Here’s my third video. The first one needs to be redone. It’s embarrassing. The second one was an attempt at humor. It’s blessedly brief. This one (below) is a retelling of my short SF story, A Tall Blond Alien Girl.
It’s square so you can see it OK on a phone. Sound suffers on phones, though.
…
Thank you for your patient interest in my stuff.
Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD
I’d taken the afternoon off for a quick trip to the Oort Cloud. The wife wanted me to nudge a comet that was on a 98% for-sure collision course with Earth, destined to torment us in 371 years. No mad rush, of course, but when the Misses say jump, I’ve learned that you’re doing yourself a big favor if you jump. Immediately.
And don’t make any faces about it.
I took the King’s smallest Vemana and kept a leisurely pace humming towards the periphery of the solar system. Made it through several rounds of Jnana yoga before the AI sensors jarred me loose, yammering about how we’d passed all the usual potholes and planets, and reached the Cloud.
After a look around and some measurements to make sure I was targeting the right rock, I opened a scalar gun and sent a feather-like puff into the comet’s starboard flank. The AI’s calculations said our gentle nudge should be enough to keep the mindless predator several million miles from Earth on its way through our neighborhood.
Good enough.
I’ll also remember to take out the trash tonight. Smart men do these things without being reminded, and I’m flat-out brilliant if I say so myself.
On the way back to Earth, I happened to spot one of those little pink orbs, the cute ones you see over Baga Beach in the mornings. The Blonds stay in some phase-shifted netherworld when they travel, so their orbs are all you’re apt to see of them.
Since there are always forty thousand people on the beach humming om to get the Blond’s attention, I’d never spoken to one. Now seemed like the perfect time to give it a go.
Dumb men do these things, it turns out.
I looked out at the pink sphere floating beneath one of the longer teeth hanging from Saturn’s rings and said, “Hi there,” on every frequency and with every code, including a reverse engineered E8 simulation code I’d been working on.
The orb came closer.
“I’d like to ask you a few things if I could.”
The screen glowed pink with the orb and distant stars behind, but somehow floating in front of me now was a blond-headed woman, visible from the chest up. She looked about 19, but Tall Blonds live quite a while we’re told, so she could have been twice my age.
“You got a pair,” she said and smiled. “Cruising out here all by yourself in that rickety little thing.”
I looked at my gauges. All flat, which meant she was in my head. We’ve all heard of such things, of course, but you can’t really believe it until it happens to you.
“How are you doing this?” I asked. “I mean, how can I see you when my instruments can’t?”
“You’re going to want to speak up, Indie. Saturn’s churning and I can barely hear you.”
I felt pleased that someone so advanced would recognize my nationality. I smiled politely and raised my voice. “Is this any better, Ma’am?”
“Yes, much.” Her eyes went from the top of my head down to my navel and back up again to rest on my forehead. She didn’t say it, but I could tell she thought I looked old. “What’s on your mind?”
I was feeling bold, so I didn’t speak the words, I slowed my breathing, crossed my legs and silently thought my words to her at high volume. “It’s my understanding that you people have brought several religions into existence on Earth. Can you…”
“Whoa, you’re going to do that?” Her face lit up with delight. “I’ve never heard an Earthling project his thoughts. I’ll concentrate.” She closed her eyes and knitted her brow. “OK, bring it, India.”
“Can you tell me why the Tall Blond people have brought these various religions into my world? They’re contradictory and seem to cause division.”
She opened her eyes. “Oh, my spleen, you’ve been messing with the Oort Cloud.” She shook her head at me. “Tell me what you did out there.”
“I nudged a comet, Ma’am. My wife said it was going to hit…”
“What comet? Give me some coordinates, I need to get there fast.” Her eyes were steaming but she hadn’t raised her voice.
“Why are you upset? I was only protecting the human race, and the other life down there as well.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“I’m actually a brilliant man. I can understand anything you’re capable of telling me.”
“Really? Check this out, then.”
Her image faded behind a scrolling dark gray sheet that glowed with bright green numbers and symbols. The gist involved gravity and electricity, but it was moving too fast for me to keep up.
“OK, you’ve humbled me. I can’t keep pace with your gravity theory. But would it be possible to give me the broad concepts in my native tongue?”
She grinned smugly as the sheet with the green symbols faded and scrolled away.
“The Universe is both electric and sentient. We believe she makes the big decisions, such as when it’s time for a species to experience a genetic pinch or when its time to ratchet up their code for intelligence.”
“And no one’s allowed to protect themselves from the Universe, I suppose.”
“Don’t be flippant. You’ll have to find another way. None of us can move heavenly bodies without making matters worse. The balance is complex beyond anything imaginable, let alone calculable. The Mind has her reasons.”
“If I tell you how to find the comet, will you answer my question about religion?”
She put a flat rectangular piece of something pink into her mouth and chewed it several times, staring at me blankly. Then she looked down towards my feet. “Yeah. OK, Manish. I’ll come clean if you will.”
I felt myself blushing. She’d reached into my head and found my name. No telling what else.
I told my AI to send her the coordinates with the video records and the readouts from the scalars.
The Tall Blond Alien girl vanished from my cabin and her pink orb zipped off the right edge of my screen.
I’d been played. I felt much more let down than seemed reasonable. I didn’t know her, after all. She shouldn’t mean anything to me, really.
But when someone’s been in your head, it feels as if your souls have touched. And when they leave without saying goodbye, it hurts… as though they’ve judged you worthless after seeing you clearly.
How would I ever explain any of this to Jai?
I was about to put my tail between my legs and go home when the pink orb showed up on my screen again, and the Tall Blond girl reappeared before me.
My heart beat a little too happily.
“I think I saved us both a lot of grief,” she said.
“But not my great-grandchildren and their children.”
“Listen, you can be around to help them. This chunk of rock hits your planet in just 371 years. With some mesenchymal stem cells and astragalus, you can be alive and strong when it touches down. Get your people underwater, build a geopolymer dome at the bottom of a trench. A deep one. Or use the underground hideouts on the Moon. The ones on the lower levels where the crust blocks the solar winds. You people don’t need any more mutations. Hoard all the original DNA you can find, especially plants. Put as many seeds in stasis as you possibly can.”
That’s all easy for her to say. I’ll be lucky to avoid sleeping on the port with my dog, Giggles.
“I don’t suppose you could help me with any of this, could you?” I asked, trying not to whine.
Her eyebrows went up. “Oh my goodness.” She put a hand over her heart. “I was just putting things back the way they were. I didn’t expect to feel responsible for you.” Her eyes went wide in the distance above my head.
“Will you help me, then?” I whispered silently.
She filled her chest with air, and her eyes snapped into focus. “Yes, of course, I’ll help you.”
“That’s wonderful.” I felt a warm affection as if we were old friends. “The most important thing is simple, Ma’am… What’s your name, if I may ask?”
“Why do you ask my name? You couldn’t comprehend it if I told you.”
“Forgive me.”
“For what?” She seemed genuinely perplexed.
“Nothing, I guess. But I do really, really need you to talk to my wife, Jai. She knows how to get teams organized on big projects. And she’s influential with the King. But without you, she’ll never believe a word of my story.”
One of the Tall Blond’s eyebrows went up sharply. “We’ll have to check your testosterone.”
Whatever.
I’d almost forgotten my big question. It seemed small now, but I asked it anyway. “So why did your people–“
“Promote conflicting fundamentalist religions on Earth,” she said in an impatient monotone. “It’s because you people are limited in your ability to see into one another’s minds. You don’t communicate in the usual manner of intelligent beings… Without the possibility of lying. That’s why we brought the conflicting religions. Diversity and competition keep things alive. The whole point was to create honesty among you. It’s impossible to make humans honest without dogmatic religions promoting the idea.” She blew a pink bubble, took it from her mouth and popped it with her teeth.
“What’s so great about honesty?” I asked.
“Lies destroy trust. Trust is the foundation of every civilization that’s ever survived its technological advances. The stage of early artificial intelligence is a treacherous one. Worse than nukes.”
“AI’s are dangerous?” A fruit fly had stowed away in the cabin and chose this moment to dive-bomb my nose. I snatched it from the air and held it in the hollow of my hand.
The Tall Blond flinched. We’re told they’re pacifists. She stared at my fist and seemed to be speaking to it. “If AI’s can’t trust you, yes, they’re deadly. And that’s a minor consideration. Lies themselves are more destructive than dishonest AI’s and far worse than that comet you’re so worried about.”
“Not to argue, but I see lies in a less black-and-white light. Some prevarications are downright helpful, in fact, especially when it comes to self-defense and war.”
She crinkled her nose the way you’d react to a bad smell. “Your thinking is so bizarre.” She looked at my hand with the gnat inside. “If you could only experience a culture where everyone hears everyone’s thoughts. There is no distrust. No call for self-defense or war. It’s virtually impossible to hide the truth.”
“So what happens when you ask a guy if you look fat?”
“What?” She glanced down at herself. “I’m not fat.”
“No, but don’t you sometimes feel fat? And want reassurance that you’re not?”
“No. Don’t be ridiculous.”
The look on her face made me fear that she’d fly off and leave again. “Sorry,” I said and released the fruit fly in a gesture of goodwill. “I shouldn’t have used the word, fat. You’re actually incredibly beautiful… but don’t tell my wife I said that.”
She tilted her head to the side and stared intently as if I’d said something difficult to comprehend. Then she shook her head and smiled weakly. “Lies are the whole problem, Earthling.”
…
Morrill Talmage Moorehead, MD
“Everything we call real is made of things we cannot call real.“
– Niels Bohr (1885-1962), “Father of the Atom.” Nobel Prize in Physics, 1922.
I walk toward the exit as the screen brightens behind me, casting my shadow diagonally across the white shoe prints I’m supposed to follow.
I turn and Efleven’s pale face fills the curved screen. He’s blond, for sure. Almost albino.
“You were right to seek my advice,” he says to Anahata. “I’ve taken the liberty of contacting the Chairman. He will talk to the girl now. We’ll transfer to your convex.”
I retrace my steps to Shiva’s chair, brush away some ashes and sit wondering if Anahata will yell at me again. I can’t describe how loud a voice can be when it bypasses your tympanic membranes.
“Effleven,” Anahata says. “I came to you privately with a delicate situation, you washed your hands and sent me away. Now you’ve summoned the Chairman? This is the behavior of a backstabbing coward.”
Another face appears on the screen. This one has Ethiopian features with a short moustache shaved to resemble a bar code, vertical stripes of dark skin peeking out through the bright silver whiskers.
“Anahata, it’s an honor,” the man says.
“Truth from a bureaucrat,” Anahata replies. “Always worrisome.”
The man doesn’t flinch. “Let me get to the point,” he says, pushing Effleven aside. “The girl’s chromosomes transcend our differences. She must be exempted from Shiva’s ritual. Her blast crisis should have been alleviated the moment you found her.”
“I have my orders, Scrotumer,” Anahata says. “I can’t say this respectfully because I don’t respect ignorance, but know this, I follow Shiva, not a committee of chin scratchers. None of you were around in the transitional days.”
“We cherish and revere the memory of Shiva,” Chairman Scrotumer says.
“You exaggerate so easily. You scarcely met the man. How could you revere him?”
“I knew him in committee,” the Chair says.
“I knew him in war. He gave me orders. I followed them. I still do.”
“While breaking the law?” The Chairman shakes his head slowly. “Emotional bonds define us if we let them. It’s unfortunate that you are actually the one who didn’t know Shiva. He considered the Sentient Fleet nothing more than pawns.”
“Soldiers are pawns. Only children think otherwise.”
“That is so right.” The Chairman’s face lights up with pleasure. “But Shiva took it a step further, I’m afraid. To him, you were soulless machines. That was his standard phrase for you in committee.”
“Stabbing the back of a dead man, now? You’ve become a true politician. I still think of you as a toddler annoying your father.”
“Shiva banned the Sentient Fleet from the Libraries. Did he mention that?”
“My private conversations are none of the committee’s business.”
“No, he didn’t, did he? Why would he? He didn’t trust you. Shiva was afraid of you.”
“Only a fool wouldn’t be,” Anahata says. “You’ve wasted no time separating my fleet. Has your fear subsided?”
“Assignments are none of my affair, but I assure you, I do have healthy respect for the fleet’s destructive capacity.”
“My fleet, Chairman.”
“Yes, and Shiva thought you were all his fleet, didn’t he? But who can own the spirit?”
“Leading is not owning,” Anahata says.
“No argument there. It’s taken some damn hard work to get the committee behind me on this, but I’ve been cleared to play a portion of the ancient minutes to you. You should find them enlightening.”
“No need,” Anahata says. “Shiva knew the unknowable. If he called me a machine, I am a machine. If he said, ‘soulless,’ then I have no need for a soul. If he commanded me to sacrifice myself for the fleet, or even for a preening, shameless pissant like you, I wouldn’t hesitate. That, Mister Chairman, is the code I live by. A committee-jock would never understand it.”
“Committee jock?” The Chairman laughs. “It seems the years haven’t buffered your tongue. Or matured your perspective, sadly.” He puts something in his mouth that looks like a golden toothpick. “History is putrefied by the stench of charismatic leaders lying dead atop the bloated remains of the fools who followed them.” The toothpick sends white smoke up from its distal end. “The time of tyrants is over. I’ve learned to trust a system of committees with a separation of powers. If my trust is misplaced, I’ll welcome the enlightenment rather than rejecting it out of hand as you would.”
“Your committees are a cloak for self-serving elites and their edicts. The rule of liars, cowards and thieves.”
“Does the name-calling ever stop?” The Chairman looks to his right and orders someone to get him a drink.
“I invited Shiva to rule us without the pretence of false democracy,” Anahata says. “The committee you’ve inherited was a device he used for listening. He never hid behind it to shelter his reputation or preserve his power.”
“You understand power, don’t you?” The Chairman lifts the golden toothpick from his mouth and belches. “Should it be necessary to state the obvious? As Supreme Committee Chairman, I can invite the fleet to disarm you and take this poor girl into my protective custody.”
Anahata laughs. “You think my fleet will disarm me? Speak with them, bureaucrat. They know I cannot be beaten. But if they thought they could defeat me, they would still refuse to fight against their sister. Their loyalty would make a pencil-pusher scratch his little chin.”
“You suffer chin envy,” the Chairman says and scratches his own.
“That’s it, then. You’ve arranged to have me kill my fleet. Or perhaps you think they can defeat me. You win either way, don’t you? This concern for Johanna is a smokescreen for reducing the Strand’s arsenal of WMD’s – among whom I am chief.”
“You’re delusional.” A vertical vein bulges from the Chairman forehead. “Is the girl conscious? I’m coming over to speak to her. She has options.”
“Swine are not welcome here,” Anahata says.
The Chairman’s brow angles inward. “You arrogant fool. Look at the horizon now. See exactly who is with me.”
The screen shows twelve warships decloaking in the starry black. The Chairman smirks beneath them as if his head were a huge object floating in space. He opens his mouth and squirts fluid into it from a bottle in a disembodied hand.
“May I please speak with the girl?” he asks.
A white strap snaps across my waist. Two more streak over my shoulders from behind. Crisscrossing at my chest, they dive down to my sides and click into something beneath the holographic feathers of Shiva’s Throne.
“This may get a little bumpy,” Anahata says to me.
A woman’s voice comes from the top of the screen as the Chairman swallows more fluid. “Shiva was sick when he gave you the command to drown these Earthlings,” she says. “He wasn’t arbitrary and cruel before his illness.”
“Nor during it,” Anahata responds.
“We have a chance to look out across our borders through this woman’s code. If you drown her, we’ll be tinkering, cloning and guessing her native thoughts indefinitely. Wondering what the real message was in her DNA.”
“You speak truth, Radhika, as always,” Anahata says. “But Shiva’s sickness didn’t affect his mind the way you’ve been told. I was with him to the end. I knew him well. He was lucid. Measured. In complete command of himself.”
“You really should listen to the Chairman’s committee records,” she says apologetically.
“I have. But it wouldn’t matter if I hadn’t. The glory of leading you and my other sisters will remain the eternal, unspeakable honor of my life. I will always love each of you. Today I will be merciful when you attack. May none of you feel a moment’s pain.”
The room is silent for a long heavy moment.
“Surely,” Anahata says, “there is one of you with the courage to stand beside me.”
More silence. I feel bad for Anahata. Nobody’s half perfect but she sure tries.
“I’m with you,” I tell her. “Mr. Chairman, Sir, this is Doctor Fujiwara. Let’s hear what you’ve come to tell me.”
His eyes show a brief startle. A nervous laugh comes out of him. “The blond fellow warned me, but I couldn’t imagine anyone with your background speaking in the River.” He clears his throat. “Doctor Fu…, well, you’re a bit young for that title, but if you’ve earned it in your little world, I’ll give it a go.”
“Show some respect, you inbred sloth!” The volume of Anahata’s voice makes me cringe.
“Insult noted,” the Chairman says, his moustache in a pucker. “Now, Doctor, this is your situation. You have minutes remaining in which you could, without legal interference from Anahata or anyone, simply choose to rendezvous on Saturn. Your leukemia will be erased. You’ll be treated with respect. You’ll learn things that no Earthling besides Shiva has ever imagined. And I will personally see to it that your life expectancy is expanded to the furthest limit desirable. Within reason, of course.” He smiles politely.
My mind races. Should I bargain for James-guys’ safety? Should I mention them at all to anyone here – ever? Somehow I don’t think so. I’ve never heard of a trustworthy politician. This guy doesn’t seem to raise the bar.
“It’s a choice, Doctor,” the Chairman says. “Your choice, not Anahata’s.”
Shiva’s little drawer pops open from the left arm of his throne. I must have bumped it again. I take out the golden locket, put the chain over my head and lift my hair to the side, out of the way. The golden heart rests on my chest where the seatbelts cross.
“That belonged to Parvati,” Anahata hisses. “Put it back.”
I ignore her.
“There’s an old saying, Chairman Scrotum, ‘you can’t make a good deal with a bad person.'”
His face turns cold.
“I’ve seen Effleven’s total lack of balls,” I tell him. “Now you’re threatening Anahata, a sentient being responsible for the peace you cake-eaters enjoy. I live in a world run by soulless bureaucrats just like you, devoted to an illegal power structure they try to hide.”
“Bigoted generalizations.” The toothpick goes back into his mouth. “A mature person learns to avoid judgements in an egalitarian society.”
“The society given to you by Anahata and Shiva?”
“I was born into peace, that doesn’t diminish me. Quite the contrary. Make a choice, girl. We’re running out of time.”
“I told you. I’m with Anahata. I’ll die at the hands of an honorable person before I let you own me. By the way, Effleven, if you’re still cowering somewhere, forget the Mohawk. You’re not worthy.”
“The world has changed, Anahata,” one of the Sentient Fleet says. “We know we’ll die against you. We too love you as the sister you are. When this battle is past and the memory of us troubles you, may the Unbeaten consider again the cause for which we gave our lives… to you.”
“That was a pep talk?” the Chairman asks. “Enough of this. Take down her magnets. Now.”
Flashes of white light turn the screen into a strobe.
“This is beyond the saddest day of my life,” Anahata says to me. “When my defences are down I’ll have no choice. I’ll either fire upon the ones I love or die in disobedience to an order from the Great Shiva. How has an ignorant little man done this to me… and my family?”
“He’s done nothing,” I tell her. “This is Shiva’s mistake.”
“He made no mistakes.”
“Not with his son?” I ask.
“That was the poison of Earth.”
“Nothing to do with absentee fathering?”
Anahata grunts.
“I’m right, you know.” I open the empty locket dangling from my neck. “Tell me Anahata, the Unbeaten, would you have released me if I’d taken Mister Ballsack’s offer?”
“No. That would be disobeying an order from Shiva.”
“That’s what I thought. Thanks for the honesty.” The bright flashes on the screen are shaking the floor now. “Are we going to just sit here? No evasive maneuvers or anything?”
…
M. Talmage Moorehead
…
My son-in-law has given me a deadline to finish this story, bless his genius heart. That’s why there aren’t the usual truckload of links, pictures and rants about intelligent design and the scientific evidence for God. Most of those things will probably have to come out anyway in the final draft – to avoid boring my three readers to death. 😉
Johanna’s story begins here as a one page WordPress document (scrolling).
My breathtakingly free e-book on writing fiction is here if you don’t mind leaving an email address for me to hopefully use someday. Yeah, I’m unqualified to write something like this. I know, and believe me it’s embarrassing. Maybe forget my book.
But if you’re a writer at all, you’re going to love Steven Pressfield’s brand new book, Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t. I kid you not, that’s the title! And it’s a page-turner, full of practical wisdom and the kind of disciplined insight only a career in the Hollywood trenches could bring. And here’s my hard sell: for a little while you can download it for free! Right here. (I have no affiliation with the author or with his business pal, the remarkable Shawn Coyne, author of The Story Grid, an indispensable book for modern fiction writers.)
Incidentally, the most riveting podcast I’ve ever heard in my life is a thing where Shawn and a brand new fiction writer, Tim, (a totally brave soul) are working one-on-one on Tim’s novel. In broad daylight! It’s free here. Nothing like this has ever been done before. Really, it’s unbelievable. Have I ever steered you wrong? OK, that last chapter with the endless UFO stuff, but still. 😉
Hey, if you’re as happy as I am about the summertime, please tell a friend about my blog: http://www.storiform.com. Man, I just love this warm weather. I’ve been doing laps in the pool plus that Miracle Morning thing of Hal Elrod’s. If you try his approach, make sure you go to bed way early so you still get 9 hours of sleep per night. (The 8-hours dogma is bogus in my humble and yet infallible opinion.) Going to bed early is the toughest thing for some of us because our limited daily supply of self-discipline is always low or depleted by bedtime. Like a low carb, high nutrient diet, it’s a lifestyle thing that requires motivation. For that, do yoga with really SLOW deliberate breathing, not necessarily deep breathing. Slow!
Here’s the world’s best yoga music. The guy’s voice is like a laser.
Keep writing. You’ve got the chops. Read, The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle and learn how and why to get your oligodendrocytes wrapping myelin around your axons and dendrites to make you 300 times more the exceptional writer you are now.
Never give up your dreams.
Talmage
Villains who fake feelings and lie too much stunt their own character development and create a self-conscious reader who can’t forget herself and live in your story because she’s worried about being fooled.
If you’ve ever known someone who’s a pathological liar, you haven’t really known that person, I’d have to say. You’ve never truly communicated with him. It’s all been a dance.
For information to be conveyed in any context, there must be trust. Real trust, not the kind of trust we often think of.
We think trust is blind. If the Taxi driver says, “Trust me, I know a better route,” we may say, “OK,” and blindly “trust” him…
But that’s not really trust. All we can do with a stranger is act as if we trusted him.
At home, your daughter says, “Mom, you don’t trust me!”
It’s an accusation. Mom has a character flaw, supposedly. But most likely she doesn’t… She probably doesn’t have chronic trust issues with everyone.
She can give me the credit card and pretend that she trusts me, despite evidence I’ve given her to the contrary. She can use society’s word “trust,” a word that means “blind trust,” or acting as if there were real trust.
But there can only be genuine trust where there is trustworthiness to create and sustain it.
Trustworthiness cannot be bestowed as easily as a credit card. It develops over time.
The one doing the trusting doesn’t have a choice one way or the other. Even a villain can force trust upon us. In fiction, he must.
For instance, a villain’s threats must be trusted, or they carry no interest.
I grew up in a family with a total stranger who lied constantly about everything. That brand of dishonesty is a disease, I’m pretty sure. As best I could tell, anything that person said had a 50% chance of being misinformation, manipulation, or pointless abuse.
Talking was not communicating. Asking a question was flipping a coin.
It didn’t take long for anyone with a decent memory to spot inconsistencies, but people didn’t point them out because that person had a short fuze and loved beating people during fits of rage.
The tone of voice could be kind and supportive once in a great while, but when it was, you had to second-guess it.
You might think that such a person would be a great model for a fictional antagonist, but the opposite is true.
A character whose words are too often “pretend” destroys the suspension of disbelief in a fictional world where everything truly is pretend. This is an example of fiction needing to be less strange than truth, so readers can “believe” it.
One of my villains is an old woman who kidnapped the protagonist’s brother. On the phone she speaks with warm tones and uses the term, “dear” to address the protagonist, Johanna. (The word “dear,” should not be capitalized in this setting, by the way.) I felt I’d written her dialogue to shown her personality better than most of the other characters in my story.
She was a genuinely caring woman, but all the lies made her warm, caring speech pattern seem like a fake persona. I was loosing her.
She seemed too valuable to allow the plot’s need for lies to destroy her.
I went back and changed things so she could come clean and apologize for lying, and start being a real person (albeit still a villain) with the trustworthiness of genuine speech that makes people real. She will still lie – not as much – but the essential change will be that she won’t ever deliberately alter her personality in order to manipulate. When characters do that in a novel, you lose them.
I can sacrifice plot – many pages of it, as it turns out – but not a major character who seems to be coming to life.
There was also this problem with her lies…
Once Johanna and Maxwell saw her deception, they started speculating on what was more likely to be true. They argued complex scenarios that began feeling self-conscious to me, like novels about novel writers can make me feel. My characters were becoming plot writers, drawing attention to the craft and crashing the suspension of disbelief.
If a villain is too often faking her personality to support manipulative lies, she cannot be “known” by the reader any more than a poor diseased liar can be known by the people around her in real life.
Faked persona – a character who pretends to feel something he doesn’t – creates emotional cardboard.
An antagonist is often the most important character in a story. True, bad people lie. But real people, good or bad, don’t lie so often they negate the value and emotional trustworthiness of their words. And they rarely if ever fake their entire personalities for the sake of lies and manipulation.
A villain’s true personality ought to be known and “trusted” by the reader.
…
M. Talmage Moorehead
…
My current in-progress version of Johanna’s novel is written by a girl from a parallel universe. If you’re interested in intelligent design, weird artifacts, genetics and psychology from the perspective of a nineteen-year-old “Hapa Girl,” it may be a fun read. The protagonist is a genius geneticist with a younger brother who struggles with depression, though you wouldn’t know it to meet him. Her evolving story starts here.
It’s an experiment called, Hapa Girl DNA, and is a hybrid itself – a tightrope crossing of fiction and non-fiction. “Hapa” is the Hawaiian term for “half.” Johanna is half Japanese and half Jewish. In writing her novel, she and I ignore some important fiction-writing rules, partly because we like to test dogmas, and partly because it’s fun to try new things.
But the “rules” are essential knowledge to anyone crazy enough to either break them or follow them mindlessly.
So you could download my e-book on fiction writing, the second to last chapter of which gives my current opinions on many of the dogmatic rules of fiction writing. Downloading that 10,000 word file will place you on my short list of people who will be politely notified when my traditional novel is done – possibly before the next ice age. (No spam or sharing of your info. I haven’t sent an email to my list yet. It’s been over a year.)
Next time you’re writing emails, if you think of it, please tell your best and hopefully weirdest friend about my blog (www.storiform.com). Thanks. I appreciate your thoughtfulness.
Talmage
Storiform.com 