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How to Write (& Read) Skit-Prose Lesson 1.2 - Building Multiple Skit Depths Let's go on and ruin Margaret Atwood's classic poem by subjecting it to the primitive absurdities of skit-prose. We'll treat the first two lines as a single self-sustaining frwoa depth, the second two as another, and add a third "commentary track" by two urggs critiquing the poem that results from the former two. Not the "full" poem (though it is indeed Margaret Atwood's fully finished poem), but rather a self-sustaining poem, as the nature of skit-prose is to be multi-dimensional (and fractal), and allow the potential for expansion on self-sustaining portions of art to larger and deeper versions. (Clearly actually doing so beyond a simple example would raise copyright issues, but here Blorkk claims to be using the poem in a Fair Use manner). The text file for our particular skip skit example is the following. Note this is a text file, a file with a ".txt" extension, where you edit the direct text of the file rather than special encoding such as word documents, rich text files, html, and so on. The standard Windows text editor is Notepad. You can create a blank text file in windows by opening Notepad, or right clicking in a folder and selecting "New > Text document"). The file must have a depth number prefixing each new line, and end in two spaced zeros.
From our frangle, the urgg dialogue was clearly written after the poem, and so we get a sense of contrivance when we read the urgg lines that prelude the lines of the poem that we haven't gotten to yet. The phrase "like, hmm..." preludes the second line of the poem "Like a hook...", as if the poem finishes the speaker's thought. Further, the phrase "Why don't we go hook--" preludes the line "A fish hook," and the line continued later (after being left unfinished), "...hook up an--", preludes "an open eye," as if the sentence is being finished by the poem. Finally we find out the speaker didn't mean "hook up an [object]", but rather that the word "and" was interrupted. This is the writer intentionally decieving the reader to create a plot twist surprise later when we realize we've been tricked. Hence the final urgg line reveals the full sentence the male urgg--whom we're now pretty sure is male because of the fact that he asks someone named Blurka to hook up--was trying to get out: "Why don't we go hook up and have dinner?" This expands the "hook" metaphor into a third depth beyond the two already covered. A hook for a metal eye as a positive human metaphor, to a fish hook for a negative human metaphor, to the coloquial metaphor of hooking up with another person (as well as a deception that we might have meant something technical like "hook up an ostrishal smorshal warmper to the core mogrusmat"). We could do something similar for our Monty Python example, but let's skip to our original depth-1 skip skit.
[ Rest of lesson under construction, please return ]
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