Writers' Workshop General Chat Thread

[canisaries]

question, @Nitro Indigo . have you written any part of your story yet?

 

[Nitro Indigo]

@canisaries I did, ages ago, but my mental plans have changed a lot since then.

 

[Beth Pavell]

How much actual reading do you do? I keep getting the impression you get bogged down because you try to write from tropes rather than think about telling a story

 

[Nitro Indigo]

I keep getting the impression you get bogged down because you try to write from tropes rather than think about telling a story

One of the many reasons why I need to stop going on TV Tropes. Nowadays, most of my time spent on there is looking at YMMV pages and stalking the forums. The TV Tropes collective has this odd absolutist mentality, where they complain about things being unrealistic no matter the context, and general consensuses are apparently literally universal. The complaining on that site that I can't do anything about stresses me out after a while. /rantble

Anyway, while I was out, I got an idea for this story: the world already "ended", and it's about to get even worse. By the end, the damage can be stopped but not undone, and the survivors are left to rebuild the world.

 

[Persephone]

I like TVtropes as a way of finding comics, web comics and lit that have things I usually like and getting a cursory glance at what a story's about

I don't read too much into the "stories are just trope collections and that's bad" meme. All paintings are just the same colors in new combinations. Art is in taking the familiar and giving new arrangements or context to communicate your perspective on things.

 

[canisaries]

sure, but those colors won't do any good if they're just plastered on with no shape of composition. we call that jackson pollock

you know what form of art really blows my mind though? composition. i literally just cannot understand how anyone can come up with a catchy, unique, memorable melody out of thin air. i've tried to make melodies and they're always very repetitive and simple.

 

[Misfit Angel]

I feel like I can come up with some decent music, but I have absolutely zero talent for taking it from my mind and putting it down onto paper. Notation is such a strange system that I just can't understand no matter how much time I spend studying it.

 

[Beth Pavell]

I sometimes wonder if musicians think about notes in the same way I think about words. Whether bum notes bug them the way an inappropriate word bugs me

 

[canisaries]

would be hard for me to imagine so. any note can be achieved from any melody by changing the key, and changing the key doesn't make that much difference in the end. but certain sounds i could totally see being hated. there are some instruments/pads/synths that i just really don't like.

 

[AetherX]

In music most of it comes down to knowing the rules. It's similar to writing in that way, except in music following the rules has much less of a stigma attached to it. I've always gotten the impression in a lot of writing communities that studying common plot structures and trying to imitate them is frowned upon because "it's art so I can break all of the rules." But in music, the people who break the rules are making some really weird, really niche music. You could argue that the people who break the rules in writing while not really knowing what they're doing (ie a lot of us here haha) are also writing some weird, niche stories, but that's another discussion entirely.

I taught myself to write music, but I also recently took some serious theory classes and to be honest, either way works. It's just that if you're teaching yourself you have to practice and experiment a lot (learning it academically is probably faster). Once you understand the concept of octaves, you realize you're basically limited to 12 notes. Once you understand keys, you realize you're actually limited to seven notes. Then you learn about chords and through either theory or experimentation you can figure out a handful of chord progressions that sound good and can be reused quite a bit. From there it's easy to improvise if you're playing an instrument, and composing is just a bit more trial and error.

Personally, I've never been a fan of writing music down using notation. I can read it just fine, but I don't have an intuitive enough understanding of music theory to write everything by hand. Usually I just improvise on the piano until I play something that sounds cool, then I go and put it in my computer via MIDI or record it on my phone it for later.

I don't tend to be bugged by "bum notes" that much, but there is very much a comparison to be made as far as little things that not many people would care about but really bother the original composer. A slightly sloppy transition, a chord or small section of melody that doesn't quite fit, instruments not sounding exactly like we want them to, etc.

 

[Misfit Angel]

Personally, I've never been a fan of writing music down using notation. I can read it just fine, but I don't have an intuitive enough understanding of music theory to write everything by hand. Usually I just improvise on the piano until I play something that sounds cool, then I go and put it in my computer via MIDI or record it on my phone it for later.

This is where I'm confused. I figured being able to write down in notation is the absolute crux of being able to create a midi. Then again, the last time I made a serious effort at making music, my midi program was literally designed like a piece of sheet music, but I see things that aren't like FL Studio these days, so what do I know

 

[AetherX]

You definitely have to be able to understand some basic theory in order to use midi, but I've always found block-based piano rolls as a much easier way of inputting notes (which is what FL Studio has). I can get by fine with a notation based editor like Sibelius, but what I meant is that I'm not the kind of person who can write by hand, pen on paper, any amount of music. I need to hear the note as I place it. That's just me though. If you're not very familiar with theory then I can see a piano roll being equally confusing as sheet music. Trying to write midi (or any kind of music, not including simply playing an instrument) without knowing scales and chords is like trying to write a story without knowing how to read.

 

[Misfit Angel]

Well shoot, now it sounds like I've gotta dive into figuring it out. Nobody has ever explained it to me in such a simple manner. It's always gobblediegook like scales, flats, pizzicattos and 3/4 time and I could never make heads or tails of any of that. Maybe it's because I never learned the basics first?

(which is odd, considering my first formal music training where all of this was talked about was when I was six, how they expected me to know all of that already, I have no clue)

 

[AetherX]

Well if you're interested, this is one of the better tutorial series I've seen that comes at it from a computer music perspective. The only basics you have to have is knowing how to identify different notes on a piano. If you don't know that then it's probably not too hard to pick up just from a quick google search. Honestly, learning piano is the best way to learn music theory.

The trouble with a lot of theory classes/lessons is that they try to teach so much mundane stuff that isn't terribly important. You don't need to know about things like pizzicato or time signatures until you're pretty far down the line, but for some reason academics like to think that it's vital. Might be important for playing, but not so much for writing. For people like you and me, our chief concern is "Tell me the minimum that I need to know to write a semi-decent song." I have yet to see a tutorial series or meet a teacher that does lessons like that. If I were to really cut out all the useless stuff, I think I could teach someone all they need to know to write a simple melody and chord progression in less than an hour from zero to hero (assuming they had the appropriate tools). If you do try to get into it and run into any questions then feel free to hit me up.

 

[canisaries]

i've gone through three years of music theory because of my music hobby, which has long since ended, but i'm still pretty confident in my theoretical knowledge. but like... theory to me is just kind of knowing how to write, or how to hold a pen. it doesn't teach you how to create out of nothing. i don't even think you can teach someone that.

notation is incredibly unintuitive to me too, but i don't know how else you would write it, either. recording might work for a temporary solution though.

some time ago my dad got FL studio, and i've been wanting to try it out (i've only tried LMMS before and the problem with that was that i just wouldn't know how to make an instrument sound like i wanted - there were way too many filters and the default instruments were so primitive themselves), but i've been busy with other stuff and also held back by the fear of failure. plus, the last time i tried making an entire song, i got really ill while doing it and stayed sick for a good while afterwards, so the whole music making thing just has a negative association to me in general. i should check out some tutorials for FL studio one of these days.

 

[InfiniteBakuphoon]

I think that it's kind of interesting how it's possible to love music so much and yet have no idea how to actually create it (in other words, what I go through). Any attempts that I make to compose something always end in failure, usually because what I come up with either sounds boring or is too close to something that I've heard before. That said, I can say that I have more success with sounds... or more specifically, with having at least a decent idea of what kinds of instruments would sound good with each other or how different ones would sound for an already existing composition. So in other words, I feel that I'd have much better potential as an arranger than a composer, should I ever decide to take music creation seriously one day. I wonder which one a musician would say is more difficult than the other (@AetherX?)

 

[Nitro Indigo]

I can come up with ideas for music, but I don't know how to write it down.

Here's something that r/Kirby has created. Would Siddeley be King Dedede in this analogy?

 

[UselessBytes]

I took AP music theory last year, so I should have a grasp on how to compose, but I've never really tried.

In other news, one of my friends recently revealed to me that he's a sucker for high school AU fics (pretty shocking considering his personality) so I figured I'd ask - what are y'all's fanfiction "guilty pleasures" to put it bluntly?

 

[canisaries]

i don't read a lot of fanfics, but in terms of other fanfic-related guilty pleasures, i, uhh... may or may not have just drawn... a shirtless pic of my fics' protagonist... chilling at a pier, thoroughly wet with a seductive look on his face... i'm really professional i swear

 

[Nitro Indigo]

@UselessBytes Last year, I came across this Cars fanfiction that was littered with spelling mistakes, and mentioned Siddeley (the plane in my avatar, at the time of typing) doing actions that would require hands so much that it lead me to believe he was telekinetic. Yet I still read the whole thing anyway, even though it was unfinished, since when your favourite is a minor character from an unpopular thing, you're desperate to see any content of them. I was like this with Staven from Spirit Tracks back in 2012. (Sad reminder that Cars 2 is seemingly more popular than Spirit Tracks on the internet.)

This one wasn't a guilty pleasure, but I came across this other Cars fanfic which involved Cars characters ending up in the real world. It was decent up until the point where an author insert met two of her OCs, one of which was a DRAGON.

There was also a genuinely good fanfic I saw on deviantART (told through the descriptions of art) about Siddeley becoming a human like in James Cameron's Avatar, but I'm too awkward to look it up...