NiGHTiNGaLE

o erm if u guys wanna check out the story i did using one of Gdine’s openers, then click on this link.. hope it works..
http://gorgeousgdine.wordpress.com/openers/

Ah well… guess we don’t have class for this week ( well as in week two although im writing this in week 3!), and a holiday is always welcome, to a born last-minute slacker. but sadly,unfortunately, and miserably, if we don’t have class on one day, it means two things. one can be that we get alotta’ homework…..
OR
Replacement class…
OR worse
Both.
LOL anyway, homework at home was interesting, because everytime i started to write a story, i would have to keep kicking at my mind to force it back onto the active,3rd person present tense road, while it tried to run away and continue down the road of a narrative, past tense and passive voice kinda story…
everytime i think of a story, i would get this image of what a story teller would look like, an old man with lots of life experiences and fables and who usually would embellish or even twist them into half truths(experiences) to give the audience a much more interesting story to visualise, and satisfy both their need for entertainment and sense of melodrama.
So usually it would come across as a “long long time ago…” so immediately it sets off this expectation that the story would be the recollection of the old man, which automatically allows past tense, sometimes 3rd person depending on the way the story is told and definitely the active voice is used most of the time, in order to engage the audience, whether its told at the street, using the malay dalang shadow puppet… ah well.. here’s me signing off to do the 5 stories!

12liners(openers)
1.Morals are like snowflakes in the sun, which melt in the face of heat and time.
2.In the eyes of a vulture, another corporate roadkill just adds to the menu.
3.Lying is a fine art, you just have to keep it simple.
4.Jeremiah gaps at the enormous figure coming out of the shadows.
5.If 4/5 of the world goes insane, would the rest of the 1/5 be consider themselves mad?
6.Honor and coolness have one thing in common; self-image.
7.We fight about a lot of things, for only one reason: Pride.
8.Susanna half-heartedly watches herself pick up the phone and dial the number.
9.Rufus pounds at the door again and again with cries of blood-thirst, as the candle slowly dims to a flicker, then goes out.
10. Driven to eternal labor in prison clothes of black and white, slave to a lifestyle obsession Jack doesnt’ even realise or even knows how to stop.
11. A woman is marries herself to either career, or to love.
12. Curiousity may kill her cat, but the neighbour’s dog will die under her shovel.

Ah first the notes from the tutorial..

Well the present writing format that we are gonna use would be in
-Present tense
-The 3rd person
-Active voice

Screenplays usually use the format to make the material feel more fresh, imeediate and urgent.

The Active voice versus the Passive.

The Active voice uses strong verbs, illustrates the action in the reader’s mind, uses the immediate sentence structure and hence conveys the story in a lively manner.

The Passive voice uses weak verbs,tells the information in a more factual manner and hence distances the reader from the story.

Also engaging in a emotional related action is more visually powerful and fufilling than just describing the feeling the character is feeling.

Tips for writing….. hmmm ill shortform it a bit here i guess

-An idea in mind? Or stuck. Keep going till you’re done

-Sleeping on a problem ain’t gonna work, so keep hacking at it till u get it solved.

-If your stuck on how to get started on a project, just writing some stuff could help, but u still need something tiny to get kick off.

-It doesn’t matter what or how you write, as your thinking and moving at your own pace would begin anyway.

Since it was the first lesson i was about to attend for storytelling , i was already telling myself” OMG here we go again through another Hell of Writcomm like eternity.”. but i was quite surprised at how the class started out with the ‘write 3 things about yourself’ card game and the name memory game.

Well if you asked me why i chose greasy, i wouldn’t know why… but at that time well when ryan said it had to be something that rhymed or at least started with the same letter of your name i thought of green.. but how do you act out a colour? ah then… the enigmatic random thought of french fries came my way… so i thought french fries = greasy fingers = greasy.. ah well. then we got through the theory bits of the lesson which definitely was quite a bit of food for thought i guess.

Then we also had to get down to creating a blog to post our homework on it.. so yeah…then came the fun part of the story writing.

Starting with a line such as ‘Louis put on his hula girl outfit and enters the temple’ got me stagnated for a little bit there, but then i sorta remembered the advice of adding a lot of visually stimulating ‘ mind candy’ words , so the crazy ideas kicked in and i started to do alot of descriptives, such as the door, the elder, how he walked, his identity, the temple ambience, the corridors beyond the first door and the doors to the rooms inside the corridors.
But then this resulted in me not being able to conclude the story properly to an end withe the amount of time i had. It could either be a very long and good story, or a very short bad, and inconclusive one. so i decided to leave it as the end of one chapter. ah well.. that was all for the first lesson…