Writing a novel when you imagine all you stories in film format is hard because there’s really no written equivalent of “lens flare” or “slow motion montage backed by Gregorian choir”
You can get the same effect of a lens flare with close-detail descriptions, combined with breaks to new paragraphs.
Your slow-motion montage backed by a Gregorian choir can be done with a few technques that all involve repetition.
First is epizeuxis, the repeating of a word for emphasis.
Example:
Falling. Falling. Falling. There was nothing to keep Marie from plunging into the rolling river below. She could only hope for a miracle now, that she would come out alive somehow despite a twenty-foot drop into five-foot-deep water.
Then there’s anaphora, where you write a number of phrases with the same words at the beginning.
There were still mages out there living in terror of shining steel armor emblazoned with the Sword of Mercy.
There were still mages out there being forced by desperation into the clutches of demons.
There were mages out there being threatened with Tranquility as
punishment for their disobedience, and the threats were being made good
upon.
Mages who had attempted to flee, but knew nothing of the outside
world and were forced to return to their prison out of need for
sustenance and shelter.
Mages who only desired to find the families they were torn from.
Mages who only wanted to see the sun.
This kind of repetition effectively slows the pace of your writing and puts the focus on that small scene. That’s where you get your slow pan. The same repetition also has a subtle musicality to it depending on the words you use. That’s where you get the same vibe as you might get from a Gregorian choir.
Damn I made relatable reblog- bait post and writer Tumblr went hard with it. This is legitimately very good advice.
Why must Microsoft make everything so hard.
It’s taken me 3 hours to figure out how to do a clean install of Windows 10 on a virtual machine partition on my iMac. And now I’ve got to figure out how to get Citrix to play nice with my work extranet.
I’ve written before about how theatre can teach trust, empathy, compassion, peaceful conflict resolution, deeper cognitive thinking, delayed gratification, create community and understanding. The men in Rehabilitation Through the Arts have far fewer disciplinary infractions inside the facility and a dramatically lower recidivism rate upon release than the general population.
I often wish I could take the guys to the theatre. You may be able to imagine that a fair number of these men had no access to the arts as children. (That’s a separate post.) We make do with production photos and the occasional “adapted for television.” Until the cast of Hamilton beautifully and powerfully performed their opening number from the stage of the Richard Rodgers Theatre for the Grammy ceremony, and then performed at the White House. Until Lin-Manuel Miranda free-styled in the Rose Garden with President Obama. Which I promptly burned onto a DVD and waited for clearance to bring into the facility.
Tonight we watched Lin-Manuel perform a piece from his ‘concept album’ at the 2009 White House Poetry Jam, and we talked about how that audience received his work. We talked about what happens when people laugh and you’re serious, about the decision to stand one’s ground and follow one’s purpose, which is a hot topic in our rehearsal room as we get closer to sharing our months of work with the population of the prison. “He gets more confident as he goes.” Some of the men are worried that the population won’t understand Shakespeare; some are worried that they will laugh at the serious parts. Tonight, one of the elders in our circle says, “We have to tell the story.”
We watch a Broadway show in the Big House. Well, four minutes of it. We watch the Grammy performance of “Alexander Hamilton.” Heads nod to the beat; some of the men snap along. “Can we watch it again?” We can.
We talk about how Hamilton is performed on a bare stage, just like we’ll perform Twelfth Night. “No one laughed when he said his name this time.” We talk about how Miranda uses language, leverages rhetoric to find each character’s voice, just as Shakespeare did. We talk about working for six years on something you believe in, and we speculated about the long, uncertain nights somewhere in the middle of year three, year four. The men know more than the rest of us can imagine about long, uncertain nights in the middle of a very long bid to survive. I attempt to describe the beautiful specificity of the physical and vocal choices that Daveed Diggs, Okieriete Onaodowan, and Anthony Ramos make to differentiate Lafayette from Jefferson, Mulligan from Madison, Laurens from Philip Hamilton; we’ve been working on character walks.
We watch the cast perform “My Shot” at the White House; we woop. We joyfully behold the son of Puerto Rican parents and the first African American President freestyle in the Rose Garden. We cheer. (One or two of us might tear up, but we don’t need to discuss that.)
These gorgeous, thoughtful, wounded men rarely see themselves represented in the world. As they fight to become the men they want to be, they still mostly see themselves in the narrative as junkies, dealers, thugs or the latest Black man brutally gunned down in the streets by the police. According to an Opportunity Agenda study, “negative mass media portrayals were strongly linked with lower life expectations among black men.” (Who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story?) But tonight, in the midst of our shared creative endeavor, they saw themselves smack in the center of the narrative of creation, possibility, pursuit, and achievement.
Representation unabashedly made me weep tonight as I watched a few of the men lean in.
There was also the fact that Mercury wasn’t exactly sure how the song was supposed to go (referring to the opera section). “This is where the opera section comes in!” Then we went out to eat dinner.
.. cutting and adding more tape to the reel due to Mercury’s habit of adding another Galileo every time they tried to record it.
The reaction of their record company’s general manager of international sales to the new single was, “What the fuck is THIS?” Add to that Elton’s John’s “Are you fucking mad?”
As a result, they are liquidating their products and selling everything for 20%-50% off. The discounts apply to everything, from thread to dress forms to sewing machines, so if you’ve been longing for some sewing supplies that are just out of your price range, now’s your chance to get them. (I particularly recommend the Sew Perfect dress forms; they’re easy to adjust and very accurate.)
Please signal boost this! I know the sewing community on tumblr isn’t super tight, but I’d hate for any of my fellow seamsters to miss out on a good deal!
I already hit my local store yesterday. Very bummed about this.
The folklore among knitters is that everything handmade should have at least one mistake so an evil sprit will not become trapped in the maze of perfect stitches. A missed increase or decrease, a crooked seam, a place where the tension is uneven – the mistake is a crack left open to let in the light. The evil sprit I want to usher out of my knitting and my life is at once a spirit of laziness and of over-achieving. It’s that little voice in my head that says, I won’t even try this because it doesn’t come naturally to me and I won’t be very good at it.
Kyoko Mori, ‘Yarn’
That last phrase especially – “I won’t even try this because it doesn’t come naturally to me and I won’t be very good at it.” It really is like some kind of all-encompassing evil sprit sometimes.
Very interesting…It is these type of articles that show the brain’s understanding is still only at the beginning of discovery. Another example that not everything is in the textbooks we hold so dear to our facts.
“I just said one sentence: ‘They’ll have to rewrite the textbooks.’ There has never been a lymphatic system for the central nervous system, and it was very clear from that first singular observation — and they’ve done many studies since then to bolster the finding — that it will fundamentally change the way people look at the central nervous system’s relationship with the immune system,” Lee said.
I have no words to describe just how ground-breaking this finding is. We’ve assumed for a long time that there was some way that the brain and the immune system were linked, but now we’ve actually found a physical pathway between the two.
Hearseeno 