A couple of weekends back, Mickey and I held a workshop with the All In! Young Writers’ Festival. While we merely touched the surface of what Speculative Fiction and storytelling was, we also conducted an exercise taught to us during our Mentor Access Project (MAP) Retreat.
It was introduced to us as workshopping. Before you apply this to your own storytelling, you will need:
It’ll be good if your friends have already read your entire draft / abstract before coming for the session for context. (Note: It’ll be good if you’re able to bring someone with some background in storytelling, writing, or creating in the group as well, just to give perspective from a commercial point-of-view) As a setup, have everyone sitting within earshot of each other, preferably in a circle. Then you start: READ YOUR WORK First, read your work. No one else is to interrupt or ask questions. Whether you’re just there to help with feedback or are waiting for your turn to share your stories, just listen to the story as it’s being told. At the same time, be clear with your reading – don’t rush over your words. LISTEN TO FEEDBACK After you’re done reading, everyone gives their feedback one-by-one, starting from the person directly on the left or right of the storyteller. The most important aspect of this stage is this – Listen to the feedback without any interruptions. This stage is to simulate a reader reading your book on their own. Realistically, such cases won’t allow either the author or other readers to intervene with feedback and opinions. For the most constructive feedback, it’s best to let each person say their piece before going on to the next person. (Note: It’ll also help to craft your feedback to be balanced – talk about what you were not sure about, but also mention what you liked about the piece. This is not praise for praise’s sake, but this can help provide the author with a direction on what to enhance and keep in the story.) DISCUSS This is when you get to ask your readers any pertinent questions or discuss any pressing concerns you have about your work. Commonly, authors tend to ask about (but not limited to) the following topics:
Regardless, it’s your story, it’ll be good if you enter the session with an idea of what you’d like to get out of this workshopping session. APPLY At the end of the session, take the notes you’ve gathered and go over them again. Decide the direction of your story while keeping the feedback you’ve received in mind, especially feedback that has been repeated over the workshopping session. Now that you have a good stack of notes, make full use of the feedback and polish your story further! The Workshopping technique was taught to us by Man Asia Winner, Miguel Syjuco. You can find out more about him and his works here.
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Comic Fiesta, Anime Festival Asia, PopCon Asia, Singapore Toys, Games, and Comics Convention, Game Start, Illustration Arts Fest… the list can go on.
While all these conventions celebrate stories told across various mediums and forms, they also recognize the importance of the independent creator. With so many new faces and names coming out in the storytelling scene (comics, writing, games etc…), organizers are seeing an increasing uptake of booth registrations for events featuring a corner for independent creators. Yet, the first booth experience can be both exhilarating and disappointing, especially when we’re not prepared. So here are a few pointers from registration to booth-owning. BE INFORMED Once you decide that you’d like to sell your works on a specific platform, make sure you’re following them on their various channels – Facebook, Twitter, the main website, etc… Many event organizers announce their calls for booth artists / creators way in advance. Comic Fiesta (held in Dec) calls for booths in July or August. STGCC (held in Aug / Sept) have a list of artists they invite to their Artists’ Alley. This is on top of the fact that artists can also write in to request for booths. Keep their schedules in mind – no one has the time or energy to listen to you declaring that your work will bring the crowd to the event if you cannot even be bothered to respect deadlines or the staff helping you. (Yes, there are event staff that have questionable attitudes too, but that will be another post.) BE PREPARED So yay! You managed to go through the reviewing process and get a booth. Now what? The Tiger and my checklists for booth preparation includes three main things:
If you’re able, you can digitize your stock tracking / sales sheet on Google Drive so there won’t be any pesky mental math involved while giving change. Regardless, take care of your stock, present your booth well, and take care of yourself. BE POSITIVE This is possibly the most important pointer in my book. It’s very tempting to fall prey to impossible math – where we think that we’ll make a killing just because we’ve got a booth at an event with high foot traffic, and a high concentration of people who’d most likely love your products. Most of these booths are screened for quality, right? And I’ve been putting my work online every day for the past six months or so. My number of likes on Facebook has reached three figures – My stuff will fly from the shelves! Not so fast. Yes, there are cases where one or two artists are picked up from the convention scene, but these cases happen once for every few hundred or so creators. Factors contributing to a great booth experience at an event have little to do with good sales or pure recognition. From what I’ve observed, a good attitude brings about a better experience. Whether it’s your first event ever or in another location, I’d recommend concentrating on the following instead of just sales:
I hope this post was helpful to everyone who’s reading this! Do leave your tips for other booth owners in the comments, I’d love to hear from all of you. A few years back, the Tiger introduced me to this book titled, “Brick by Brick” by cartoonist Stephen McCranie. It was a comic about sustaining creativity as a creator / storyteller, where McCranie spoke of his journey as a developing artist. As someone who is still trying to run with things, this book gave me quite a few tips. One of which is probably one of the most difficult, yet foundationally important step one can take: FINDING YOUR ARTISTIC LINEAGE Note: This is not going to be me telling you what you should do, I’ll just be offering my point of view through my own experience doing the same thing. All creators are influenced by another party, be it a more established artist, works by a certain production company, or a story which touched them on a personal level. And these influences serve not only as foundation, but also sources of inspiration. When I learnt about this, I did my own searching and found an inkling of focus – wasn’t much but it was a good step. This was how I did mine: What do you like? Whose works do you follow? It starts with us – why do we create? What do we create? And who inspired us? What I did was to write a list of people whose works inspired me. In my case, it was a lot of authors of works which I loved reading – Suzanne Collins, Gillian Flynn, Koushun Takami, Ransom Riggs. Work backwards From there, a quick search on Google and a bit of background knowledge helps. If you’ve read your favourite author or artist extensively, you’ll be able to get an inkling of where they get their influence from. Here’s a lineage I have as an example: Ransom Riggs – influenced by -> Stephen King – influenced by -> Richard Matheson Explore
After that, you can start exploring! From a single author or artist, you now have a wider range of works to look at – more ideas, more inspiration. It’s a simple step, but it has helped me put together To-Read Lists and opened my reading repertoire to more contexts and ideas (*cough*Atwood*cough*), many of them unexpected. Try it on your own and see where this takes you. For more information on finding your artistic lineage, check out Brick by Brick by Stephen McCranie, or click here. I have a confession to make – I think about writing more than actually doing the act itself. For the longest time, my worst habit was to write as little as I can get away with and hope for the best – only because I was not in the groove. Of course, this proved to be incredibly unsustainable if I wanted to produce work on a regular-enough basis so that there’s something to put out in the world.
This meant times where you had to buckle down – something I believe even the best of us have inertia against. Therefore, instead of forcing the words out after a few hours of staring at a blank screen, here are a few things I’ve been doing to keep at writing, or getting back into the groove, even on the dry days: CONSUME Read to reacquaint yourself with your love of the written word and turns of phrase. Listen to good fiction podcasts for dialogue and descriptions. Watch good films and TV serials for inspiration. To paraphrase Stephen King, to not read is to not write. We can only discern what’s “good” or what speaks to us if we consume the media we like to create. In our current circumstances, good stories are not confined to the written medium, so look out for stories you can relate to or are interested in. Who knows? Maybe you’ll pick something up. P/S – This is also useful in giving you some pointers on what to avoid as well. HACK YOUR IDEA BANK Remember those ideas you had over the course of the last few years? Did you manage to write them down? That’s your idea bank. I find it really useful to keep my notebook / journal of previous story ideas in the event of days where story ideas don’t flow. Even if you don’t go with any of the ideas you’ve written down in the past, it’s also quite a great exercise to flex some creative muscles and see if they get triggered reading your past thoughts. GET HELP There are two main ways I do this – collaboration and / or working side-by-side with other creators, which gives you that slight pressure of keeping up with your end of the project. The other way is what I call the Charsiew Space Tactic. A good friend of ours, Ben (a.k.a. the creator of the Charsiew Space universe), told this to one of our friends who kept asking, “How do you manage to put out so much stuff with a full time job?” His answer was, “Apply for a booth at the next indie festival and ask your sourced printer about the last date you’ll have to send you files over or else you’ll have nothing to sell to make your booth costs back during the event.” I’m not saying that this is one of the best ways to get yourself to work, but I’m not saying that it doesn’t work as well. (Shhh…) FINISHED, NOT PERFECT I feel this is probably the most important pointer I have both for other creators and with myself. Since I started participating in the National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) programme, I’ve learnt the value of having finished, instead of perfect work. We know of people who speak about wanting to put work out but never do in fear of criticism or that it’s not “perfect” enough. A blank page is more difficult to edit than a “crappy” piece of work – and I feel that having this in mind while I finish the last, painstakingly-written line for the day makes my writing session feel more productive. I can always go back to a piece for more edits. I can’t really do much with a blank piece. JUST WRITE ANYTHING Anything. Fan fiction, short lines, dialogue, chapter plans, story plans, just so you can get your muscle memory of the act of writing back. And you may be surprised with what you find during this period so why not? So as I leave all of you with this post, I hope these pointers helped in some way. I am, no doubt, still on this journey. So I’d also like to hear from all of you – what else would you recommend to boost your creative motivation? Leave it in the comments =). |
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