Ramblings and Nonsense

All roads lead somewhere, but very few lead to the somewhere that you want. And when the road you take leads you to the wrong somewhere, what then?

When the road you took takes you to a somewhere you didn’t want to go, you can go back and find your own somewhere. But what if the somewhere you went turned out to be more interesting than the somewhere you wanted? Now you have a problem. While you can go back from the wrong somewhere to find the somewhere you thought you wanted, you can’t find that first road that led you to the wrong somewhere anymore. The roads keep leading you to the wrong somewhere. Not that these somewheres are the wrong somewheres, they just aren’t the somewhere you went when you went to the first wrong somewhere that was the wrong somewhere when you wanted the right somewhere. So, these somewheres don’t interest you, because they’re not the right wrong somewhere.

But you can stay in that first wrong somewhere too. The road that brought you to that somewhere goes on to other somewheres. One of those somewheres might even be the somewhere that you wanted before you knew that you wanted to end up in the wrong somewhere.

But you can’t stay in the wrong somewhere forever, either. Sooner or later, you have to move on to some other somewhere. They may be just as wrong as the first wrong somewhere, one may be the somewhere you first wanted, and they may never be as interesting as the first wrong somewhere. But you can only find the somewhere you really want by going in all the wrong directions. 

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This is probably the best piece I've ever written.  It is called Somewhere. I wrote it in 10 minutes in the middle of the night. For some reason, that's when I do all my best writing; the darkest hours, when all the world's asleep. Peace and quiet, those elusive luxuries for the writer. Even the voices in your head have to sleep some time. So, poetry, micro-story, short fiction, call it what you will. My voices liked this one. I hope you do too. 

How does this fit with my blog, you ask? Well, it's good to brag about yourself every now and then. And, after all of the editing and rewriting, I need a break from ripping my hair out. 

Photo Credit: Elke Rohn

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Stephen trolly

Stephen Trolly is a 20-year-old novelist and screenwriter. His primary focus is in fantasy and dystopian worlds of his own creation. He is a student at Algonquin College.

These are the blogs of my associates. I find them useful. 

The Character Spectrum | What's So Funny

Moving On

Writing is a portal: to the past, to the future, to realms unknown to humanity. It bridges chasms between other worlds and our own. It connects us in ways that other art simply can’t by showing us lives that mirror our own in some twisted way. But, sooner or later, all good things have their end. You run out of ink, but hopefully, not imagination.

For this week’s episode of Affiliated, I actually did something a little different. I wanted to make sure you got the ending, so, I combined the final two screenplays. Though I could wish to have had more space to work with, actually going so far as to describe certain scenes only made the story drag on for too long.  

If you’ve been following along, you know what’s happening. Stan Mulder and Sarah O’Shea have been investigating a murder. Well, now is the time to find out who did it.

Episode 4: End Game

This week, it’s all about the wind down, but because I’m trying to fit two episodes together, winding down was hard to do.

Conclusions are hard to write. You’ve finally gotten to the point where it just has to end, but you still have ideas to keep it going. For example: what happens to Stan and Caroline. By now, you know that there’s obviously some romantic involvement there. Exploring that would have been interesting.

So, End Game is sort of split into two parts, with the majority being more the original idea of the official episode four screenplay. Part two, and the episode is by no means equally divided in half, would have been episode five. As I said, conclusions are hard to write, and winding down that quickly means leaving a lot of good stuff out.

Episode five would have focused more fully on being an actual ending: the trial of Terrence’s murderer, police-Affiliated clashes in the city, the start of a new war to decide the city’s fate. It would have been interesting to write, and maybe I’ll still do it. But, for now, it goes back on a shelf, making way for other, more important projects. Since Rising Vengeance, my first novel, is now for sale as an eBook, I have to start working far more seriously on its sequel, The Devil’s Dominion.

Affiliated has been fun to work on, and I’ve enjoyed sharing it with you.

PAST LINKS
Writing Screenplays
Scene Writing
Paint War 
Choosing the Right Words for your Objectives

PAST EPISODES
Episode 1: 12-Inch Coffin Nails
Episode 2: Hell Hole
Episode 3: Intrusions

Photo Credit: Thomas Bush |  Stephen Trolly

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STEPHEN TROLLY

Stephen Trolly is a 20-year-old novelist and screenwriter. His primary focus is in fantasy and dystopian worlds of his own creation. He is a student at Algonquin College.

These are the blogs of my associates. I find them useful. 

The Character Spectrum | What's So Funny

Weighty Words

What I love about writing this week is how important one single word can be. One word can change what you think of a character. One word can create a sense of danger or any other emotion. One single word. But the problem with that ability is that you have to choose the right one. The wrong word is worse than no word at all.

That’s what happens with translation though. The wrong words are used as stand-ins because there is really no perfectly appropriate word for what you are trying to say. These are some of my favourite examples of that:

Iktsuarpok: This is an Inuit word for the feeling of waiting for someone so you keep going outside to see whether or not that person has arrived.

Pålegg: A Norwegian word for anything that can go on a sandwich. Literally anything.

Cafune: The literal translation into English from Brazilian Portuguese is “to tenderly run your fingers through your lover’s hair.”

If you want more untranslatable words, look here: Untranslatable Words

In other news, look: Episode 3: Intrusions. Aren’t you so excited to see what happens to Stan this week?

I bring up untranslatable words because, even from English to English, words are hard to fit together. People say, “Oh, you’re using that word too much. Here’s a thesaurus.” But the problem is, you’ve usually chosen the word you want because it is that specific word. Maybe you haven’t done that consciously, but you did do it. But, you take the advice of the people who say that you need to look at some synonyms. And then you read the definitions of those synonyms, and though technically they mean the same thing, they are literally different. So it seems you have quite the conundrum. Quandary is a synonym of conundrum, but you don’t actually have a quandary if you have a conundrum. A conundrum is "a difficult problem", whereas a quandary is "a state of uncertainty". They are technically synonyms. They are literally different.

I bring all this up only because it is relevant. Stage directions for this episode say: Stan pushes open the door. He looks at the envelope on his desk, then at the other desk. He (Stan) looks confused by the other desk. Pan from Stan’s face to above shot. Show Stan moving into the office. So, I have to convey that by saying, essentially: Stan Mulder arrived at his office to discover two things: a manila envelope and a second desk.

Not exactly the same thing, are they. If you want help choosing the right word, there are a lot of videos on youtube. I recommend this one: Choosing the Right Words for your Objectives 

PAST LINKS
Writing Screenplays
Scene Writing
Paint War 

PAST EPISODES
Episode 1: 12-Inch Coffin Nails
Episode 2: Hell Hole

Photo Credit: bnbn

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STEPHEN TROLLY

Stephen Trolly is a 20-year-old novelist and screenwriter. His primary focus is in fantasy and dystopian worlds of his own creation. He is a student at Algonquin College.

These are the blogs of my associates. I find them useful. 

The Character Spectrum | What's So Funny

The Importance of the Single Scene

"Writing is freedom..." My constant mantra. The whole reason that I write. I write to expand my own freedoms, to give me new worlds to explore, new personalities to understand, new people to know and love as if they were actually real. Everybody has a reason to write. Do you know what yours is? 

Every one of the posts on this blog is going to start with something about why I love writing, so get used to a lot of chaos theory and a lot of raw emotion. 

But that is a curious question. What drives you  to write? What drives you to do anything at all? To bring this post into line with the whole reason this blog exists, why do you think Stan Mulder, whom you all met in The Writing Process, even gets out of bed in the morning? It can't just be because he needs his coffee. Would you like to find out? Good. Episode 2: Hell Hole.

The basic inspiration of the bedroom of Stan Mulder
 

A 30-minute TV show is actually only about 18 minutes. The rest is commercials. So the average screenplay, going back to the formula I've already laid out, really only needs to be about 20 pages. Since most of that is spent telling the camera crew which angles to use, or reminding the actors which cameras are pointed at them, there wasn't a ton to work with for this instalment. With only one setting, the story gets cut down a lot. 

That said, I think there is a lot of disregard for the single setting, especially in TV. Why not waste an entire 18 minutes, broken up by commercials, with characters just standing around awkwardly looking at their feet? Once you read my latest conversion, I think you'll agree with me. 

The only general theory about short-story writing with which I often do not disagree is that it has to be short. You can't waste time writing about space. One-liners from the characters have to do for readers what visuals would do for someone watching. But sometimes, in short stories, description through dialogue just can't be done. Sometimes, there is only one character, so he or she is just talking to you.  Like this: Paint War. This story wasn't originally written as a series of journal entries, but even from that, you can understand my point. Dialogue isn't everything. People do want some idea of what they're supposed to be pretending they're looking at. 

If you want to learn how to make your scenes work, on pretty much any level, try this: Scene Writing

Photo Credit: Stephen Trolly

PAST LINKS
Writing Screenplays

PAST EPISODES
Episode 1: 12-Inch Coffin Nails

Photo Credit: Stephen Trolly

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STEPHEN TROLLY

Stephen Trolly is a 20-year-old novelist and screenwriter. His primary focus is in fantasy and dystopian worlds of his own creation. He is a student at Algonquin College.

These are the blogs of my associates. I find them useful.

The Character Spectrum | What's So Funny

The Writing Process

Writing is an artistic realm unto itself, sequestered from all other forms of expression. It is vivid and imaginative, rhythmic and lyrical, picturesque and graceful. It is also chaotic, violent, undefinable, and inconsistent. It asks thousands of questions while giving one answer, or maybe two. It asks for your soul to pour out an infinite stream, and the reward is to be satisfied with what you have created, and to start over and do it again.

That is the birthplace of Affiliated. More specifically, that is how the insane notion that writing it as a series of screenplays wasn’t enough work. It suddenly had to be converted into a series of short stories.

Affiliated is a crime drama, taking place in one of the world’s many generic cities. The main character, Stan Mulder, is a rude, brash, unapologetic detective with absolutely nothing left in the tank to put into his job. You’re going to get to meet Stan. Aren’t you so excited? 

Episode 1: 12-Inch Coffin Nails

As for turning it from screenplay to story? Believe it or not, that was the hard part. Writing long screenplays is no secret art: a few characters’ lines mixed in with a lot of different ways to tell people how to do their jobs. One page translates into about one minute of screen time. That’s the whole formula. Taking those 20 pages of directions and making a five-page short story forced me to not only edit and rewrite the hell out of what I had, but forced me to rely on a writer’s most feared, dangerous enemy, which is also the one thing they seem to praise to no end: The Writing Process.

The Writing Process is something you’re probably going to get sick of hearing about, but you will hear a lot about it. The Writing Process is one of Hell’s great practical jokes: a world of rules both stylistic and, to a creative writer, only of marginal importance.

For screenwriting, those stylistic rules actually do have meaning. Every detail has to be an important one. Every thought that the writer puts down has to be clear and simple. Everyone involved with that project has to understand exactly what it is that they are supposed to be doing.

For short stories, every single rule that you’ve ever thought you could count on to exist needs to be ignored. Writing is freedom, not a collection of do's and do-not's. 

If you want to learn how to write a proper screenplay (which is not what I did), try this: Writing Screenplays

Photo Credit: Jaime Cavazos

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Stephen Trolly

Stephen Trolly is a 20-year-old novelist and screenwriter. His primary focus is in fantasy and dystopian worlds of his own creation. He is a student at Algonquin College.

These are the blogs of my associates. I find them useful. 

The Character Spectrum | What's So Funny