Breaking Clichés

I recently got some feedback on a short story from a top editor and of course the piece is going back into the shop to utilize their comments. However one of the compliments I received was on using a clichéd opening that worked in spite of the cliché. The story began with the character waking up.

If you do not write much or do not hangout with writers learning their craft you may not know just how often this opening starts off stories that fail to deliver. It has been theorized that this opening is so prevalent among novice writing because it mirrors the creative process. The writer doesn’t know how to start the story and begin at the start of the day, with their main character coming out of a slumber. This theory is further reinforced if the character awakens to a white room, the white space very reminiscent of the blank white paper in a typewriter. (And that gives you a sense of how old this cliché is.)

In art any rule can broken so when it is right to start a story with this tired trope?

I think the critical question is what woke the character up? The story I got the positive comment on had as a major theme sleeping dreams and in order to get the character as close as possible to their dreams I needed them to start asleep, but that alone would not have been enough to break the cliché. In addition to the theme, the character is awoken by bad news. In others words this was not just any random awakening, there was the commentary on the dream and an immediate obstacle that presented a dramatic need to my character.

If you are tempted to having your story start with the character coming awake my first advice would be, look for another point in the tale with greater dramatic impact, but if you cannot leap past the moment make sure it fits thematically and has dramatic stakes straight away.

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A Foolish Waste of Time

Among Conservative, particularly the ‘Tea Party’ set it’s nearly axiomatic that Government cannot solve any problem. Go far enough down that line of thought and you will discover those who advocate private enterprise ‘solutions’ to law enforcement and the courts.

As foolish as that line of thought becomes it is also foolish to think that every problem can or should be solved by government action. Right now there is an idiotic fad of people eating detergent ‘pods.’ They do not do this alone and in secret, but rather video record their idiocy and then spill it out for all to see on the Internet.

Okay, these people are fools and we need to spread the word that eating detergent is a stupid and dangerous. However, there is a push by some that the government needs to step in and regulate the appearance of these soap delivery systems so that they are less appetizing to idiots.

No.

This is not a problem solved by government. You cannot have the mechanism of laws, and law enforcement chasing down every dumb thing people do. It is not the enlightened man’s burden to save ever fool from his folly.

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A Power Historical Drama: Conspiracy

Monday night, when I came home from my local writers group meeting, I developed a migraine and was unable to write or read. After taking my medication I pulled up HBO Now on my apple TV and browsed for something to watch while I waited for the pill to work.

I selected the 2001 HBO/BBC production Conspiracy. It is a movie I have seen twice before and being something familiar that would work well with my migraine and I could watch just enough until the headache subsided and I could retreat to bed.

I watched the entire film.

Conspiracy is about the 1942 Wannsee conference where Nazi General Heydrich calls, at Hitler verbal directive, a meeting of the top ministries and military divisions of the Nazi government to settle the ‘Jewish Question.’ It is the meeting where the murder of millions was decided. The meeting was held under conditions of extreme secrecy, each participant was given one copy of the meeting notes and instructed to destroy them after reviewing the record. (Luckily for history Foreign Minister liaison Martin Luther failed to destroy his and the record was captured after the war’s end. It is his copy that the film script is based upon.)

With an impressive cast including but not restricted to Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci, and Colin Firth, the film is nearly a play. Set primarily in a single room, it is a large group of men talking, arguing, and giving vent to their hate. And yet with so little ‘action’ it is utterly captivating. The banality of their evil is a chilling reminder just how easily people slip between prejudice and murderous hate. How anti-Semitism comes in a sickening array of flavors, from the knuckle dragging brutes of the SS to brilliant legal minds warped by conspiratorial thinking and imaginary world spanning cabals.

The crux of the piece is of course how this meeting set the holocaust in motion, not by accident, not by lack of foresight, but by premeditated intent to murder millions.

It did not start here. It did not start with the hate, though plenty bathed in that hate and weaponized in their poisonous politics. No for Germany and its population it started with the scapegoating, the blaming, the lies and finger pointing to a marginalized population as the source of all of Germany’s troubles. It started with words.

Pay attention to the words hurled by others and those repeated by yourself, what starts as a political tactic can all too easily end on horror on unimaginable scales.

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A Day Long Remembered

Well, we hope that today is one that will be long remembered for the successful flight of the Falcon Heavy.

At about 10:30 am Pacific time, if weather and technical issues allow, SpaceX will attempt to flight the Flacon Heavy, which is essentially three Falcon 9 strapped together. Unlike other large rockets with large side boosters, SpaceX, as they have done on a number of Falcon 9 missions, will attempt to recover the rockets after flight, landing two of them back at the Kennedy Space Center and the center rocket on the floating barge, Of Course I Still Love You.

The upper stage, after loitering in orbit for six hours will boost the test payload into an elliptical orbit that nears, but does not intersect with the planet Mars. That upper stage will not be recovered and the payload will coast between Earth and Mars into the indefinite future.

Here’s video from SpaceX, with a hat tip to the late David Bowie, showing the planned mission.

 

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The Reading Habit

Like many other things, reading is a habit you can encourage or one you can fall out of. For me the greatest single challenge when it comes to reading is finding the time. Between the day-job, writing my own stuff, and quality time spent with my sweetie-wife, it can be difficult to find the hours to sit and enjoy a good book. I recently shifted my work schedule around, starting the day-job a little but later in the day and getting home a little bit later. This was done to hopefully produced more time for my writing but it paid additional benefits in opening a little more time for reading.

Sadly the last two genre books, one a fantasy and one a hard SF, failed to work for me. The fantasy I didn’t finish, I found I was uninterested in the main character’s life, and the hard SF I did finish but found it underwhelming. After those two books I was a little concerned that my tastes had drifted enough to create an additional challenge.

Last week I picked up the novel The Spy who Came in from the Cold. I have seen the movie a few times and now I wanted to see how it compared.

Ahh, how nice to fall into a novel that just pulls you along. I’m about half way through it, reading in that snatches of time I can find, and I am thoroughly enjoying the book. (Even if the author has American’s using the phrase ‘ring you’ when we say ‘call you.’) Even setting aside the 50 odd years since its publication it is interesting visiting a very different writing style. It’s more objective and head-hopping than what we generally see for published works today.

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Movie Review: The Shape of Water

I have been a fan, but not a devoted one, of Guillermo del Torro since I had the good fortune to catch Chronos during its theatrical run and from the first trailers The Shape of Water, is a movie I wanted to see.

Sadly I spent weeks in December and January sick with colds and flu, but this weekend I finally managed to make the time to go see the movie, properly in a theater.

The Shape of Water, clearly inspired by the classic Universal film The Creature from the Black Lagoon, takes place in a mythical USA, someplace between 1957 and 1961, when the country was locked in a spacer-ace and the cold war with the USSR. Elisa and Zelda work as janitorial staff in a secret government facility just outside of Baltimore when a new asset, the amphibian man is brought into the center. The new security officer, Strickland, is flat portrayal of 50’s white, heterosexual, patriarchy dominance and very much the villain and antagonist of the movie. Over the course of the story Elisa and others from marginalized communities, discover the humanity in that which is not human and the inhumanity in their own species.

The film is a fairly tale, one of del Torro’s favorite areas to work in, and the opening narration places within that genre as surely as if it had intoned, ‘One upon a time.’ The film is photographic beautifully, and the period is rendered in loving detail. The performances, over all, are sharp, layered, and nuanced. Strickland, for my tastes, is presented in a too one-dimensional manner and this weakens an otherwise strong script. I found it easier to accept a song and dance number deep within the movie than the broad, stereotypical villain. Still, it is a very enjoyable film, and one well worth seeing in a comfortable theater with good sound and image.

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Watch Your Units

When I took chemistry, both in high school and in college, a common warning from the professors was to ‘watch your units.’ Make sure that you tracked if the equations were in milligrams or whatnot and not lose track of those units, because mixing up units produced wildly erroneous results.

This is good advice in general. Always make sure that you are measure by the same methods and units otherwise you can’t compare things. A good example is unemployment.

Do you know what I have not heard from conservative talking heads and friends throughout the year of 2017? Labor Force Participation.

During the final years of the Obama administration, as unemployment fell, it was a quite common rebuttal from advocates on the right that that the raw unemployment figures were not the ‘true’ story and that one had to look at the terrible labor force participation, the percentage of the adult population that took part in wage labor to see that the Obama policies were actual failures covered-up by the falling unemployment figure.

Over the last year the Labor Force Participation rate has remained basically at the same level as it was during the last year of Obama’s presidency. Since now those on the right want to crow about a good economy they have changed out measuring sticks, throwing aside their former ‘truths.’

By the way this is in no way a fault that lies purely on the right. During the tail of Bush II’s administration I heard quite about ‘underemployment’ as the ‘true’ measure of the economy, and argument that vanished with the election of a Democratic president.

What’s really sad is how often these partisans will honestly forget that they ever used a different measure. With a new situation they’ll abandon their old certain truths for new certain truth that support their current position. This human failing is one of the great weaknesses in democracy, people rarely operate by purely rational means and that puts us at the whim of emotion, tribalism, and popularity.

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Ignore the Circus

Well, we’ve endured a year of Trump’s Presidency and many people, including nearly all of the press, have failed to learn the most basic lesson; ignore the Circus.

The only things that people should focus on are policy and corruption, everything else the realm of tabloid gossip and salacious titillation.

Focus on the 1-2 trillion dollars added to the nation’s debt, not the idiotic ‘Fake News Awards.’

Pay attention to the fact that his administration reduced to budget of the CFPB to zero and reduced the fine on Wells Fargo for defrauding customers, not that he clearly lies about his weight.

Saber rattling with Korea and pulling out of international agreements, surrendering our position of leadership, is far more consequential that bedding a porn actress.

Refusing to enforce sanctions against Russia for meddling in our elections greatly outweighs any Twitter tirade with another celebrity.

It must always be remember that not only is Trump an attention whore but he has no shame. You cannot embarrass him talk of bedding a porn star that only feeds his ego. You cannot cow him by talking about him that only empowers his narcissism.

Ignore the Circus, Ignore the Monkey, watch the money, watch the policy.

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Misleading Language

On Facebook there is a news article being passed around about how the most recent spree shoot/killings represented the 11th school shoot of 2018 and one person on a friend’s page responded shocked that we have become so used to these events that they no longer become major news items.

Her confusion we led by the deceptive language of the headline and far too many people simply do not read beyond that.

When she read ’11th school shooting’ her mind conjured up the image of mass shootings, of vile people or persons stalking the hallways killing at random, of the horrific images of Columbine and Sandy Hook, but have there been 11 of those in just three weeks?

No.

So what are the details of those 11 shootings?

2 are suicides, a man who shot himself in a school’s parking lot and a 14-year-old boy who killed himself in a school bathroom.

3 incidents were bullets fired from unknown people outside of the school for unknown reasons that shattered school or bus windows .

1 was an accidental discharge after a firearms instructor left a live firearm in the classroom and students mistook it for a training device.

2 more were shots fired from vehicles, 1 person was injured but the reports do not state that the injured person suffered a gunshot wound,

1event followed an altercation at a fraternity event at a university that resulted in a death.

1 was a teenage girls shot in the cafeteria by a teenage boy. No one else of the 45 to 55 people present were shot.

And the final event was the mass shooting with two deaths at the Marshall county High School. That brings us to 11 shooting in or around schools but it is clear why nearly all of these failed to make national news.

Every murder is vile, every suicide is tragic and there is no doubt that we are in the midst of cultural crisis. As I have stated in other posts I think that we will reach of critical mass and there will be a state change in the public debate on this issue. (One that might be sped along by the degradation of the Republican Party by Trump.)

All that said, the deceptive language doe not help. The purpose of language is clear communication and it doesn’t matter if your are classifying every shot fired near a school as a school shooting or rebrand torture as enhanced interrogation, abusing the language is not the way to go.

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