Speedy1236

Early teenage me liked disaster movies. You know, the likes of Day After Tomorrow and Dante's Peak (which felt like a James Bond crossover to me). My parents would watch them when they came on TV, and I'd watch along. I liked the suspense, and seeing the characters get through the terrible things happening to them and building friendships on the way.

Slightly older teenage me had reached a point where I wasn't only interested in science, but in a place where I could begin to understand how things work, and a lot of movies and such didn't live up to my desire to see this science I was learning represented realistically in fiction, too. Because, come on, once you learn a bit about atmospheric science and climate and stuff, The Day After Tomorrow becomes rather unbelievable.

Unfortunately, that held true for a lot of movies of this genre, or of many science fiction stories, too. A large majority of them just turned out to be sloppily researched, if researched at all. And for a while, my enjoyment of this type of stories lost out to "no, black holes don't do that" or "lava doesn't behave this way" or "this isn't how genetics work".

Interestingly, this ever critical mindset didn't have problems with the entirely bizzare and fantastic. Things like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, fantastic tales like those of Jules Verne's, Asterix, or super hero stories like Iron Man or Fantastic Four, or, say, a game series based on a hedgehog running faster than the speed of sound - that was so extremely ridiculous scientifically that for some reason suspension of disbelief came easier. It seems a paradox that I could accept stories about magic or full of cartoony non-science, but a movie about a runaway tornado got shut off after twenty minutes because no, clouds don't work like that, go read at least the Wikipedia article, writers of this movie's script!

... It might seem a bit weird that just a few years later, I'd end up writing fanfiction about totally outlandish concepts like Floating Islands, magical gemstones, teleportation, time travels and giant talking animals with super powers. And yet, that's where I am.

It's probably noteworthy that already late teenage me had gone a lot more laid-back about suspension of disbelief again. And while twenty-something me still does mind all too terrible blows to common sense and basic scientific knowledge, it's far from something I would actually get worked up about.

But it's an interesting concept, suspension of disbelief. Any story requires it, from the writer as much as the audience. We all know the characters aren't real, the events aren't real, maybe the places described in the story don't exist, either.

In fact, the unrealistic nature of a story is part of its allure; highly realistic stories tend to bore me, or just not be interesting enough to spend time on. I have reality all day long, when I read a story, I don't want it to be quite like real life. Where'd the fun in that be?

Any piece of fiction has to somehow balance the knowledge that it's a tale with the requirement to make it seem and feel real enough still to care about. We as authors and readers/watchers need to basically forget it's not real so we can become truly invested in the tale and its characters. Part of the enjoyment derived from fiction comes from this make-believe. It's an escape from the bounds and restrictions of reality. In a fictional world, magic can exist, we can travel through time, or to enchanted places. I dare go as far as to say it's a basic human trait, the desire for the fantastical, the longing to imagine.

I'm not the only one to grapple with toeing this fine line between wanting to make the make-believe work and coming up against the knowledge, the logical part of the mind that ends up throwing out error messages when confronted with all too bizzare concepts and events. I know plenty of people who don't like science fiction or fantasy for that reason, because they can't forget flying carpets are total BS.

Personally, in the end it was the little boy inside who goes "But I want carpets to fly!" who won. I want to see something fantastical, I want to see something bizzare and absurd sometimes.

But I want it to be consistent. In itself, I mean. If a fictional universe has magic, I can work with that. If a universe has spaceships capable of faster than light travel by some unexplained mechanism, I can work with that, too. If a universe has Chaos Emeralds, I can totally work with that, too. But I want to see a certain logic within the madness. A concept that's solid in itself, even if it's based on a wild fantasy thing.

To bring this back around to the start... Disaster stories. The story concept/"plot" of a disaster story is probably ancient. Some of humanity's oldest tales are tales of calamities. Say, Atlantis. All across literature, ancient as well as modern, we can find natural catastrophes. Earth quakes, floods, thunderstorms, volcanic eruptions. Nature is both awesome and terrifying, and it often makes a good story.  

I was told once by a friend that my environments in Sonic fics are more dangerous to the characters than the antagonists. I think my response at the time was something like "but that's the way it is in the games, too!"

It really is. I die more by falling for a level hazard than in boss fights usually. And from looking around, I'm not even the only one.

Storytelling-wise, the "nature is dangerous" is an almost lazy approach. You don't need to think up a plot an antagonist comes up with. You hardly need plot at all. Natural events are often unpredictable, and you can just go and throw one at your characters.

My latest fic is one such "lazy" approach. It's about a volcanic eruption, which brings me right back to the start of this post. It's not even about a fantastical concept. It features a few inklings of magic and such, by ways of the universe it's set in, but at its core, it's one of those disaster stories young me enjoyed, slightly less young me decided are too terrible to put up with and that today's me is kinda back to enjoying if they don't make absolutely no sense in themselves.

Is it a realistic tale? Maybe, if you ignore the fact that it's set on a floating island and that the characters in it are a supersonic hedgehog, a fox flying by use of his double tails and an echidna who deploys magical energies. I guess all of that already requires a fair bit of suspension of disbelief.

But that aside, I tried to not make it entirely unrealistic and unbelievable. There's a pyroclastic flows that falls down a slope of the volcano as they do. There's lapilli fields, ash and smoke from forest fires.

I have never been in a eruption (thankfully!), but I've been to various volcanic islands, I've stood on those fields of dust and rock deposit and had it slip away under my feet, I've stood inside and at the rim of calderas and cinder cones, and it's mind-blowing. I've stood on ground that's younger than the first moon landing and inside craters the collapse of which triggered tsunamis that devastated coastlines all across an entire ocean. At some point, in midst of a field of blackish rock that still looked like it was frozen in the middle of flowing down the mountain, you realise that you cannot possibly imagine what it's like when one of those mountains isn't currently asleep or dead and extinguished altogether. Awesome and terrifying.

In a way, that's what I wanted to put into a story. So I scraped together the impressions from trips up volcanic mountains and several hours of research on the demise of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and then I scaled it all back down to not entirely blow apart this small stage for the story to be set on.

The result is balancing just barely on that fine line between too absurd and functional suspension of disbelief. I'd like to think younger me would've maybe sat through it.

Where's your line of realism? When does it become too much for you to work as a story?

So, um, yeah. Maybe it's not entirely unjustified to be a little bit mad. Sorry for venting, but I do feel a bit better now. Carry on, friends.

I just realised that the current Number One priority WIP I have actually follows an almost traditional arc of suspense, you know, like they teach you in school about traditional literature. This pyramid/sine cone structure in which the plot of a story consists of five parts: exposition/introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. Remember that one? Yeah, it's a bit fuzzy here, too.

Back in school, younger Speedy looked at this model and thought about it, because younger me was as prone to overthink stuff as I am now. It obviously applied to the classical plays and novels they had us read. But as soon as I went and tried to fit it to other stories, it stopped being useful or accurate. I remember asking my teacher at that time if there were other models, maybe for newer stories, written after that classical period. The teacher looked at me like I had suggested a crime punishable by death. Obviously, this is the only true way to tell any story of quality. (Looking back, I assume the teacher was either an idiot or at least didn't think highly of anything literary published after 1800.)

Obviously, inquisitive and ever critical teenage me wasn't satisfied with that answer. I remember that the question stayed with me for a while. Why was it so important all stories be told in this form? After all, it's imaginable to end a story at the climax and leave it there, for example (the audience probably wouldn't like that, but it's possible). It would also be possible to start at a point with high suspense and let it wind down as the story goes. And even such more outlandish ideas aside, a lot of the stories I liked didn't follow a clearly defined arc like they taught us. It's not a clean ascent towards the climax and then it goes back down as gradually. A lot of the books I liked for example seemed to have various points of high suspense, followed by a period of winding down, then the action climbs up again, and so on. Lord of the Rings for example is like that. Sure, there's the overall climax of the battle for Mordor and the Hobbits facing Mount Doom, but along the way, we have ups and downs in the arc (more like wave) of suspense. The Hobbits and Aragorn facing the Wraiths at Weathertop and the following flight to Rivendell is a high, then when they rest up there the action calms down, then they form the Fellowship and head out, the action climbs again... Along the way, there are several instances of highs, like when they are attacked, when Gandalf falls in Moria, when they fight at Helm's Deep... There are also frequently lulls, moments of the calm before the storm type of moment, or instances after a crisis has been dealt with. There is no one climax and that was it. Sure, there's a finale the story builds up towards, but if it's long enough, the action cannot rise continuously to this point.

I'm not actually a very technical person when it comes to art in general. Sure, technique is important, but in the end, there's theory and then there's practice. To me, the message always comes first. What is the story or picture suppose to feel like? Does every picture need a background and foreground? I've made pictures that didn't, I've looked at (and admired!) pictures that didn't, so probably that isn't necessary.

I'm not the type of writer who goes and plans out their writing in a way that would include fitting it to anything like an arc of suspense. Yes, I have a plan in mind, in particular for the longer stories. It's more like a point by point thing most of the time. Point A and B are defined, and the story needs to go from A to B. It's kind of not that important to me how they're going there in the beginning, or how quick they are to arrive. The how is the story, I suppose, and it's kind of likely they'll visit points C,D and E before arriving at B.

Maybe that's a problem I have. People have informed me my pacing needs work. Maybe it does, and I try to pay attention to it.

I'm not very successful.

Most of my stories are journeys. Quests. They're not about the characters going to Point B. They're much more about the characters eventually arriving at Point B, maybe about the characters wanting/having to arrive at Point B, but the story is usually about how they get there. About the obstacles they overcome, the experiences they make, how those experiences shape the characters and alter their relationships.

As such, a clean arc wouldn't work for me most of the time, even if I meant to apply it. I kind of want my stories to be a little like life. Unpredictable. Changeable. Yes, maybe even, chaos forbid - random. That means that they might get lost. Their plane might crash. Something they try doesn't work. Things might look good for them, and then BAM, something happens! Unexpected enemy contact, natural disasters, bad weather, accidents. It's about reactions. Stuff happens, and sometimes it's Very Bad Stuff, and the characters have to react and adapt and somehow deal with the whole thing. Suddenly there's a spike of suspense, they story has to pick up, then the situation is eventually resolved, the characters (might) get a break. Until they stumble into the next problem.

Maybe it's individual situations that could work with that model, and that's sort of why it fits to the story I mentioned. It's a short story. (Currently. I think it might stay one, too.) In a very loose sense, it describes one event. From different angles and in quite a lot of detail, but it's one situation, or at least several connected situations. Everything that happens in this story happens because of that one event. None of my usual longer stories do that. There's an overarching plot, but there are subplots and side quests and random events in between that aren't actually directly connected to the main plot. They're too complex (or too badly structured, I have to admit to that possibility). In Mirror's Edge I added an entire relatively long chapter to the almost end of the story that wasn't planned to be there because I'd written something about a situation and it got out of hand but I liked the result. In fact, I'm afraid I do that sort of thing a lot. I write like I travel. "Today we're going to go to - oh, look, what's that thing over there?! Let's check that out!" Um. Yeah. I'm at least somewhat aware of my flaws?

So, what do I mean to say here? I think I was going to be making a point with this when I started, but...

I have no idea anymore.

Maybe that it's funny that a model from back in school that I considered archaic and too narrow-minded when I learned about it applies to a story I'm writing right now. Because it IS funny.

And it's an interesting thing. How do you guys organise your stories? Do you follow a model? Do you plan the highs and lows of suspense first and then go about writing it? Do you cut material that doesn't fit into a plan like this? Or do you, like me, mostly write on whims and gut sense? Whatever feels right goes?

I don't even think there's a right or wrong way to write a story. It's art. There is no wrong way to make art. But maybe the way that'll give the best results is to be found somewhere in the middle, somewhere between rigid five stages arcs and whatever goes.

Sorry for rambling.

This journal is probably going to be a little strange. I don't really know where I'm going with it, or if I'm going anywhere with it at all. It's a bit about writing, a lot about perception, a bit about language, a bit about "extrasensory perceptions" and about some other things. And I'm not sure if anything here will actually make much sense to anyone, but I find it an interesting bit of philosophy and thought, and if there's a place to share it, it's a community of artists.

I am a synesthete, or more specifically, I'm a chromesthete. I experience what research has termed chromesthesia, a form of synesthesia that links sounds to a perception of colour. At least, that's how researchers and such have come to describe it. In words that looks less strange and are easier to type, I perceive sound, primarily music, as coloured.

Nobody knows how wide-spread synesthesia at large or sound to colour synesthesia specifically are. Estimates go from very rare to actually not that uncommon. Research on it is relatively new, so we don't understand how it develops and what causes it in much detail. On the other hand, 19th century composers Liszt and Rimsky-Korsakov famously argued about the colours of musical notes. The thing itself has been around for a long time, probably.

I remember hearing coloured music and nature sounds (thunder is a dark violet, but can explode in a flash of bright pink with a close by thunderclap, for example) all my life. And I assumed it was normal, that everyone experienced it this way. I distantly remember a discussion with a Kindergarden aunt about the colour of birdsong, but I was four or five at the time, and I think it was put off as overactive childish imagination. I didn't speak much at all about it with anyone growing up, mostly because it was such a normal part of my field of perception that I took it for granted without question.

I was over twenty when I realized that no, it's not normal, and then I didn't talk about it anymore with anyone because I feared people wouldn't understand, that they'd make fun of me and think me crazy. Since finding out it's rare and unusual, I've only talked to a handful of friends about it, and even when I talk about it now, it's quick and superficial.

Not all of that is this sense that I'll alienate others with it. A big part of it is that once I stopped to actually reflect on this experience, I found the words language(s) supply are entirely insufficient to describe it. Language is made to describe things everyone experiences. We have words for sight, hearing, smell, sense of temperature, etc. Senses everyone has.

And that's the problem in describing it. It's not a sense that everyone has. Synesthesia literally means "union of senses", and that's how you see it described in articles and the like. In the case of chromesthesia, studies tend to group people who experience it as either "associators" or "projectors", based on the idea that the former group gets a feeling of colour connected to the sound they hear and that the latter group actually sees a coloured shape. Now, honestly, it's neither for me, or maybe it's both, and it depends on the circumstances, too. It's a bit like "viewing" vs "watching", I suppose. You can look out the window and see a sunrise, or you can actively watch it. In the latter case, it becomes a much more intense experience, because you pay attention, because it's an object of focus, not just background lighting while you're focussed on something else. When there's music somewhere in the background, the colours are vague, subtle. When I focus actively on the music, they can be quite striking.

The crux with describing it is that it tries to describe it as "one sense triggers the perception of another", which might be true for some people, but that's not how it works for me. It's not vision. It's not like looking at something with your eyes. It's an auditory experience, but not exclusively either, but it's innately tied together and the attempt to explain its nature by using separate terms for the musical sound and the colour it is to me doesn't help describing it.

The few times I talk about it, I usually sum it up, simplify it, by saying something like for example "this song we're listening to right now is green". But actually, green is only the sum of its parts, because when I actually listen, every instrument voice has a different colour, and they blend together. Green is what it sounds like playing this particular song from a small radio in the corner somewhere. Green is what it's like when it's background noise, a low murmur at the edge of your attention and awareness. Green is the colour of the overtones and melody most of the time. When I actively listen to music, with headphones or with large speakers that actually fill the room with sound or when I go to a concert, yes, there is lots of green in this example song, but there's so much more. When it's not background noise, it's not an association, then it's different colours, in different shapes, and they move through space. There are waves, twirls and bursts of colour and sound.

Earlier this week, I was in Hamburg with my dad to see a concert of a Tangerine Dream, a band we both enjoy, in the new Elbphilharmie. Which is an architectural and acoustic design marvel and definitely worth a visit, by the way. And the music and acoustics were great, I've never heard anything like it. Thoroughly amazed, I wrote to my best friend that evening that it was "like sitting in the middle of a fractal of music that weaves and floats and evolves as it wraps around you, so sharp and clear that you think you can stretch out a hand and snatch the sound out of the air". I couldn't only hear the sounds. In a way that's impossible to describe in words, I could also see it, as with my inner eye, bright and beautiful sound that filled the entire room. It was stunning. Ethereal. Something that felt out of this world, in a way.

But I'm stuck with analogies, with metaphors and comparing it to things, because language has no words for this experience.

And this is where this becomes about writing, too. I don't write about synesthesia. Not per sé. But I write about chaos energy, about characters using and interacting on a deep level with a force of nature that we don't have in this world. With magic. How do you describe magic? How do you properly describe a sense humans don't have? I fail to actually properly communicate the intricacies of a sensory experience I actually make in my life to people who don't make it. And when I want to describe how Knuckles or Sonic or another character feels chaos energy, the only fallback are analogies again. I can say they see the colour of the Emerald they're using, I can say they hear the energy, or use analogies like a sensation of temperature. But what it is (supposed to be) is an extrasensory perception (not as in, say, ghosts, but as in a sense in addition to the recognized ones). Looking at some things in my current WIP script as well as some things I wrote years ago, I have here and there tried to take the synesthesia approach and combine different sensations to craft something new, because I want this chaos sense to feel like something unique, something that's not just "oh, look, it glows".

I think this actually comes up in several genres and topics of writing. Magic in Harry Potter. Tolkien's Music of the Ainur in the Legendarium, or how Elves communicate with trees. They're described as music, or as speech, as something auditory, something that's heard, but it seems more that it's something that's felt, not strictly heard as you'd hear speech or actual music. It's something else. Something similar enough, and yet different in nature.

And now this is where this turns into philosophy altogether. It's not even just language that's limited, it's also our ability to imagine things that go beyond our scope of perception. Some animals have magnetic senses (turtles and birds, for example), allowing them to perceive magnetic fields. Other animals (sharks, platypuses, echidnas, too) have sensors for electric fields. Birds and some other animals see UV light. Snakes perceive temperature through their tongues.  All of these are perceptions, ways to experience and navigate the world that are outside of what we as humans can imagine.

We don't even have to go that far. What is life like if you've never seen because you were born blind? I have a distant aquaintance who says his taste in music drastically changed after he got a Cochlea Implantate, because he learned to hear things he just didn't hear before.

I think it's a cool and humbling thought that we all experience the world in a unique way, and maybe once in a while we should stop and appreciate what we experience, because maybe nobody else make this exact experience.

Perhaps it's one thing that makes writing and reading so interesting, too. It gives you the chance to explore things you couldn't in your own life. A small taste of another's reality. Isn't it awesome?

There's something I wondered. I think I actually might have mentioned it before somewhere. When you take the sentence "Sonic the Hedgehog, Tails the Fox and Knuckles the Echidna chase the evil Dr Eggman" and translate it into German, word by word including character names, you get "Schall der Igel, Schwänze der Fuchs und Fingerknöchel der Ameisenigel jagen den bösen Dr Eiermann", and it sounds absolutely ridiculous. I have to laugh every time I hear or read it, and it has proven to be almost guaranteed to crack my friends up too when I say it to them. Something about it sounds utterly bizzare and hilarious. And I wonder why.

It can't be the meaning of the words per se. All of these character names are 'regular' words, commonly used in everyday English, too (well, somewhat, anyway). They're not just names in English, either. They're regular nouns that in some way fit to a characters' traits and were assigned to them as names (or nicknames in case of Tails), and to be fair I am aware of them being rather unusual names in English, too.
 
It also isn't that I knew them as names first and as words later (as would be the case for some other fictional characters' names, like the entire Ducks in DuckTales , whose last names were never localized, so until I learned English, they were indeed just names, and not words with a meaning). When I got into Sonic, I knew the meaning of all the characters' names, but they never really struck me as bizarre. A little funny, perhaps, but fitting, too, and they certainly don't sound weird enough to my ears in English to actually spend much thought on them.

Now the question is if that is because I've gotten used to words-turned-names in English, and if the German translations of the names primarily sound so weird because I'm not used to them (and to be honest, "Fingerknöchel der Ameisenigel" is quite a mouthful, too).

Or is the practice of turning words into names something that's so normal in English language media (a lot of cartoon and comic characters have names following that scheme), so that even as a non-native-speaker, you grow up with hearing them and that's why you're used to them?

Or is it actually a second language thing? When I read these names, I don't read them as word with their 'normal' meaning, but exclusively as names. The difference is easy to spot in English, because names get capitalized and 'normal' words not (as opposed to in German, which capitalizes all nouns and names). It's probably a context thing, too, but I seem to have no difficulties at all to immediately differentiate between the name and word in a text at all, even at sentence starts when they're both capitalized (or when a name ends up non-captalized due to typo). One is a name, and reading it makes me think of the character, the other is a descriptive, specific word, describing physical concepts, anatomy parts, and so on. I would go as far as to say that the names are hardly actual words to me anymore, kind of like most common names actually used to be words and had a meaning, but it got almost completely forgotten about. The well-known first name "Paul" for instance comes from the Latin word for "small", and maybe it used to be the name of people who were of small height or something, but the word turned into a name and sort of lost its meaning this way. That's kind of what happened to Sonic, Knuckles and Tails, in my head, and to even weirder names like Cream and Cheese, too.

So, do you native speakers constantly crack up inside about these characters' bizarre names? Or do you read them as names, too, almost entirely removed from their original meaning, so that they're names first, and the original meaning of the word is more like a background concept you know, but don't think about much? Or something entirely different?