Sunday, February 12, 2017

Stories, Why They're Influential, and Why I'm not Writing Them...

...yet. I'm studying to write stories, but it's very lonely independent study, because I don't know anyone who teaches what the world has not yet learned.

The adult world has not yet learned to tell or hear the kinds of stories where people are people. Instead, we have stories with heroes and villains--even superheroes and supervillains, even though we know that no people in the real world have superpowers or super-morality--because those are the kinds of characters and the kinds of conflicts that make stories interesting to people. Heroes, villains and conflicts make stories marketable. Stories that are too different don't sell.

If someone writes a novel (whatever possible use that could be...) that doesn't follow an accepted format of what publishers want to see in a particular kind of novel, it's just another wannabe novelist being told that a publisher doesn't currently have a place for that novel. That happens so much it's a cliché, which is ironic. A cliché is an un-original idea, so getting a rejection letter from a publisher because the ideas in the writing were too different, and that whole scenario being so common as to be cliché, is ironic. Irony is...oh, skip it. We aren't a dictionary. We're just trying to convey an idea that is so odd, we are sure we can't explain what it's going to take for us to promote this much-needed idea in storytelling, and that storytelling affects everyone's world-view.


I've found my way not to be the writer in the photo to the left. For a start, I write and publish here, online. No one tells me what to write and no one has to buy my writing, ever. The pressures of a novelist trying to get published do not apply to me. I write. Nothing really stops me except not finding the words to convey the ideas which are my own ideas. As long as I can think in words (I don't always. I also think in pictures, feelings and music) and can tap keys on the keyboard, I don't get writer's block. The only other challenge is reader's block. My writing is (obviously) an effort to connect through words with another person: right now, you, because you're reading. My only real challenge at the moment is keeping your interest.

So let's discuss some stories that might be familiar to you, but let's try to look at these stories in a particular way. Let's look at fiction stories to find truth in them.

I can come up with two stories I think will be familiar to readers of my blog: One is Star Trek and the other is Lord of the Rings.

Like many other people who were teenagers in the 1970s, I read the Lord of the Rings books, starting with The Hobbit, which wasn't part of the trilogy, but was the book that got many young readers interested in reading the other books. Since it is a trilogy-plus-one, it's quite a long story. I won't waste time trying to summarize it. Instead, I'm going to focus in on one set of details: in the LOTR story, there are several races of sentient, human-like beings, and a certain consistency in how they're described; all the different kinds of "people"--whether they are hobbits, elves, dwarves, orcs or men--each have a racially-linked basic character. Hobbits can't help being into a leisurely life, dwarves are industrious workers, elves are lovely and magical, orcs are ugly, coarse, stupid and evil, and men are strong, brave conquerors and rulers; all of these qualities are shown consistently in the LOTR stories as character traits that are entirely due to the race to which an individual belongs. The basic character of each and every character in LOTR is determined by their respective races.

I'm not the first person to notice or describe this. I'm just very concise in my description.

LOTR was very likely written as an analogy for World War Two, which was an era when most people had no issues at all with dividing the entire world into races, nationalities and racial/national character. Orcs were Nazis and axis nations. LOTR presented a world in which we could all think of Germans and Japanese as pure, irredeemable evil, and that the allied forces (of good...) really had no choice but to destroy these orc-like peoples. The big war ended before LOTR was published, but LOTR found its initial audience among readers in the English-speaking world who had recently been slaying orcs and dethroning Sauron.



That's about all the time I have for writing today. The other thing that keeps me from being the classic frustrated writer is that I have a family that loves me and needs me around. I choose not to sequester myself for days at a stretch, imagining that writing is more important than anything else in my life. It's important, I'll keep doing it, and that's what I have for today's session.

Stay tuned if you want. Next time I'll be writing about how to revolutionize storytelling and being human. It's the good part.

Sunday, February 5, 2017

Video of Drumming in Near Dark

January 2017, Dog Beach, Chicago.

Posted by Richard Wallace on Saturday, January 21, 2017