World domination for the win

Do writers ever become kings? Or queens? Or presidents? Dictators even? That is other than in their own fluffy puffy world of unicorns and vampires they write about? Do they run about proudly, knowing things common people don't? Are they sitting frustrated at their computer day by day, shaking their heads at some Trending Topics on Twitter?

How many of us studied politics, psychology or ... just social stuff? If you have, consider yourself lucky. You can flow some of your topic into your writing. Saves you days of research. Me? Not so much. I was a bad student, too lazy to learn, to sit down every day doing homework, torturing my head over several different topics. But that's just what I am doing now. Writing on my first novel, a historic story, I have to ponder over many different things, I'd have gone nuts if you had asked me to learn them a few years ago. The interaction of nobilities and the royal court, intrigues, hate, success, love, former human life, etc. As soon as you got all of this in your head (more or less in the right order) there are other topics coming up. Right, human feelings in general. What means social intelligence? How does a person successfully manipulating others think?

You don't necessarily have to write a historic novel to consider all these things. Sure, you don't have to learn how a king in 900 AD was functioning, but some basic things are there throughout human history. Like politics or psychology. They change, but they have to be faced when you aim for a deeper theme of your story. Even if we want to write about a taxi driver in a rural city we must fill hundreds of pages. What is he thinking? How is sitting for hours in a hot car affecting him? Is he cheating the taxman? What consequences is he facing when getting caught? His relationship to his disabled daughter, how does he feel having to work double-shifts to pay the hospital bills?

Now tell me. After having read yourself into non-fiction books for days, don't you just have your moments of wanting to brag about your newly gained knowledge? I do sometimes, and I don't think this is selfish. I believe it is only natural, the need to share our experiences with fellow human beings.

Now, after hours of reading about Emperor Henry VI, I can hold my head a bit higher because I gained knowledge. And no matter what we are researching we always learn, thus we always win. Even if your family and friends are laughing about your newest unicorn romance, you can only smile at them, because only writers know how much more there is in a story than just the mere words on paper.

They say reading is knowledge. This knowledge doesn't come exclusively from political thrillers, but also from fairy-tales which, when well researched, teach you a lot about life.

So let's get out with our heads held high. We may not have the president's job, but remember: no books = no president.

The books I've read in 2011

On the Kindle:

• Crime and Punishment 
• UR 
• Why Me? 
• Der Schimmelreiter
• Winter's Passage
• Kidnapped
• His Voice, His Command

Paperback:

• Blindsighted
• Kisscut
• A Faint Cold Fear
• Indelible
• Faithless
• Beyond Reach
• Triptych
• Fractured
• Undone 
• Broken
• Fallen

          (all of the above are Karin Slaughter Books)

• The Winter King
• Enemy of God
• Excalibur

         (Bernard Cornwell's Arthur Trilogy became one of my top favourites)

• Here be Dragons
• Falls the Shadow
• The Reckoning

         (Penman's educational trilogy about Welsh and British history in the 13th      century)

• Black Horses for the King
• Roadside Crosses

     

Not listed are the various nonfiction books I read and study for my writing. Among them are books about writing, history, psychology, and human behaviour in general.

A second pair of eyes would be nice. 

An example for inner conflict and outer impact

I am posting this for all of you who are having problems as to where to start searching for sources of inner conflicts you could use to create outer conflicts in your stories. This is however just one of many possibilities, but maybe it can serve you as a kick into the right direction.

I am reading the book For Your Own Good by Alice Miller. In this book she writes about the 'hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence', about things originally well-intentioned by parents that are then negatively affecting the child as an adult. A topic concerning not only past generations but ours as well.

In writing I've been taught that conflict is story. I've also been taught that you must dig deep into where your character is coming from so as not to get a one-dimensional cardboard puppet. It is my opinion that the more you know about how the human mind works, what its influences are and what possible ways there are to change it, the more convincing characters you can give birth to.

Miller describes how fatal it can be to teach a child unconditional obedience to her or his parents. She describes how a whole generation fell for a dictator (Hitler) and how it was possible for  foreigners not to fall for him at all. I however quote only a bit of the book, you'll have to buy the book if you want to learn more about this topic.

I've chosen this part of the book because it gives us an insight into a mind creating ideas inexplicable for us. It tells about things that happened not all that long ago. But above all I took this part because of the last sentence Miller writes in this paragraphe, an arc leading us back to present times, telling us that we are not at all save from such things to happen again.

First comes a speech Heinrich Himmler gave in 1943, after this comes Miller's explanation to the origins of Himmler's mentality.

<<I shall speak to you here with all frankness about a very serious subject. We shall now discuss it absolutely openly among ourselves, nevertheless we shall never speak of it in public. I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It is one of those things which is easy to say: "The Jewish people are to be exterminated," says every party member. "That's clear, it's part of our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, right, we'll do it." And then they all come along, the eighty million upstanding Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are swine, but this one is a first-class Jew. Of all those who talk like this, not one has watched [the actual extermination], not one has had the stomach for it. Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet - apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness - to have remained decent, this has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and never shall be written.
The wealth which they [the Jews] had, we have taken from them. I have issued a strict command ... that this wealth is as a matter of course to be delivered in its entirety to the Reich. We have taken none of it for ourselves. Individuals who have violated this principle will be punished according to an order which I issued at the beginning and which warns: Anyone who takes so mach as a mark shall die. A certain number of SS men - not very many - disobeyed this order and they will die, without mercy. We had the moral right, we had the duty to our own people, to kill this people that wanted to kill us. But we have no right to enrich ourselves by so much as a fur, a watch, a mark or a cigarette, or anything else. In the last analysis, because we exterminated a bacillus we don't want to be infected by it and die. I shall never stand by and watch even the slightest spot of rot develop or establish itself here. Wherever it appears, we shall burn it out together. By and large, however, we can say that we have performed this most difficult task out of love for our people. And we have suffered no harm from it in our inner self, in our soul, in our character. [Quoted by Fest]>>

Now comes Miller's explanation as to what in Himmler's psyche made him be thinking like this in his adult lifetime.

< <This speech contains all the elements of the complicated psychodynamic mechanism that can be described as splitting off and projection of parts of the self, which we encounter so often in the manuals of "poisonous pedagogy". Schooling oneself to be senselessly hard requires that all signs of weakness in oneself (including emotionalism, tears, pity, sympathy for oneself and others, and feelings of helplessness, fear, and despair) be suppressed "without mercy". In order to make the struggle against these humane impulses easier, the citizens of the Third Reich were offered an object to serve as the bearer of all these qualities that were abhorred because they had been forbidden and dangerous in their childhood - this object was the Jewish people. Freed from their "bad" (i.e., weak and uncontrolled) feelings, so-called Aryans could feel pure, strong, hard, clean, good, unambivalent, and morally right if everything they had feared in themselves since childhood cold be attributed to the Jews and if, together with their fellow Germans, these "Aryans" were not only permitted but required to combat it relentlessly and ever anew among members of this "inferior race."
It seems to me that we are still threatened by the possible repetition of a similar crime unless we understand its origins and the psychological mechanism behind it.>>


As you can see, in search of inner conflicts to create outer monsters (or saints), you can make use of the sources of history. I like reading books on psychology, they are good for creating the fundamentals of a character's life-style.

Alice Miller's book "For your own good" is available on amazon, where I bought it. But I think you can get it in bookstores, too.

About women's football and criticism-anxiety

The women's football (soccer) World Cup just started here in Germany. Since a lot of people consider football to be exclusively a men's sport, the football ladies have to listen to following comments all the time:

"
- Please don't destroy our turf (= from the local Bundesliga football teams).
- Women shouldn't play football, it's indecent and inappropriate.
- Women's football is like a horserace using donkeys.
- Wondering how many bottles of hairspray they use before entering the arena.
-  I don't even know about their rules. What happens when their nails splitter? Is every woman wearing her own dress because she aims at being the most stylish one of the arena?
"

Now, don't you think these kinds of thoughts originate only from men's brains. My mother - as much as I love her - shares some of these thoughts, too (in here defence: not the donkey one). My dad on the other hand enjoys women's football as much as men's football. Other football fans don't insult but are simply not interested in seeing women playing football. They stick to men's football, which is a matter of taste and completely okay.

Football is the most popular sport here, thus especially established footballer like to insult the ladies in interviews, or during a game by telling their less successful buddies to join the women's team, as soon as they missed the goal.

Fact is that our German football ladies deliver games so successful the male footballer can only dream of. Fact is that they are as well trained as men, that they have to play in the same hot or cold weather, having to run the same distance as their male colleagues. These women always kept going, holding their ground, studying game clips of their male colleagues, improving their skills continuously. They kept their tail up and as a result are establishing women's football more and more.

They never let anyone bring down themselves or their love for this sport. Their biggest reward for staying strong over a long time: success and jealousy.

That's what I call stamina!

But there are other facts as well. The fact that every human being reacts and responds different to critic, praise, failure and success. A football team contains about 30 members. You can imagine yourself that not everyone of them is always strong, facing criticism and insults with a mocking smile or a quick answer. Those of them who are shy and fear to be confronted with critics can't always get protected by the team. They have to face tricky situations all alone as they walk down the street or have to give an interview. They may love their sport as much as the stronger ladies, it's just not in their nature to react quck-witted in a second and forget about the whole thing the other second. But yet they have to brace themselves physically, have to attend the next match as though nothing had happened, playing with all their might.
If they don't they lose their profession, but probably not their passion.

Those who are giving up because some muppets talked them and their work down will be sitting at home with an aching heart, crying to be allowed to let out the sportsmanship, the writer's muse or whatever. And guess what? The critics don't care and don't change, either. They most likely just go on criticising other people. But you, the one who gave up following your dream because there are people out there who don't understand but love to ill-comment, you will still be sitting at home, allowing the evil to gain the upper hand.

You and I and all of us got two options:

1. Giving up and mourning our loss, envying other people and wondering how they did it. Drawing the conclusion that those other people are supermen, born to do what they do, getting their asses licked the day they started to do what they do. Never having to deal with blows aimed at themselves or their work.

2. Not giving up. Working on becoming a better football player, writer, cook or what the hell ever. And then, all of a sudden, one fine day looking back, smiling and thinking, "Dude, I had to eat a lot of dirt, my ass got blue from all the kicks, my eyes got puffy from tears,  but see where I am now. This is what I wanted. This special feeling I am having in this special second. I know this feeling will vanish the next second. I can't keep this feeling forever. But just to have gained the experience makes me so strong, that even in the darkest, most stressful moment of my work there will be this flash of light going through my brain, telling me that I did it. I did it once, I will do it again, over and over again. And I do not ever again allow anyone to talk me down."

Now, you choose. [Please...if you vote number 1. ...go to the bathroom's mirror, slap yourself, come back and think of it again]

Last but not least let me quote a sentence I've once read: Getting pitied is for free, but to be envied is hard work.

Happy writing!

Why I write

Actually I can't tell you exactly why I write. I have no clue why I'm sometimes sitting at the computer for hours, shutting my eyes, forcing my restless, used-to-multitasking brain to concentrate on only one thing: making up a rational story. Oh right, there are a few reason why they say writers enjoy to write.

1. Writers love to tell stories

So, why don't I just volunteer at a kindergarten or discussion group to get rid of my stories? Wouldn't it be just so much easier to spill out the words within minutes than to be searching for the right verb to be written down for hours? It would. But it wouldn't be the same.

2. Writers have a fanciful mind

Well, I do. But I doubt that only writers suffer from daydreams, stretching from a romantic love scene on the beach to the image of a great white shark, chewing off the lover's leg in the next second. This happens to non-writers as well. Restless mind, anyone? Maybe some just don't have the desire to write down this stuff.

3. For fame

Please! I'd get more fame if I'd take a nude run downtown. Lots of ill fame included. And a lot faster than by writing a book. That's for sure.

4. For money

Yes. The possibility of becoming rich as a writer is at about the same level as winning the lottery. Forget it!

5. A writer's job is wonderful, because it is all about spilling fantasies and imagination on paper and share it with others.

Skip the fact that you have to study characters, settings and logical course of story continuously. Don't think about how you might be giving up on page 200, simply because you lost track of where your story was supposed to be heading to. Don't allow yourself to think that the euphoria of writing a book just as brilliant as the one you've just finished will vanish at the very minute you sit down at your computer, trying to type in the first words. And don't run away at the sheer thought of the outlines and graphics you'll have to create just to stay in control of your story. If you do all this, you can keep thinking that writing is simply about spilling thoughts on paper.

And yet, if you are a writer at heart, if you want to write, even if you haven't started so far, the thought of writing is bugging you until you obey. This is the call of the wild within a writer's heart, deep down in your chest, howling up to your brain, causing your fingers to be itching to the point where you have to sit down to write. This is the reason why I do what I do. Despite all the trouble, tired eyes, headache and hard work. It is my call. It is my way to shout into people's face what is going on inside me. It is what I was born to. This is my answer to why I write. I got no better one.

Why do you write?