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a journal |
 This book is intended as a place to blog about my life and things I'm interested in and answers to prompts from various blog prompt sites here on WDC, including "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  and "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" I'm not sure yet what it'll turn into, but I'm going to have fun figuring it out. |
| Write about water rising, overflowing or flooding such as a creek, the River Seine or any other river, the ocean, a swimming pool, a bathtub, water in a glass...any water. One of my recurring nightmares is about flash floods. I'm in a car--backseat with someone else driving--and the water is rising so fast that the road is becoming a river and we're floating down a hill that's becoming a waterfall and I'm waking up . . . Needless to say, a disturbing thing. I know where it comes from. I live in a town with an older storm sewer system that flash floods in torrential rain. Which happens at least once a year in our area. So, when the storms come, the streets flood, sometimes to the point that they're impassible. We generally try to be home when it happens, but we've been out sometimes. One time, Dad had come home early from church because he had to go in to work (he could walk) and parked the car on the street so that Mama could back in the van when the rest of us came home. Massive rain happened, and when we got home, our house was in a small lake that came up to our walkway (the house was probably five feet above the street, the walkway only two) and the car was standing in water up to its windows. We waited an hour or so until the water went down, rented a shop vac, but the water had come up to the dashboard (the cupholders were full) and that was an automatic total. We'd only had the car for about two months at the time. Another memorable day, we were going to lunch (Mama, Dad, and I) through the back roads because Mama likes them). We were on a street that was a straight line from the major we'd been on to the major we wanted, but there was standing water. People were stopping before it, and the brave were driving forward, with wakes of water breaking away from their tails. We made it through the first one no problem, but there was a car a little bigger than ours stalled out in the next intersection. We backed up and went to a different restaurant. The water rises worst in the intersections and on the edges of the road, were the dips are. There's a road (the major just north of our house) that actually feels like waves as you drive along past each intersection as the road humps up and back down--it makes me sea sick, sometimes. And when it rains, that's a bad one. One day we were driving home along it and finally cut south so that another car wouldn't drown. |
| “The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.” Leo Tolstoy Agree or disagree and what do you think Tolstoy meant? This is an interesting quote, and I agree. In realistic fiction especially (we're not talking about fiction in which good and evil are simplified to make things simple--Sauron is evil incarnate, but he's designed that way. If he was complicated, the story would not be a myth) the characters should be realistic. Ignoring the fact that we are talking about something that can't be done (characters are necessarily edited, and so fall short of the real) the fact that we want realistic characters means that the motivations of the characters should also be realistic. And every character should have some angle where looking at them makes them the hero. In other words, people don't set out on a path saying "let me be bad." They come to that through a series of choices--a story line that makes the horrible things they do feel inevitable and justifiable when seen through their eyes. Now, I know that there are real life people who do bad things, sometimes for no reason whatsoever, but we're talking characters. And characters need to have some place where the reader can latch onto, to make them real, to make the things they do more horrible by giving the reader a place where they can empathize with the character. That's why Sauron isn't as scary or real as Saruman. As readers, we want our heroes to be human enough to have flaws. We're not interested in Lancelot the greatest knight who always wins and gets all the ladies. We want him to suffer defeats and unrequited loves and try to be honorable but fall in love with the queen anyway. And we're not interested in unmotivated evil. We want the villain to love his mother and think that his actions are the right ones, justified, even while they get more evil. Whenever we think about a character's motivations and say "well, he did it because he's the bad guy, duh," we're wasting the opportunity to come up with the point of view that says, "The sheriff of Nottingham is overtaxing the people because he grew up poor and gets panic attacks if he doesn't have all the gold" or "Mordred fights Arthur because his mother feels betrayed and ignored, and he loves her." That's what I think Tolstoy meant. A good story balances something that's good in the protagonist's eyes against something that's good in the antagonist's eyes--making it more complicated, interesting . . . compelling . . . than good vs. bad. |
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