“The Secret City”

I posted another recording of a writing exercise on Soundcloud. I describe it as a scientist searches for a secret city.

I’ve been part of a writer’s group for several years now. At every session we do a writing exercise. We start with a random prompt. It is usually a title. We each then have 30 minutes to do our exercise. When the time is up, each of us reads the exercise we’ve written.

If time runs short, then I will do a writing exercise on my own. That is what happened after our last session.

The prompt title was “The Imaginary Gun”. I got a finished piece is just under 30 minutes. A couple days later, I went to record it, so I could share it with the other people in the group. As I reread the story, I started to feel very uncomfortable with the implied message of the story. It didn’t fit with my personal views.

I have always followed the rule that I don’t rewrite my exercises. It was a struggle for me to decide what to do about it. I didn’t like what I had but didn’t want to rewrite it. In any event, it would have been difficult to change the message. I considered doing a fresh writing exercise with the same prompt title.

In the end, I decided to pick a new prompt title and do a new story.

The new title was “The Secret City”. I may have gone “a few seconds” over the 30-minute time limit. Even so, it was shorter than some of my other exercises.

I recorded it using Audacity. For some reason I had trouble speaking some of the lines and had to retry them until I got something I felt was OK. In one case it took me 5 attempts. I had to edit those out.

I had three speaking characters. Two were male, so I used a plug-in called Rovee in Audacity to alter my voice. The other was female. In that case I used a website called https://voicemaker.in/ to generate a female voice. I picked a Chinese voice. The website also allows you to modify how individual words are spoken. I used that to put emphasis on some words. I changed the pitch of some words as well.

I finally got the recording posted on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/dynamiclethargy/the-secret-city

As I thought over the story later, I wondered if I could develop it into a longer piece. I think the female character could be interesting.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog