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Winter Ceramic DM™: THE WINNER!
- Thread starter mythago
- Start date
Sialia
First Post
I blame Google.Maldur said:btw Sialia you should work on your dutch!
I don't speak but perhaps six words of Dutch, and have no understanding of the grammar. Best I could do was try the same prhase at a couple of different translation sites and pass it forwards and back a few times.
But I figured,the kid may be a polyglot, but he's not necessarily fluent in everything either. Dutch is definitely less common around here than Spanish or Chinese.
Anyway, if you want to send me the correction, I'll add it to the list of things I will fix when I can bear to look at this story again.
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Sialia
First Post
OK the following is for those of you who like things pureed and spoon fed.
If you prefer to do your own reading, please ignore.
The Fully Detailed Naked Explanation of what the Heck I was Talking About in Round 3
If you prefer to do your own reading, please ignore.
The Fully Detailed Naked Explanation of what the Heck I was Talking About in Round 3
OK, all three stories are about the perception of the passage of time.
Each also has a sub-theme:
The first is about the definition of art.
The second was meant to be about performance, but came out being more about dramatic composition.
I don’t have a good single word for the third, but I think “politics” is as close as I can get. Perhaps "integration."
The village is made up of many different peoples, which they celebrate with their many-hued maypole. As I tried to have Miguel explain, the point of the village is not to blend all the cultures into one bland homogenized thing, but rather to celebrate the uniqueness of the individuals.
The fungal mind is made up of many, many minds, but they are illithid minds (and a few dwarfs and a halfling). The illithids were setting up a new colony, which means they were far from their original Elder Brain, and ready to form a new one. But since the psi-fungus overloaded from the feedback of being involved in the taste-linked performance eating and ate them, it merged them without properly being able to integrate them into the single personality of a true Elder Brain. (Remember, Illithids don't become petitioners when they die--they merge with their elder brain. There is no other afterlife for an Illithid.)
As discussed in the Illithiad, illithids despise partial personalities--their survival and reproduction depends upon it. So they are fundamentally required to try to excise any part of the brain that is trying to exert independent thought. Which, in this case, was all of them. It is likely that the creature would have destroyed much of itself until only one dominant personality was left. At that point it would have become much more like a true Elder Brain (with the accompanying 5 mile radius of psi influence that would surely have eaten much of Berryessa.)
Volpe is a true blend of many things: elf, human and halfling. He does not see himself as being made of parts--he is himself, with one unique identity. Problem is, without having peers like himself to associate with, he is anxious about who and what he is, what his purpose in life is, etc. and this anxiety keeps him endlessly on the move, and detached from other people. So his integration is successful, but his self understanding and his ability to connect with other people is not. His other problem is that he is hundreds of years old, and he finds it difficult to connect with shorter lived purebred halflings who come and go so quickly. He wonders what is the point of trying to create anything when he has seen so many things end. As a historian, his is obsessed with uncovering evidence of the ends of things older than himself.
Miguel is like him--a mix-breed. Also unfathomably old. If Volpe is hundreds of years old, Miguel is thousands of years old. He has learned to cope with being what he is. He is in the story to give Volpe a chance to see that it is not all futile, just because it is also all endlessly falling in to the sea. Also because, like a certain moderator that I chose to honor, he has the gift of being able to set limits on what is acceptable behavior without doing harm. If Mirabelle learns nothing more from him than how to accept help gracefully when she needs it, she has learned one of the things she needs to know to be able to grow.
Each also has a sub-theme:
The first is about the definition of art.
The second was meant to be about performance, but came out being more about dramatic composition.
I don’t have a good single word for the third, but I think “politics” is as close as I can get. Perhaps "integration."
The village is made up of many different peoples, which they celebrate with their many-hued maypole. As I tried to have Miguel explain, the point of the village is not to blend all the cultures into one bland homogenized thing, but rather to celebrate the uniqueness of the individuals.
The fungal mind is made up of many, many minds, but they are illithid minds (and a few dwarfs and a halfling). The illithids were setting up a new colony, which means they were far from their original Elder Brain, and ready to form a new one. But since the psi-fungus overloaded from the feedback of being involved in the taste-linked performance eating and ate them, it merged them without properly being able to integrate them into the single personality of a true Elder Brain. (Remember, Illithids don't become petitioners when they die--they merge with their elder brain. There is no other afterlife for an Illithid.)
As discussed in the Illithiad, illithids despise partial personalities--their survival and reproduction depends upon it. So they are fundamentally required to try to excise any part of the brain that is trying to exert independent thought. Which, in this case, was all of them. It is likely that the creature would have destroyed much of itself until only one dominant personality was left. At that point it would have become much more like a true Elder Brain (with the accompanying 5 mile radius of psi influence that would surely have eaten much of Berryessa.)
Volpe is a true blend of many things: elf, human and halfling. He does not see himself as being made of parts--he is himself, with one unique identity. Problem is, without having peers like himself to associate with, he is anxious about who and what he is, what his purpose in life is, etc. and this anxiety keeps him endlessly on the move, and detached from other people. So his integration is successful, but his self understanding and his ability to connect with other people is not. His other problem is that he is hundreds of years old, and he finds it difficult to connect with shorter lived purebred halflings who come and go so quickly. He wonders what is the point of trying to create anything when he has seen so many things end. As a historian, his is obsessed with uncovering evidence of the ends of things older than himself.
Miguel is like him--a mix-breed. Also unfathomably old. If Volpe is hundreds of years old, Miguel is thousands of years old. He has learned to cope with being what he is. He is in the story to give Volpe a chance to see that it is not all futile, just because it is also all endlessly falling in to the sea. Also because, like a certain moderator that I chose to honor, he has the gift of being able to set limits on what is acceptable behavior without doing harm. If Mirabelle learns nothing more from him than how to accept help gracefully when she needs it, she has learned one of the things she needs to know to be able to grow.
Sialia said:
I like spoonfed. I like spoonfed from the author AFTER I've read my own meaning into it.
So this was interesting to me. I think some of what you were trying to do came across, but much of it (due to a 3 day writing time) got scrunched and mushed so that those of us not in your brain didn't get it (or at least I didn't).
I also find it interesting that you knew what you were writing about. As in a theme.
I (rarely) write with a theme in mind. I write a story and then on the re-reading and editing find the theme and build the editing around trying to polish that theme.
Frex: One of my (very) early stories concerned the killing of a dragon. When I wrote it, I wrote just to get it out of my head and for a creative writing assignment. When others read it, they told me it was about euthansia. Looking at it later, I realized they were right and was able to strengthen the story with that in mind. However, the story ended up being a conglamoration of 5+ years of my writing style growing and changing so it is basically crap at this point.
More recently I wrote a story that I knew had a theme going in (environmentalism in vague terms), but I tried to just let it write. Afterwards, I'm working on editing it to make the message more clear without being a clue-by-four and also to polish the sub-theme (it is wrong to trap a wild being).
My most recent story was a struggle, because I had no concept of a theme. And without it, I was floundering for an ending. I still haven't hit upon a good theme, so while the story is "ended" it is not "finished" because I hate the ending.
Zhaneel
Berandor
lunatic
Thanks for deleting my posts, PirateCat!
Perhaps I might make a good editor, except for editing my own stuff
Sialia: I think all of this is in the story, but some of the themes didn't occur to me before as belonging to a common idea. That is definitely a result from the time limit.
So now, after you read my points, let's wait for arwink showing me how it's done right
Perhaps I might make a good editor, except for editing my own stuff
Sialia: I think all of this is in the story, but some of the themes didn't occur to me before as belonging to a common idea. That is definitely a result from the time limit.
So now, after you read my points, let's wait for arwink showing me how it's done right
Sialia
First Post
Well, unless the judges are a lot sweeter than Zhaneel and Berandor, at this point the bragging rights mostly consist of "I didn't suck as badly as my opponent." And somehow, I'm just not counting on the judges being sweeter.Cedric said:
Nor am I actually especially interested in sweetness for it's own sake.
It's interesting to hear about what worked and what didn't work.
Writing these stories was the reward for doing this contest for me. I learned some things that I can use again forever, that I really needed to know. At least two.
1. I used to try to build my stories by creating characters and then take one long thread of thought and try to knit a plot for them. This almost always failed. The characters would be interesting but they would sit around and talk forever and do nothing and go nowhere. I didn't know where I was trying to take them, and just kept hoping something interesting would occur. It rarely did, or at least it would only result in amusing episodes, and not a rise toward climatic action.
For these, I created good characters and then took a series of "beads" (key moments I wanted to develop), crafted them first, and then ran the characters and the plot string through them. This works fabulously, and because I was able to repeat the trick three times, I know it was not a unique fluke.
It's similar to how Piratecat has told me he crafts a module. There are a series of things he wants the players to get to, but they have freedom to be themselves and get from point A to Point G in whatever way seems to make the most sense.
Being able to concentrate on a theme at the same time as the characters and a plot comes from knowing that each "bead" can have both a literal meaning and also metaphorical meaning. It doesn't matter which comes first, as long as you eventually find both. So I can introduce the rocks first just as rocks, and then have characters discuss them later. Or I can have Noachsvernvorel work the second level of her hands at the moment they arrive in the story.
Generally, I prefer not to use any focal thing in a story which I have not previously established is present in the world. So my stories run long because I want to introduce the basket of heads before I use them for the nightmare sequence.
2. When I was at a party Saturday night, I got to chatting with a scriptwriter from LA. I didn’t discuss my story with him specifically, but I asked him how to create a thought that was neither so predictable that the audience could see it coming miles off, nor so erratic that they couldn’t follow it as it unfolded. His advice was to go deeper into the characters. Each person has his/her own motivations. If you know what the character wants as short term goals, as long term goals and also as underlying needs, then you will be able to find the way that the character will try to solve his/her problems in a way that is unique to that individual.
This made perfect sense. It’s why GMs are continually surprised by their players, and players are frequently surprised by GMs. The more you are inside somebody’s point of view, the more it seems like there is an obvious thing to do that is only obvious to that person. It's what saves a plot from being to linear, where it seems that the characters have no choices at all and are being railroaded through the sequence of beads.
Now, with a little more time, once you’ve gotten there, you can show the story to some other readers and then try to get a sense of how far you had your head up that character’s, um, ‘persona’ (hi, grandma!), and then you can try to help the audience get there, too. What did you need to know about this character to be able to follow her train of thought that I forgot to tell you about because I was so far in her that it seemed obvious to me?
The other way to “go deeper” for me was to go back and re-research my characters classes, levels, inventories, and the ecology of my monsters. If you know what’s in their toolkits, how they work, and you know what they want to achieve, it is easier to make them do something interesting and plausible with what they have to work with.
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Wow, Sialia that was very informative and interesting. Thank you for sharing.
OTOH, I will re-state: I liked both your and PC's stories. So it is not a matter of "who sucked the least." You both wrote good stories and you both wrote well.
The critism is just that: Constructive critism. How to make your good better.
Zhaneel
OTOH, I will re-state: I liked both your and PC's stories. So it is not a matter of "who sucked the least." You both wrote good stories and you both wrote well.
The critism is just that: Constructive critism. How to make your good better.
Zhaneel
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