Zuri

Has anyone watched Netflix's "The bastard son and the devil himself"? Not only is the show entertaining, so is the soundtrack:

I know, yet, there are words that don't sound like they've evolved into English but are rather a loanword. Technically, Prince Ernst August of Hanover even has the title "Prince of Great Britain and Ireland", but in Germany, the legal privileges of royalty and nobility were abolished in 1919.

It will never not be weird that you guys use German words without having an own word for that 😂

I always like thinking back at the time when I published previous stories. As long as I don't re-read them, I think of them somewhat highly. When I re-read them … well … I also cringe. When it's about spelling and grammar, I'm open to hints from my readers and like to correct them (spelling and grammar, not necessarily my readers ^^) if I'm not too lazy at that moment. I found that Grammarly is a good help with finding these errors. When it's more about logic or the like, I wouldn't correct that. I think, it can be seen as a measurement of my own development as an author and I should adhere to my own shortcomings. If I started fixing plot details not a stone would be left standing. And yes, I like the idea of preserving stuff even though, I don't really know, what for. But I kinda follow the principal, once brought onto paper, you've spent enough thought on that, so it'll fit.

@Libby Drew Thank you so much for reading my post and your comment Very interesting thoughts, I enjoyed them, too. You'd probably make a great conversationalist Let's differentiate a bit: I'd say, consuming fiction is always escapism, but the topic of the fictional work can be either or to some extent, of course, always limited by their fictionality. Well, I guess, that depends on what the base is. To use Platon's theory of Forms: The idea reflects the idea most likely while all alterations divert from the idea. There are probably exceptions where a person who adapts something, actually manages to improve it, but I guess, it's rare to get praise like this. The more frequent case is the movie adaption from a novel, as far as I know. So we are used to being disappointed if not everything is like our mind painted it for us. The difference is, that a movie adaption goes from abstract to specific, so there's more room for interpretation and more room for disappointment. I mean, how often does it happen, that someone tells us about another person and when we first meet said person, we go "why did I always imagine them with black hair?"? Another problem, as I tried to emphasize, is, that movie is a completely different medium, so copying it word for word from page to screen is doomed to fail. These media have different ways of expressing themselves, therefor, we don't "copy" but "adapt" it, so we need to find a way, how visual storytelling would tackle this. That can also lead to dropping scenes because they fail to tell the story on screen as they do in the book. Protagonist/antagonist: The unreliable narrator is such a great tool—used wisely of course! I have to admit, I've not used it yet, but I'd love to if chance arises. Unfortunately, I don't know any of your examples, but if one asked me for an example, I can think of, it might be The Doctor from Doctor Who. We as an audience, represented by the companions rely on the doctor and even if he eventually saves the world, we have to keep in mind, that the doctor always lies what makes for good plot twists if we happen to feel too save with them. My short story only has 3455 words—I usually write embarrassingly short short stories, I don't even consider short stories (for reference: My longest story here on GA is 12,676 words—just 2k above what is considered a short story) 😬😅 I'd love to participate in that short story challenge if you put it into action. Interestingly, I just had a conversation about bad short stories: Those, who rush through the plot because they have too much to tell, so that it's not actual storytelling but a re-narration. I suppose, it's a somewhat common misconception that short stories have to be compressed in terms of pacing (which leads us to "Show, don't tell" resp. story time vs plot time vs screen time). Thanks again for your comment and sharing your thoughts on these topics

Authenticity vs everyday life There are two camps of literature consumers: Those who practice escapism (fantasy and science fiction to the rescue) and those who prefer stories that seek a high order of reality and authenticity: Feelings—good ones as well as bad ones—, situations you can identify with, which you even already might have experienced. In the early days of filmmaking, there have been ideas now and then, that had the potential to be revolutionary. The idea, I want to talk about in this section, came actually into fashion in the last decades—but not quite the way it was intended. I’m talking about reality TV. I’m not sure, if you can therefore actually consider him the father of reality TV, since reality was important to him—funnily, that was the reason, his concept was a flop. But let’s not put the cart before the horse: He wanted to follow a married couple around for 24 hours a day—unscripted, uncut, uncensored. But that turned out to be a little overkill: People felt bored watching it, even though in theory that sounded like an honest concept and the two people unintentionally provided a surprise moment—their son came out as gay. Yet, well-intentioned is the opposite of good. The project failed. Even though reality TV strives for the opposite extreme today, it does what we talked about in the previous chapter: Deliver, captivate, include—and everything on command. But that doesn’t have to mean that the product is the best that is the most far-fetched. Reality TV is called “scripted reality” for a reason—essentially, it’s closer to a motion picture than to actual reality. They have a script, are arranged by a director to ensure, we hang on the character’s every word, and cut by an editor so that we don’t have time to catch our breaths. But is that wrong? Do we feel like somebody lied to us? No, of course not. The dose makes the poison—the trick is to find the right balance. The movie is worse than the novel—that is the law Just like they say, the movie adaption is doomed to be worse than the novel it’s based on, you could assume, that the attempt to capture reality in a motion picture is destined to have the same desolate destiny. The problem with that assumption is, to think, the task was to copy reality in every possible aspect. Of course, that endeavor would most certainly fail. But the medium “movie” has its own way to express themself—just like a novel has theirs. Let’s imagine, you were asked to adapt this scene from a novel to a movie: We see that this text describes plenty of things before there is action, let alone words spoken. Of course, I could try to emulate the gaze with the camera and follow it by looking at furniture and clothing, but while this seems quite natural in the book, a viewer of the movie would assume, these things had a special meaning that will have significant importance later on. For the movie, I decided to place the children opposite their parents on the other side of the table, which is closer to the wall. Why? Well, in the novel, there is no indication of where each family member sits at the table. While in the novel, there is kind of a Schrödinger’s cat situation (everybody sits everywhere and nowhere at the same time; in quantum physics that is called a superposition), actors inevitably need a specific place to sit in. And so a director would make a virtue of necessity and do subtle storytelling with the characters' placements. We have the indication from the original text that the children sometimes fear their parents, and transformed that into an image because it wouldn’t have been possible to adapt that line par for par. The children sit with their backs to the wall and on the other side of the table are their parents, cohesively. In comparison to explicitly looking at furniture and clothing, this detail is not that pushy and not spelled out for the viewer so that the viewer is aware of that but more subconsciously. In the novel, this scene takes several seconds to read; in the movie adaption, it’s not more than a blink of an eye. The thing about relevance When the mother returns home from work, it takes her forty minutes. That’s inevitable. During a movie or novel, we wouldn’t always explicitly show her driving home unless something interesting or important happens while she’s underway. If we omit her way home, it’s called “time compression” (see story time vs plot time vs screen time). In the reality TV documentary, I talked about two sections earlier, they would have shown us all her way home, leaving nothing unseen and us bored. Sure, in reality, there is no shortcut to this. We have to accompany ourselves on our way home. But even though, we might like stories to be realistic, this is most certainly not what we want to see. We still want to be entertained. It’s enough to see her heading home and arriving. We can imagine the rest. In a story, I wrote, I provided the protagonist with a cute yellow lab—cool, isn’t it? Well, so it might feel for you readers. Fair enough, maybe not even for you, since you might have noticed that it is nice to have a dog but considerably less appealing to see the protagonist walk the dog in almost every scene just like in Groundhog Day. The dog became a burden—and it wasn’t even his fault. That’s how pets might feel when they were brought home from an animal shelter and after the initial excitement, nobody wants to take care of them anymore, so they are eventually returned to the shelter. I realized that I’m not fit to be a literary pet owner. One or two nice scenes with a dog—be my guest—but besides that, I’m just not creative enough in this aspect to keep the dog around while at the same time finding interesting scenes with him. Initially, I didn’t want to tell a story specifically with a dog, but I mean, it's not like it hurts anyone, does it? Spirits that I've summoned … The evil protagonist Who does not know it? In movies like James Bond, viewers want the hero to win; when we, on the other hand, watch shows like How to sell drugs online (fast), we usually want the bad people (drug dealers) to win. So one could argue, it’s less a matter of morals but a matter of who’s the protagonist. Why is that? Well, the protagonist is naturally the character we spend the most time with for the duration of the story and get the best insight into the inner workings of their mind. Many villains are provided with a backstory that explains their actions and maybe even rectifies them. Often times that’s enough to make us hope for the villain to eventually succeed. And who knows, we might get a sequel then. Sure, there are shows like “Money Heist”, where the heroes (the police) act quite stupidly or are prone to corruption and/or infiltration by a third party. Also, their credo “The end justifies the means“ might actually enable them to enforce law and order, but might conflict with our attitude to morality. Even in movies like “Joker” where the protagonist is actually a homicidal maniac who would kill us without turning a hair, we consider him “cool” since we are not his target (see NIMBY). Then, there is the show iZombie, where the seemingly evil protagonist (a zombie) is only considered evil by society. Would we do it any differently? I had an interesting conversation with my flatmate lately. Let’s imagine a man whose children had been kidnapped. Police start looking for them, arrests a subject, and release it after some interrogation. Impuissance washes over the father. “Why doesn’t the police do anything!?” he keeps asking himself. Of course, the police do everything in their power and what they are allowed by law to find the children. On the spur of the moment, the father ambushes the subject, handcuffs, gags, imprisons, and tortures it, to prize the information where the children are out of the subject. Classy thriller plot. Sure, we side with the father. The police are only doing their job, but in this case, we are okay with lynch law. Because at this moment, we are the father. In Germany, we had a case like that (see The murder of Jakob von Metzler). What would we say if the subject turned out to be innocent? Do we still side with the father, who just broke multiple bones in the other man’s body? Or how would we react if the father realized that he’s too late and because he can’t bear the loss, he wants to fire an atom bomb, to kill all humankind? I observed that it is everything but easy to not identify with the protagonist per se because we see the story from their perspective and so their perspective becomes our perspective. That’s what they are made for: We might question their actions, but we offer a shoulder to cry on when needed. Just like good friends. Or like court-appointed legal defenders represent a remorseless, dangerous criminal. Like partners in toxic relationships. That’s why I once wrote a short story: Because I wondered if it was possible that readers identify more with the antagonist than with the protagonist. I think this is only possible if the reader isn’t able to relate on any level. Only when they push us actively away. See also What is an Antagonist — 7 Types and How They Work Here’s Why Writing A Screenplay Is Harder Than Writing A Novel - Dr. Ken Atchity

@raven1 Punching numbers into a phone would have been too ordinary 😂

This song is currently totally stuck in my head: Hagelslag does a lot of stuff I like in general. So, check them out if you like

Thanks for taking time to read my humble blog Honestly, I haven't read any of Jenna's books either 😅 Yeah, in my opinion, she's often times quite on point and doesn't shy away from pointing things out as they are. My only pain point with her might be her high-pitched voice from time to time in my in-ear headphones ^^

I originally wrote this blog post in German for another community, but I felt like I give it a try to translate and share it with you folks. This is the first post of a now three series which I’m intending to expand since now and then, I get new ideas or encounter other cases when writing or editing stories. I'm sorry if it appears to be a bit random, but I wrote it as the ideas came to my mind. Make sure, to also check out GayAuthor's writing resources! I'm sorry if the intro is a little short, but the subsequent parts will be considerably longer and more in detail. Grandparent scam/assets of a Nigerian prince Don’t just pull rabbits out of the hat when you need them. If there was given no hint beforehand whatsoever, it may be convenient, but feel like cheating at the same time. It’s better to lay out the bait a few scenes before. The Hunt For Red Herring A story, you know the ending when you read the first page, is rightfully considered dull by most readers. That’s why especially whodunit-type stories use distractions, deceptions, and plot twists to fire full blast. Just like a magician, you are not just telling facts but making them entertaining, and let the readers delve into fictional worlds. One common mistake is to create a deceptive plot line that doesn’t seem to serve another purpose than the deception itself. Readers will often times feel dissatisfied by that. More information: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47ntBElzaWk&list=PLG2IXYJ6H-fuZzLunP0fSUNrZYAm8mUtK&index=17&t=55s Truism alarm Why so precise? Quite unlikely in reality. If being that precise doesn’t serve the story in any way or has no specific reason, scratch it. A lot of things are dependent on a lot of factors. Our daily lives rarely work dead on time each and every day without any incidents. That kind of process fits an evil mastermind more than an average protagonist who isn’t a Mary Sue. Show, don't tell Better: Good vintage has to stock for quite some time … and sometimes, it gets forgotten in the vine cellar. Or simpler: When I want to harvest vegetables or corn, I have to put seeds in the ground and wait in the first place before the seed yields fruits. It’s just not fast food! Two pieces of information, which trigger an epiphany or a change of mind, shouldn’t be introduced within the same scene. That makes it more authentic, more surprising. Many plot twists are planned well in advance. Some even date back to the very first chapter and don’t come into play before the climax. This is essentially called "Chekhov's Gun" (by StudioBinder as seen in "How Knives Out Perfects"). Family tree No shit, Sherlock! I would have never guessed that both had the same family name, since they are related. Of course, there are exceptions but in these cases, mentioning it makes sense. You should refrain from attributing complex and implausible family trees to your character if that is not explicitly needed, or you want them to make themselves a fool. Closing words Here are some more tips on Writing with Jenna Moreci: BEST AND WORST WRITING TIPS Also, the On writing playlist by Hello Future Me These are the channels with the most videos in my storytelling playlist See also: "How To Write A Twist Ending" with John Gray by Film Courage on YouTube

The more you tell me about your father, the more I like him