This past week I joined the Twitter #writechat and #storycraft weighed in my two cents. It was great, I met some cool people got a lot of my comments retweeted. But, one comment I made to the #storycraft got someone’s attention, this tweet name will remain in the dark. Here was the tweet I made:
"Never look to others and ask how your story should end or start. Whose creation is it, yours or theirs?"
I believe this to the point, I think writers really need to bleed for their own work. It’s different if your in a group project, but if you’re writing your own story don’t look to others for the start, ending, or when you have writers block. Take ownership of it sink or swim. That's how every writer should roll.
Then out of the blue I get this nice little response "Sometimes it helps to ask. Someone's idea could spark an idea that takes me a different way." Hmm, not bad, still don't agree.
I come back with "But, then it becomes no longer your creation, writers need to dig for their own creativity."
After a few more tweets I get the famous quote "All art is theft. ~ Pablo Picasso?" WTF!!!
So an easy question to ask, is "If all art is theft, then why not rip off what's out there now, why seek the helps of others?
This tweet comes back with "That's why I read." At this point my writing passion is on fire! I can't wrap my head around this, is this person really trying to justify and make up excuses for not trying to be creative? They claim that there is no more originality and the we subconsciously steal, so what's the big freaking deal if I take an idea here and there. Sorry, I call that a lazy writer who shouldn't be in the field of WRITING!
If someone say's there's no more originality in this world, then it's our job as artist to redfine it. Writers are the foundation of all everything new and creative, an artist that doesn't think of a way to bring something new to this world, gets in to a lazy habit of thinking. It's our duty and sense of adventurism to create something different, don't fall on the " Well, it's been done, so let's steal someone else idea." I'm calling bullshit on every writer that sinks to that level. Trust me, I'm not scared to blast whoever it is on it, be it one of my Geekachicas.
What do my Geekachicas and readers think, weigh in. Do you disagree, agree, or have a different view point. Let's hear it.
I leave you with these final words from one great mind "I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my own imagination- Albert Einstein "
Most of you probably don't know that my day job used to be copy editing. Basically, people paid me to make sure their important documents didn't accidentally make them look like morons to people with a decent grasp of grammar and punctuation. I worked on a contract basis, and I found it rather surprising how much my skills were worth on the open market, considering that anyone who halfway paid attention in English class should know what I know. This was both encouraging (Woot! I can has Monies!) and depressing. (The the high-powered business people who could pay me $30.00 an hour to toss their jargon-filled corporate word salad into something recognizable as English obviously didn't need to know they shouldn't use an apostrophe to pluralize to be, well, high-powered business people. I console myself that this basic life skill could have saved them a lot of money. Money I was happy to take from them. Chumps.)
I soon discovered that online communications had new and exciting ways for people to violently misunderstand each other. Ways that could, perhaps, be helped by good punctuation, but never completely eradicated. In online written communication, we only get words. Things like inflection, tone and facial expression are lost entirely. Which is to say, it becomes much harder to express the concept of sarcasm elegantly.
Inventive netizens found ways around this in this in annotations used to make their meanings clearer, such as [/sarcasm] or [j/k], and let us not forget the wide array of emoticons and smileys with which we are now quite familiar. (Such as )
Still, netizens of note would occasionally remark on the lack of a clear way to denote sarcasm in writing. (Most recently by Neil Gaiman, who was told by his readers that such a mark existed in Ethiopian - an interesting side note, if not terribly useful to those of us unfamiliar with the language.)
Well, my friends, our prayers have been answered! The US firm Sarcasm, Inc. stepped up to fill the void by inventing the SarcMark, a downloadable punctuation mark you can install on your computer or texting device for the low, low price of $1.99. It currently supports most Microsoft platforms and many popular devices, and they are working on expanding to Mac as well. Right now it is available in graphic as well as in font formats, but the font version (which can be re-sized or appear in different colors) can only be seen by another device that has the SarcMark installed.
"That's a great idea," you say, "but will it catch on?" It's too soon to tell, but early sales are promising. The inventors are also reporting that they have been approached by several software companies and social networking sites who have an interest in incorporating the mark into their applications.
They even have a commercial on YouTube:
Only time will tell whether this will catch on, but I hope it does. I've always been proud of the inventiveness and can-do spirit of the Internet, and this underscores the way 'net culture inspires people to do things for themselves. Feel the lack of a sarcasm mark? Invent one!
That's what the Internet is all about!*
*Well, okay. What the internet is all about in a social evolution sort of way. In terms of commerce, it's still largely about the porn. But that's a topic for another day.
Today, the writing community across the blogosphere gathers in celebration of the No-Kiss by sharing scenes from their works-in-progress of that moment when you think the leading character and his or her love interest are finally going to lock lips... but they don't.
In honor of this UST blogging-palooza, I thought I'd share the most excellent no-kiss and kiss moments in existence-- those shared between Princess Leia and Han Solo.
My fellow Geeks, I present to you an awesome selection of Han and Leia scenes, brought to us by the power of youtube and one tangerineclem.
Personally, my favorite is in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, when Leia falls in Han's lap, followed closely by their exchange in the South Passage where Leia utters the most fabulous line "I'd just as soon kiss a wookie!". Which Han and Leia moment do you love the most?
For more No-Kiss moments be sure to head over to Frankie Writes for a complete listing of blogs taking part in today's event! (My own original contribution from my WIP is here.)
Today is the last day to push your wordcount past 50,000 words to join the ranks of NaNoWriMo Winners! A few words of advice before we hit the final letters for the Not-Yet-Of Troy series!
1) Double check and make sure your timezone is correct! Because of daylight savings, you might be an hour ahead of yourself if you didn't correct your timezone after you started! This could mean that instead of having until midnight to verify, you only get until 11pm. Which leads me to my next point--
2) Verify EARLY! Do everything in your power to get yourself verified before 11pm local (or earlier if you can swing it!). The Word Counter for the NaNoWriMo site may shave some wordage off your word processor's count, and you will want time to be able to recoup those numbers before midnight! Also, there is usually a rush to validate at the last minute which slows down the site-- don't let yourself be timed out and lose the win after all your hard work!
3) Pat yourself on the back for making it this far! Whether you got to 50K or not, you answered the challenge to write a novel, and that's something to be proud of. If you didn't quite make it to 50K this year, you can always try again next November! And I hear that NaNoWriMo is trying to put together a year round program, too--assuming they make their donation goals.
When I began writing Helen, I was certain that she loved Menelaus. Part of the history and the myth is that Menelaus and Agamemnon spent some time in Sparta/Lacedaemon during their youth, after a usurper took the throne of Mycenae. Tyndareus helped them to reclaim it. Later, Tyndareus marries both his daughters to these Sons of Atreus-- Helen to Menelaus, and Clytemnestra to Agamemnon-- which made me wonder exactly what kind of relationship Tyndareus had with these men.
Was it just that Agamemnon was so powerful a neighbor? Or could it have been something more? A relationship between Tyndareus and these orphaned boys that was like a father to his sons? And if Tyndareus cared for them, brought them into his home, helped them to reclaim their own city, might not Menelaus and Agamemnon have had relationships with Tyndareus's children too? That would certainly have an affect on any marriages arranged, and I was certain that Helen must have been relieved, even pleased, to be married to a man who had been a friend and brother to her in her youth, rather than some stranger twice her age who only wanted her for her beauty.
Unless of course there was some mitigating factor-- like a foreknowledge of what was coming. If Helen knew that marrying Menelaus would result in such a terrible war, how would that affect her relationship to him? And if Tyndareus loved Menelaus as a son, would he listen to the warning Helen brought him? Helen, just a girl, and with only dreams to back up her argument, probably would not have swayed her father if he was determined to make Menelaus his son in marriage as well as friendship. This is the warning Helen gives Theseus in the earlier letters, telling him that if he wants her as his bride, he must act immediately, and ultimately I believe it is what convinces him to abduct her, though he could not have known who Helen was meant for.
But Menelaus knew. And watching Helen become friendly with Theseus, a son of Poseidon, and a great hero, could not have been easy on his ego. Menelaus was not a king, nor could he claim any divine heritage. He was just a man. And in comparison and competition with Theseus, how confident could he really be about his chances?
Theseus has his own very rich mythology. His own challenges and adventures. He is in many ways the Athenian version of Heracles, right down to his divine heritage and the trials he faces. A parallel hero. I hadn't realized at all until I started doing the research that Heracles and Theseus were contemporaries and were known to team up, nevermind that they were also contemporaries (relatively speaking) of Helen.
There's so little source material for his abduction of Helen (and it varies widely). Just a line here or there that he made off with her, and then her brothers took her back. It's almost an absentminded recollection. "Oh yeah, well, you know Theseus, always making off with some pretty girl or another, it's hardly worth noting. And there was no lasting harm." Of course, that's the greatest place to start when you want to write fiction-- finding something that hasn't really been explored in great detail, and seeing where it leads. It was the perfect opening!
Neither Theseus nor Heracles made it to the Trojan War, but they almost certainly witnessed the events leading up to that point... Well, witness maybe is too strong a word. Theseus was trapped in the underworld for a while, and Heracles had to go fish him out. Both of them, however, had sons who fought against Troy.
So who is this Pirithous? He's a fellow Demi-god and king. A son of Zeus! By all appearances, he's one of Theseus's closest friends. Close enough that when Pirithous proposed a trip to Hades to kidnap Persephone, Theseus had no qualms about helping him out. To repay a similar kindness, perhaps?
With all my being I struggle between granting you this gift, granting myself this gift, and doing what must be done for the good of my people. What you ask may well provoke a war, and though I confess to wanting you for my own, I would not wish to betray the trust of my people this way.
Helen, you are but a child yet. If your father does not heed your warnings, perhaps it is with good reason. Perhaps he has information which you are not privy to? Your brothers, too, are good men. If they believed you to be in the path of harm, nothing would stop them from protecting you with all their strength.
I do not know what causes you such anxiety for your kinsmen, but I am keen to listen. While I can not promise to give you what you ask, I would meet with you and hear your concerns. If your reason is sound, I will not dismiss it, Helen. That much I can and will promise you, whether or not you become my wife.
If it is to be done, it is best done in secret. You may trust I will reveal your request to no one, though if your worries are founded on any truth I can present to Tyndareus upon your behalf, I would be happy to do so. Only a fool would refuse to listen to his equal in rank and dignity.
In working with the myths surrounding the Trojan War, there are some definite challenges. For starters, no two accounts of Helen's life and story are the same. This also applies to Theseus, Paris, Menelaus, Agamemnon, and every other major player within the story. The reason for this is that these myths come from an oral tradition, and over time it would have been natural for them to shift and alter slightly between regions. People from Athens would talk Theseus up, because he was one of their founding fathers. People from Sparta might want to portray Helen as stolen, rather than an adulteress, to save her honor. They also might make Paris out as a coward, to emphasize his dishonor.
The sources we have available to us today can't even agree on the reason for the start of the Trojan War. There's the story of the goddesses, Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite, competing for the title of "Fairest" with Paris as the judge, and at first glance, it seems like the simplest answer. Paris chose Aphrodite, and she gave him Helen as a prize, offending the other two goddesses and causing them to turn against Troy-- of course there was the little matter of Helen already being married to Menelaus, and he would have to go get her, but Aphrodite had no problem assisting him with that or making it sound like a good idea.
If you continue reading, there are other forces at work behind the goddesses and their vanity. According to Hesiod and the Cypria Fragments, the entire war was planned by Zeus as a way to destroy the race of demi-gods (children of the gods with mortals) and lighten the earth of men. Now, historically, not long after the rough dates we have for the Trojan War, the Mycenaean empire collapsed. Isn't it convenient then, that the Greeks had a myth to explain the widespread destruction that cast them back into a dark age?
Personally, I find the contradicting accounts and stories to be exciting and interesting. For my writing purposes, it allows me to sift through the different pieces and put it all together in a unique way. It gives me a lot of freedom to work. Creative license, if you will. Which brings us to today's letter from Helen to Theseus.
For some reason, Homer places a great emphasis on lineage and title in The Iliad. The smallest of side characters is often outlined by his father, and his father's deeds. This is especially true of the greater heroes and kings, who are just as often referred to as Son of So-and-so as they are by their own names. We don't often meet their fathers outside of these side-tracked stories-- with the obvious exception of the sons of Priam, King of Troy-- but the Iliad is filled with these distracting flavor bursts of parentage. Why so important? Well, establishing yourself as the son of someone who did something great leaves you poised to accomplish something even greater!
A lot of this is reflected later on in history, as we see people over and over again drawing their lineages back to ancestors who were either gods or heroes (often heroes themselves were demi-gods or of divine heritage). After Homer's time, claiming a god as an ancestor was a way of validating and justifying an individual's authority or superiority. It's a little bit more subtle than claiming absolute divinity, like the Kings of Egypt, Alexander the Great, and the Emperors of Rome, but all of this is the precursor of what later became the Divine Right of Kings who claimed their rule to be mandated and willed by God. Interesting how these "pagan" practices wormed their way into the Christian world!
Whew. Now that we've gotten the history out of the way, I give you the letters! (The first two are here and here. Go ahead, we'll wait for you to catch up!)
This is the next letter in the series, written from Pollux to his sister, Helen. (To read the first letter, go here!)
Technically speaking, it's unlikely that Helen and Pollux would have ever been exchanging letters in Homeric Greece. The only evidence we have of written language from that time are the Linear B tablets of the Mycenaeans, and mostly these tablets gave us information on inventories of goods disbursed. From the tablets we can extrapolate that Mycenae had some kind of overarching administration, and it's suggested that the script was only known to a small group of people, high up. It would not have been used by any common folk.
Helen, as a princess of Lacedaemon might have known that such records were kept, but it is highly unlikely she would have been taught to write. Further, Linear B is only found on clay tablets. Obviously this does not mean that writing on any other medium was impossible, because the tablets were preserved through the destruction of the palaces by fire which would have destroyed anything like skins or papyrus, but if they were only writing in Linear B on clay, it would make for an awkward letter.
But, you say, imaginary friends are for kids! And not just for kids, but for kids who are lonely, or otherwise lacking something emotionally fulfilling somehow!
My readers, we have entered a new era in the research and study of imaginary friends, thanks in a large part to research by a Dr. Marjorie Taylor of the University of Oregon in Eugene. For those of us who are writers and always wondered if we were going a little bit crazy because our characters are wandering around the house, the results are good! It looks like it's okay, and we're not alone!
Along with the excellent company of children between the ages of 3 and 7 (and sometimes even 12-17 if you include the sublimation into "dear diary" entities as mentioned in this article which I swear to you I read once in full for an informative speech in college, but am thankful the abstract still contains the most cogent information!), we can add writers to the list of people who are allowed to have imaginary friends! Let me tell you, I breathed a sigh of relief.
The mysterious researcher Dr. Seiffge-Krenke (man do I wish I could read German, googling her brings up tons of information that isn't written in English), also found that it was the more socially competent and creative adolescents who had these sublimated imaginary companions rather than the social misfits, as previously believed.
Before National Novel Writing Month began, I like others, was doing some research and preparation for my project-- a new look at the myths around the Trojan War, and a reinterpretation of Helen and her early life. In an excess of excitement, and the compulsion to purge some of the research I had done and turn it into creative energy, I started writing letters. I'm a far cry from Ovid and his Heroides, but at least there was a precedent.
The letters helped me to get my head into Helen's and feel out the other characters that I would be playing with in this new book, before the adrenaline rush of NaNoWriMo. The exercise was so much fun that I didn't really want to stop, and I expect I'll be doing quite a few of them before the month is out. They won't appear in the manuscript itself, but I thought they would be a fun sneak peak behind the scenes of the story for you GeekaChicas readers!
This first letter is from Helen (age 12) to her brother, Pollux. Helen and Pollux are both children of Zeus resulting from his rape of Leda as a swan. (Really.) For more information on the sources and the mythology of the Trojan War, feel free to take a look at my blog. I have a lot of helpful links to primary sources in the sidebar, and discussions of most of them in my recent posts.
Amalia The Savage joins us from the frigid northeast! You're going to love her intelligent pieces on a variety of subjects - this lady loves to do her homework. She also absolutely loves to write and will probably cross-post from her personal blog, and I hope everyone is looking forward to reading her work as much as I am. My people have sung of her exploits for generations. Seriously, she's a bigger deal than Beowulf.
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