Saturday, September 06, 2003

Novelists are playing God I just finished reading all the essays in "Techniques of Novel Writing" by A.S. Burack.  Fascinating and a bit intimidating and liberating, all the different ways of thinking about creative writing.  One in particular, near the end of the book, struck me.  In "Writing A Mystery", Patricia Moyes compares novel-writing to playing God, in the sense of free will vs predestination.  The novelist can make the plot first, and then create the characters that are predestined to play their parts in the plot, like puppets.  Or, he can imbue each character with distinct personality characteristics, history, etc. and set them a goal, and just turn them loose, having free will.  The writer just writes down what happens. Besides being very interesting to ponder, it relieves me as well.  Because so far I have one interesting major character, two other soon-to-be-major characters that I know very little about, and a very vague "goal" in mind.  No idea how to get there, though.  But then I said, maybe I'll try to flesh out one of these other characters and see what happens.  And it's amazing the tension, the harmony, the dimension that comes out of that!  I can see that some interesting things are going to happen.  Whether they are as dimensional on paper as they are in my head remains to be seen. I also have to guard against overplanning.  At least two of these essayists (novelists all) have stated that they have overplanned a book so much that they never got around to writing it.  Don't want that to happen! 11:01:29 PM    Here's what I have to say about THAT! []

Time to write to your local newspaper again - do it TODAY! This article in Salon talks about Sunday's Doonesbury strip, which is going to discuss masturbation.  That is, it will unless your local newspaper editor pulls it in favor of the alternate, not-expected-to-cause-controversy strip that Trudeau will also supply.  The strip will be discussing the recent article blogged about in Salon and elsewhere, about how masturbation can reduce the risk of prostate cancer.  I will be writing to my local newspaper today, to urge them to print the masturbation strip.  That's what this country needs more of - more masturbation and fewer teen pregnancies and less transmission of HIV and other STDs. 11:25:32 AM    Here's what I have to say about THAT! []

Apparently, God DOES play favorites One person was killed and 10 injured when a roller coaster car separated and derailed at Disneyland yesterday.  Dolores Burlie, from Denver, said "If we had been in the line 5 to 10 minutes earlier, that would have been us.  God was watching over us." So of course, I have questions.  Maybe God was so distracted by watching over Dolores that he completely forgot about all the people on the ride at that time.  So, what exactly was Dolores up to at the time?  Or does she just have large breasts? Or maybe everyone else on the ride was a much bigger sinner than Dolores, particularly the guy that died.  What were their sins?  They must've been pretty bad for God to just kill that guy like that.  Maybe the injured people were just "collateral damage". I guess what I'm saying is, people, please save the claim that "God was watching over you" for situations when no one got hurt, and don't use it when just you and your loved ones were spared. 9:48:00 AM    Here's what I have to say about THAT! []