Worldbuilding
May. 30th, 2012 07:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethThe trouble with me and writing is I find the inventing things stage interesting and the writing stories part hard work. I suspect this is common. Plus by the time I've invented a world in sufficient detail to know how the plots would work out, I know how the plots would work out. I mean, why explore more?
:eyeroll:
All of which is to say that despite me not having writ a single episode with Rhodri et al, after filling a folder full of world notes, I have another ever so slightly different world springing to mind.
I was thinking that my assorted insomniac mary sue adventures have departed from their madly crossed over canon sources to the point I could just slip the last few ties and have basically a whole new epic science fiction adventure. Which, granted, would be a tad bit familiar in places, but, genre.
But if I put it that way, nobody would ever read it.
Yet if it's all about awesome women running interstellar empires and kicking lots of arse, with bonus epic romances, some of them between expressive scientists and stoic military types, that's like a grab bag of everything cool.
All the women looking like clones of me would be somewhat of a problem for the cool factor though.
The epic xoverness of the verse required there to be several of me so they could be in lots of places at once. So far Asgard cloning, genetic modification with other species DNA, ascension, descension, and paradoxical time loops have all been utilised in making enough of me to go around. Any one of those would be a world changer, but the cloning/DNA stuff is the most interesting because the closest to possible. There's also the possibilities inherent in the brain taping / copying over to new clone bodies. Like, they could just stay ghost in the machine. And then you can tweak the code some for slightly altered selves, or you can just hang out in virtuality. But once you've got fully customisable VR, why ever leave? Though, having read Accelerando, I can think of just a few reasons. ANYway, I don't usually think much on the virtuality stuff, because the point is to marry as many of my favourite characters as possible. Er, and save the world a lot. Neither of which are really optimised by being a computer program.
Fanfic goes there with any and all of that stuff though, they're like standard tropes. I'm pretty sure I could find all of them as John/Rodney. ... actually, I think most of them I could find as John/Rodney from one, maybe two writers.
Fanfic does not so much write about women though.
Does it?
I mean, whenever I go looking, I find more pretty angsty white boys, but do I just not know where to look?
Also, men in a story frequently distort women's whole lives to be All About Them.
But we only have a word for that when girl characters do it, or derived from that name, Mary Sue.
And, okay, protagonist, but there's ways to do that as leave other characters with some kind of agency or... point. I mean, some characters seem to be there solely because giving one dude All The Skills Ever only works up to the point they need extra hands. Or because the admiration has to come from other people too if he is not to be a total wanker.
I find when I'm worldbuilding now I flinch from some of the stuff that seems like most fun.
It's not just that some characters seem to need more of a cover before I can let other people see them.
It's just accumulated baggage from knowing what fanfic does.
So I'm fine with taking characters from all over, filing the serial numbers off, and letting them play with each other
but making up characters from available parts - from me - that's... awkward.
I know research is the difference between 'write what you know' and 'write about a really boring English student', but write what you know is still important. Taking your insides and pouring them on the page is pretty much the line to 'write what only you can write'.
Even in collaborative stuff like TV series or in genres with strong tropes and conventions that's still the point.
Okay, not the only point, sometimes it's like dancing and the communal engagement with the required steps is building something interesting too.
But if I'm going to sit here and be the kind of crazy that puts words on the page, they should be the ones I can make, not just echoes.
I think part of the problem is when I invent plots I don't do things that seem stupid to me.
yes, that sounds like an adventage, but
I spend the most time in insomnia story land getting in arguments with how other people run the world.
The times I have spent in discussions with assorted Captains, of the Enterprise and elsewhere, they would fill books.
Unfortunately they'd be epic, boring books of philosophy and politics and yelling.
Not always though. I mean, if you disagree with the Prime Directive you can get in awesome amounts of trouble trying to fix things.
But if I'm making up a world, I'm not going to think of the Prime Directive (unless I skim it from somewhere else complete), because it is wrong and obviously wrong and why would that spring to mind?
So then mostly my characters don't get in those epic and important to them yelling times.
This is a theory though, because obviously I do have all these arguments in my head already, so I could structure the whole story around why all the other shows are Doing It Wrong.
It would just seem like fanfic with a rather odd angle.
Would be an easy way to populate a 'verse though. Take all the spaceship shows and give them different planets, see how their politics crunches together. All those ready made characters and that political variety, even if you only bring the humans. And then what I would do is different again, so my people would be in the middle, clearly being right.
Or, you know, not, and then readers would still be interested because they could cheer the other teams.
Writing it as a crossover... it kind of happens sometimes, but it's always x visits y's world, small team stuff. There's never just, the Tau'ri discover the Federation, politics ensues. I mean, in Stargate there are so many planets and galaxies of humans, there's no particular reason to not just do that. Granted the history of the Federation would involve parallels of epic scope right up until the 1960s, but go lalala about that a very little and you've just got another set of neighbours. If the Earth all these space heroics start from is just one in a vast set of planets where people looked at the ground and named it Earth then everything fits like kaleidoscopes. And it's suddenly less obvious who The Good Guys are.
That could be interesting.
But now I should do essays.
:eyeroll:
All of which is to say that despite me not having writ a single episode with Rhodri et al, after filling a folder full of world notes, I have another ever so slightly different world springing to mind.
I was thinking that my assorted insomniac mary sue adventures have departed from their madly crossed over canon sources to the point I could just slip the last few ties and have basically a whole new epic science fiction adventure. Which, granted, would be a tad bit familiar in places, but, genre.
But if I put it that way, nobody would ever read it.
Yet if it's all about awesome women running interstellar empires and kicking lots of arse, with bonus epic romances, some of them between expressive scientists and stoic military types, that's like a grab bag of everything cool.
All the women looking like clones of me would be somewhat of a problem for the cool factor though.
The epic xoverness of the verse required there to be several of me so they could be in lots of places at once. So far Asgard cloning, genetic modification with other species DNA, ascension, descension, and paradoxical time loops have all been utilised in making enough of me to go around. Any one of those would be a world changer, but the cloning/DNA stuff is the most interesting because the closest to possible. There's also the possibilities inherent in the brain taping / copying over to new clone bodies. Like, they could just stay ghost in the machine. And then you can tweak the code some for slightly altered selves, or you can just hang out in virtuality. But once you've got fully customisable VR, why ever leave? Though, having read Accelerando, I can think of just a few reasons. ANYway, I don't usually think much on the virtuality stuff, because the point is to marry as many of my favourite characters as possible. Er, and save the world a lot. Neither of which are really optimised by being a computer program.
Fanfic goes there with any and all of that stuff though, they're like standard tropes. I'm pretty sure I could find all of them as John/Rodney. ... actually, I think most of them I could find as John/Rodney from one, maybe two writers.
Fanfic does not so much write about women though.
Does it?
I mean, whenever I go looking, I find more pretty angsty white boys, but do I just not know where to look?
Also, men in a story frequently distort women's whole lives to be All About Them.
But we only have a word for that when girl characters do it, or derived from that name, Mary Sue.
And, okay, protagonist, but there's ways to do that as leave other characters with some kind of agency or... point. I mean, some characters seem to be there solely because giving one dude All The Skills Ever only works up to the point they need extra hands. Or because the admiration has to come from other people too if he is not to be a total wanker.
I find when I'm worldbuilding now I flinch from some of the stuff that seems like most fun.
It's not just that some characters seem to need more of a cover before I can let other people see them.
It's just accumulated baggage from knowing what fanfic does.
So I'm fine with taking characters from all over, filing the serial numbers off, and letting them play with each other
but making up characters from available parts - from me - that's... awkward.
I know research is the difference between 'write what you know' and 'write about a really boring English student', but write what you know is still important. Taking your insides and pouring them on the page is pretty much the line to 'write what only you can write'.
Even in collaborative stuff like TV series or in genres with strong tropes and conventions that's still the point.
Okay, not the only point, sometimes it's like dancing and the communal engagement with the required steps is building something interesting too.
But if I'm going to sit here and be the kind of crazy that puts words on the page, they should be the ones I can make, not just echoes.
I think part of the problem is when I invent plots I don't do things that seem stupid to me.
yes, that sounds like an adventage, but
I spend the most time in insomnia story land getting in arguments with how other people run the world.
The times I have spent in discussions with assorted Captains, of the Enterprise and elsewhere, they would fill books.
Unfortunately they'd be epic, boring books of philosophy and politics and yelling.
Not always though. I mean, if you disagree with the Prime Directive you can get in awesome amounts of trouble trying to fix things.
But if I'm making up a world, I'm not going to think of the Prime Directive (unless I skim it from somewhere else complete), because it is wrong and obviously wrong and why would that spring to mind?
So then mostly my characters don't get in those epic and important to them yelling times.
This is a theory though, because obviously I do have all these arguments in my head already, so I could structure the whole story around why all the other shows are Doing It Wrong.
It would just seem like fanfic with a rather odd angle.
Would be an easy way to populate a 'verse though. Take all the spaceship shows and give them different planets, see how their politics crunches together. All those ready made characters and that political variety, even if you only bring the humans. And then what I would do is different again, so my people would be in the middle, clearly being right.
Or, you know, not, and then readers would still be interested because they could cheer the other teams.
Writing it as a crossover... it kind of happens sometimes, but it's always x visits y's world, small team stuff. There's never just, the Tau'ri discover the Federation, politics ensues. I mean, in Stargate there are so many planets and galaxies of humans, there's no particular reason to not just do that. Granted the history of the Federation would involve parallels of epic scope right up until the 1960s, but go lalala about that a very little and you've just got another set of neighbours. If the Earth all these space heroics start from is just one in a vast set of planets where people looked at the ground and named it Earth then everything fits like kaleidoscopes. And it's suddenly less obvious who The Good Guys are.
That could be interesting.
But now I should do essays.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-30 11:32 am (UTC)Sorry, not trying to derail anything, just bookmarking. Or postmarking. Or . . . oh, clicking the button already.
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