Topic Tuesday #153 2015/06/23 "A Climate for Writing"

Topic Tuesday #153 2015/06/23 "A Climate for Writing"

Ladies and Gentlemen of my readership, we have had quite the week since I have conversed with you on topical matters. The news has been rather heavy, week over week and it has taken its eventual toll on me, thus I am unable to fully articulate the gravity of the activity on the world stage. I am not silent on it, as you can tell by my other posts and the continued activities of the ORly Radio Podcast. The news has hurt me and has moved me to alternative action. In as much as we have seen through time - adversity, even if it seems tangential to this writer, fosters creativity. This last week it was not the news of the Charleston murders that hit me the hardest. Though they are certainly shocking and deplorable, I have been desensitized to the bigotry and violence to those of color by those with a far paler character. No, what has moved me to some sort of action and kept me awake is the future.

I would consider myself a rational person and a man of facts and perspective. I have grown to trust the scientists that work in their chosen fields and have come to know many of them. They value the same things I do. Facts and the truths that they describe. The recent news that the figures were wrong and corrected on the so called pause in global warming was a hammer blow. I didn’t expect it to be so, as I had a feeling that this sign of climate change was not up for taking a vacation, but still, I had hoped that nature had a trick or two that would explain it and it would not be a miscalculation. Sadly, the results indicate that we were incorrect with initial findings and that the world may have warmed much more than was anticipated in other models and it was not getting any better.

Credit: NASA.

The data that they used to make these statements came from a big data project, NASA Earth Exchange (NEX). It’s data is available to the public. http://climate.nasa.gov/news/2293/

“The NASA climate projections provide a detailed view of future temperature and precipitation patterns around the world at a 15.5 mile (25 kilometer) resolution, covering the time period from 1950 to 2100. The 11-terabyte dataset provides daily estimates of maximum and minimum temperatures and precipitation over the entire globe.”

I have concerns. I am a future minded person and they are painting a rather hot picture of the future, a future that if I am not a part of, surely my offspring will be. So I have to prepare them for the reality of climate change, rising oceans, hotter summers, colder winters, floods and droughts, and the people that deny it could happen. This is the tall order that keeps me up at night, and I figure if I am going to be kept up, I might as well be creative and productive with it.
This is the inspiration for a story I am going to write. It may be horrible and completely un-entertaining and worthless to some, but I will learn a lot along the way about how to write and communicate a narrative of discovery and adventure - one of surviving a changing world.
National Novel Writing Month is approaching you know.

Time to get to it. Let me know what you think.

Topic Tuesday #95 2014/05/13 "Tell Me A Story"

Topic Tuesday #95 2014/05/13 "Tell Me A Story"

Once upon a time...
In a galaxy far, far away...
It was a dark and stormy night...
And it came to pass...
So we were at this bar...
There was this girl/boy/woman/man/dog/cat/horse/pig/etc...

How does the story begin? How does the story end? And what the heck is in the middle to get from here to there?

It's a struggle that every writer has to contend with. No matter what topic, you have to begin, present, and end. Which is the hardest? That depends on the writer and subject. 
If you are the kind of person that finds it hard to walk away or say good bye, you may have dozens of stories that are only half told with no exit strategy.  
You may know the perfect ending and have a beginning, but choke when figuring out all the connective tissue between the two.

You might have great story ideas but no entry and no exit in sight and that wall prevents you from writing a damn thing. 
Frustration is the annoying officemate that accompanies the writer to the break room talking about the same inane drivel they always do. 
I have mentioned it before but it bears noting again; outlines are your friend.

Take Hollywood as an example. Why are those terrible stories made? Well... Formula scripts work. They are easily understood. They fit into production schedules. Editors have an easier job. 

I am not telling you to write a formula Hollywood docudrama. Please... Think of the children...
But we can take an example from the sweatshop script factories. They have the ability to both start and finish, while connecting the two in a somewhat intelligible way. (Some series ends excluded of course.)

As we know, most of the time they do not care about the story. They make it fit a rigid structure. That structure is valuable. Check out some script analysis diagrams. (I say scripts simply because it is often easier than working through the structure of a literary work, but can be translated to it.) You start with the "exposition", then you transition to the "rising action", then to the "climax", " falling action", and the "resolution", or cliffhanger if you are in the sitcom biz, or George R. R. Martin...

In longer stories each chapter, or even every paragraph, may follow the same basic flow.  It's hard and sometimes constrictive, but that can be magical. For example, I recently did a little game on my Facebook wall. Short stories, of only six words. This was remarkable for bringing out rampant creativity. Hemingway* did, perhaps the best of these. 

"For sale, baby shoes. Never worn." (* - Heminway may not have been the originator but is credited with it.) 
Sometimes all you need is a little restriction to actually soar to new heights. I'll get into the psychology of choice another day. 

Go write something!