Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Trinity

I think I have an obsession with threes. Skyshard Heroes, a game I'm working on, has an enemy faction called the Triumvirate. I made them.

The Trinity was something I came up with while trying to work out a way to be more creative and to avoid buckling down and forcing myself to write like I am now. The idea was simple: tell a story on twitter. One hundred forty characters seemed like an easy way to be creative without overwhelming myself. So I took that and multiplied it by 3 and then realized I needed to sketch a story arch and then gave up. Maybe someday I'll return to it, but until then...

Are they going up or down?
Elevator Pitch: The Trinity is a story told over three separate twitter accounts, by three different people over three different time periods. All three chronicle an alien invasion and each can be read individually, but when put together they create a larger world. The three Twitter accounts would run for 6 months from beginning of story to end. However, only one account experiences time in this fashion.

I had been reading George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones and was inspired by the way he paints a giant world while not losing the importance of his characters and their relationships. Each chapter is a small segment of story from a character's point of view and we might not see that character for another seventy or so pages.  When they pop back up we remember where we left the character and are excited to read more.

Especially about you, Davros the Onion Dalek. Too nerdy?
Trinity
The Trinity, which is more of a place holder name, tells the story of the invasion of Earth by something  beyond. The story is told through three sources: The Engineer, The Star and The Monitor.

The Engineer: An astronaut on NASA's last manned flight to space. Whatever this threat was collided with his shuttle on its entry to Earth. The Engineer was on the outside of the ship at the time repairing some external damage to the shuttle and has been left floating in space, above Earth, with no hope of retrieval.

The Engineer's story, while occurring over six real months, will only chronicle his last three days as his brain slowly becomes oxygen starved. His Twitter account represents a computer at Ground Control that is recording and encoding what he is speaking into his comm. The one hundred forty characters are justified by his frantic thoughts that slowly become more labored and hazy as his body shuts down.

The Star: A B-List celeb on a trashy reality T.V. show. Think Jersey Shore. She finds it easy to party hard when working is just partying. Her shallow tweets become angry as she tweets about losing air time to the news reporting on events around the world. She is our ear to the ground and eye on the scene, however unfortunate that is.

The Star's Twitter account would be like a normal Twitter account. It is expressly there in the beginning to brag and whine, but it soon becomes our most accurate window into what's happening. Her story happens in more 'real time' then the other two. Her one hundred forty characters are justified by Twitter.

The Monitor: Underground during the events of the story; the Monitor is recording events all around the world. The Monitor itself is sort of an ambiguous character. We learn bits about it, but the less said the better.

His/her only job is to make sure that everything that is happening is preserved. The Monitor's time period is significantly longer then the Engineer's and Star's; taking place over three years. The power in the location the Monitor's is in is spotty, so he/she makes her recordings short, limiting them to one hundred and forty characters.

An easier to understand timeline.
All three accounts are tiered. The Engineer is Tier 1: personal. We learn about him, his life and what they were doing in space. The Star is Tier 2: national. As the Star moves around the country we see the effects of this invasion as it touches the lives of others across America. The Monitor is Tier 3: global. Through the Monitor's recordings we learn how the rest of the world fares during the invasion and if we make it out in the end.

The Two Obstacles: One of the major obstacles to writing this is me having to kick myself in the ass, get the key events down, and do some research. So that first obstacle is really just me being a lazy jerk. 

The second is me gaining a better grasp of Twitter. I hear it's really not that hard to use, but I think I'm getting old because I've caught myself turning my nose up at technology "the kids are using these days". It shouldn't be that hard, right? 

So why don't I get cracking at figuring this out? I might.

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