So Christmas is Sunday! I won’t have web access on Monday, but I’ll post prompts with the “publish later” feature – this just means I might not have linked to your story yet if you post it after, say, Saturday. I will update the post Tuesday night with any missing links. But I’ll run through all this Friday. Unless I forget. If I do forget – merry Christmas everybody! Or happy Hanukkah!
There are none. Read the prompts, get inspired, write something. No word count minimum or maximum. You don’t have to include the exact prompt in your piece, and you can interpret the prompt(s) any way you like.
OR
No really; I need rules!
Okay; write 200-500 words on the prompt of your choice. You may either use the prompt as the title of your piece or work it into the body of your piece. You must complete it before 6 pm CST on the Monday following this post.
The Prompts:
no time to bleed*
things we lost in the fire**
clockwork soul
wandering mind
safe word
Want to share your Inspiration Monday piece? Post it on your blog and link back to today’s post; I’ll include a link to your piece in the next Inspiration Monday post. No blog? Email your piece to me at bekindrewrite (at) yahoo (dot) com.
Last week we discussed how words are tools that make complex ideas portable. And ideas are powerful. Ideas create change. Ideas founded the country I live in. Creating ideas can be dangerous. But destroying ideas can be even more so.
So how do you destroy an idea?
Just kill the word.
George Orwell, Rose Macauley, and C.S. Lewis all wrote about it.
It starts out harmlessly enough. First, change the word from an objective fact into a subjective insult or compliment. For instance, the words villain and gentleman both used to refer to specific positions in society. A villain was a worker of a country estate. A gentleman was a man who lived off the interest of his property. Then people began to use gentleman to mean a person of good breeding or manners. Soon, the signs of verbicide appeared:
“As long as gentleman has a clear meaning, it is enough to say that So-and-so is a gentleman. When we begin saying that he is a ‘real gentleman’ or ‘a true gentleman’ or ‘a gentleman in the truest sense’ we may be sure that the word has not long to live.” -C.S. Lewis, The Death of Words
A word that becomes nothing but a compliment soon becomes overused and meaningless. Gentleman is now nothing but a polite term for male. Conversely, as soon as a word gains negative connotations, we avoid it. Think of all the harmless, factual descriptors that have become naughty words: Illegitimate. Dog. Excrement. And villain may not be “naughty,” but it certainly isn’t nice.
So, when a word becomes a synonym for good or bad, its original meaning fades.
As Mr. Lewis puts it:
“The vocabulary of flattery and insult is continually enlarged at the expense of the vocabulary of definition. …so words in their last decay go to swell the enormous list of synonyms for good and bad. And as long as most people are more anxious to express their likes and dislikes than to describe facts, this must remain a universal truth about language.”
Here’s the scary part.
Now, the first time I read the essay quoted above, it got me thinking. But then I read 1984, and it freaked me out. Because Orwell talked about good and bad synonyms, too. Listen in on this conversation about Newspeak (Big Brother’s idea of a language):
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good’, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning; or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still…In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words—in reality, only one word.”
And the punchline:
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.”
Mr. Lewis sums it up:
“…when, however reverently, you have killed a word you have also, as far as in you lay, blotted from the human mind the thing that word originally stood for. Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say.”
…
Now let that sink in.
…
When words die, ideas die. We are not only the creators of words and ideas; we are their caretakers. Our job is about more than using proper grammar. It’s about fighting for meaning.
So by now you probably all know that I goofed, or some mysterious technological misfortune prevented me from posting prompts last week. Fortunately Chris covered for me! Extra awesome points to Chris! So, first, here are all the people who wrote the week before last.
Lynnette, not sure if you had one but I’m linking this one. 🙂
_
The Rules
There are none. Read the prompts, get inspired, write something. No word count minimum or maximum. You don’t have to include the exact prompt in your piece, and you can interpret the prompt(s) any way you like.
OR
No really; I need rules!
Okay; write 200-500 words on the prompt of your choice. You may either use the prompt as the title of your piece or work it into the body of your piece. You must complete it before 6 pm CST on the Monday following this post.
The Prompts:
Best nightmare
The war that never happened
Mind games
Reading faces
Beggar king
Want to share your Inspiration Monday piece? Post it on your blog and link back to today’s post; I’ll include a link to your piece in the next Inspiration Monday post. No blog? Email your piece to me at bekindrewrite (at) yahoo (dot) com.
It feels like passing out a loaded gun to every random stranger that passes by.
In the wrong hands it could be very dangerous.
But when I think about it, it’s already in the wrong hands. The hands of con artists and cult leaders and politicians. And there is no way to take that power from them except to make everyone else aware of it.
Have you ever thought—I mean really thought—about the power of language? Most of us take it for granted. Not only as a tool to tell our families we love them, or to ask where the bathroom is, or to get anything done at all, but as the only way to transmit complex ideas.
It can take a whole book to explain one concept, but assign a name to that concept within the book, and you create a shortcut. Then, if a person has read that book, you can speak one word that conjures up an entire world in their mind.
Quixotic is a simpler example; in Don Quixote, Cervantes (albeit unintentionally) created a word which combined two previously separate ideas: chivalrous and foolish.
Back in 1948, “big brother” meant nothing but “older male sibling.” Then Orwell came out with 1984 and more than 60 years later, we still use the phrase to mean an all-seeing, all-powerful totalitarian government.
Or take the word hnau from C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, used to differentiate between animals and intelligent lifeforms in a universe where humans are not the only intelligent lifeforms. That’s an inadequate explanation, because the distinction involves far more than intelligence, or even spirit or soul—you’ll have to read the book to understand it.
Point: words are more than labels. Words are the means of wrapping big ideas in small packages, so we can hand them off to each other almost effortlessly.Collapsible concepts. Portable philosophy.
This is possibly one of the most powerful things on earth. Why?
Because you can use it to change the way people think.
Take a simple example. Consider the difference between the synonyms said and claimed. “Bob said he saw Linda at the store,” is neutral. But change it to “Bob claimed he saw Linda at the store,” and suddenly you doubt Bob’s honesty.
Or go the opposite direction and put “Bob confirmed he saw Linda at the store,” and suddenly the statement is fact.
Now apply it to one of our portable philosophies. Say there’s been a break-in at your condominium and the homeowners’ association votes to put up security cameras in all the corridors, so they can monitor who goes in and out of every condo. The cameras go up and everyone feels a lot safer. Then somebody graffitis “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” on the wall beneath one camera. Suddenly you’re conjuring up images of emotionless masses in jumpsuits being presided over by a giant television screen that never shuts off. Suddenly you’re worried a little less about security and a little more about privacy. And the next time someone proposes a measure “for added security,” you’re a little slower to agree. You might flat-out oppose it.
Why does it take a whole book to explain?
It only took me six words to define Big Brother at the beginning of this post. So why aren’t we creating collapsible concepts left and right? Because it has to be more than a label. If we’re going to remember it later, it needs to strike a chord with us. It takes the emotional journey of Winston Smith to solidify Big Brother in our minds. That’s the power of stories.
Of course, chances are, you knew what Big Brother meant even if you haven’t read 1984—even if it never “struck a chord” with you. That’s because it struck a chord with so many other people that it became iconic. That’s the power of storieson a world-changing scale.
Obviously, this doesn’t happen every time anybody writes a book.
But it can happen.
Remember that next time you’re reading a dystopian novel, or watching the news, or starting a new paragraph in your WIP. Listen carefully—and write even more carefully.
SPOILER ALERT: The following includes spoilers for City ofAngels(Sparks), Message in a Bottle (Sparks), A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens), The Brothers Bloom (movie), and Stranger Than Fiction (movie).
When—and how—to kill a main character. Because sometimes you have to.
But here’s the thing: if you find yourself choosing between preserving the integrity of the story, and pleasing your readers—you are doing something wrong. Readers (the only ones you care about, anyway) will only be pleased if you preserve the integrity of the story.
Or maybe you just want to avoid the clichéd happy ending. But if the ending is that predictable, the ending isn’t the problem; the rest of the book is. Killing the hero because letting him live is cliché is like painting your daughter’s nursery black because pink is cliché. It’s a stunt. Controversy for its own sake, instead of what’s good for the story.
What you’re really looking for is surprise—a twist the readers weren’t expecting. But ask yourself what kind of surprise you’re giving them—good or bad?
Nicholas Sparks’s Unfailing Examples:
An angel falls in love with a human, eventually decides to become human himself, so they are finally free to be together when suddenly she gets hit by a car.
A reporter finds a heartbreakingly romantic message in a bottle and goes on a search to find its writer, who turns out to be a rugged sailor in the throes of depression over the death of his wife. As he finally opens himself up to love again, he suddenly dies in a shipwreck.
We’re on the edge of our seats rooting for these people to get together, and then—whammo! Sorry, kids, here comes the rainy funeral scene!
Two Reasons This Sucks:
1. While many people like sad endings, nobody likes rude surprises.
2. It’s the same as the pot-bellied uncle who begs “gimme five,” and pulls his hand back at the instant you go to slap it. It’s not clever. It’s just mean.
The Surprise Death
If the death must be a surprise, then it must be meaningful, and the whole story should lead up to it.
When Sydney Carton dies in A Tale of Two Cities, we look back and see that his resemblance to Charles Darnay, his love for Darnay’s wife, and his regret that he has wasted his life, all lead him to give his life for Darnay, so Darnay and wife can live happily ever after.
The Brothers Bloom appears to be a charming heist movie—we aren’t expecting any good guys to die. Bloom, who has wanted out of the crime business for a long time, reluctantly follows his big brother, Stephen, into yet another con. Bloom doesn’t discover until the end that the con involved Stephen sacrificing himself to get Bloom out of the business for good—with a pretty girl, to boot.
“You don’t understand what my brother does. He writes his cons the way dead Russians write novels, with thematic arcs and embedded symbolism and s****. And he wrote me as the vulnerable anti-hero. And that’s why you think you want to kiss me. It’s a con.”
– Bloom in The Brothers Bloom
The Expected Death
“The woman I loved is…dead.”
– Christian narrating the beginning of Moulin Rouge
Like all of Sparks’s books, Moulin Rouge tells the story of two unlikely lovers who overcome multiple obstacles to be together—until one of them up and dies at the end, for no apparent reason. The difference? Moulin Rouge warns us at the very beginning. Do I miss the thrill of not knowing? No, because instead of holding out for a last-minute victory and then being sorely disappointed, I’m free to enjoy the story for what it is—a beautiful tragedy.
The Surprise Survival!
Or you can turn it around and hint—even state outright—that you are going to kill your hero, and then up and save him. Happy surprise! But be careful; the same rule for the surprise death applies for the surprise survival: it must make sense. In Stranger Than Fiction, for instance, Eiffel saved Harold Crick with his wrist watch, which had itself been a character since the beginning.
Hilbert: Why did you change the book? Eiffel: Lots of reasons. I realized I just couldn’t do it.
Hilbert: Because he’s real? Eiffel: Because it’s a book about a man who doesn’t know he’s about to die. And then dies. But if a man does know he’s about to die and dies anyway. Dies- dies willingly, knowing that he could stop it, then- I mean, isn’t that the type of man who you want to keep alive?
