I create a world of finite somethings

Kinda relates to this post regarding strong images, but talks about it in a different way.

Rhythm isn’t something that they talk about much in a writing class. You’ll talk about voice, about structure, about flow, about show versus tell, and maybe about grammar. You’ll figure out things you can drop, things you can’t get rid of no matter how much you try, and things that people respond to, good and bad. But talking about rhythm in an almost song-like manner is something usually reserved for poetry or occasionally about dialogue in play scripts. Yet I tend to think rhythm can be important to narrative writing too.

Visualizing it is easier than spelling it out, and I sort of had this minor epiphany when watching film commentaries, so there you go. In the extended edition of The Two Towers, Jackson talks at length about how the planning of the warg attack midway into the film was fumbled a bit and they didn’t have a clear direction to go with the scene even when they were shooting it. In post-production, Jackson gave the graphics team the empty plates of Rohirrim fighting yet-to-be-animated wargs and said something along the lines of “I need x number of shots that have good punctuation.” Obviously he wasn’t talking about commas and question marks. The direction was for scenes that had a kind of emphasis to them, an energy that “punctuates” beats in the battle to make it have an ebb and flow, to give it intensity and excitement.

I touched on this a bit before I think with action scenes, but I think in general it works as a principle too: finding those moments in a scene, whether strong images or words or dialogue or emotional beats that give a shape to sequences and centering the scene around them. While I’m not gonna say it works for everyone, part of my own process when it comes to writing is to write piecemeal. A scene there, a line of dialogue here, two paragraphs describing something, a couple of pages outlining the blow-by-blow of a fight…I tend to find “punctuation” as I called it before first, and fill in the rest later.

It does a few things if you go at it like that. For one, those clear images, moments, and bits of dialogue are often the best, as you get to sit on them a lot longer, feel them out, tweak them a little bit, and are obviously based on the thing you feel strongest about or most inspired to do. It gives you something to work up to, so you don’t have the intimidating endless white at the bottom of your file mocking you with how far it seems you have to go until the end. But, probably most importantly, it gives you rhythm, both in your writing process and in what the readers will take away. You can end-stop your work, give something a sense of accomplishment beyond “getting the chapter done” or “getting the story done” and down to “getting the scene done” or even “getting the exposition out of the way.”

Obviously, you can take it and apply it to the basic setting of a story. A description of a location is often the set-up for a scene or chapter or whatever and that can often benefit from you describing it way ahead of time—if nothing else than it puts you as a writer in that place too. Establishing shots in films and television are often important to give you not just plot relevance of location and time, but also the kind of tension or ease you’re supposed to be feeling. If you write down little blurbs of observation you make regarding locations—whether places you’ve been, places you’ve seen in images, or just the place you’re imagining—and know the kind of feeling they evoke, you can sometimes use it for something you didn’t even realize would become important later on. My fic for this year’s contest has a bit of description like that regarding just an observation I’ve jotted down before regarding similar locations I’ve been to.

But really, take it past that. Do it for humor. It won’t work all the time (in fact it may make your humor seem forced if done overly often) but if you hear something funny or happen to think of something in a character’s voice that makes you laugh, write it down completely separate from any in-progress piece you might have. Whether you know that chapter 14 will need a bit of levity and so it might work out there, or even just later on in the process of writing the current chapter you feel like x joke will fit in well, you’ll have something already jotted down. The little thread of Arihiko taking notice of Rin in Went Left was originally a thought from What I See of Shiki joking about bringing Rin home and how his friend Arihiko would complain about how hot she was, and in mentioning that Arihiko had red hair, Rin retorted about liking redheads. Well, it didn’t work there, but I found a place for that in the next story.

Do it for action. Whether you’re stuck on new and interesting ways to be exciting or need to add action-tension or just because you think a character needs something to add to the coolness factor. Usually it works best for a setting that has strange or unusual fighting in it, but, well, this is a Nasuverse forum, so that should be right up this alley. Often, too, this can come out of imagery or actions not necessarily associated with fighting: I’ve described Shiki once or twice performing a “scorpion kick” that fits with the whole animal-like, arachnid-ish movement the Nanayas do, but the kick itself is more associated with soccer/football. I remember watching a clip of someone performing one during a game and was like, shit, I’m using that somewhere, wrote it down, and then tada, a year or so later, it was the first thing I had written in chapter 4 of What I See, long before I’d even started chapter 1.

Hell, do it for lemons. The first thing I had written for Rin Messed Up was Rin and Shirou arguing while in the middle of doing it over taking a camera phone picture. It's not my fault the story got away from me.

Anyway, I just got my copy of last year's Animax Musix. No time to waste, May'n and FLOW do Guren no Yumiya. Fuck this writing noise.