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First Draft Zombies

Monday, October 26th, 2009

While on the forums, someone asked about turning off their inner editor. It seems like a simple enough thing. You just keep going onwards and don’t look back until you’re done. I equated it to zombies, which means now I need to elaborate.

When writing the first draft of anything, I’d suggest never looking back. It’s hard for some people to do, I know. You want it to be perfect the first time, but first drafts are rarely ever masterpieces and they will almost always need heavy editing. You could spend hours making it perfect the first time, or you could have fun with it the first time.

I like to write now and edit later, as I now realize that my first drafts will usually suck. Let it come out as it comes out and don’t worry too much about editing. If you can help it, don’t edit at all, leave it raw and then you can go back afterwards and fix everything if the story is worth it.

Like zombies.

Think of your story like a city infested with zombies out for your brains. The more you write, the closer you get to the chopper to get out of there. Unfortunately, these are running zombies and they’re always right behind you. Don’t look back, just keep writing/running until you get to the end/chopper. You can make it! YOU CAN DO IT!

Then you’re at the chopper. Now you can look back at your story infested by zombies. There’s grammar and spelling mistakes, plot holes and character inconsistencies. That’s fine. It’s what the first draft is for. You are safe now, it’s done. Take a breath, get back to society and remember what it’s like to be around normal people.

Then, when you’re very ready, go back to the zombies. And bring ammunition. Take your bombs/red pen and tear the whole thing apart. Keep going until it’s all good and inhabitable again.

Although by this metaphor, it follows that your mistakes create zombies. I guess the metaphor still works.

Run like hell, leaving zombies in your wake and make it to the chopper at the end. Look back and risk getting eaten by the zombies with no hope of ever reaching the chopper. Sure, you can turn back and kill a couple that are breathing on your neck, but don’t fight the whole army. Once you reach the chopper, recuperate some and come back with the big guns and bombs that will kill them all.

Why yes, I am still looking for my notebook.

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NaNoWriMo Guide

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

So Nanowrimo is obviously on my mind a lot right about now. Which means I have started preparing and trying to encourage several other people to join along with me again this year because the experience is wonderful.

This year, however, I’m putting together my own survival guide. For myself and for everyone else so much as thinking about taking on the challenge.

Don’t Panic – Like the Hitchhiker’s Guide, NaNoWriMo is a daunting task for a lot of people. The word count seems insurmountable. 50,000 words is an impossible task, right? It is, however, only 1,667 words a night. Depending on your typing speed and your inspiration at that moment, it can be as little as an hour a night for a month. Maybe more, maybe less. But not nearly as much time as you think.

You are not Alone – Around the world, thousands of people are doing exactly the same thing. Some of them veterans with words of wisdom and many of them newbies and first timers approaching it with the same fear and wonderment as many of the veterans. The forums are a wonderful place to utilize for help if you need anything over the course of your novel.

Busy is Good – It seems counterintuitive, but being busy does amazing things for your writing. It’s also easier to write when you are busy. No, really. Please stop laughing. Making sure you don’t spend every waking moment on the book will keep you interested in the story. If it is something you do when you aren’t working, it will seem more like play. And if you do nothing but write for the month with nothing else, you are likely to lose interest because that’s all there is to do. And if it’s all there is to do, it’s less likely you will do it.

Do Some Preparation – Also important. Especially if you’re worried about the word count. Nanowrimo allows you to do as much preparation as you want before November 1st, so you can come out with outlines, full character sketches, whatever you need to do to get your story ready. You can have everything ready to go before the end of the month so in the middle, there’s no chance of getting stuck.

But it Won’t be Good! – No it will not, in all likelihood. Get over it. Your first draft is never good, it will always need rewrites and you do not get to the rewrite and editing phases where your story actually becomes good if you never have a first draft to start out with.

Writing Totems – This is a personal favourite. Find something to wear every single time you write. Like Pavlov with his dog, you will train yourself to write when you wear these. When these are worn, they will instantly transform you into a real writer, capable of creating marvellous stories, characters and plotlines. You will do no wrong. And when they’re off, you can go back to your normal life. Simple as that.

The Head Start – The beginning of the month is when people tend to be the most motivated. At the start of the month, try to get as much writing as you possibly can. This will be a bit of a buffer in case something comes up later in the month and you will be grateful for it.

Check Your Inner Editor at the Door – You shouldn’t be editing during Nanowrimo. This isn’t the time for things like that. he point of Nanowrimo is to give you a head start on a novel that you can later go through and edit in full. No novel or story, no matter how much time you put into it and how careful you are, will go unedited, so forget all about editing for this first draft. Focus instead on getting it done, ploughing ahead and never looking back.

November First Candy Outing – November 1st is the day after Halloween. Go buy lots of discount candy on a break from your day one writing. Nanowrimo is a bit of a marathon and the sugar rush can be very good when you just need that extra little kick. Or, it can be used as…

Incentives – Good deeds should be rewarded. Milestones, more so. Come up with your own marks on the trail to 50K (Word counts and plot points work rather well) on a sheet of paper. And next to each milestone, write what you will give yourself for every mark. First thousand words? Chocolate bar. Half way thorugh? A day off in the city to shop for that new computer. Finished? Burn the computer! Okay, maybe not that, but it’s good to reward yourself for a job well done. Or a milestone hit, anyway.

Pace yourself – Nanowrimo is a bit of a marathon. It’s undoubtedly long and the word count can be daunting. So while you’re working on it, make sure you don’t burn out and give yourself breathing room. If you can’t do anymore that night, put it to rest and get some rest. It will still be there in the morning. Inspirational burnout is a good thing to avoid, so try not to push yourself too hard, especially on your first year.

Don’t be Afraid of Tangents – In Nanowrimo, the goal is to try and get your word count as high as possible in a short amount of time. This means writing down any idea you have. This means sometimes letting the characters do things you haven’t planned for them. If your characters suddenly decide to hop in the car and take an unexpected roadtrip through time, let them. Who knows? The tangent they take you on might prove to be an interesting story. And if not, there’s nothing saying that it wasn’t all a dream.

Getting Ahead – Great for you! Don’t get cocky, though. If you aren’t done yet, then remember there’s more yet to do. You can breathe easier now, but try to keep the pace going until you’re actually done. Nothing’s final until that word count is validated.

Falling Behind – DON’T PANIC! You’ll be okay. There’s a lot of tips out there about how to quickly add to your word count when you fall behind. You just have to be a little creatively underhanded.

  • Word Padding – This technique is the easiest to learn. It is simply trying to jam as many words as possible into a sentence. These words are often completely unnecessary in order to increase word count. This works especially well with description.
  • Meanwhile… – Sick of the story? Want a break to work on some other idea? The word “Meanwhile” allows you to go on completely random tangents with no affiliation to your main plot. With it, you could even write two stories at once.
  • Incorporate That Academia – If you are a student with papers due in November, try to incorporate them into your novel! Say there’s a student in the story who also coincidentally has to write or read a paper. Bam! Excuse to put the paper into your novel.
  • Search and Replace – The desperate last resort of those on their last week and very far behind, or those who are just worried in general, search and replace is powerful if used well. Find a name, then replace it with their full, thirteen word name for the entire story. Or replace “they will” with “they might. Maybe. Probably… or will they? Perhaps they won’t and that would be awfully troublesome if they didn’t but they probably will cave and they will” if you really need to. Every single time it shows up. It can help.

Be Social! – On the forums, you can often find people living near you who are also taking on the same daunting word count of a novel. These people are likely to hold social events of sorts, such as meet ups and write ins, that you can go to. For a little while, you can talk to likeminded people who know exactly what you’re going through and can help you along, or you can help them if they are in distress about their own novel. Or you can just chat. Or write!

Don’t be Afraid of Failure – Failure is always a possibility. If you don’t make it at the end of the month, don’t worry! You are not alone! Sometimes it happens. Nanowrimo is hard. But now, you have the beginnings of a novel that you can continue to work on at your own pace. A good head start. Or maybe you’ve written enough to know you don’t want to write it anymore. Both situations you would not be in if you never undertook this, which isn’t too bad of an outcome. And you can always try again next year now that you know the basics.

Finishing the Word Count – Congratulations! You’re done! Your story might not be complete, but you will have gotten a good way into your story by now and have a decent chunk of it done. You’ve done well. You can rest for a little while, say hello to all those loved ones you’ve left behind and let your mind take a break from the story. Or you can keep going. Your choice really. You’ve already won Nanowrimo. Download your swag and be sure to tell everyone you know you’ve just written a novel.

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Transmedia Storytelling: My perspective

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

You may already have an inkling of what a transmedia story is. You probably already do if you’ve been paying any attention to television and the new trends of marketing strategies of late. You’re dimly aware that Batman had a physical scavenger hunt wherein they put phones in bowling ball bags and cakes or that Heroes decided to launch a comic weekly to show scenes that they didn’t bother filming with characters you’ve never heard of. That is transmedia. Sort of.

It’s telling a story across two or more distinctly different media. A comic and a novel. A movie and a game. A comic, a movie, a novel and a television show. All of which are telling the same damn story. That’s really all there is to it, though there are little details of it that come into play.

The core is something that I’ve hammered into my mind and come up with my own meaning for. The core is the center of the story. This is where everything happens and what everyone needs to know. This is the one fall back point if anyone gets lost to refer back to in order to figure out what the hack is happening in the other media. And this core is split into two distinct aspects.

The core narrative in particular is like a backbone. It’s a premise and everything the story is. Kid bitten by a radioactive spider. The world is really a computer simulation. THERE ARE SUPER POWERS! Whatever the basis of the story is becomes the core narrative and the thing that the story cannot live without.

Secondary to that is the core medium. This is often where the core story is originally told, though it means something more than that. The core medium is where the story is often told and where the story is meant to unfold. This is the media appropriate medium that is required to get the essence of the story out.

Outside of this, the other media camp out and take pieces of the narrative to make their own stories. They take aspects, they take whole story lines and they take just about every facet of the story they can to expand upon in order to make something more of the story. It is in these media that transmedia occurs and where the magic happens.

One of the purposes of transmedia in story, aside from the lucrative marketing advantage that most of the large companies have been taking advantage of, is that the story can be expanded. Characters can gain more depth and writers can show off the world better. There is more to it than ever before and there is the opportunity to tell different aspects that might not have worked well in the core media in a media that works better.

And therein likes another purpose behind it. There are certain story lines that sometimes get cut from stories because they don’t work well for comics or video. Deep introspection is better for a novel. With transmedia, the meditation can be fully explored where on screen it would have been dull. Specific story lines or aspects can get their rightful treatment in transmedia rather than being cut or heavily altered to fit in with the rest of the story in the selected media.

Transmedia storytelling is new yet and still going through the pains of adolescence trying to define itself. Aspects of it are not yet set in stone and there will be more developments in the coming years. But in the mean time, the growing pains are turning into an upheaval in the way stories are told. Given time, it should blossom into something wonderful.

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What I Learned from Phreak615

Friday, June 13th, 2008

Okay, since some high profile (for Canada) marketing campaign done in the form of an alternate reality game was released, I figure I should probably take a good look at it and think about it in terms of my project. Things like what I’d do different and how to improve on the design and what not.

For those uninitiated, and for my own reference, Much Music had someone slipping weird, static-y videos into their feed at random intervals. They were very carefully placed, though at the time it was so weird to see something interrupting the regular broadcast that you weren’t sure what was going on. The shock factor was so bizarre that people didn’t do much more than speculate.

Then the link showed up. Good move. It was a blogspot blog. Really, would have been better if they hadn’t bought the domain then set up the blog. The blog with a blogspot url would have worked pretty well to establish credibility too.

The problems also started with the blog, though. It was clear that this guy was doing it for shits and giggles and had no point to it. One of those going out with a bang quitting interns. Yet he called himself an activist fighting the power without any goal, rhyme or reason behind his actions. The attacks were random.

Or rather, they were. Until I saw two episodes of Video on Trial in one day with the exact same interruption in them at the same time. I’ll admit, I’m very slow. This was the thing that tipped me off first. Granted, I hadn’t found the blog yet.

And then I saw the explanation for the hacks on his site. And they did not coincide with what I saw. Worse, I saw a screenshot of an alert sent out to the Much employees to proceed as if nothing was happening. First off, his default is Arial while the email is in trebuchet (which bothered the crap out of me for some reason. Come on, Courier is more credible!) and if he’s a tech genius WHY IS HE USING OUTLOOK?! And no Firefox either. I disbelieve him completely.

It also raises the question very plainly of why the VJs didn’t react to it in the first place. Why NO ONE reacted.

Started paying a little more attention at this point. Meaning I actually checked the site once a week to see what was going on and I was happy listening to people point out that it was a fake. Also, noticed that the username was exactly what they were going to do. Phreak the MMVAs (Much Music Video Awards) on June 15. Original. Name him after the marketing campaign. Woot?

Might have worked better if you were clear on the intent right off the bat. Suddenly he has a motive way too late in the game.

A good while later, they release the Find the Phreak contest on Much. It’s cheesy, it’s a pain in the ass and it sounds like management talking to a tech team trying to sound like they know what they’re doing. In short, it pissed me off.

Some time in here they started randomly putting Phreak masks in random indie hipster emo clothing stores that were well out of reach of the Phreak’s location. Nice to see them getting into the audience participating in the game physically. Fail for not adhering to the geographic limitations.

And then they stop pretending that it was anything but a marketing campaign. All of the MMVA commercials have those Youtube videos from the camwhores who believe it or think that they can get their half second of fame. Embedded into the video. Overtop of cheap and cheesy videos that go against their branding for the MMVAs at perfectly timed intervals.

And no more phreaks of the shows. It turned into an outright marketing thing, contained entirely in the commercials.

Way too long after that, Phreak shows up in the commercials for the contest. Sorry, buddy, way too late given your character. Not believable. But that does bring us to the present state of affairs.

So first they needed a reason for the Phreak to stick to. Putting the reason into his name, fine. Not announcing the reason outright, fail.

No one reacted. Don’t tell the VJs what’s going on and see how they react. It makes it feel more legitimate when someone on air, especially live, acknowledges that something’s happening and they don’t know what’s happening.

Embedding it into the video. BAD IDEA if you’re going to explain it like that. Instead, play the little phreaked video once and only once. And don’t perfectly time it either. Have it actually overlap some stuff. Cut off the end of a VJ throwing and over the front end of a video. Hang off a video and into commercial. Make it seem like he’s trying out something.

Video quality. Lower it. The video itself is low (better if it looked like cam work), but the production looks a bit like Video on Trial. And some of those clips are expensive to get. I know from trying to find stock video for my project last semester. And a little less audio production too.

If it built UP to that quality based on suggestions from users, that might have worked better.

Youtube and Blogspot involvement were good. Be better if they knew how to use their involvement there, but still a good idea.

Don’t post screenshots of your character’s computer to people who might be familiar with the demographic. Or, at least, install the right programs. Honestly, how many techs still use Outlook when they can get stuff forwarded to anywhere else that’s not a Microsoft product?

I don’t know enough about the physical aspects of ARGs to comment much, but it seems like posting a map and saying “Go here” is a shitty way of going about things. How about clues? Hints rather than outright, “If you live in the area, visit this trendy clothing store and get the mask.”

You know, what might have salvaged this was making it not a marketing campaign. The relation to the MMVAs made the whole thing very cheap and the phreaks were all so pointless before the connection. They had the potential to gain some potency over time when he found his legs, but now it’s just a pain in the ass. Doesn’t even phreak the shows anymore. It’s all part of the commercials. No point.

Want some semblance of decent? Hint that they should watch during one of the popular much countdown shows and give the viewers the gift of the Hamster Dance. Or maybe some Thrice. Get some exposure to the lesser played and forgotten. Play all of Thriller over a commercial break and into a show. Video from the 70s. You know, something that might have a point to it. Tell the world he wants to help Canada by forcing his music tastes on them.

Or swear on television. That would have shown me.

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