What Makes a Good Story?

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An eight-hundred-page book tells the story of a forty-inch-tall man traveling across a semi-mythical world to throw a ring into a volcano.  A famous play is the story of an overly proud king disowning his only loving child for not flattering him and then paying the price for it.  A three-thousand-year-old poem tells the story of a proud warrior being dishonored by a foolish king and the havoc that ensues in a famous war that includes gods and goddesses acting decidedly human.  A boy saves a princess with the help of a space pirate and a mystical monk long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away.  Two almost god-like races, one devoted to peace and truth and the other consumed by war and evil fight a war of extermination in the Milky Way galaxy over the course of billions of years.  A movie tells the story of seven samurai or seven cowboys agreeing to save a town from bandits with glory as the only reward.  A hen-pecked New Jersey grocery store owner sells everything he owns and travels 3,000 miles to California to buy an orange ranch that doesn’t have any oranges on it.  A man drags his wife and young son two thousand miles to an isolated hotel in the Rocky Mountains where they will all be the playthings of ghosts who want to add them to the spectral residents.

What do all of these stories have in common?  Well, almost nothing.  Each of them is a fairly popular work of fiction.  But otherwise, they’re all over the map in terms of plot, characters, genre and the societies they represent.  But what makes them successful stories is their ability to draw the reader (or viewer) into their worlds and spark human empathy.  It’s as simple as that.

We recognize Frodo’s humanity and cheer him on as he pits his tiny strength against titanic forces of evil.  We shake our heads at the pig-headed antics of Achilles and Agamemnon but we nod our heads at the recognition that war will take good men like Hector and make his wife a widow and his son an orphan.  We thrill to the heroics of a small band of warriors pitting their strength and skill against a small army of bandits, knowing full well that most of them will die in the battle.  We laugh at and at the same time see ourselves in a man constantly belittled and frustrated by everyone around him including his overbearing wife and annoying children who then stubbornly heads down the road to ruin only to be saved by fortune and his own indestructible sense that eventually it will have to be his turn.

So, what is the most important aspect?  Plot or character?  I used to think plot.  After all, we all like the quest and the action scenes and all the other hooks that draw us into the story.  But as I get older, I realize that if the characters are mere ciphers, then the hold thing devolves into a video game.  And it can be fun and exciting but on reflection it feels sort of meaningless.  Does it really matter how many monsters he fights if you don’t believe the hero is real?

So that’s the trick for the author.  Somehow you have to invest your heroes and villains with enough humanity to make your reader (or viewer) care.  Breathing life into a stream of words takes a bit of doing.  Usually, you have to take something from your own experience to make it seem real.  But when it’s done right it’s the rewarding part of writing.  Self-satisfaction.

Meanwhile Back on Planet Earth

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Busy day today.  Yard work in hazy, hot and humid conditions.  But physical activity is good for the mind.  It’s not good to dwell too much on the diseased condition of our politics.  And let’s face it, I’ve spent way too much time for the last week gorging on the panic on display in Washington.  What did Nietzsche say?  If you stare too long into the abyss, it stares back.  I think I’ll let Donald Trump worry about whether Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Morgoth will be the Democrat candidate in November.

We can check back in a couple of weeks or until the Left has a chance to cow Biden into withdrawing from the race.  It should be interesting to hear the excuse if he does withdraw.  I guess he can claim that the Almighty told him to.  Of course, to Biden it’s the Almighty Dollar that speaks to him.  Hey, maybe that’s what he’s waiting for.  He wants a bribe to drop out of the race.  Maybe a $100 million in one of Hunter’s off-shore accounts would convince Jumpin’ Joe that it’s time to park his Parkinson off-stage somewhere else.  Either way, that’s a comedy act for another day.

Probably the more useful thing for me to follow and consider are the people out there who aren’t waiting for the November election but are trying to fix things right now.  Christopher Rufo has been working on state level governmental efforts like the reform of colleges in Florida and Texas and some other places.  He’s on the Board of the New College in Florida and they’ve successfully demolished the DEI and other pernicious initiatives there.  Now he’s gotten started helping a whistleblower in Texas who reported a hospital for continuing a pediatric transgender program after it has been legislatively banned.  It seems that the federal government has gone after this whistleblower and Rufo is raising a flag over these retaliatory efforts by the Justice Department.

It’s going to come down to determined people in red states drawing a line in the sand and taking concrete actions to stop the federal government from crushing the freedoms that they no longer believe in.  If Donald Trump wins in November that might give us a little breathing room to rally the efforts of everyone wishing to stop the government’s encroachment of our rights and try to turn things around.  If Trump is lucky enough to get Republican Senate and House majorities then he can hope to make some meaningful changes to the laws.  If not, then executive orders can undo the damage Biden did with his orders.

But if Biden or some other Democrat is in the White House next February then it will be more important than ever that red state governors, legislatures and judges work tirelessly to find ways to obstruct all the damage that this new administration creates.

I live in a deep blue state.  I have always been a stranger in a strange land.  Every thing around me is imprinted with the code for the hive mind.  Even the local news station from the cable company is impossibly partisan.  I don’t need anything to raise my consciousness as a conservative.  Every day I search the internet for a trail to others like me.  There are a few of us out there and maybe one day we’ll figure out a way to focus our strength into something that provides real results.

I look at the devastation that the Tories in Britain brought down on themselves by lying about their agenda.  They tore down their own party, kind of like the Republicans have done here.  But then I see what Nigel Farage has done.  He’s started a reform party and even though he’s starting from scratch almost alone, he’s not riddled with fake conservatives.  He can try to do it right.  And that’s what I hope eventually happens here.

08JUL2024 – Quote of the Day

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We are brought to a belief of God either by reason or by force. Atheism being a proposition as unnatural as monstrous, difficult also and hard to establish in the human understanding, how arrogant soever, there are men enough seen, out of vanity and pride, to be the authors of extraordinary and reforming opinions, and outwardly to affect the profession of them; who, if they are such fools, have, nevertheless, not the power to plant them in their own conscience. Yet will they not fail to lift up their hands towards heaven if you give them a good thrust with a sword in the breast, and when fear or sickness has abated and dulled the licentious fury of this giddy humour they will easily re-unite, and very discreetly suffer themselves to be reconciled to the public faith and examples.

Michel de Montaigne

Guest Contributor – TomD – 07JUL2024 – Photo – Just Stumbled Across This

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Tom | Flickr

TomD

SONY DSC

Another view

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DSC7922.jpg

Little history. This shot was made in a park near the Port of Pensacola. If you look just above the car, you’ll see a statue of a Spanish Conquistador, Trisdan DeLuna who founded Pensacola in 1559, the first European settlement in North America.

Considering that was somewhat before the introduction of air conditioning, I don’t know how they stood it. Although the absolute temperatures around here aren’t higher than found elsewhere in the country, the humidity is astounding.

Cry Me Denial

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I watched the Stephanopoulos interview.  Compared to how that midget would have grilled a Republican this was a lovefest.  But as carefully and as politely as he could couch the questions, he still tried to get Biden to admit that the public thinks he’s senile.  And because they believe this the polls are showing his support slipping.

But Biden would have none of it.  According to Joe the race is dead even.  He’s on track to beat Trump and he’s never been sharper.  He’s trotting the globe defeating tyrants, expanding democracy and swashbuckling his way into history.  And only the Almighty can tell him to quit.

I’m not a fan of Stephanopoulos.  I think he’s a detestable partisan rat pretending to be an objective journalist.  But it was painful to see how completely unwilling Biden was to admit to any problems at all.  His handling of the country.  The public’s perception of his mental state.  Or in his present position in the electoral polls.  In Joe’s eyes he’s the best man to run the country and the only man who can prevent Donald Trump from regaining the presidency.

I’m of two minds about this.  The part of me that witnessed the 2020 election results thinks that Joe knows the fix is in and he knows they can print out another million ballots in Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Detroit so everything is honkey-dory.  But the part of me that looks at the state of the country and can’t believe that even the Deep State wants this to continue, thinks that Joe is going to be carted off to the Cracker Factory in January 2025.

But either way it’s fascinating to see Joe Biden on display in all his deteriorating splendor.  His porcelain teeth shining bright in a mouth that can no longer produce clear English.  Near the end of the interview when, “Stephanopoulos asked the president bluntly how he would feel in January if Donald Trump ended up winning the election and his warnings about Trump and democracy came to pass. Biden replied: “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about….””

Well, when your kids are two or three years old, goodest is a reasonable thing to say.  It shows a mind finding patterns in the formation of superlatives in English.  Past five I’d say it indicates a problem.  When used by a man running for the office of president of the United States, I’d say it’s a flashing red light.  He’s becoming a doofus.

To sum up the whole experience of watching the interview, it appears that the Left can’t get Joe Biden to jump off his campaign wagon.  And as things continue to unwind for his prospects, I have to admit I’m feeling a certain unbridled enthusiasm beginning to well up.  Sure, I know that anything can happen in the next four months.  And I know that absentee ballots can be printed at an incredible speed.

But even a “win” by Joe Biden at this point will be therapeutic.  How many people will be satisfied if the polls have Biden down by double digit in the swing states and he scratches out a win by a few thousand votes a week later?  I’m guessing almost no one.  And that would put to rest the myth of fair elections once and for all.  And to my mind that would be an acceptable conclusion to the whole populist experiment.  We’d know that dissent is forbidden.  And we could all give up the farce of voting every four years and do something useful instead.

But just imagine if Trump wins.  There would be a party that would go on for a week.  People would be dancing in the street and YouTube videos of Democrat voters wailing and gnashing their teeth would be playing on endless loops until the whole internet finally crashed.  Joe Scarborough and Rachel Maddow would have to be committed to lunatic asylums for electroshock therapy for a month just to stop them from screaming.

And I wouldn’t be able to stop smiling for a month.