Green Room - Week 5 - Day 5

[clauderainsrm.livejournal.com]

When I saw the topic suggestion of “South Indian Cuisine”, my brain immediately went to “regionalism”. Southern Indian cooking is a different animal from what they have in the more popular Northern dishes, and it’s something that not as many people are as familiar with. But that core idea of how something within the same border can be so different appealed to my sensibilities, stretching it far beyond food.

“ha-ha (not to be confused with laughter) had a similar effect. There was the definition of what a “ha-ha” was, and that certainly had enough metaphorical ways to twist it around. But the fact that they included the phrase “not to be confused with laughter” took my brain in all kinds of interesting areas.

The historical “Go Tell the Spartans” and how that could be translated into modern life was great, and I knew that a lot of people would have “It’s not Tacky if You Wear it Well” stories. I’ve seen pictures of most of you. ;)

So, despite the complaints to the contrary, I thought this week had a hell of a lot of potential of what could be done with it. I’ve found that often people just end up slamming their heads into the wall, until they realize that they have been staring at the solution to their problem the entire time!

Some people went in similar directions to me, and others went into interesting pathways of their own: http://therealljidol.livejournal.com/664951.html is where the poll is located, which is where you should be busy reading, commenting, and voting to keep in your favorites!

Comments

[theun4givables.livejournal.com]

I still think these topics were evil but I did enjoy a lot of the different takes that came from them all.

This here is a creative bunch. :)

[n3m3sis43.livejournal.com]

FRIST!!

[roina-arwen.livejournal.com]

This is indeed a very impressively creative bunch!

[jem0000000.livejournal.com]

Yay first! :)

[bookishgeek.livejournal.com]

I can't believe that last week I was complaining about how hard it was to write beyond my comfort level.

Well, I can.

What I can't believe is that I DID IT AGAIN THIS WEEK what is wrong with me!?

Those of you who have been following these 2 stories: would you like me to continue the path, or branch off into something else? Do you want back story, or would you prefer for it to be a two-episode Twilight Zone-esque piece?

[n3m3sis43.livejournal.com]

As a sometime serial addict in season 8, I will just tell you that it gets really, really hard to do a serial well in Idol. You can never assume that people read the other pieces or are going to go back and read them even if you link to them.

Everything has to stand on its own.

So, um, do what you're inspired to do, but just beware of that, I guess?

[n3m3sis43.livejournal.com]

Already read everything and voted! Go me?

My first thought with "South Indian Cuisine" was cannibalism. Woops. :P

[clauderainsrm.livejournal.com]

Since you've read everything, you know that someone *did* "go there"!

[banyangirl1832.livejournal.com]

Stats has been taking up way too much of my time the last two days for me to read, but I'm hoping to change that in the next couple I days. I'm so glad I ended up writing something new after all because I love it so much more than the first piece I wrote!

[adoptedwriter.livejournal.com]

Morning GR! I leave for a short road trip w The Mothership tomorrow AM. Back on Sunday PM. Wish me luck! She's not an easy passenger. AW

[poppetawoppet.livejournal.com]

Well as soon as I looked up a definition for ha-ha, an entry immediately came to mind, since I'm working on breaking down my own barriers. Just the format of the entry was a little hard

(not really, I love form poetry. Especially sestinas. Maybe next Idol round I'll do entirely in sestinas.)

Today is my awesome nothing day of awesome, as it is every year :D

[x-disturbed-x.livejournal.com]

Oh sestinas. I wrote one once and it had to be the worst thing I've ever written.

I envy people who can write poetry. :P

[joyfulfeather.livejournal.com]

Part of the fun of Idol is the challenge of writing to oddball topics! Or on the other side of the coin, coming up with creative responses to really generic topics. It's a competition - it's supposed to be challenging! And I love that. I might not be the best at rising to the occasion, but it's still fun to try. And I love seeing how everyone else handles the topics!

[sweeny-todd.livejournal.com]

Ugh. I just got back in internet land. oops.

I had an idea for 'haha' - it means 'mother' in Japanese, so I was going to write about my time in Japan.

oh well. hopefully I will home game a bit.

[bookishgeek.livejournal.com]

I was very sorry to see you go, Slimey the worm. :(

[agirlnamedluna.livejournal.com]

I honestly thought I'd have to throw the towel this week. Deadline is 3 AM for me, and I need to be up to get my kid to school at 7. Two hours before the deadline I didn't even know which topic to pick.

[joyfulfeather.livejournal.com]

Wow! Go you for getting something done and posted in such a short time, and at such an inconvenient time for you! That's impressive.

[oxymoron67.livejournal.com]

With me, when I saw the topic about clothing, I immediately knew what I was going to write about.

Still, it wasn't all that easy... the original draft was about twice as long and not really coherent.

In other news, I just made reservations to go to Hyde Park on Thursday to see FDR's home and library. And Eleanor Roosevelt's Val-Kill.

[jem0000000.livejournal.com]

Have fun!

[x-disturbed-x.livejournal.com]

I had a nonfiction idea but as I started typing it up I realized it wasn't going anywhere so I deleted it. Then I spent most of Saturday sulking until the wife threw me an idea.

Luckily that triggered my creativity. :)

[xo-kizzy-xo.livejournal.com]

I had had a couple of vague ideas until something happened IRL that triggered what I wrote. It went through four different drafts within a day and a half :boggle:

And I have to leave for work in the next 10-15 minutes!

Tonight SO and I were invited to the annual "Taste Of [city]" where many of the local restaurants and other food purveyors offer samples. In all seriousness, there's a rather large Indian population in the city, and two of the largest Indian restaurants will be there! Don't know if they specialize in South Indian cuisine, though ;)

[jem0000000.livejournal.com]

Have fun! :)

[lrig-rorrim.livejournal.com]

I did a LOT of brainstorming for these topics, especially because I needed to come up with a creative fiction idea and something for my alt doing non-fiction. So yeah, there was a lot of ARGH in my brain.

My first thought for "South Indian Cuisine" was: South Indians as cuisine. Alien invasion! Chomp! I didn't feel that I knew enough about the region to do this idea any kind of justice with detail, though. I considered writing about my favorite tasty, tasty foods, but eh, it wasn't wacky enough for me.

"ha-ha (not to be confused with laughter)" had me banging my head against a wall for a while. I thought about writing a murder mystery involving a body in a ditch, writing a complicated science fiction piece involving firewalls and paywalls and invisible walls and also disambiguation. I thought maybe I'd write about a god of chaos and confusion, a modern day trickster, who was mucking things up on the internet and offline. And eventually, when I stopped trying to write stories that weren't fun to write, I came up with something I liked.

"Go Tell the Spartans" made me think of time travel. Like a lot. I had half a draft of a time travel story involving someone dressing up as Hermes the messenger god to go tell the Spartans something. I had another half a draft involving the actual monument with the inscription being repaired by time travelers. They weren't good drafts. Other ideas in the idea folder were "something something rocks fall they all die" (not kidding. I was getting desperate here) and "war, what is it good for, hunh"

The "It's Not Tacky" prompt didn't get much idea time from me, because I had sufficiently weird stuff to beat my head against with the other prompts. I did consider writing about how much I love wearing wacky clothing, though. Frog hats for the win!

There you go. A peek into my brainspace during "oh god I have a story to write in how long?" pressure.

Anyway... what makes a GOOD prompt? What do you like in a prompt? What do you hate in a prompt? I tend to like prompts that are very non-specific, like they don't reference a specific cultural meme or thing, but they're very visually or emotionally evocative. I mean, I'll work with anything (I did sign up for this, after all *grin*) but those are my favorites.

[porn-this-way.livejournal.com]

I like the really off-the-wall ones that require some beating into submission. Super open ended prompts just leave me with nowhere to start and I feel like it might as well be an open topic. The weird-ass ones that have everyone shaking their fists and running to google to figure out WTF it even is...for whatever reason, I tend to do best with those, probably because I'm forced to focus on a fairly narrow thing and then get down and dirty to wrangle it into submission.

[millysdaughter.livejournal.com]

Your comments on "Southern Indian Cuisine" made me smile, because I sure see drastic differences with what they call "authentic Mexican food."
The only real stuff, in the world ruled by my taste buds, is stuff the way it is served in Albuquerque, where sopapillias are the delicious hot bread served WITH the meal. We have encountered places where they roll them in sugar and serve them as dessert. Sometimes hot, sometimes cold. But either way...These places are simply WRONG.

[halfshellvenus.livejournal.com]

But that core idea of how something within the same border can be so different appealed to my sensibilities, stretching it far beyond food.
That is certainly true, but unless the writer makes the point very clearly, and writes a good story stemming from it, it might not appear to use the prompt, which is a voting factor for me.

I'm with lrig_rorrim-- I prefer the more open and evocative topics, rather than the ones that seem really specifically tied to a culture (both this topic and "Spartans" for me).

"Ha-ha (not funny)" would have been my second choice topic, but the connection of the South Indian Cuisine to something I really wanted to write about clicked first. For awhile, I wasn't sure I was going to write any non-fiction for this round, the way things were going!

Today: read, read, read, debug All The Hardware at work, and still try to plan that freakin' vacation. *eye roll*

[kandigurl.livejournal.com]

I wanted "tacky" as soon as I saw it, though I admit it did feel something like taking the easy way out. :) I was intrigued by "ha-ha" as well.

[clauderainsrm.livejournal.com]

I need to get into this "link bait" racket. I see it all over the place, and I think I should have a piece in the internet's version of the Weekly World News.

"Murder in an elementary school!" (about all of the animals that were killed to make school lunches)

Good start?

[jem0000000.livejournal.com]

Sounds good to me? But people will mistake you for a spambot.

[kf4vkp.livejournal.com]

My initial post was actually going to be non-fiction concenrning some cooking done with an ex, where we made curried taters. And the teasing that came from me calling them curried taters. But, then I discovered my journal is being stalked by the ex's current and that went out the window.

[medleymisty.livejournal.com]

*hugs* That sucks.

[dreamsreflected.livejournal.com]

I found these topics way easier to work with, than last week. Though choosing a topic is the hardest part for me, I'll start writing something and then change my mind, try another topic flip flop flip flop etc. at least when the topic is picked for me I *HAVE* to come up with only ONE idea.

[ashgaelsonaria.livejournal.com]

I simply slept on it and an idea came to me.
It is a testament to my twisted mind.

[whipchick.livejournal.com]

I'm at a writing retreat right now and we are writing every day - freewriting in class, refining ideas and bringing in short essays (250-300 words) the next day. Loving it.

Today was hard - it took me all day to figure out what I wanted to write, and there were a bunch of fairly substantial false starts. Eventually, later at night than I wanted, and in desperation, I said, OK, I am going to write six sentences starting with, "The part that I remember is...". Number five hit, so I wrote.

With Idol, it's easier to leap from the topic because the topic is more specific. I didn't want to do South Indian Cuisine because I'd written about India pretty recently. Spartans didn't do it for me. I thought about ha-ha because I love Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia, in which a ha-ha figures prominently. Finally, I realized that a piece I'd written in writer camp that morning from a prompt of an actual maraschino cherry (which the teacher passed out on napkins) would work if I expanded it with new material by about a third, relating it to the Tacky prompt.

Thus was my process :)

Also, if you're like me, and writer camp is a big fucking expenditure that would have to be put on a credit card, but you'd still like to get some of the experiences, I'm writing out notes on our daily discussions, linking to our reading assignments, and posting our in-class prompts and our homework assignments. It's all open to anyone if you care to stop by my journal.

Finally - I love new writers and old friends. I love people who are early and people who are right on the deadline. I love people who are on the nose with the prompt, people who shoehorn it in, and people who go off on a tangent so broad I have to check back what their topic is. What I don't love is poor sportsmanship.

Everyone has a right to vent, to ask for and receive consolation for a low vote total, a piece they don't feel great about, or an elimination. We are a community. But there can come a point where, if we are making a lot of withdrawals on the Bank of Goodwill, it's important to deposit some support and love in the opposite direction, or it starts to feel like sour grapes. It's a contest on the internet with no prize. You get out of it what you put into it. Have a good time :)

[kathrynrose.livejournal.com]

*Like*