My Fantasy Tool Kit (5): Let Your Characters Rock

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There are all sorts of stories about authors whose fictional characters came to life. (Bram Stoker really hated it when that happened.) I don’t mean to suggest that this can truly happen in the real world, although there is some evidence that it does. Rather, it is a metaphor for what should happen when you write fiction.

First you have to imagine a character as a whole other person, totally distinct from its author. This is a step that some would-be writers are never able to take. But unless you can cut the cord, the reader is always going to be able to tell that your character is just a surrogate for you–a phony character who does things you’ve never done, but desperately wish you could do. This is the genesis of seriously awful writing.

Step Two is even trickier. You have to get out of the way and let the characters do what they want to do. This won’t happen, of course, unless you’ve spent a lot of time with the character and fully, deeply imagined him or her, and allowed this fictional person to have nothing to do with you.

At that point, you may find that something you planned for the character to do is not going to happen because he won’t do it. He wants to take some other action. It may even be something that you, the writer, never anticipated. Usually this turns out to be a great improvement over what you were going to write at first. At the same time, if you try to force the character to say or do something he doesn’t want to do, your story will suffer.

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But it’s only art.

I often find a character kicks in and comes to life after I’ve succeeded in “seeing” and “hearing” him as an actor in a movie. First the face, then the voice; and next thing you know, the story is unfolding itself before you, and you’re writing to catch up.

All of this is especially applicable to fantasy, because good fantasy depends more on the imagination than any other genre–not just the writer’s imagination, but the reader’s, too. To come alive, the fantasy needs both the writer and the reader.

But that’s the subject for another essay.

Paltrow: More Power to the Prez

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I know–it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, to pick on some Hollywood airhead for saying stupid things. But Gwyneth Paltrow really raised the bar of stupidity when she said this, a couple of nights ago:

“It would be wonderful if we were able to give this man all of the power that he needs to pass the things that he needs to pass” ( http://dailysignal.com/2014/10/10/famous-actress-wants-give-obama-power-needs/ ).

Yo, Gwynnie–you need to catch up on current events. The most lawless chief executive in modern history already claims he has the power to do “anything I want,” via “phone and pen.” If he can’t get something passed in Congress, all he has to do is sign an executive order. And as long as he has at least 51 Democrats in the Senate, he can perform human sacrifices on the White House lawn with no risk of impeachment.

So, Gwynnie, what more would you like the criminal-in-chief to be able to do–beyond erasing our country’s borders, importing dangerous diseases, stacking the judiciary full of left-wing fanatics, waging jihad for homosexuality against Christianity, changing the mission of NASA from space exploration to “reaching out to Muslims,” and setting back race relations 75 years? In what has he failed to content you? What damage has he left undone, that you would have him do? As it is, if he disappeared tomorrow, it would still take at least another 50 years to repair the harm he has done.

She also said to the lawless SOB, to his face, “You’re so handsome that I can’t speak properly.”

Oh! What these people say, when they don’t have someone else to write their lines for them!

And Furthermore…

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This business with the Sayreville High School football team raises two more questions in my mind.

How in the world did this happen more than once?

And how was it kept a secret from the student body?

Just askin’.

High School Football Scandal: Just What You’d Expect

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Today’s public school outrage: Sayreville High School, in New Jersey, has canceled its football season this week, in response to allegations that upperclassmen on the football team sexually abused freshmen players.

This is a Christian blog site, so if you want the gory details, you’ll have to read the newspaper article ( http://www.dailyrecord.com/story/news/local/2014/10/08/sayreville-football-scandal/16915427/ ).

After you read it, you may wonder, “Gee, where do kids get the idea to do such degrading and potentially dangerous things?”

From their public schools, that’s where.

Here is an article I wrote four years ago about a New Jersey Sex Education Conference attended by hundreds of sex ed teachers ( http://chalcedon.edu/research/articles/when-sex-education-turns-into-pornography/ ). The featured attraction at the conference was “Healthy Endings: A Workshop in Anal Health and Sexual Safety.” There were a lot of booths selling “sex toys.” And it was all about educating children.

What the Sayreville football players allegedly did to younger players in the locker room is only what you would expect them to do after being “educated” by “teachers” who attended that conference.

Parents need to re-think their kids being in the public schools.

Folks, it’s every bit as bad as we’re saying it is. You can easily check the information and confirm that it’s true.

Meanwhile, I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that, even if Sayreville High School’s football program bites the dust, “sex education” there will survive and flourish.

They’re Killing Childrens’ Souls

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So you still want your children in the public schools?

At the Lincoln Public Schools, in Nebraska, teachers have been ordered to stop using “gendered expressions”–like, for instance, calling boys and girls “boys and girls”–and instead using “gender inclusive” gibberish–like calling them “purple penguins” ( http://m.nationalreview.com/article/389862/school-told-call-kids-purple-penguins-because-boys-and-girls-not-inclusive ).

The Lincoln schools are following “12 steps on the way to gender inclusiveness,” a program of induced insanity and wickedness developed by the wackos at Gender Spectrum.

A few years ago, this cropped up in schools in British Columbia. Certain of my esteemed colleagues insisted it would never happen here. Well, now it’s here.

Please do not feel secure if you live in a Red State like Nebraska, or a county governed by conservative Republicans. The same teachers’ unions run the schools in all 50 states.

And now they want to teach your children that it’s wrong to think in terms of “man and woman” (Male and female created He them, Genesis 1:27), and to train them to “Point out and inquire when you hear others referencing gender in a binary manner… Ask things like…’What makes you say that?’…Provide counter-narratives that challenge students to think more expansively about their notions of gender.”

This is for the benefit of poor warped souls who have bits of their anatomy lopped off, and have themselves shot up with hormones, so they can say they are of another sex than the one into which they were born. For the sake of this microscopically small constituency, we are expected to turn our whole culture upside-down, and our own minds inside-out, and abandon our religion.

If you don’t have this in your own public school district yet, be assured: it’s coming, and sooner than you think.

All Christians who continue to send their children to public schools are, whether they know it or not, accomplices of the teacher unions, and complicit in their crimes.

By the time these people get done “educating” a child, will he or she still have a soul?

How to Cross over the Chasm

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I’m doing some of the final editing for The Glass Bridge (Book #7 of the Bell Mountain series), knowing it will still be some months before it’s in print, and wondering what else will have gone wrong with America by then.

We are at the mercy of rulers and opinion-shapers who actively and purposely ruin our prosperity, undermine our national security, corrupt our morals, make a shambles of the rule of law, and debauch our culture. God has permitted this as punishment for our sins–especially the sins of pride and ingratitude. These leaders are the scourge in His hands.

Government by the criminally insane is a very bad business.

Lest we kid ourselves into thinking God will just let us out from under this without some gesture of good faith on our part, turn to that colossal rusting junkyard we call history. Those broken, unsalvageable heaps piled up to the sky were once civilizations.

But whoa–this is getting awfully heavy, isn’t it? Not at all in the spirit of the book I’m editing.

In the book, the glass bridge stands for a perilous passage that can only be crossed, if crossed at all, by faith. Not faith in our own cleverness; not faith in the works of our hands or the inventions of our minds; not faith in who we are, or who we think we are: but faith only in the wisdom, the righteousness, the sovereign power, and the divine love of the only living God.

This is the faith that’ll get us across the glass bridge.

This, and no other.

They Had One Job To Do….

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Continue Reading “They Had One Job To Do….” →

What We Can Learn from Bad Movies

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There are many sites on the Internet listing “the 50 worst movies of all time,” according to this or that viewer poll, this or that critic. Even allowing for much variation, there are still a few films that make everybody’s list: legendary clunkers like Heaven’s Gate, Gigli, Plan 9 from Outer Space, Speed 2 (set on board a cruise ship going six knots per hour), etc. I am always shocked to discover how many of these I have actually seen.

But each and every terrible movie raises the same question: What ever made them think that this was going to be good?

Think about it. A movie isn’t slapped together in an afternoon. It takes days and days of work; and at the end of the day, the director and the staff have to watch the rushes to see how the last bunch of filming turned out. For the most part, it costs a lot of money to make a movie: so supposedly the people who are making it know what they’re doing.

So how is it that you have investors who want a return on their money (and if they were in the habit of just throwing money away on silliness, they would soon not be rich investors anymore), writers who are paid good money for writing, a director whose career could end if he makes a bad enough movie, individuals who are paid good money to act in the film, and all of the work that all of these people do subject to day-by-day review and oversight–and with all that, you still wind up with Exorcist II: The Heretic? How could anybody look at the rushes for The Fifth Element and not realize they were creating the ugliest movie you ever saw?

Is it any wonder that equally fallible (or even criminally mischievous) persons, lacking the capacity for immediate oversight enjoyed by movie-makers, come up with a disaster like Obamacare? Is not Global Warming the Heaven’s Gate of science?

Policy-makers don’t have daily rushes to look at–although, when all is said and done, they are very able to ignore lots and lots of negative feedback.

If America’s immigration policy were a movie in progress, what do you think the rushes would look like? If Ed Wood could look at the dailies for Plan 9 from Outer Space and say “It’s good, print it,” is it any wonder that the leaders who have turned our southern border into a giant vacuum cleaner sucking in millions of illegal aliens, and all sorts of diseases, can look at what they have done and say, “It’s good”?

The only difference is, bad movies hurt those who produce bad movies; while those who produce bad policy walk away unscathed while the rest of us suffer.

My Fantasy Tool Kit (4): Imagination

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One of the hardest things about writing fantasy is to turn your imagination loose.

You folks out there who’d like to try to write this stuff, be warned: the easiest thing in the world is to fall into writing fantasy that is not imaginative, that’s been done to death by everybody else, that’s dull and predictable, etc. True, there is no new thing under the sun. But it’s funny that the greatest enemy of fantasy should be the cliche.

Speaking only for myself, I find sometimes that it takes an act of will to let my imagination have free rein. But if you’re not going to do that, why write fantasy? The world already has all the stale, derivative, imitative, boring fantasy it’ll ever need. You have to be bold. You have to take a chance. A timid imagination has no place in fantasy.

Some examples:

In The Lord of the Rings/ The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien awes me with his depiction of the forest of Lothlorien as a place outside the normal flow of time. How did he ever think of that? And having thought of it, how did he ever come to write it so effectively?

In The Magician’s Nephew, one of the Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis had his magical transportation rings work by taking you to a special place in another dimension that was a kind of gateway to all the other places in the universe; and although it was also a place in its own right, it was like none of the others. I find it hard to describe, but you don’t need my description: Lewis’s is better!

Edgar Rice Burroughs, in The Chessmen of Mars, imagined a backward civilization cut off from the mainstream of Martian culture and science–a place where the art of taxidermy is put to unexpected purposes. So detailed, so vivid is his depiction of the city and people of Manator, you may find yourself dreaming about it.

I can’t tell you how to develop a wild imagination. If you don’t have an imagination, well and good–you can always write for television. But I suspect you’ve either got it or you don’t. The thing is, you might not know you have it. The only way to find out is to start using it and see what happens.

Final hint: Your imagination is never going to stretch its wings if you insist on writing about street-smart nuns and crusty but benign old wizards.

‘National Health’ to Push ‘Stop Drinking’ Pill

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In their continuing campaign to abolish free will among the human race, Britain’s socialized medicine establishment, the National Health, has come up with a drug that’s supposed to stop you from wanting more than one glass of wine or pint of beer ( http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/nhs-pill-stop-drinkers-having-4369536 ). To quote the lead paragraph of the news story in The Mirror, “Hundreds of thousands of drinkers who down half a bottle of wine or three pints every night are to be offered a pill to cut their cravings.”

“Offered,” eh? Hey, it’s only being “offered”–it’s not like they’ve gone all Mike Bloomberg on you and forbidden you to have more than one nip before they tuck you in.

The story does not tell you what happens if you reject the “offer” of the stop-drinking drug, but we can guess. Maybe later on you trip over a loose roller skate and break your ankle; and when you try to get treatment for it, they answer, “Hmmm… Looks like you refused to take the anti-drinking pill. No treatment for you!”

“But it’s a broken ankle! It has nothing to do with drinking.”

“Sorry–we have a policy against treating antisocial types like you who won’t do what the government says is good for you.”

All right, if I drank three pints of beer–48 ounces–I’d be face-down on the floor. But since when is the government my mommy and my daddy and my nanny, to tell me what I can or can’t drink? I have no desire to drink three pints of beer at a sitting–but it’s none of their cotton-pickin’ business!

Oh, and the drug costs 3 pounds per pill; and nobody has any idea what might be the long-term effects of taking it every time you feel like having a second glass of wine.

They’ve stumbled onto a good thing, here. Maybe they can also come up with pills that will kill your desire to stay up late to watch a movie, to phone in sick to work so you can go fishing, to eat White Castles when you should be having tofu, and so on. Maybe they can shut down all our bad habits!

If they really wanted to do some good, why don’t they invent a pill that won’t let you vote for liberals or socialists?