Acceptable methods of getting the point across.

[DNS]

Or rather, methods of storytelling.

for school, I've been reading hamlet. It's impeeding my ability, at the moment, to write anything at all, partially becuase translating shakespeare is a task for all of my brain, and partially becuase it's a really REALLY awesome play. Like.. amazingly awesome.

I'm also half thinking of nexus at the same time, and some characters I want to up and send people.

Those two thoughts are irrelevant to the point of this post, but for one thing-- together, they inspired my current line of thought. It's a hypothetical line of thought, more like "hmm, I wonder. This might be interesting to try sometime.." And very likely people have asked it already, but I wasn't here for that. so.

On nexus, for some agencies, we write candidate stories, in the tranditional third person narrative form. You know, storytelling. A few places also accept comics, which is a pictoral form of storytelling. So.. do people accept the other modes of storytelling?

Like, any of them. Specifically, I'm thinking Plays/scripts/scenes, or poetry, which are the other two really big methods of storytelling that I know of. Perhaps even pseudo-roleplaying [which would be like normal-stories, only not as smooth. like a log, only you're writing up both sides of it yourself], or real roleplaying [where you grab a friend and one takes the position of a searcher, and the other takes the position of the character that's getting searched] and so on. Maybe song lyrics, but that's similar to poetry.
All of this in the place of your tranditional, third-person-this-happens-then-that-happens sort of story.

I'm not really thinking of doing any of that myself, really. Just a curious, whatchoo-all-think kind of thing.

And what are other methods of storytelling, besides what I listed up there and verbal/animations/motion-pictures-and-actual-acting. :3 I'm suddenly very interested in that sort of thing.

[Shard]

I think one of the Swim candidates was sent in the form of a poem, and several others along the way I've seen have had lyrics interspersed with the story.

I think a script would be difficult to read, but kinda fun and different. That might be something I'd do for one of my Talon City Talent Agency people, it'd be fitting with the idea of actors, directors and the like getting involved with dragons.

Personally I'm not into poetry, it does very little for me. When it's really good, it's really good, but when it's Hallmark Card Poetry I kinda balk at it. I have a keenly developed sense of Smarmy.

I do like it when song lyrics match up or inspire a character. I actually have one already, Echo, who is based on the song Echoes from Pink Floyd's Meddle album. Also another who I've never used, the Sun King's Daughter (nicknamed Sunny) from Billy Thorpe's space epic 21st Century Man. i ought to make her.

[DNS]

I was thinking scripts like... Iunno if anyone's ever read Fenses, by.. August Wilson? I think. So google tells me. >.> I trust google.

But anyway, fences had amaaazingly detailed scene descriptions, descriptions of the characters beforehand, and whatnot. And other plays have that italic [-character- moves forward, looking angry]. That sort of thing. >.> I'm doing something like that, or rather, considering doing that, with different characters, not for nexus. :3

And eew, hallmark poetry. Poetry doesn't do much for me either, but on the rare occasion, a story-poem is awesomely awesome. For something like htis, i suppose it would be more like.. iunno, the Odyssey, or, more tediously, Gawain and the Green Knight. [though, as an agency owner, if anyone sent me something like Gawain and the Green Knight, I'd first admire them and then throttle them. >.> the language! SO FRUSTRATING. damn you, translations from old english!]

For song lyrics, I was thinking more original lyrics, but that's like a poem. XP

But hee, that's awesome. :3 that one of the swim candidates was submitted in a poem. It makes me gleeful and excited.

[Xenoqueen]

I personally don't like reading scripts. Scripts aren't meant to be read. They're meant to be watched, as a play or movie, not read. If the script is full of details, it might as well be a regular story.

I'm not big on poetry, either, and especially wouldn't be so for a poetry-candidate. I have trouble imagining a poem which could convey the two things I require 1) evidence of how the character acts and 2) something related to bonding. O.o

Song lyrics...I rather find those hokey when they're inserted in stories, myself. Characters with theme songs are fine, I do that myself, and stories based on song lyrics can be cool, but if you're reading along and suddenly there's lyrics slapped in the middle of things...it's not often I've seen that pulled off well. Especially if it's a song so famous everybody's sick of it. :P

Finally, I get stories that contain RP elements all the time, and contribute to them, too. But I don't like them in plain ol' log form. I want to see them cleaned up and streamlined, from the point of view of the character I'm judging.

Of course none of these opinions are in my rules and I wouldn't reject a story just because it was one of the above, but it would affect my whole bit about how much I like the story equalling what value Token/Charm you get from my agencies.

[Astra]

I always thought it would be cool if someone made a film of their candidates using a handheld video camera and their old barbie and gi joe dolls as characters and slapped it on you-tube and linked to it from the stats sheet. I would laugh my arse off if anyone did that. I'd do it myself but I sadly don't have a digital video camera. Though my quasi-boyfriend does :O

[DNS]

-giggles- I thought of that, but it would be a little too much, I think. And it would short-circuit my computer. :3 It cannot handle such things!

Puppet shows, maybe? that would be cute, but hard to do. XP

-would get such a kick out of making barbies look like her characters- whee!

I actually like reading plays/scripts as much as I like watching the product and reading stories. :3 I guess i seperate them in my mind. And i can think of a few ways to put your tranditional dragoning story into narrative verse/story poetry, but I'd never do it publiaclly. XP i dun like writing poetry.

Hee, fun ideas, though. :3

[Cacopheny]

There are ways to vary the reading/writing experience without moving out of story-format, too: drabbling (short, 100-word scenes-- you can do some amazing things by writing several in a sequence), changing tense (present vs past, though I can't imagine trying to write in future tense XD ), changing person (I do a few stories in first person, and second person could be fun to experiment with ^^ ), switching point-of-view around, write a story entirely in dialogue and see how well you can convey what happens (that's fun =D ), etc. I certainly do lots of rp-based stories, but like Phe said, I always format them into story-format rather than "<nick> does this" // "<othernick> does that". It's easiest to do as you go along, for me >.>

So, you know, if yer particularly bored with the typical "third person this happens then that happens" format, there's ways to branch out without having to go too exotic and annoying the readers who don't like that sort of thing ^^

[DNS]

I know about varying writing styles and whatnot-- I've thought about that too. :3 There are just other ways of telling stories, and i'm trying to find out what they are and look into variations of them too, partially to look into myself, and partially becuase it's just really neat. XP on just an observational level, to see all the ways you can do things in this medium, and in that medium.. kinda like in different mediums in visual art. :3

and also getting opinions on things, becuase I'm thinking of doing some of it on my own time, and wanted to see if i could intigrate it into here. :3 Apparently, it's something for non-nexus, though, which is cool.

but yeah, I've thought of all of that. :3 and tried it, in my spare time. Varying story styles is fun.

Does anyone know any other methods, btw? >.> since that part of it might have gotten eaten by the main of it.
I know there's TV, film, Play/musical, epic/story poem/stories in verse, visual art, comics, plain writing, verbal story telling, and whatnot-- are there any other ways of telling a story that anyone can think of?

^^

[Astra]

What about flash movies? Those would be pretty cool as candidate stories ^_^

[DNS]

ooh, trudat. XP Provided you had the patience, of course, and the software.

How much does flash cost, anyway? :3 I've been meaning to get it, but the last time I saw, it was waaay out of my budget. >>

[Cacopheny]

Dance : O But that'd be hard to do via internet media XD

[DNS]

-claps- hee, I hadn't even thought of that. XP
Digital camera, perhaps? but you'd get shoddy picture quality. ^^;

[Xenoqueen]

Cost me $700 to get Flash Professional 8.

[Astra]

its true flash is expensive. I use it on the school computers myself. Of course it can also be aquired by less than ethical means *cough* I used to have a macromedia keygen but it was on my jump drive that I lost. Sad.

[DNS]

-dies- Yeesh, spensive. XP way out of my price range.

[Dray]

My opinions on the them are pretty well summed up by Phe already.

Mind you, I would love to get a few limerick or haiku candidates, so long as they didn't beat a dead horse.

[Astra]

I'm learning about poetry in school and I tend to get annoyed at it quickly, especially pretentious poetry, but at the same time I really like writing it because I'm weird that way. Haiku candidate, eh?

He, a mere servant
Luck shined upon him today
A dragon to bond

Heee!

[Shadow]

I was thinking similarly recently. "What if someone wrote a 'story' in the form of a journal" But then that's just me.

[Cacopheny]

Phe's done that one before X3 Dr Schroeder's story for Myr's mystery clutch was in journal format ^^ I expect that counts perfectly fine as a story XD

[Xenoqueen]

Valentine and I had to sidestep around Angel as we went back through the halls--that's the fourth time this week she's gone streaking in her child-form...

Journals are fun when they don't detail normal events. X3

[Shadow]

And thus I am blind to the previous happenings of The Nexus. XD Carry on.

[JKatkina]

Psst -- you know what would be cool? XD A reading-aloud of a story, recorded through a mic and then fiddled with so it doesn't sound all grainy and gross. >.> You gotta be a good speaker to pull it off, but daaaamn, if it was well done, it would be awesome. :D

[Xenoqueen]

Unless you're the sort who doesn't have the patience or ability to listen to spoken word. That is, me. XD I'm horrible at comprehending spoken things. I watch movies with closed captioning on half the time. Though having sat through a couple chapters of a well-done audio book (outside of rewinds for comprehension) I do agree it would be neat for people who can actually remember things they hear. X3

[baka-ryu]

The lurker speaks!

I've read this thread (and the comic one) several times over...and I've got some suggestions!

Has anyone here tried Stream of Consciousness? It's hell to write (for me at least), but I enjoy reading it. There's been whole books written in SoC, some really good books. (James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for example). That'd be something a little outside the norm.

As far as poetry is concerned, I'm rather fond of sonnets. It would be neat to have a story written in sonnet form (multiple sonnets, of course XD I would take more than one to get a 'plot' across, I'm sure).

Also, character studies are rather neat. We did an 'autopsy' for our Hamlet project this year, in which an outside individual picked apart the character and explained aspects of the brain/heart/etc. I'm sure I have the write-up lying around somewhere. If one wrote that as a sort of...experimental surgery while the character was still alive, it could world. At the very least, it could be a creative alternative to stat pages.

And fairy tales! Who doesn't love fairy tales? I mean, it's rather close to your average story, but fairy tales have that...feel to them. I have at least two candidates who I'm planning on writing 'fairy tales' for.

On the same line, one could write an outside character explaining the candidate's story in the form of a prophecy or epic poem/song (I'm thinking medieval bards, here).

Newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, e-mails/letters between characters...there's an endless amount of possibilities. If anyone would accept it, doing a series of paintings/drawings that convey a story without words would be rather fancy as well.

I'm sort of...exploring forms of story telling myself right now, for a candidate/100-prompts thing. It's a hell of a lot of fun, straying away from the 'norm'.

Opinions on any of those things (and whether or not they'd be accepted) much appreciated. ^-^