Quill and Ink Corner: A writing thread for the Cobbies.

Lerad: That is good to hear. Let us know when we can see it.

I am finding it easier to write in note pad for some reason. Maybe because it is so stark and simple like a paperback page.

Little or nothing to distract your thinking just what looks like a straight white sheet.

edited 18th Oct '13 7:43:46 PM by TuefelHundenIV

I tried Na No Wri Mo for the first time last year. Got sidetracked by life a week into it and had to abandon it. I'll try again this year.

I actually went and signed up for Na No Wri Mo. If anyone would care to add me, my name is "TheBlueNinja".

I went ahead and added you. My username over there is 'NoCyg'.

edited 23rd Oct '13 6:23:20 PM by Nocturna

@Blue: I'm doing Na No again this year and I added you as well...I'm - you guessed it - Drunk Scriblerian.

I'm developing supporting characters for a sitcom script I'll be trying to get myself to write as a modified Na No Wri Mo and trying to decide if it would be worth coming up with a reason why a Scottish-Indian character (of South Asian descent, raised in Scotland) would move to America and end up working at a coffee house. Admittedly, a lot of that reason would probably be based on what city the story is set in, which I haven't decided on yet.

Since I'm writing a teleplay, it'd also make casting more difficult, since I don't expect there's a lot of call for Indian actors in America to learn Scottish accents. I'm just particularly interested in Great British people of South Asian descent right now, and looking for somewhere to write one. Makes an unusual detail I could probably get some story mileage out of.

I am going to do a Na No Wri Mo this year. I successfully finished it last year, and I think I can do it again.

Currently, the story I have in mind features a man who had his girlfriend killed when they went to an overseas trip by four serial killers. Then follows the quest of vengeance where the man tracks all four of them down and kills them with their very own modus operandi. I'm thinking of ending this story with the main character turning into a psychopathic murderer himself in the end.

Normally this kind of thing would take a lot of research, but hey, no rules.

Paradox: Well, there's a somewhat well-known Indian actor who was raised in England, so I suppose you could find an actual Scottish-Indian actor with a bit of looking.

edited 23rd Oct '13 7:41:57 PM by Leradny

Moving to America and getting a job as a barista can be as simple as moving to America to go to college and snagging a job at the college Starbucks.

Or it can be more complex and be all about moving to America and getting a job at a coffee shop because Uncle Typical Immigrant Name has opened a coffee shop in Tulsa and needs help.

Or it can be externship while the wealthy son of the family of Indian ex-pats living in the North of England moves to Hopkinsville KY to learn the ins and outs of the copper industry and gets a job at the local coffee shop because... it's fiction and he can do what ever he wants.

Part of an actors job is to learn accents. Some people have an ear for them and pick it up with little trouble, others have to work at it.

edited 23rd Oct '13 10:05:48 PM by blackcat

The main one I'd come up with was college, but it seemed a bit of a stretch for an Indian family moving to Britain for a better life to send their kid to America to study. Plenty of excellent schools in Britain.

Oh, did you mean a family who actually immigrated from India to Britain, and not a Scottish family of Indian descent?

As for going to college, the protagonist could simply WANT to go to college in America.

edited 24th Oct '13 12:06:17 PM by Leradny

Actually yeah, the concept works better if the family's been in Britain for a few generations.

It's (technically in my time zone) the scariest day of the year: the day before Na No Wri Mo!

Last year, I used November as a modified Script Frenzy, where I made myself write one short script, usually but not always sketch comedy, per day. I'd wanted them to be mostly around three pages so I could have a total near the 100-page Script Frenzy goal, but I couldn't come up with three-page ideas, and a lot of them were barely half-page filler sketches. One of them, probably written when I was in a rush to make up for missed days, just describes zooming out from an astronaut apparently running around a spacecraft's ring a la 2001 to reveal he's actually in a giant hamster wheel.

This year I've given myself a much scarier task. I want to write a season of nine 10-15 minute sitcom episodes over the course of the month. It's the sort of show that can serve as a catchall for a lot of throwaway ideas, amd I have some plans to recycle things that may not have worked as well as sketches, as well as a couple of pre-existing short film scripts I'll be rewriting for the finale, but still, I sat down and planned out the basic plots of each episode and some of them are still dauntingly sparse.

Comic scripting is a very different challenge from prose, mostly because pages are counted instead of individual words. I'm still keeping it to pen and paper first, and I've developed a (probably extremely messy) shorthand which allows me to squeeze 10 comic pages into one piece of paper. But it looks unimpressive when I've written 5+ hours for an issue and all I have to show for it are 3 pages.

I didn't know you were interested in writing comic books. The style has much more in common with screenplays than prose, but it's different enough I can't say I'm exactly familiar with it. Is this for NaNo or just the regular project du jour? The format is different enough I'm not sure how 100 pages of screenplay (the Script Frenzy goal) translates to comic scripts.

My goal per episode is 10-15 minutes, which roughly translates to 10-15 pages. A page may be less than a minute if it's heavily action or description, or more than a minute if it's heavy on dialogue.

I had roughly the same pages per hour tonight, but that was largely because I'm badly out of practice on knuckling down and actually writing.

edited 2nd Nov '13 12:42:57 AM by TParadox

I'm writing a 12-issue graphic novel. It was on the page before this.

100 pages would be about 3 issues/chapters. I could do that in a week if I tried hard enough. Right now I'm still trying to familiarize myself with the process, so I'm a bit slow.

I've gotten basics beyond casual comic reading down, and I'll probably pass the rough drafts to a few people for critique.

I think this is a pretty good self-introducing line, at least for a first draft.

(Delivered through a thick Scottish accent) "Callum Manish Roy, assistant manager and ambassador from the East and West. Before you ask, my family's lived in Glasgow for four generations, I moved here on some daft idea I'd get better schooling, and no, I don't especially fancy curried haggis."

It'd be over the top to also have him mention not wearing a tartan turban, wouldn't it? Dang, actually putting the words together sounds pretty funny. I may have to hold on to it for later.

edited 4th Nov '13 7:46:07 PM by TParadox

Keep things how they are for now. Don't get hung up on editing until you have at least a chunk of the first draft done. Is this a short story or a novel or what?

Short sitcom series, the first episode. I was going to aim for 10-15 minutes per episode, but I'm seven pages in and still introducing characters, haven't done much by plot, and it's not very funny. But my first drafts are for tying down the story. I can't figure out where the story is going and be funny at the same time.

Figuring out the plot first is a good idea. Comedy is a matter of tone, not events. And it is way easier to edit tone instead of plot.

edited 4th Nov '13 10:23:13 PM by Leradny

I really meant to get more than 5 pages of issue 2 done this week.

I know the scene after the next one ... but not the next scene, and the story and setting is such that I can't simply time skip straight ahead. I also am very bad at writing stuff out of order, so I don't want to do that and then "come back to it" because I know whatever I insert later will be of lower quality.

I have the same problem. Write the crappiest scene off the top of your head to get it over with and edit later.

Issue 2 of The Meliad is going slowly but well.

My group of friends has encountered a snag, however: one guy keeps telling everyone to do a bunch of tutorials or watch anime, under the reasoning that "most of you are closeminded, lazy, and ignorant". The leader called him out but the dude apparently thinks "no one sees his logic because they don't like his tone". He's right, but it's not helping HIS case.

edited 11th Nov '13 11:29:32 AM by leradny

Um ... how exactly does watching anime help you write? Unless you're doing research for a fanfic, I suppose.

If he had phrased it in the proper manner, he could have said something along the lines of "If you watch a bunch of high-quality anime such as ___, ___, and ___, you could grow to understand some major stylistic conventions and cultural differences between Eastern and Western storytelling which will allow for flexibility in your writing."

Mostly he just came off as an anime elitist jerk.