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Omaha, this one's for you.

Smaller doses more frequently

My mother likes to call and angst and anguish at me once in a while, usually when she's been drinking a little too much. She goes and on about how she failed me as a mother (funny, I'm the member of the family that's doing fine) and so forth and so on. She can't really worry about my siblings: Ruth isn't hers to worry about, Steve and Sandy both have their own much more messed up lives than my own.

At least now it's only for half an hour every week or so, rather than a real binge every month. But, still.

This week, however, was special. As I revealed recently, I bought a new phone. That one in the picture to the left. And yes, true to my nature, it is pink.

For some reason, this really freaked my mother out. She sounded very upset, as if it were wrong for me to have a pink phone. She insisted that since Omaha had a black phone I should "trade mine for Omaha's." She went on and on about how a pink phone was just not appropriate for a man and kept asking, "Are you sure? Are you sure?"

I finally had to say, "Mom, I am not an insecure man. And I am keeping my phone."

"Whatever. Whatever makes you happy. If it makes you happy, you go ahead and keep it." Sigh. She converted from Catholicism to Judaism, and she really learned how to manage guilt from both sides. Good grief!

Writing Woo

I'm a big consumer of books on writing. Usually in a very casual way: I have yet to find a book-length treaty on the subject that couldn't be summarized into a few pithy sentences. Some books are better than others at delivering on the promise to be worth your time than others. Robert McKee's Story is one of my favorites, and Self-Editing for Writers is another. Both make a big deal out of the 'beat' of a story, out of making each exchange between two characters, or between the character and his environment, mean something to the reader, and that's one of my favorite insights: don't look at each paragraph, but at each burts of paragraphs where the characters change: learn something or react in some way.

There are a lot of terrible books out there, written by people you've never heard of, that don't teach you anything. And there there are the maddening, infuriating texts where a gem of an idea is scattered through far, far too much dross to make the effort worthwhile.

Into that category I must drop Dramatica: A New Theory of Story. First, the writers are obsessed with process and formula. They break down the entire notion of "a story" into a collection of boxes, and then draw them out. Every story has four plots; every story has four major characters; every story has four themes; every story has four movements. And then these get arranged in a colletion of nifty 2x2 boxes and whammo, you have every possible idea you could need to write a best-seller. They use bizarre terminology like "storymind" and "throughline" (apparently because "theme" and "plot" are too much). It's like Writing Woo (to steal Orac's term).

Some of the invented terminology is even survivable, like "contagonist": someone who is not opposed to the protagonists' initial goals but who becomes a hindrance as the story progresses: the example given is the traditional police officer whose advice to do things by the book becomes a barrier to the hero's need to stray outside the letter of the law to catch an exceptional criminal. But I don't know that I'd use it myself.

This book shoves a lot of traditional writing advice into these "everything has its opposite" boxes, to the point where your story needs to be broken down into a 64-box grid of the charaters, their motivations, their normal mode of evalutation, their mode of responding, and their purpose. It's actually a nice list in some ways: will your character wait for solid proof, or go with probablies? Is your character interested in knowledge for its own sake or carnal satisfaction, and so on? It's the artificiality of the grid system (which is clearly intended to sell the Dramatica software package, an expensive chunk of woo) that bugs the hell out of me.

In the end, the best advice is still "have wolves chase your hero up a tree, make it cold, make it rain, have lightning strike the tree, set the tree on fire, have a volcano blow up near by, and have children come and throw rocks at him." If you need an outline, and a guide to show you how your impassioned but passive heroine is balanced by a reactive but rational hero, or vice versa, while facing a proactive, rational villain, you can do it on paper, and you don't need this book.