[Montaine's Scrapbook] The Cellar Door

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

First, let me say I loved Montaine's old avatar picture of Keats. We had an interesting PM convo about it as he taunted me until I guess correctly who it was. I read a great deal about Keats in school and studied several of his works in my creative writing/poetry classes. And it was killing me for two days until I figured out who his avatar was.

And the next day he changed the pic to the current one


Now, down to business...

First, I'd like to address a particular thing Monty said in his post:

Well, I honestly think that without an image to go to we all imagine written characters differently in our heads. One of the greatest aspects of reading, one of the reasons I think literature is such a unique artform, is that it requires you to become so involved in the creative process. The book, the page, the sentence, they're all simply instructions to you, vague descriptions as to how you create the world they discuss.

This statement stood out to me because it reminded me of a passage from Steven King's book "On Writing". I read it as part of my creative writing class this past spring semester. Here is the excerpt in question:

WHAT WRITING IS

Telepathy, of course. It's amusing when you think about it--for years people have argued about whether or not such a thing exists, folks like J.B. Rhine have busted their brains trying to create a valid testing process to isolate it, and all the time it's been right there, lying out in the open like Mr. Poe's Purloined Letter. All the arts depend upon telepathy to some degree, but I believe that writing offers the purest distillation. Perhaps I'm prejudiced, but even if I am we may as well stick with writing, since it's what we came here to think and talk about.

My name is Stephen King. I'm writing the first draft of this part at my desk (the one under the eave) on a snowy morning in December of 1997. There are things on my mind. Some are worries (bad eyes, Christmas shopping not even started, wife under the weather with a virus), some are good things (our younger son made a surprise visit home from college, I got to play Vince Taylor's "Brand New Cadillac" with The Wallflowers at a concert), but right now all that stuff is up top. I'm in another place, a basement place where there are lots of bright lights and clear images. This is a place I've built for myself over the years. It's a far-seeing place. I know it's a little strange, a little bit of a contradiction, that a far-seeing place should also be a basement place, but that's how it is with me. If you construct your own far-seeing place, you might put it in a treetop or on the roof of the World Trade Center or on the edge of the Grand Canyon. That's your little red wagon, as Robert McCammon says in one of his novels.

This book is scheduled to be published in the late summer or early fall of 2000. If that's how things work out, then you are somewhere downstream on the timeline from me...but you're quite likely in your own far-seeing place, the one where you go to receive telepathic messages. Not that you have to be there; books are a uniquely portable magic. I usually listen to one in the car (always unabridged; I think abridged audiobooks are the pits), and carry another wherever I go. You just never know when you'll want an escape hatch: mile-long lines at tollbooth plazas, the fifteeen minutes you have to spend in the hall of some boring college building waiting for your advisor (who's got some yank-off in there threatening to commit suicide because he/she is flunking Custom Kurmfurling 101) to come out so you can get his signature on a drop-card, airport boarding lounges, laundromats on rainy afternoons, and the absolute worst, which is the doctor's office when the guy is running late and you have to wait half an hour in order to have something sensitive mauled. At such times I find a book vital. If I have time to spend in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library (if there is it's probably stocked with nothing but novels by Danielle Steel and Chicken Soup books, ha-ha, joke's on you, Steve).

So I read where I can, but I have a favorite place and probably you do too--a place where the light is good and the vibe is usually strong. For me it's the blue chair in my study. For you it might be the couch on the sunporch, the rocker in the kitchen, or maybe it's propped up in your bed--reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren't prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets.

So let's assume that you're in your favorite receiving place just as I am in the place where I do my best transmitting. We'll have to perform our mentalist routine not just over distance but over time as well, yet that presents no real problem; if we can still read Dickens, Shakespeare, and (with the help of a footnote or two) Herodotus, I think we can manage the gap between 1997 and 2000. And here we go--actual telepathy in action. You'll notice I have nothing up my sleeves and that my lips never move. Neither, most likely, do yours.

Look--here's a table covered with a red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. In its front paws is a carrot-stub upon which it is contentedly munching. On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8.

Do we see the same thing? We'd have to get together and compare notes to make absolutely sure, but I think we do. There will be necessary variations, of course: some receivers will see a cloth which is turkey red, some will see one that's scarlet, while others may see still other shades. (To color-blind receivers, the red tablecloth is the dark gray of cigar ashes.) Some may see scalloped edges, some may see straight ones. Decorative souls may add a little lace, and welcome--my tablecloth is your tablecloth, knock yourself out.

Likewise, the matter of the cage leaves quite a lot of room for individual interpretation. For one thing, it is described in terms of rough comparison, which is useful only if you and I see the world and measure the things in it with similar eyes. It's easy to become careless when making rough comparisons, but the alternative is a prissy attention to detail that takes all the fun out of writing. What am I going to say, "on the table is a cage three feet, six inches in length, two feet in width, and fourteen inches high"? That's not prose, that's an instruction manual. The paragraph also doesn't tell us what sort of material the cage is made of--wire mesh? steel rods? glass?--but does it really matter? We all understand the cage is a see-through medium; beyond that, we don't care. The most interesting thing here isn't even the carrot-munching rabbit in the cage, but the number on its back. Not a six, not a four, not nineteen-point-five. It's an eight. This is what we're looking at, and we all see it. I didn't tell you. You didn't ask me. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We're not even in the same year together, let alone the same room...except we are together. We're close.

We're having a meeting of the minds.

I sent you a table with a red cloth on it, a cage, a rabbit, and the number eight in blue ink. You got them all, especially that blue eight. We've engaged in an act of telepathy. No mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy. I'm not going to belabor the point, but before we go any further you have to understand that I'm not trying to be cute; there is a point to be made.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, hopefulness, or even despair--the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it in any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

I'm not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly; I'm not asking you to be politically correct or cast aside your sense of humor (please God you have one). This isn't a popularity contest, it's not the moral Olympics, and it's not church. But it's writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can't or won't, it's time for you to close the book and do something else.

Wash the car, maybe.

So do we all see the same overweight Calbert or bad-toothed Mory? No. Just as Steven King says we don't all see the same exact cage. But there are details we DO see the same. Details that are truly important and at the center of our focus. The glass horse perhaps? The bloodshot look in Monty's eyes when Tock awoke him from being hungover? I know the foul taste described in his mouth. There are details we'll all zoom in on, and the rest, the background details? Those our minds may all fill in differently, but in the end, we read the same story, and we see the same thing. Even if we see the same thing differently.

[Echelon]

Ok time to catch up on my favorite blog, aside from mine, cause it had nothing to do with OOC stuff, with in retrospection prolly defeats the purpose of a blog... hrm

First, Pash. I think you described, give or take some details, all of our childhoods especially through middle school and high school, and even MORE children now days. I honestly didn't have much of an imagination until I came into a *ahem* specific driving force which the PG rating of this site does not allow me to talk about in detail. However, my awakening lead to me internalizing, for the first time, the world around me. I stumbled upon my first properly nerdy friends then as well, and RPing quickly ensued. Include my more romantic experiences back then RPing was in many forms a part of my life. It's been probably about ten years now and I've spent, oh I'd say 50% of my life since there role playing or thinking about role playing. Because, some time real life just doesn't cut it. Sometimes you need to stretch a little farther, into a realm unseen.

Montaine, thanks for addressing my question. May I say as a visual artists your response appalled me to no end..... I stared blankly at the page for several seconds just asking myself, is he for real? Then I realized the respect in it. If I drew a picture and wanted a story written about it I wouldn't write it myself, I'd ask a writer to do it. If I need something colored I draw a picture then have somebody that intimately knows color to complete it. Art, especially in communities like this, that are every ounce as much about the aesthetics than the writing, is all about collaboration. We have to trust our peers to support us so that we can focus on our strengths. As a side note, ironically the opposite of Trente's opinions, who believed firmly that at least on a personal level specialty breeds weakness. Interesting.

This all said, your logical acquisition of Monty's appearance was just that. You thought upon the character you wanted, he wanted him to mean the same thing tot he writers, be the came thing to the readers as this silly poet dude is to you, so you asked yourself what would a visual artists make him? You found two answers. One conforms more with what is the norm on Mizahar, and one I liked a lot more because to me it really said Monty... not posh and flirty wanabe vampire.

This all said, both on my previous topic to Pash and this one. I live in the physical world I SEE things. Both that are there and that I imagine. I'm a visual artist to the bone, and so role playing to me is quite honestly mostly about the body. What do scenes look like? hats important to me. Go read my Memorial Cemetery thread and say I have a flare for writing. I don't, because I don't connect to my audience. But in my own mind, in my own, that was a struggle to show you all what this looks like in my mind. Honestly, a lot cooler in here that it must seem from out there.

That said, it was hard for me to just post that text, not draw or find a picture. I thought about it, I drew some sketches of the place. But, in the end I opted to attempt pure text. Next location I make, I'm going back to using pretty pictures.

As for NPCs, they are a WHOLE different stories. I always found the comparison between PCs and NPCs to be very interesting. And one of my favorite past times in analyzing the psychology and similarities/differences between people PCs. I find their NPCs are far less noteworthy, for they are constructed on a whim. That said my NPCs tend to take on a life of their own, ass holes...

Monty you forgot to mention that you don't make females... how did you miss that? You think there is a reason for that?

To answer your question though, I enjoy character flaws. But, I tend to dislike character flaws that are inherently an issue with a character, and prefer flaws which are a product of their environment. Inherent flaws never seem to go away, which in time makes them.... boring. What good is a character that never grows?

On the other hand idealistic or "angel" characters are fascinating, though not endlessly so, for each person sees them differently. Lets take Nira'lia for example. What a sweetheart, she his passionate, caring, polite, and very beautiful. She has a dark past but she copes with it in an elegant, albeit annoying way. I see her as one of these angels, but at the same time she is fierce, longing and hungry for meaning. This is all special to my lil sis, and you can tell it in her writing. Things I might call characters flaws are part of her angel.

My personal angels take on another light. They tend to be passionate, physical, intimate, and most importantly interested ultimately in ONLY the existence of others. Not in a way that judges, but a way that accepts. I'd say they are painted as very different then an average perfect person.

This all said, I find that angel character tend to be what I call "essence characters." Characters that embody an essence, and even if done, or especially if done properly that essence never shifts, and so the character can have no growth. Boring story, great character.

And on a final note, some1.

[Montaine]

Hah! The Keats charcoal remains, and ever shall remain, enshrined at the top of my character sheet. Using Mister Whishaw is just a cunning plan to slowly seduce Pash into letting Monty have his way.

In response to what you said, and much like Stephen King wrote in Minnie's quote, I think most art is trying to show the world, be it the viewer, reader, listener, what have you, an image or thought or idea you have in your head. Be it literally, through visual media, and I include written language as a visual medium simply because its purpose is often to inspire you to imagine the world presented, or more viscerally through less literal media, such as music or poetry.

It's something I'm only just getting to grips with, studying literature. I've always feared that my chosen field is utter fluff, that we're reading things into texts that were never there to start with, but that's wrong. We're reading things that are there, they are the ideas that are presented, the images that are invoked, the meanings that lie hidden beneath the prose, behind the paint, under the chord.

Slightly afraid I've taken a step too far into the world of scholarly over pretension now. The point is, we're all just trying to show each other what we have in our heads.

In relation to character creation, I think I agree with you about angels. There's a lot less room for growth when they have so few flaws. Monty's key flaw is unchangeable, his physical frailty, but it still provides opportunities for personal growth, as a lot of Monty's other flaws - his insecurities, his unwillingness to accept to help from others - come from it. That said, it's brought out some good qualities in him too, such as his strong work ethic.

And why don't I write female characters? I'm not entirely sure. I spent six of the past eight years attending an all boy grammar school and only started having female friends in the past two years, since I started university. Even then, the vast majority of my friends are male. Perhaps it is simply a lack of exposure. I don't think it's because crusty old men are inherently funnier than crusty old women, but now that you've brought it to my attention, I am starting wonder why I didn't give Calbert an overbearing, naggy wife.

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

To add a little something to Eche's point about pc's vs npc's, I'd like to refer back to our earlier discussion about art in video games.

Video game npc's are typically far less detailed. Their artwork is poorer, they have more bland clothing, and often they are copied and color palatte swapped to make multiple generic npc's off a single template. Whereas the main characters are much more unique and detailed.

The same thing happens in animated movies. On the making of video for hunchback of notre dame, they discussed how they made large crowds of people by copying a small group over and over again without much differentiation between them.

In games and movies, this all saves time and money. But there's a bit more to it. Npc's are SUPPOSED to be less detailed. If an npc is too detailed, they draw attention away from the main character. And our pc's SHOULD be the central focus of our threads. The other characters in the background are like movie extras.

To add to this, I'll point out something about the npc's at Minerva's job. Most are nameless. For example, I wrote a post just today with some brief interaction with an npc known only as 'the architect'. I deliberately avoid giving him a name or even any dialogue (instead just summarizing his speech in the body of my text). I often do this with npc's who only serve a background role. I don't want to distract the reader's focus too much by centering on the unimportant characters.

Her boss Jacques, however, is quite different. He plays a central part in Minerva's character development. Specifically he is one of the primary ways I'm working on teaching her to control her temper and outbursts. I sculpted several aspects of his personality specifically for this role. He is portrayed as being am educated gentleman, very upper class. He is very patient and calm, and expresses very little emotion. He is Minerva's opposite in many ways (right down to his very clear and articulate way of speaking ).

By making him so different from Minerva, he is a character that shows all the things she COULD be. Maybe even some things she WANTS to be. We don't know much about him (is he married? Does he have kids? How did he get to own his own business?) But these things aren't necessarily important. As an NPC, he serves a certain role, and the details needed for that particular role are there.

Npc's that serve less important roles need less details. The more important they become to the story, the more we learn about them in the process.

[Echelon]

I disagree with this approach. Of course it all depends on ones goal. But for me, I believe main characters should shine because they have more merit than the average man. Now we agree on that much. However, I don't agree with lowering the realism of the average man so that a bland main character can shine. Instead, I try to encourage main character to polish themselves up. NPCs should be average, detailed, and as much a part of the operating world than anybody else. They should have equal opportunity to brainstorm, come up with ideas, steal the quest reward and everything as the main character.

Of course, if one is modding this gets trickier, and you must rest what your players want. Still, if I have to dumb down my NPC somebody isn't doing their job, or pulling their literary weight.

Then again, as my friends often put it, I'm a philosopher not a story teller. I get anthropology a lot too >.< Yeah my priorities can be a little fucked sometimes.

[Montaine]

By Any Other Name First a thank you to Cas for Along Came a Spider, it was good fun and I got to write a song which is always entertaining. Cas picked out this topic for my scrap and before we get into it I want to highlight that the image was chosen simply for the quote in the title and not because it bears any meaning to the content of this post. What is that content, I imagine hearing you ask? Why, my friends, it is none other than names. There are specifically three different types of name that I want to consider here and the first of those is thread titles. Now I don't know if you do the same as me but I um and er for a while over thread titles. It is difficult to find the balance between catchy, witty, relevant and not too cliché and it doesn't always work, occasionally I've just given up at put down whatever I can think of à la Dice at the Docks or Unfaithful Telling. But sometimes, and I know this sounds pretentious, I like putting names with what I imagine to be slightly subtler meanings. Take, for example, Out of Place, Right at Home in which Monty, a lifelong Zeltivan, meets Erudite, a new arrival, at the university library. Monty has never before been up to the university, and more than that cannot read. Erudite, however is a scholar and an academic. As such the title refers to both simultaneously yet contrarily. Monty is out of place in the university, even though he is in the city he calls home, Erudite, conversely, is so far removed from her native Mura and yet feels right at home amongst the library books. I'll briefly gloss over a few others, Production Like Clockwork addresses both the timely production of windows and Monty's first meeting with the gadgeteer Tock whose creations are distinctly like clockwork yet not, No Goodbyes tells of Monty grieving at a funeral unable to both physically say goodbye nor emotionally, and The Hard Sell, well, those of you who know what's coming up in that thread, or have read it if you're from the future, will hopefully get the joke. The second set of names I want to discuss are character names and there is a reason why I put this right after thread titles. I, personally, tend to pick character names at random. The only one for whom I picked a name on purpose was Monty, and that was because I wanted him to be called Monty yet didn't feel him to be either a Montague or a Montgomery. Some people pick names with meanings, with relevance to their characters. In 'Tis Pity She's a Whore by John Ford the main characters are a pair of incestuous siblings by the names Giovanni and Annabella. If you have sharp eyes you might notice the same syllable in each that hints at their shared origins in the Hebrew name Hannah, meaning grace. It is an ironic choice given their relationship but highlights the inherent narcissism of Giovanni, he and Annabella aren't simply siblings but the same person, same blood, same name. Okay, got sidetracked by renaissance playwrights there, I do apologise. My point is this, unless I'm doing something incredibly convoluted and tricksy, like Ford, I just can't be bothered to work in some deeper meaning to my character names. After all, our names do not govern our personalities nor do our personalities govern our names. Which brings me on to the third. In an online scenario I tend to be very, very cautious about the information I put out there. I grew up with a dad who does computer stuff for a living and so was always made aware of the dangers of privacy. Essentially, that once something is out there, it's out there for good. That's why there are so few pictures of my face out there, and only two that I can think of that show it clearly, and one of those is in the database of my university and so there's not much I can do about that. My name, however, is far more readily available, certainly my surname. Both my parents have websites and businesses and so the proliferation of the family name is all good advertising for them, that said my surname shall forever be under wraps in the public sphere, until I get published and fancy some advertising of my own. My forename, however, is a different story. I hate my name. I figure this is a common complaint. You don't get to choose your name, you rarely get to control what people actually call you. I'll just say now that I can't stand the nickname variants of my own name even more than I can't stand my actual name. Seriously, calling me by one of those damnable nicknames is a dealbreaker in our friendship. It's one of the few things I'm really, bloody petty about. In an online setting, with people I've got to know over a couple of months, some of whose names I know, some of whose I don't, I'm still incredibly wary of distributing that little piece of knowledge. Knowledge that could do very little to harm me, knowledge that simply states I have a name shared by plenty of other people. All I will say is this, unless we have a rapport, unless I know you by your name, or consider you a friend, I will not stand for anything beyond Monty or its already established variations on this site. I'll put these three prospective titles here, but one's already been picked out, so tough if it's not the one you wanted: Musings on Muses, Fear and Loathing, My Second True Love. Word of the day: phrontistery, an establishment for learning, a thinking place, because I needed a word to sum up all the bizarre and wondrous words Seven introduced me to. -Patrick

[Minerva Agatha Zipporah]

It's interesting how much our makes define us, and how much we can try to control them. I have a good friend named Christopher, who absolutely HATES being called Chris. Hates hates hates it. Yet I've been calling him Chris for sixteen years, and it took him about twelve of those sixteen to point it out to me. But that point his identity as 'Chris' was so firmly grounded in my mind that I cannot consider changing it.

Yet there is a difference in how we view someone, whether it be Christopher or Chris. It can depend how close we are to them, how serious or causal of a person you consider them. Consider a 'William' who is a professor at a University versus a 'Billy' who is a plumber. Names can be a sign of status (even when it might be unfair to view it as such; plumbers make more money than professors).

Then there's Minerva. Her name was chosen quite deliberately. I spent a long while coming up with a name I thought was pretty enough and, let's say 'Classy' enough. I spent even longer coming up with her nickname, and even LONGER coming up with her in character explanation for the change.

Further, her middle name is a tribute to the source of inspiration that led to Tock's creation. Her last name was a result of research and deep meaning... which I've actually forgotten in the meantime. But it meant something important... *thinks*

[Sojourn]

For a long time, I didn't really like my name. It was perhaps more because my family insisted on sending me to private school where anyone else with my rather common name was rich and liked tennis and fancy jewelry. I have never been rich, went on scholarship, and hardly wear jewelry or play sports. So, I suppose, I began to have a negative frame of reference for my name.

That said, I got over it. In graphic design school, one of my friends came up with a geeky nick-name that made me the happiest design nerd on the planet, and I've signed my name as .tif (the file name) ever since.

All I needed was a change of perspective.

Now, I like my middle name, but only because my parents told me that they kind of duked it out to the end about which middle name I would get (Meghan or Anne). My initials are TMS, so you know which one won.

[Cascade]

All throughout high school, my friends insisted on calling me a variant of my nickname, and I hated it. The only reason they called me that name was because it was more girly, and it irritated me because it wasn't my name, and because it was catching on.

What's ironic is that today, I introduce myself with that name. I couldn't shake it off so I just gradually started accepting it. Oh well.

[Montaine]

Musings on Muses We begin today with a thanks to Cas for Return of the Glass Horse, the third episode in the Anselm Series. I updated my character sheet just now and had to say a tearful farewell to the miniature, glass Anselm in my inventory. Well now, let's get onto the topic for today's post in which I shall be discussing inspiration. But first, let me just say this to the Internet, and Google Images specifically: screw you. The Ancient greek muses were around long before that bloody band, and if I type 'muse' into Google, I damn well expect Grecian art, not album covers! Gah. Anyway. Sorry. Inspiration. Well, I'll get onto specific sources of inspiration in a bit, but first there is something else related that I want to discuss. When I was a child I was obsessed with books and stories and yada yada, yes Monty, we already know this, anyway, I've always loved writing, always wanted to write and up until I started university two years ago I did a fair bit of writing in my free time. Just piddly little things, poor quality, what you'd expect from a kid whose never experienced anything in life. But the point wasn't that it was bad, but that I was writing. After beginning university my mind was caught on other things, the necessity to make friends, the new environment and yes, occasionally, studying, and writing got left at the wayside. No matter how often I tried to pick it up again, I couldn't even reach the bottom of page one. After quite some consideration I've come to a conclusion. I'm deeply lacking in confidence. Really, it's rather embarrassing, but to everyone I meet I'm pretty sure, judging by what they've said, I come across otherwise. But the truth is I have very little faith in my abilities, be it in writing or other aspects of my life. The trouble is I also consider myself as deeply rational and am fully aware the the way I see myself is not the true way that I am, I know that I have skills, that I make people laugh and all that stuff, I know it's irrational, but still it persists. I fear I'm getting away from the topic here but trust me, it's relevant. The point is I struggle, I struggle so hard, to show people in real life, my friends, my family, I struggle so hard to show them my work for fear of its quality and I know, I know this is stupid. That's why I love this site so much, so many faceless faces reading each other's work and with no fear of reprisal they can be brutally honest with no repercussions to either party. It's a place where I can write and people can say it's good and I believe them, and I'm not worried if they don't like it because at the end of the day it's just the Internet. Just over two months ago I started writing again. I wrote a little piece called A Broken Glass Boy, not very long, not necessarily a work of art, but I wrote it. And it was graded, and commented on, and commended, and you know what? I felt inspired. I felt inspired like I hadn't in years, not since I was a kid writing fantasy on scraps of paper, not since I was a kid dreaming of magic and technology and worlds that existed solely in my own mind. I felt the urge to write again. So. Yeah. Just wanted to say that. Thanks, dear. Now, personal inspiration, every day inspiration, what makes me sit down and hammer something out? Well, it's not going to be as interesting as what I've already covered, nor nearly as long but quite simply? Boredom. Graham Linehan writes comedy for television here in Britain and wrote a number of my favourite programmes, he says that before he starts writing he sits in a café for an hour and half so that he can just get really bored. Because when you're bored, that's when you feel the motivation to do something. A blank page to me is so disheartening, but once I get over that initial hump I'm away. Generally 500 words'll take me twenty, thirty minutes if I'm motivated, if I'm bored. So yeah, that's my secret. I'm bored. Right, here are the potential titles, pick one out for me so I don't have to choose: My Second True Love, The World of Tomorrow, Fear and Loathing. Word of the day: rumen, noun, the first of a cow's four stomachs. Don't ask me why, just accept the knowledge. -Monty