Silly Stories for Serious Times :: Letters to my Nephews

Gentlemen,

I'm afraid that the news is not good.  My generation is set to pass to yours a world fraught with serious problems and fractured by divisions that are deeper than ever before.  At some point, we will toss you the keys to this world and our problems will be your problems.

I lived through the end of the cold war and I can give you a bit of advice for going on with. There is really only one time-honored and proven way to get through these tough times. In serious times, silliness gets us through.  Revel in it. Never turn your back on it.
 
Most of the best silly still comes from Great Britain. You're too young for Monty Python or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but I look forward to you coming to an age when you're able to appreciate them. I don't even care that they were already a bit dated when I first encountered them. True silliness is timeless. It transcends piddling things like time, space and culture.

We really should figure out how to harness the stuff. We'd be flitting about it jetpacks and time machines in no time.

Where was I?

Oh, right.  American silliness had its heyday in the time of your great grandfathers and it's high time we woke it back up. Sadly, our strategic reserves of silly seem almost tapped out and I don't know where we will find more. So much of current comedy has become political, acerbic, droll, deeply ironic, and/or some combination of all three. I can appreciate that trend on some levels. There are far too many things going on that beg us to laugh at them to keep from crying about them.  But with humor of that stripe, you're never quite certain if people are laughing because the joke was funny or because they're uncomfortable.

The only prescription for times when even the humor becomes tinged with sadness is hefty innoculations of silly.

Sadly, our country has been importing our silliness for so long that we've all but forgotten how to make our own, which makes it more important that we find and nurture all the silliness that we can find.

This is one reason why I spent the last few months writing a silly story about a young lad standing with his family and friends in the face of serious events (it really doesn't get much more serious than an alien invasion, in my opinion) and breaking it down with unrelenting silliness.

There are people who will sniff at you when you tell them you write humor, or - worse yet - science fiction. There are many who think I've lost my mind, devoting so much time to delving into the absurd when there are so many deeply troubling issues to explore.

They're wrong.

Being silly is never a waste of time. And people who are serious all the time are missing the real joy of being alive. And I refuse to give in to that mode of thinking. All the terrible things happening in the world is no excuse not to have a laugh or take time to dream. When you can do both at once, that's a real gift.


Our sense of humor is perhaps our greatest gift as human beings. Our willingness to embrace the absurd is part and parcel to our ability to cope when the going gets tough. Sometimes you just have to throw your hands up and laugh.

Love,
Your silly uncle Scott

Write

Some thoughts inspired by handing my nephew his first Moleskine.
 
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Write.

Whether or not you want to be a "writer" you must write.  Inscribed on metal, incised on clay tablets, ink on paper, you must write.  Your life is an historic moment, a unique part of the vast tapestry and your story will be lost if you do not write it down.

To refuse to write is to choose to be forgotten.
 

Write.

Because your thoughts are important and anyone who tells you they are not is an idiot and/or someone trying to make a living by telling you that their thoughts are important.  

They are not. 

A careful study of history will astound you not because we know so much, but that we surmise so much from so little.

More has been forgotten than we will ever know.

Entire lives have been sucked into the void of time because those who lived them did not record them.  And even in a world where it seems that less and less goes unrecorded I think it’s actually getting worse rather than better.

Virtually nothing that you see here will still exist 100 years from now.  This blog, these web pages, all of these digital dots on digital screens will cease to be.  They will eventually blink out of existence, as obsolete as Geocities, recorded - if at all - in formats that are as inscrutable to future generations as cuneiform is to modern eyes and 5-inch floppies are to modern laptops.

Ironically, the Library of Congress has been given the Twitter archives, so if anything survives; it will not be the substance, but the soundbyte.

Write.

I am part of the leading edge of the original digital generation.  We were the first kids who grew up with video games and personal computers, the transformative generation that watched records give way to CD’s give way to MP3’s.  And I’m told that means that mine is the last generation whose primary schooling included computers and penmanship.  Permanence is passé, proving Douglas Adams’ assertion that human beings are unique in both our ability to learn from our past and our unwillingness to do so.

The handwritten notes I am transcribing into this blog have a greater chance of survival than the post they are becoming.  Not because they are beautiful, but because they are physical, tangible, permanent.

I hold the love letters written between my grandfather and grandmother during his time in the Pacific Theater of World War II.  He wasn't a writer or a poet, he was a dairy farmer.  His words are simple, small and heartfelt.  His penmanship is astonishing.

My grandparents stood in my mind like unassailable giants.  They had survived depressions and wars and come out of it like an indomitable force of nature.  I never fully grasped their humanity until I read the words between a frightened Army sergeant and his bride on the eve of the invasion of the Philippines.  Intellectually, of course, I knew that my grandparents were human beings.  They faced the same doubts and fears (and then some) as I do.  Their world was different and the same.  That soldier felt in 1944 the same deep love for his wife that I do for mine today.

Will my grandchildren get the same effect reading my emails and Facebook statuses and Tweets?  I’d wager that they wouldn’t and that they won’t even get the chance.  But they will know all about my grandpa and grandma if they choose to read them.

Write.

Cut & paste with real scissors and real paste.  Write with ink.  Never erase.  The eraser and the delete key are the enemies of history.  Cross things out, draw arrows to show your reader that this should’ve been up there.

Neatness counts in schoolwork and business correspondence.  In life, it’s the messy bits that count.  So scribble thoughts in the margins of books.  Underline things you like, cross out things you don’t.  Doodle in the margins.

Think about your handwriting, but remember that even the messiest scrawl carries greater beauty than even the best font can hope for.

Write in the vernacular.  Use the words you know and say them the way you want to say them.  Do not use the dictionary, do not look up words, banish the thesaurus from your shelf.  Keep your grammar simple.  Talk about the weather and local events.  Print photographs and date them and record who is in them on the back in indelible ink.

Write.

Because societies are created by intellectuals, cultures are created by people.  And both are forgotten if the people don’t care enough to record them.

Children's Book Week & My Next Project

This story is both about and not at all about Children's Book Week.  It is simply the happiest of coincidences that this week and CBW happen at the same time.  Sometimes if you shake the puzzle box juuuuust right, the pieces fall together on their own.

Last week I began a new project and acquired a new co-author.  I will be writing a midgrade/young adult novel with the able assistance of my 12 year-old nephew Jared.

Yes.  You read that right.

We talked a bit and I ran an idea by him that he likes and we have a bit of a rough idea what we're doing and how we're going to do it.  It will be a contemporary fantasy with young protagonists, written to - at least in part - bridge the chasm of our respective generations but also the expanse of United States that lies between us.

I'm not sure how I'm going to approach blogging about this.  I love the genre and feel in many ways that the most exciting things currently happening in literature are happening in the areas marketed to these younger age groups.  And the constraints of the intended audience are that much greater and yet also that much less at the same time.

I love the idea we came up with, the first go at characters we're going to use to tell our tale and the fact that it gives us something to talk about when we don't see one another for such great lengths of time.  Jared is such an avid reader and really seems to love writing.  And I was about his age when I first got the bug myself so... family tradition?


This is going to be wonderful fun.


Anyway, happy Children's Book Week, everyone!  I was going to jokingly lament that Hallmark doesn't make a card for this, but it occurs to me that there are cards for this holiday.  They generally have more than two pages and they stock them in the kid's section of your friendly neighborhood bookseller.

Cheers!

It Builds Character (A Letter To My Nephew)

Dear Jared, Your mom tells me that you have a story to write for school and want some advice on creating and introducing characters in a way that doesn’t detract from the storytelling. The most important thing anyone ever taught me was that stories don’t ever begin and they don’t ever end. We always join them in the middle and leave before they’re done. I know that sounds odd, bear with me for a moment. Say, for instance, that you are a character in a short story. The story is about what you did last Saturday and it begins with waking up Saturday morning and ends with you going to bed that night. Saturday is your story. But you didn’t spring into existence on Saturday morning and you won’t wink out of existence at the end of the day. Sunday morning, you will get up and do Sunday things. Your story didn’t begin with the first sentence of the story and end with the last sentence, your Saturday did. You existed before it began and you’ll go on once it’s over. The story is just a snapshot of one day. That’s probably the most important thing to keep in mind when you’re crafting any story, because you have to decide where you’re going to jump into a story that’s already in progress. There’s a name for that, by the way, it’s called “In medias res” which is Latin for “In the middle of things”. Characters are much the same. They have a beginning (they are born), the have a middle (they live) and they will eventually have an end (they die). But unless your story is ten thousand pages long, odds are you’re going to have to leave some of that out or your reader will never get to the good parts. So, we will almost always join them in medias res -- in the middle of their story. So, what do you leave out? What do you put in? Think about Harry Potter. How much do we know about Harry at the beginning of the books? He’s got messy dark hair and he wears glasses. Oh, and he has a scar on his forehead. JK Rowling takes a hundred pages to tell us that he’s a wizard with a tragic past. That he’s destined to fight Lord Voldemort has to wait another hundred pages. And we never get a complete description of the characters. We know Hermione has bushy hair and we know Ron Weasley is a freckle-faced redhead -- anything more than that is discovered later through the storytelling. For now, all the author needed us to know is that he’s a kid with glasses and a scar and that’s enough to get the story rolling. When you create a character for your story, it’s vital to keep in mind that they’re supposed to be a person, just like you or me or your brother, mom. dad, or teacher. We’re going to see a small fragment of their life in the story you’re writing and all we need to know about them is what’s important for the story you want to tell. Introduce characters quickly. Tell the audience as little about them as you can. Fill in the details as you go along. Another cardinal rule of writing is “show, don’t tell.” Rather than telling the audience all about how this kid with the scar on his head is really a wizard and has this evil enemy lurking in the shadows, just waiting to strike and he’s the chosen one… JK Rowling told us the bare minimum and let the rest of it come to light as the story progressed. She didn’t tell us, she showed us. How you show us will largely be a function of how you’re choosing to tell the story. And that means talking a little about Point of View. The key elements of storytelling and characterization will be mostly decided by how your readers are seeing the story. If the story is told through the eyes of a specific character, your readers only get to know what that character knows. This is called “first person”.

First Person: “The lady walked into my office. She had a hat the size of a super-deluxe pizza with all the trimmings. I could tell she was going to be trouble the moment I laid eyes on her.”

We only know what the guy sees, and more importantly, we only know what the guy bothers to tell us. He leaves a lot out because he’s obsessed with her wacky hat. It’s a great way to keep from having to tell your reader too much by having your character focus on the wrong thing. It’s a lot of fun to write like that and a lot of writers do it, but it gets really hard to write in first person because you can’t tell the readers anything that your main character isn’t there to witness and describe. Often this leads to some pretty preposterous stories because you have this one guy running all over the place, doing crazy and unrealistic things simply because the writer needs them to be there to tell the readers what’s happening. If you are telling your story from outside, seeing all the characters as if they’re in a movie and you’re not inside the head of any of them, that’s called “third person”.

Third Person: “Jordan dropped her cigarette as she tumbled out of the car. He took a step back and held up both hands as she glared at him with all the dignity she could muster. Now that he had her out of the car, he looked surprised rather than angry. An average-looking fellow of about thirty, bearded and tanned around the neck of the faded flannel shirt. Her gaze dropped to the dried mud on the knees of his jeans, pegging him as a gardener. “Smoking isn’t allowed on the school grounds, miss.”

Even in third person, description is kept to a bare minimum because your reader wants something to happen, they don’t want to sit and read Jordan’s resume. Almost all of my books are told in this style and this is an excerpt from my most recent novel. The two characters have just met and all we know at this point is that Jordan is a woman who got caught smoking (and she's a bit clumsy) and the man who caught her is average-looking, bearded and dressed like a gardener. It’s another twenty pages before you learn his hair color. I chose the passage above for two reasons:

1. This is the only description of the main character that the reader ever gets.
2. The character isn’t a gardener. I’m using Jordan’s perception of him in his grungy clothes to mislead my audience into believing that he is. At least for the moment. This is because, even though I’m using ‘Third Person’, I’m only telling the readers what the characters know about each other.

That last part is important. When you’re introducing a character, don’t venture much beyond what the characters could see if they looked at each other. Think back to what I said about characters being like real people. How much do you know about the average customer that walks into your parent’s store? You only know what you can see and what they tell you. Even when you’re talking about a good friend, you only know so much about them. Only show your readers what they absolutely need to know. My early novels and stories were almost all fantasy novels, which is what I believe you’re currently working on. It’s difficult sometimes to get this same information across in a fantasy setting because you’re worried that your reader doesn’t know as much about your world as you do. They won’t, and that's ok. They might not know specifically what a Ranger is, but all they really need to know is that the character spends a lot of time in the woods. Any special abilities he gets from his status as a Ranger (or a rogue, thief, wizard or whatever) can be unveiled in the story. And if you don’t get to it? Don’t worry about it. If it didn’t come up, it wasn’t worth worrying about and you have something saved for the sequel. -Uncle Scott