Storylines

Where do storylines, story ideas, come from.

So was driving for a few hours the other day and, as the mind does, the thoughts wandered. Driving through the forests and townships which in early 2009 were devastated by a horrific bushfire/wildfire.

It is not clump of trees, or a mountain, burnt out. It is half an hour of driving at a 100 kilometres an hour, through blackened twisted skeleton forests.

The mountainsides are extraordinary - because you can see them. Because the forests which once covered them have been scorched free of the leaves and small branches on the trees.

The trees become so many silent blackened stooped sentinels standing naked on the mountainsides. Old men broken by the flames.

Which, after the usual thoughts on Nature and mortality (as regrettably more than a handful of people died in the fires), turned to storylines. Everything is grist for the writing mill.

Where could this be? What had happened here? The twisted disfigured trees? The mountainsides of crazed cracked rock due to the fire's intensity. The sheer enormity of the devastation, and this was just what I could see  as I drove along from the road.

Mordor.

Tolkien's mythical land of evil in "Lord of the Rings".

This is the land of Mordor a year after the fall of Mordor. The landscape devastated. The very ground, after centuries under the black clouds of Mordor, broken, the trees shattered and blackened.

Some trees, with the freeing of the black cloud of Mordor, are abruptly suddenly headily crazily budding. Tiny shoots, tendrils, and leaves sprouting up and down the main trunk and branches of some trees. Their reaction to stress. They look green and furry.

Other trees, and there are whole glades and hillsides of them, will never recover. They are stripped bare of all greenery, charcoal black bites dot their trunks and dismembered limbs where the fire fed.

Many trees have fallen, or stand drunkenly propped up by a more solid and less weakened neighbour. There is no consistency to the devastation. The fire in its speed and ferocity sometimes racing ahead of its own anarchistic intentions and missing a tree or clumps of trees. They stand as lonely reminders of what once was.

The rule of Sauron, sovereignty of Mordor is no more. Finally vanquished and consigned to history it is the earth, the trees, which still show the horror of the place; the toxic effect of Mordor on the world.

End#

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Dickens serialization

So Charles Dickens was published in the mass-circulation magazines of his time, which were the grand avenues to the populace, the great unwashed, the purveyours of cheap mass produced stories.

And yet he wrote stories which have withstood the power of Time, look likely towithstand for many years to come. Stories which are used in all mediums.

And yet Dickens broke many of the cardinal commercial rules on what to write. He moralised to, and at, the readers, telling them of the evils of the poorhouse, the ingrained poverty of the slums, even the inefficiencies and glacial slowness of the British legal system.

His characters were real, and had a sense of time and place, and yet were also immortal.

Writing for magazines, similiar to Arthur Conan Doyle, Dickens had in each episode to begin by resolving a "cliff hanger" and setting in place a fresh cliff hanger so the reader would buy the next instalment.

Most importantly he was published. He wrote and in the medium of his day got published.

Be it internet, or computer gamen magazine, newspaper, television script, play or book or "kindle".

As a writer we should aim to be published, and to be compensated for the time we have taken and the skills we employ, in creating something worthy for someone else to buy. Create something of value.

Be proud. Write.

Dickens and Writing Markets

Well presently I am surrounded by the busy shopping rabble. It is Boxing Day, and here in XXX it is the traditional biggest shopping day of the year. Everything is discounted, even books.

So it makes you think that maybe, just maybe, writing is also about commerce. The production of one thing of value to be sold to someone else. 

Which brings you to Dickens. Charles Dickens.

The Christmas season is not complete without some Dickens. "A Christmas Carol", a retelling of "Oliver", Scrooge, etcetra...

As with Dickens, this entry will serialised...

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Test of blogger email delivery

Testing email direct delivery of blogger updates. Please ignore. It is really a boring test message.

No. 4 - Time and character connectivity

Writing demands Time. And thus updating a blog on writing is not the very best way to accumulate words on the page for the stories, novels, scripts, poetry, prose, or reviews you are writing - in fact a blog is probably pretty close to procrastination.

Though I like to think, the blog enables one to practice communication of a message to an unknown other, and develop a sensible readable voice. Not a bland voice, but a voice which people might want to hear.

Besides by definition life is a procrastination from writing, and by life I include all activities including sleep, eating, breathing..........perhaps I am a tad extreme in my views.

Of course without life you would not have anything to write about. Or would you? Does a space opera require input from my life? Can my day to day domestic chores reflect on the activities of characters in a Tolkein-esque universe?

The answer is that such activities must. The reader must be able to relate to the characters on some level, else they lose interest completely and irretrievably. Which means they will place your piece of writing down, or close the book, or turn off the television, or walk out of the theater. They may shun anything with your name on it forevermore.

Such a reaction is not conducive to a career in writing. Knighthoods and royalties shall not be yours.

So allow your character to connect to the reader, if not physically, if not by locale, if not by job, then by thought or emotions. Let them buy the character is real, and thus, all could be real, if they but pause and read awhile......

No 3 - the brick house

Writing is not easy, and yet at times we soar. I write, and write, and write. Some is stories, some is poetry. Some poetry I shall affix here, momentarily. For now some briefest thoughts on writing.

Writing is what you do all the time, storing gems of fact, thinking how that mannerism could be added to, how the world we view might contract.

I want to know. I am happy if the answer is unknowable, but how did we reach unknowable?

A spaceship winning across the stars, to a clean crisp world, far from humanities short-comings, and as they land the computer electrocutes the entire human contingent onboard.

Because the computer knows, even if they do not, while they can seek a new beginning, a new world, they bring the seeds od destruction, the diseases of the old, with them in themselves. If they are no more, then the world has a sense of this.

Bit sobering to treat human race as un-fixable. Perhaps in a million years we will work together, without the need o be forced to do so by circumstances.

So a poem:

+ Homer and Tiger +
Your tales great are still sounded
Of journeys long and men hounded
By Gods and maidens seeking love
Of golden fleeces and cyclops above
The heroes then the same as now
Vain and skilled who could wow
The watching crowds with their powess
Send them into raptures with each caress
Of bow string or sword slice so
Those great heroes you did know
Feet of lead they always had
For so often misbehaved and grew bad
Our heroes now are not so dissimiliar
As we hear about them over dinner
Wives they leave in the lurch
With hubris drink fornicate and miss church
CNN and Fox play the chorus
Paparazzi unrestrained and raucous
And as with those of whom you wrote
We hold our breaths and strangely hope
These heroes set upon pedestals high
Who we pushed ever upward to the sky
After reflection and humility taught
May again rise strong and taut
Show us human weaknesses can be overcome
That we mere mortals to fate need not always succumb.

Two

Numbers in writing are important, they mark chapters, they indicate pages moving, the story flowing......and here is the second entry:

If you are a writer, it would appear you must be in need of a blog.

Oh d*mn I hear echoes of Austen here, as in “It is well known, if not universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of a fortune, is in need of a wife” - or in this period of modern history, “a writer in possession of words, wishing to sell such words must, even if it is not universally acknowledged, create a blog to inspire readership, lure agents, and demonstrate the craft of writing”.

One without the other, writing without a blog, is in the manners of the “noughties”, unseemly.

Where once writers were seen as isolated creatures, to be kept apart, locked in attic garrets, or existing in poverty level conditions in tumbled-down country cottages; it is now expected writers be gregarious and outgoing. Writers are expected to be witty and friendly and understanding, with the "right" type of political views so as not to alienate the reader – even if they lust after their neighbour's llama. Writers are expected to promote, and market, and sell the wears of their imaginations as loudly, brashly, insincerely, as the most slippery cunning car salesman.

Thus I present to you, the reader, the glorious reader, the glorious reader from whom readership, and for whom the publishing of the books is concerned; this most humble blog on words and writing.

I shan't aim to limit this blog to merely my own writing, writings, or wisdom; else it be no deeper than this humble writer before you.

I am by birth Irish, by taxable residence Australian, and, by inclination, an internationalist. This probably falls back to both the place of my birth, and the country in which I now make my residence.

The Irish dispora, the great outflowing of the Irish across the world, has never ceased, those who would call themselves Irish have ever possessed wandering feet. Australia by population size, geographic position, and population mix, has always been an associate of great powers rather than the power itself – thus an open minded international approach to allies and foes has always been the Australian modus operandi.

I feel I am waffling already. Let me then say I am not yet a published author, I am merely a writer. I also have not, to the best part of my knowledge, ever killed anyone, and thus I am a writer of promise as yet unconfirmed.

I have written plays, and stories, and poems, and more than a few attempts at novels. For some less than sensible reason, known only to my own mind, I don't tend to write many short stories – my stories are half novel size or a few pages. I also write poetry, usually at least one a day, and sometimes several, and the quality of such poetry I leave to the judgment of the reader. I have been writing poetry for many years now. Many many years.

I am currently working on several novels, and going back over a few others, editing, and tidying, and addressing the voice, and considering the character – and......well going about doing the stuff of writing.

A question I think every writer should ask, is do they want to be published? Do you dream of seeing your book marked down from $20, to $10, to $5, to the three books for $5 bin?

Even the best writers suffer this fate, and unless you have the un-shakeable faith of Moses in your own ability – and this reflects the reality of your ability, it shall not be your fate to have the joy of seeing your written wares gradually reduce in value over their time in the marketplace....; for without faith it does not matter if you are good enough - for you shall not find someone willing to publish your novel.

You see, self publishing, whilst a way to promote your ability, and product, is not going likely to result in a writing career.

You need someone else, a money grubbing company run by Satan's minions to take your manuscript (or lengthy email, or libidinous blog), edit it, create cover art for it, set it in print, and bind it between covers – with your name somewhere thereabouts – and definitely their corporate logo; before you are properly published.

Before you can call yourself an author, rather than a mere writer. For many, many, many, are the writers in our midst, with their single story which, if they could but complete, would stun the world to silence, only broken by the turning of pages, or the click of fingernail to screen, to move the story, so brilliantly transposed, forward.

So that's is writing.

Why write. For immortality, to preserve your sanity, to earn money and pay bills, to gain fame; it matters not. One must just do and, in achieving, be rewarded.