What I learned by conquering the Iron Throne

Okay, I didn't really conquer the Iron Throne. But it was fun to pretend for a few moments.

The Game Of Thrones costumes and props exhibition is in Belfast at the moment on the last stop of the tour. The studios where they film in Belfast are a matter of minutes down the road, and I can only imagine that some of the props will be heading down there for Season 4!

My Dad and I got some tickets to go down and see it. Below is a picture spam. Please forgive me if your internet connections are slow!

Note: I'm trying to look empowered here. I just look uncomfortable.
This is why I'm not an actor.

But I learned something very important from the exhibition. The name of the game is detail. It was mind boggling to wrap my head around the detailing on some of these costumes. On Sansa's Winterfell dress (2nd from the left on the top picture) there are stitched gold leaves on her collar. Why? I mean, why when it already takes so long to make costumes would you put in so much detail into something that won't even show up on camera?

Because it needs to feel real. If the Game of Thrones world was real, that character would actually have put little gold leaves onto her collar.

The same goes for writing. Why would you put in extra details that have nothing to do with the story? Because it gives your characters depth and colour beyond the story. They feel alive, and that's because the details breathe life into them.

But at the same time, you can't go overboard with detail or your plot and characters will get lost, suffocated under all that detail. Lets keep the costume metaphor going. If there had been gold leaves all over the dress then it would have looked ridiculous, and fake.

An example of little useless details that I've put into writing: In my current WIP my protagonist is getting her feat measured for boots by her friend who is a leather tanner. She knew him as a child when he was a kind of Grandfather figure to her and he taps a mole on her foot and makes a 'boop' noise the way you would to make a kid giggle.
This isn't important information at all. But it colours that scene a bit more than it would have been and I really like it.

What useless little details have you put into your writing, or anything else that you do just because you could?

Sarah x

Does anyone actually write any more?

(Translation!)

So today I decided to handwrite my blog, because...well... handwriting stuff is becoming a bit of a dying art.

I apologise in advance for any spelling mistakes because IRL there is no spell checker (unless you count a dictionary but I'm lazy and that involves getting up, plus I don't notice usually when I spell things wrongly.)

How often do you handwrite things? Do you handwrite the outline of blog posts, or the outline of a story?

For me, I tend to write down ideas but I have so many notebooks lying around that there are snippets and ideas scattered incoherently throughout many different notebooks.

Sometimes I also work on my stories (including fanfiction) in long hand. Usually it happens when I'm on the train going to and from University or when I find my fingers ineffectively hovering over the keyboard, unable to think of what to write, that's when I turn back to pen and paper. Usually, I find a few sit down sessions with a pen and not a keyboard will kick my brain back into gear.

How often do you, if at all, actually write your stories? I find my best productiveness in a mix of the two, but I do know that some of you swear by either the pen or the keyboard exclusively.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who made a comment on my last post. I had such a great response and lots of suggestions and ideas to get me back into writing and blogging. I've got some wonderful new followers and as a result found some more blogs to follow myself. So thank-you to everyone who read and commented on my last post.

(I will type this out also, in case you can't read my writing!)

Sarah x

p.s. I've realised some grammatical errors in the post because I was just writing candidly and not reading back and correcting sentences. I think I got my general point across though!