First, some old business. Regulars will have noticed that there is not another WIP Interview here. For various reasons, I have moved the venue for those, though I have high hopes of continuing them for the foreseeable future. They can now be found at http://www.writing.com/main/profile/blog/hammer18.
I have moved them there for various reasons, one, to clear my own space so I can begin blogging again, and two, they weren't doing well here, in terms of visits and comments, and the way that space is set up, it will become known as an interview page, and attract a regular following (I hope!). In any case, it is set up so that anyone can read it, but you have to be a member to interact. That shouldn't be too great a limitation, as the site boasts 500,000 active members whose chief interest is in new writers. So, best of luck to all who participate, and take note, a new interview with Jenny Jobe, a friend from Scribblers' Den, was posted today.
I have moved them there for various reasons, one, to clear my own space so I can begin blogging again, and two, they weren't doing well here, in terms of visits and comments, and the way that space is set up, it will become known as an interview page, and attract a regular following (I hope!). In any case, it is set up so that anyone can read it, but you have to be a member to interact. That shouldn't be too great a limitation, as the site boasts 500,000 active members whose chief interest is in new writers. So, best of luck to all who participate, and take note, a new interview with Jenny Jobe, a friend from Scribblers' Den, was posted today.
"Scientists design atomic clock" Moving on to current business, then. Last Wednesday I was chatting with a 17-year old girl (Relax, prudes! Friend of my grandkids) as she was sitting on my living room floor wrapping up some social studies homework. She looked up and asked me if I knew anything about the Red Menace.
Are you kidding? What baby boomer could have been oblivious enough to have not noticed what was going on in the world of the 1950s? There is a well-known fantasy trilogy in which an all-powerful monster named Sauron threatens to blow a great blast of evil into the world and torture, subjugate, and enslave every free-thinking human, elf, and dwarf, because happiness and free will are abominations to him. Amateur!
Every child on earth during the last half of the twentieth century grew up in the shadow of Great Uncle Sauron, or to use his modern name, the H-bomb. I could tell her about growing up in a world where building contractors could make a decent living adding in-home fallout shelters to existing houses. I could tell her about the air raid sirens that were cycled every Monday at noon, at which time everyone was expected to look around and plan what they would do if they saw the flash right then. I could tell her about Thursday morning's fourth grade class where all of Mrs. Fulsom's little charges practiced diving under the desk and building a fort out of the chairs to protect us from the ten-megaton blast that would shortly be erupting above the Navy base at the bottom of the hill. I could tell her about the Berlin Airlift, the wars in Korea and Viet Nam, how in the clear waters off the coast of Cuba, the world walked up to the brink and looked into the abyss while millions of schoolchildren watched on black-and-white TVs on their teachers' desks. I told her about the proxy wars fought in every backwater shithole on the face of the earth while our leaders postured, bluffed, and played a daily game of brinksmanship that would have brought a seasoned gambler to his knees in tears. I could tell her about our horror movies. We didn't need Freddy and Jason; we had Failsafe and On the Beach to scare the b'Jesus out of us! Now almost two decades after the end of the Cold War, it's sometimes difficult to remember what we were so afraid of.
Are you kidding? What baby boomer could have been oblivious enough to have not noticed what was going on in the world of the 1950s? There is a well-known fantasy trilogy in which an all-powerful monster named Sauron threatens to blow a great blast of evil into the world and torture, subjugate, and enslave every free-thinking human, elf, and dwarf, because happiness and free will are abominations to him. Amateur!
Every child on earth during the last half of the twentieth century grew up in the shadow of Great Uncle Sauron, or to use his modern name, the H-bomb. I could tell her about growing up in a world where building contractors could make a decent living adding in-home fallout shelters to existing houses. I could tell her about the air raid sirens that were cycled every Monday at noon, at which time everyone was expected to look around and plan what they would do if they saw the flash right then. I could tell her about Thursday morning's fourth grade class where all of Mrs. Fulsom's little charges practiced diving under the desk and building a fort out of the chairs to protect us from the ten-megaton blast that would shortly be erupting above the Navy base at the bottom of the hill. I could tell her about the Berlin Airlift, the wars in Korea and Viet Nam, how in the clear waters off the coast of Cuba, the world walked up to the brink and looked into the abyss while millions of schoolchildren watched on black-and-white TVs on their teachers' desks. I told her about the proxy wars fought in every backwater shithole on the face of the earth while our leaders postured, bluffed, and played a daily game of brinksmanship that would have brought a seasoned gambler to his knees in tears. I could tell her about our horror movies. We didn't need Freddy and Jason; we had Failsafe and On the Beach to scare the b'Jesus out of us! Now almost two decades after the end of the Cold War, it's sometimes difficult to remember what we were so afraid of.
Oh, yeah . . .
But I, a man certified by the IRS as a professional writer, a man who lived throughout the era, couldn't find the words to answer the one question she kept asking: "Why?" Why did the world align itself into two warring camps that daily threatened to unleash nuclear Armageddon on each other with thousands of hydrogen bombs? All I could tell her was that we didn't wake up one day and decide that this was how the world needed to be. I compared it to that old saw about slowly boiling a frog so that the frog doesn't think to jump out of the water until it's too late. There would be an action here, a counteraction there, and whatever that created became the new norm, and we moved on from there. But I couldn't explain the why or the how behind the world turning itself into the galaxy's insane asylum and throwing away the key.
I still can't, and I don't know what she finally took away from our conversation, but at the end of the day, this is a writer's blog, and my task is to tie this experience into The Craft. This is what I've realized because of this conversation:
If you are a young or inexperienced writer just starting out, and you write in a genre where you need to create worlds, sci-fi, dystopian, fantasy, alternate history, you may be concerned that the world you create is too unbelievable for readers to accept. Let me tell you something. There is nothing you can dream up in the depths of your worst crack-fueled hallucinations that can hold a candle to what the world was really like from 1950 to 2000. Go on, try. I dare you!
Make your world. Make it as crazy as you like, and be secure in the knowledge that the real world was crazier than anything you have dreamed up. Put your characters into it and send them on a grand adventure. Throw in a romance or two, and solve a mystery while you're there. Your readers will love you for it!
Okay, that's all I've got. Get to it. I can't wait to read what you come up with!
But I, a man certified by the IRS as a professional writer, a man who lived throughout the era, couldn't find the words to answer the one question she kept asking: "Why?" Why did the world align itself into two warring camps that daily threatened to unleash nuclear Armageddon on each other with thousands of hydrogen bombs? All I could tell her was that we didn't wake up one day and decide that this was how the world needed to be. I compared it to that old saw about slowly boiling a frog so that the frog doesn't think to jump out of the water until it's too late. There would be an action here, a counteraction there, and whatever that created became the new norm, and we moved on from there. But I couldn't explain the why or the how behind the world turning itself into the galaxy's insane asylum and throwing away the key.
I still can't, and I don't know what she finally took away from our conversation, but at the end of the day, this is a writer's blog, and my task is to tie this experience into The Craft. This is what I've realized because of this conversation:
If you are a young or inexperienced writer just starting out, and you write in a genre where you need to create worlds, sci-fi, dystopian, fantasy, alternate history, you may be concerned that the world you create is too unbelievable for readers to accept. Let me tell you something. There is nothing you can dream up in the depths of your worst crack-fueled hallucinations that can hold a candle to what the world was really like from 1950 to 2000. Go on, try. I dare you!
Make your world. Make it as crazy as you like, and be secure in the knowledge that the real world was crazier than anything you have dreamed up. Put your characters into it and send them on a grand adventure. Throw in a romance or two, and solve a mystery while you're there. Your readers will love you for it!
Okay, that's all I've got. Get to it. I can't wait to read what you come up with!