No, I think there's still quite a broad variety of places from which people get their ideas, and having someone explain how they got from the topic to their concept for how they intepreted the topic can be fascinating.
For example, I'll bring up my Week 20 "Playing House" (http://zia-narratora.livejournal.com/605257.html) post from last season: there is a long stretch from "Playing House" as a single sentence to a story about a demon that lives in a coffee can and possesses people.
My first intent was to write a story based on "The House of the Rising Sun," about a whorehouse full of demons. But I decided it was too complex an idea, and I wanted to be careful about exoticizing New Orleans and Creole culture, so I decided that that idea could be seen as being in poor taste, and chose not to do it. I thought back to a series of pencil sketches I did in college that involved an old house and a woman with a coffee can, that were inspired by the lyrics to "I Seen What I Saw" by 16 Horsepower. Once I got there, I started thinking about the other lyrics to the song, and combined it with ideas from another 16 Horsepower song, "Cinder Alley," which is about a girl named Carol Sue that has a lot of possession imagery in it. So I took those two ideas and then needed to invoke a spirit of "play" back into the piece, so I centered it on two children playing a typical dare game.
I think for every single piece that someone writes, there is a story about how they got from the prompt to that piece, and every one is going to be different and unique. I think the most interesting entries are the ones where someone clearly thought deeply, re-interpreted, and personalized the prompt, but that doesn't mean we know how they got there.
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Date: 2010-12-03 07:29 pm (UTC)For example, I'll bring up my Week 20 "Playing House" (http://zia-narratora.livejournal.com/605257.html) post from last season: there is a long stretch from "Playing House" as a single sentence to a story about a demon that lives in a coffee can and possesses people.
My first intent was to write a story based on "The House of the Rising Sun," about a whorehouse full of demons. But I decided it was too complex an idea, and I wanted to be careful about exoticizing New Orleans and Creole culture, so I decided that that idea could be seen as being in poor taste, and chose not to do it. I thought back to a series of pencil sketches I did in college that involved an old house and a woman with a coffee can, that were inspired by the lyrics to "I Seen What I Saw" by 16 Horsepower. Once I got there, I started thinking about the other lyrics to the song, and combined it with ideas from another 16 Horsepower song, "Cinder Alley," which is about a girl named Carol Sue that has a lot of possession imagery in it. So I took those two ideas and then needed to invoke a spirit of "play" back into the piece, so I centered it on two children playing a typical dare game.
I think for every single piece that someone writes, there is a story about how they got from the prompt to that piece, and every one is going to be different and unique. I think the most interesting entries are the ones where someone clearly thought deeply, re-interpreted, and personalized the prompt, but that doesn't mean we know how they got there.