Stories are our foundation, as necessary to us as love.

October 13, 2007 — Pat Bertram

Ever since humans first noticed they were different from the other creatures, they (we) have been trying to figure out what specific quality sets us apart. Opposable thumbs? Awareness of self? Awareness of death? It can’t be; other creatures share, or at least seem to share those characteristics.

From the beginning, as humans huddled around the fire, they exchanged stories, and the best storytellers were revered. That is the one trait we humans alone have: the ability to tell and appreciate stories. Stories are our foundation, as necessary to us as love. Stories help us figure out who we are as individuals, and who we are as a people. Stories take us away from our problems, yet they also help us solve them.

We cry at the misfortunes of people we’ve never met, people who never were, people who seem more real to us at times than our own families. And we rejoice in the successes of those story people as if they were our own successes.

With all our sophistication and technology today, we haven’t come far from our primitive beginnings. Where once we huddled as a group around flickering fires, we now huddle singly before our flickering screens, but the need, the basic human need for stories is the same.

Although most of us may never get published, thanks to the Internet we can still reach others with our vision of the world, with our interpretation of it.

There is satisfaction in that, though, to be honest, getting paid would be even more satisfying.

Posted in blogging, life, writing. Tags: . 2 Comments »

Knocking on my blog’s door for lemonade and gingersnaps.

October 9, 2007 — Pat Bertram

 Have you ever met one of those lonely old people who are willing to talk to anyone who happens to wander into their life? They don’t care if you had the wrong address and knocked on their door by mistake. They still ask you to come in, to have a glass of fresh-squeezed lemonade or a plate of homemade gingersnaps, to stay and chat awhile.

That’s how I feel when I check to see how people found my blog. I don’t care that they found their way by accident while looking for something completely different. (Usually they are searching for Omar Khayyam’s quatrain about the moving finger, but why are so many people interested in that, all of a sudden? And why come to me? I did finally post that quatrain for these visitors so they wouldn’t go away empty-handed or empty-headed, but still, there are other sites where they could have found it.)  At any rate, I’m glad that someone, anyone came knocking on my blog’s door. I just wish I had some lemonade to offer them, or a plate of fresh-baked cookies. Probably would get more traffic if I did, but I have yet to figure out how to send gingersnaps through cyberspace.

In light of this, I’m sure you can imagine how I felt when I got a comment about one of my posts. Like I was a celebrity or something. A person I had never met read what I wrote, and liked it.

In the end isn’t that what we’re all looking for, whether we’re young or old, lonely or befriended? Aren’t we all looking for someone to acknowledge us? Someone to see us as apart from all the other billions of people in the world, even if only for a moment? We writers and bloggers spew out billions, trillions of sentences each day, and every single one of them says the same thing: “Notice ME.”

Well, for a single blip of time, I was noticed.

Posted in blogging, life, writing. Tags: , . 2 Comments »

Our Most Cherished Beliefs are Bunk

October 8, 2007 — Pat Bertram

 An agent once said that to sell, a novel has to validate our most cherished beliefs. If this is true, then what’s the point of writing? Our cherished beliefs are bunk.

The universe does not make sense. Not every effect has a cause. And things don’t always work out for the best.

The government does not have our interests at heart. A government consists of government employees, and the only interests they have at heart are their own.

Marriage is an outdated institution, perpetuating outdated roles. There is no happily ever after. Love does not come to all of us, and it doesn’t last forever.

Family is not the most important thing in our lives. How can it be? We spend our adulthoods trying to overcome what was done to us in our childhoods, and we put our children in daycare centers and schools to be raised by strangers.

Motherhood does not confer special status. Mothers are common – about half of all creatures on this earth are mothers.

And apple pie makes you fat.

So what’s the point of writing? Because for one brief moment we control the universe, and our cherished beliefs become real.

But what the hell do I know.

Posted in life, writing. Leave a Comment »

The Fickle Gods of Fashion

October 5, 2007 — Pat Bertram

I’ve written before about darlings, those bits of our own rhetoric we love but that serve no purpose in our novels. This speech, orated by the verbose character Harrison, is another of my darlings from More Deaths Than One. By the time I got rid of all his unnecessary speeches, he went from being a major character to a minor one. 

 

          “All through history, people made clothes to fit their bodies, but with the advent of ready-to-wear in the twentieth century, people now make their bodies to fit their clothes. This aberrant behavior has become so ingrained that everyone takes it for granted, as if it has always been so. In fact, women take great pride in being a perfect size zero or four or whatever.

          “I was strolling down a street in mid-town Manhattan not too long ago, watching the power-suited, whippet-thin young men and women hurry by, and it occurred to me that the sign of a prosperous and pampered nation is this fashionable gauntness rather than corpulence, as is commonly believed. Only in a country assured of an ample and continuous food supply can its citizens starve themselves to the point of emaciation simply to serve the fickle gods of fashion.

          “But perhaps it’s not their fault. Advertising is a powerful behavior modification tool. Take the story of the match king.

          “In the early part of the twentieth century, Ivar Kreuger, a match manufacturer, managed to corner the match market. Through various deals, he ended up with the exclusive rights to sell matches in many countries, including most of Europe, but this monopoly was not enough for him. Back then, it was a common practice for two or three people to light their cigarettes from the same match. Ivar realized that if he could somehow keep that third person from using the match, he could greatly increase his sales, so he had his advertising department start the rumor that it was unlucky to light three cigarettes from the same match. Tales were told of dreadful things happening to the third person who used a match, like the bride who had been left at the altar and the soldier who was killed after each had lit a cigarette from a match which two others had already used. Even today, though most people use lighters, the superstition that it’s unlucky to light three cigarettes from the same match still persists. That’s the power of advertising: the ability to control the behavior of vast numbers of people.”

Posted in life, writing. Tags: . Leave a Comment »

You can be a bestselling novelist, but do you really want to be one?

October 3, 2007 — Pat Bertram

 I’ve been reading the works of a bestselling novelist, trying to pinpoint why she’s been so popular for the past two decades. It’s hard work. Her writing style is surprisingly amateurish, her characters are not well drawn, she tells and explains instead of showing, and she repeats herself as if she can’t remember from page to page what she’s already said.

So, why do people keep reading her books?

Passion. Her characters never like or dislike anything. They love and hate, but mostly love. “She ate a piece of cherry pie, and she loved it.” “They had sex, and they loved it.”

Identifiable characters. She gives her characters tags that readers can identify with (mother, prosecuting attorney, abused child, wronged wife) and lets the reader fill in the blanks.

Issues. She picks an issue people are passionate about, and wraps her story around that.

And most of all, she gives readers someone to love and someone to hate, and makes her character choose between them. And, brilliantly, the character chooses the one the reader doesn’t want.

Example: a prosecuting attorney, who adores her husband and their young daughter, gets breast cancer, has a mastectomy and chemotherapy. The husband can’t handle it, is mad at her for “pretending” that she’s sicker than she is, is totally unsupportive, and even worse has an affair.  A coworker supplies the support the husband refuses to give her, and she and the coworker fall in love and plan to get married when her divorce goes through. A year after being diagnosed, she is doing well, and the husband comes nosing around again. In the end, they get back together.

See? Passion. Identifiable characters. Issues. Someone to love and someone to hate. And the wrong ending.

Why is the wrong ending the right one? If the author went with the new love, who would remember? By having the character go back to her husband, the author is manipulating us into thinking about the story. Would we go back to a husband (or wife) who treated us like garbage just so we can uphold the sanctity of marriage?

As you can see, even though I hated the book, she got me. After all, I am blogging about it.

Posted in blogging, books, life, writing. Tags: , . 2 Comments »
Newer posts »