When I first began writing seriously (meaning past naming characters, putting them in designer clothing and making up some dialogue), I never did research. I sat in a cold, concrete floored room at the back of The Ditch and wrote what I knew.
Pages upon pages of what I knew.
Then, I began to make outlandish things up.
And I filled pages upon pages with words.
I never sat around thinking, "Hey, I don't know enough about that, I should look it up."
Granted, this was the day and age before the internet was in your hand at all times, but the Internet was a happening thing and I believe I sometimes ventured over to use it to research things whilst still in high school. I know I used it in college.
I hated the internet.
I'm honest. I hated with with a flaming passion because I could NEVER find what I wanted. Throughout college, I sat in the dusty library and did my research using books that sometimes hadn't seen the light of day since the sixties.
And I still wrote.
Still filled pages of notebook paper with words, still typed Word docs filled with stories and characters I grew to love.
But, never once did I research anything passed maybe looking up a meaning of a name I was unable to find within one of the numerous baby name books I own.
It never occurred to me that as a writer of works of fiction, I'd have to do research, have to do something similar to what I did when writing an essay for school.
Then, one day, my mother informed me I ought to "look something up" so it sounded like I knew what I was talking about. I do not remember WHAT she told me to look up, only she created a monster.
I am a research monster now.
I'm still not any good at it, the internet still fails ninety five percent of the time to tell me what I want it to tell me, but I research everything now. Hours of my life are wasted on various websites looking up random bits of information. I've spent time hunting down slang used in the Old West for ONE SENTENCE. I've wasted time trying to find how a British person would say "crazy" in the twenties. I spent an hour trying to find out when the rollerball pen was invented and how widely used it was in the 1940s. I spent at least two days searching floor plans online till I finally gave up and made my own-- just so I could describe something better. I've lost track of how many time I've made sure the stupid pop culture reference I've made actually would be known by certain characters and are the right time period.
It's a lot of freaking work.
And that's just for the fan fiction I've been working on as if recent.
Last summer I spent days on end looking at school catalogues to get ideas for course to stick students in. I've wasted hours making sure the schedules I made for them actually worked. I've spent years trying to figure out what colleges some of my characters are going to attend, though I don't plan to actually write about them IN college. I've spent days staring at a map of Glasgow on a real estate site trying to find a flat. For a fictional character. (I did find one. Well, two. Then I merged them, as what I wanted doesn't actual exist.) I've scoured the internet for images of interiors so I'd have a good idea how to describe them. (One day just to find out they'd remodeled the building I was trying to write about so I really had to just use what was in my head. No one thought to take pictures of the fourth floor Adam Smith lecture hall before they redid it...)
Hours of my life were lost when I was working on HYRM and I got lost in a world of quotes. Quotes ate me alive for days on end.
Many of the clever things I come up with in my original works as well as my fan fics no one bothers to really take note of...it's like I always thought: no one notices. They are reading and enjoying the story-- not looking for symbolism, not looking for those little things.
Then, I got feedback when someone noticed the painstaking effort I put forth.
One of my stories follows two real people, who are quite famous. I went back to my roots in my fan fics and started writing about actual people instead of fictional ones. I had the idea in my head for awhile and it wanted out, so I let it out. Yeah, you might think it is rather teenybopper of me, and I think it is, but I like the two OCs I created and if I REALLY wanted to, I could change the names of the famous people, change the names of projects, etc and it'd be orignal. So, I guess you can say I'm just too lazy to change the inspiration. (10p technically started out as a fan fic, only I changed the main romantic interests name, then his profession, thus, it's not. See? No...that's fine.)
Anyways, I've become somewhat fixated with where these two people WERE. I don't care where they are right now, I care where they WERE. I get caught up in trying to figure it out, till I suddenly realize what I'm doing and I laugh.
I'd be worried if I hadn't done the same thing when I was writing some of my original works. Granted I cannot scurry the internet to figure out where my characters were located, but if you saw the pile of paper I carry around for RAB, you'd see I'm rather keen to know every detail.
It wasn't always like this. Once upon I time, I just made stuff up and called it a day.
(Except that one time when I was in high school and I drew a map of the town RAB takes place in just so I could name the street's D used to get from one end of town to another. I could have just made that up, but...I didn't. I made an entire map. On lots of paper. I still have it and use it too. Well, I did have it...I'm not sure where it got off to now that I think about it. Hopefully it survies the move.)
Showing posts with label celeberities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label celeberities. Show all posts
28 June 2009
what the world is coming to
So, I just found out that Billy Mays is dead.
Via facebook.
Again.
Why is that lately every time someone dies, the first place I find out about it is not the news, the TV or any form of the media, but facebook?
In other news, I saw "Transformers" the other night. I thought it was good, my husband thought it was bad.
You must know, my husband things "Army of Darkeness" is a good movie. Seriously, he liked bad movies, but when he views something as bad it isn't a bad movie. Does that make sense.
I thought "Transformers" was good for a wide array of reasons. I thought it was funny in the right places, corny in the right places and had some nice explosions.
I've seen a lot of movies as of late. I saw earlier last week "The Proposal" which I also thought was really good. It was funny and touching, and only the ending was sappy. Plus, the guy whose name escapes me at the moment, had really expressive faces which just made the movie. Oh, and the fact the lead female character had a Berkin bag rocked. It was orange. She also had killer shoes. Which I totally noticed and spent the rest of the movie watching for the tell tail red soles.
Via facebook.
Again.
Why is that lately every time someone dies, the first place I find out about it is not the news, the TV or any form of the media, but facebook?
In other news, I saw "Transformers" the other night. I thought it was good, my husband thought it was bad.
You must know, my husband things "Army of Darkeness" is a good movie. Seriously, he liked bad movies, but when he views something as bad it isn't a bad movie. Does that make sense.
I thought "Transformers" was good for a wide array of reasons. I thought it was funny in the right places, corny in the right places and had some nice explosions.
I've seen a lot of movies as of late. I saw earlier last week "The Proposal" which I also thought was really good. It was funny and touching, and only the ending was sappy. Plus, the guy whose name escapes me at the moment, had really expressive faces which just made the movie. Oh, and the fact the lead female character had a Berkin bag rocked. It was orange. She also had killer shoes. Which I totally noticed and spent the rest of the movie watching for the tell tail red soles.
26 June 2009
Jumping the bandwagon
I first heard Micheal Jackson was dead from someone's facebook status update. Thinking it had to be a joke, I went to Google News, which only told me he was suffering from a heart attack.
At some point yesterday, he was dead. Declared dead, confirmed dead. He was dead.
Last night, BET was playing Micheal Jackson videos. For lack of better things to watch, my husband and I watched Micheal dance one last time, for as you well know, now that he's really dead, the music video is truly dead.
The music video has been dead for awhile. It died at some point at the dawn of the new century, when MTV and VH1 ceased to actually play videos and moved on to playing the dumbest, stupidest reality TV shows. Micheal Jackson made the music video into an art form. Have you seen "Thriller?" MTV was made into what it was supposed to be by that video. Jackson's videos all had plots in them. There was always a story in there, usually having to do with what the song was babbling about. His dancing was always perfect and went along with the music. I have seen many Micheal Jackson videos (I know I have not seen them all, as this morning when VH1 and MTV finally played some, I did see a few I had never seen before). However, I have seen many. I've seen them mostly on "Pop Up Video" which is one of my all time favorite things in the word to watch, as I could watch music videos all day long and having random tid bits of information is just all the better.
Last night, as I watched the "mini-movie" that "You Rock My World" and I began thinking, "There is a lot of Micheal Jackson in Justin Timberlake." I did not realize at the time, that video was from 2001, so it might have been the other way around, but as I watched this mini-movie music video, I realized the music video was dead.
When you think about it, what is the last music video you've been excited to see? When was the last time you stopped what you were doing in order to watch a music video? When was the last time you actually saw ALL of a music video? When was the last time a music video debuted on prime time television?
I think I might have been in first grade or second grade, when the Dangerous Album came out and "Black or White" premiered on prime time TV...I think on TGIF Friday maybe? I do not exactly remember, but I do remember everyone at school being excited to see it on TV that night, and one just had to watch. I do not remember much about watching it, I do remember it was the most popular song at the talent show that year. Of course, I had no idea what the song was about or why it was such a big deal until I saw the video when I was in junior high or high school on "Pop Up Video."
I also remember being shocked when I found out Micheal Jackson was black, as throughout my childhood as far as I knew he was a funny looking white guy. I think it was my mom who pointed out that the black child who was the lead singer of The Jackson 5 was the same Micheal Jackson who had the little nose and white face. I also really figured this out more when I watched the movie/long tv show/drama thing about the Jacksons.
As I entered junior high and the boy bands all started coming out, I remember thinking Micheal Jackson wasn't cool. I did like his song, "You Are Not Alone," which to this day is the only Micheal Jackson song I own, as it was nominated for a Grammy, thus on the Grammy CD I own. That was the music video with Lisa Maire Prestly and I couldn't figure out how they had made it when Jackson was showing so much skin.
There will always be an elephant in the room when we think of Micheal Jackson, because his crazy, mixed up personal life over shadowed his talent as a performer. However, that talent is perserved in the countless music videos he made. His crazy personality does show through in most of the videos, so he is not totally lost.
What is totally lost is the music video. The last music video I watched in full was Britney's "Have U Seen Amy." It casused a buzz because of its "dirty" chorus, which I guess I'm stupid becasue I don't get it. I also didn't really get the video. Most of todays videos I don't get. Most of them are tasteless and stupid. None of them are truely sexy or artful. While I have a hard time taking Michael Jackson as sexy, his videos are artful and thought provoking. There might be sexy, artful videos out there, but I'll never seen them because MTV, VH1 and the various other "music" channels don't play music videos, as they do not think people want to watch music videos. I used to not be able to live without MTV and VH1 for the music videos. Now, if I did not have these channels, I wouldn't notice, as I do not watch them any more. I think a lot of people feel as I do.
I believe Micheal Jackson changed music, he used music videos to do this. I don't think he would have become what he did, professionally, without music videos. He gave us the form of the music video that was copied for years. He created stories in his videos, they were not just him standing around singing, there was always a theme.
Some poeple out there think he's getting too much attention and he shouldn't get it due to the elephant in the room. Farah Fawcett died on the same day as Micheal. However, we all knew she was going to die, as she's been fighting cancer for awhile now and it was rumored she was getting worse. Micheal came out of left field and caught us all off guard. If you look at the two of them, I'm going to have to say that Jackson had more of an impact than Fawcett. She gave us a hair cut, one season of Charlie's Angels and a poster. Jackson gave us countless music videos, years of high jinks, and music that shaped a whole generation (and then some) lives. Everyone's got a memory linked to a Micheal Jackson song. I can't say I've got much linked to Fawcett other than the fact my mother told me she couldn't get her hair to do that Farah Fawcett cut. I'm not saying Fawcett should not be mourned, I'm just saying the world's reaction to Micheal Jackson's death is expected. At least, Fawcett will be at rest and her passing will be more peaceful with the world's glare focused on Jackson, who always lived for flash.
At some point yesterday, he was dead. Declared dead, confirmed dead. He was dead.
Last night, BET was playing Micheal Jackson videos. For lack of better things to watch, my husband and I watched Micheal dance one last time, for as you well know, now that he's really dead, the music video is truly dead.
The music video has been dead for awhile. It died at some point at the dawn of the new century, when MTV and VH1 ceased to actually play videos and moved on to playing the dumbest, stupidest reality TV shows. Micheal Jackson made the music video into an art form. Have you seen "Thriller?" MTV was made into what it was supposed to be by that video. Jackson's videos all had plots in them. There was always a story in there, usually having to do with what the song was babbling about. His dancing was always perfect and went along with the music. I have seen many Micheal Jackson videos (I know I have not seen them all, as this morning when VH1 and MTV finally played some, I did see a few I had never seen before). However, I have seen many. I've seen them mostly on "Pop Up Video" which is one of my all time favorite things in the word to watch, as I could watch music videos all day long and having random tid bits of information is just all the better.
Last night, as I watched the "mini-movie" that "You Rock My World" and I began thinking, "There is a lot of Micheal Jackson in Justin Timberlake." I did not realize at the time, that video was from 2001, so it might have been the other way around, but as I watched this mini-movie music video, I realized the music video was dead.
When you think about it, what is the last music video you've been excited to see? When was the last time you stopped what you were doing in order to watch a music video? When was the last time you actually saw ALL of a music video? When was the last time a music video debuted on prime time television?
I think I might have been in first grade or second grade, when the Dangerous Album came out and "Black or White" premiered on prime time TV...I think on TGIF Friday maybe? I do not exactly remember, but I do remember everyone at school being excited to see it on TV that night, and one just had to watch. I do not remember much about watching it, I do remember it was the most popular song at the talent show that year. Of course, I had no idea what the song was about or why it was such a big deal until I saw the video when I was in junior high or high school on "Pop Up Video."
I also remember being shocked when I found out Micheal Jackson was black, as throughout my childhood as far as I knew he was a funny looking white guy. I think it was my mom who pointed out that the black child who was the lead singer of The Jackson 5 was the same Micheal Jackson who had the little nose and white face. I also really figured this out more when I watched the movie/long tv show/drama thing about the Jacksons.
As I entered junior high and the boy bands all started coming out, I remember thinking Micheal Jackson wasn't cool. I did like his song, "You Are Not Alone," which to this day is the only Micheal Jackson song I own, as it was nominated for a Grammy, thus on the Grammy CD I own. That was the music video with Lisa Maire Prestly and I couldn't figure out how they had made it when Jackson was showing so much skin.
There will always be an elephant in the room when we think of Micheal Jackson, because his crazy, mixed up personal life over shadowed his talent as a performer. However, that talent is perserved in the countless music videos he made. His crazy personality does show through in most of the videos, so he is not totally lost.
What is totally lost is the music video. The last music video I watched in full was Britney's "Have U Seen Amy." It casused a buzz because of its "dirty" chorus, which I guess I'm stupid becasue I don't get it. I also didn't really get the video. Most of todays videos I don't get. Most of them are tasteless and stupid. None of them are truely sexy or artful. While I have a hard time taking Michael Jackson as sexy, his videos are artful and thought provoking. There might be sexy, artful videos out there, but I'll never seen them because MTV, VH1 and the various other "music" channels don't play music videos, as they do not think people want to watch music videos. I used to not be able to live without MTV and VH1 for the music videos. Now, if I did not have these channels, I wouldn't notice, as I do not watch them any more. I think a lot of people feel as I do.
I believe Micheal Jackson changed music, he used music videos to do this. I don't think he would have become what he did, professionally, without music videos. He gave us the form of the music video that was copied for years. He created stories in his videos, they were not just him standing around singing, there was always a theme.
Some poeple out there think he's getting too much attention and he shouldn't get it due to the elephant in the room. Farah Fawcett died on the same day as Micheal. However, we all knew she was going to die, as she's been fighting cancer for awhile now and it was rumored she was getting worse. Micheal came out of left field and caught us all off guard. If you look at the two of them, I'm going to have to say that Jackson had more of an impact than Fawcett. She gave us a hair cut, one season of Charlie's Angels and a poster. Jackson gave us countless music videos, years of high jinks, and music that shaped a whole generation (and then some) lives. Everyone's got a memory linked to a Micheal Jackson song. I can't say I've got much linked to Fawcett other than the fact my mother told me she couldn't get her hair to do that Farah Fawcett cut. I'm not saying Fawcett should not be mourned, I'm just saying the world's reaction to Micheal Jackson's death is expected. At least, Fawcett will be at rest and her passing will be more peaceful with the world's glare focused on Jackson, who always lived for flash.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)