And I just now realized that I totally never posted my goals. I really thought I'd done it! Um. At any rate, here they are now?
1. Goals as artist/impact on the reader: I want to show the process of adaptation and the means by which a piece of writing that belongs to someone else becomes your own. I also want to make the characters, especially the main character, real and sympathetic, while capturing some of the rights of the man who doesn’t even know that his own words have been stolen, but recognizes them anyways – essentially, showing both sides. I want to have some humor, and I also want to make the time period believable. Aside from all this, I want to turn several different kinds of media into an organic whole – use them as a way to tell different parts of the story, but still keep it recognizably text-based, user-friendly, and all part of the same greater thing (for lack of a better word).
2. Model/mashup: Obviously, I’m stealing from Shakespeare, which is a large part of the story. The poems, the basic framework, and some parts of the story are going to be stolen in format from Shakespeare and writing style if I can manage it, although for the dialogue I’d rather take from Stoppard than Shakespeare himself. For the modern-era parts, it’s going to read like a fairly standard teen fantasy genre novel.
3. Practical goals: there are going to be five versions of the poem that differ in various degrees from the original. The story itself will be told in five-act format, and each act will include one Photoshopped ‘document’, one script of two pages or so, and one section in straight prose from the modern era. Some may also have something in the voice of the main character.
4. To do: Write the different versions of the poem; figure out how to tell the voice of the main character; write up the documents, Photoshop them, and add marginalia; write the straight prose story; write the scripts. Study plays for this.
2 comments:
I'm working on a Shakespeare paper right now and it occurred to me to ask: How are you addressing the fact that most of the sonnets are written to a man (if you're addressing it at all)?
I'm actually playing around a little bit with that - the sonnets start out being written to a man (who most people assume was Shakespeare's patron) and then bring in a woman, the Dark Lady. When they were published together, though, they were rearranged to make it look like many more of them were addressed to a woman than actually were. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the market decision to have the poet stop writing to a man and write about a woman instead - kind of a parody of publishing today, what sells and what doesn't.
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