#also tumblr is probably the best place online for a triptych

[xellandria]

Week two of the Bonfire Art Bash: Storytelling! I always enjoyed those colouring/story combo books as a kid and wanted to continue this year's personal theme of "things I could hand/mail to their characters' owners if they wanted them," so I made a trio of colouring pages, then coloured them myself! Gave it a stained glass look too, both because that makes it more satisfying to colour (for me, anyway) and because it's a neat effect that's easy to pull off—avoid large uninterrupted swaths of space and repeating the same exact colour next to itself and you're golden.

Bonus: the heights of the characters aren't quite square but they were designed to make one big continuous image if you hide the "middle" borders!

[the-royal-courier]

Azeroth Works: Writing is Fullfilling Work

By Sky Stoneseat

(Editor’s OOC Note: This interview was conducted on a real life author who just so happens to find interest in our little roleplaying community. She does not play World of Warcraft but we wanted to share this in the hopes of inspiring all of you out there who write on tumblr or in game. Please take the IC as a little tongue in cheek.)

While we here at  the Royal Courier strive to be the best source of news in Azorth, today we offer up something a bit different. We bring you something that is from another realm in the hopes that you may find it interesting.

We know that many of you write in your spare time, so I sat down with an author from "Earth" who was kind enough to share some tips that she uses. J.M. Frey is an author, fanthropologist and professional smartypants on AMI Radio’s Live From Studio 5. She’s appeared in podcasts, documentaries, and on television to discuss all things geeky through the lens of academia. She also has an addiction to scarves, Doctor Who, and tea, which may or may not all be related. Her life’s ambitions are to have stepped foot on every continent (only 3 left!)Her debut novel TRIPTYCH was nominated for two Lambda Literary Awards,  won the San Francisco Book Festival award for SF/F, was nominated for a 2011 CBC Bookie, was named one of The Advocate’s Best Overlooked Books of 2011, and garnered both a starred review and a place among the Best Books of 2011 from Publishers Weekly.

Lucky for us dear readers that she found time to sit down and chat.

Any tips for getting into the mood for writing?

For me, writing is a full time job, so to get in the mood to write I get up, get dressed, have tea, and basically prepare to sit down at the computer as if it is a real dayjob. That gets me into the headspace required, that “this is work, so work” mode.

But in terms of environment, I like it as uncluttered as possible. Nice lighting, daylight, and only the notes for the project that’s currently on the docket pinned to the board beside me. I really prefer silence, too. I absolutely cannot write in public spaces, and if there’s any noise at all, it’s got to be white noise – either from outside of my window or an online digital generator.

The only raging, noisey mess should be inside my head. When creating a character what are some ways to build an interesting back story's that feel fresh?

There’s a idiom that creatives use about avoiding the low-hanging fruit. The thought is that the first idea within grabbing range might be the most appealing, but it’s also probably going to be the most obvious and the most over-used.

However, sometimes your first instinct is the right one. I always grab the low-hanging fruit, but then – to stretch the metaphor – figure out the best way to turn it into fruit salad. Clichés are clichés because they work, but that should always and only be a starting point.

I like to come at my stories from the perspective of the person who is least often allowed their own voice in common narrative. For example, my series The Accidental Turn is a standard sword-and-sorcery epic fantasy. But instead of making the muscle-bound hero or the scrappy sidekick the narrator, I chose the hero’s overlooked, overshadowed little brother.

The low-hanging-fruit approach to this brother character says that he ought to be craven, cowardly, perhaps even sneaky or secretly the villain. So I thought, yes, okay, let’s give him those traits. Because that’s what’s expected. But let’s figure out a different reason for them. Why does he behave like that? What made him like this? How much is nature, how much is nurture?

Instead of being craven because he’s “just a bad person”, the little brother is quiet and withdrawn because his older brother used to bully him. Instead of being sneaky because he’s plotting, it’s because he’s actually secretly a spy for the king, on the side of good. This led to all sorts of neat things to explore in his backstory – who chose him to be a spy? Why? Who trained him? How? What purpose is there to have a spy planted in the home of the hero?

When you try to find different motivations for common traits, then you start to get into really interesting territory for backstory and character creation. And their reactions are going to be totally different, too – the way these characters address problems or react to violence will be fascinating, because the motivations and backgrounds you’ve created for them is new and interesting.

Any thoughts on a character who a bit go big or go home vs a slow burn sort?

For me, characters fit the kind of story I am telling and the kind of narrative and growth arc they need to have.

Kintyre Turn, the hero of my fantasy series, is defiantly a Go Big guy. He starts out with being gifted a magic sword at the age of eighteen, and the complete inability to ever lose. He’s got a big ego, big muscles, bit personality. And he’s great, he fits what I needed from him perfectly; but I also found with him that there was nowhere left to go. He was too big. There was no upward growth available. I found an arc for him by letting him shrink inside his own skin again. He puts away the sword, and the mantle of the hero, and starts to attend to his own mental health, in repairing and nurturing the relationships around him, and swapping places with his little brother to become the caretaker of their family estate, in allowing himself to stop running from commitment and finding domestic peace and a loving partner. Pulling Kintyre away from the Big and Bold gave him growth.

His brother Forsyth was the opposite. He started small – physically skinny, shorter than Kintyre, swaddling himself in too many house robes and the mantel of the prim, fastidious Lord of the Manor. He even stooped and stutters. He’s the King’s secret Spymaster, but even then he works from behind a desk and lets others do the legwork. He is a Slow Burn character. He grows by increments as he becomes surer of himself and his worth. He stands straight. He learns not to be ashamed of his stutter. He goes out into the world and wields a sword and becomes a hero.

But, going back to what I said about backstory above, his background and motivations mean that he is a Ravenclaw hero rather than a Gryffindor. He would rather talk his way out of things, or think through loopholes, or outwit his opponents than beat them down with a blade.

Both Go Big and Slow Burn types of characters are useful. It’s just a matter of knowing (or learning as you go) which kind is better for the sort of story you’re telling and where you need it to go. And always remember that there’s always an avenue of growth available somewhere; you just need to find it.

Dialogue can be tricky to get right, how do you create conversation that both moves the plot but is not an info dump? My first rule is to completely avoid “As you know…” or “As I said before…” or “I just remembered that…” in dialogue. If the characters already know, then the audience should already know.  And if the audience knows already, there’s no need to repeat it. If they don’t know it already, then you’re telling the story in the wrong order, or writing the wrong moments.

Focus your scenes on the moment when the character learns the information, rather than on the scenes where they report the information.

If you can’t do that, then try to keep as much of a natural flow in the dialogue as possible. Listen to people in coffee shops or pay attention at your own family dinners. Note the natural ebbs and flows, where people interrupt for clarification or pause to gather their thoughts. Watch what they do with their hands, their bodies. Watch how they fidget, or pace, or tap their sugar packets on the table top. Describing the body language will help break up large paragraphs, especially if you can use that body language to convey the character’s emotions or reactions to the news. To show instead of tell.

When I’m not sure if the dialogue is working, I strip it down into a script – dialogue only – and ask a friend to read the scene out loud with me. If it sounds unnatural or repetitive, it trips and jams in my ear. Reading your dialogue out loud, either alone or with a friend you trust to be brutally honest with you, is a great way to catch unnatural errors.

There’s also the trick of giving the characters something to do. They don’t have to be sitting in an office, or in a car, or at the kitchen table. They could be hiking, or chasing a suspect, or fighting off a barbarian horde, or slaying a dragon, or skulking through an abandoned spaceship. There’s nothing saying that the info dump has to come at a moment of stillness and quiet.

And remember that the moment of revelation should be the climax of the scene. Each scene should have its own mini-plot-mountain-rising-action-course. Instigating, rising action, climax, and then either cut to a new scene or a brief denouement. Something should happen in every scene – some information discovered or revealed, a character changes or grows, there’s a scene of action, or the plot leaps forward, etc.

Scenes that do more than one of those things are even better. Info-dump scenes don’t feel so boring if they’re happening in the middle of a sex scene, or a fighting scene, or a scene in a laboratory, or a travelling scene.

Is the look of your characters set before you start writing or do they change as you get to know them? Sometimes my character walk into my head fully formed –Forsyth strolled in one day, prim as you please, a skinny ginger amalgamation of Eddie Redmayne, Mark Gatiss, and David Thewliss. But some characters I deliberately sit down to design to compliment the world and what I need from them. For example, if Forsyth was the skinny ginger kid, then Kintyre had to be big, buff, tanned, and straight from the cover of a Harlequinn novel.

From there they sometimes change as the need arises – like, knowing a certain physical trait would be useful to solve a problem, so I go back and retroactively put it in.

But I try to be deliberate about my choices too. In the final book of The Accidental Turn series, our heroes step off the pages and into “the real world”. So I made a point of making every other character around them non-white. Fantasy tradition, which is what the series is commenting on, dictates that the heroes are always white and the PoC-representative characters are always monsters or half-something-or-other. I wanted the “real world” to reflect the world I actually live in. And choosing a variety of ethnicities for each character meant that I had an idea of how they would look and – stereotypically, based on their social standing, religion, personal culture, and country of origin – how they might dress.

But even then, I had a great time flouting those stereotypes. One of my favorite new characters is a first-generation Indian girl living in Toronto named Ahbni, who is totally into both respecting her parent’s home culture and a rainbow unicorn pastel-punk.

Once the character has been nebulously envisioned in my head, I write down the basics so I don’t forget them – eye color, hair color, height, weight, identifying features like freckles or piercings or tattoos – but then I don’t worry too much about it. If something important to their appearance comes up in the text (like Forsyth’s fear that his little tummy paunch means that he’s getting fat) then I describe it. But after I’ve described the character on the page for the first time, I don’t really bother doing it again.

I know that no matter what I say, the audience will envision them how they like, and I don’t mind that. Though I do make a point of trying to give a really clear, and quick, and immediate description of the character when we first meet them, something that really stands out to the reader.

And I try to avoid describing my narrator characters except in the comments of others. Nobody stands in front of a mirror and describes themselves or evaluates their own bodies for sexiness in real life. Please, can we chuck that narrative trope straight out the window?

There’s no need to tell the reader outright exactly what the narrator looks like, unless it is an extremely important narrative reason. Reveal it through showing, not telling. Reveal it in the character’s choices, what other characters say about them, how they react to situations. Find a way to be active about it, not passive.

Your readership is clever – let them put the clues together themselves. Trust them.

You can find out more about J.M and her work at http://jmfrey.net/books/ or follow her @scifrey here on Tumblr.

Editor Note: Do you have an interesting job? Is your work something out of the ordinary? Do you simply take great pride in what you do?  Columnist Sky Stoneseat wants to interview you!

Reach out today and be a part of this exciting new column. We want to highlight you and your line of work!

(OOC Note: We are looking for individuals who want to share the ins and outs of their RP job. These interviews will be conducted solely over tumblr.  You’ll be sent a set of questions and asked to reply in private to Sky. Once she has your responses, you may get a few follow up question over Tumblr chat. The responses will be used to write up short and sweet profiles of interesting jobs around Azeroth. Contact @skystoneseat today to schedule your profile!)