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.
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.
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.
That's what I want to do. Later.
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