Music, or converting atmospheres into stories worth sharing.

[SamIO]

It's something I regularly feel — in particular when exposed to aesthetic pleasures — this compulsion to expand upon the wonderful emotions and thoughts I experience from time to time. All sorts of tones and themes and atmospheres and concepts and scenes and little tiny things that stand by themselves in my heart are worth so much of my emotional context. But these things are fleeting, often unoriginal, and seldom relevant to roleplay in and of themselves.

I'll find myself loosely associating a few of these things in my mind and end up with scraps that inspire me, spur my muse into fleeting overdrive, and fall into the aether as quickly they came some days later. But I've always loved the time I get with these moments, and wished I could do better than hope for a way to explore them. I guess this is my way of asking for help. ^.^;

Roleplay has been my favored form of expression for such a long time now that I seldom consider an alternative means of handling the business going on in my head. Once upon a time, I'd draw it or music it, but these days I've lost any real capacity to enjoy those skills. So writing is what I see as the light at the end of a very long tunnel.

Bravo once wrote to the effect that we should never try to start a roleplay with only a premise. And that really struck me as a sensitive piece of information I'd really never stopped to consider. So much of my muse is based on premise that it utterly contradicted my worldview on self-expression. But it is so self-explanatory — so self-evident, I think — that a premise is seldom worthy of the breadth of a complete effort. I suppose this is where I get to the meat of my rambling questions.

Where do these scraps come from for you?

Where do they go?

How can our mind-scraps be molded into stories worth telling?

@Bravo

 

[Diana]

These scraps are called PLOT BUNNIES. At least... that is what I call them. >> I have a billion of them a day. Most of them I never bother to jot down somewhere and they disappear in to the ether. My favorite example is one day I was driving and I saw a bit of road kill, and then this concept of a Lady in a fancy carriage going down the street seeing dead animals and dirty streets and dying people everywhere. I have no plot for this yet. But the whole atmosphere and general feeling of what I want that to be still sticks in my head even a couple years later. O__O

THEY GO WHERE YOU PUT THEM. If I really, really really, like something that popped in my head, I write down everything I was thinking. Even if it's a jumbled mess. I don't even bother trying to make it pretty, I just make sure to write down everything that was important and really made that whole "feeling". You'll find a lot of that kind of stuff on my roleplay blog. Character concepts, plot concepts, random stuff.


The molding... I dunno. XD I just stash things and then one day come across them again, or a sudden inspiration will hit and I'll know exactly what to do for creating it in to something more solid.

 

[Kagayours]

The fleeting thoughts and ideas I generally don't bother with, because those are the ones that I know I'll lose the interest/motivation to pursue before long.

It's the ideas that keep coming back to me when my mind's wandering... the ones that make me say "that's interesting, but I could never actually make that into a roleplay/character/whatever", until I keep thinking about it... and I start to realize that I can make it work, but then I tell myself "but this is silly and there's no way I'd commit to something like that" but then I keep coming back to it so I'm like "FUCK IT, I'M DOING THIS" and then it's a thing that happens. This is the reasoning behind a lot of the weird stuff that goes into my RP's. Especially Fandomstuck. Fandomstuck just gives me too many ideas.