Hello. Long time no see!

Anyway, I’ve been wanting to say this and this seems like the best place to say it. There have been a number of … shall we say, confrontations, between persons of different political leanings that have garnered a lot of public attention. Just one type of these confrontations is one side telling the other side that they’re behaving in less than admirable ways, and that side replying with, “So much for your vaunted tolerance!”

Sigh. The folks saying this are stupid, ignorant, or malicious. Seriously. Because they seem to think that tolerance is an absolute quality, something handed out to everyone like, I don’t know, Halloween candy. Or something.

But what it isn’t is absolute. It’s like respect. You earn it. You deserve it. And you do that earning and deserving by giving it. If you cannot give it, you don’t get to complain about not getting it.

I get it. Really, I do. I figured out a long time ago that over 90% of the stupid people do is due to they don’t know better, or they misunderstood and need more or better information, or they’re distracted and they just didn’t step up this one time. Most people, most of the time, are more than willing to be kind and good and all things warm and fuzzy. So I tend to give such folks the benefit of a doubt. But malice … we, as human beings, are hardwired to recognize malice. We generally react very, very badly when we encounter it.

If your stupidity, your ignorance, or your distraction resemble malice, don’t be surprised if people don’t tolerate it. After all, wouldn’t you fail to tolerate it from them?

And if it is malice?

Bye, Felicia.

There’s a point in the creation of any work of art when the creator yells, “DONE! FINALLY!”

And said creator wraps up their spanking new creation and proudly shows it off to all and sundry, unsuspecting and otherwise, and they hear those dreaded words, “It’s … nice. But …”

I call that the “What do you mean I’m not done yet?!” moment. I aspire to the time when I am the first and only reader to say the dreaded about my own work.

HA.

Okay, I gotta get this off my chest. How is taking a knee ‘disrespectful’?

One kneels in church. One kneels to say one’s prayers. One kneels before authority when authority bestows rewards, like knighthood. And one kneels before the love of one’s life when one asks them to be yours for always.

So how is taking a knee before one’s flag, requesting the powers that be to apply the rule of law to oneself and one’s friends and family equally, the way they apply the rule of law to themselves and their own, disrespectful? I gotta say, I don’t get it.

On second thought, I’m okay with not getting it.

Saw this on Lawyers, Guns and Money, and … well. Yeah.

I’m not familiar with the Drive-By Truckers. Methinks I’ll have to fix that.

 

Someone (who might resemble this guy) wants me to pontificate about what triangles have to do with stories. Ooookay…

 

In story structure, you want triangles: romantic triangles, villain triangles, hero triangles. Having a fourth corner and fitting it in can cause pacing/revelation issues.

To explain what I mean: take Star Wars. Family triangle 1: Luke, Owen, Beru. Family triangle 2: Vader, Luke, Leia. Family triangle 3: Leia, Han, Kylo.

Hero triangle: Luke, Han/Chewie, Obiwan. But also the romantic triangle of Luke, Han, Leia, who are all human, with Chewie part of a non-human triangle with C3PO and R2D2. Obiwan is a fourth point, once the heroes are escaping the Death Star: Luke, Obiwan, Han/Chewie, Leia … and Obiwan dies. This is inevitable, because Han/Chewie are a set pair, Luke is the main character, and Leia is the main love interest. Obiwan is the only one who CAN die.

Well, Obiwan could have just left, but where’s the drama in that? And having him captured would have been repeating Leia’s arc. So death it is.

But there’s a training triangle: Luke, Obiwan, Yoda. Which has an earlier incarnation in Anakin, Obiwan, Qui-gon Jinn. And a later one in Luke, Kylo, Rey.

Villain triangle: Vader, Palpatine, Darth Maul. Jabba, Han, Bobba Fett. Or, for that matter, Darth Vader, Darth Maul, Darth Sidious.

(Yes, Han fits the villain mode. After all, he shot first … it was a boring conversation!)

And really big triangles, such as the Empire, the Rebellion, and ‘neither’ (independents like Corellian smugglers.)

I could go on. Note that members may overlap between triangles, and when they do, there is normally only one character overlapping. Note that a group, such as ‘the Rebellion’ or the Han/Chewie set pair, may be a point of a triangle.

Detective, victim, perpetrator. Prince, evil stepmother, princess. Gunslinger, sheriff, school marm. Triangles are everywhere in characters.

A killing, a search, a confrontation. A request, a refusal, an acceptance. A meeting, a getting to know each other, a marriage. Those are plot triangles.

But why triangles?

Humans are a species which recognizes patterns. We see them everywhere — including in things such as the stars, in tea leaves, and in the rolls of dice, where random chance is at work. Even to random things, we assign meanings to these patterns, and agency, and direction. Pure randomness is anathema, because it is chaos — it has no pattern, no shape, no way for us to grasp it and understand it… or to use it, or be safe from it.

It takes a minimum of three things make a pattern. Usually Element One, Element Two, and then Element Three which bends, breaks, or confirms the pattern implied with the first two mentions.

But why three? Why not two, or four, or eleven?

Well, it has to do with counting, balance, and tension.

Two is the minimum number for confrontation, but it tends to be binary: there are two possible outcomes. Person A wins, or Person B wins. Or both win, or both lose. Such possibilities are easy to predict — there is no surprise. Where there is no surprise, there is no tension. (Readers of romance may differ with me here, but then, I suspect readers of romance aren’t reading for ‘Will they or won’t they?’ but more for ‘How will they?’)

Anyway, you therefore want more than two elements in your triangle.

Harry Houdini used to invite audience members up onto the stage to investigate his set-ups before he did his tricks. He’d have a dozen people look them over and say yes, this is what he said it was, and that is, too. Then they’d go back down into the audience and he’d do his trick and wow them all.

But … not all of the audience members would return to their seats. One would be a plant, and would stay on stage and help Houdini create his illusion. And the reason why this worked for Houdini over and over again is because most people don’t sight-count above seven, and almost none are capable of sight-counting twelve, unless they concentrate on doing so. This is also true for readers tracking story threads. So you need seven or fewer elements in play if you want your audience — your readers — to remember the important ones easily.

With three main characters/elements, you have six relationships to keep track of: A to B, A to C, B to A, B to C, C to A, and C to B. With four elements, you have twelve. With five, twenty. With six …

But according to the principle of sight-counting, you want seven or fewer relationships to track per set. So, three elements. A triangle.

Tension and balance come into it because people are not hypothetically spherical primates of evenly distributed density. In short, they are seldom equal. If you put one on each end of a rope and tell them to pull, then the likely results are either the strong one hauls the weaker into the puddle between them or they both dig in and do nothing much. Both are boring; the first because it is too easy a resolution, the second because there is no resolution.

But … tie the ropes into a triangle, put someone on each point, and then … who wins? The strongest, because he pulls both other corners to him? Does the strongest lose, because the two weaker gang up on her? Maybe there are two strong points and the issue is convincing the weak point to join a side. Or desert a side. Or maybe the third finds a knife to cut the rope with and backlash happens …

Even in ostensibly two-person stories, there is an implied third: the reader. Tension is maintained because the reader wants an outcome which may not be possible …

I could go on, and likely will … in a different blog post. But for now, just know that writing things in threes isn’t a bad way to structure your story.

Me, I have a tendency to go against the grain and write in fives and sevens and … well, ridiculous. But that’s a different blog post, too!

 

Twitter is busy today letting everyone know why everyone writes. Some people do it for self and some do it for others. Some do it to persuade and others do it to express. Still others have odder reasons that stand beside or blend or ignore all of the above.

But me …

One of my first memories is sitting at the dining room table in my grandparent’s house. A filing cabinet full of paper and pencils and crayons sat in the corner, behind the table, and I was free to occupy myself with them whenever I wanted, for as long as I wanted — or until dinner time, whichever came first. I drew pictures of bugs and trees and the window, a frame through which a world might be presented.

That feeling persisted when I went to school, when I sat at a desk with a pen in my hand and wrote notes. And doodled in the margins, of course … and those doodles had captions, eventually. The captions grew to become portions of stories, of dialogue and description and plot.

The feeling hasn’t faded, even though I’ve switched from pens to keyboards, from paper to the bright white screen of a computer. My grandparents have been gone for many years, but every time I sit down to create, to pass the images in my head to the page in front of me, I feel them still, as if I am still at that dining room table, and they are still in the kitchen, in the office, in the garden, doing their thing while I do mine.

And that, ultimately, is why I write. Because it is as much a part of me as they were, and are, and always will be.

I have two main responses to people telling me, “You can’t do that!” The first is, “Why would I want to?” and the second is, “Watch me.”

Fortunately for my health and the state of my driver’s licence, the latter attitude is expressed most often in writing, rather than in combinations of alcohol and speed. (Well, okay. Sometimes it’s in combinations of alcohol and writing.)

There are prescriptivists and descriptivists out there. The former tell you what can and cannot be done, and will go on at length why this is so, usually pulling in all sorts of reasons based in social values — “It’s more polite” or “This is the what defines this form” or that old chestnut, “This is the traditional way.” The descriptivists will say, “This is the way it was done here, but it was done that way over there, and those folks in the corner? They’ve turned everything backwards.” In short, prescriptivists tell you how something should be; descriptivists tell you how it is.

I’m on the side of the descriptivists, more and more as I get older. This isn’t because the descriptive is better; it’s because, for me, the prescriptive is the base form. For me, creativity doesn’t lie within the lines; its most interesting expression, for me, is when the artist not only colors outside the lines, but incorporates color and lines in a way I haven’t seen before.

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of different things decrying work which doesn’t stay within its lines. Maybe it’s poor wordsmithing, or unusual characters, or a plot that pays more attention to adrenaline than coherency. Maybe it’s taking a genre convention and dressing it up in a weird outfit, then plunking that down in the middle of nowhere and giving it Lego to build its own setting. Maybe it’s taking a treasured classic and not only changing all the names, but changing the settings, the genders of the characters, and the central reason why everything happens.

I understand why some readers react badly to such work, just as I understand why they might react just as badly to modern sculpture or Cubist painting or smooth jazz. But that doesn’t mean I sympathize with their position. There is a lot of work which I don’t like, for a variety of reasons — some of them prescriptivist. So? That doesn’t mean the work is bad, or that it isn’t enjoyable … or even that *I* didn’t enjoy it. It means that those colors? Those lines? They don’t work for me. But they worked for someone else, and really, that’s the basis of all advancement, in the arts or anything else.

But I do like my own pieces where I’ve gone, “Watch me.” Bye-bye, lines. Wild blue yonder, here I come.

That took longer than I expected.

GENRE: A Short Reference Guide and Dictionary is live and available on Amazon right now. Ebook or paperback, whichever pleases most.

I’m already thinking of things to do to a next edition …

I’ve just about finished my latest offering. It isn’t fiction; it’s a dictionary of genre terms, called GENRE: A Short Reference Guide and Dictionary. I got tired of looking for lists of terms, and finding a list of Romance terms, or SF terms, or Mystery terms … but never a list of all the terms. And the lists seldom came attached to definitions; those were a separate search.

So I wrote a book where I have all the lists and all the terms in one, alphabetized place. And some of the local writers are already interested in getting copies …

One more day? Hopefully no later than the weekend. I just need the cover finished …

Composer Mark Korven got a job scoring a horror movie, and he decided that the digital files for weird noises were too same-same, so he asked a guitar-making friend to produce a new instrument, which he named the Apprehension Engine.

Never mind necessity being the mother of invention. The human taste for novelty is the spark that lights the way from passion to reality.

The Apprehension Engine