Rutabaga

Some one liners: -- When I was born, I was given a choice ‐ a big dick or a good memory....I don't remember what I chose -- Having sex is like playing bridge ‐ if you don't have a good partner, you better have a good hand. -- What do you do if you come across a tiger in the jungle? Wipe it off and apologize. -- I used to have fears of hurdles, but then I got over it. -- I always wanted to learn how to juggle, but I just don’t have the balls to do it. -- One problem with auto correct is that you always end up posting some thong you didn't Nintendo -- If a mute child swears, does his mom wash his hands off with soap? R

I think this thread has kumquat a ways downhill in recent posts. R

Speaking of which, has anyone seen the Mr. Holmes movie that's now out? Is it any good? R

The irony is that it's perfectly readable on a mobile device, where it's all black type against a white background. R

Oh, don't misunderstand. I intend to wait. Windows 7 is working just fine and I don't want to change it. R

My computer keeps trying to upgrade from 7 to 10, but my anti-malware tools have blocked it so far. R

That's good, because otherwise it would seem to me like watching a poker game where you could see every player's cards. R

I've looked through the Kindle sample, which comprises an initial chapter entitled "Gloria" and part of the next chapter entitled "Matt." From that brief sample it does appear that there is enough difference in attitude and speech patterns that it is not hard to see the difference between those two characters. It is not enough of a sample to permit me to discern whether I could overcome my normal dislike of round-robin first-person stories. That type of story still calls to mind the formula of a classic Columbo episode on television, where the entire beginning of the program shows exactly who did the killing and what steps they took to carry it out and create misleading evidence that would point away from them. We know everything in the audience. The show isn't about figuring out "whodunit"; it's about wondering whether Lt. Columbo is going to figure out whodunit. It's a different kind of story. I feel the same way about multiple first-person presentations in a story. We, the readers, gain inside knowledge of multiple players in the game of the story, knowledge that the other characters may not have about each other. We become like the Columbo audience, wondering whether and to what extent the stuff we know will come to light and affect the characters' interactions. It's a little bit like playing poker with marked cards that only I can read -- there's no guessing left. R

I think all the B&N stores around me have closed, except there may still be one in Studio City. The Kindle price is $11.99. R

I'll take a look at the preview available on Kindle. On principle I hate to pay Simon & Schuster's inflated e-book prices, so if I like it I will seek it in a library. R

No particular reason, except that readers tend to have certain expectations and it's risky to violate them. But William Faulkner certainly did so in "The Sound and the Fury" which I referred to earlier. That novel is about, in succession, Benjy, Quentin, and Jason, and to a lesser extent Caddy. The approach was, I understand, fairly controversial at the time, but of course Faulkner delighted in the unconventional. I guess in the end the only real test is whether people will read the story and find reward in spending their time with it. Let me first say that I detest rotating first person, because I constantly have to scratch my head to remember who "I" is. I think that if anything like that is attempted the number of people should be very limited (i.e., no more than two) and something conspicuous should be done to differentiate them, such as putting one of the characters' narration in italics. But I would still dislike it, and I would venture to say that I have never, ever, seen an example where the multiple first-person viewpoints were warranted or enhanced the story. Most of the time, in my experience, the multiple viewpoints robbed the story of much of its value. And, adding insult to injury, the inner thoughts of the other characters that were revealed in the rotation turned out to be entirely predictable and clichéd. I have seen authors of first-person narratives use a number of clever means to fill in gaps of information that the viewpoint character did not personally witness. I mentioned above Elizabeth Peters's character Amelia Peabody, who is the first-person narrator of a whole series of mystery novels set in Egypt. Periodically, throughout the books, the first-person narrative is interrupted by interstitial chapters entitled "Excerpt from Manuscript X." These excerpts contain third-person reporting of events outside of Amelia's immediate experience. As I recall, they are supposedly prepared by her son Ramses; in any event, they bridge over the gaps in the first-person discipline in a way that is palatable to the reader. J.K. Rowling used a bunch of devices to finagle her way around the gaps in her viewpoint character Harry Potter's personal knowledge. In "Half-Blood Prince," the pensieve in Dumbledore's office allows Harry to take in previous events involving Tom Riddle/Voldemort and his family. In "Deathly Hallows" a book by Bathilda Bagshott provides extensive background about Dumbledore, as do conversations with various people who knew him many years earlier. In several of the books, articles in the Daily Prophet provide other such information. Mystery stories can use police reports, transcripts of wiretaps, newspaper articles, anonymous letters, and various other devices to achieve this. The challenge is to do so in a way that is natural and organic to the story, rather than seeming hokey. R

You'd probably get a charge out of a typical Arthur Hailey novel, such as "Hotel." Lordy. He rotates endlessly, setting up all kinds of interwoven threads and popping around from head to head of the characters, then occasionally steps back and describes the scenery or the context or something else. I could forgive him that, but not the way he resolved all the seemingly unresolvable issues in that book. (I won't say more, though I'm tempted to, for fear of spoiling this hack of an ending.) I think it takes considerable story-fashioning skill to knit together multiple viewpoints as you describe. It's hard enough, in my view, when you have one main character. When you start mixing in other viewpoints, there may be confusion about who the main character actually is, or what the story is actually about. There is risk that the story may morph into a "Love Boat" episode with three separate tales unfolding at once, and none of them standing out particularly. But then again, "Love Boat" made a ton of money for some people, and launched (ooh, bad pun) a number of careers. R

There are a number of instances where the author sets up an unreliable narrator, which the reader may not discover until well into the story. I'm trying to think of good examples. This strategy actually trades on the phenomenon you have mentioned, namely, the assumption that the first-person narrator is a straight shooter with the reader (much less the story world). The author deliberately violates this at some point. One very interesting twist on this theme is Agatha Christie's "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd," where the narrator proves to be supremely unreliable. I won't say more for fear of spoiling it. I guess yet a different twist on this is the early part of Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury," where the reader gradually discovers that Benjy's first-person narrative is not so reliable either, at least by ordinary standards. Really, there seem to be infinite variations on the theme of viewpoint, and many gradations of both first-person and third-person. I think of "The Maltese Falcon" where Hammett's dry third-person seems to be emulating a camera viewing the scenes, not getting inside anyone's head. We get physical description, and we get what amounts to a stenographic transcript of what people say and do. Then there are the polar opposites in chatty first-person characters such as Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum or Diane Mott Davidson's Goldy Schultz. Or there's the elegant wry wit of Elizabeth Peterson's Amanda Peabody. Or the angst-ridden teen narrators of every DomLuka story (see, for example, Desert Dropping at http://www.gayauthors.org/story/domluka/desertdropping). I think it's a matter of what the author is comfortable with and what suits the story. There is no absolute right or wrong viewpoint/person, nor one that is intrinsically better than the other. At the same time, one of them may suit a particular situation better than the other, and in all cases they may be well or poorly executed. R

Of course it's a beagle. R

Thanks to the magic of Amazon offering free previews of Kindle books, I was able to read the first chunk of "The Road." Cormac McCarthy is not my cup of tea at all, but there's no disputing that he is an evocative writer. At least two things jumped out at me immediately. First of all, although the writing style is a bit idiosyncratic (like not using quotation marks for dialogue), it is immediately evident that this book (at least the first part that I was able to read) is written from the close point of view of the father. It is third person limited, not omniscient. All of the details mentioned are ones noticed by the father, even though there isn't a constant litany of "he thought" or "he noticed." A specific example illustrates this clearly. After the visit to the abandoned gas station, the father gets out his binoculars and scans the valley below. We read what the father is observing. Then the son asks, "Can I see?" The father hands him the binoculars and the boy looks. Then the father asks, "What do you see?" The boy responds, "Nothing." We do not experience what the boy is seeing when he looks; we only know what he reports to the father. Second, this excerpt brims with examples of "show, don't tell." It starts out with immediate and specific signs of uncertainty and peril. Evocative details are presented to begin the piecing together of something awful that must have happened. A more elaborate example of this comes when the father returns to the abandoned gas station in order to collect the remnants of oil and other fluids for them to use in the lamp. Without saying so in so many words (that would be "telling") the author illustrates that the world is one of scarcity and deprivation. Indeed, we know something is seriously wrong when the father finds expensive and useful tools abandoned in the vacant garage, and he too concludes that there would be no point in taking them. A bit earlier he concludes that the two of them need to move on because "it isn't safe here." And we have to wonder what is going on when the father observes early on that the sleeping son has knocked his mask off. The reader asks, His mask? What's the deal? On the whole, therefore, I see "The Road" as a prime example of "show, don't tell." R

By modern standards, the 3rd person omniscient voice has fallen out of favor with readers. It was much more common in the 19th century. My personal opinion is that it is very difficult to pull off well, because it tends to call attention to itself and interrupt the experience of the reader becoming lost in the story. Far more common is the so-called 3rd-person limited point of view, where, while the events are presented in the third person, it is done in alignment with the point of view of one particular character. The Harry Potter books are a good example of this -- in general, everything is presented from Harry's point of view. The only departures from this occur in the later books, where scenes involving Lord Voldemort (where Harry is not present) are presented in a fairly neutral third person. But the significant point is that we never receive narration from the point of view of Ron or Hermione or Dumbledore or anyone else -- it's always Harry (or no one in particular, in the case of the Voldemort scenes). Third-person limited has enough in common with first person that it should not be an insurmountable task to move from one to another. But I think that readers are less comfortable as you move toward omniscience, or toward a situation where the point of view hops around from character to in the same scene. Thus, we can hear that "Harry felt his stomach lurch" but we can only see external signs of other characters' feelings ("Hermione's eyes grew wide"). Getting to your main point, however, the structure you choose depends on what the story is about at its core. What does the main character want at the beginning? What's stopping him from getting it? If there is a strong sense of this in the time frame prior to the apocalyptic event, and if it ties into the overall goal of the story, then there's no harm in presenting it. It may be that the main character's answers to the two questions will be one thing before the apocalyptic event, and then this event forces him to change his outlook. Let's say that initially he's caught in the crossfire of divorce, decides he hates his parents and siblings, and runs away. Then the apocalyptic event comes, kills all kinds of people (including his family), and forces him into survival mode. This may cause him to realize that his situation with the family, however dysfunctional, was still a heck of a lot better than he has now. But if that's the approach, I would not present the pre-apocalypse time in exposition. Better, in my view, to launch into a scene that exemplifies what's going on. Perhaps it's the night he packs up stuff and runs away. Perhaps it's the fight that turns out to be the last straw. Give us something to digest, rather than something you have pre-digested for us and simply announced. If the backstory isn't really a part of the main character's journey, but merely illuminates certain traits and behaviors, then I would say to save it for brief bits and pieces that are slipped in with care. R

As a general rule I would say yes, definitely, it's better to slip the backstory in unobtrusively later on, and only to the extent necessary to serve the story, rather than dumping a big piece of background information on the reader as their first experience with your story. The problem, quite bluntly, is that the reader doesn't care about the backstory -- any of it -- when there's no context for it. Describing the "before" time when everything is fine (known as "happy people in Happy Land") is simply not very engaging for a reader to start out with. The reader doesn't know what information will be important, or why they should bother to learn it. They don't have any stakes in any of the characters or the status of Happy Land at this time. It brings back memories of history lessons at school. The risk is that you will lose the reader before anything of importance actually happens in the story. Think of it this way. YOU know the significance of the details in the backstory because YOU know what's coming ahead in your plans for the story. But the reader has no idea what's important or why. And even after reading your entire opening chapter, the reader will still not know what aspects of the background information he just read will be important, or why. It's a lot of homework to assign a reader who has no concrete evidence of why it's needed. The modern convention in fiction (which modern readers generally expect) is to start right in with your character(s) doing things and experiencing things where high stakes are immediately evident. The stakes could be a 4-year-old's beloved doll, as in the beginning of "The Thorn Birds," or survival itself, as in the beginning of the 2007 film "I Am Legend." Readers like it when they can find out early on what the story is about, and about whom. My suggestion would be to go ahead and write your first chapter, and then see what happens if you remove it and actually start your story at Chapter 2. Or maybe partway into Chapter 2. Writers often find that they do a lot of hemming and hawing in opening paragraphs that should just be cut out. Save Chapter 1 in a separate file somewhere that you can refer to, and update as needed, when you're writing the main story. Others may disagree with the above but I am confident that it reflects a broad consensus of current fiction thinking. You are, of course, free to fashion things however you wish. R

You say "the reader needs to know how and why," but do they need to know everything right now? That is the essence of the show, don't tell philosophy. Don't dump all the information on the reader at once. Show the characters behaving consistently with that information, and if the behavior seems curious, the readers will want to figure out what's going on. But they don't have to have the full backstory right then and there. In fact they may never get the full backstory (though you should have it in mind while you're writing). Thus, suppose there is a character who reacts abnormally to sudden loud noises. All the reader needs to know right now is that the character reacts abnormally to sudden loud noises. And if they see a setup for something that's going to make a sudden loud noise near this character later in the story, they will know that this character is going to react. But the readers actually don't need to know WHY this character has an abnormal reaction to sudden loud noises, unless (on rare occasions) that information is central to the story. They don't need a discussion of the character's childhood and the events that led to this fear. The readers will just accept that as a given part of the character's makeup, just as readily as learning that a character doesn't eat mushrooms or puts the toilet roll on the dispenser underhand. In the world of Ender (Orson Scott Card), the government and military authorities have instant visual, voice, and data communication across impossibly long distances using something called an "ansible." But it just appears and is used. There's no discussion of its background or technology, no recital of history. (Actually there is an interesting history that comes out in a later book, but I don't want to include a spoiler here.) The people just use it. Similarly with Captain Kirk and his team beaming down to a planet's surface. We know how the transporter works (we hear them call it that in dialog) and we know it lives in the Transporter Room. We know that people stand on lighted circles at one end of the Transporter Room, and then Mr. Kyle or some other crew member pulls down some sliders on the control console (after entering the "coordinates") when the Captain says "energize." We know that the people sparkle and shimmer and fade and then reappear on the planet's surface through a reverse sequence of sparkling and shimmering and fading. We, the audience, know all we need to know. We don't need to be told anything about this device -- we can see it at work. My advice would be to resist the urge to write a first chapter that lays out a whole bunch of stuff in narrative/exposition form. Start right in with something happening. Trust the readers to "get" that there are some things they need to learn. Indeed, if part of the story is that the main character has found himself in a setting that is unfamiliar to him as well as the readers, then all of them will need to learn what's what as a team. Don't just spoon-feed it to the audience. Let it be revealed through key details or events, and be a process of discovery. R

What a charming story. Of course, not being a Canadian, I had to look up what a "donair" was. Never heard of it. But now I'm hungry! http://www.awesomedude.com/gee_whillickers/the-problem/the-problem.htm R

It seems to me as though Microsoft has been thumbing its corporate nose at massive segments of its existing user base while being clueless about the new initiatives it has (somewhat halfheartedly) tried. Windows 8 was a cruel joke, especially on the enormous installed base of Windows 7 users who were perfectly happy (and still are). Microsoft rushed out Windows 8.1 to essentially provide an ability to choose the appearance of Windows 7 again and get rid of all the carnival atmosphere of Windows 8. Meanwhile we see Apple and its iPhone -- which is comically inadequate and clunky as a business tool -- putting Blackberry out of business and establishing itself as a major player in the smartphone/portable world that even Microsoft perceives as the place where the world is moving. A good friend of mine has a brother who has been working for Microsoft in Redmond for 20+ years. He (the friend) told me that he had remarked to his brother that it must be nice to have such a secure job with a big company. His brother responded that everyone there lives in daily fear of losing their job because of some major reorganization or realignment of the company. Microsoft products are still important in the enterprise realm -- particularly server technologies. The alternatives are UNIX-based systems or mainframes. That world is not going to go away. But it is clear that Microsoft (through Windows) will never be "everywhere." R

That course on WWII, by the way, is outstanding. It is taught by Prof. Thomas Childers, and is described here: http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/world-war-ii-a-military-and-social-history.html. I've listened to it a couple of times. Major public libraries often carry these courses, which are a bit pricey to purchase, in their audio section. If you are interested in purchasing, wait until it goes on sale, which happens frequently throughout the year. (Note: The Teaching Company changed its name to "The Great Courses" recently.) While I'm at it, let me mention that their course on World War I is also outstanding. R

Here is a discussion of subtext that makes points applicable to written stories as well as screenplays. http://www.scriptmag.com/features/wendys-la4hire-great-screenplay-writing-part-4-kill-exposition?et_mid=771715&rid=239276265 R

Main character wants something. He can't achieve it because ____ is blocking him. So he does this ____________. And the outcome is this ___________. R

We discovered that we had a family of rattlesnakes living in our back yard when we lived in the Santa Monica Mountains. Our dogs got bitten three times. Thankfully we were able to find and eliminate them. I'm very kind to animals in general, but it gave me great pleasure to dispatch these. That's the only time I've encountered rattlesnakes here in southern California. R

I don't know if anyone has ever written down the early history of Nifty. I'm familiar with it because I was a student at Carnegie-Mellon University where it started out as a directory on the school's computer server, with the address nifty.andrew.cmu.edu. It wasn't until some time later that it got moved to its own solo URL. I always assumed that the powers-that-be at C-MU decided that perhaps the content hosted there was not consistent with the image C-MU wanted to project. Back in its original incarnation, I don't recall that the Nifty archive was as open to contributions as it is today. As far as I know it's possible to go back to the earliest days on the present site and see what the stories were like back then. Nowadays there is an appalling amount of chaff to sift through in order to find any wheat. R