Hacking Consistency Without Getting Bored 🕸️ Issue 13
The Making of OTC 1: The Complete Kuukua Collection
In my last Spinneret post, I announced the relaunch of my passion project, On the Ceiling. It’s a three-fold project, and the first part has now been compiled into The Complete Kuukua Collection, which you can now download and read for free!
In 2017, after I wrote the first story, “Kuukua and the Magical Markers”, I realized that it was the beginning of something bigger. But I also knew that I lacked the sort of discipline I aspired towards as a writer, so I decided that the first portion of this bigger thing, whatever it turned out to be in its final form, would be my consistency project. On the Ceiling thus turned into a personal challenge, with the following goals:
Each month for the rest of the year 2017, I would release a new OTC story on my WordPress blog for free. Since I released the first one in May 2017, the rest of the project would carry on through December 2017—a perfect number of 8 Ananse-themed stories in 8 months, because a spider has 8 legs!
I was not allowed to miss a month; no matter how horrible the draft was, I would put a story out before the end of the month, and so I better make sure it wouldn’t bring shame upon my name. Alas, some of the writing was bad enough that I did indeed grow to be ashamed of it, and that’s why I rewrote every single story, keeping the plot the same, and re-released them in 2024 on the new site.
To help me be consistent, I would use a formula—something akin to what I now know is called a beat sheet in screenwriting. (Around the time I was working on this project, I joined a nascent screenwriting club on my college campus.) Using a formula meant that I didn’t have to rack my brain trying to start building from scratch with every single story or stumble in the dark until I found a plot that happened to work.
The Beat Sheet
Let me spend a moment expanding on this. It sounds quite technical, but even before I knew what it was, I sensed it intuitively. The earliest instance of this I can recall is how, listening to the High School Musical soundtracks as a kid, I realized that the same movie had essentially been done three times. It’s interesting that it wasn’t the plot that clued me in, but the music. For example, each movie had to have a song that Troy and Gabriella sang with romantic energy, which Sharpay covers in a different musical genre (HSM 1: “What I’ve Been Looking For”, HSM 2: “You Are the Music in Me”, HSM 3: “Just Wanna Be With You”). Each movie had to have a boys-boys song (HSM 1: “Get’cha Head in the Game”, HSM 2: “I Don’t Dance”, HSM 3: “The Boys Are Back”). Troy always had to have a conflict-saturated solo (HSM 1: “Get’cha Head in the Game”, HSM 2: “Bet On It”, HSM 3: “Scream”), Gabriella always had to have a Troy-has-broken-my-heart song (HSM 1: “When There Was Me and You”, HSM 2: “I Gotta Go My Own Way”, HSM 3: “Walk Away”), and so on. For better or worse, much of my informal training in storytelling comes from passively studying Disney shows and movies.
It was more than a year after wrapping up OTC 1 (that is, all eight of the original Kuukua stories) when I got into the formerly Fox and subsequently Netflix show, Lucifer. Through Lucifer, I realized that the police procedural had a beat sheet so exact that I could accurately estimate how many minutes into each episode the pivotal moments would occur: the discovery of the murder victim, the timestamp for when the obvious suspect is proved not to be the murderer, the timestamp for when all the clues slide into place, allowing the characters to pinpoint the true murderer. It quickly became one of my favorite shows, and I’ll speak more about it later in this post.
Visualizing a Consistency Project
Hacking consistency involves several little tricks and one of them, for me, is making sure that the thing I’m working on is constantly in my face, so that it becomes very difficult to brush it to the side or forget about it entirely. Visualizing my projects also helps me to think through them, as does physically engaging my body by using analog writing and craft tools.
This is a photo of an OTC project board I created for my dorm room wall while I was in college, in 2017. The main categories were:
The timeline—the months when each story was meant to go live.
The titles—which I had decided all ought to be alliterative (Kuukua and the Magical Markers, Kuukua and the Twisting Tablecloth, Kuukua and the Haunted Hair, etc.) because why not?
The setting—because this would help me to design the Main Event of each story, which was always some trickster prank played by Kuukua and her friends. After all, what is an Ananse story without a harebrained scheme?
The era in Kuukua’s life—given that the stories were so formulaic (i.e. there was a prank in every story), it became particularly important for Kuukua to go through some sort of character evolution from story to story, or else the project would grow too stale for me to stay engaged, how much more for my potential readers. While I based my concept on Ananse folklore, which is famous for making characters as consistently flat as possible so that they can play the same roles in several stories, I wasn’t actually writing folktales yet. That would come later, in the second arm of the OTC project, Green Green Grasses.
Finally, the subject—the thematic anchor of each story, often some social phenomenon I felt was peculiar to Ghanaian (middle-class) society, based often on my experiences and observations as someone who was born and raised in Ghana and experienced Ghana Twitter throughout the 2010s.
Below my table-like project board, I had a brainstorm section, which was where I threw ideas out as they occurred to me for stories within the first series or for what would become OTC 3: The Okonore Trilogy (look out for it in early 2025!). This additional space helped me think a little outside the rigidity of my main board and often fed right back into it.
Not Getting Bored (or Boring)
When you’re working with formulaic storytelling strategies, it can be a struggle to keep things dynamic enough that it doesn’t feel like the exact same thing over and over. Take the High School Musical movies, for example. The songs on the soundtrack between films weren’t always a one-to-one match. The boys-boys song in HSM 1 is sung by Troy alone; in HSM 2, it’s Chad and Ryan; in HSM 3, it’s Troy and Chad. The romantic Troy-Gabriella song in HSM 1 is covered by Sharpay and Ryan; in HSM 2, it’s covered by Sharpay and Troy himself; in HSM 3, it’s covered by Sharpay and a minor character called Jimmie (so minor that I had to look his name up to remember it). Of course, Sharpay’s goal is constantly shifting, as is the reason for Troy’s conflict, and other elements within the movie trilogy shift within the defined framework as well.
In the case of Lucifer, even though the police procedural format was as predictable as the sunrise (at least in parts of the world that are close to the equator), the twists, cliffhangers, and long-drawn-out drama were introduced through the fantasy aspect of the show. There was a relatively unpredictable fantasy storyline full of crazy relationships, angels, demons, and other characters from the Christian Bible and Apocryphal books running underneath the repetitive murder mysteries that I thought was brilliant and incredibly engaging. So, that’s another way to go about things: combining genres to allow for consistency and dynamism.
In the case of OTC, I had some advantages. One of them was the boredom inspired by my own source material: Kwaku Ananse stories. There was a young Ghanaian filmmaker whose scripts I occasionally reviewed in my spare time. When he found out that I was working on a project based on Ananse, he snubbed it, being one of the people who believed there wasn’t much originality in Ghanaian stories and legends. I do not blame him. Little did he know, my main character, Kuukua Annan, felt the same way! I had to challenge myself to put enough of a twist on the legacy of Kwaku Ananse to make it exciting enough even for me to write, so there was a level of personal challenge involved.
I incorporated many hopefully refreshing elements into my worldbuilding: “Ananse” being not a name, but a title passed down from generation to generation, “the Ananse” being many individuals throughout history, the capacity for Ananse to be male or female, Ananse existing as a human student in JSS3 in the 21st century, and so on. But for the dynamic aspect, character evolution was the key dynamic element. There’s a running theme throughout the stories that Kuukua is being prepared to take on the primary role of Ananse, and though vaguely defined, it does mean that she is being actively trained and equipped by people in her life to mature into that role. It is an interesting challenge, evolving a character while keeping her consistent.
Another aspect of the process which helped me not to get bored was the fact that I had decided to write a “genius” character who was able to come up and get away with practical jokes that were difficult to achieve. In order to write a genius, I had to try and be one, to think as she would, and heaven knows I am no mechanical engineer. While Kuukua Annan is no Artemis Fowl, she is what I could handle at this stage of my life, and I am immensely glad I pushed through all my doubts, anxieties, and intensities of my academic schedule, to create her. 🕸️
BTS: Revision
Let me round this post off with a brief acknowledgement of the work it takes to revise bad writing! When I say that I rewrote OTC 1 in 2024, I meant it. Below is a screenshot of what my manuscript looked like before I finalized all changes. In Scrivener’s revision mode, you can select a color to indicate any revisions you make to your original text. Everything red is new; everything black is what was already there.
And if, perchance, you read the new OTC 1 and wonder why it still sounds a bit juvenile, well, that’s because I had to apply better writing techniques for series of tales which are still narrated from the first-person perspective of a teenage girl! There’s a lot I could do about the structure, diction, and stylistic formatting choices; the tone, however, had to remain as authentic as possible to my beloved Kuukua.
Until the next issue,
Akotowaa 🕸️