Do Words Tell the Story?

Someone sent me a note about the power in revising the words we use to tell our stories as well as a youtube video that shows an excellent example of how the right correct best words can improve the message. (Side Note #1: I’m not sure how to forward the address for the video so here is a copy of the site http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=Hzgzim5m7oU&vq=medium ) Of course I found the video moving. I didn’t see it whenever it first came out but according to the company that put it on the internet they received gobs of comments on it. I’m sure that all of the comments were positive. (Side Note #2: If you’ve viewed the video read on, if not skip this note.  I’ll bet that none of the commenters mentioned that it was filmed in Glasgow and those folks don’t actually know what a beautiful day is like. The action character in the video is a young woman who we first see wearing sun glasses. A shot from the ground looking up reveals that it is a typical day in Scotland, i.e. overcast and the ground is wet from a recent rain. This could have been done to add a bit of irony to the film; since the person who she is helping by rewriting his sign is blind and couldn’t possibly know that the day is beautiful.)

Get back to the point, if you actually have one, you say. All right don’t nag. What occurred to me after reading the note and viewing the video was the question that has plagued writers since Moses first took chisel to stone. “Do the words make the story, or does the story provide a need for the words?” Not clear? How about “Which came first the cave drawing or the first word for ‘spear killing mastodon?”

The person who sent me the note was of course referring to selecting the best words to say what you are trying to communicate. I, however, was drawn to the images and the story portrayed in the video. Since I now deal exclusively in fiction I lean toward the idea of a really great story being told by the writer. If the story is truly great does it need the perfect words to tell it? Can better words make the story better? Maybe.

In 1898 a writer named H.G. Wells wrote a story called “The War of the Worlds.” It was, and is, a brilliant piece of fiction. Wells was considered a prophet by some for his use of machines that later came to reality. By today’s standards of scientific understanding the story may seem a bit naïve, but at the time it must have seemed very realistic to Wells’ readers. The story was taken and reworked by Orson Welles as a part of a radio broadcast in 1938. (Side Note # 3: Radio, for those of you born with an I-phone in your crib instead of a mobile, was like television but without the pictures.) The story was broadcast as a realistic series of news bulletins, and was accepted by many listeners as an actual description of events happening in New Jersey at the time of the broadcast.  The broadcast supposedly cause widespread panic within the listening area.

The story has since been produced as a movie several times, as well as a for-television-only video. Not too bad for a dude who wrote about invading aliens in 1898. So we have the basis for the question. Is it the story or the words? I would postulate that certainly in this case it is the story. Wells’ story about the invading aliens survived a number of re-writes and changes of venues. Many have gone ahead and used different words to retell Wells’ original tale. Have they made the story better? I personally think not.

Other Heroes

Other Heroes

Someone who noticed my ramblings about heroes reminded me of heroes who aren’t people. By that they didn’t mean our heroes who are fictional. After all I did write about the boy who lived on and on for seven books. (Side Note #1: To be honest J.K. Rowling is one of my favorite authors. I find her books to be one of my great secrete pleasures. After all in the beginning the books that she wrote were supposed to be aimed at children. For an adult to be caught with one, required quick thinking. Usually we claimed that we were reading the books to our children or grandchildren. Some of us even had to create imaginary neighborhood children who we were entertaining with our reading skills.

 Then as the books gained in popularity those of us who had been reading them in the closet could come out and proudly show our copies to the world. Of course it helped that the books were so well written that movie studios clamored to produce film versions. Since this is a side note I won’t go into whether the scene where the Weasley house was blown up was necessary or why the screen writers felt it necessary to have the boy hero suddenly decided to physically assault the evil villain in the last movie. Those issues have been dealt with well enough in the many blogs about the lead character. My particular love of the books is due to Ms. Rowling’s ability to write a chapter so well that I truly feel as if I’m inside of the room or place that she is writing about. I can sense the fires burning in the large fireplaces that warm the rooms. In fact I often find myself standing with my back to the fire to warm myself while the characters are acting out a scene in front on me.

There are a few other authors who can do that for me. Rick Riordan, who writes books on young heroes who are descended from Greek or Roman gods, is able to occasionally evoke the same powerful scenes that Ms. Rowling fills her books with. And no, before those of you eagle eyed readers detect a pattern; I also get the same feeling from so called adult books. Perhaps the first time that I realized that I was in a book and not merely reading the words was while reading “Moby Dick” for the first time. Herman Melville’s description of the chowders in the beginning of the book left me hungry for days. To this day memories of that part of the book can cause me to salivate. The funny thing is that before reading that scene I don’t believe that I’d ever had chowder.  A lacking that I have since corrected.

James Patterson writes a series of books about a character named Alex Cross. His descriptions are so vivid that I have been forced to stop reading the books because I can’t stand being there while such brutal killings are carried out.  I admire the skill he possess but have found it intolerable to carry myself into his worlds

At this point I believe that some of you may detect a secret desire of mine. I would someday like to be able to craft scenes, such as those that Ms. Rowling so easily places her characters in, that can carry readers into the places that I can see in my mind.)

I believe that they are speaking about our heroes who are from the animal world. (Side Note #2: In case you missed it, side note #1 ended at the close of the previous parentheses with the words “in my mind.”) We have the “Old Yellers” and “Rin Tin Tins” who proved over and over that dogs really are man’s best friend. (Side Note #3: I am deliberately leaving out Lassie. I mean just how many times can we believe that Timmy has fallen into the well? And why didn’t Timmy’s father cover over that well after the first few times that Timmy fell in?) There have been characters of a feline nature who have been companions that prove helpful. (Side Note #4: Of course anyone who has been adopted by a cat knows that such instances of helpfulness are totally at the convenience of the cat. A) Cats do not do what they are told, and B) They certainly don’t do it when told to.) There have been characters who are dolphins and even birds who have shown heroic tendencies. (Side Note #5: There may be some question here as to whether Ms. Rowling actually used birds as heroes in her books. The boy has a loyal owl who stays with him throughout most of the books but in that case the owl is really more of a companion than a hero. She does have a phoenix named Fawkes who saves the boy in book two. That was certainly heroic, but the question arises “Is there really a bird such as a phoenix, or perhaps better asked “Is the phoenix really a bird?)

Added all together I apologize to our heroic friends in the animal world for having forgotten them when I last spoke of heroes. To the Bullwinkles of the world thank you for your heroic service to those of us who continually get trapped in the flooding basement by the villains of the world.

If not Heroes Then...

If not Heroes then…

Well of course if you think about heroes, then the next thing that pops into your mind has to be villains.  And as any of the actors in the movies about the “super” hero who favors bats will tell you, it’s the villains who have the best roles and lines. Not to imply, as one who prefers the written word, that we should look to films for our guidance. It is, however, on the big screen that we see the largest portrayal of the evil in this world.

If the heroes of the world help us to defeat the villains, what is it that the villains do? Well some of the traditional villains take things, like candy from babies. Admittedly that isn’t much of a villainous thing to do, unless of course you’re the baby being robbed of your sweet. They pick on the less powerful, abuse children, and generally work to make life miserable for the rest of us.

Sometimes those “crimes” are perpetrated on a small scale, one small boy or girl at a time. Other times the villains go global and start wars to conduct their chicanery. At any scale the villain perpetrates his abusive activities without opposition until our former subject, the hero, intervenes and saves the day.

Are villains always obvious? Well in the good old days the villain always wore a black hat, or kicked sand in the face of the less fortunate. In today’s world they often wear a $2,000 suit and work their evil out of offices in sparkling clean buildings. In the past the bands of villains ravaged the country side, taking sheep and anything else that wasn’t tied down. In today’s world they are likely to meet their victims at seminars for investing. The end result is the same though and when the villains are finished the unfortunate investors are left with little in the way of savings or sheep.

There are of course other villainous types around. Those who steal from the unfortunate in the more traditional way are still with us. Every major city has the “muggers” who assault their victims in the street and take their money and valuables.

Must a villain take the property of others to be classified a villain? I think not. There are those who simply cause harm. They do this intentionally or in some cases without premeditation. Those muggers may simply be assaulting their victims for the “fun” of it. Reveling in seeing others suffer. Still other villains act without thought of those who will be injured by their actions. The person who has been drunk so often that the police have taken away their driver’s license, and yet still goes out and drinks to the level where they no longer can control a car and crash into buildings or worse yet people.  Are they villains since they will claim that they hadn’t planned to injure anyone. It just happened. I suspect that most of us would see them as villains. Although sadly in these cases the heroes rarely can be there to intervene and save the day. The police are usually reactive and do not have the ability to stop the dunk driver from drinking. (Side Note #1: To be fair police have in a number of instances set up check points during anticipated times of extreme revelry, to stop the drivers who have over imbibed from continuing to drive on the roads.)

So without any attempt at summation, we have villains who do not wear black hats, do not take other’s possessions, but still cause harm. It is that activity which may most accurately define a villain, they cause harm to others. That harm may come in the form of physical abuse. Here we have the traditional sand kicking bully, or the hockey mask wearing murderer. The harm may result from the villain depriving individuals of their savings, or means of earning a living. (Side Note #2: I’m not deliberately leaving out those who cause harm by charging individuals for substandard housing. Surely those who provide the buildings that are barely standing and have little heat or running water should not be left off of the list of villains.  They too cause harm of the most grievous nature, to those who rarely have the ability to fight back. I would love to read about a caped figure flying in and saving the unfortunate from the poverty into which they have fallen. OK this side note is taking on the characteristics of a separate piece and so it must end.) Some villains trap individuals in schemes that have no good outcome. (Side Note #3: Those of you who are about to sign up with the “you too can earn thousands working from home scheme” this means you.)

It is the job of writers to come up with really good villains, so that the heroes will be able to trump them and look heroic. I’m going to take my own advice and go off to think up a really good villain.

Heroes

Heroes

It turns out that Chocolate contains several substances that can trigger abnormal behavior.  Such psychological sensations are similar to those caused by addictive drugs.  This mood altering affect is what, I believe, caused me to write the piece about cultural culinary adventures.  Clearly I was not in my right writers mind when I penned it. I mean really a sausage made from white and dark chocolate. And so I ask that those of you read my ramblings about bizarre foods at Easter time put it out of your minds as I must have been out of mine.

Let’s get back to writing.  I’ve been thinking a lot about heroes. Here I mean the people who save the oppressed, not the sandwich.  You know the ones who go on quests, and have to overcome horribly difficult obstacles to succeed. They typically get the object of their affections in the end, but not before saving the innocent from the evil villain.

Prior to this century most heroes would have been men and they would have slain the dragon to save the woman, who would then fall deeply in love with the dragon slayer. The last hundred years have given us a Wonder Woman who does all of the things that the male heroes of the past did, but with greater flair.  And speaking of differences, we have lately seen the hero be an ogre who not only doesn’t slay the dragon, but enlists the help of the dragon in overcoming the villain who happens to be a man. Here the villain is smaller than the hero, and when you get right down to it looks much more like someone who needs saving and not defeating.

Probably the most widely read hero of the last twenty years was a young boy who constantly needed the help of his dead parents, friends, and teachers to overcome the evil villain who is far more adept at creating threats than the hero is at overcoming them. Yet with the help of the afore mentioned individuals he is able to overcome the massive threats placed in his path and defeat the villain, who in all actuality defeats himself.

So we have broken the traditional mold for heroes, and today we can all create protagonists who in the past would have been considered unworthy. Is today’s hero stronger that the opponents? No in many cases the hero is far less physically capable than those who stand against him. Is the hero smarter than the villain? No again, although the hero is often more aware of the world around her than the opponent.

What then are the characteristic of the modern hero? Loyalty seems to be high on the lists of traits we want to see in our heroes. While the villains may cast aside their cohorts, the heroine sticks by them to the end. Even when that action may spell doom for her, she will not abandon her friends. The villain collects weapons of mass destruction, the hero collects obligations. Heroes see that the world needs saving, while the villains see an opportunity to take over the world for their own purpose.

There appears to be a need for the hero to have a villain as an opponent. If not an actual opponent then she must at least be presented with an impossibly difficult barrier to overcome. The hero must show courage in the face of danger or opposition that threatens. Perhaps not to the extent the hero’s very existence, of course that type of threat certainly accentuates the hero’s courageous behavior.

Must the hero win in the end? Sometimes just continuing to go on is the fate of the hero. As writers we call that the lead in to a series. In life we call that reality. And so that brings me back to the heroes of today.

They face almost unbelievable difficulties just to survive. Often those difficulties are nearly invisible to the average person, but the hero sees and must overcome them none the less. The hero triumphs over the opposition and yet there are rarely any rewards for the action. Even some of today’s “super” heroes rarely receive a reward for their heroism. They have to pay the rent with second jobs. Perhaps that’s why so many writers have their heroes start out life as privileged individuals, who can drive around in fancy cars without a worry in the world about the price of High Test gasoline.

I read a story in the paper the other day about one of the real heroes of today’s world. His name was Tommy, but it could have been Tom, Dick, or Ahmed and it wouldn’t have mattered. His single parent, his father, had been murdered the month before and he was living with his only remaining relative, a seventeen year old single mother who was holding down two jobs to pay for her apartment and food for her two year old child and herself. Now she had taken in her nine year old young brother.

There was no trust fund to pay for their daily needs.  No fancy black limousine that would carry them around town and on to the nearest crime scene. Heck, they lived in a crime scene every day. Each day Tommy would get out of bed and face the impossible odds of going to school without breakfast or food of any kind. The article told about Tommy getting a meal at his school, and that meal was probably the most food he was going to get all day. He would return to the apartment and try to study while the television blared next door and could be heard through the almost paper thin walls of the low rent building.

Hard enough you say to stymie even the bravest hero in the comics. Yet fate would test him even further. Summer was coming and then there would be the apartment with one window and no air-conditioning. So at least he will be able to go outside and play.  Of course there are the drive-by shootings to keep life interesting.

Yes, today’s heroes face challenges that no costumed hero ever would have imagined in the comics. Oh, and don’t forget, during the summer there won’t be any school, nor the one filling meal that he got there. If only there were some magic words that he could say to make it all go away.

Cultural Culinary Adventures

Cultural Culinary Adventures

I live in a very ethnically diverse community, and Easter is a very special time for many nationalities. As I don’t cook very much my friends all invited me over for Easter diner.  However, since all of them wanted to have everyone else over for a meal they decided to take turns and each of them would cook diner on a different night of Easter week. I should mention that all of us here are at least second generation so I think that some of the recipes have been Americanized just a bit. Still it all tasted very good, and I heard no complaints from the groaning tables.

My friends who have relatives from Greece got the honor of having the first meal. There were “gyros” served on soft bread with a delicious sauce over the meet. Along with the gyros they served stuffed grape leaves. They were stuffed with a rice and milk chocolate mixture that got rave reviews from everyone present. My host said that it was possible that they might have gotten the recipe for the grape leaves a little wrong since they had been drinking a beverage made from grapes when they copied down the ingredients.

The next night we all gathered at the house of folks who had forefathers who came from Poland. They served a sausage called Kieska on a bed of shredded lettuce. At least I thought that it was lettuce, but I was wrong. It turned out that the sausage was made from both white and dark chocolate, and instead of lettuce it was served on a bed of shaved licorice. They too thought that they might have gotten the dish a little wrong since they had been drinking a beverage that was traditionally made from potatoes. 

I was beginning to suspect that the American influence was a bit more prevalent than I originally thought. My friends who have an Italian name had the next meal prepared when we arrived at their house. Now I had spaghetti before but not in what they told me was the traditional Easter style. The spaghetti was made from chocolate flavored noodles, and served with a white chocolate sauce.  It came with marshmallow meatballs. Again very tasty, but somehow I was beginning to doubt the authenticity of the preparations. 

The next meal up was from my neighbors who came from England. They served a roast beef and along with the meat they had a traditional Easter soup, that the lady of the house assured me was made exactly as the recipe that her mother sent her in a letter.  It was called Easter egg soup, and was made from the eggs that they had during the Easter celebration. It had a cream base and was very rich. I suspect that she might have gotten it a bit mixed up, but using the chocolate Easter eggs actually made the soup the best part of the meal.

Our next meal came from folks who had a few relatives from Turkey.  It turned out that they eat a lot of lamb over there and it was a favorite for Easter. They said that it was “butterflied” leg of lamb, but it turned out that there weren’t any butterflies in the recipe.  They had taken the bone out of it and stuffed it with a mixture of bread crumbs and dark chocolate. I must admit that I had never known just how much chocolate they used over there in Europe.

Our final meal came on Easter morning, and this time the influence was from France. They served Pain Chocolat. Well I guessed this one wrong as well. The dish wasn’t painful at all, it was really good and it finished off our Easter week celebrations just swell. What they served was French toast that had chocolate in the mixture. Very tasty.

After all of that food everyone came over to my place and we watched the traditional Easter Egg toss on TV.  This year to make it a bit more interesting they didn’t boil the eggs before they had to start tossing them to each other. Of course I served the traditional drink for egg tossing championships, Hot Chocolate.

Words

WORDS

A friend, acquaintance, person I know asked why I wanted to write books.  He said anyone can write a book after all they’re just a bunch of words that someone put down on paper. I expected him to use the “million monkeys with a million typewrites could write one of Shakespeare’s plays” argument, so I was ready with the MIT study defense.  That study proved that monkeys don’t have the manual dexterity to hold down the shift key and hit a letter key at the same time to get the capitalization correct in Romeo and Juliet. [Side Note 1: The study can be found at the MIT site at WWW.Mostly Idiotic Twaddle .con/monkeybusiness] Then I decided that as an educated man I should take the high road and simply said “OH yeah!”

His comment got me thinking about the use of words, and from there I went to the words themselves. I mean since you’re reading this you must be able to read, or have the ability to understand the meaning of the written word. So just where and when did we start to use words. I went to “Whykapedia” for the answer. [Side Note 2: Whykapedia is the internet site that doesn’t really give you the answer to your question but rather decides why you want to ask the question in the first place.] Whykapedia sent me to ROS.com [Side Note 3: ROS can be found at Really Old Stuff. Con] There I read about morphemes, roots, graphemes, symbols, and languages.  All of which gave me a clue to what words are, but not the where and when of the use of words. [Side Note 4: I really didn’t understand all of the answers that I got there but after an hour I gave up and decided that I probably could do without the exact meaning of the word “word” after all.]

What to do? For days I poured over history texts trying to find out the answer to when we first started to use words. Back to recent references of the “Rap” artists who make up their own words. Further back to the Renaissance where neat words like “Thou” and “Joust” came into use. The Romans used a lot of words. For instance they had all of the road signs they put up all over Europe.  Of course all of the signs read “This way to Rome,” but at least they tried. The Celts who preceded them had a bunch of words as well.  Like “London’” “Dover,” and a large number of references to basketball. 

Obviously I needed to go as far back as I could before I was going to solve the question. After an exhaustive search [Side Note 5: Translate as more than a half an hour.] it turned out to be a question of how you define words. Spoken or written. Pictorial or symbolic. Dirty or clean. I eventually decided to go with the written word since it was the writing of books that got me started on this quest in the first place.  I eliminated the pictorial references as I was getting too many pornographic listings, and I went with “clean” for the same reason. This got me to early “words” in the caves of France which were dated at 10,000 B.C.  Further research showed that the words “Kilroy was here,” were added after the pictures of the cave men chasing mastodons.  There were references to the Egyptians using words as far back as 3,500 B.C.  Strangely when translated into English they read “Kilroy was here.”

I eventually settled on an ancient text that had been translated from Sanskrit.  Here the story of the first written word was revealed. It was in what today is modern Turkey, at a fast food restaurant. There Al, the owner, had been using pictures to let his customers show what they wanted. The problem arose when too many people complained that they were getting the wrong order. Since the motto of the place was “Get it my way, or else” that didn’t bother him very much, but he was losing business so he had to come up with a solution.

In the past all a patron had to do was point to the picture of a cow or a sheep and the kitchen would know that they wanted either beef or lamb on their gyros. The problem developed when the Al’s mother started to sell sheep’s wool sweaters at the cash register. [Side Note 6: Yes, I know that cash wasn’t invented until later, but that’s what the article said so deal with it.] His mother put up a picture of a sheep to show the origin of the wool. 

People would point to the picture of the sheep, but they were getting wool yarn on their sandwich. Finally the owner came up with the idea of something other than a picture to let the clerk at the counter know what a patron wanted to eat. He invented words.  Patrons were to come up to the counter and use the words that he invented to state their preference. The only problem I’m left with is whether “Moo” or “Baa” was the first written word.