Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Hippies

Hippies

There was a period in my lifetime when the Hippies had their day in the sun. Woodstock came and went and there was a philosophy that came along which I recall as “Do your own Thing.” People joined communes and experimented with “Free Love” and all that sort of thing. It was sort of like Socialism… a concept that might sound good but leads nowhere. In the end there are no free rides and no substitute for hard work and ambition.

I was as affected by this but never got sucked into the vortex. I didn’t do drugs, attended a Military College, went to Vietnam and believed firmly then as I do now that there are some insidious political ideas out there that are a sham designed to lead people astray. For example in Russia under Communism, the new aristocracy was the government who tried to control the economy (An impossible task) and those who wound up with the power and the perks (Dacha’s on the Black Sea) were the card carrying members of the party who had the talent and ambition to work hard and make their miserable unworkable system perform to the low levels of its potential.

Anyway most of my Hippy friends woke up and those who had not fried their brains got jobs and raised families and made a decent life for themselves. Unfortunately many also passed on to their children that do nothing Hippy philosophy which the kids liked so much they never moved out of the house They got their student loans, went to college, played around and expected the Namby-Pamby land they saw as the “Real World” to give them something for nothing.

In College this culture affected the arts as well. Discipline and structure went out the window. Liberal leaning professors taught, “Just pick up the pencil and write anything that comes to mind and as long as the words are spelled right and the grammar is correct, who is to say that what you are cranking out is any better or any worse than what others are writing. Publishers and Editors were painted as the “Capitalists” when they refused to print most of the trash they were getting. They knew all to well that if writers chose to disregard the story telling and poetic models that had proven themselves over time that nobody outside the “Intelligencia” was going to plunk down their hard earned money to read this crap. Writers who wanted to succeed had to relearn much of what they had been taught…. To realize it was full of holes, to rediscover what it was to write something decent and get the public to buy it. This struggle is ongoing and the gulf between what “Higher Education” education teaches and what a person needs to succeed in life widens.

Now… “What?” you might ask, brought on this tirade. It is having to continuously explain the importance of the science of writing. Only after coming to Writing.com did I realize how shortchanged I was by the educational process. I thought I was so talented that all I had to do was write down what popped into my mind and I would be rewarded by instant success. Duh! Was I stupid or what?

If you read Essence and the Stones, and Bedelia and Petra in my port you will see the result of writing what pops into your head. I’m not saying that a writer can't do this for awhile but what you wind up with is a hodge-podge of different things that ramble on with nothing to really give them direction and cohesiveness. The structure and characters do not "develop themselves" and the more you go on the more convoluted everything becomes. I do exploratory writing but once the story line begins to firm in my mind I have to stop and go back. It is a frustrating and difficult task to clean up the mess. What I have learned is that once you have the thread, you write an outline of the chapters and inside each chapter a thread of what it will convey and the things that move the story along. Then try and write a first draft one step at a time. HOWEVER! the outline is more than what you learned in school. It is not just the framework of the story you intend to write. It is also a structure where you append the basic ingredients to good story telling. THE MODEL! For example who the central character is, what is their want need and desire, what are the crisis, one two and three, how is the CC changing, is the momentum building, etc. From your references write down the ingredients the “experts” say are important and make sure you include these in the outline along with the story line. Then write your novel in baby steps one scene at a time, following your outline and character sketches. This is simple… How come nobody ever mentioned it in college and graduate school?“