and other services would have to be brought into the house for them.

If she spends the night or several nights there as part of her cover duties, it's fairly easy to sneak about. Someone finds her lurking in the wrong place in the middle of the night, she just starts looking worried and apologizes profusely because she got up to visit the privy and got turned around and lost. Handwave her own navigation - scents from various rooms (Japanese nobles had personal incense scents blended for them and would perfume their robes with it) identifying people and places, air currents and variations in temperature telling her whether there's walls or corridors, the sounds of people moving coming through thin paper walls. And look up a few of the news articles that came around before about the blind kid who uses echolocation to get around like everyone else - he makes clicks and listens to the tones of the echoes.

Then a few days or weeks later, after the memory of the masseur/entertainer has faded, sneak back in during the night and assassinate. Or instead lure the target into a situation where she has the advantage - deep fog, total darkness, extremely bright light - or force her advantage - something that affects the eyes, like a version of pepper spray or smoke.

And then you make those parts nonstop action, so that the scene changes before the reader has a chance to slow down and think "wait..." about anything you forgot.

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Minekura and Cook both have worldbuilding, but it's subsumed to the characters, and it's inferred from the dialogue and action. Tom-Tom and One-Eye stand out because they're dark-skinned and come from the south, so the world is set up similar to ours in which the light-skinned people tend to occur farther north. There's high-energy magic, but it requires lots of training and is really beyond the reach of an ordinary person. Etc.

The thing that keeps throwing me with Cook is that he'll have full scenes, and then all sorts of major events and entire characters will be Croaker saying "this happened and this happened and this person went off to..."

I think that's part of why I like it - it reminds you of the conceit that Croaker's writing this all down in the Chronicles, and that it's all filtered through his point of view.

Yeah, that's why it works because it does come across as he just randomly decides to write some things out in more detail, but I also keep thinking "wow, he actually thought of a way to justify telling instead of showing!"

Exactly. :) Telling is a perfectly fine way of telling a story if you do it the right way, and one of the right ways is to make the narrator a distinct, compelling character. It works for Cook in the Black Company novels, and it works for Steven Brust in the Phoenix Guard series, because Paarfi, the historian ostensibly writing everything down, is just hilarious. XD

I've got a book on self-editing for fiction writers but I haven't been able to get too far in it, because it starts with a chapter on Show Don't Tell which immediately makes me ornery and contrary and want to do stories in tell mode. Especially because one of their telling samples in the writing exercises at the end is perfectly fine and just needs a bit more polishing to make it a funny-narrator type of thing.

Prompt me!

Re: Cool Bits Story Generator to the rescue!

Re: Cool Bits Story Generator to the rescue!

Re: Cool Bits Story Generator to the rescue!

Re: Cool Bits Story Generator to the rescue!

Re: Cool Bits Story Generator to the rescue!