Script Frenzy 2012

 Script Frenzy, Writing  No Responses »
Apr 252012
 

Far be it from me to self-identify as a scriptwriter, but I still decided to take on the challenge of Script Frenzy this April. As defined on the official webpage, the challenge is to “write 100 pages of original scripted material in the 30 days of April.” As is the case with NaNoWriMo, “winning” is simply a matter of completing the challenge, and does not imply the superiority of one’s script to those of other participants (though I imagine that some participants choose to submit their work to actual contests following the completion of Script Frenzy).

Script Frenzy 2012 winner badge

I approached Script Frenzy in much the same way as NaNoWriMo, using it as an excuse to write for the sake of writing, as it were. Also, I had a very old, (nominally) ongoing game project lying around, which I thought I might turn into a script just for the hell of it. Thus was born yet another incarnation of A Timeless Epic, a project I’ve been failing to complete since 2006 or so.

A Timeless Epic started out as a small RMXP project, specifically designed to be a kind of surreal game in which I could try out experimental code without worrying about quality. In fact, the sound and graphics were purposely poor; for example, I drew every frame of animation without referencing the previous one, which resulted in a visual style nothing short of the absurd. I also made a decision early on to use a 1-bit palette for the game (that is, only white and black, without any intermediate shades of grey).1 The storyline was quite horrible as well, consisting almost exclusively of situations haphazardly thrown together to provide context for the functions I wanted to try.

Initially, the game more or less served its purpose, but as I kept adding new functionality and tacking on more aesthetic atrocities, I found myself growing attached to the project. The ugliness and absurdity of it all appealed to me,2 and I eventually abandoned some of my more “serious” projects in favour of A Timeless Epic. This proved to be a horrible idea, for a multitude of reasons.

Once I started thinking of A Timeless Epic as a real project, I found myself trying to “fix” it and make it, if not good, then at least consistent. Again, this was a game whose appeal was a direct consequence of its lack of consistency. Therefore, this new direction promptly caused me to lose interest in the project. I have since made several more versions of the game3, based on the same general idea and some of the more amusing fragments of the original design, but I haven’t really enjoyed making any version except the first one. I have also played around with spin-off games taking place in the same universe, but with other protagonists and different themes and game mechanics,4 which felt at least marginally more rewarding.

This brings us to the subject of my Script Frenzy project. Ever since the end of last year’s NaNoWriMo, I had been looking forward to Script Frenzy. Still, with about two days left in March, I realised that I had yet to think of an idea worthy of being turned into a script. The rules of Script Frenzy permit any kind of scripted material, the examples given on the webpage being “screenplays, stage plays, web series, TV shows, short films, and graphic novels.” I knew that I didn’t want to write anything film-related; I rarely even watch movies, so the prospect of making one, even in theory, didn’t appeal to me at all. Still, I had a basic grasp of what movie scripts were supposed to look like, while the other suggested script formats were completely alien to me. Furthermore, as my brother frequently writes scripts, I figured that I might as well pick a format that would allow me to ask him for advice. Thus, I decided to write my script as if it were for a movie. As for the actual story, I figured that I might as well pick A Timeless Epic and use Script Frenzy as an opportunity to make some sense of the plot.

I quickly realised that writing a hundred pages in a month would hardly be a challenge at all, especially considering the amount of whitespace in the standard script format. The fact that I did not once entertain the thought of overachieving, even after coming to this realisation, should probably have been a massive red flag. As I prefer to count words rather than pages, I made a rough estimation of a hundred pages being about 30,000 words. I later adjusted my estimation to 25,000 words, which was pretty accurate; my final word count ended up at 23,442.   Words.

Where was I going with this post, again?

In writing the pseudo-movie version of A Timeless Epic, I managed to produce more refined versions of some of the existing scenes, as well as some passable dialogue. I also added a couple of new characters and settings. What I did not succeed in doing, however, was to address the issue that had been plaguing this project ever since I started thinking of it as a project in its own right: A Timeless Epic was never meant to be coherent, and every attempt at making it so has consistently been detrimental to my enjoyment of the creation process. Trying to turn the whole mess into a script was the most frustrating thing I’ve ever done to this poor, abused project, and I ended up quitting as soon as I hit a hundred pages, ignoring the fact that it would have taken me at least another hundred to reach a conclusion. As such, one might say that I failed even though I won; the only thing I gained by doing this was a new level of insight into just how much I hate working on this project.

In retrospect, I believe this may have been the best possible outcome, because the frustration I felt while writing my script has brought me to a conclusion that I should have reached long ago: The only way I can ever improve the state of this project is to give up on it. A Timeless Epic started out as a by-product of other stuff, and from now on, that is what it’ll be.5

As for Script Frenzy, I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as NaNoWriMo, for several reasons. While a novel is a stand-alone work of art, a script is inherently more of a blueprint, making it far more difficult to stay interested if you have no intention of turning it into a finished product. As I knew from the get-go that I wasn’t going to make a movie, or indeed anything, based directly off the script, I found myself churning out text with absolutely no sense of purpose.6 Also, where I spent a lot of time socialising on the forums during NaNoWriMo, I hardly even looked at the Script Frenzy forums. I simply didn’t have anything to say, as scriptwriters don’t feel like “my people” in the same way that novelists do.7 Though I do applaud the initiative behind Script Frenzy, I probably won’t participate next year.

Beads of Frozen Sweat

 Running, Sports  No Responses »
Jan 312012
 

Far be it from me to complain about matters beyond my control,1 but I really hate the weather. I am in the habit of going for a run about three times a week, and while I enjoy the privilege of ready access to a treadmill, I try to run at least part of the distance outdoors regardless of the degree of meteorological antagonism, as it were.2 Now, as long as the temperature remains above, say, -3°C or so, I can simply take off my jacket and gloves when I get back inside, and otherwise stick with the same equipment on the treadmill as well, apart from the shoes, which tend to be wet and disgusting by this point.
Today, however, the outdoor temperature was as low as -6°C, meaning that I had to wear this to make my run anywhere near comfortable:

A mountain of clothes.
And upon my return, I had to take it all off to change into something better suited to the treadmill portion of my workout,3 which completely broke my flow.

Sort of.

Okay, so my run went pretty well anyway, but it might have broken my flow, is the point I am trying to make.

I seem to have lost track of where I was going with this post. To be honest, I thought up the topic in advance, and then ended up proving myself wrong by enjoying the whole thing a lot more than expected. I actually find low temperatures quite pleasant, provided that my clothing is appropriate, and as long as I keep moving. My lungs sometimes protest a bit for the first kilometer or so, but that was not the case today. Also, while you do have to wear heavier clothes, at least there is no need to bring half your weight in water when it is cold outside. Still, though, look at this pile of laundry. Look at it!

A pile of laundry.

Now, a far worse drawback of running outside in the winter is the way those hateful little patches of ice tend to form in the worst possible places. I have yet to actually slip and fall during a run,4 but I figure it is only a matter of time, and then I will really have something to whine about. Also, snow. Ik haat sneeuw. See? I even went through the trouble5 of learning the Dutch word for hate just to be able to express my dislike for the foul substance. Snow has all the worst properties of both ice and liquid water, and I hate it. Good going, nature.

NaNoWriMo 2011 in Retrospect

 NaNoWriMo, Writing  No Responses »
Nov 302011
 

Now, I’m not saying that those who settled for the default goal of 50,000 words should be any less proud of their accomplishment, but I ended up writing a total of 80,000 words this month.1 Once I got the hang of writing without worrying so much about the quality of what I churned out, 50k no longer seemed all that intimidating. In fact, I reached that particular goal on the 14th,2 though the official validator didn’t become available until the 25th.

NaNoWriMo 2011 Winner

I had three goals in mind when setting out on this journey.3

  1. To complete the official challenge and “win” NaNoWriMo by writing 50,000 words in a month.4
  2. To get some solid touch-typing practice, because it’s something of a disgrace for someone who types as much as I do to do it wrong.
  3. To end up with some kind of a finished draft, with a beginning, a middle and an end, and interesting5 enough to be worth editing.

Goal 1 went well; as previously mentioned, it took me only 14 days to write the first 50,000 words of my novel, and what’s more, I reached my individual goal of exactly 80,000 with a whole day to spare. After hitting 50k, I briefly considered going for 100k, or possibly writing another 50k piece, but decided that I didn’t want to push myself too hard. Another year, perhaps, though I hope to have less spare time in the future, rather than more.

All this touch-typing practice seems to have paid off, as well. I now type at the same pace I did before, if not faster, which is shiny. Since I wrote my novel thing in English, though, I fear that Å, Ä and, to a lesser extent, Ö may slow me down when typing in Swedish. Also worth noting is that you typically make little use of the numerical row when writing fiction, with the exception of the double quotes and the question mark.6

I was less successful with regard to my third goal; as proud as I am of my 80,000 words, they are just not any good. The plot is terrible, there is at least one character with no depth whatsoever, and I never got around to writing anything one might call a conclusion. As such, I still haven’t decided whether to bother editing this abomination, let alone allow anyone to read it. Trying to get it published was never my intention in the first place, so that hasn’t changed. I’m glad editing isn’t a part of NaNoWriMo, because while my current draft is well above 80k words in length, I can’t imagine that more than, say, 20 or 30k will be worth keeping.

I wanted to write a horror novel, because that’s one of the genres I tend to enjoy the most, as a reader. Some elements of my idea may have had some potential. Confined spaces, for example, tend to be quite effective in creating a frightening atmosphere, and an airship in mid-flight, which is the setting of my story, is about as unforgiving as one can get in terms of escape routes. I also opted to use a relatively small cast of characters, with the intention of giving the whole affair a more intimate quality. The main thing that went wrong in writing my story was probably that the premise was too complicated; horror needs to be simple, direct, and my setup was anything but. That, in turn, created an unfortunate necessity for exposition, and I soon found myself with more than 30k words without so much as a hint of an actual threat. From there, things only got worse7 as I began writing more exciting scenes with the intention of shoehorning them in later. Had quality been my main concern, I would likely have given up somewhere around the 40k mark, because at that point, I was descending at terminal velocity into the dark depths of inane writing. It was more fun to write than the good decent bits, though. For the remainder of the month, I bounced back and forth between writing scenes that might potentially fit into the finished novel, and complete nonsense.

The initial working title of my novel was Monocled Monstrosities, a horrible title for a horror novel, intended mainly as a kind of droll reference to my choice of genre and setting. I later promoted a chapter title, A Taste of Mud, to the title of the whole work, because I liked (and still like) the sound of it. Now, that’s hardly an ideal title for a story that takes place on an airship, and I kind of felt that I wanted to reserve that title for another piece, for which it would be more appropriate. Thus, I changed it again, to the incredibly creative Not A Taste of Mud, which is the current title. However, given my utter lack of success in making it a compelling horror novel, I am beginning to feel that it’s probably more of a Monocled Monstrosities, after all.

The month as a whole has been interesting and a lot more rewarding than I had imagined. I have managed to convince myself that I can still write longer texts, despite some prior evidence to the contrary.8 It was a nice change of pace to focus on quantity over quality for once, as I have always tended to edit my texts to pieces even while writing the first draft. While my actual story is, well, shit, I’ve had the opportunity to think a lot about writing in general, and my own writing in particular, and I believe I may have some better ideas for next time. I will definitely make a habit of participating in NaNoWriMo.

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