comunika

[blueberry-beanie]

I have several job interviews tomorrow (there is a sort of job fair and a media industry congress happening at university) and I tried to prepare for them. It's been so long since I had to do all of these business-theatrics and I'm unsure about how well I'll be able to present myself.

[sandybrownjensen]

"You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.”

“Then the Old Man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, raised a huge stone from it, and left it leaning. It disclosed a great hole that went plumb-down. "That is the way," he said. "But there are no stairs." "You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.” ― George MacDonald, The Golden Key and Other Stories

Week Three of the Network Narratives class--now that I’ve thrown myself in, time to reflect on the free fall of the past week.

At the top of my list of achievements in the class this week is a short story I wrote for the #5cardflickr challenge, “Where Warriors Fall from the Sky.”  I realize that most people take the five photos presented and jot a few lines to find a unity if they can. Some of these make more sense than others, but the thing is--I take “story” seriously.

 If I am asked to write a “story,” I get out my storymaking toolkit and by god try to write an old-fashioned story with characters, a setting, a “world-shattering moment” that changes the emotional trajectory of the character arc, plus I feel a retro obligation to a beginning, a middle, and an end.

I find it useful to start with the Pixar storymaking tool. It looks like this, and if you’ve read any of my little stories, you’ll recognize these moves embedded in them:

Following that pattern with thought and integrity will always get me there. The hard part is “letting go and letting imagination.” Some piece of my conscious mind has to be subjugated, so the waking dream can come forward and take over and tell me where it wants to go.

Another rule I hold myself to that I get from the good folks at Pixar:

These little stories like “The Greenhouse” (week one), and  “The Wheel, The Horse, The Ladder to the Sky” (week two), and “Where Warriors Fall Out of the Sky” (week three)  are what Hemingway (and I) call “five-finger exercises.” They are like a musician’s scales and warm-ups and practice, practice, practice.

When I revise, I usually have something different in mind each time. For “Warriors,” I worked on “character arc.” I wanted to make sure the protagonist had an emotional flaw and some self-doubt that she grows through or out of by the end of the story. I am always looking for that “world-shattering” moment, and that is the biggest challenge to my imagination--dreaming that “what next?” incident.

These aren’t stories I believe in enough to go back and revise until I’m blue in the face; however, this is a digital STORYTELLING class, and I don’t want to miss any opportunity to actually exercise my storytelling muscles.

It’s easy for me to be lazy--it is a known character flaw. I would rather slide through a prompt with half a poem, a germ of an idea, a fragment that I tell myself is an arty fragment--or a meme, clever saying or even somebody else’s thought repackaged. 

But none of that is doing the real work of dreaming the wholeness of a story.

I completely understand master fiction teacher Robert Olen Butler when he says:

 “There are two of you, one who wants to write and one who doesn’t. The one who wants to write has to keep fooling the one who doesn’t.” ― From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

One of the startling and fun things that happened to “Where Warriors,” is that co-#netnarr-conspirator Kevin Hodgson riffed his own meta-story on top of it in Hypothesis (clickety-click!). How cool is that? It is, to me, the quintessence of internet “openness” a.) for me to trust someone else with my story and b). for someone to have the initiative, imagination and sensitivity to jazzify my tune into a more intricate and interesting composition.

The week was also made extra special special with a Virtual Studio tour with Leonardo Flores, followed by weird annotation frenzy of its video on Hypothesis. I praise Kevin for Hypothesizing my story in a creative and original way, but my general opinion of Hypothesis does not yet match that of others. “Faint but pursuing.”

Hypothesis aside, I got very jazzed by Dr. Flores and his exciting introduction to e-poetry and e-literature in general, and I blogged about this Virtual Studio event in “Dr. Flores! Dr. Flores! My Head is Exploding!”

The “Daily Digital Alchemy” challenges gave me something to do each morning as I woke up with iPad and coffee:

Mon. Jan. 30 #30 “Distort the Scale” Day. “Find similar objects of different sizes, and make a photo that emphasizes or exaggerates the differences.” 

This was a photo I had taken the Sunday afternoon before which does the real deal in terms of foreshortening or visually distorting the scale. The Great Blue Heron has a wingspan of six and a half feet, but he looks tiny approaching the willows on the far shore because of the distance of the shot.

Tues. Jan. 31 #31 “Defy the rules- take a photo directly into the light.”

I had just come down off local Spencer’s Butte. As I approached the top, I just turned around and looked up at the summit crag with my iPhone 7+. I saw these people on top and the eerie light of the sun behind them and just shot into the sun. I didn’t see the rainbow effect until I got home. 

Wed. Feb. 1 #32 “Show us the most laboratory-like place in your home.”

Right above my computer is a collection of art supplies, so I didn’t have far to go. I had just received the journal with the Dark Angel on the right in the mail from an artist in Poland, so I moved things around to include it.

Thurs. Feb. 2 #33 Visualize Taroko Gorge Day. This was a super cool idea that got lots of good responses. The instructions were to “Open Nick Montfort’s dynamic, generative poem…. Let it flow by… Relax your mind.Now try to isolate a stanza or two. Try to copy it or save it in a screenshot. Next, connect to a photo (preferably your own). What imagery comes to mind? What gorge do you see?” My response was based on one of my own recent photographs with screencaptured text layered on top:

Fri. Feb. 3 #34 This was supposed to be “Build a community story using memes” day, exact wording, “Find the tweet for this DDA from @netnarr, and make a new meme that continues the narrative. Or build on someone else’s responses.” I thought nobody really understood the story-building concept of this prompt and the responses, including mine, were pretty lame.

Here is the original with my so-called response:

Sat. Feb. 4 #35 The question of the day was, “What gets your alchemist brain juices flowing?” I take any opportunity I can to make videos out of all the beautiful sites I get to photograph here in the Great Northwest, so I knocked together this little video to show that getting out into my world revs my creative brain right up:

Sun. Feb. 5 #36 This was Magical Realism Day where we were to write a paragraph based on a Twitter bot offering. We are promised this will go somewhere else next week. I collected a bunch of the bot-generated lines and saved them in a post.  My two favorite lines are “A talented cook bakes a cake made of stars,” and:

“A professor of English literature is looking for an enormous turtle in a Sicilian garden.”

Mon. Feb. 6 #37 Today was “Glitch Art” Day, which I had never heard of; however, directions and links were given. I randomly chose the glitch art generating site LunaPic and loaded a selfie I had taken of me and a tree. Result is actually kind of cool:

That’s about it for another quiet week at #netnarr. I’m looking forward to another Virtual Tour tomorrow plus the Big Reveal of the Week Four Syllabus. Somewhere in a universe far far away (Kean University in New Jersey), real students are sitting around doing this class and getting real credit for it. I sure hope they’re having as much fun as I am as an Open Participant here in Eugene, Oregon!