melannen | I can do five things. Sure.

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I can do five things. Sure.

1. Ebook piracy: the latest hot topic. I have been staying out of this discussion, mostly because: I have been listening to pirated audiobooks since before I could *read*, since pirated audiobooks meant "check the LP out of the library and copy it on to reel-to-reel tape." I worked through all my moral and ethical questions about the issue by the time I had hit kindergarten, with the assistance of the fact that *all* of my peers and authority figures did the same things; I had picture books that were photostat copies bound with brads; I had Boxcar Children books that were bookstore remainders with the covers stripped.

My father was a math and programming teacher in the early 80s; the county-wide department inservice days were the best thing ever, because Dad would come home with 5.25-inch discs holding pirated copies of all the latest Apple II games that all the teachers were trading around under the desks. (True story: I once asked Dad what the "kracker" did in programming, since all the programs we had at home had a "kracked by" credit before the opening screen.) In fact, I have never met a single teacher, at any level, and growing up a TK I've met a lot, who has taught for more than five years and doesn't routinely make illegal copies of things for her classes. When a law is that widely flouted (by pretty much everyone who doesn't directly benefit from its existence, and also often, quietly, by them as well), what you need to do is change the law, not human nature.

Which is to say, I got over this topic two decades ago. Can we move on and stop acting like fainting flowers about it? ^_~

2. Still listening to (pirated) Dresden Files! 3.5 books in have reached Step 10 in the getting-into-a-fandom timeline. Current fic bunnies: A Day In the Life of Father Forthill; 5 Times Harry Dresden Narrowly Avoided Learning About Slash; and Ray Kowalski Dances With The Winter Lady. Also did another meme fill, which was probably obvious to anyone who knows me and is reading over there. However, I've reached the point where I know just enough canon that I no longer feel comfortable writing fic without knowing it all, sigh, so that's stalled, mostly.

Luckily, the anon meme is keeping me in fic for now! Actually I was just thinking that maybe Dresden Files has finally cured me of politics RPF, given the relative numbers of times I've been reloading the two memes, but then Dresden Files fandom decided on its own to adopt Rahm Emanuel as a character, so I suspect I'm just cursed to read politics RPF forever. (Oh, Rahm, oh.)

3. I am almost finished with my mending basket! Which means time to start a brand-new sewing project, maybe! (Or go back to a years-old retired one.) The last thing in the basket was the Madelyn Mack dress I wore at con-txt and ripped the hem out of. It's 100-year-old black silk, so thin it's translucent in sunlight. I have a picture of my grandmother wearing it, c. 1930, in an "Old Hometown" history pageant; I have a picture of her grandmother wearing what might be the same dress, 30 years earlier. I was really, really nervous about attempting to repair a dress that's practically an artifact and such fragile fabric, too - until I actually started the repair.

I am at *least* the fifth person who has attempted to repair the hem of this dress! (And a better seamstress than at least two of them.) That makes me feel a lot better, and, somehow, love the dress a lot more, too. In fact, its value as a historical artifact may not so much be its value as a dress, as it is a record of Edwardian and early-20th-century home clothing repair techniques; this dress wears its scars proudly, and I'm learning things about effective and efficient repair just from studying it that even my mother's generation seems to have forgotten. (I never did get a picture of me wearing it last summer. Maybe once the repair is done I'll attempt a photographic record. Repair being done make take awhile - there is literally six yards of hem around this skirt.)

4. Last Thursday was the first 10 O'clock Live! It was not terrible! It could use some settling-in time, but it was legitimately good. It actually feels like it's kind of halfway between wanting to be the Daily Show and wanting to be something more like W$W - a serious but irreverent real current events magazine. Am looking forward to more.

...and then the next day Keith Olbermann signed off for the last time. D: D: He wasn't always right and he wasn't always good, but he almost always said the things that the American left needed said but was afraid to, and shouted them when they needed shouted, and now who's to do that?

5. I joined

inkitout - the DW community to challenge yourself to keep writing all year - and so far, thanks to Dresden Files, am doing okay. But! This week's support post was to introduce one of your characters, and I was like hooray! I always want to talk about my original characters! Until I tried, and realized I couldn't do it. When I try to describe my characters, I talk about what they do, what happens to them. How can I give an age to a character when I've known her from pre-birth to afterlife; how can I give a character's favorite author when part of his story is discovering a whole new world of stories that he had missed before; how can I tell you about a character's family when zie has found-and lost-families several times, and has changed zie's definition of 'family' every time?

I can't decide if this is a bad thing or a good thing. On the one hand, people who fill out tons of character profiles and can tell you the character's favorite color and astrological sign and weight down to the ounce, I have found, tend to create boring and unrealistic characters, at least until they get past the character sheets. (Plus, I can't even tell you *my* favorite color; I am in a long-term argument with my horoscope; and my weight varies within a 20-pound range without notice, which is part of the reason why I rarely bother with those things for my characters.)

On the other hand, though. Is knowing characters only by way of what's happened to them, and how they've reacted, and by the sorts of traits and values that don't fit on a chart - is that good? Am I missing something, turning my characters into mere servants of plot, if I don't know their exact height and oldest fear and greatest desire and most prized possession? Should I go back to filling out character profiles (at least in moderation)? Is it a weakness in the way I make stories that I can't describe a character without writing a biography that tells their life?

(Although, let's be honest here, maybe I'm just really bad at condensing a character bio down. I have a file that profiles some of my characters by nothing but gender identity and it still took something like three paragraphs each to get them down semi-accurately. And the last time I tried to do character profiles, I ended up working out a five-dimensional grid system to plot sexual orientation. I mean, the reason I want to tell stories about these people is that there is no other way to say the things I want to say. So maybe I should just tell the damn stories. On the other hand, maybe the fact that I can't say this stuff - that I skitter away and jump back, when I try to lay it out in bare exposition, that I don't want to diagram up my characters like a dissected frog - is why I can't just tell the damn stories. Maybe I need to be willing to do that; maybe I can't keep treating my characters as friends, with a right to secret selves.)

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Hmm.

I think it's a bit like going at an obstacle from different directions, but ultimately knowing the approximate shape of said obstacle anyway, if in different terms.
A fact can tell you a lot about a person, but often it only actually tells you a lot about them if you already know them well. (Exempting tropes obviously.)
A fact can also shape a person.

Let's take height. Now, when I was a kid I was a lot taller than everyone else. Then I stopped growing rather abruptly at 15. Nowadays I'm not the tallest person by any measure (I'm about 5'9".), but the tall-person-mentality stuck with me. I act tall. I think tall. People don't notice as much if I'm shorter than they are.
In another person the same circumstances might have caused a complex, or even a hunching posture. I believe what matters are less the exact numbers, the history of what happened, but what character traits developed because of it in me personally.
I have plenty of RPGing friends who map out every minutiae, but it's often about what they think those minutiae signify, and not the numbers themselves.

In a way, it's like "5'9" at 15, stayed that way" = "not all that tall but acts confidently with expansive gestures"
The information that is implicit for the one writing it down is what's important, not the way the superficial information is presented.

I hope that made sense. I'm just going to leave it as is now. :)

Hmm. Yeah, that makes sense, I think (although making it all about what's implicit for the writer still leaves the problem of how to write an intro for *other people* - if it's just for me, I don't need to write it down, because I'm the sort of writer who can store most of the notes in my head. And not always in the form of words.)

I was trying to come up with an example of the two ways of doing it, but couldn't (because I was still running into having to go to three paragraphs to make it work. :P) and you've hit on it exactly right, I think. It's the different between 'is 5'9" ' (a fact I would rarely know about anyone); 'was tall as a child but stopped growing early' (which has obvious implications to me as the writers, but could mean a lot of different things to different people, and even a lot of different things to the same person) and 'acts taller than she is' (what an external observer would see, but something a person wouldn't necessarily even notice about herself.)

Height is actually nice and simple to use as an example. Hmm. Maybe I can even make it work as an example for me. So, character number one I was trying to write up for that community: She's noticeably tall for a woman of her time & position, and big-boned with it. She was always large as a child, and shot up even higher at puberty, so she thinks of herself as large. But she's uncomfortable with it, because everyone around her has called her "too big to be pretty", and all the tall women she knew as a child were people she never wanted to be. She hunches down into herself and doesn't dress or move to use her height, and while she'll take advantage of her size if she has to, she hates to, but as a result of [A plot] she starts having to very often, and gets used to it, until has a crisis about how maybe she's becoming one of those women, but then [B-plot] she starts to grow into herself, and--

Um. I should have called that a win and stopped after the second sentence, I think.

And then the other character I was trying to write up yesterday, I don't really care about her height, and neither does she? I mean, she has a height, which changed as she grew older, and she used her size to her advantage in various ways over that time, but it's not something that ever really made a difference to her choices and personality, you know? I can't actually tell you whether she's above average height or below average height or exactly average; it hasn't come up; when she was small, she was small, and very good at using that to be unnoticed and underestimated; as an adult she has enough physical presence in other ways, and is good enough at using it, that height is the last thing anyone notices about her.

But is that realistic? Is that just a symptom of my own general obliviousness to appearance, and my tendency to vastly misestimate RL heights based on personality, and I need to look at it differently when I write someone who isn't me?

Edited 2011-01-24 22:45 (UTC)

Yes. I suppose this is where the "show don't tell" comes in. Which is a big part of why I like the "was tall as a kid but stopped growing early" better than the perhaps more static approach of specific values.
The traits and associations that you want to convey to the reader maybe come a little more naturally. The character acts and speaks in consequence and in relation to those things, but the "facts" don't absolutely need to be mentioned.

Re: the last part.
If you show how the other characters react to her, maybe some based on perceived height (to stick with the example) or actual height, I think it's all good. Based on force of personality and general body language savvy, she could make everyone's perceptions skew the way they do for you. The relative realism is less important than the perception you build - you just have to make the reader believe. (Haha, "just". *cough*)

I wrote a metanovel for NaNo this year, and the sort of questions you ask in 5) were the actual subject of the novel. My narrator didn't even have a name until midway through the novel she decided she needed one. The way I see it, writing any character is a voyage of discovery. If you've dwelt with a character for a long time, naturally you know a lot about what the character will do, but there's no reason for your knowledge to easily match a character profile. That just means there's more to discover, and if there weren't more to discover, there would be no point in writing the characters.

How very well-adjusted!

I wish I could even put down what I do know in a reasonable way, though.

And OMG, names. Have my longest-loved OCs still don't have names. I get the impression this is unusual. Or does everybody just fake it?

It's certainly not unusual for me. Characters take all sorts of shapes. One of the main characters in my Yuletide story, the one whose image popped into my head and inspired the premise of the story, I think of as "the man with the omelette face".

Wow, my history with piracy is very different from yours. I'm pretty sure the first time I was exposed to a pirated anything was in high school, or maybe middle school at the very earliest. This was mostly probably because I had no need -- I didn't really watch tv or movies, I didn't really listen to audiobooks, the library had a world of books, and my dad owned a truly ridiculous amount of music. This means that my moral agonies on the subject are all of a fairly recent vintage still....

Also, your Madelyn Mack dress sounds amazing and fantastic, both that you HAVE a dress like that, and that the dress is actually from your own family history. I would love to see a photo of what it looks like, at some point!

Really! We didn't do it constantly - there was a library, there were used book sales and stores, we weren't really that in to music either, but when we needed something that required illegal copying, which was a few times a year at least, we didn't blink twice. (Most of the audiobook stuff was for long car trips.) But you never copied a record onto a cassette or were given a mixtape or anything, huh?

THE DRESS IS AMAZING, I love it, and it fits me perfectly, but I'm terrified to wear it much because I'm pretty sure it can't handle being washed any more. (I have a few other awesome old dresses too, though not that old - mostly my grandmother's from the '30s and '40s and Mom's from the '60s and '70s. It is sometimes nice to come from a packrat family and be their size.)

Really really! It's a very alien perspective to me, this idea that pirating is just a part of childhood. Although -- now that I think about it I can think of one illegally copied thing from my childhood, which was a copy of the Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella (the version starring Brandy), which was copied off of the tv broadcast. And I have vague recollections of one of our cassette tapes having a handwritten label, which I suspect means illegal copying. But other than that, no! Actually when I was first introduced to the very idea of mixtapes I was pretty sure they were just some weird thing that was big in fiction but never actually happened in real life.

Ohhhhh awesome old dresses, I am SO SO JEALOUS. My mom and my grandparents are none of them my dimensions (curse you, tallness!) so I have no such luck.

@5 - okay, first off, now you are making me want to join

inkitout because eeh writing comm eeh original character intros (yeeeaah I have some OCs I am very keen on showing off *g*), but now I am hiding in fear of the sign-up. 75k words over the year as a recommended minimum? um I am trying to get myself writing at all. :(

More importantly and without the selfish whinging, I am totally with you. Um. I tend to think that knowing your character's history, their values, how they will act in any situation (both of which will be strongly informed by their history!) is much more important than knowing their favourite colour. (I'm not sure I know *my* favourite colour either. And definitely not my favourite author.) And I think there are, like, useful and nonuseful ways to approach the question? Like. "Zdeika's favourite colour is teal" tells me nothing. "Zdeika does not believe in the concept of favourite colours because she thinks that is far too static a concept; if you ask her anyway, she is likely to tell you her favourite colour is 'whirring noise' or 'the smell of roast s'chung meat' just to annoy you" tells me more, and leads me to ask how she gained that philosophy which leads to her thoughts on change and the transience of life.

I also dislike the "flaws/strengths" categorisation that I find very common in character sheets because I'm of the opinion that well-written characters ought to have traits which are flaws in some situations but strengths in others. Someone with a fiery temper is likely to stand their ground well and not let themselves be treated as a pushover; someone who is loyal and honest may support their friends even when those don't deserve it and refuse to listen to people who are trying to point out genuine problems, or be easily manipulated because they are not used to thinking in that way.

Also also also, totally with you on the names. I have some dearly loved OCs that don't have names, and in fact chars like Zdeika (where the name just popped into my head) are extremely unusual for me, it's usually sweating blood and tears to get the names right.

...yeeeah, I am fairly sure I will not make 75k, but signing up for something like that last year helped, even if I failed it, too.

But I wouldn't join it just for the OC discussion, that's not really the main point. People keep *talking* about making a DW community just for people to ramble on about their OCs guilt-free, but it hasn't happened yet, AFAIK.

See, I am so with you on the favorite colors thing! But apparently a lot of people really do have favorite colors? And I know writing close to the bone is good, but I don't want *all* my characters to be exactly like me in unexamined ways (one reason I find fanfic valuable: it gives me someone else's idea of what a 'person' is as a check on my own assumptions.)

I can do "Fari's favorite color is black, and not because of the evil sorcerer thing, shut up or she will cut you, srsly, but because it reminds her of her old tribal colors." But I don't want to fall into the Freudian trap where everything about my characters is because they had an unhappy childhood, y'know? (Although I know nothing about Jamie's childhood, or much at all beyond the short few years of Jamie's story, and yet I know for absolute sure that Jamie's favorite color is orange. But then, Jamie is really unusual for one of my characters.)

Oh god: Flaws/Strengths, yes. Any decent strength is also a flaw; any decent flaw is also a strength. If you've got one unmixed, then either you haven't thought about it much, or it really isn't that important. (Although I have recently decided I kind of like the idea of figuring out a character's ruling Deadly Sin and Heavenly Virtue. Maybe because picking from those limited sets with centuries of symbolism means that they're acknowledged already as complicated and layered things. Jamie's sin is Greed and virtue is Temperance; Fari's sin is Pride and virtue is Diligence.)

I have been teetering on the edge of Dresden Files fandom, and between you and Rahm I think I might have to fall in. I guess I'll read the third book. (I've already read some of the anonymeme and some of the fic you've recced...)

\o/ Kind of.

A lot of people (including me) seem to find the third book a hard slog, it introduces some fun characters but it's very much a Third Act in all its depressing and grinding glory. I am enjoying book four a lot more already.

But, then, you know, Rahm. Also it is making me finally go back to my Due South watching that I got distracted from after one season, so there's that.

Well, I'm going to listen to it rather than read it, which sort of keeps me from stopping in the middle, as what else am I going to do 12 miles into an 18-mile run? But thanks for the warning.

And the University AU really sounds like you.

See, I kept having to pause the player because I was getting distracted by plotting less-depressing fic in my head, and losing track of the actual story. But maybe not everyone has that problem!

And no, that one's not me, though I'm flattered! (Best hint it's not me: that authoranon managed to get up to 16 parts within a reasonable length of time.)

I held back from doing the character-outline stuff at

inkitout; I wasn't sure I could *stop.* "Make a well-rounded chracter" is Gamer 101 play; I can rattle off major & minor character descriptions faster than I can plotbunnies.

I think lists of descriptive details are boring and useless, but using them as keyword-sparks for personality traits is reasonable. Like, knowing I'm 5'2" is meaningless; knowing I've always been short, and liked it that way, is not. It means I don't feel intimidated by tall people, but I also don't try to squelch someone who's pulling "I'm the biggest guy here and therefor you must listen to me!"

Knowing a character's zodiac sign is pointless; knowing whether *she* knows it, or cares, is not.

Knowing a character's sexual preferences regarding gender/s often isn't as important as knowing whether she thinks tuxedos are dashing and elegant or stuffy and old-fashioned.

See, I can't separate characters from plotbunnies: coming up with a character is the same thing as coming up with a plot, for me. (...which is possibly why I fail at RPGs in general; when your character comes ready-made with a 12-book epic it is sometimes hard to play well with others. I never played well with others when I was a kid either, actually, come to think of it, because I always knew the whole story and they would try to do it wrong.)

I think descriptive details ... can be boring and useless? But on the other hand... well, maybe part of the reason it's so hard for me to put the stories actually on the page is that when I finally do get to the point where I have to know if she's tall enough to reach the shelf, I have to stop and agonize over it, because I don't know.

Does this mean my brown skirt is fixed??? EXCITEMENT!

You should post some pictures and/or descriptions of your new stitch learnings.

Yep! The only issue was the ruffle and the lace on the bottom hem, right? If that was it, it's fixed! You'll have to come to Maryland and pick it up.

Yay! There were two or three places where the lace was torn, and then the bottom ruffle that split, yup.

You could hop on a cheap bus and bring it to me! :D :D

That is such a neat thing about the dress! It's a wonderful feeling to hold functional history in your hands like that.

1. I used to tape songs off the radio with my mom too.

3. Eee, that's awesome! I'd love to see the photos.

5. Maybe try a 'snapshot' approach? One moment in time?

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I can do five things. Sure.

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