The Not Writing Creative Outlet

The things I do other than writing:

1. Sing - sang professionally for a short bit, mostly for a medieval minstrel troupe. I can, indeed, still sing a couple of songs from right around the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This is galling, mind you, because I went to an arts college. But not for music, where I made far and away more money than I ever made in my degree field which was:

2. Acting. Ah, yes. The much vaunted BFA in acting. Did some acting. Mostly extra and bit parts in commercials, TV shows and films that were in town. That faded as most shows moved north into Canada where it is apparently cheaper and easier to film. So then I went back to stage shows, mostly Shakespeare. Even helped choreograph fight scenes since I did come away with a certification in staged combat. Another skill that I'm sure will come in handy some day. Zombie apocalypse, maybe. Most of my acting these days is relegated to staging and playing out contentious scenes in a story. Helps to be able to get up, get into a character and look at a scene that way.

3. Taking pictures. This is the only place I actually have photos to offer up. And please note that while I *like* taking pictures, I make no claim that I'm actually any good at it. It's just a way to force my vision from the interior of my head to the world outside. Dead useful.

 

This first shot, left, is sunset over the Olympic mountains. The rocks in the foreground are the breakwater protecting our marina. Forest fires in California and in Eastern Washington threw smoke high into the atmosphere and gave us a summer of unbelievable sunsets.

 

 Then I had to get a moon shot. Everyone else was getting the super moon, but my camera and I aren't equipped to get shots of the brilliant full moon. That takes tripods, stability, and filters. Far easier and far more effective for me to go for a dimmer gibbous. This image is impressive because I took it from the transom of the boat. On water. Love my Nikon.

 

The last image is from a beach walk. I found a great blue heron just off shore, taking advantage of the low tide. While I'd really wanted a shot of him snagging his breakfast from the water, his fishing expedition wasn't much of a success. He made a few grabs, but failed to bring up the goods. What I do like about the shot is the detail in the feathers on his wing. Contrast isn't the greatest, but hey. This is why I'm not attempting to make any kind of living from taking pictures.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally. There's this thing happening Tuesday 11/18. The second installment in Isa's adventures comes out. May I ask for your assistance on Tuesday? I could use the help getting the word out. I will certainly post to Twitter and Facebook and the like, but my reach is limited. If you'll do this, I promise I'll stop singing.

 

"Like to a friar bold Robin Hood disguised himself one daaaaaaaay..." 

Dialect Tools

Early this week, Jeffe mentioned actors and the training we receive in dealing with dialects. It is extensive, immersive work. We even learned an entire alphabet to help us mark our scripts so we could learn our lines with the dialect. For acting purposes, there's a neutral dialect (the west coat of the US - theory has it this is where words are said with the least phonetic morphing of the sounds.)
From that ideal neutral, each dialect in the world changes the sounds of letters a specific way. Using the phonetic alphabet, actors can teach themselves a specific accent. Terrific, right? It brings up a couple of problems especially for writers.

1. Accents are meant to be heard, not read - in a play, a dialect is music. In the written word, it's nails on a chalkboard. See James's H.P. Lovecraft example if you need proof.
2. For actors AND for writers, the phonetic alphabet only tells you how word sounds change - think aboot rather than about. There's a whole other aspect to dialect that actors cannot actually write into their scripts unless they have music training. It's a couple of concepts called cadence and tonality.

Cadence and tonality talk about the musical aspect of a dialect. This covers inflection patterns - where speech and tone of voice rise and fall. For actors, musical marks give us a way to get at that. Authors are limited to sentence length, word choice, and word order. Those are powerful tools, too, so don't despair because there is a point in here. I promise. To capture the music of an accent, actors must listen to a native speaker (who is subsequently speaking the actor's language). Most libraries have tapes or dvds or mp3s specifically for this purpose. Yay for actors. Authors don't get to do that much, because, you know, we don't write with musical marks.

Here's the point I took so long to get to: All of us know what an accent is. All of us, unless we've been living under a rock with no internet connection, have heard all kinds of dialect. Southern, Bronx, Aussie, British, Irish, Scottish, Slavic, Asian, you name it, we've all probably heard it.  As an actor, my job is to reproduce that accent so well that a native will mistake me for a fellow countryman. Your job as an author is the exact opposite.

There's a story about an interview with Lawrence Olivier wherein he said it wasn't his job as an actor to feel anything. It was his job to make YOU feel everything. Perfect description, I think, of writing dialect. An author's job isn't to dictate what she hears in her head to her readers - it's to suggest just enough dialect that the readers hear dialect for themselves. 

The best tool for hearing dialect? Movies, TV and Youtube. Americans have a tremendous resource in the BBC because there you have native speakers from all over the world. You can hear the music, the word choices, how sounds change. Youtube has videos from people all over the planet and you have immediate access to hearing speech patterns from just about anywhere. Where this falls down is in historical contexts because every historical period had its own dialect. Shakespeare, obviously, but also very notably the Regency...but that's another issue entirely. If you care about that, look at plays from the period. The speech patterns are very different from what we're accustomed to.

However. This stuff is research and backstory. It needs to be done and then it needs to be nearly invisible. Hint at these speech patterns in writing - preferably with word choice, regionalisms, and intonation rather than with dropping every g or all the r's in someone's dialog. Otherwise, you aren't trusting your reader.

Assimilating Learning

When I was in college, we paid a whole bunch of money to get knowledge stuffed into our heads, yet we took the entire month of December off (as well as the usual spring and summer holidays). I didn't understand it when I started classes, but I sure as heck did by the time I graduated. It was all about assimilation.

Cornish is an acting conservatory. This is a fancy way of saying that most of the school year, they owned me from seven AM until eleven PM. My classmates and I worked our butts off. But very often, we'd batter our heads against the same problems over and over. Then the winter holiday would roll around. We'd go our separate ways for a month, and we'd get lost in the flow of family, work, holidays and whatever else suited us. When classes resumed, the issues that had held us back before break had magically vanished. Why? It wasn't the eggnog.

Assimilation. Turns out there's a huge difference between knowing something and owning something. Those long breaks built into our course structure were there for a reason - everything our instructors tried to teach us, all of the technique and all of the physical conditioning work - it needed time and space to sink in. We had to assimilate it, to take what we'd learned out of heads and let it settle into our bones, into our blood and into our breath.

It's the difference between learning how to ride a bike and knowing how. When you get on a bike, do you think about how to make it all work? When your folks first took off your training wheels, do you remember how much concentration and thought it took to remember to keep the handle bars steady and to peddle at the same time? Do you remember the point at which you'd assimilated the learning and no longer had to think about riding as you rode? Yeah, me neither. All of the effort and all of the heart-pounding anxiety over riding the bike slipped away unnoticed.

Assimilation is the final step in learning anything. It's the point at which you've incorporated your lessons into who and what you are. It's also the point at which you forget all of the pain and effort that went into learning in the first place. You take your knowledge for granted. That's both good and bad. Good in that you don't have to think about what you know and how you know it. It's bad if you have to teach someone else and can't remember how you learned it yourself.

The important bit here is to not take yourself and all you know for granted. If only because at some point, you're likely to have to teach someone else how to ride a bicycle.

When I Grow Up, I'm Gonna. . .

In 1969, I sat in front of our tiny black and white TV set and watched the first humans land on the moon. From that moment on, I wanted to be an astronaut. In my mid-teens, a friend and I decided to follow in our fathers’ footsteps. We’d enter the Air Force and from there, we’d apply to the astronaut program, which would naturally accept us both, and we’d get assigned to the same missions. No question. I tried to get into the Air Force Academy my junior year of high school.

Turns out, if you have asthma, the government is disinclined to allow you to soldier in any fashion, much less to entrust billions of dollars of equipment to your care. So there it was. My ambition. Shot down in flames before I’d even gotten to basic training. Probably just as well for all involved. I don’t seem to be wired to having other people tell me what to do. Authority issues R I.

For the record, my friend DID go to the Air Force Academy. He did become a test pilot. He did work at an undisclosed location in the Nevada desert, though he still won’t get me alien photos, darn it. He did apply repeatedly to NASA. The astronaut program never worked out for him and he’s retired from the military after more than twenty years of service.

As for me, I bounced around, trying to come up with a new plan. My father, in an attempt to be helpful, said that when one dream is snatched out of your reach, you should go for the next best thing. Granted, Dad had in mind a career in engineering or astrophysics on the ground at NASA. I went to college at Evergreen State, and then left before I could spend four years getting a degree in nothing. I went to work temping, doing a bunch of different jobs to see where I might fit in.

Nothing clicked. But I learned to scuba dive during that time. Yeah, I know. It was weird, but it was also a good time. Began taking one off classes at a community college – again, trying on careers. My very first computer programming class was a HUGE failure. That one put a big dent in my smarts confidence. So I signed up to work behind the camera in a weekend workshop that paired techie types (behind camera) with wannabe actor types (in front of the camera). The two instructors auditioned everyone who applied to the class. This startled me, but I figured what the hey? I’ll read the bit they gave me and then we’ll talk about letting me get my hands on a video camera. The woman in charge of the actors refused to let me go. She declared I’d be in front of the camera. Oh. Two years later, I was auditioning for and accepted to the Acting Conservatory at Cornish College of the Arts.

Note that acting professionally was never actually a plan. It was an accident – a happy one at the time, and something I desperately needed. I had no emotional vocabulary prior to acting school and only a passing acquaintance with the fact that I actually, you know, felt stuff. I did bit parts here and there and promptly made more money as a singer than I ever made as an actor.

Another career change was clearly in order. I had a BFA in Acting and no way to pay student loans. Oh, look! Temping! Then along came Microsoft, where I found out I suck as a secretary (damned authority issues), but I was good at HTML and SQL. I trained up and went to work.

And yet.

One thing remained constant, from the time I was a little kid, through school, through dreams smoldering on the ground, through confusion, heartache, acting school and days spent tending my customers at work: telling myself stories. During breaks, down time, or, at school, whenever I’d heard the lecture one too many times, I wrote snippets of stories. Little things to keep my heart and mind active and alive. Early in my marriage, my husband challenged me to begin submitting. I’d never actually finished anything to that point, but I accepted his dare.

And got my very first rejection letter from Marion Zimmer-Bradley. I still have that letter. Somewhere. When the call came to say Berkley wanted to buy Enemy Within, it was my husband I called first to tell him that ten or twelve years later, his dare had finally paid off.