Promo post for Resonance
Sep. 18th, 2008 07:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jadesfireIf you're on my flist and wondering why this has appeared, it's a companion to my SGA Big Bang Promo Post, over here. There's an incredibly thoughtful and insightful review of the story by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rustydog (I swear, no money exchanged hands) and a few notes on how the story came about.
If you've come over from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
sgabigbang, it's nice to see you and I hope this answers some of the questions that I posed over there. I am an incurable rambler, so I make no promises.
I was asked some questions about the writing process for Resonance which was, I have to admit, even more tortuous than usual. In general, I'm a last minute kind of person, and starting a couple of weeks before the deadline didn't mean I avoided that last minute panic. It meant I ended up with ten thousand words that I couldn't use.rustydog asked me how I know when a story's working and how I know when it isn't
The simple answer is that if the story sings to me, then it's working. If it doesn't, then it isn't. I think this is an instinctual thing that everyone who writes knows. Are you hitting the tone right? Do your characters sound right? Is the story flowing? Do you want to know what happens next?
It's that last question that keeps me writing, more than anything. Knowing the ending is like the kiss of death to my stories. I write because I want to know what happened next, and is the reason that my plots tend to have holes big enough for tanks in them. It's also the reason I rely so heavily on my betas, not only for editing once I'm done, but for bouncing ideas around during the writing process. I don't see the holes until I've passed them, so I need someone to yank me back and make things make sense.
My writing is always entirely linear - I start at the beginning and write through to the end. I've tried other methods, but none of them work for me. Having said that, I'll often have a later scene or line of dialogue in mind, and will write to see how it fits into the main story. In the case of Resonance, I knew that the emotional heart of the story was Rodney's feeling of helplessness and drive to do something to help John. The scene that expresses that had been in my mind since I started writing, and I just had to wait for the right timing to drop it in.
The original draft, while having the same main plot element, was trying to do too much, tell too many stories. At its heart, this had to be a story about John, as hero, friend and victim, and it was only when I got my focus back on that that the story started to sing for me.
with_apostrophe asked:
1. You have a fair amount of Ancient in your story. Are the words and phrases Latin "straight up", or did you alter the language? If you did alter it, did you have any rules you followed, or did you go by instinct?
Like so much of this story, the Latin felt more like self-indulgence than anything else. I'm a Classics graduate, and have been pretty obsessed with all things Classical since I was about eight, so anything that lets me use Latin, I enjoy. The language in Resonance is definitely less accurate than the Latin I used for Rodney's Poetry Months, mostly because I didn't have it beta'd by someone whose language skills are better than mine. But then again, Stargate takes considerable liberties with 'Ancient', so I didn't feel that my mock-Latin translations were completely out of place. I used a reference list of Ancient already used in Stargate, the language I'd used for the Poetry Months story, and quite a lot of artistic licence. For the most part, the vocabulary is accurate, it's the endings that aren't.
In writing terms, I tried to keep a balance between sounding alien and incomprehensible, and getting across the gist of what I meant. My betas pushed me to change some parts so that they made better sense, even if you didn't know what John was actually saying.
with_apostrophe also asked about writing John's mental connection with Atlantis. This was something I spent a long time thinking about. I don't entirely buy the 'sentient Atlantis' premise - I enjoy it in fanfic, but find I can't quite believe it enough to write it, if that makes sense. For all that I love the pictures (see in_the_bottle's artwork for a perfect example), in canon, John spends a suprisingly short amount of time in the chair before S4. It's an enormously potent image, of course, and the fact that we don't get it too much on screen means that it preserves its power.
In my own head, Atlantis is a hugely powerful computer, but lacks AI, so it's still reliant on programming to tell it what to do. It's been programmed to respond to certain thoughts in certain ways, but that doesn't make it intelligent. So I wanted to find a way to balance my own wariness of sentient!Atlantis with the need for John to be absorbed by the city. Bearing the prompt in mind as well, and using the evidence of 'The Return', I wanted to push the idea that the city was more responsive to the Ancients than its current human inhabitants, and that someone who's halfway between would have a different experience to either of them.
Of course, when you throw my personal weakness for telepathy fic into the mix, it affects the tone of the writing. To be honest, I did what I always do when writing telepathy, which was to close my eyes and just write. What if the city was giving John information as well as receiving it from him? What if he could tap into systems that were usually shut off to him? It was also a useful macguffin for the scene that he overhears between Rodney and Teyla. I always have a pivotal image or moment in my stories where, for me, we've reached the peak, emotionally at least. That scene had to be it, but there was no way John could hear it unless he was more connected to the city than usual. So a useful plot device grew into so much more and really dictated the flow of the story.
I'm always up for more discussion - positive and critical (I'm a big girl, I can take it) - and would love to hear what people thought. There's been some intriguing slash vs gen discussions floating around the edges of my flist recently, and I'd be intrigued to know what people who usually only read slash made of a gen story, if you tackled it at all. Also, did the short writing time show? My instinct is that it does, but that it's not necessarily a problem.
Anyway, thanks to everyone for reading and I hope you enjoy both the story and the wonderful art work that goes with it.
rustydog (I swear, no money exchanged hands) and a few notes on how the story came about.If you've come over from
sgabigbang, it's nice to see you and I hope this answers some of the questions that I posed over there. I am an incurable rambler, so I make no promises.I was asked some questions about the writing process for Resonance which was, I have to admit, even more tortuous than usual. In general, I'm a last minute kind of person, and starting a couple of weeks before the deadline didn't mean I avoided that last minute panic. It meant I ended up with ten thousand words that I couldn't use.
rustydog asked me how I know when a story's working and how I know when it isn'tThe simple answer is that if the story sings to me, then it's working. If it doesn't, then it isn't. I think this is an instinctual thing that everyone who writes knows. Are you hitting the tone right? Do your characters sound right? Is the story flowing? Do you want to know what happens next?
It's that last question that keeps me writing, more than anything. Knowing the ending is like the kiss of death to my stories. I write because I want to know what happened next, and is the reason that my plots tend to have holes big enough for tanks in them. It's also the reason I rely so heavily on my betas, not only for editing once I'm done, but for bouncing ideas around during the writing process. I don't see the holes until I've passed them, so I need someone to yank me back and make things make sense.
My writing is always entirely linear - I start at the beginning and write through to the end. I've tried other methods, but none of them work for me. Having said that, I'll often have a later scene or line of dialogue in mind, and will write to see how it fits into the main story. In the case of Resonance, I knew that the emotional heart of the story was Rodney's feeling of helplessness and drive to do something to help John. The scene that expresses that had been in my mind since I started writing, and I just had to wait for the right timing to drop it in.
The original draft, while having the same main plot element, was trying to do too much, tell too many stories. At its heart, this had to be a story about John, as hero, friend and victim, and it was only when I got my focus back on that that the story started to sing for me.
with_apostrophe asked:1. You have a fair amount of Ancient in your story. Are the words and phrases Latin "straight up", or did you alter the language? If you did alter it, did you have any rules you followed, or did you go by instinct?
Like so much of this story, the Latin felt more like self-indulgence than anything else. I'm a Classics graduate, and have been pretty obsessed with all things Classical since I was about eight, so anything that lets me use Latin, I enjoy. The language in Resonance is definitely less accurate than the Latin I used for Rodney's Poetry Months, mostly because I didn't have it beta'd by someone whose language skills are better than mine. But then again, Stargate takes considerable liberties with 'Ancient', so I didn't feel that my mock-Latin translations were completely out of place. I used a reference list of Ancient already used in Stargate, the language I'd used for the Poetry Months story, and quite a lot of artistic licence. For the most part, the vocabulary is accurate, it's the endings that aren't.
In writing terms, I tried to keep a balance between sounding alien and incomprehensible, and getting across the gist of what I meant. My betas pushed me to change some parts so that they made better sense, even if you didn't know what John was actually saying.
with_apostrophe also asked about writing John's mental connection with Atlantis. This was something I spent a long time thinking about. I don't entirely buy the 'sentient Atlantis' premise - I enjoy it in fanfic, but find I can't quite believe it enough to write it, if that makes sense. For all that I love the pictures (see in_the_bottle's artwork for a perfect example), in canon, John spends a suprisingly short amount of time in the chair before S4. It's an enormously potent image, of course, and the fact that we don't get it too much on screen means that it preserves its power. In my own head, Atlantis is a hugely powerful computer, but lacks AI, so it's still reliant on programming to tell it what to do. It's been programmed to respond to certain thoughts in certain ways, but that doesn't make it intelligent. So I wanted to find a way to balance my own wariness of sentient!Atlantis with the need for John to be absorbed by the city. Bearing the prompt in mind as well, and using the evidence of 'The Return', I wanted to push the idea that the city was more responsive to the Ancients than its current human inhabitants, and that someone who's halfway between would have a different experience to either of them.
Of course, when you throw my personal weakness for telepathy fic into the mix, it affects the tone of the writing. To be honest, I did what I always do when writing telepathy, which was to close my eyes and just write. What if the city was giving John information as well as receiving it from him? What if he could tap into systems that were usually shut off to him? It was also a useful macguffin for the scene that he overhears between Rodney and Teyla. I always have a pivotal image or moment in my stories where, for me, we've reached the peak, emotionally at least. That scene had to be it, but there was no way John could hear it unless he was more connected to the city than usual. So a useful plot device grew into so much more and really dictated the flow of the story.
I'm always up for more discussion - positive and critical (I'm a big girl, I can take it) - and would love to hear what people thought. There's been some intriguing slash vs gen discussions floating around the edges of my flist recently, and I'd be intrigued to know what people who usually only read slash made of a gen story, if you tackled it at all. Also, did the short writing time show? My instinct is that it does, but that it's not necessarily a problem.
Anyway, thanks to everyone for reading and I hope you enjoy both the story and the wonderful art work that goes with it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-18 11:34 am (UTC)This is good stuff. I think I like reading people talking about their writing almost as much as I like the stories. Still digesting, I may have more thoughts and questions later.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-19 08:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-18 12:50 pm (UTC)I think we think the same concerning sentient!Atlantis (except that it annoys me in fanfic) so I was so glad to see that you managed to give John that connection, without giving Atlantis sentience in its own right nor by making John able to control Atlantis with his mind all of the time (Equally hated by myself when I see it in fanfic.)
Interesting about the Latin. I know no Latin, but did learn Spanish and understood most of it without any translation needed whatsoever. I truly understand the frustration with onscreen Ancient. It's especially bad when Daniel is puzzling over something and it's blatantly obvious what it means!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-19 08:18 pm (UTC)Onscreen Ancient is... As you say, they puzzle over simple words, then translate complicated ones as though they're nothing. It's one of those weird TV things, I think :)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-18 11:34 am (UTC)This is good stuff. I think I like reading people talking about their writing almost as much as I like the stories. Still digesting, I may have more thoughts and questions later.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-19 08:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-18 12:50 pm (UTC)I think we think the same concerning sentient!Atlantis (except that it annoys me in fanfic) so I was so glad to see that you managed to give John that connection, without giving Atlantis sentience in its own right nor by making John able to control Atlantis with his mind all of the time (Equally hated by myself when I see it in fanfic.)
Interesting about the Latin. I know no Latin, but did learn Spanish and understood most of it without any translation needed whatsoever. I truly understand the frustration with onscreen Ancient. It's especially bad when Daniel is puzzling over something and it's blatantly obvious what it means!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-19 08:18 pm (UTC)Onscreen Ancient is... As you say, they puzzle over simple words, then translate complicated ones as though they're nothing. It's one of those weird TV things, I think :)