Fantasy: May 09, 2018 Issue [#8888] |
Fantasy
This week: Lucky Edited by: Robert Waltz More Newsletters By This Editor
1. About this Newsletter 2. A Word from our Sponsor 3. Letter from the Editor 4. Editor's Picks 5. A Word from Writing.Com 6. Ask & Answer 7. Removal instructions
Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Destiny is a good thing to accept when it's going your way. When it isn't, don't call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery, or simple bad luck.
-Joseph Heller |
ASIN: B07K6Z2ZBF |
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You're lucky to be reading this.
No, seriously. The Universe is trying to kill you. As far as we know, every last square centimeter of it, save for a layer proportionately thinner than an eggshell, is uncaringly inimical to human life. And even within that shell, we have (just to name a few) volcanoes, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, deserts, wildfires, and Australia, all with you in their sights.
Any number of things could destroy you at any moment. Any number of things could have destroyed you, or your ancestors, sometime in the past 4 billion or so years.
But they didn't. So you're lucky.
Luck, however, will only get you so far... in fiction. Sure, people have survived incredible odds in real life, but in a story, we don't usually want to hear about it. We want to hear how they were saved by something - their own ingenuity, the power of love, proper preparation... anything but sheer dumb luck.
Oh, you can probably get away with luck once or twice in a story. It helps to lampshade it, like in the scene in Pulp Fiction where all the bullets miss - though even there, one of the characters explains it by divine intervention - which is, after all, indistinguishable from luck.
This goes right out the window if luck is established as your character's superpower, like the previews are showing for Deadpool 2, which I know everyone wants to see. But of course, not all your characters can be that lucky.
So even though you're lucky, that's not enough for your characters. Keep 'em unreal.
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Some fantasy for you:
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