Write about what?

Consider the possible basic conflicts in fiction:  man against environment, man against man, man against society, and man against self.  In most plots the conflicts are between people.  Even in Robinson Caruso and Castaway, tales of man surviving in isolation, other people are part of the conflict. The fact that the protagonist  learned to survive  on his own didn’t bring either story to an end. When people arrived on Robinson’s Caruso’s island, they weren’t friendly. The enemy had to be defeated. In Castaway the  biggest conflict occurred when the main character returned to civilization only to realize that the love of his life had married someone else. Contact with people only brought new conflicts.

What causes the conflict between fictional characters is often over simplified. Typically character A and character B want the same thing, but they don’t want to share. This love triangle plot is played over and over…

When a person refers to classic art, you automatically assume it is the style derived from classic Greek art. This style is associated with city-states on a small Greek peninsula beginning about 500 B.C. and ending 323 B.C., at the death of Alexander the Great. There are other civilizations with other classic periods, blooms in culture led to the height of artistic expression. Why do we assume that the culture is automatically Greek when it is not identified?  One clue is the ending date, the death of the Alexander the Great. Alexander was actually a Macedonian, but military empires often do not come up with their own “culture.” Rather he adopted one of a conquered region and spread it where ever his armies traveled. Having a similar language and culture makes it much easier to rule a huge empire. When the Romans took over they were too busy building roads and outposts to…

The social psychologist Solomon Asch  is famous for his experiments on  how peer pressure affects our perceptions in 1950s.  According to Asch if all those answering before the research participant selected the same incorrect answer approximately 76% of the people would choose that same obviously incorrect answer. [1] So if most people are in a group of ten or twelve people and all of the others say the sky is normally red, the average person will agree and somehow rationalize agreeing with a statement that they know to be false. Perhaps the question is about Mars, and not Earth. The sky is normally red on Mars, isn’t it?  This really has not changed since this 1950s, if anything differs it is the fact that less than 24% of the people tend to disagree when they know that the others are wrong.

But there is something else about conformity that…

When Edgar Allen Poe published “Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841 the murder mystery was a relatively new genre. He wrote a few more of these increasingly popular detective stories before leaving behind his own mystery. In 1849 he was was found wandering injured and delirious through the streets of Baltimore. The brilliant writer never regained his wits enough to explain what had happen to him. He died a few days later leaving behind a real unsolved mystery.

Current detectives have more techniques for identifying possible suspect but still lean heavily on the use of a psychological profile. You are probably familiar with a few of the terms they throw around, such as calling card, MO, and motive.  These are not just reserved for suspects in murder mysteries.  Fictional characters take on their own personalities when you remember to consider each of these features. Paying attention to these aspects  doesn’t…

When reading a professional author’s discussion thread, I noted that more than one person assumed the trick to creating a unique writer’s voice was “writing like you talk.”  There is some truth to this if you are a good verbal storyteller. But many good writers are do not excel at public speaking.

Recently I was discussing a book written by a prominent newscaster, mimicking his unique conversational mannerisms. One of the people made an interesting observation. He said, “You can really hear him speaking as you read it, and that really slows you down.” Now, I prefer reading to listening for the very reason that I can read about three times faster than I can listen. This led me to consider the complications of writing like you speak.

Most people tend to be more dramatic and less accurate when speaking. This allows them to be heard over competing voices. Frequent repetition…

Imagery is one of the harder to pinpoint concepts in poetry. What exactly is the difference between describing something in poetry and creating imagery?  This concept is not always easy to explain.  So I looked at what some experts in the fields of communication and language said about imagery.

Marshall McLuhan, a modern philosopher well known for his communication and media theories, was particularly in the application of these theories. He wrote extensively on how marketing and advertisement appeals to people. He stepped into the realm of politics to comment:

Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.[1]

Noam Chomsky, a linguist and cognitive scientist, who is known for his political involvement looked at McLuhan’s area of expertise, how the public perceives advertisements. According…

Recently I was following a thread of writers discussing how to find names that make characters memorable.  Honestly I believe that writers should be looking at the reverse situation.  It is the skillful creation of a character whose strengths and weaknesses  strike a chord of truth in the reader that make the character’s name memorable. Names like Scarlet, Sherlock, Romeo and Ulysses invoke images of their fictional counterparts.

People seek out empathetic protagonists when they read. These characters are constructed so that people can relate to them and  even feel an emotional connection with them. One critical thing to remember is not everybody will identify with the same kind of character, which is fortunate because I would hate to be reading about the same person over and over again. It’s fairly clear that the ideal fictional character is a mix of strengths and weakness  – neither perfect or perfectly rotten –…