August 26, 2018

REFLECTIONS ON KOREA AND CRON #1: Communicating and Growing

NOT using the panel discussions of the most recent World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, CA in August 2018 (to which I be unable to go (until I retire from education)), I would jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. But not today.

I may  have mentioned that one of my goals is to increase my writing output, increase my publication rate, and increase the relevance of my writing. In my WRITING ADVICE column, I had started using an article my sister sent me by Lisa Cron. She has worked as a literary agent, TV producer, and story consultant for Warner Brothers, the William Morris Agency, and others. She is a frequent speaker at writers’ conferences, and a story coach for writers, educators, and journalists. I am going to fuse the advice from her book WIRED FOR STORY with my recent trip to South Korea.

Why? I made a discovery there. You’ll hear more about it in the future as I work to integrate what I’m learning from the book, the startling things I found in South Korea, and try and alter how I write in order to create characters that people will care about, characters that will speak the Truth, and characters that will clearly illustrate what I’m writing about.

I spent three weeks in South Korea, returning a week ago today.

While I was there, I had a number of profound experiences. The most disturbing was how much history I had ignored and how much current change I was ignoring.

There is a reason. In reading up on it, I found a couple of the names given to the Korean War. One was The Forgotten War, the other The Unknown War. Of course, those were names given to it by Americans. Flush with the victory of WWII and still naïve enough to think that the Russians and Chinese were our buddies and only at the beginnings of the reign of Joseph McCarthy, there was little that Americans thought that they couldn’t do.

For the South Koreans, however, standing with a token American “advisory group”, their world caved in at the end of June in 1950. White Americans were enjoying unprecedented affluence then – though they were also sowing the seeds of explosive civil unrest in the glowering 1960s followed by the death of “American dreams”, but things happening in such a far-away and exotic place as an Asian peninsula nation had nothing to do with "us".

Then the North Korean Army poured into Seoul and captured it. The elected government moved to Daegu and became a government in exile…sixteen kilometers from where I stayed in suburban Waegwan (say it Weh-gahn). Three years later, the turning point of the invasion occurred less than a kilometer from my bedroom. In 1953, the North Korean Army had taken over most of the Korean peninsula and what was left of South Korea encompassed a bit more than 8000 square miles -- smaller than the state of Vermont. The fighting had involved slaughter on a level that the US hadn’t seen since the early part of the 1860s (ironically barely less than 100 years earlier) and left the entire country in a shambles.

At any rate, you can see that I learned my history.

The history of South Korea sparked a series of ideas and in fact, it added to the foundation of a concept I’ve been writing about for a while and you can read it in my blog work-in-progress, LOVE IN A TIME OF ALIEN INVASION (Scroll back to Chapter One if you want the whole story: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/search/label/Love%20In%20A%20Time%20of%20Alien%20Invasion%20--%20YA%2FTeen%20Science%20Fiction. It’s the idea that the Human fear of invasion by aliens might turn into something much worse.

Earth may become a battleground and the Human race unimportant bystanders to the much more “important” clash of ideologies. The more I read about, studied, and observed the aftermath of the Forgotten War, the more I wondered about our own place in the universe. 

The more I pondered the Fermi Paradox and read up on that, the more I wondered if it was just a matter of time until a couple of alien species discovered that Earth would be the perfect proving ground for their battle of ideologies…I wanted to tell the story and to tell it well enough to engage people so that they might look at our own planetary history.

Lisa Cron’s book had created a methodology based on how our brains work. While I've been working on my story for some time (since 2013!), I can begin to apply the principles of Cron's book now. I’m a science geek, having been a science teacher for over 30 years. I like what she wrote and I especially have an innate respect for and I am drawn by her premise.

In this place, over the next few months, I’m going to forge a link between this new story I want to tell and the work she’s done that will help me create not only sympathetic characters that will form over the page in three dimensions, but also live in a story compelling enough to increase the response of editors to the stories I write.

David Eagleman, on the cover of Cron’s book writes, “Remember when Luke has to drop the bomb into the small vent on the Death Star? The story writer faces a similar challenge of penetrating the brain of the reader. This book gives the blueprints.”

That's what I want to do. Later.


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