Wishing wells seem to know exactly what is needed to fulfill people's lives ...
im the best way possible. Of course it doesn't seem that way at the time!
Made this for Churchy, whom I hadn't made a caption for in like 4 years! Wow! Time does fly, doesn't it? I certainly once again crammed in quite a bit of set-up, and I actually whittled down a few paragraphs when I was almost done because I hadn't actually figured out exactly how to finish it.
At one point, the entire carnival was magic, and once they made their wish, I had an old lady wandering up to them, giving them a ticket to return the next day .. letting them relive the day/date from the other person's POV. But .. it didn't make the story any better, and it was just easier to cut her out and make them relive the same day once again. Replacing 8 lines of text with 3 lines, while tightening up the story was a win/win situation.
Most of the dialog I had in mind from the start .. well except for that last line. I thought about what would happen after "he" proposed. Would they change back or be stuck in each other's body? I had other questions (as tends to happen in my captions!) and knew I couldn't even answer one of them within the space I had left. I figured, "why not have THEM ask the questions?" and then leave it that way .. Churchy can figure out which direction her best ending would be. Each of us reading it would have the same option. What I think is cool about this that we hardly ever think to include that as an actual part of the caption, letting the characters ponder their own fate.
When I was done, it still didn't feel quite right. There wasn't enough weight to their destiny, in my opinion, to warrant the life-altering wish and have it fulfilled. Luckily in going over her preferences again, she said that she's really been into pregnancy captions lately, and that gave what I wrote much more gravitas .. and definitely gave more gravity to their lives before the carnival date happened.
Then the wish, giving them the chance to see themselves from the other side, really did matter. It could have helped save them from a forced marriage that might have given them resentment, which would have doomed it from the start. Now, they truly ARE sharing their lives .. figuratively and literally. They'll be much more together in that they'll never know if/when they are switching back.
Yikes! I didn't expect to type this much out in explaining all this! Hopefully we'll get enough views and comments to make it worth it for a Tuesday post.
Did reading this give you an idea that much more was going on in the caption than when you first read it? I like giving behind the scenes discussions about WHY the captions turn out the way they do, but it can be time-consuming, and often seems to slide by without much recognition by those who visit this blog, especially since I don't think there are as many of my captioning peers visiting as there used to be. I'd like to hear from anyone/everyone as I am still trying to figure out exactly what I would like to do with this blog moving forward.
Lovely sweet caption.
ReplyDeleteI always love to read how you create your captions.
For one, because it tells me if I read the same caption as you wrote. As you not only have open endings which allow me to use my imagination for what happened after the caption, but often, like here, you only write the essence down, creating a very open story, that allows me to fill in the blanks while reading.
The other reason is that it helped me a lot when I started to write captions myself. Not only for the pointers you put up here. Then as well as now writing my captions is rarely without struggle. It is still helpfull for me to see that captions like yours, that seem to have been written effortlesly often have their detours as well.
Most of my captions probably wouldn't have seen the light of day if I was convinced that the proces should be effortless.
Yours is one of the few blogs that give a good insight on the creative proces of the artist.
Thanks Helena! A comment like this is worth 100k page views.
DeleteI hope that many creative people come by here to see my process, which hopefully can make them more productive. It was either you or Nadine that mentioned before that creativity is knowing what to cut out and what to keep. I don't think that captioning can be particularly hard. Everyone has 20-30 in them. The hard part is doing it over and over again without hitting the creative wall.
The way you put it, it was probably Nadine who mentioned it. However I have a qoute translated from my favorite Dutch writer, Godfied Bomans, under my avartar since I became active at Rachel's Haven: "To write is to erase, what remains is writing." that is basically the same thing.
DeleteBomans passed away in 1971, so he was probably ahead of us. ;)
Another great quote of him that fits here: "Simplicity is not the mark of the novice, it's the hard fought stamp of the master.
I like the open-ended aspect, and I think it's perfect that they're asking the questions, leaving us to come up with our own answers.
ReplyDeleteThe potential pregnancy aspect definitely gives it some more weight, and makes those answers even more interesting. I can understand how difficult it is to fit everything into a caption, but this is one of those cases where understanding the background and the process actually makes it more interesting. Kind of like a hidden artist's commentary track. :)
Glad you enjoy that too. As a musician, I've always been interested in bootlegs that weren't supposed to be heard by the public. Getting to hear a song from its initial creation, with alternate lyrics, guitar solos, etc .. is still very fascinating to me. I try to do that here too, giving a bit of background as to what I was thinking when I made each caption, choices I had to make, and why I chose to go in a certain direction .. even posting reasons why I didn't think a caption was done well can be (1) cathartic to me in getting it out and (2) educational to those reading them, and those that create them. Maybe they are hitting a block that I've managed at some point to break through.
DeleteThank you for your consistent replies and thoughts!