The Place For My Writers Notes

original posting 5 July 2011

The April, 1992, issue of the Writer, had an article on pages 15 to 17 with the title, "Plotting from A to Z" by William F. Nolan, the author of Logan's Run and other books. It starts out...

"Plot has a double purpose in fiction. Actively, is the driving force of any story or novel... Passively, it's the spine of a story, the structure around which the story is told."

"A strong, surprising plot is essential if you are to capture and hold readers. The plot must keep them engaged and draw them deeper and deeper into the narrative."

So the plot's the thing within which we'll capture the readers... With apologies to Shakespeare.
( Mulligan stew )

Original posting 1 December 2008

[Fair warnng -- I'm likely to be a bit hit-or-miss this week -- I'm at a conference in China, and I'm supposed to have a chapter ready for a book next week -- software engineering stuff, but I do need to put some time in. So if I seem to be somewhat scarcer than usual, that's probably it. Later!]

Slip sliding away

The other day I ended up in one of these situations that I get caught in from time to time. You see, the students were giving their final presentations, so from one o'clock to five o'clock -- four hours -- I was sitting in the middle of a number of Japanese colleagues, listening to Japanese students rattle on in Japanese. I wasn't really expected to ask questions, understand, or even stay awake, really, although I do tend to try to look somewhat interested. At least I stayed awake -- not everyone around me did that, even.

Anyway, one of my tricks for this is mental puzzles. In particular, this time, I picked a fallacy ahead of time, and thought about various situations or twists on the fallacy. This time it was a slippery slope fallacy -- the notion that having taken a step in this direction, we are automatically committed to going too far, tumbling down the slippery slope into the abyss.

Some of the twists and turns that I thought about include:

-- when the weeds start to crowd the pond, it's already too late -- so kill them early and all.
-- when the snowball hits the slope, the avalanche won't stop.
-- fairness versus special cases and situational awareness: if we do something for one case, must we do it for everyone?
-- anti-slippery slope: even after the most energetic strike, the pins stop bouncing eventually.
-- positive feedback cycles always grow to the limits of their environment, and then die from destroying it.
-- once you let a fuse, it's hard to put out the fire, forest fire, explosion
-- providing atmosphere to one crew member usually means letting everyone catch their breath

Not all the best, and not even all of the variations that I can come up with, but I find having this kind of a mental puzzle in hand can be useful when I run into the ceremonial meeting madness.

Who knows, maybe you will too. There are plenty of fallacies to play with, and we certainly need to think about the various ways that we express these fallacies. Philosophers, critical thinkers, and other such folks so often seem to use very drab descriptions, or Latin names. Ad Hominem? Do you get that with bacon and eggs? No? Okay, how about calling it a smear attack? And how many different ways do we mix up personality, individual history and actions, and other such irrelevancies with a person's claim or argument?

Slip sliding away

The other day I ended up in one of these situations that I get caught in from time to time. You see, the students were giving their final presentations, so from one o'clock to five o'clock -- four hours -- I was sitting in the middle of a number of Japanese colleagues, listening to Japanese students rattle on in Japanese. I wasn't really expected to ask questions, understand, or even stay awake, really, although I do tend to try to look somewhat interested. At least I stayed awake -- not everyone around me did that, even.

Anyway, one of my tricks for this is mental puzzles. In particular, this time, I picked a fallacy ahead of time, and thought about various situations or twists on the fallacy. This time it was a slippery slope fallacy -- the notion that having taken a step in this direction, we are automatically committed to going too far, tumbling down the slippery slope into the abyss.

Some of the twists and turns that I thought about include:

• when the weeds start to crowd the pond, it's already too late -- so kill them early and all.
• when the snowball hits the slope, the avalanche won't stop.
• fairness versus special cases and situational awareness: if we do something for one case, must we do it for everyone?
• anti-slippery slope: even after the most energetic strike, the pins stop bouncing eventually.
• positive feedback cycles always grow to the limits of their environment, and then die from destroying it.
• once you've lit a fuse, it's hard to put out the fire, forest fire, explosion
• providing atmosphere to one crew member usually means letting everyone catch their breath

Not all the best, and not even all of the variations that I can come up with, but I find having this kind of a mental puzzle in hand can be useful when I run into the ceremonial meeting madness.

Who knows, maybe you will too. There are plenty of fallacies to play with, and we certainly need to think about the various ways that we express these fallacies. Philosophers, critical thinkers, and other such folks so often seem to use very drab descriptions, or Latin names. Ad Hominem? Do you get that with bacon and eggs? No? Okay, how about calling it a smear attack? And how many different ways do we mix up personality, individual history and actions, and other such irrelevancies with a person's claim or argument?

rocking around the clock, even around in twists!