Friday, March 21, 2003Pros & ConsI thought a little bit more about the story last night and I realised I can't think of a way to end it. Do I just end it with Mary's culmination between her stories and reality and she starts offing the popular kids one by one? That's just a bad horror movie. I want the focus of the story to be her metamorphosis from shy introvert to completely insane by the time she's 30. Hmmm.. A writer should "write what they know" right? Well the basis of this whole idea is pretty much my experiences as a kid. I was the school dork in junior high and I just couldn't win with the popular kids no matter how hard I tried. In fact, the harder I tried, the more I failed miserably, opening myself up to even more ridicule. I sometimes wrote little vignettes or bad poetry, but nothing revengeful. It was just something I did for escapism. But I don't deny there wasn't a time or two when I would have loved to have seen one of the popular girls fall on her face in front of the whole school or something equally embarrasing  . The character of Mary incorporates some of my own experiences, but amplified to the extreme. I came out of it okay, Mary goes insane.
posted by Melia @ 02:04 PM CST [Link] [Discuss] [94 Comments] Thursday, March 20, 2003Plot? What plot?I was trying to explain the story idea for Mary to my daughter and it came out rather garbled. Maybe writing it out will help. The general plot is that this is a story of a loser kid no one really likes, is teased and humiliated from a young age by her peers - everyone knows how mean kids can be - but for Mary, the teasing continues as she grows up. She withdraws more and more into herself and uses little fiction stories she makes up as an escape mechanism. She begins writing little 'revenge' stories that start out as fairly mild as she's just a kid and to her, sticking her foot out and tripping the popular girl in the cafeteria so that she falls into her tray of food makes her feel empowered. As she grows up, and as the humiliations she suffers at the hands of a cruel group of 'popular' kids gets more intense, so do her stories. They become darker, more vivid and violent until it culminates and she begins a fast descent into insanity and her stories and reality blur. That's about as far as I've gotten. I could have gone another way on this I suppose and have Mary use her stories to write about empowerment, and make characters who are strong and powerful, but good, until maybe one day she becomes a world-famous author etc etc, but I think I fancy trying the darker side first just to see how that goes. posted by Melia @ 11:59 AM CST [Link] [Discuss] [89 Comments] Wednesday, March 19, 2003MaryThis is Mary. She's the main character in the story I've got floating around atm. I'll develop her further as I go. She just came out during a writing exercise I was doing... ------- There was a Mary in every junior high. The girl no one remembered. The girl who endured the jokes about her clothes from the rich kids. The girl who could never hope to be popular because she did everything wrong. She was the one who, when asked to go up to the board and answer a math problem, had an embarrassing stain on her jeans the day she got her first period. She was the girl who threw up at her desk during biology. Teachers may have felt a little sympathy towards her, but mainly they wished she was in any other class but their own. She was a chubby girl with horribly curly brown hair. No svelte, bouncy curls for her. Oh no, it was wiry and had a tendency to stick out in odd directions. Her small, freckled face was dwarfed in size by her thick glasses. Her vision was so bad, she couldn't read the big 'E' on the eye chart. Her mother said contacts were out of the question until she was older and so, she suffered behind those god-awful frames. She looked rather like a wild-eyed owl dodging students as she made her unobtrusive way to each class. When she entered the classroom, no one noticed. That's not exactly true... the teacher noticed and gave a little grimace. One of the popular girls snickered at Mary's hopelessly out-of-date clothes. Mary eased past the 'cool crowd' and slunk into her seat at the back of the room where she immediately piled her books as high as she could on top of her desk and hid behind them, lowering her head and staring at her desk for the duration of class. The teacher never called on her anyway, what was the point of paying attention? She would just sit here and write her little vengeance stories. Her stories were her escape. ----------------------------- So there's Mary. I have a vague idea of what I want to do with her but right now, it's just *too* vague. I could add a little more depth to her as well. I think I want her to come out of junior high so traumatised and tormented that she vows she'll get even with the nasty 'popular' kids one day. And so she writes little stories of how she gets back at them all. And as she continues on to high school, her stories get darker and more violent. And I could intersperse her everyday life with her fantasy world until one day, they merge together. posted by Melia @ 03:14 PM CST [Link] [Discuss] [257 Comments] Evolution... I want to get back into writing. I really loved writing fanfics there for a while, but my interest in that faded. But I always seem to have a story idea or two floating round in my head that I never manage to write down. Since I did so well keeping up my Life Online blog for a year, I figured blogging gave me the motivation I needed to keep at it. So having said that, I'll use this corner of the web to work out story ideas, begin stories, develop them, work out characterization kinks etc. until I reach my goal of having written a full story from start to finish. As the reader, you'll be able to follow the journey, cringe at the bad ideas, applaud the good ones, leave comments, and give me your input. Wish me luck
posted by Melia @ 09:43 AM CST [Link] [Discuss] [57 Comments] |
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