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 |  "Putting on the Game Face" |
  This blog is a doorway into the mind of Percy Goodfellow. Don't be shocked at the lost boys of Namby-Pamby Land and the women they cavort with. Watch as his caricatures blunder about the space between audacious hope and the wake-up calls of tomorrow. Behold their scrawl on the CRT, like graffitti on a subway wall. Examine it through your own lens...Step up my friends, and separate the pepper from the rat poop. Welcome to my abode...the armpit of yesterday, the blinking of an eye and a plank to the edge of Eternity. Note: This blog is my journal. I've no interest in persuading anyone to adopt my views. What I write is whatever happens to interest me when I start pounding the keys. |
| The BMFIC Where was I yesterday….On a rant or what? I am amazed by the response these blogs get… mostly ambivalence but everybody seems to respond differently. I affect people. Some laugh, some cry and some would like to see me returned to the dust from whence I came. But I’ll get the last laugh. Someday somebody will read these blogs and realize that everyone in these times wasn’t some pie eyed liberal who believed the problem with our Republic was the slow cyclic rate of the OMB printing press. Oh yeah… The March of the Ten Thousand. Well it’s time to tell my astute readers something they already guessed. At the cocktail party the Sultan murdered and/or put in chains all the dumb-assed Greek Generals. He incorrectly assumed that by doing this the Greeks would no longer be able to function. The reason he believed this was because that is what would have happened in a Middle Eastern army. These Middle Easterners believed then and still do that a society is a hive and if you kill the queen bee everything else comes to a screeching halt. What they never understood was that their Greek enemy, a short 500 years earlier, had led humanity down out of the trees. Now pay attention, ( I know, I know) everybody didn’t come down to earth and run with this notion like a bunch of lemmings…There are still plenty back in the trees swinging clueless from branch to branch. What happened was that a few came down out of the trees. The revolution was in the way some people came to think about things, but most folks then and to this day are still old school thinkers. What it boils down to is how you define “Good.” To the Middle Easterner, “Good” is whatever the Sultan (Mullah, Iotola) says it is. He had the power then and now and what he said was how good was defined. This is how they think. Just because the jungle dried up don’t believe for a minute that these clowns are operating with any other than a prehistoric mind set. What the Sultan couldn’t grasp was that the Greeks had transitioned from hive thinking to a distributed data base. Greek Society was no longer a main frame but a sea of laptops. Once word got back to the Greek camp that all their generals had been put to the sword, guess what happened? Did they all fall to the fetal position and go into a catatonic stupor of terror, frenzy and anxiety? Did they gnash their teeth and cry out “Woe is Me? NO! Of course they didn’t… The held an election and appointed new Generals. It was about as non a problem as it gets….that didn’t cause much more than the ripple of a second thought. Then they went back to business as usual and the military machine didn’t slow down by a hick-up… BECAUSE the Greek mind no longer thought like a Persian mind…The Greek mind defied GOOD using reason, (The Scientific Method) while the rest of the world continued to blithely use the outdated, historical model that held that all wisdom resided in the pee brain of whatever Grand Wizard had the biggest biceps. The Greeks decided to go home and they did. Their epic journey back to Greece is known as the March of the Ten Thousand and despite that fact that everything the Sultan tried to do to stop them, it was all for naught. If you don’t believe me read about it and while you do pay particular attention to the speeches given prior to the many battles they fought. If you don’t see the problem solving model being used in selling “Good” then you aren’t paying attention. (Good is a powerful motivator when your ass hangs in the consequence) Except for some extremely modest combat attrition almost every soldier returned home…And let me remind everyone that it’s a long hike from Bagdad to Athens pursued by a numerically superior and supported enemy. Now before you brand me some sort of pot smoking, bleary eyed idealist, be advised that I am well aware that everybody didn’t come down out of the trees. Even where the science of collective thinking and the networking of minds didn’t quite catch on in a homogenous way…with everybody in a given Western Society, enough did to take us to a whole new level. In almost every contest since, where the West has been pitted militarily with the East smaller well trained armies have triumphed. It continued with Alexander the Great down through the Crusades and into the present. They still don’t get it. We can send them to our Universities and they can get degrees in medicine, engineering and Nuclear Bomb making but they still don’t buy into the fact that a small group of Westerners came down out of the mountains over five thousand years ago with a fierce and independent spirit and said “Anybody has it in them to be a GENERAL.“ Some might have more than others, but collectively, following the science of an optimizing model, (at least in part) an enlightened society is capable of so much more than a strong man who tries to run everything with his individual lamp. Tomorrow I’ll talk about Iran and Nuclear Weapons. |
| Those Darn Greeks Most TV talk show personalities and Radio Talk Show Hosts would have you think that the world began with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Well it didn’t. There was some stuff happening on this planet before 1776. American History is very short…I believe I told you that my father once said that he talked to a civil war veteran as a boy who related a story of his great grand something or other told, who fought in the American Revolution. It is sort of like JRR Tolkien’s Silmarillion, which shows that in the history of the Elf’s, the Lord or the Rings Trilogy was a footnote. Democracy started with the Greeks… In days of old they were more than the seedy group of socialists that currently occupies the turf. Anyway these Greeks of the old school pushed back the frontiers of enlightened thinking in virtually every area imaginable and it used to be… In the Civil War era, that a liberal arts education was the only education and it carried with it a liberal dose of Latin and Greek. This is where all the fancy notions in our Constitution came from. Jefferson took them from the Greeks and the members of the Constitutional Convention pretty much understood what he was talking about. Now there were many Greek States and Democracy was not the only form of rule…indeed it was, outside of Athens, not to be seen much in evidence. This is because it required a citizen to both look out for their self interest as well as the public good at the same time. Is that pie in the sky or what? Anyway after the Peloponnesian War… you know after the Spartans finally kicked the Athenian’s ass… with the help of the Persians….Sneaky Devils…, those Persians….The Greeks were flat on their butts, after years of war fighting, rape, pillage and destruction. Now in those times Cyrus, the second son of the King of Persia was the conduit for much of the financial aid and political support that had flowed into the Spartan Camp. He saw in the unemployed Greek armies a fighting machine that had taken war fighting to an all time high level. His political ambitions were to displace his brother as Sultan and to this end hired 10K of these Greek Mercenaries. So good were these Greek fighters that in short order they cut through a vastly numerically superior Persian enemy and were on the outskirts of Bagdad. It is here that Cyrus did something stupid and went and got himself killed. To take advantage of the power vacume, Big Brother, the Sultan, or whatever his title was… declared a truce and called everyone together to negotiate what was going to happen next. He set up tents, arranged for catering, good food and wine, no doubt some dancing girls and some of the amenities for which the decadent Persians are famous. Naturally all the Greek generals accepted the invitation and flocked to the gathering. I’ll tell you tomorrow what happened, if you haven‘t already guessed. For all their genius, the Greeks of the day were pretty dissipated and their enlightment didn't run all that deep into common sense. |
| A Writers/Warrior’s Mind A writer needs to connect with a reader or audience at a visceral level. It isn’t enough to just make some sort of abstract intellectual statement. I come from a family of academic pontificators who have spent their lives trying to impress each other with how smart they are. These are people who honestly believe that Socialism and Mao are the only way to go. I won’t go off on that tangent but only say that as a nation we have forgotten what discipline is. It used to be that most everyone had a remedial understanding of what this concept was and some actually learned to apply it to themselves. This was called self-discipline. It began as an externally imposed set of values learned in the home, church, school and finally the graduate course in the military. In the process people learned something of what it was and seeing the benefits, applied it to themselves. It was good that they did because self discipline in a free society is essential to preserving a Democracy. The Greeks who “thought up” Democracy were not overly optimistic about its utility as a system of government and the ability of its advocates to discipline themselves and give the public good the same attention as their self interest. Indeed the term Idiot derives from the Greek word “idios” which was applied to those who refused to accept a role in dispensing the public good. However, for all its warts it is way better than option number 2. Sorry, You must hate it when I go off on one of my inane digressions… Please be nice and don’t hold it against me. I can’t help being a nerd. Last night I dreamed I was back in the Military and was on the verge of retirement. I was being tasked to show someone how to write an Operations Order. You think writing a novel is hard….There is a huge gulf between theory and practice in both undertakings. The military version is a process of gaining an edge on your enemy and it begins with the Commander’s Estimate of the Situation. The term Staff Study has evolved from this step which boils down to deciding the best thing to do. The operative word is “Best” which means, to a military mind, the optimal solution. Good is coming up with something better than doing nothing at all…Better is a choice between two goods and best is the optimal solution, considering all the possible good options. (Maybe even a couple of bad ones.  )So the process starts when the commander and staff, examine the problem and independently decide the best way to solve it. The staff working diligently in a tent and the General off scratching his ass somewhere, probably talking to one of his dick-head Brigade Commanders. Now peeling back the next layer of the onion the General and his staff must first define what the problem is. This is a huge task… A hundred people can look at the same set of circumstances and come up with a hundred different definitions of what the problem is. (Does this help explain why the world is so screwed up?) So to make it easier the “Brain Trust” focus on the situation and says….The problem is to determine the best way to….Screw the enemy.” “Save my ass” perhaps “rape, plunder and pillage,” whatever it is that they have percolating in their seedy brains... Don’t forget that there are armies representing states out there that have radically different points of view on what constitutes “Best.” The above boilerplate, The Problem is…to determine the best way to…. also insures there are several distinct and discreet possibilities and not a single two pole switch with a “go/nogo” position. So after defining the problem, and choosing an appropriate course of action the General Staff writes the Operations Order which is the plan for the Division (Corp…Army)implementing the chosen course. This is the document I was being asked to write in my dream. And here is the interesting part…Like at WDC some writers are better at writing than others….Some have more experience and talent and then there is the time and urgency factor. If you want it bad you get it bad. This used to be an axiom in planning circles and it contains more than a germ of truth.…Usually it translates to, if you want it fast… there’s going to be some quality tradeoffs. So the process gets abbreviated and is expanded or contracted to fit the time available. You might get a full blown set of documents or you might get a hip shot vision of the first thing that pops into some high paid moron’s brain. I won’t take this discussion any further…. I don’t want to sound like too much of a partisan. You don’t have to have a military mind to grasp what I’m trying to say. Anybody who writes quality stuff, does not need to be schooled by Percy Goodfellow….Who the FRACK is he anyway and….? (What a GAY sounding name!) |
| The Exploratory Writing Contest This contest is being proposed for sponsorship by New Horizon’s Academy for those who want to try the exploratory writing process. What is that you ask? It’s an approach a writer can use to get ready to write a larger work. There are many writers here at WDC who have well developed tactical writing skills but who hesitate to move on to something bigger. For example they write good flash fiction in the 1K range or short stores in the 3K but when it comes to a novella, a stage or screen drama or even an epic poem they are not so comfortable in taking the next step. For example in my class I found that students struggle with story line and character development. In a shorter work that is not as big an issue as in a longer one. This begs the question how one comes up with a good story line and interesting characters and this contest offers a different approach for delving into it. I think the way I will approach it is with a check list a student can use as they cast about and get their characters talking to one another. Ideas need a chance to percolate and bubble up and that developmental opportunity was not enough in evidence for the One Act Play Workshop. Having time to focus on a thematic story and strong central character should pay big dividends In this contest a NHA student or any WDC member will be expected to write six (6) vignettes with a common back story and characters. These vignettes will be in the range of 1K to 3K in word count. They will be episodic not so much in a sequential sense as sharing the same back story. The writer will take the Academy prompt and each week write a vignette. The Academy Weekly Prompts I am thinking will be: 1. A very special person: (I.e. A strong central character) 2. A Want, need or desire. 3. A Life Changing Event 4. Crisis #1 Self Induced 5. Crisis #2 Externally induced 6. Crisis #3 Tsunami, the biggie, climax Once the six vignettes are written, they will be loosely arrayed and from the context a story line will be extracted. Then that story line will be imbued with the ingredients in the story telling model producing a Comprehensive Outline (CO). This CO is the end product of the exercise and provides a good start point for writing a larger work. A writer does not have to be a student of NHA to participate in the contest. However, to receive a weekly faculty assessment and take advantage of the last two wrap-up lessons, enrollment is required. This faculty assessment is not actually necessary for someone wanting to try out the technique and evaluate its merits, nor are the final two lessons on pulling out the outline and inserting the dramatic ingredients. Nor is it necessary to enter the NHA contest. Any of the fifty contests on the WDC contest list could be used to serve this purpose. Everyone is encouraged to test this technique and see if it’s something they can use . The contest, once sanctioned, will begin in January and run weekly. The prompt will be officially posted on Tuesday and the contest will close Monday, at midnight WDC time. Winners will be announced on Wednesday. Contestants cannot win twice in a row to give everyone a fair opportunity. Those who win have the option of submitting the following week but as non competitors. Better yet they are encouraged to try other WDC contests. Here are the rules 13+ Can’t win two weeks in a row Don’t have to be an NHA student 1K-3K word count Post the word count and prompt at beginning of submission Submission will be evaluated by panel of judges using a rank order and point counting process. We are hoping that this contest will offer a springboard for WDC writers to expand their skills into more ambitious projects. |
| Lazy Days and Fridays…. My goodness…. What a lot of medical issues are cropping up in my extended family…Not sure exactly what “extended” means but to me it refers to those who are not in my immediate family. Does that make sense? Anyway I won’t even go into all that except to say we need to count our blessings and take nothing for granted. Life is good until you weaken, my Dad always used to say….am I repeating myself? Today I talked to Karen and Katz. Karen is the Head Administrator of New Horizon’s Academy (NHA) and Katzendragonz is her Executive Officer. We discussed my idea for an Exploratory Writing Course. We came I think to a consensus which should work well. I will develop the course as a prerequisite to the One Act Play and test it to see if it has a broader application to other courses at NHA. So today I have been cleaning up the “straw man” I plunked down into an E-Folder last night. Then I plunked down the three contest pages that are necessary for the contest. I didn’t fill them out, but they are now in a folder ready for further development. My first student will be teaching a course Novel writing and I can’t wait to see what she comes up with. We need more advanced courses to give balance and symmetry to our basic and intermediate courses. I am full of ideas but I have to restrain myself and it is good that I have Karen and Katz to use as a sounding board. There is a new crop of sensual prose writers that is coming on board at WDC that are very talented. They are not as graphic in my opinion as some of the old school writers and are coming up with some good stories and not the same oh, same on thing. Anyway their tactical writing skills are exceptionally well developed and its hard to tell if they have the operational and strategic where-with-all to write a more in-depth work. I will be trying to get some of them to take may course and find out. I would like to see the sensual prose cadre move from the flash fiction form to a more expanded 3K word limit. That makes it possible to write stories with a story line that goes beyond wham, bam thank you ma’am. Maybe include a bit more emotional and sensory development and get a better look at the characters beyond the hoots and glutes. Tomorrow is the first day of hunting season. Linda, before she went off to Marshfield put blaze orange collars on the dogs. They look funny but they get hunting season. Tomorrow when the shooting starts they will be sticking close to the house. The don’t like the shooting especially the lab…The doodle doesn’t really mind the noise although tonight the coyotes started tuning up and she was getting nervous. Tomorrow I have to get some more wood split. Maybe I need to work some with Mark to try and get ahead some more. The weather forecast said it is supposed to rain. This has been the wettest year Wisconsin has seen in a long time. The ladies of the Church have a chili supper for the hunters as an annual fund raiser and Linda has me delivering some crackers and butter to the enterprise. It has been a long day and I think it is time for me to hit the rack. Good-night everybody. |
| Day in the Life of Percy Today Linda and I went to Baraboo and ate at the Cracker Barrel. I really like the chicken strips and vegetables. Linda had some soup and liked it as well. Then we went over to the mall which was practically deserted. The Wisconsin Dells area is very seasonal and there isn’t much going on. The fudge shop which sells a $5 Ice cream cone was deserted. I bought a half pound of fudge and it was $7.50. It was good but very rich and I could only eat a little. Then we went into Land’s End and the dyes were so overpowering that I had to get out. I walked around and even though it was cold the air was fresh and I did a shuffle/jog and sang a happy tune to myself. “Life is good,” my dad used to say, “if you don’t weaken.” My dad was supposed to take over the family farm but just couldn’t bring himself to do it. He loved the army and after WW2 stayed in. How does the song go….? “How will you get him back on the farm when he’s been to gay Paree?” Or it went something like that. Somehow I could never picture my mother living on a farm. She liked the social aspects of the service and all the entertaining and bridge playing. Plus she was a natural with languages and learned to speak them wherever we went. My Dad was a short little fellow and being in the Army made him feel like a “Big Shot.” So he loved every minute of the time he spent in the service. I didn’t share his deep and abiding love for the vocation even though I spent a career in the Army. I had an aptitude for it but not a passion and I never fit the Airborne Ranger Profile. Still I was successful and it put food on the table and the girls through college. Glad I was when I retired and came back to the farm my great grandfather homesteaded. I went back to technical school and got a certificate as a diesel mechanic. “It was good enough for me and Linda Barkley” I think the lyrics went “….good enough for me and Molly MaGee…” Pretty clever the way I twisted them around, don’t cha know? So here we are living on the farm and in two weeks Linda will retire as a nurse from Marshfield Hospital. It will be good to have her around and not see her always trying to psych herself up halfway through the week. How well I remember that drill. I have always been something of a connectional thinker. I see things and I make connections. Maybe that’s why I have such a curiosity about everything and like writing so much. I connect things from my life to the characters I write about and when I do they seem to come to life. Da da da da….There goes that twilight music again. I think a writer can animate his/her characters by imbuing them with the spirt of past experiences. That a character really becomes more real that life if you put a piece of yourself into the sketch you make of them. I was amazed last night when in just a couple of hours I wrote the pages for a new course I am proposing at New Horizons Academy; Talked about in yesterday’s blog. I like teaching the One Act Play Workshop and think the Exploratory Writing Workshop will be fun as well. Plus I am going to have to crank up a contest. The last one I built didn’t have very many takers and I shut it down for lack of interest. This one should do better. We learn much more from our failures than we ever do from out successes. We tend to take them for granted until they turn gimpy. Then we realize how good we had it. Next week Linda wants to go see the new Twilight Movie. I read the series and couldn’t put them down. What a gifted writer, “What’s her Name?” is. I think she should have let the two sides slug it out but then who am I to say. She had a spin off character called Bree Tanner and wrote a novella about her. That happens to me a lot… I get a character that might only get a couple pages of viz in something I write but that I find myself really intrigued by. That happened with the characters, Manny Hardin, Petra and Bedelia. My wife really likes Bedelia and wants me to write more about her and forget about Manny and Petra… Linda likes to play scrabble on line with her sister and daughters and friends. They get so into it and delight in sticking it to one another. My youngest daughter is an awesome player and keeps trying to beat her husband who is a real powerhouse of an intellect. One would never think it to look at him…He’s laid back and a “Good Ole Boy,” but he is one bright fellow. I didn’t really want to write about the usual things tonight so have just been rambling on… It’s getting late. As my daughter used to say… “See you later on.“ |
| Exploratory Writing Epilogue to the Outdoor Wood Stove. It turned out that the problem with the stove was air in the pump as well as a plug in the line and a shorting pump. Yes the three of these were at issue to one degree or the other but the final problem was air in the line. After repeated attempts I cracked the lines with the motors going and air spit out and the water finally started circulating. Still it demonstrates that with persistence, money, and unlimited time anything is achievable. The stove is now working beautifully. What do you suppose the moral to that story is. New writers tend to get an idea and just go off and start writing about it. It’s like learning to swim by jumping off the end of the pier. Rather than discourage this natural inclination I have been thinking about developing a course at New Horizon’s Academy (NHA) that takes advantage of it. I am thinking about naming the course “Exploratory Writing.” The reason I like the possibility is because it is a technique I have been using here at WDC and one that really dovetails with and takes advantage of the other tools the site offers. First of all it would be an NHA course and that is a real benefit to new writers. Second I have found that as a teacher of the One Act Play Course that my students are often in a quandary coming up with a story line and characters that are worthy of all the time and effort that goes into writing a drama. Third it would be a great prerequisite for my class because it would give time to do some pre-course development. The idea came when I looked at some of the story lines my students came up with not to mention some of the characters. What this course will do is give them time to think about story line, and character development before engaging in a more serious undertaking. This is my concept of how it would work. The idea would be to write a weekly vignette or poem and enter it in a contest. There would be two contest options, a new contest under the auspecies of New Horizon’s Academy or one of the fifty contests on the WDC list. These vignettes would be episodic and use a common back story. In the last week the vignettes would be brought together into a larger work. It would be like serials that are all related to one another. The class would last eight (8) weeks and the students would write six vignettes or six poems for six contests. These could range from flash fiction (short poems) to more fully developed short stories or poems but they would contain the same characters and give opportunity for developing broader ideas ideas. Anyway this is a technique I often use that I call “Exploratory Writing.” The reason it works so well at WDC is because the writer gets feedback from the system, and the contest prompts force the author to go off on tangents, in the course of which, new characters begin to emerge and the story line builds momentum and takes on new twists. Students would be encouraged in the prompts to do character development. So this would be the Lesson Outline for the eight weeks. Note that these are also some of the Dramatic Ingredients essential to telling a good story or writing an allegorical type poem. Prompts/Lessons Week 1: A Special Person (Central Character) Week 2: A Want, Need or Desire Week 3: A Life Changing Event Week 4: Crisis One Week 5: Crisis Two Week 6: Crisis Three Week 7: The Thread Outline Week 8: The Comprehensive Outline In the last two weeks of the course the student would collect their vignettes or poems and write (1) A story outline and (2) the last week a comprehensive outline which would include the story outline and the dramatic ingredients plus a synopsis of each of the stanza themes/chapters (vignettes) This would set the student up for writing a larger work. In the One Act Play course they could hit the ground running and be ready to take real advantage of the next eight weeks instead of scratching their heads and wondering about the story line and characters they need to be coming up with. |
| Last week it snowed and the power went out for about three hours. While we were “powerless” Linda and I heard a “Ker-thunk” in the basement and couldn’t figure out what it was. We never did get to the bottom of it but soon there-after our outdoor wood stove quite working. By that I mean there was still heat in the box and the garage circuit was operating but the house circuit was "tits up." By feeling the supply and return lines at the stove heat could be felt… but in the heat exchanger in the basement there was only a chilly sixty degrees. "Ah-ha!" I summarized, my technically adept mind clicking into passing gear. "it can only be one of two things. Either the line is plugged or the pump has quit working." When I turned on the spigot at the heat exchanger and only a trickle came out….”Must be plugged,” I concluded. So I closed the valves to the supply and return lines and disconnected the two plastic lines that ran from the outdoor stove to the house. Then I went into the basement and hooked a hose from the main well input pipe to the return and supply lines spigot. You know those little rubber sealing gaskets? Well I was short one and when I turned on the pressure water flew everywhere. Unfortunately Linda was downstairs at the furnace and called me on the cell phone in a panic. I told her to turn the spigots off. You see, I had already derived empirically that there was barely any water coming out the disconnected return line.. “Darn line is plugged," I sagely concluded, stroking my jaw with certainty.. So I went downstairs and Linda was mopping up the water and giving me hell for the mess. I told her I had to go and buy a “Snake” to clear out the stoppage. She was livid and told me to quit trying to save two cents and call the plumber…. We had already spent 3K to fix the valve on the April Air Unit, a sump pump and new linoleum for the two rooms that suffered big time water damage two weeks ago. I told her to relax, and I’d be back to fix the problem. So I went into Westfield bought the snake and returned. Now I needed fifty feet but the most they had was a twenty foot one. So I came back and snaked it out as best I could. Then I went back down into the basement and this time made sure I had an O-Ring for the hose and hooked it back up and turned on the water pressure. Then I went upstairs and out to the stove in time to see a plume of water squirting out of the disconnected return line. “Yes! Yes! I said overjoyed…“The water pressure blew the stoppage out. So I hooked everything back up and turned on the power. To my disappointment the pump wasn’t working even though the water was now flowing. So I went to Stephen’s Point and $125 dollars later, plus gas, I was back to replace the pump. As I went to install it I noticed a flow arrow on the pump. "Why is it pointing that way?" I asked myself. The flow is in the other direction. I checked the old pump and sure enough the flow pointed the opposite way. "No problem, just turn the pump I concluded…" However, the pump would not fit truned around because it was not symmetrical and one side stuck out further than the other and there was insufficient boiler clearance. This meant I had to either go back and get a new pump or install an elbow to get more clearance. I adopted option number two, got the parts and installed them to see if everything fit. They did and the pump seemed to be working, but the fitting were leaking and it was dark and I was all wet and cold and my frustration level meter was pegging in the red. So I turned off the valves, shut down the electricity and came inside. Switching to the gas back-up I said,"screw it….I’ll finish up in the morning…" So here I am… Will let you know tomorrow how it all turns out… Life on the farm….Sheesh! If it ain’t one thing its another. |
Today I want to talk about this important aspect of the process. I get comments all the time that writing from an outline is all but impossible for most writers. This is because they try and use an outline to accomplish the impossible. Trying to come up with a story line using an outline as starting point is about as futile and frustrating as it gets. Note that in writing the comprehensive outline for the Petra story, the first step was “Exploratory Writing.“ At WDC this is made easy with all the contests. You simply take that amorphous germ of an idea and write a vignette about it using one of the contests. I suggest a contest that has a 3K word ceiling. Flash fiction, which I will define here as 1K or less really sharpens your skills but what you are shooting for is the meat of about a chapter that can be expanded later on. Further a contest that runs every week is superior to one that runs monthly for this purpose. So you enter this “short story” and get some feedback….usually there is at least the “Obligatory Review” provided by the host/hostess of the contest, (they like repeat entries) and you have a beginning. The next week there is a new prompt and you are ready for your next vignette. This is also a good place to do a little character development. There are two popular approaches to doing this….The first is to use a “Trait Profile” and the second is to do a “Sketch.” As new characters begin to evolve use one or the other of these back-story type techniques to sharpen your character's focus. These profiles/sketches are like a back-story is to a novel. You will use some of it in the actual writing but most will remain submerged. While the audience/reader won’t see it all the writer needs to get to know the characters on a much more intimate basis and as the picture expands the profile/sketch should be expanded and like the back-story become a living document. Under the umbrella of the overarching story that begins to spin as you enter these contests from week to week, the thread begins to percolate up. For most minds it is difficult to outline a story that doesn’t exist yet and regurgitating a ten K story line from a 1K brain can be overwhelming. So you let the story bubble up in little chunks while you have fun doing the contests. When you have say ten vignettes written then stop….At this point you have the story line and from there you can write the tread of an outline and include in it the dramatic ingredients as I demonstrated yesterday in the one I provided on Petra’s story. Let me say here since I still have some room left, that once you have the Comprehensive outline, writing the Novella becomes much more doable. You know your story as a beginning middle and end and if you write one chunk at a time you will soon come to “The End” and have an integrated manuscript that contains all the traditional story telling ingredients. The writer isn’t close to finished at this point but is better postured than if the manuscript was in the final polish phase where it tends to become rigid and resistant to anything more than final tweaking. The Manuscript in the Comprehensive Outline Phase is totally pliable and expandable. Chapters can be added that move the story along, more exposition added, and all that other work that will expand the word count into a least twice it was in the vignettes. In the military, a guy in Napoleon’s time, named Clausewitz, was a thinker who came up with many innovations in the development of the German General Staff . One of these was The Three Levels of War. These are the Tactical, the Operational and the Strategic. In writing a novel the outline is analogous to the strategic, the Operational… to the Comprehensive Outline and the tactical to writing each chapter. Trying to juggle all three at the same time simply doesn’t work… not in war or in working a novel. The science of storytelling requires making each a separate component and then working each part as a manageable subset of the whole. |
| This Comprehensive Outline is provided for Illustrative purpose to anyone interested in the process. The exploratory writing vignettes that coaxed the story line into existance are in my portfolio under the file Petra. Most of the sensual prose will be edited out in the next phase. (this is after all a fantasy) Essence and the Stones: Petra’s Story The Central Character: Petra Supporting Character #1: Creedor Kartz Supporting Character #2 Hilda Supporting Character #3: Mariana Other Characters Big Mortichi Jason Bedelia Guiles Horance Cracious Life Changing Event: The Attack by Empire forces at the gorge. Petra’s Want Need or Desire: Petra, a lesbian, wants to have a family and children. Resolve: Petra resolves to accept Creedor’s proposal in order to escape confinement. The three Crisis Crisis # 1: The Murder attempt Crisis #2: The Revolt of the Goldens Crisis #3: Choosing between the Empire and the Confederation Denouement: Delivering the Child… Name of Novel: Essence and the Stones: Petra‘s Story. Synopsis and Story Line (Outline): Petra is a Simian Elf. This means her mother was a Golden and her father is Horance the Wizard. As a Simian she has well developed telepathic powers that exceed those of a Blue Blooded pre-puberescent female elf by about fourfold. She was used at the Empire's fortress, located at Myrocenia , to “Pick” minds and when the advanced base fell was taken as a child to the land of the Tristonian Elf’s where she grew up and became a “Beacon.“ A Beacon is a telepathic sender with the Special Operating Forces used for long range communications. While on a Mission to the Gorge the Sword of Orwald was found. This Relic dated to the War of Confederation and was reputed to have great powers. The Empire sent Troops to recover it and Creedor Kratz, head of Psychic operations was attached to the mission. Chapter 1: Discovery: Story begins with exposition showing Petra’s desire in life and the problem it inherently holds. She feels an attraction to other women but also a desire to be a mother and have a family. The Discover of the Sword of Orwald is developed and some of the back story.. Word comes that the Empire is about to descend to take the sword. A diplomat named Morgolic is given the sword and an ancient Tristonian relic call a blood Scarab. A diversion is created and Morgolic flees with the sword and relic. Cracious, leader of the archeological survey team and son of the King is taken captive along with Petra. Chapter 2: Captive: Petra finds herself “Black Cladded” and placed under interrogation. As part of the spoils she is given to Creedor Kratz, who becomes her bondsman. More of the back-story is told that includes why the sword was valuable and what the legend is of the four Heroes of the confederation. Creedor talks about Psychic Operations and how they have learned to track Confederation patrols that are on information gathers missions deep in Empire Territory. He talks about the Witches in the Valley of Men and one in particular they need to lay their hands on. Chapter 3: Broken: Creedor questions Petra and she resists. He breaks her and takes her back to the Compound. There he has her powers temporarily drained. Petra continues to resist and finally Creedor breaks her will.. Horance visits Petra in her drugged and dream like stupor and tells her to quit playing hero. Chapter 4: Unexpected Visitor: Bedelia and Cpt. Standaloft penetrate the compound on a reconnaissance patrol. She finds Petra finds in a drugged state being mistreated and siphoned of her powers. Chapter 5: Hilda. Develops an emotional attachment with Petra in the course of her jailor duties. Then there is a back-story on how Jody, the son of the Chief Custodian, hires her to become a milker. Petra begins encouraging a relationship with Hilda that get out of control when she finds herself bonding with the prison matron. Chapter 6: How the bonding develops into a physical and then an emotional one plays out. It begins with Hilda attempting seduction and Petra trying to use the relationship to regain her powers. It develops into something more. Meanwhile Jody has a clash with his brother in law and reveals him to the other guards in a compromising situation. Another guard, Big Mortichi, develops feeling for Hilda and she finds herself reciprocating. Chapter 7: The Proposal: Creedor, a homosexual, wants to use Petra to produce offspring… His Mother Mariana, refuses to go along with the scheme unless marriage is a part of the deal. He agrees to a marriage of convenience and artificial insemination to foster the pregnancy. Creedor puts the offer to Petra and asks her to give it some thought. Chapter 8: Resolve: Petra reaches the point in her confinement that anything is better than prison. At first she rejects the notion out of hand….Then she remembers Horace’s and Bedelia’s advice and begins to give the matter more thought. Creedor puts her to the acid test (proposes publicly) and she reluctantly complies. Chapter 9: The Marriage: The marriage takes place. The Golden’s are in violent opposition however they are a captive race. After the ceremony Petra is taken to the Chateau. Hilda artificially inseminates Petra. Chapter 10: Mother In law: Petra Meets her mother in law. They have a talk in the garden. At dinner that night the conversation continues. Creedor is not warm to the new status of affairs and finds the adjustment difficult . Mariana tells Petra she is pregnant and that she must be wary for attempts on her life. Chapter 11: Mayhem: An attempt is made on Petra’s life…Big Mortichi spoils the plot and saves them. Creedor goes ballistic and introduces sanctions on the Goldens. This is the last straw and they put into effect long simmering plans of revolution. Chapter 12: Revolt: Horance begs assistance from the Confederation as he sees revolution as imminent. All the Confederation can do is send a combat patrol with Copt Standaloft and Bedelia to assist. They make their way into Compound and lead the revolt. They think Petra is an ally and Petra must decide who’s side she’s on. Chapter 13: Decision: Petra vacillates, finding it difficult to make up her mind… but knows the Goldens if they succeed will murder her and the unborn child. She tries to reconcile her loyalty to the Confederation and her new family. Chapter 14: Escape: The revolt takes Creedor by surprise and he is taken prisoner and black cladded along with his mother. Petra enters the confinement cell with Hilda and subdues Bedelia and her Captain, They are bound by the guards and Petra flees with her husband and Mother in law. to Corinth. Chapter 15: Epilogue: Creedor is not pleased with the outcome…. He tries to figure out Petra's role in the revolt. His mother tells him not to look a gift horse in the mouth. He is wary and bitter but restrains himself as Petra carries their son further and further into term. The child is born in the palace of the Emperor. |
| The Role of the Libido in Artistic Endeavor In my exploratory writing on the Novella, Essence and the Stones two other stories spun off. The First was Bedelia, which has good potential and the other was Petra which at first blush looks to be a loser. I say that because it contains a male homosexual and a lesbian. Since this orientation comprises only ten percent of the population and tends to send the other ninety-percent into cardiac arrest it is at best a nitch audience, and unless someone shares that orientation is hard to write about convincingly. It also contains sensual prose and as I have explained in earlier blogs that is included to animate the writing in it’s early stage. The reason I am convinced it is a “downer” is that I see it evidenced in the ”Views.” So this is a great story to experiment with. It is like working on a “Ho Hum” car model and trying anything you want without fear of ruining the basic raw material. So I have taken the vignettes I wrote, just as I did those in the Manny Hardin series and plunked them into the process. I am showing this to interested readers to demonstrate the process. First in my port in the Petra folder are the raw vignettes. I mean this literally and figuratively because I didn’t hold back on the sensual prose. In earlier blogs I talked about imbuing writing with sexual energy and going back and editing it out later and still having it etched into the piece…. I know it sounds Da da da da….Da da da da… (Twilight Zone Music) but it’s something I’m thinking hard about…. (Don’t expect much) and it is tied into the art and science thing. There are a lot of teachers out there, and other professionals for that matter, who think the science of writing (Teaching Writing) with all the testing and number crunching is stifling the art… I tend to believe that art cannot be taught, only encouraged, however the science can be definitely taught. Thus schools are a lot more into the science than the art of writing… Further as I have said on one or more occasions before, the science launches the art and the art elevates a manuscript into orbit. This brings us back to what art is and the source of the germ which I believe is the engine of our creativity….I know! I know….nobody wants to hear it….OUR SEX DRIVE! What drives our creative energies is the old Libido and it is a chronic force that cranks out energy driving us to make little babies and the excess is diverted into other activities, of which writing is one in a host of many. Yesterday I went in the WDC chat room for the first time in a very long time…I wrote a piece on the difference between prose and poetry called the “Chat room.“ that nobody but a few inquiring minds gave much heed to. Anyway yesterday I was bored and popped into one here and there were some young women talking at light speed and they touched on Hemingway and how he liked to take a break from writing in the spring and fish and chase women. I had heard that Hemmingway was inclined to single sex relationships however it appears from my eves dropping that he ran AC/DC. What was interesting about the conversation was his belief, as explained, that he felt that having sex dissipated his creative writing energies. This is something I have heard before from athletes, such as boxers and track stars but I always associated it with physical activities rather than intellectual ones. My view has always been that most of us are frustrated enough with our sexuality that there is plenty of residual energy being thrown off by the alternator of our spiritual dynamo that there is plenty left over for other purposes. I’m digressing I know and I’m sure you are wondering where this is all leading. It is leading to Step Two in my fandango writing process. Instead of talking in abstractions, I will post in my blog tomorrow, the outline for Petra, that includes the story thread, dramatic ingredients, and chapters, complete with a brief synopsis. For those out there who are interested and don’t feel inclined to take my class “The One Act Play,“ I am providing a do it yourself version of this important component to story telling, which I call “The Comprehensive Outline.“ |
| Manny Hardin and the Story Telling Model This blog-a-mine has really taken off here of late. I still have the same 16 unique members that pop in and out but they are return customers with 180 visits in the last month. What has really surged is the non-member views. Almost 400 in the last month. This month I have increased by about 100 views. Think I’m about to get offered a syndicated contract? Actually I think the interest is because I write about writing. The people who visit this site are naturally interested in that subject and if you write about writing instead of your mother-in-law or your dog you are almost a shoe in to pick up a few views. Anyway this blog today is a continuation of that theme. Today I combined my Play writing philosophy with my sensual prose writing and came up with a formula for writing a novella. This is how I did it. First off, for the past year and a half (On and off) I have been writing vignettes, first for the weekly Quickie and more recently for the sensual prose 2 and Jaces contest. While doing the weekly quckie I wrote a bunch of 869 word vignettes that featured a character called Manny Hardin. So today I pretended that these were exploratory writings for a new novella and I made an outline just like I require my students to do in the One Act Play class. Step on was to take the vignettes and come up with a common thread story line. This was not difficult because they had all been written under the Manny Hardin umbrella and contained the same back-story. So I arranged these short stories in some kind of order and put that outline to one side. Then I took the thread of the outline and inserted the dramatic ingredients…If this sounds like a broken record it is but there is always someone who will read this blog as a stand alone entry. So I identified the Central Character (No it wasn’t Manny, surprisingly it turned out to be Beth) This is a good point because who you think will be the central character doesn't always turn out to be the case. Seeing the vignettes together convinced me that Beth, who is in the center of things is inclined to be the CC. Naturally the Main Supporting Character (MSC’s) are Manny but there is also Race,(aka FranK) who's the car builder she falls in love with. So with the CC and MSC’s identified I had to come up with the next ingredient. This is a life changing incident. I resolved to make the hiring vignette show this scene. Then it was onto the next...the want need or desire. For Beth this is a fierce desire to save the Family Real Estate firm, become the Broker and gain financially independence. With that checked off I needed to find some crisis. By going through the vignettes I found three that were biggies. Then I had to come up with a theme and undercurrents and I’m working on these right now. I think the undercurrent will be her desire to have a family and her bio-clock is ticking away. Once I had the story outline thread integrated with some of the dramatic ingredients I began filling in the chapters. Naturally the material from the vignettes suggested the chapters and in short order I had twenty. Then I started going back and plopping them in. Now this is going to require some work because Beth wasn't the only female character I gave an audition to. Several of the Interns that Manny tested had different names. There are other issues as well and the POVs get a little crazy in these stand alone stories and they have to be sorted out but all this is doable. Then I have to start editing out most of the squeeze and tease. Now this is another interesting aspect. I think that once a piece of literature is imbued with the procreative spirit it's like an ink stain. (Not to be confused with those other sorts of stains. ) You can’t get rid of them even if you delete some of the graphic language and sensual imagery. The piece remains animated and even after the hysterectomy, the spirit of the libido sticks to the pages like fly paper. This is a good thing and is another reason why aspiring writers need to show both boldness and discretion about going into the bedroom. ‘Tis a fine line between crowding the margin and disdaining to stick your nose under the tent.So this is where I am now. I will show my readers, in a few days, where to find this composite piece that is evolving and would welcome any comments. By the way the process for doing this can be learned in my One Act Play class but for those of who are timid most astute readers can probably figure it out by reading this blog. Personally I think it’s a lot more fun to take the class that will be offered in January. |
| How the Manny Harden Series of Vignettes Evolved. I got to thinking this morning about a thought that spun off a blog comment. It had to do with scary dreams and characters you encounter in them. For me I have a problem remembering my dreams and they must feed into extremely short term memory because If I don’t jot them down when I wake up, they are soon gone….If it was a nightmare,. I used to say, “Good Riddance” but these days I take a different view. Bad Guys and Gals are hard to write about and some of the men and women I encounter in my dreams definitely qualify for the label. So after awakening from a Nightmare I quick jot down a sketch of who I interfaced with and what it was about the encounter I found troubling. One of the scary characters that sprang from a dream is Manny Harden. He’s a thug, working for Organized Crime as a recruiter. He recruits women for an activity so sensitive I’m afraid to write about what it is… I’m more than afraid actually, I’m totally in the dark. I haven’t figured out yet what it really encompasses… only that it’s real bad… So I needed this bad guy for the role and I signed up Manny for the part. His job is to take a female intern and find ways to make her quit the program. The idea is that the syndicate wants women in this field who are tough enough to take the heat if they ever get picked up by the federal authorities. Now concurrently with this series I was writing for a flash fiction contest called the “Weekly Quickie” which solicits vignettes of 869 words or less that meet the “Excitement” criteria. The challenge is to engage the reader and give them a twinge of sensual excitement at the same time. This is not an easy thing to do in 869 words and the contestants really struggle with the word constraint. The ideal entry tells a story, has a sensual prose theme, and excites the reader. Now anybody who writes a good submission really has to think about structure…devoting each precious word to achieving the structure of the story telling model, while meeting the tingle criteria. In the process of sharpening my skills in this contest, and not doing very well (by the way), I wrote a series of vignettes about Manny Harden. In the contest there are prompts and you can imagine what I came up with (Or read the evidence… Car builder and Real Estate Agent) when confronted with mild bondage, seedy locations, role playing, fairy tales and those sorts of things. What emerged was a series of stand alone stories that were wrapped into the context of the Manny Harden recruitment enterprise, and his efforts to get his candidates to quit their internship by putting them in these awkward, sexually exploitive situations. In the process Manny emerged as the central character (CC) but he was not always seen as such. Initially the CC was a car builder, then a female real estate agent and finally Mr. Harden who stole the show. The criteria I used for evaluating the characters was "Views." When Manny was involved in one Views went way up. While I didn’t intend for this to be “Exploratory” writing, that's what it turned out to be and I had an opportunity of really get a good look into the character of Manny, his girls and the supporting cast. Still, despite the over arching umbrella of the back story, the vignettes were a loose collection of incidents that did not conform to the story telling model. As a consequence writing the extended story will require that I sift through all the vignettes and draw out the thread and build the model as I know it needs to be put together. In the process many of the bizarre sexual exploits that have animated the parts will be removed but ….and here is the point I want to make….I suspect the story will remain animated even after most of the titillating details will be edited out. I could explain why I think this will happen but that will get into some "Unmainstream" ideas about what makes a story exciting. So in this quest, I started with a contest….wrote some vignettes, and tried out some of the different characters that began to emerge. This constituted the exploratory writing phase of the novel. Now it remains to take the thread, and put it into an outline. Then take the outline and add the story telling ingredients…I.e. The CC, a life changing event, a want need or desire, a resolve to act, a series of crisis, a climax and a cooling off and closure with the reader. I thought I’d share this because I know that many of my readers who have only seen the individual parts might not realize that it has all been part of a process that has a grander purpose and seems to be working for me. |
| Quadrants of Acceptability Today it snowed all day. It was all but impossible to get on line. Then we had a power outage…That lasted about four hours. I had to go out and feed the outside wood stove and then take the step ladder and sweep off the satellite dishes. Then I settled into Janet Evanoviche’s latest book, “Wicked Appetite.“ Her characters are unbelievably vivid and her dialogue is witty had crisp. An amazing sense of humor underlies her novels and they are hard to set aside. I’m wondering right now why I’m writing this blog and not reading the rest of her book. I wrote a couple of chapters of Petra. She is a lesbian character I am practicing with and she seems to be coming to life. As my readers know I experiment with sensual prose in order to find out how close I can get to the edge without forcing mainstream readers into a current they don’t want to paddle. As I’ve said before I think that the creative energies of a writer are tied to the engine of their libido. A reader is also compelled by this procreative drive even though it might be a bit more repressed by societal mores. Since I believe it is a part of all of us, a thing a reader or audience finds compelling either overtly or introvertly, it is in the interest of the writer to crowd the margin of acceptability for the right reasons as well as the wrong. The right reason is to fully develop the potential of the material…The wrong reason is worry about getting it published. Then there is the issue of homosexuality which is even more explosive and prescribed and if sensuality doesn’t get a reader’s defense mechanisms up a gay male or lesbian certainly will. These are huge turn offs to readers at large and publishers understand this and act accordingly. On top of this is the ability of a writer to write convincingly about an orientation he/she doesn’t share. This is a challenge but no more so than writing convincingly about a serial killer in a mystery novel. So we have the public at large turned off to a degree and then the authors themselves get turned off because they find the material threatening, see it as a publication loser and perhaps most troubling fear those they know personally will attribute to what they write some sort of Freudian connection. I.e. if he writes that good about a gay character he must have latent homosexual tendencies or worse yet his serial killer character is so frightening and authentic sounding that maybe he has some deep seated psychotic desire to kill. As a consequence, anyone who begins to crowd the margins of sensual prose, or sexual orientation, or child abuse, incest, or that broad range of despicable behaviors is going to have to face some gaff from friends, enemies and the community at large and this is not always a pleasant experience. How does the saying go….about the heat in the kitchen? Well there it is. For all the reasons I have stated authors write in rather narrow range. Think of these categories in four quadrants. Quadrant 1 Morally and politically correct: Here we see the quadrant where most writers write. Examples are children’s stories that don’t offend anyone Quadrant 2: Morally correct and politically incorrect: In this quadrant we see stories that are not immoral but might be politically offensive…Like the children’s story,, Little Black Sambo. Quadrant 3: Immoral and politically correct: In this quadrant we see a story that crosses the line of what the public will suffer, even though the material might not be socially reprehensible. For example writing that is about straight sex but is too graphic for the tastes of most readers and audiences. Quadrant 4: Immoral and politically incorrect: Then we have material that is way too graphic and deals with subjects prescribed by social mores. For example incest, underage sex, child abuse and single gender relationships. So while most writers don’t think they are particularly constrained they are unless they choose to write outside quadrant 1. I could go on about invisible walls and glass ceilings but why bother.? Everybody knows they’re there and after a while they become invisible until you slam up against one…Like having a gay character, or an evil bad guy that does bad things to the innocent and helpless. Then the author finds themselves walking on egg shells and wondering if the effort is worth the bother. |
| Good and Evil I have a real problem with this in my characters. This is because I see life as a conflict between the divine light and the elements. I see a person as analogous to a light bulb. The bulb is made of the elements… There is a silicon globe, a tungsten filament, some metal thrown in and the thing drawn to vacume. Once the switch is thrown the bulb is animated and begins to glow as the electricity flows into it and across the filament. To me that is what life is like. Life is a union of the two…. There is the divine trying to find expression in the physical world and the containment vessel made up of the elements that are shaped and twisted to give the spirit a chance to feel what here-to-for he/she could only imagine. The elements do not really like being used to the ends they are made to serve. Indeed they want to return this insidious creation called life to the dust from whence it came and eventually succeeds, but not before new little light bulbs are reproduced and so the cycle goes. Using this model one thing becomes evident… Good is analogous to the divine light and evil the elements. We are the union of the two and quite naturally see as evil, that hard and cold realm that despises our awareness and and would like nothing better than to see us all plunged back into a silent and eternal darkness. Thus I see in a character both good and evil and the whole purpose of the exercise of life is to keep good in the drivers seat and make sure evil stays in the backseat with the dogs. In writing a story however, while it is tempting to show the Witch in Snow White as a persona with some redeeming human qualities, it is better to show the crone as an unadulterated personification of evil, hell bent on the destruction of the lives around her. As you can see my view on life makes it hard for me to write a character who is totally a knight in shining armor any more than a totally dark specter, unredeemed by any goodness. Indeed the very definition I have of life makes this impossible. Still this is more a theoretical hick-up than a real problem. There are those extremes that are not quite absolute and a writer has plenty of latitude to show some pretty despicable characters, like Hannibal Lector and Voldamort and the Wicked Witch of the West. The same case can be made for a Hero and I have as much contempt for a character who is Lily White as I do for one, cold as a well digger’s ass in Montana. However, a good story thrives on the contrast between the two and while it is possible to show the good guy as having some blemishes (He is in the process of overcoming) having the bad guy transform into a choir boy is always a bit of a disappointment to a reader or audience. Yes, yes I know it happens all the time in the soap operas and Darth Vader turned out to be not so bad but a writer needs to restrain themselves from rehabilitating an evil person to any large extent, just as they do making the the good guy too much of a rake. It dilutes the edge of the story and going from either extreme a character should not be allowed to migrate to far into the great unwashed center of mediocrity. |
| Repetition, I use repetition in teaching my One Act Play Course. If I think something is hugely important I keep coming at it from different angles and saying it over and over again. My Dad told me once that to get people to pay attention you have to say something at least three times. That axiom has shown itself so many times in my life I take it for granted. I think it is a universal truth and thus a reader or audience doesn’t mind repetition if it contains an important message. This is a great device in story telling… I once saw a play where it was used in conjunction with an undercurrent. It was a kitchen scene where a bachelor was cutting strips of bacon off a side of pork…. There was a conversation taking place as he sliced away, not very skillfully, one piece after the next. A female supporting character stepped in and took the knife and continued the slicing, much more adeptly as the conversation continued uninterrupted. There was a message here… That even in the least of us there are skills ideas and perspectives that can be extremely valuable. Another of my students wrote a play where there were three generations of women in a family… Grandma, mom, and daughter. These three females were supposed to be different and indeed their ages and demeanor and style of dress, social views would lead you to think so but they were really acorns off the same tree. I tried to get the writer to show a bathroom ritual where these three who were supposedly so different prepped in the same way or a sewing ritual where they each threaded a needle with the same grip, hold to the light and squinty eye ritual. When the audience sees this they say “Oh my gosh!” These three might look and act different but they are the same model, versions separated only by years and a different set of conditions. Another variation is a mannerism or habit that keeps repeating in a character. Maybe chin stroking as she ponders and gets close to the truth… Another might be a stammer when confronted by an undercurrent which is the true cause of the speech impediment…. And on and on and on the variations are endless. If done right, with an artful touch they can be very powerful in making a point indirectly…. And used in conjunction with symbolism can show the reader or audience things a character doesn’t realize… giving them a sense of insight or superior knowledge without coming right out in a monologue or dialogue (exposition) and trying to tattoo it on the reader/audience forehead. For most of my students this is a graduate level type of artfulness and I am usually involved with getting the basics nailed down before trying to get too cute with the fancy stuff, but these are tools and techniques that are fun to play around with and give the story a dimension that otherwise it won’t have. Still the basics come first. In the model there is a Central Character. You would be surprised how many times who the student thinks is the central character and who, by the nature of the story is really inclined to be that central character. My best technician in this last class had a central character who in my view was not central. My best blend of technician and artist had the same problem. Central means central. This is the person in the middle of the drama, like the center on a basketball team. The author or playwright need to get this right. Here is a checklist that comes to mind. 1. Is the CC center stage smack dab in the middle of things from the get go. Not somebody that shows up midway through the second scene skipping around the set looking in the windows. 2. Is the CC on the verge of a life changing situation? Going on a date, baking a pie or cleaning the house is usually not a life changing event. This event needs to happen early. 3. Does the CC have a problem? He/She might not see it in the beginning of the play but the reader or audience needs to be given enough information to raise an eyebrow. Indeed superior knowledge of a reader or audience is an ingredient of good story telling. It can take the form of an undercurrent where the CC cries out…”Hey everybody, I have this real bad problem and I can’t for the life of me figure out how to deal with it.” 4. Does the CC decide to get off his/her butt and do something about it. This needs to be the CC and not some supporting character who steps in and solves the problem for the CC. A writer isn't a parent of the characters, (even though they often look at their manuscript thru the same lens they use with their children.... What the heck do you mean my kid has warts?) Don't solve a CC's problem for them. I won’t tell you how often I see this happening. 5. Once the CC is resolved to do something to correct the sad state of their lives, do all manner of things (crisis) begin to happen to keep the CC from reaching their goal? 6. Do these start small and build on each other, each larger than the last until the big tsunami comes crashing down? 7. In the course of the play/read do we see a before and after snapshot and in-between growth at work, changing the outlook and/or persona of the CC. Again I had a student with a CC who flatlined across the entire play. Despite a series of minor inconviences (crisis) the character remained static, essentially unchanged from when first introduced. Now there is a lot more to writing a short story, novel or stage/screen play than getting the CC right but let me emphasize that this is a huge component. I encourage my readers to take this checklist and assess their CC’s compliance with the Story Telling Model before seriously beginning to write. |
| Coming Up with a Story Line A good story begins at the good part. Everybody’s life has some good parts but they don’t happen with a high degree of frequency. Most of what we do is repetitive and routine, day in day out the same oh same oh. Then something happens that is life changing, an event jerks a person out of the rut…. That groove they have settled into and catapults them into a situation that is new and overwhelming. When you write a story, this is where the writer needs to begin…at the good part. In a stage play, a novel or a short story or whatever, the good part needs to come at the beginning where that life changing moment is introduced. Don‘t wait until the middle or the end. In flash fiction the window of opportunity might be a thousand words….In a short story maybe five times that… but regardless of the form there isn’t room for a whole lot so focus on the essential thread of the story line. In my one act play class defining the central thread of the story comes first. Then the ingredients are worked into the tapestry. Finally all the other little threads get woven in. You don’t just start out weaving with only the vaguest notions of what you want the composition to look like. Now don’t confuse this with exploratory writing to see if the central thread is going to work or indeed to discover what that central thread is. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of a good story line. It is worth the time to find one that is worth your time and effort. Many of you know I have an automotive interest in rehabilitating old cars and trucks… I am not into “Restorations.” because that is a whole different ball games….If you pick up any magazine like “Hot Rod” for example you will see an amazing number of ugly vehicles that have been beautifully restored. This is analogous to an author writing a beautiful story with a crappy story line. At WDC I go to a student’s port hoping to find something they have written that has a potentially viable story line. If I see something I file it away for when they invariably come to me with the old snivel… “oh Percy, I’m having so much trouble finding something to write about.” But I’m ready for that one, lurking in the weeds ready to spring out and pounce….“ I give them the old….”Well Lucy, I really liked your story on Bozo the Clown…I thing that has dramatic potential.“ Of course the story Bozo the Clown has dramatic potential, any story has dramatic potential, look at some of Shakespheres anemic story lines. A master story teller can take a sows ear and turn it into a silk purse, given the talent and understanding of the ingrediencts necessary for the telling of a good tale. However, why start with a “ho hum” story when you can start with something that has real merit to begin with. Dust off a classic or a fairy tale if nothing else. Think of what you could do if you came up with the idea for the…“Gift of the Magi.“ How cool is that? She has her hair cut off to buy her husband a watch chain, and her husband sells his watch to buy her a set of combs… That is the bare bones of a story line thread that is a real zinger. So where do you get these great ideas. Well you can think them up or you can take them from what you’ve written, or you can steal them from what you read. I don’t mean plagiarize, I mean borrow… By borrow I mean take the seminal germ of an idea and grow it in a new and different way. |
| A good story has undercurrents. I am not referring to back story which is a different thing altogether. Back story is that huge universe of which a story is a mere speck. When I read JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy I thought that was pretty broad and all encompassing. Then I read the Silmarillion which was his history of Elves Men and Dwarves and the Trilogy was only a two page footnote in that esistle. When we write a novel it’s like that… There is a huge back story of context and a little piece that focuses on the tale at hand. Even if the reader is not told everything the author has to be aware of that larger context in order to write convincingly…. However, this blog today is not about back story. An undercurrent is a story beneath a story. For example in the screen play, Real Steel, there is a story about a fighter (Central Character...CC) who wants to win… to be a big shot… to be esteemed by women and have a heavyweight Robot Contender. So on the surface the audience gets to see a transition in character, a before, during and after snapshot of the CC and this constitutes the surface story. However there is an undercurrent frothing below. The CC ran out on his wife and son to pursue selfish career aspirations and a dissipated lifestyle. At the end of what I would call the first scene in the movie he discovers his ex-wife has died and his sister in law is seeking custody of his son. This is fine with the CC who is more than willing to sign over the boy he sees as a complication he doesn't want to deal with. Concurrently however, after slipping to the lowest rungs of the Robot fight game, a county fair, he is distracted by a good looking woman in the stands and a bull in the ring destroys his Robot. At the custody hearing he notices that his Sister-In-Law's new husband is a wealthy man and sees an opportunity to shake him down to get money to buy a replacement Robot. Now the audience is getting to see how low the CC has sunk and what a sleaze he has become. The Wealthy husband agrees to pay the CC the price he is asking but is about to embark on a honeymoon to Europe with his new bride and agrees to half down and half when they get back… and the stipulation that the boy spends the summer with his father. So beneath this surface story an undercurrent begins to develop, of guilt, bonding and redemption. An undercurrent makes for a great story because the audience is getting two stories for the price of one. However, it is more than this... It is the delta between the two concurrent threads that begins to produce friction and heat Undercurrents can take many forms. There are some things that are so painful for people to face that they use politically correct proxies as a substitute. They will argue about the food or the kids or the bills when the real problem rages beneath the surface…. Perhaps infidelity, or some other form of human weakness or issue that is too painful to confront. An author shows the audience (reader), the surface or superficial thread, and then the subliminal thread and in the contrast of the two there is an incongruity that agonizes as the story moves along. It is a clash between façade and reality and it makes for great drama. The reason this works so well in a stage play, (or any other form of literature), is because this is a game that is all to familiar to theater goers. A man plays golf and its “Business,” a woman goes shopping and it’s "Homemaking…" A man forgets a birthday and its because he no longer loves his wife, and a wife won’t make love because she has a headache. People attach a twisted sort of logic to what they do and when their pat little politically correct “reasons” conflict with an underlying truth, the result is an undercurrent. “Oh the tangled webs we weave when we practice to deceive (ourselves)”... and the consumers of literature, be they audiences or readers delight in the interplay between this truth and deciet that lurks beneath the surface of people's lives. Writers who crank out words for a living understand this component, this ingredient in the a story telling model and work the hell out of it, yet to the consumer it is all but transparent... they know they like it but they can't figure out why. So when the "unwashed" decide they are going to try their hand at writing they usually begin with a remedial understanding of what constitutes the science of writing and if they include all the ingredients, and get the sequence right, it tends to be more by good fortune than design. |
| You don’t need to paint Leaves, Percy Today I got some feedback from a reader. She agreed that the science of writing is important and something a writer should work at achieving. Regarding the art she said a lot of stuff gets published that isn’t that good and commercial success isn’t always much of a measure of a manuscript’s quality. I responded… All wisdom doesn’t reside in the mind of Percy Goodfellow. When God created mankind he made us into a distributed data base and not a main-frame computer. We are a collection of individuals that network together and not a hive of bees. What you say is absolutely true and a point worth noting. Success as a writer requires an understanding of the science of writing, talent, persistence, skill in advocating your work and once you achieve success, resisting the corrosive forcers that try and put you down and eventually send your spent body into the grave. Our Artfulness is a gift from our creator…. A thread of divine spirit, that sets a ceiling on our potential. Like the marketplace determines the value of a good or service, publication determines the quality of a writer’s work. It isn't a perfect measure by a long shot but it is the best litmus test out there. If you get published, and somebody outside your support group is willing to take your manuscript and give you dollars to publish it, that is about as good an indicator as you are going to get as to the merit of your work. I agree that the almighty dollar goes up and down in value and some writers produce some pretty shoddy work, but if it sells, if people are willing to spend their precious shekels to read it, that has to be a statement worth noting. If your mother says your writing is great, or a friend, or a teacher, or a writing group.... all that is wonderful, but when a publisher, in the business, sends you a check, because he/she believes there is a market for your work, that is high praise indeed. And if your manuscript becomes a financial success, regardless of how many warts it has, that is still stronger evidence that what you write is the real deal. In response she asked, “…so you think then that art supersedes the science?” I responded… I believe that in all cases art supersedes the science. The science launches the art. Without the science there is no launch. It's like a two stage rocket. Science gets the manuscript off the ground and art elevates it into final orbit. She replied with one of the nicest compliments I’ve gotten in a long time. “…You don't need to paint leaves, Percy.” |
| The Dust from Whence it came... or the Song of their Spirits I have written before about the science and art of writing. In school most all the emphasis is placed on the science. This is to say that you learn about vocabulary, grammar, spelling and structure. Those who learn best how to follow the rules get the good grades and so on. For those who have an affinity for the science of writing the system tells them, you have a talent for writing and are a budding master of the form. What you are not told is that the science of writing is like the ante in a poker game. When you have a manuscript you feel is worthy of publication and send it in to a publisher, the science part is taken for granted. If there are issues with the science the manuscript is thrown in the discard heap. For those who aspire to become published the science must come first before the art has any hope of lifting the manuscript to the next level. For example say a publisher gets one hundred submissions. Half of these fail the science test. The other half then is evaluated using the “Art” criteria. Of the fifty remaining maybe 5 will pass this subjective hurdle. This is why getting published is so hard. Most aspiring authors can’t pass the science test and only a handful of those have the artistic potential to make the second cut. By this I mean you might have gotten straight “A’s and have a closet full of masters degree’s and know the science backwards and forwards but if you have no talent, if your writing is deficient in art, the publisher will throw your manuscript into pile number two. What is art? begs the question….Art is my watercolor teacher painting five leaves in ten seconds, with a light touch of her brush that I could attempt to duplicate for a hundred years and never come close. It is a gift from our creator. If you love writing and are a master of the science there is a place for you in academia, or perhaps technical writing, maybe as a critic, but in the creative field of the craft I tell you, it’s a whole new ball game. So to reach the highest rung you need to first know the science of the craft… That will get you a few rungs up the ladder. Indeed you can have all the talent in the world and if you have a poor grasp of the science it is all for naught. But science alone won’t get you there. What gets you there can’t be defined…it is subjective and murky soup, but you know what? A reader, an audience and a successful publisher usually knows it when they see it...' Incline thier ear when they hear it. They might not be able to produce it but when it materializes before their eyes or resonates in thier ears, they say “Ah Hah….there it is…".like a fragrance wafting in the air they smell it, like the glimpse of a shadow that flickers on a wall they see it in the heartbeat of a fleeting nstant and experience the glow that sings the music of the “The Real Deal.” song. In my one act play class, I have students that are deficient in the science of the craft but who have artistic talent. One of my worst technicians was one of my best artists. If I were a publisher I wouldn’t even take the time to read what she wrote. But in my class I often see the art of these bumbling technicians. Usually they become disheartened convinced that they have no talent…that they are artless because they have little command of the science… One of my students is definitely in this category. In Appalachia I have seen people who could not spell their names, pick up a fiddle and make the instrument come to life. I have seen curb side art that cried out for recognition. I am discouraged by the certainty of the presence of many great writers out there who will never get to first base in expressing the germ of their talent... because they can't turn the wrenches of the craft. This is the way life is. If a person is truly gifted in the art of a genre,,, the chances of being discovered are slim indeed. First they have to learn the science, then they have to be discovered and finally they have to resist the corrosive forces that seek to return the song of their spirit to the dust from whence it came. |
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