R. Vania's Blog, page 2

Not interested in the whole climate change, green thing?

Not interested in the whole climate change, green thing? There are many people who aren’t. These books, this series, is made for you—and them. There are no preachy finger-wagging guilt trips about anything related.  Instead, characters live their lives, struggling through adversities or enjoying the moment. Climate change happens around them, touching their lives when a super-storm rages through or when they visit a (real) nation that happens to raise 100% organic food. Out of a score of characters, only one or two is active in climate change issues as a driving force in their lives.

Why this more subtle approach? Because it’s the way most of us live our lives. We do what we can, we might recycle parts of our trash, we might watch a TV program, or read an article now and then. Otherwise, the vast majority of the population is too busy to notice. We don’t see it happening to us directly, and we have more immediate everyday concerns.

As fictional time passes, some of the characters become more aware while others remain distanced from climate issues.  Depending on where one lives, unless one reads about the lives of others, one can remain blissfully ignorant of the long and devastating reach of climate change. Hopefully, some reader somewhere will finish a passage and think Huh. I didn’t know that. Maybe I should pay more attention.

But the “undercurrents” part of social issues is a different story. Literally. Characters are constantly facing the expectations and traumas of the society around them. Discrimination, prejudice, fear, parenting problems, crime, and relationships with others are what gets in their (and our) faces on a minute to minute basis.

It’s hard to be concerned about your carbon footprint when you are under personal attack. If we can solve the immediate interpersonal and social crises that plague today’s societies, only then can we see the long term disasters looming on the horizon that we need to address.

Breathing Life into the Printed Page

Book #3 in the series is in progress. In it, one of the characters says something like:

“Living, breathing life doesn’t happen like it does in books.  It’s not linear and it’s not divided into neat chapters. Life is chaotic, weird, tangled, full of paths of rocketing exhilaration, and dead ends full of nothing but boredom. There are multi-planed realities, misconceptions, and fantasies lived as though they were fact. . .”

How to get those very chaotic, undivided, weird, and tangled aspects into a story line is not easy. But, it is enriching. One of the techniques in the series has been not to use chapter designations. Instead, the books are broken into “parts.” The parts usually designate places or locations instead of abrupt stops to fit a critics view of what content layout should look like.

Within each part, there are minimally obtrusive breaks. They are indicted by an extra blank line or two and a single “~” in the middle.  These tend to fall in times and places where a scene changes.

Beyond ditching chapters, there are other ways to keep the story lines complex and more in keeping with the way people live their “real” lives. Multiple sub-stories bounce off a number of characters at once like so many balls in a pinball machine. Topics and character personalities, and events vary wildly and can be disconcerting. Relationships change and evolve along with points of view. People portrayed can have both “good” and “bad” aspects while some situations simply are with no obvious judgment.

Life can be messy. So can stories. That is when the two-dimensional paper page serves not as a limitation, but as an organizing map.