Dan Kim

Story time:
When I was younger I was sent to all those "special" classes for "gifted kids" but let me tell you -- along with a good education there is a massive amount of indoctrination. Year after year you're told you're "leaders of the future" and that you have a special responsibility to and authority over others...

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Fucking disgusting. Spouting democratic principles and equality-talk in public and then sneering at the "normies" (yes, even seventh and eighth graders talked like that) in the classroom. The basic story we were fed was this: normies are rubes/children who need their betters to help them, guide their lives, open their eyes, and lead them to their better selves... on a leash if necessary. They went on and on about child labour, saving the rainforest, saving the whales, sustainable energy, etc. -- but the real problem underneath all that, really, was that the world was filled with people too was too stupid/evil/blind/cruel to listen to their intelligent/good/awakened/empathetic betters. The ease with which these people dismissed the actual concerns of others in favour of advancing a movement or adhering to some abstract principle -- you know, the "right" concerns -- was shocking. Who carts off seventh graders to protests? Who loads them up with scripted questions to ask at a public conference on child labour to score points in a long-running personal feud between activists? Who videotapes them and feeds children scripts to create an emotionally manipulative presentation for parliament? Who uses children as cover and ammunition in a row between cliquish arms of an environmentalist group? Teachers for enrichment programs, apparently. And these are supposed to be society's "betters"? These people believed that a righteous cause was all the justification that was ever needed for anything. Fuck them.

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Anyway, so long as you can set the criteria, you can always fool yourself into thinking you're "special" or "better". Whether you think you're hot shit because you can run real fast, have money, overcame a great hardship, can do massive calculations in your head, or descend from a line of people who've been hard done by, the story's the same. But keep in mind that the criteria is always up for grabs and motivated by an ever-shifting landscape of human interests, desires, and frailties, and you'll improve your odds of warding off the dangerous belief that you're special/different/better/chosen, and that the normal rules don't apply.

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Read "How Fiction Works" by James Wood.

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If you haven't already, check out these tips from Pixar:
http://nofilmschool.com/2012/06/22-rules-storytelling-pixar

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Personally, I think if you're writing a plot, you should be able to condense it into fairy-tale form: someone wants something, they don't get it, and they suffer, then they get it, and it's even worse! It's not what they wanted at all! Then the person either suffers, learns a lesson, or simply "returns from the dream".

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If you're worrying about plot hole, you're working too closely on the details. Get the overall arc of the story set out first and set up the initial situation so that the consequences flow naturally out of the situation. For example: a man gets a newspaper that tells him the future. So first he uses it to win the lotto, but then he thinks about the obituary section and the various disasters reported in the newspaper. And so he starts to try and stop these things from happening. But then his own actions start appearing in the newspaper! And then his own death appears -- and his killer appears! Now he's trying to kill his killer before he's killed... but that person also as a future telling device...?! Then, as the plot progresses,he starts to think about himself as a person, about whether he has to right to manipulate the future like this, about the nature of destiny, and why him...?

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And so on. It practically writes itself. And then you can think a bit about what you're really talking about -- is it about a man encountering forbidden knowledge, or about fear of the future, or about destiny, or maybe it's really about possibility and choice, or maybe something about human character... and you can start to fill in the flavour and characters with this in mind (for example, you may tune various personalities so that they show what "that kind of person" might do with the future-newspaper, etc. )

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Anyway... hope that helps! Don't worry about backstory, work on the overall arc and what you want to talk about. The rest is flavour and detail.

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np, dawg, I didn't think it was you.

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Anyway, I don't really see the sense in trying to say that all uses of the word "love" have something in common that a proper answer to the question "what is love" would capture. I think trying to take what the teenage garage rock band sings about, stuffy poet writes about , and what the biologist studies and tie them together in a single vision is just a mistake. There is no pre-linguistic naturally individuated phenomenon called "love" that is floating out there that each party dimly perceives from a different angle. They are all talking about different things.

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I think the most useful thing in that grab-bag, for me, on most days, is what the biologist is talking about: the mating/nest-making/pair-bonding instinct. If you understand that we're all animals and that there are real constraints on the possibilities for mating, nest-making, and pair-bonding, then we can learn about these constraints, make better informed decisions, and interact with the world in a more profitable way. That other stuff about flying in the sky, whiskey bottles and pick up trucks, love letters in shoe lockers, or where-art-thou-Romeo or whatever --- well, it's all very pretty, but I have no idea what to do with that.

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