#additional post

A quick update to our special series. 

The show is over. 

What happens now?  

Didn’t Liv say, “Whatever we want?”

Some of our authors decided to tap into the potential of life after the White House. 

Check them out!

SEASON SEVEN

POST-FINALE

04/10/2018

A topic that earnestly piques my interest: style and prose in writing. As you can see from the layout of thy blog, I thoroughly enjoy Archaic and Shakespearean English because I believe it gives a dramatic flair to our modern speak. Lanham describes this as attitude in Style: an Anti-Textbook: “...then prose provides the vehicle of attitude as much as of statement of description” (Lanham, 63-64). Prose, our own style of writing, is meant to be unique while still being clear and descriptive. It is meant to be distinct and provide attitude and flair. This is what keeps writing from becoming monotonous and corporate, while supporting individuality and creativity.  

I use this dramatic flair of old English in my everyday writing, such as emails and text messages, mostly because I enjoy reading fantasy books and I think it’s fun. In fantasy books, I think authors enjoy incorporating this prose because our writing today is so far removed from modern English and it can give a fantastical feeling to their world building. You can enjoy my collage that I inserted where I use this language sparingly, but still in a fun way to break out of the simplicity of today’s language.  

On the other hand, the scarcity of individual prose is lacking in today’s educational institution. Why is this? Lanham argues that the amount of time to teach this is diminishing within schools, which is true. It’s more prevalent today in the post-Covid era, where students and teachers are struggling to play catch up after the lack of proper learning during the pandemic. I will say, however, that prose is still relevant in song writing and the arts. I’ve attached pictures of lyrics from the band Sleep Token and Knocked Loose.

Not all readers of "The Broken Bridge" listen to the hand-selected music tracks for my scenes(*), but I want to go into a little more detail in this particular post so you can see how much effort can go into just one scene.

As you may know, HeinrichVSA, my beta reader and friend, and I work closely together to select certain music tracks. I write and he finds the music tracks that I end up choosing to use. It's not always easy, because on the one hand the length has to fit the scene and on the other hand it has to support the mood as perfectly as possible. I listen to the music while I read the scene at the same time, checking whether the dynamics match certain actions precisely and then I determine the sentence in the story where exactly the music should start. A perfect result would be if the track stops exactly at the end of the scene and the dynamics in it can emphasise certain actions. This doesn't always work, but sometimes it is desirable for the music to cover several scenes.

I can't use many titles simply because they involve singing or speaking, or because there is clapping from the audience at the end. This distracts from reading. So far I've only used two songs with vocals in "The Broken Bridge", but only as bonus tracks at the end of the chapters. With the exception of titles where the vocals are untranslatable and part of the music (Sámi Joik, for example). Watch a film and see how the score is used in certain scenes to heighten the drama, then you'll understand what I mean.

In the last chapter, "Corona", I wanted you not only to read about Fabian's joy at being back home and reliving a childhood memory, but to literally feel his emotions. Everyone knows the scene in Tangled where Rapunzel dances with joy in the square in front of the church and draws other people around her into it. In my opinion, it's one of the best scenes in the film and I love this song.

My only problem with it was how to integrate the relatively short song into the already written scene in such a way that it both emphasises Fabian's thoughts and feelings on the way through the town and ends exactly when the dance is over. The increasing speed of the dance also had to fit in as closely as possible with what had already been written. So I started looking for alternatives over the next few days after finishing the chapter. Some YouTubers extended the song, but either it lost its original dynamics, or you could hear too clearly where the song was edited or it was simply extended in the wrong place. There were also two very well-made remakes from fans to choose from, but either just as short as the original (2 min 20) or unfortunately with adverts at the end. In the end, I decided in favour of an extremely well-made extended version that met all my criteria.

(*) Many Frozen fans on Tumblr don't read fanfics on a computer, but on their smartphone. Tumblr unfortunately has the stupid habit of simply stopping embedded songs in posts when you read with the app. This doesn't happen if you read my chapters in the blog on a laptop, for example.

Here are the songs from Tangled Fans that I sorted out, but which are still great:

Heinrich's 1st choice, the Tavern Edition:

My find, as a violin duet, unfortunately with adverts for more of their videos at the end: