Sophinisba Solis (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophinisba) wrote2010-05-22 04:51 pm
sophinisba) wrote2010-05-22 04:51 pm
Entry tags:
notebooks
I was doing some cleaning and decluttering earlier today, and going through old notebooks was as amusing (and distracting) as always. My lecture notes are boring but they're mixed in with original song lyrics, story ideas, song titles for playlists, random diary entries, etc. When I was in high school and college I didn't know about fanfic but I used to make up a lot of stories for myself, some really closely based on novels I was reading or musicians I was obsessed with, and some a little more original. I did a lot more planning and world-building than actually writing out the stories – lots of lists of character names, sometimes maps, sketches, diagrams, etc.
I found this list of imaginary band names with a few of their album titles. I think this is from about ten years ago.
Shade (album: Lemonade)
Mosquito Bite (albums: Itch, Scratch)
Riverrun/River Running (albums: Eve and Adam's, To the Sea)
Mish
Mesh (albums: Chain Link Unity, Sham)
ESL (album: Accent)
False Positive
Witch Hazel (already a band?)
Brandywine
Willow Wood
Everybody and the Moon (albums: Monday, Sing Me Down)
Pravda
On the next page I have a list of the six members of Shade with the instruments they play, and then some little bios about how they met in college and played happy party type music, and their relationship drama, and how then the lead singer Maggie became phenomenally successful and some of the others went on to form Mesh, whose music was a bit edgier.
I never did it for Shade, but there was this other fictional band I spent years and many notebooks plotting about, and for them I actually wrote songs (and learned how to play them on the guitar) and knew what those songs meant in the context of the characters' lives and careers.
In this same notebook I have some lyrics (and chords!) for a silly song I wrote about all the male characters on ER who had PTSD. This was my college friend L.'s idea, that there should be a band who would just sing about ER plotlines, but I think she just said it as a joke, and when I went ahead and started writing the songs she wasn't really interested. :P
I heard a couple years back that there actually was a band called Previously on Lost that would just sing songs about Lost plots, but I never find out anything else about them.
Anyway, it just got me thinking that I never do that kind of thing anymore and that makes me a little sad, that my creativity is a lot narrower than it used to be. I write fanfic now and I love it, and I sometimes actually finish stories and share them with other people, which is something I never used to do! Or sometimes I just type up the ideas for fics but don't actually write them, and that's fun too. But I stopped doing anything else.
These days my experience of fandom has a lot more diversity of art forms than it used to. When I started out I knew fanart and filk existed but the comms I was in and the challenges I participated were always only about fic, and that was all my friends and I did. Now I'm friends with people who do podfic and vids and icons and fanmixes. Most of the Merlin comms I follow accept all kinds of fills for their prompts and challenges;![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
camelot_fleet especially is always encouraging people to try new things, and I got to do that Artword collaboration with zephre, which was awesome and totally new for me.
But still, when I sit down to do produce something, that means opening up a Word document and typing, so I skip those other creative activities that used to go along with storytelling (or, I guess, "storydwelling", since I didn't do it with an audience or even a finished product in mind back then). Even as recently as 2006 or so, I was writing fic and that was all I ever planned to share with anyone, but since I was still sometimes writing it in notebooks, from time to time I'd end up sketching out the way the rooms in my version of the Houses of Healing were oriented or the placement of a group of characters around a table.
It's not that I can't open up a sketch pad or GarageBand or whatever, but it's a separate undertaking, and usually one that involves working on unfamiliar skills, whether artistic or technological, and the feeling that overcoming those barriers isn't worth the effort, since I don't have those kinds of talents in the first place. (Last night I spent over an hour trying to record less than 4 minutes of podfic. I was about ready to cry by the time I stopped and I didn't even finish anything, and this is the way it goes every time.) It's not part of what I do anymore, the way doodling in the margins used to be.
What about you? How have these things changed for you in the time you've been in fandom or part of online communities? I'm having some trouble with my Internet connection at home so I'm not sure how much I'll be online this weekend, but I would love to hear from you.
I found this list of imaginary band names with a few of their album titles. I think this is from about ten years ago.
Shade (album: Lemonade)
Mosquito Bite (albums: Itch, Scratch)
Mesh (albums: Chain Link Unity, Sham)
ESL (album: Accent)
False Positive
Witch Hazel (already a band?)
Brandywine
Willow Wood
Everybody and the Moon (albums: Monday, Sing Me Down)
Pravda
On the next page I have a list of the six members of Shade with the instruments they play, and then some little bios about how they met in college and played happy party type music, and their relationship drama, and how then the lead singer Maggie became phenomenally successful and some of the others went on to form Mesh, whose music was a bit edgier.
I never did it for Shade, but there was this other fictional band I spent years and many notebooks plotting about, and for them I actually wrote songs (and learned how to play them on the guitar) and knew what those songs meant in the context of the characters' lives and careers.
In this same notebook I have some lyrics (and chords!) for a silly song I wrote about all the male characters on ER who had PTSD. This was my college friend L.'s idea, that there should be a band who would just sing about ER plotlines, but I think she just said it as a joke, and when I went ahead and started writing the songs she wasn't really interested. :P
I heard a couple years back that there actually was a band called Previously on Lost that would just sing songs about Lost plots, but I never find out anything else about them.
Anyway, it just got me thinking that I never do that kind of thing anymore and that makes me a little sad, that my creativity is a lot narrower than it used to be. I write fanfic now and I love it, and I sometimes actually finish stories and share them with other people, which is something I never used to do! Or sometimes I just type up the ideas for fics but don't actually write them, and that's fun too. But I stopped doing anything else.
These days my experience of fandom has a lot more diversity of art forms than it used to. When I started out I knew fanart and filk existed but the comms I was in and the challenges I participated were always only about fic, and that was all my friends and I did. Now I'm friends with people who do podfic and vids and icons and fanmixes. Most of the Merlin comms I follow accept all kinds of fills for their prompts and challenges;
camelot_fleet especially is always encouraging people to try new things, and I got to do that Artword collaboration with zephre, which was awesome and totally new for me. But still, when I sit down to do produce something, that means opening up a Word document and typing, so I skip those other creative activities that used to go along with storytelling (or, I guess, "storydwelling", since I didn't do it with an audience or even a finished product in mind back then). Even as recently as 2006 or so, I was writing fic and that was all I ever planned to share with anyone, but since I was still sometimes writing it in notebooks, from time to time I'd end up sketching out the way the rooms in my version of the Houses of Healing were oriented or the placement of a group of characters around a table.
It's not that I can't open up a sketch pad or GarageBand or whatever, but it's a separate undertaking, and usually one that involves working on unfamiliar skills, whether artistic or technological, and the feeling that overcoming those barriers isn't worth the effort, since I don't have those kinds of talents in the first place. (Last night I spent over an hour trying to record less than 4 minutes of podfic. I was about ready to cry by the time I stopped and I didn't even finish anything, and this is the way it goes every time.) It's not part of what I do anymore, the way doodling in the margins used to be.
What about you? How have these things changed for you in the time you've been in fandom or part of online communities? I'm having some trouble with my Internet connection at home so I'm not sure how much I'll be online this weekend, but I would love to hear from you.