Trailer for the 1940 black and white film The Grapes of Wrath. Russell Simpson as Pa Joad. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is a previously published post about writing ideas about using your settings as characters.

In the latest issue of Wired magazine, I’m reading an article about the “depression of the future.” So I decided to think about this “depression of the era” kick the media spouts, too. Or as Sarah Palin would say: also, too.

What would a depression of say, the year 2024 be?

Assuming social networking apps like Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, Squiddo and others are still around, how would the world’s Tom Joads survive in an online world? Would they fight for survival, like in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road? Instead of doing anything and everything for food, we might kill each other for a battery that works with our laptop; we might do worse things if we find a battery compatible with the iPhone 3G?

Or how about trying to begin anew, like the folks did in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath? (What would you do if you find a flyer with these words printed on it: Come to New California! We’ve got Internet connections! 12-Hour work-days required for plug-in.)

This is all silly, of course. But stories are churning in my head as we speak. Apply questions about the current state of our culture, economics or what have you, to your story so that it will give you some fresh appeal. In fiction writing, use setting as a character, just like Joad himself.

This isn’t a book review, but the ideas in the preface of The Information Diet excited me. Call it a pre-screening.

Mashing up ideas

In an earlier post, I wrote about a literary technique called defamiliarization: The writer’s job is to present old information in new ways. As the book of Ecclesiastes says, “There’s nothing new under the sun.”

Clay A. Johnson defamiliarizes the idea that we shouldn’t only abstain from eating fatty foods.

Information diet plans

Right away, he encourages us to look at information through a different lens. “Maybe,” he says, “We should start looking at this through the lens we use to view everything else we biologically consume: health.

What if we started managing our information consumtion like we managed our food consumption?”

A free diet to whet your appetite:

There are kinds of food we’re hard wired to love. Salt, sugars, and fats. Food that, over the course of the history of our species, has helped us get through some long winters, and plow through some extreme migrations. There are also certain kinds of information we’re hard wired to love: affirmation is something we all enjoy receiving, and the confirmation of our beliefs helps us form stronger communities. …In the world of food, we’ve seen massive efficiencies leveraged by massive corporations that have driven the cost of a calorie down so low that now obesity is more of a threat than famine. Those same kinds of efficiencies are now transforming our information supply: we’ve learned how to produce and distrubite information in a nearly free manner. The arallels between what’s happened to our food and what’s happened to our information are striking. Driven by a desire for more profits, and a desire to feed more people, manufacturers figured our how to make food really cheap; and the stuff that’s the worst for us tends to be the cheapest to make. As a result, a healthy diet–knowing what to consume and what to avoid–has gone from being a luxury to mandatory for our longevity. Just as food companies learned that if they want to sell a lot of cheap calories, they should pack them with salt, fat, and sugar–the stuff that people crave–media companies learned that affirmation sells a lot better than information. Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they’re right?

The Information Diet Table of Contents

After juxtaposing our information intake with our (un)healthy eating habits, Johnson attempts to design an information diet for us by ”describing the healthy habits of a good information consumer, and providing pointers on how to consume that information.”

Part three, he says, is a call to action. “Just as the food we eat has an ethical consequence, so do the choices we make around information.”

The best diet plan

Like any of the thousands of diet books currently on the market or what any of the gurusof the low-carb/high fat diets or vice versa, the information diet only works if you use it. Instead of “garbage in, garbage out,” feed yourself only four-six servings of social media broccoli, only two servings of television protein, and minimize the fatty, sugary and salty information that, in Johnson’s words, “we’re hard wired to love.”

When I feel mentally fragmented, I’m reminded that information is beneign. It’s how much and what we consume that matters most.

Instead I was “stuck” with the rich storytelling of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Michael Landon.

On a car trip recently, I listened to the book-on-cd that Little House was based on.

In On the Banks of Plum Creek, I heard familiar characters like Ma and Pa, Laura and Mary, mean Nellie Olsen, the reverend, and all the neighbors.

What struck me while I listened to this story was how difficult it must have been growing up on the frontier in Minnesota. Material things were scant. Laura had a regular dress to wear  at home, one for school and maybe one for church; sometimes, they only had two dresses if they outgrew them. They had no toys, no gaming systems, and no conveniently-packed TV dinners.

The story really centers around the wheat harvest. When the family first settled near Plum Creek, they planted a crop. Their first year on Plum Creek, they waited on pins and needles for harvest time. One year, Pa was convinced he could get $40 for the crop. That was enough money to last them the entire year.

One day a black cloud covered the sun. Out of nowhere, millions of grasshoppers covered the crops and began eating every green and golden blade in sight. Within days nothing was left. Worse, they laid eggs, so for two seasons,  Pa had to walk three hundred miles to find work. Then one spring, the grasshoppers just left, like an army being called to another war.

This was a tough time, and Pa  worried about feeding his family, but he also had to worry about whether his shoes would hold up for such a long walk. He almost succumbed to despair, but he held it at bay.

“It’s gonna be all right, Caroline,” he said. “We’ve been through hard times before.

Fast-forward a hundred and fifty years. We have so many conveniences at our fingertips. We don’t worry about clean water or shoes; the government pays farmers if the crops fail. A tragedy may strike our families like foreclosure, but that doesn’t mean we have to start living under a bridge.

Sometimes, though, we worry like life will end. Instead of saying, “We’ll make it through these hard times,” we worry ourselves sick.

There are genuine things to be concerned about, but the next time we feel like worrying, do like Pa did: Make a plan, however unpleasant the choices may be, take action, execute that plan and realize the temporariness of the hard time. For him, good days were ahead, and it will be for us as well.

Recently, I read a chapter in a book about how stories can impact others. The point of the book was that you can make a lasting impact on someone else by giving them something to remember about a point you wish to make.

A story of prayer

The author told one story about a high school kid who had his heart set on going to the U.S. Naval Academy. He felt like going to this school gave him the best chance to help make an lasting impact on the world.

When the son first made this announcement, his mother was filled with such pride, but she quietly knew it was a long-shot. Few were selected to the Academy.

She did the only thing she knew to do: pray. While at a conference, a woman she hardly knew asked for prayer requests. The mother told about her son’s desire to attend college at the U.S. Naval Academy and that he needed as many prayers as possible. The acquaintance said she would pray for her son.

Hours before the deadline, the acquaintance felt compelled to pray. The son was accepted and went to school at the Navy academy.

Stories using objects to make its point

Like Tabasco sauce, some ingredients stand out on its own.

Best examples of using this literary device is The Lord of the Rings. J.R.R. Tolkien created a ring to represent good and evil. Another example of literary fiction is Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a collection of stories about a Vietnam soldiers.

Read this example from Sparknotes about the soldier’s objects:

O’Brien uses the list of physical objects that the members of the Alpha Company carry in Vietnam as a window to the emotional burdens that these soldiers bear. One such burden is the necessity for the young soldiers to confront the tension between fantasy and reality. The realization of this tension disrupts Cross’s stint as the resident dreamer of the Alpha Company. Cross thinks that because he was so obsessed with his fantasy of Martha and the life they might lead after the war, he was negligent. He sees Ted Lavender’s death as the result of his negligence. If “The Things They Carried” is the illustration of the conflict between love and war, then the death of Ted Lavender and the subsequent disillusionment of Lieutenant Cross signify a triumph for war in this conflict.

Your challenge

Pick an ordinary object and incorporate it into your story, article – whatever you’re writing. Use it as a character, motif, or to extrapolate a theme. Make your story a literal object lesson so the readers will remember the lesson you want to share with them.

This is a previously published blog post. Browse through the categories for other ways to feed your writing muse.

I’ve been reading a lot about Malcolm Gladwell’s classic book, Outliers: The Story of Success.

I’m very intrigued by it because it seems to fly in the face of another book I read recently by Marcus Buckingham. (By the way, if you haven’t read Buckingham, run to your bookstore or library.)

Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance is the latest of his I read, and his premise is this: strengths rely on three things before you can really consider them to be a strength: talent, knowledge and skill. If you don’t have this combination, then essentially you’re wasting your time and talent.

Gladwell’s new book provides a different viewpoint: Talent is overrated, he says. It’s not about strengths or weaknesses. It’s about whether you have 10,000 hours to master a new skill.

He uses an analogy of a rice paddy, or rice farmers, specificially. They spend 3,000 hours a year working! They care about the work; they cultivate the fields, and growing rice is almost an art form.

Read this excerpt from Outliers: The Story of Success

Bill Gates was addicted to his computer as a child…The Beatles put in thousands of hours of practice in Hamburg…Working really hard is what successful people do, and the genius of the culture formed in the rice paddies is that hard work gave those in the fields a way to find meaning in the midst of great uncertainty and poverty. 

What is Gladwell’s Saying About Success?

Success is less about talent than it is about opportunity, preserverence and good ole’ fashioned hard work. So what does this have to do with a writing life? Everything. We have to be willing to get up at 4:30 in the morning and tap away on the computer, to write and revise and revise again. We enter into a contract of sorts with ourselves, knowing that if we work x-amount of hours more at Activity A, we’ll be x-percentage better than we were a year before.

The Caution

Live by your principles, create a personal mission statement. Make writing a part of your life, not your life. It may take you longer to reach the 10,000 hour plateau, but what matters most will hurt in the long run because your life will be out of balance.

Once upon a time, I read an article about Stephen King and his family having a writing contest together. Kids, mom and pop participated. It involved the beautiful illustrations of award-winning author Chris van Allsburg, who wrote The Polar Express and other tales.

Van Allsburg’s wonderful Illustrations filled my head with mystery and fancy. Like a call to the wild, I imagined a backstory for each picture.

[Follow this link to Chris van Allsburg's website.]

Today’s challenge – This is awesome

Fast forward twenty-something years later. i09.com has offered a new writing challenge. Here’s the background:

Our experiment is a variation on the “exquisite corpse” method of story creation. An exquisite corpse is a storytelling method where the narrative is collectively assembled by a group of individuals. Each writer adds to the body of work by advancing the story where the last writer left off. In our version of the exquisite corpse, artists from the incredible visual effects firm Framestore will participate in advancing the story too.

Whether you’re most interested in flash fiction, transmedia storytelling or just tellin’ a good yarn, hundreds of ways to publish your story are at your disposal. Not interested in sharing it with the world? Use these kinds of contests as writing prompts. Start a new habit or better yet, involve your family. They will love you all the more for it.

Where do ideas come from?

All places. Today, it came from my daughter’s reflection on a dirty car. Ma

How I discovered it from parenting

Like magic, I was reminded–again. (Sometimes I forget.) The day before, my daughter and I both woke up on the wrong side of the bed. I took her to school, and we were both in a tizzy. It was one of those mornings where you just wish you could hit the rewind button.

The next day, I decided not to repeat past mistakes. I tried to be gentle and patient. Admittedly, getting her out the door was a bit easier. When I helped her out of her car seat, I smoothed her dress out.

“You look so pretty today, Sophie,” I said.

We were standing beside the car. As dirty and grimy as it was on the outside, she saw her reflection.

And then she smiled.

Even though she could barely see her own reflection because of all the dirt, she saw enough of herself to know that she thought she was pretty.

Quotes about love

After walking with her, hand-in-hand, past the crossing guard, following the playground fence, around to her class room door, I felt a tremendous amount of love for her.

“Good-bye, Sweet. See you tonight,” I said.

“Bye, Daddy.”

It wasn’t the grin she gave to me after saying her farewells, although that made my heart melt.

How do I know my daughter loves me?

I know my daughter loves me because, as she walked into her classroom, she stopped a second time and turned around, in the middle of the crowd which parted like the Red Sea.

“I love you, Daddy,” she said with a smile bigger than the first grin.

Feeding the creative muse

When you know there’s someone who loves you, it is bound to feed anyone’s muse.

When bees drown in their own honey

My great-grandfather loved bees. I remember watching him putting on his netted hat and protective clothes as he dipped his hands into the bee hive and pulled out the honeycomb. It’s a terrific memory from my childhood. It’s the first reason why I was pulled toward this quote. Reflecting on it, I realized it had a bigger meaning.

What Hawthorne said

“Bees are sometimes drowned (or suffocated) in the honey which they collect. So some writers are lost in their collected learning.”

Discovering the zone

A good writing session means I’ve gotten into “the zone.” I’m sucked into a different world. I forget the crying children or the stress at work, and I become a part of someone else’s story.

Reading other genres

Hawthorne also mentions how “writers are lost in their collected learning.” What is “collected learning?” For me, this means using and applying the knowledge of others.

We get lost in our work, but we also want to learn more as writers. Writing Sci-Fi? Discover naval history or read technology essays. Robert Heinlein even wrote about slavery in his novel, Citizen of the Galaxy. You never know how or when you might stumble across unique information that could add depth to your story.

Copy other writers

I don’t mean plagiarize. Study them. It’s a key element in how we can grow. I wrote about Ben Franklin in an earlier post. He not only studied the writing of Joseph Addison, publisher of The Spectator, he copied chapter after chapter of Addison’s works. Franklin wanted to learn Addison’s flavor of writing, to learn how to create structure, to learn voice and so on. Franklin’s own style emerged from these exercises.

I remember doing this as a younger writer. After finishing a Tom Clancy book, I tried to write what he wrote. I didn’t worry about finding my own plot or characters. I already knew those things, and it not only helped me get into the zone, I wrote my first novel that way.

Two questions to ponder

First, do you ever get lost in the world you’re creating? What was it? Second, what kind of books do you read that aren’t typical of what you usually write about?

Recently, a little five-month-old girl told an incredible story, though she didn’t know the alphabet or didn’t change the world by espousing intellectual ideas. About all she knew was eating, sleeping, and pooping.

Ironically, her bucket list – the things she wanted to do before she died – went viral. Last May, Avery went to Heaven, but not before telling the world about all the things she wanted to do.

Avery’s father and mother described the illness from their little girl’s point of view.

Where to read more about Avery

Read more about Avery by following these links:

• Good Morning America: About Avery’s Bucket List
• About Avery going to Heaven
• Avery’s Bucket List

Lessons from Avery

Here’s a short laundry list of lessons from Avery’s story.

1. People are bigger than themselves. Avery became mythic, thanks to the power of social media (and national news coverage). More, she touched people’s hearts, some who became aware of spinal muscular atrophy, some who wanted to create their own bucket lists, some who lost their own child and grieved along with Mom and Dad Avery.
2. Life can be unfairly short. Carpe Diem can be a cliche, but in this case, it is apropos.

A powerful point-of-view lesson for writers

Point-of-view is often the forgotten literary element. We focus on plot or character, sometimes setting. Point-of-view front and center? Not as much.

Instead of this as a last step in fleshing out a plot or article, put POV front and center. Whether it is for inspiration, entrepreneurialism, or entertainment, tell a unique story by thinking outside of the box. For example, are you chronicling your efforts to attain more financial margin? Tell your story with the goal of helping those who are unemployed. Instead of telling about why others should jump on your business bandwagon, show someone actually benefiting from using your product.  If a husband is your fiction story’s protagonist, how would the man’s dog tell the story?

And if you’re still not sure how to think outside of the point-of-view-box, (re):discover Avery’s story.

Wired

Journalistic integrity rears its ugly head

Every few years, journalistic integrity becomes a hot topic. (Remember James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces or Jason Blair of The New York Times)

The outcome is severe: People loose their jobs, publishing houses loose market share and retailers pull books off shelves when professionals blur the line between fact and fiction.

Deciding your principles

A favorite motivational guru of mine is John C. Maxwell. While Maxwell has authored dozens of books, he is best known as a business and motivational speaker who cuts to the heart of what matters most in life: family, friends and faith. Money, success and credit, he postulates will follow  only if a person’s core being is right and true.

In his book, Today Matters, Maxwell urges us to write down those personal values we embrace, like faith, love, trust. Keep them in your wallet or in your car, wherever you are the most. The point is, he says, refer to them often for daily or hourly reminders.

Live with consistent personal values

Why do we need daily reminders? I suspect that in the case of Jonathan Lehrer or others who have fallen to scandal they got caught in the moment. We allow the circumstances to drive us; money, fame, pride or other deadly sins compel us to do things we wouldn’t normally do.

I doubt there are many writers who intentionally set out to defraud his or her readers. Unless you have neither conscience or soul, no one gets up in the morning and saying, “I’m going to fabricate this Bob Dylan quote.”

It just happens because we pay too much attention to our pride and sense of self-worth and don’t pay enough attention to what we believe.

Your homework

Write down your personal values on the back of a business card or a piece of paper; something you can carry with you. Look at it each day and give yourself a daily dose of “Vitamin V.”