Harboring thoughts.
May. 5th, 2011 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinA few months back I posted some construction posts for Star Harbor Nights. They haven't really gone anywhere because I wasn't quite sure how I wanted to develop them. While a lot of my sleeping projects seem like they're better suited for books than serials, SHN was born out of my adolescent desire to participate in a serial medium (comic books) and it's hard for me to breathe in that universe within the confines of a book.
But it's not easy to write as a serial, necessarily. One of the problems with writing Star Harbor Nights has always been that it's even more sprawling than Tales of MU. In both universes I have the problem of having too many characters who are fascinating and fun to write, but in Tales of MU I can prioritize such things because I have anchor/viewpoint characters that I need to tie things to.
I think this is why I've always done best with SHN when I used the chapter/sub-chapter (or arc/chapter, or whatever you want to call it) structure I started out with: 1-1, 1-2, etc., for five or six chapters in a row. It keeps my attention focused in one place.
For a while I was trying to write it page-a-day style, thinking that would keep the story moving. It had the opposite effect. I spent months writing Rhyme running around Webmistress's underground hideout. It was a fun story but it didn't build momentum. I knew that when I revived SHN I wanted to do it with longer story segments but I wasn't sure how much longer. I also felt like I wanted to bring more of a cinematic scope to it. Above all, I knew that I needed something distinct from the Tales of MU format, because they are such very different projects and it needed something that works as well for it as the thing that became my default approach worked for Tales of MU.
A few days ago I think I hit upon the right idea. It was while I was thinking about Doctor Who, and the way the series is structured. You have your individual episodes, which have a story built the way an episode of a TV show is built. You have two-parter stories, and you have arcs that spread across episodes (and sometimes seasons), and then you have the seasons themselves. This sort of thing has been adapted across medium in things like the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics for "Season 8" of the TV show.
I think that's what I need for SHN. I have the big stories I want to tell... the Big Bads, the world-threatening and world-shattering events... and then I have the small, intimate stories I want to tell about the characters who make us care about the world in the first place. This seems like the way to do it. Writing a season's worth of television seems to operate under similar lines to the way I work: you have a basic plan, you need to get from point A at the beginning to point B, but then what happens in between is often a lot of making things up as you go, taking advantage of opportunities that come up and working around obstacles as they occur.
So SHN is going to be coming back. Probably during the summer. I need time to plan out a season, and I have good luck with starting things in the summer. Both Tales of MU and SHN were first launched in the middle of the summer. I don't know if I'm going to be starting from the same point I was looking at with the construction posts. I'm loathe to do a whole reboot (the universe has been rebooted enough times already, comic book universe or not) but I might want to start from a cleaner slate than the one I was looking at just so that new people have an easier time getting on board.
Abandoning SHN was never in the cards. The Harborverse and the MUniverse are tied together way too deeply. Not in a way that matters too much to the story of either, but the little crossovers are canon to both. Also, I doubt very much I would be a writer at all if not for comic books, and the long summer nights I spent with my older brother spinning whole worlds' worth of stories about them.
But it's not easy to write as a serial, necessarily. One of the problems with writing Star Harbor Nights has always been that it's even more sprawling than Tales of MU. In both universes I have the problem of having too many characters who are fascinating and fun to write, but in Tales of MU I can prioritize such things because I have anchor/viewpoint characters that I need to tie things to.
I think this is why I've always done best with SHN when I used the chapter/sub-chapter (or arc/chapter, or whatever you want to call it) structure I started out with: 1-1, 1-2, etc., for five or six chapters in a row. It keeps my attention focused in one place.
For a while I was trying to write it page-a-day style, thinking that would keep the story moving. It had the opposite effect. I spent months writing Rhyme running around Webmistress's underground hideout. It was a fun story but it didn't build momentum. I knew that when I revived SHN I wanted to do it with longer story segments but I wasn't sure how much longer. I also felt like I wanted to bring more of a cinematic scope to it. Above all, I knew that I needed something distinct from the Tales of MU format, because they are such very different projects and it needed something that works as well for it as the thing that became my default approach worked for Tales of MU.
A few days ago I think I hit upon the right idea. It was while I was thinking about Doctor Who, and the way the series is structured. You have your individual episodes, which have a story built the way an episode of a TV show is built. You have two-parter stories, and you have arcs that spread across episodes (and sometimes seasons), and then you have the seasons themselves. This sort of thing has been adapted across medium in things like the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics for "Season 8" of the TV show.
I think that's what I need for SHN. I have the big stories I want to tell... the Big Bads, the world-threatening and world-shattering events... and then I have the small, intimate stories I want to tell about the characters who make us care about the world in the first place. This seems like the way to do it. Writing a season's worth of television seems to operate under similar lines to the way I work: you have a basic plan, you need to get from point A at the beginning to point B, but then what happens in between is often a lot of making things up as you go, taking advantage of opportunities that come up and working around obstacles as they occur.
So SHN is going to be coming back. Probably during the summer. I need time to plan out a season, and I have good luck with starting things in the summer. Both Tales of MU and SHN were first launched in the middle of the summer. I don't know if I'm going to be starting from the same point I was looking at with the construction posts. I'm loathe to do a whole reboot (the universe has been rebooted enough times already, comic book universe or not) but I might want to start from a cleaner slate than the one I was looking at just so that new people have an easier time getting on board.
Abandoning SHN was never in the cards. The Harborverse and the MUniverse are tied together way too deeply. Not in a way that matters too much to the story of either, but the little crossovers are canon to both. Also, I doubt very much I would be a writer at all if not for comic books, and the long summer nights I spent with my older brother spinning whole worlds' worth of stories about them.