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Everything posted by richardmurray
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Why Plots Fail
September 26, 2022 by Tiffany Yates Martin
Many authors embark on a new manuscript with one of two common inspirations: a great idea for a plot, or a fascinating character and situation.
Both can be good springboards for story, yet without more development, each may result in stories that peter out, dead end, or get lost in rabbit holes (especially during the breakneck pace of NaNo).
Plots most commonly fail when:
- they’re approached as an isolated element of story, a series of interesting events for authors to plug their characters into, or
- when interesting characters are randomly loosed into an intriguing situation with no specific destination or purpose.
Characters must take action, but action is not plot, and plot is not story.
The role of plot in story
The basic definition of story is a character pursues something he desperately wants, and he is changed by that pursuit and his success or failure in achieving his goal. Plot is simply the road the character travels on that journey.
I often reduce it to a simple formula:
Point A + Plot = Point B
In other words, story equals character arc plus plot.
Creating an elaborately structured plot and calling it story is like mapping a trip and calling it a vacation. What makes it complete is the character’s experience of it. Character drives plot, not the other way around.
Don’t panic, plotters. That doesn’t mean you can’t map out your plot ahead of time. And fear not, pantsers—it doesn’t mean you have to painstakingly develop or outline the whole story before you begin.
But creating compelling, cohesive stories does mean considering how these two crucial story elements work together.
Know what your character wants
Before you can put a character in motion, you have to know where she is headed and why. What drives your characters is the engine and the fuel for the actions they take and fail to take in the course of the story, the reason they—and we—take this journey.
Your character’s goal(s) and motivations determine those actions, as well as her reactions, inaction, and interaction; they dictate every choice she makes that pushes her along the plot. It’s essential to understand at least these basics about your characters before trying to put them in motion.
In director Baz Luhrmann’s recent movie Elvis, the titular character’s main motivation is evident from almost the first scene: Elvis loves music, especially blues and gospel. It literally moves him—in an early scene he wanders into a tent revival and his body starts shaking and swaying seemingly without his volition.
That dictates his main goal—to make his own music—which is the propulsive force for every subsequent action he takes (or doesn’t take) in the course of the story, starting with recording his own version of the one of the songs by a local blues musician that fascinated him, accepting Colonel Tom Parker’s offer to tour him on the carnival circuit, and every subsequent choice he makes.
But characters may have other goals and motivations as well, and will also continue to evolve as the story develops and as the author’s understanding of them deepens and grows—which will also affect the choices they make and the paths they take.
Elvis’s desire to pursue his music begins to morph early in the story as he is seduced into a new goal—fame and fortune—which evolves from his deeper motivation: a desperate need for love.
These are powerful and universal desires, the kind many readers can relate to. But they’re vague—another reason plots can falter or lose focus.
Create tangible as well as intangible goals
Pinning your character’s intangible longings to a concrete goal gives readers something to root for—or against—and tells us when the character has “won” (or lost).
Without that, momentum may stall, like a footrace with no definitive finish line for runners to orient themselves toward or to tell them when they’ve reached it.
Or the story may lose cohesion and feel episodic: “This happens…and then this happens…and then this happens…” but because the plot has become disconnected from the character arc, the actions lack meaning or impact.
Tie your character’s more generalized motivations to some specific, tangible “brass ring” that represents them.
For Luhrmann’s movie version of Elvis, each element of what drives him is pinned to a definitive representation of that longing:
- His love of music—his kind of music—is tangibly represented by a Christmas special where Colonel Parker demands he sing sanitized traditional carols and not swivel those hips, as well as the broader concrete representation of Parker’s pushing him to shift his career to inoffensive, bland music, against a new manager who wants to encourage Elvis to play his own kind of music and swivel at will. This sets up a clear story conflict that serves as a powerful propulsive force.
- His desire for fame and fortune is represented by specific, tangible goals that Elvis associates with money—wanting to buy his mother a pink Cadillac, Graceland, his own plane, etc.—and popularity and acclaim, like bigger venues, Hollywood movies, and eventually a European tour.
- His longing for love is represented by his profound devotion to his mother, Gladys (and to a smaller degree his father); the Colonel; Priscilla and Lisa Marie; and, as the Colonel himself reminds viewers throughout, the fans. Elvis thrives on attention and confuses it with love—and that motivates every decision he makes in the story.
Defining what your character wants and why allows you to grow a cohesive, integrated plot as you throw obstacles in the path between your characters and what they want, and let their “why”—what drives them toward that goal—dictate the choices they make. Each choice sends them on the next step of the path as your plot develops organically, always driven by the characters.
Know how your character changes
One final reason plots may fail is that the character’s point B—how they change by the end of the story, externally, internally, or both—is not directly related to or a result of what happened to them in the course of it.
But if you let their goal and motivation dictate their actions and behavior at every decision point, then readers will see on the page, step by step, how your character moves along her arc: how each challenge she faces, every choice she makes, affects her, shifts her perspective, and causes her growth or change.
This direct, intrinsic relationship between plot and character—the character’s struggles, choices, longings, and goals that drive the actions they take in the course of the plot—is what makes for dynamic stories that feel organic, cohesive, and satisfying to readers.
Article
https://www.janefriedman.com/why-plots-fail/My Thoughts
the following is a little aside. but, what do you think about short stories that contain key tenets or rules in a world that can prepare an author in making a longer story in the same world ? I use as an example. ursula leguin's earthsea. she wrote three short stories that like any good short story stand on their own but also displayed key principles of the world in the later books. I have a larger work I am working on, the plot is not finished, but that is based on what I want a few major characters to do at or near the end and it is an important choice. But a smaller story, in the same world , is near complete, The characters , The plot, the story is done. The ending resolution even relates to where I want the larger story to go. And some key rules are displayed. Maybe some plots fail because authors are unwilling to give glimpses, ala short stories, into the world first? I will be blunt, I never wrote a short story at the same time working on a larger one in the same world. Maybe if plotters:) or pantsters step back from the big book and make an intentional short story in the same world, it can help them with the cohesiveness between the plot side characters lives in the longer story.
Writers of the future talk
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No Proof Of Racism By School Bus Driver Who Assaulted Black Children On Video, Cops Say
The adultification of Black children was demonstrably what happened on that school bus.
Written By Zack Linly
Posted September 21, 2022Source: SOPA Images / Getty
Here’s the thing: There’s a difference between blind speculation and experience-based speculation. But our legal system isn’t equipped to differentiate between the two. In any incident involving white people causing harm to Black people, there will be speculation that the incident was racially motivated. In many cases, there won’t be any racial slurs or verbal indications that race played a part in an attack. But Black people will see the racism based on our experience with racism. In other words: We know it was racist because we’ve seen this before.
But that will never match up with the burden of proof our legal system requires before it will call something racist, regardless of how obvious the racism is. And that’s why the Morgan County school bus driver who was caught on camera pushing a 6-year-old Black child and his 10-year-old Black sister will not be called a racist when he stands trial—at least not by the court.
According to the Morgan Citizen, James O’Neil, the now-former bus driver in question (he was fired after the video went viral), has been arrested and charged with two counts of simple battery after the recorded incident that took place earlier this month. He was booked in the Morgan County Detention Center, where he spent a day before being bonded out.
“The investigation resulted in the arrest of James O’Neil on two counts of simple battery,” Morgan County Chief Deputy Keith Howard said in a statement. “While this was not a complex investigation, it was complicated by the allegation that the incident was perceived as being racially motivated.”
“Investigators took additional time to investigate all the facts to include consulting with prosecutors in the Ocmulgee Judicial Circuit,” he went on to say. “Investigators could not establish a nexus that the incident was racially motivated.”
So, how do we know it was racist? Well we don’t—not for sure—but we’ve seen the adultification of Black children at the hands of white authority figures before. We see it in the statistical evidence that Black students are disproportionately and more harshly disciplined than their white counterparts. We saw it when a 9-year-old Black girl was forced into the back of a police car and pepper sprayed while she was severely distraught and begging for help. We saw it when Aurora, Colorado, police pulled over a Black family in an SUV (despite the vehicle description they were given being a motorcycle) and had young Black girls—the youngest of whom was also 6 years old—lying face-down on the ground while handcuffed and frantically crying.
The adultification of Black children was demonstrably what happened on that school bus.From the Citizen:
According to Nene Carter, the mother of the children who were pushed, O’Neil allegedly told her six-year-old son to sit in the back of the bus, despite the fact that primary school students usually sit in the front of the bus away from the older high school students riding the bus in the back.
The 12-second video that went viral on social media shows the bus driver standing over the small child while pushing the boy back into his seat near the front of the bus. The 10-year-old sister is standing next to the bus driver trying to reach out for her brother. The girl shouts, “Stop pushing my brother,” as the bus driver is seen repeatedly pushing the crying boy back into the seat.
“Shut your mouth,” the bus driver says to the girl as he continues pushing the little boy.
The girl asks again for him to stop pushing her brother when the bus driver appears to put his hands on the girl. The girl tells the bus driver to “get your hands off” when the bus driver suddenly pushes her, causing the girl to stumble backwards. The bus driver then says to her, “What a pain in the neck you guys are. Get back there.”
A 6-year-old child isn’t a “pain in the neck” because he’s fearful and anxious about being moved to the back of a bus to sit with older teenagers. He’s just a small child being a small child. A 10-year-old child isn’t a “pain in the neck” because she’s trying to protect her younger sibling from the grown man who is aggressively putting his hands on him. She’s just a child doing what she knows she’s supposed to do as a big sister.
But white America often views Black children through a lens that doesn’t detect innocence and underdevelopment as readily and naturally as it does when viewing white children. It’s just really hard to imagine a white 6-year-old child being sent to the back of a bus among much older kids and then being pushed because he didn’t want to go. (I’m going to go ahead and skip over the part where I talk about the racist implications of a white bus driver sending a Black child to the back of the bus in the first place, BTW.)
It’s also worth mentioning that Carter believes O’Neill was only fired because he was caught on viral video manhandling her children.“We feel like he was terminated because the story got more coverage than the Morgan County Charter School System would have liked,” said Carter. “It was rumored that they were just going to send him to be retrained.”
And if that’s true, it would have been racist AF. But we could never prove it.
ARTICLE
https://newsone.com/4413554/morgan-county-bus-driver-video-update/
Referral
https://twitter.com/msolurin/status/1573716117956304896My thoughts
The problem is Black people seem not to realize the usa is a collection of states. Each state is free to have its own culture as long as it is republican, meaning no kings or generals or oligarchs running a state. But that doesn't mean a community can not be empowered in a state and abuse other communities in it.
Yes, the legal system in the usa allows for cases to be taken to the federal level, but that is a task.
The state in question is georgia. A confederate state. A state where jim crow was at its most firm when other compatriots like new york city were allowing more, albeit trickles, for black folk. Has Georgia ever been anything but the enemy to blacks in its history?
Do you think this case needs to go to the federal level? -
Why couldn't Disney make a movie titled the Little Mermaid using Halley Bailey as Gabriella?
Gabriella is the name of the deaf black latino mermaid that enjoys adventures with ariel in the little mermaid t.v series. why couldn't Disney make the little mermaid movie with Halley Bailey as Gabriella?
The two questions are simple, can a thespian act beyond their physical definition, and are roles for thespians absent? Halley Bailey can play Ariel,as any thespian can attempt to play any role, but Halley Bailey didn't need to.Gabriella was in the following episodes of the little mermaid show
"Wish Upon a Starfish"
"Ariel's Treasures"Gabriella Angelina Bommino - a child whose spirit flew at a very young age, was an inspiration to the character.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-10-22-ca-48649-story.htmlP.S. I will be blunt, honoring the Bommino by making the character inspired by her titular role in the new Little Mermaid film I think would had been a far greater gesture on many levels, than changing the appearance of Ariel, for no reason... and Black women need to watch more television who said they never saw a black mermaid before, cause disney made a black mermaid already. Why didn't black women know about Gabriella already?
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Giorgia Meloni, the leader of Fratelli d'Italia, at a meeting in Palermo for the 2022 Italian elections. (Francesco Militello Mirto/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
MY THOUGHTS BEFORE YOU READ THE ARTICLE
I apologize, recently, I have been courteous and not manipulated or coerced a reader's mind with my thoughts, before. But I am compelled this time from my own energies.... you see , as a Black person from the USA whose bloodline has been in the USA too long. I am used to hearing from blacks or whites of the multiracial acceptance of Europe. The old black lindyhop teacher who teaches all age groups in finland. that kind of thing. I have sad it a billion times, most humans despise immigration when it next door. Many countries in Europe never dealt with immigration. This goes back to European empires, where people from Indochine rarely traveled to france. People from the gold coast rarely traveled to england. People from Nova spain rarely traveled to Spain. But, quietly, the European Union, and the poverty in humanity has pushed into europe enough immigrants for the european local farmer or small town resident to notice and as usual, all hell broke lose.
Europeans love coming to New York City, they spend money, see the rainbow, but they go home to a white village usually, and they can make a diary of their journey. But, dealing with immigration next door is another cultural being and it is clear most Europeans in Europe are not ready.
I do think of angela merkel who once said, germans must teach people how to be german. I said she was right then and she is clearly right in hindsight.
But what does this have to relate to Black people in the USA. well... the Black community in the USA has historically had a tribe in itself that is related to other black tribes in the usa , financially rich. Said black rich have always pushed or supported immigratory activities in the usa.
They were the ones always pushing the black kids de segregate the schools, not get more money for black schools. Desegregate the white communities, not get more money for black communities.
Meaning, a large percentage of black people support the immigration of non blacks into the black community and the act of blacks immigrating into non black communities.
I find it funny how europe, often touted by financially wealthy black people as accepting to immigration, is showing the truth we all know to immigration. No one wants the immigrants near them. Russia/China are closing up shop. Texas is sending immigrants to New York. European countries are proving putin is not a european outlier. If Putin holds out, Russia will have destabilized the european union and exposed the countries that stood quietly against russia while changing many countries in Europe into their honest selves.
I wonder can the black community in the usa be honest?
Immigration, crime propel Europe's move to right, analysts say
Melissa Rossi
·Contributor
Thu, September 22, 2022 at 4:27 PM·10 min read
In Europe, political analysts are pointing to Sweden and Italy as possible harbingers of a political mood shift across the continent driven by a growing wariness of immigrants as well as anger over rising crime rates.
The startlingly strong performance of the far-right Sweden Democrats in this month’s Swedish parliamentary elections and polls showing that the nationalist Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d'Italia) party is poised for victory in this weekend’s contests in that country have both been spurred by those two issues, analysts told Yahoo News.
“Gang violence in Sweden was the issue in the election,” said Gunilla Herolf, a researcher at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs who specializes in European integration. It’s a problem, she added, that is weighing on every Swede. “Some are furious. Some are just terribly upset.”
In Italy, “security issues are being exploited by right-wing forces,” sociologist Giovanna Campani told Yahoo News.
At a glance, the two countries share relatively few commonalities. Sweden is a wealthy, cohesive welfare state, which over the past 90 years has typically been led by leftist coalition governments. By comparison, Italy’s economy, which is burdened by massive debt, is reeling. Costs of living are soaring, and over the past decade, its government has changed nearly every 18 months. But in both places, rising crime and misgivings about immigrants are prompting a political realignment.
The Sweden Democrats, originally formed as a neo-Nazi party in 1988, were one of four right-leaning parties that won a combined 176 of 349 seats in Sweden’s Parliament in last week’s election, besting the center-left coalition by six seats. Now, details of which parties will partake in the new coalition government, and how much influence the Sweden Democrats will actually have, are being hammered out. Despite being ostracized by mainstream Swedes, the party won 20.5% of the vote, elevating it from the fringes to Sweden’s second-most popular party. Its campaign in Sweden — where 20% of the population is now foreign-born, and the country has become known as “the gun violence capital of Europe” — was built on promises to control crime perpetrated by young migrants and to deport some foreign-born Swedes.
Jimmie Akesson, the new leader of the Sweden Democrats, insists his party has shed its fascist leanings, though the party remains staunchly anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim and keeps pounding home its messaging linking foreign-born Swedes and crime. The party points to recent crime trends showing that drug-peddling armed gangs have emerged in some migrant communities during the past five years. In 2021, Sweden experienced some 360 gang-related shootings and 47 deaths; by September of this year, 47 had already died in shootings.
“Sweden used to be a completely peaceful country — and safe,” Brussels-based Roland Freudenstein, vice president of the independent think tank GLOBSEC, told Yahoo News. “Now it’s become one of the most unsafe places in Europe” — not only because of its gang shootings but also because of high number of incidents of rape. “So that’s brought an end to the political correctness,” he said. “Even the [liberal] Social Democrats are talking about immigration, law and order, and getting tough on crime.”
The rate of armed violence is growing faster than anywhere else on the continent, according to a 2021 report by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention. “The increase in gun homicide in Sweden is closely linked to criminal milieux in socially disadvantaged areas,” according to the report.
Until recently, it was all but taboo in Sweden for mainstream politicians to acknowledge the problem.
“That's why the Sweden Democrats are gaining in popularity,” said Eric Adamson, a Stockholm-based project manager at the Atlantic Council’s Northern Europe office. “They were the only ones talking about this” in recent years. Both socially and politically, he said, the topic had previously been off limits for Swedes to discuss.
In Italy, a Sept. 25 snap election necessitated by the July collapse of the government of Prime Minister Mario Draghi seems likely to result in the most conservative leadership there since Benito Mussolini seized power in 1922. The likely new prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has also run on an anti-immigrant platform, vowing to mobilize the Italian navy to prevent African refugees from reaching her country.
Like Sweden, Italy has also been dealing with rising violent crime, though much of it doesn’t involve the immigrants who have sought safe haven there in recent years. Youth gangs of Italians, which some 6% of Italian teens are believed to belong to, are becoming a nightmare for the country, especially around Naples and the south, though some African migrants appear to be starting to form them as well.
This June, however, an estimated 1,500 African youths went on a rampage in the northern town of Peschiera, breaking windows, roughing up tourists and allegedly sexually assaulting young women on a train. Matteo Salvini of the League, a right-wing political alliance he formed with Brothers of Italy and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia for the upcoming election, lambasted the attack. Meloni, the Brothers of Italy leader, who has promised to protect Italy from “Islamization,” seized on the uproar, posting a video on her Twitter account of an African man allegedly raping a woman in broad daylight.
The bigger issue for Meloni, however, may be the changing face and complexion of Italian citizens. The woman who promotes “God, homeland and family” frequently laments Italy’s low birth rate and fears the extinction of Italians and their replacement by immigrants from Africa, a conspiracy she has accused the government of the European Union of orchestrating. “The EU is complicit in uncontrolled immigration, the invasion of Europe and the project of ethnic replacement of European citizens,” she wrote on her website in February.
Campani thinks there are a number of factors at work in Italy that end up working in the right’s favor — including anger over the bureaucracy of the European Union, which imposes rules on many aspects of Italy’s government, such as the treatment of migrants, how to utilize COVID funds, what sorts of energy to invest in and how to handle its debt crisis.
Meloni has promised to challenge Brussels’ authority, vowing that if she’s elected to lead Italy’s government, “the fun is over.”
If she does become prime minister, Freudenstein said, European policymakers will find “a more pugnacious and feistier Italy.”
“She’s a fresh face — and I think Italians want to try out something new,” he added.
According to a December 2021 YouGov poll of residents in 10 European nations, both Italy and Sweden were among the top three European countries saying that the number of foreigners allowed to immigrate to European countries has been excessive — a statement with which 77% percent of Italians and 73% of Swedes agreed.
In April, young migrant men, protesting the planned burning of the Quran by a Swedish provocateur in towns across the country, kicked off riots in three cities that injured more than 100 Swedish police — just one disturbing event that forced then-Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson, a Social Democrat, into admitting a problem with violence among some migrant communities, and the existence of “parallel societies” of many foreign-born in Sweden. “Segregation has been allowed to go so far that we have parallel societies in Sweden,” she told reporters. “We live in the same country but in completely different realities. We will have to reassess our previous truths and make tough decisions.”
The issue in Sweden, said Herolf of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, isn’t immigration itself. It’s the mafia-like Eastern European clans and gangs that made it into the country along with legitimate asylum seekers and refugees.
“There are people coming into Sweden who bring criminality with them,” she said, including some from the former Yugoslavia. “But there were also loads of decent hardworking people from there too. So [previously] we didn’t want to talk about that and risk hurting the good people.”
What’s more, she said, it’s now widely recognized that Sweden has taken in far too many refugees since 2015, when the civil war in Syria broke out creating a refugee crisis, and that the government in Stockholm has been reticent to force them to integrate into Swedish society. “We have a responsibility to make demands on them to learn Swedish, to join in Swedish society," and not just live in foreign bubbles.
“Sweden has been an extremely tolerant and antiracist country,” Johan Martinsson, a political science professor and research director of the Laboratory of Opinion Research and the Citizen Panel at the University of Gothenburg, told Yahoo News. He pointed to an incident in 2002 when a politician suggested that foreigners should be given a basic language test before being given citizenship. “It was considered an outrage,” Martinsson said. “He was called a racist for even suggesting it.”
The increasing popularity of nationalist, anti-immigrant parties in Europe, such as Marine LePen’s rise in France, underscores the need for mainstream politicians to openly admit to issues as they emerge, and to stop worrying that acknowledging them simply reinforces the radical right, said Freudenstein. “Integration policies for migrants have to become much tougher,” he added, and governments need “to be tougher about language, about [banning the wearing of] burqas, and about prohibiting afternoon [Islamist] schools where children unlearn what they learned in the morning about women’s rights and the separation of church and state.”
Freudenstein, for one, is concerned about what the rise of far-right parties will mean for the cohesion of the European Union — all the more with soaring energy prices and potential shortages, even the possibility of natural gas rationing — as the continent heads into the colder months. “We know a crisis winter is coming,” he said. “And it’s going to reinforce this feeling of ‘Let’s try something new,’ and the feeling that the structures and powers in place have failed.” He points to the growing possibility of “a severe recession that will dramatically increase social tensions.” The next six months will be crucial, he believes, and will “decide the future of politics in Europe.”
ARTICLE
https://news.yahoo.com/immigration-crime-propel-europes-move-to-right-analysts-say-202748280.html