If so, please stop!
How Shrinking perpetuates Hollywood’s most sexist cliché – BBC Culture
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230315-how-shrinking-perpetuates-hollywoods-most-sexist-clich
Category: thoughts
Advice about moving to Hawaii to work
If you’re thinking of moving to the Hawaiian Islands, get hired for a job you can do here first, then move! And be prepared to sacrifice a lot to stay here.
Or be very rich.
Why?
- Living here is very expensive.
- Pay scales are not competitive with pay scales at other, similarly-expensive areas.
- Many employers won’t hire people new to the islands until you’ve been here 3-6 months.
They’ve been burned too many times by people that came to the islands on vacation, decided they loved the islands so much they had to stay, got hired somewhere here – then went back to where they came from when our cost of living hit them. Like when their first two-weeks’ paycheck came to less than their apartment rent.
And how does keeping secrets affect your characters?
Your secrets hurt your mental health. What’s the alternative? | Aeon Essays
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.
Your story, your art, your life
A quote from Dianna Wynne Jones, author of many, many well-loved books, such as the Howl’s Moving Castle trilogy:
…somewhere, somewhen, someone is going to read your book at a time when such things stick for life. And you have to make it the kind of book that is worth remembering that vividly for that long. You have to make it an experience in its own right.
Reflections On the Magic of Writing by Dianna Wynne Jones
Do it. You know you want to, because you know somewhere, somewhen in your life, someone wrote a story – or told you a story – that stuck with you. That changed you, changed what you wanted to do, changed who and how you wanted to be in your life.
Do it.
Why we need new words for life in the #Anthropocene – BBC Future
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230125-why-we-need-new-words-for-life-in-the-anthropocene
Something writers of clifi should be well aware of, but also, writers have been in the business of making up new words for a very long time!
Do you feel like a “conventional thinker” sometimes?
New Research Reveals the Secret to Unleashing Creativity in Conventional Thinkers
What a Fourteenth Century Legal Case Can Teach Us about Storytelling – Uncanny Magazine
Involving a little-known English author by the name of Chaucer.
The myth of the “non-creative person” – Ozan Varol
https://ozanvarol.com/the-myth-of-the-non-creative-person/
Ozan Varol is so right about the school system and creativity.
Society and business are the same way. Neither wants creativity (making something new). They want “innovation” (smoothing the edges of what already exists).
So go be creative this year!
Something to think about for stories and characters
Evidence grows that mental illness is more than dysfunction
Reminds me of a science fiction novel I read, in which society had genetically engineered people they called ‘vampires’. Stronger, faster and much smarter than humans. They were also engineered with sociopathic traits: lack of empathy, seeing others and society as systems, machines.
The ‘vampires’ were needed to solve complex, difficult problems beyond ordinary human abilities, problems that threatened to destroy the human species.
Perhaps this is related to the idea that sociopathology exists because there were times when societies needed the condition’s combination of clear thinking, situational understanding, impulsiveness, and willingness to sacrifice others, in order to survive violent threats such as wars?
Why do you tell stories?
How to tell a great story to motivate others
https://www.fastcompany.com/90780223/how-to-tell-a-compelling-story-to-motivate-others
Dancing Treefrog 