Category: stories

And how does keeping secrets affect your characters?

~ David W. Jones ~ Leave a comment

Your secrets hurt your mental health. What’s the alternative? | Aeon Essays

https://aeon.co/essays/your-secrets-hurt-your-mental-health-whats-the-alternative?utm_source=rss-feed

A lot in here that can apply to us (as a person) and to story characters.

How many stories have you encountered where characters keep secrets from one another? How did it affect them and their relationships?

It also talks about guilt and shame: the differences between them, their effects on people, and ways to handle them.

The author pursued these studies of keeping secrets because he and his brother are products of a secret his parents decided to keep from them before the kids were even born: That each was the product of sperm donors. Different donors. So the usual childhood discussions of “who was the most like Dad” had a secret depth they weren’t even aware of.

If you’ve followed the Marvell Comics Universe stories about Thor and Loki, those are stories of keeping secrets, and what happened when they came out.

The movie Thor: Ragnarok is particularly about keeping secrets.  The secret of their banished sister Hela, the secret of how Asgard became so powerful. When the secrets came out, Asgard was destroyed!

The James Bond movies starring Daniel Craig regularly have secrets coming back to bite the characters. In fact, the entire plot of Skyfall is about M’s secret betrayal of an earlier Double-Oh agent to the Chinese, and how that eventually kills her and massively damages the agency.

So read the essay and think of how keeping secrets affects themes, plots, characters.

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A bit from a story in progress

~ David W. Jones ~ Leave a comment

One of the problems with adults is they stop believing in real things. They only believe in made-up things, like stock markets, marketing plans, reality TV and internet memes. See, adults think they know what reality is, while they’re only squinting at the shadows moving on the cave wall.

David W. Jones

Another of my AWESOME stories is PUBLISHED!

~ David W. Jones ~ Leave a comment

Yes! In the latest Hawaii Fiction Writers group anthology, a fundraiser for the Friends of the Library chapters at Aina Haina Library and Kapolei Public Library:

Kissing Frogs and Other Quirky Fairy Tales

Thank you, editors extraordinaire Michael, Gail and Carol Catanzaritti (in memoriam).

While mine (“The Disrespectful Prince and The Frog”) is (as always) AWESOME, there are 25 other beautiful, funny, clever and nearly-awesome retellings of fairy tales along the lines of the old Fractured Fairy Tales cartoons.

So buy yourself a copy, buy your friends copies, buy your exes copies, buy your enemies copies, buy copies and donate them to your local school and prison libraries. And rejoice in great stories and in being an Official Goodness on the Face of the Earth™ for supporting our libraries!

Advice to storytellers from me

~ David W. Jones ~ 2 Comments

Tell the story that needs to be told, in the way it needs to be told, to the length it needs to be told.

Don’t poison a story by insisting it must be an apple when it’s really an orange.

Don’t stunt a story by forcing it beyond its natural growth nor by forcing it to grow in a box too small.

“Genres” and “standard story lenghs” are publisher’s artefacts, not part of storytelling.

Breakthroughs don’t come through abiding by conventions and working in boxes.