Hello, and welcome to a whole new arc to The Plotstains Perspective. We’ll be covering Shadows Rise 3.01 in this one, so if you haven’t already read it, what the hell are you doing here. Go! Follow this link and don’t come back until you’ve read it!
Now that you’re back, this time on the Plotstains Perspective, I’m going to have a little fun. Originally I was going to talk about why it took so long to get going with this arc, but frankly, it is kind of boring. Basically Blackbird broke her hand and couldn’t write. That’s all. The moment she could write again, we were back on schedule.
Anyway, as many of you must have noticed, we posted 3.01 on April 1st. In the spirit of the day, I figure I’ll dedicate this perspective to the fun that Blackbird and I have while editing.
Editing sucks. Both Blackbird and I sort of agree on this. You have to tear into someone’s hard work and highlight all the things that aren’t so good about it and the person being critiqued has to try not to take it personally. I don’t think that we’ve ever really taken any of each other’s comments personally (we get into heated debates often, but it is never personal). On top of all that, it’s just boring. No one enjoys slowly reading through their work over and over again. And if that wasn’t bad enough, sometimes there’s a massive time crunch. Over the time, though, we’ve both come to enjoy the editing process more and I think part of that has to do with the fact that we like to meme.
Yes, you heard that right. Meme. Memeing is the single best part about editing. Whenever there’s a chance to make a little joke about the writing, characters, plot, or common comments I make on Blackbird’s writing, I take it. This episode’s theme, for example, seemed to take the tone of Charlie Brown gifs. A sappy love moment between two characters? Throw in a picture of Snoopy sticking out his tongue in disgust. Misread a sentence to say, “good grief”? … Well, that one’s pretty obvious.
A classic that I liked to do in the beginning was highlight every time a character sighed and leave a comment simply saying, “sigh”. Trust me, if you saw how many times these characters sighed before I had her edit them down, you’d be thanking me. Far less melodrama now.
Another classic meme I like to pull out is when Blackbird foreshadows or sets up a future story line well. I’ll send her the video of George Lucas in the behind the scenes videos saying, “It’s like poetry, it rhymes.”
This sort of memeing is what gets us through those long hours slowly chipping away at long documents. It makes the time fly by just a little faster.
Okay, that’s all I’ve got this time. Maybe next time I’ll actually talk a little about the actual story.
Until then,
-Plotstains
Written In Shadows 