Setting

Greetings gentle reader, this installment takes on the topic of settings, which, like your characters, calls for differing levels of specificity.

Setting, in most cases, is driven by the main premise. Some stories unfold entirely inside the main character's head and can be as fantastical as the writer's ability to express such fanciful places.

Otherwise we arrive at the question that devil's most writers and that is 'how much is too much?' If you have taken pains to establish the story takes place in the fall do you need to tell the reader that the leaves rustled (fill-in-the-blank) every time there is a whisper of wind?

Exposition is the art of timing when you tell a reader something pertinent to the storyline. Often what you share descriptively pertains to where the character is in the story.

Which brings us to the other side of it...is it necessary to tell the reader about the howling wind and the creaks and groans the shelter makes once you have established there is a storm?

You definitely go there if the character is being stalked by something (often being chased by personal demons can be more terrifying than a real life threat!) but choosing when and where to use the landscape as a vehicle to move the story forward is a tough call.

I'm sure I'm not the only one driven to distraction by Tolkien's endless description of the trek through the forbidden forest but it achieved the desired effect, by the time the spiders captured the company you were glad he stopped describing the ceaselessly falling and rustling leaves!

(I don't have a copy of 'The Hobbit' handy or I'd look up it's proper name and since Tolkien employed a lot of similar sounding place/character names, I don't dare guess.)

Which is to opine that Tolkien took a chance when he purposefully stretched the trek through trackless forest letting the reader become as nauseated as his characters were, trapped in an endless, unchanging landscape.

I'd advise against using a similar device (unless, like Tolkien, you're writing fantasy...just saying.)

But I digress, when setting up a scene you want to be sure the reader has enough information so they aren't left wondering 'how'd they manage that' because you forgot to include a specific item your character had access to.

But this is part of the 'loose threads' factor authors also combat routinely. (You can't include anything in a story that you don't 'pay-off'!)

When writing, one must be careful not to 'lose' the reader and you definitely don't want to raise more questions than you answer! (A very good indication something is tragically wrong...like your memory is shot!)

All of that said, I preach to the choir...

Thanks for stopping by!

The Embodiment of Evil....

As writers, we are all tasked to create 'believable' characters...even when they allegedly have ice-water in their veins. Your dialog is based on the characters inner compass. From there we encounter the first obstacle and that is how well do YOU read people? Can you channel your inner wimp or are your characters all over the map? (Let's not to lose sight of the fact that many stories 'track' a character's development but this is another factor entirely! I'm pointing at question 'are your characters multi-dimensional or are they monochrome reflections of one another?')

With that in mind, have you noticed the trend in 'unbelievable' characters populating screens both large and small? Or have you? (I once again allude to the tendency to simply absorb what the screen feeds us rather than thinking about what we're witnessing.)

This isn't so much a critique of an industry that has minimal time to develop and effectively transmit plot devices, we all laugh at sitcoms precisely because we don't personally know anybody who behaves like that! Perhaps it's funny because we all know someone we suspect would act like, that given a similar situation.

In writing your 'customer' only has a mental picture of the characters you create, their personality comes across through their words and deeds.

How effectively you flesh out the character is demonstrated in how 'memorable' they are in the reader's mind.

Some would opine that keeping your characters 'real' minimizes their memorability but to that I leave you with something to chew upon (al-la Kaiser Sozay) "The Devils greatest achievement is convincing everyone it is he and not they, themselves who are the embodiment of all evil!"

Thanks for letting me inside your head!

The power of Marketing

One day I came upon a plastic figurine of an Native American among my son's playthings and I immediately marveled over the fact that it had never once occurred to my son to murder that redskin!

I spent my youth playing cowboys/settlers and Indians and the poor natives NEVER won. To be fair, I also spent countless hours hunting Nazis and Japs but I was (not that I was consciously aware of it, especially at the time) a victim of my environment. We'd play all day and watch Rawhide, Gunsmoke, McHales Navy and Twelve O'clock High/Rat Patrol/Hogan's Heroes at night.

Ironically, when Star Trek/Lost in Space came along, didn't we channel our energy into killing aliens just as zealously.

So when I see how this phenomenon has been 'adapted' to our current cultural soup, I am alarmed to note the 're-imagining' of the past, where the facts are being 'massaged' to protect the guilty. (Perhaps the most glaring example of this is 'Morning in America', also known as the Reagan years (the worst presidency ever!) The only ones saying otherwise are those too young to remember what it was really like!

But I digress, the topic is how easily your perceptions are altered. Now what does this have to do with writing?

Everything, it all begins with ideas on paper!

One of my 'alter ego's' favorite questions is 'How can you be expected to make correct decisions without accurate information?'

Well, good citizen, this applies to you as well. How will we save ourselves/our children from those who control the eye that never blinks?

Maybe you should have a word with your congressman next time you bump into him/her...oh, that's right, they live in Washington, you NEVER bump into them! (and they've been re-elected how many times?)

Here's an idea, maybe you can write to them (not that they'll read what you communicate, they have 'people' for that...)

But once again I digress, let us return to that plastic figurine and how it never occurred to my son to kill it? (A decidedly good thing.)

Now reflect for a moment on how the 'eye that never blinks' is molding our children's tomorrow.

Can you say (anything but) "reality TV' But those young, impressionable minds don't know that, what, you kids watch Anime?

Now be afraid, be very afraid (because they're raising a bunch of 'Pollyannas' and we can only wonder why?)

Drop the pencil and nobody gets hurt...

I've been on a tear these last few posts about 'responsibility in writing.' What the author writes and what the editor publishes. The beauty of the net is it's the wild, wild west all over again. No rules (should say few rules, spew enough vile content and somebody, somewhere will take it upon themselves to land on you with both feet so writers beware!)

While it has calmed somewhat since the early days, there is still a 'divide' between the 'brick & mortar' world of publishing and the, er, 'independents' who are largely self-sufficient.

That said, let us direct our attention to that bought and paid for guardian of 'free speech', the Editor. He decides which projects get the green light and which ones get sent back for re-write until they meet his/her 'journalistic standards.'

Which is to shine a light on one of the many elephants on the room, the severe and persistent lack of attention being given to 'executive privilege'. This is not a shot at the President because he has no control over those who use their office to 'shield' their activities from scrutiny.

Our current 'can't get out of their own way' government is the result of this appalling 'lack of transparency'.

So how do we fix this? As long as we allow 'private ownership' of the media (with the one cutting the paychecks determining what you can and can't see) we can't. These are the same people who have 'muzzled' our representatives by making the revelation of their treachery...treason.

Since sanity is defined as what 'the majority of the public' regards as 'normal', you can see the Chinese handcuffs but you can't get them off!

I read in an online news source today that said the 'average citizen' should be, er, 'deeply concerned' about the billion dollar price tag attached to running for the Oval Office.

Logic dictates that ONLY people [read: sock puppets] owned by the One Percent (actually the one hundredth of one percent) can run for the nation's highest office (largely because of the artificially high cost of media coverage...go figure? Isn't the media considered a public utility?)

But we are once again faced with the question of 'what are YOU gonna do about it?'...(if you don't like it?)

Naturally, much more disturbing is the fact that ALL money is 'funny' (as well as being terribly mis-managed.)

Which is to point out that it's 'all on paper' for those pulling the strings and call the shots...shots YOU have to live with.

To paraphrase a famous quote, If not now, when and if not us, who? Yeah, Reagan said it but he didn't say it first, I believe it was most famously cited by Churchill.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

What was the question?

Greetings gentle reader, I encountered two articles yesterday that gave me pause...one, responsibly labeled itself 'speculation' on the topic that extra-terestial lifeforms might be, er, gi-normous. (The rational being, larger creatures have longer lifespans, thereby encouraging the development of the brain.

Elephants (when not being hunted to an early grave) have/had for a long time a longer average lifespan than most humans but this is speculation. Whales, turtles and parrots also enjoy long lifespans but there are no recognizably sentient beings among any of them...using our understanding of sentience...

The second, and again, using our critical reasoning skills we have to 'assume' the average viewer knows the question was posed for 'entertainment purposes' (It was some producer's idea that people would be interested in knowing if poverty was 'hereditary.'

What rankles about this is the fact that the one percent truly believes they are 'exceptional' (and they desperately want YOU to believe that too!)

If we remove the 'stop-think' factor a rational person employs when viewing 'entertainment', you find the not particularly bright taking this rhetorical question to heart, and believing their less than stellar economic prospects were their parent's fault.

While it is 'true' that a child born to wealth has a better chance of enjoying a prosperous life than a child born to poverty (and in this, Morgan Freeman uses himself as an exception to the episode's 'genetic inheritance' meme.) left unbroken is the general perception that people with money are 'smarter' than the rest of us, which isn't true at all.

If 'smarts = prosperity' then where is Einstien Inc? There is no such place/company, conversely where are the intellectual works of JP Morgan (whose major accomplishment in life was to bankroll Thomas Edison.) They too do not exist.

(Why the average dummy thinks Einstien founded GE [a wholly owned subsidiary of the Morgan Guaranty Trust] is, er, baffling.)

It is NOT 'speculation' that poverty is directly proportional to the corruption/mismanagement of the civilization you live in.

Poverty, like money, is a human invention...therefore poverty is the by-product of money being 'mis-managed'. But this isn't particularly 'entertaining' considering the history of the impoverished has a rather murderous track record.

I share this because it rarely occurs to the young to question their circumstances...and they usually believe what their elders tell them, even if these elders are severely misinformed...(as the scientists on this particular episode of 'Through the Wormhole' were and most modern economists are as well!)

That said, it all starts with 'writing', the first step in sharing knowledge.

How unfortunate is it that those who control your 'perception' keep you and by extension yours, ignorant of the fact that poverty is NOT a 'natural state of affairs'.

Now I will return to my long time signature catch phrase,

Thank you for letting me inside your head.

Fact, fiction and that blurry line in between

Greetings gentle reader, I read something yesterday that truly blew my mind (and I've been avoiding those 'easily mis-understood and purposefully divisive' articles for some time now...but wasn't on the renowned MSN homepage an AP article (you could see this drivel coming out of Fox but AP, they're supposed to vet their stuff more vigorously...except when it comes to, er, propagandizing the extraordinarily gullible public.

Yes, I take heart in the fact that most people retain a modicum of critical reasoning skills so yesterday's, er, 'poll' citing white people are 'cool' (read sympathetic) to police violence I sort of stopped short and wondered what kind of, er, editor would greenlight such an irresponsible opinion piece...and it wasn't run as an op/ed, it was run as a 'most people think', an 'informational article' on the scale of did you know?

Well, coincidentally or otherwise, the article went on to cite the 'usual suspects', the 25% of the public that identify themselves as conservatives. While the article didn't specifically say conservatives, it's where the coincidence kicks in...it said 25% of white people could see a situation where a law enforcement could assault an average citizen during the performance of their, er, job.

Um, understand, it is NEVER okay for ANYBODY to use physical force to control you. NEVER. Not a cop, not a judge, hell not even a prison guard! It's NEVER okay so where and it doesn't matter who's 'cool' with the idea...so the entire article was...pointed.

Yes, gentle reader, the purpose of article slike that one is to plant in YOUR MIND that it's 'okay' for law enforcement to use physical force when they feel it is 'warranted'.

Naturally the factor that makes the average citizen's mind recoil in horror is these guys ROUTINELY exercise poor judgement with lethal force, now we are being told it's 'okay' for them to put a beating on you...if they feel threatened.

US police have KILLED more people LAST MONTH than UK police have killed since 1900...a hundred and fifteen years, something's wrong with this 'police state' we find ourselves in.

It's time to start demanding editorial accountability.

The Reviewer's dilemmna

Writers are very defensive of their works so why are reviewers surprised when authors go off on them for what they perceive to be 'unflattering' reviews of their works? (Which begs the question;why do most authors refuse to review the work of others? (because it is a totally thankless task... unless you write flattering puffery which aids no-one. And we've all read those reviews too...worse, we bought the product and asked ourselves afterwards what book did knothead read because it certainly bears no resemblance the one you have in your hands!)

Authors are correct, the reviewer (often) doesn't understand what the author is trying to communicate, but who's fault is that?

If the author had done a better job of explaining themselves, mayhaps the reviewer would have been kinder...or maybe not because dreck is dreck. You can't put lipstick on a pig, thereby magically turning it into art!

Don't misunderstand, it is possible to breathe new life into old stories but simply re-hashing badly over-trodden ground serves no-one.

Unsurprisingly, many fall short of the mark...and succeed despite the lack of logic (plot holes large enough to fly commercial airliners through) so perhaps that is why some authors write drivel and expect to be heaped with praise, sort of a self-inflicted wound, the talentless bilking the clueless is one of the oldest cons there is.

So I've got this here sharp stick, now, who wants it right in the ol' eyeball?