Not losing the plot, and even how to find it

As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, the most difficult part of writing for me is plotting. The characters come relatively easy, though there is always the danger that they can be too much alike. I’ve noticed from my own reading that some authors produce a limited range of characters, not unlike some actors. Whether I fall into that category is for others to judge. 

But my characters do vary in age and gender and include AI entities (like androids). Ideally, a character reveals more of themselves as the story unfolds and even changes or grows. One should not do this deliberately – it’s best to just let it happen – try not to interfere is the intention if not always the result.

I’ve also pointed out previously that whether to outline or not is a personal preference, and sometimes a contentious one. As I keep saying, you need to find what works for you, and for me it took trial and error.

In my last post on this topic, I compared plotting to planning a project, because that is what I did professionally. On a project you have milestones that become ‘goals’ and there is invariably a suite of often diverse activities required to come together at the right time. In effect, making sure everything aligns was what my job was all about.

When it comes to plotting, we have ‘plot points’, which are analogous to milestones but not really the same thing. And this is relevant to whether one ‘outlines’ or not. A very good example is given in the movie, Their Finest (excellent movie), which is a film within a film and has a screenwriter as the protagonist. The writers have a board where they pin up the plot points and then join them up with scenes, which is what they write.

On the other hand, a lot of highly successful writers will tell you that they never outline at all, and there is a good reason for that. Spontaneity is what all artists strive for – it’s the very essence of creativity. I’ve remarked myself, that the best motivation to write a specific scene is the same as the reader’s: to find out what happens next. As a writer, you know that if you are surprised then so will your readers be.

Logically, if you don’t have an outline, you axiomatically don’t know what happens next, and the spontaneity that you strive for, is all but guaranteed. So what do I do? I do something in between. I learned early on that I need a plot point to aim at, and whether I know what lies beyond that plot point is not essential.

I found a method that works for me, and any writer needs to find a method that works for them. I keep a notebook, where I’ll ‘sketch’ what-ifs, which I’ll often do when I don’t know what the next plot point is. But once I’ve found it, and I always recognise it when I see it, I know I can go back to my story-in-progress. But that particular plot point should be far enough in the future that I can extemporise, and other plot points will occur spontaneously in the interim.

Backstory is often an important part of plot development. J.K. Rowling created a very complex backstory that was only revealed in the last 2 books of her Harry Potter series. George Lucas created such an extensive backstory for Star Wars, he was able to make 3 prequels out of it.

So, whether you outline or not may be dependent on how much you already know about your characters before you start.

Road safety starts with the driver, not the vehicle

There was recently (pre-COVID-19) a road-safety ad on some cinemas in Australia (and possibly TV) for motorcyclists. We have video of a motorcyclist on a winding road, which I guess is the other side of Healesville, and there is a voiceover of his thoughts. He sees a branch on the road to avoid, he sees a curve coming up, he consciously thinks through changing gears, including clutch manipulation, he sees a van ahead which he overtakes. The point is that there is this continuous internal dialogue based on what he observes while he’s riding. 

What I find intriguing is that this ad is obviously targeted at motorcyclists, yet I fail to see why it doesn’t equally apply to car drivers. I learned to drive (decades ago) from riding motorcycles, not only on winding roads but in city and suburban traffic. I used to do a daily commute along one of the busiest arterial roads from East Sydney to Western Sydney and back, which I’d still claim to be the most dangerous stretch of driving I ever did in my life. 

I had at least one close call and one accident when a panel van turned left into a side road from the middle lane while I was in the left lane (vehicles travel on the left side, a la Britain, in Australia). I not only went over the top of my bike but the van started to drag the bike over me while I was trapped in the gutter, and then he stopped. I was very young and unhurt and he was older and managed to convince me that it was my fault. My biggest concern was not whether I had sustained injuries (I hadn’t) but that the bike was unrideable.

Watching the ad on the screen, which is clearly aimed at a younger version of myself, I thought that’s how I drive all the time, and I learned that from riding bikes, even though I haven’t ridden a bike in more than 3 decades. It occurred to me that most people probably don’t – they put their cars on cruise-control, now ‘adaptive’, and think about something else entirely, possibly having a conversation with someone who is not even in the vehicle.

In Australia, speed limits get lower and lower every year, so that drivers don’t have to think about what they’re doing. The biggest cause of accidents now, I understand, are distractions to the driver. We are transitioning (for want of a better word) to fully autonomous vehicles. In the interim, it seems that since we don’t have automaton cars, we need automaton drivers. Humans actually don’t make good robots. The road-safety ad aimed at motorcyclists is the exact opposite of this thinking.

I’m anomalous in that I still drive a manual and actually enjoy it. I’ve found others of my generation, including women, who feel that driving a manual forces them to think about what they’re doing in a way that an auto doesn’t. In a manual, you are constantly anticipating what gear you need, whether it be for traffic or for a corner, to slow down or to speed up (just like the rider in the ad). It becomes an integral part of driving. I have a 6 speed which is the same as I had on my first 2 motorbikes, and I use the gears in exactly the same way. We are taught to get into top gear as quickly as possible and stay there. But, riding a bike, you soon learn that this is nonsense. In my car, you ideally need to be doing 100km/hr (60 mph) to change into top gear. 

We have cars that do their best to take the driving out of driving, and I’m not convinced that makes us safer, though most people seem to think it does.

Addendum: I acknowledge I’m a fossil like the car I drive. I do drive autos, and it doesn’t change the way I drive, but I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed the experience. I accept that, in the future, cars probably won’t be enjoyable to drive at all, because they will have no 'feeling'. The Tesla represents the future of motoring, whether autonomous or not.

Is liberalism under siege?

Like most so-called liberal-minded individuals, I read liberal-minded media, like The New Yorker, but I also acquire The Weekend Australian, religiously, every weekend (a Murdoch broadsheet newspaper). Like most weekend tabloids, it has ‘sections’ and pull-out segments, including a Weekend Australian Magazine and Weekend Australian Review. These pull-out segments often include profiles of people from all walks of life, coverage of arts and culture, as well as commentaries on topical issues.

There is a curious dichotomy in that the main body of the paper has opinion pieces that are predominantly and overtly conservative, whereas the ‘pull-out’ sections (mentioned above) have far more liberal content. Having said that, this weekend, there was virtually a full-page article called Voice, Treaty, Truth: Heart, which was an extract from a book called Treaty by George Williams and Harry Hobbs (who are, respectively, Dean and lecturer in the faculty of law at the University of NSW). It gives a potted history of the treaty process in Australia for indigenous people, with well written arguments on why it’s a necessary process for all Australians. The idea has long been opposed by conservative voices in Australia, so it says a lot that it finds expression in a conservative newspaper.

I only reference the article to give contrast to other feature articles dealing with the current ‘black lives matter’ crisis occurring in the US and spilling over into Australia on the same weekend. In particular, 3 opinion pieces by Paul Kelly (Editor at Large), Greg Sheridan (Foreign Editor) and Chris Kenny (Associate Editor) that provide different yet distinctly conservative views on the divisive issue. None of them are apologists for Trump, yet Sheridan and Kenny, in particular, are critical, to the point of ridicule, of the backlash against Trump, and downplay the racial schism that has become a running sore over the past week.

But I wish to focus on Paul Kelly’s commentary, The Uncivil War Killing Liberalism, because his arguments are more measured and he takes a much wider view. Kelly has been critical of Trump in the past – in particular, his incompetent handling of the COVID-19 pandemic right from the outset.

Kelly effectively argues that liberalism is under attack from both sides, with the political desertion of the ‘centre’ all over the Western world. I’ve made the same point myself, but, even though I’d guess we’re of a similar vintage, we have different perspectives and biases.

Kelly provides a broad definition, which I’ll quote out of context:

...liberalism means equality before the law regardless of race, equal access to health care and education on the principle of universalism.

This is an ideal that is far from fulfilled in virtually every democracy in the modern world, and is manifest in faultlines, particularly in the US, which is the main focus of Kelly’s essay. He more or less says as much in the next paragraph:

Yet the US today is engulfed in a series of social crises, with life expectancy falling for three successive years since 2015.

Kelly sees Trump as a symptom, or a ‘product’ of a ‘decline into cultural decadence’ (quoting conservative New York Times journalist, Ross Douthat, from his book, The Decadent Society). Kelly clearly agrees with Douthat when he quotes him: Trump exploits the decline of liberalism while being an agent of that decline.

But, like many conservative commentators, Kelly lays at least part of the blame with what he and others call ‘the Elites’. He quotes another American author, Christopher Lasch, from his 1995 book, The Revolt of the Elites:

The new elites are in revolt against ‘Middle America’ as they imagine it: a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes and complacent, dull and dowdy.

There is a social dynamic occurring here that I have seen before, and so I believe has Kelly. I’m thinking of the 1960s when there was a revolt against postwar conservative values that was arguably augmented by the introduction of oral contraception. It included a rejection of the dominance of the Church in both legislative and family politics, as well as shifts in feminist politics, the effects of which are still being experienced a couple of generations later. Were the ‘radicals’ advocating those ideals the ‘elites’ of their generation?

One of the major differences between American and Australian cultures is obvious to Australians and a surprise to many Americans. In Australia, religious belief is rarely an issue, and certainly not in politics. This wasn’t always the case. When I was growing up there was a divide between protestants and Catholics that even affected the small country town where I lived and was educated. The dissolution of that division was one of the more providential casualties of the 1960s. These days, most Australians are apathetic about religion, which renders it mostly a non-issue.

The reason I raise this is because militant atheism is most aggressive in countries where fundamentalist religion is most political (like the US). In other words, when you get extreme views becoming mainstream, you will get a reaction from the polar opposite extreme. And this is what is happening in politics pretty well worldwide.

So Kelly is right when he contends that Trump is the manifestation of a reaction to left wing ideologies, but he leaves a lot out. If one goes back to the ‘definition’ of liberalism, scribed by Kelly himself, the word ‘equality’ tends to stick in one’s craw. Inequality is arguably the biggest issue in the US which has been exacerbated by recent events. Even in the pandemic, which one assumes is indiscriminate, Black deaths have outnumbered Whites, which suggests that health care is not equitable.

It would seem that people (well, conservative political commentators at least) have already forgotten both the cause and the consequences of the GFC. The GFC hit middle America hard and it is their hardship that Trump exploited. So, the so-called ‘decadence of liberalism’ is a straw man that hides the discontent caused by the sheer greed of the people whom Trump and his ‘Tea Party’ allies really represent.

Kelly argues that ‘aggressive progressivism’ is one, if not ‘the’ cause of the ‘assault on liberalism’, to use his own words. He doesn’t say, but one assumes by ‘aggressive progressivism’, he’s talking about the strong push for renewable energy sources in response to what he calls ‘climate change alarmists’. Curiously, it’s been reported in the last week that industry leaders (you know, the ones who vote for conservative governments) are pushing for more investment in renewable resources. So we have industry groups attempting to lead the (conservative) Australian government, following the paralysis of the last decade by consecutive governments on both sides.

Kelly also argues that ‘individualism’ is one of the factors, along with ‘multiculturalism’, which he denigrates. In Australia, I’ve witnessed at least 3 waves of immigration, all of which have brought out the best and the worst in people. But generally people have got along fine because we tend to live and let live. As long as people from all backgrounds have the same access to health care and education and job opportunities, then there is very little societal dislocation that the xenophobes warn us about. There is inequality, especially among indigenous Australians, and I think that is why the recent protests in America have resonated here. Equality, I believe, starts with education. There is an elitism around education here and it is a political minefield. But the ideals of liberalism, expressed so succinctly by Kelly, surely start with education.

If one takes a broad historical perspective, it’s generally the ideas and ideals of people on the Left of politics that develop into social norms, even for conservatives of later generations. This is arguably how liberalism has evolved and will continue to evolve. Importantly, it’s dynamic, not static.

How do we understand each other?

This is the latest Question of the Month from Philosophy Now (Issue 137 April/May 2020), so answers will appear in Issue 139 (Aug/Sep 2020). It just occurred to me that I may have misread the question and the question I've answered is: How CAN we understand each other? Whatever, it's still worthy of a post, and below is what I wrote: definitely philosophical with psychological underpinnings and political overtones. There’s a thinly veiled reference to my not-so-recent post on Plato, and the conclusion was unexpected.

This is possibly the most difficult question I’ve encountered on Question of the Month, and I’m not sure I have the answer. If there is one characteristic that defines humans, it’s that we are tribal to the extent that it can define us. In almost every facet of our lives we create ingroups and outgroups, and it starts in childhood. If one watches the so-called debates that occur in parliament (at least in Australia) it can remind one of their childhood experiences at school. In current political discourse, if someone proposes an action or a policy, it is reflexively countered by the opposition, irrespective of its merit.

But I’ve also observed this is in the workplace, working on complex engineering projects, where contractual relationships can create similar divisions; where differences of opinion and perspective can escalate to irrational opposition that invariably leads to paralysis.

We’ve observed worldwide (at least in the West) divisions becoming stronger, reinforced by social media that is increasingly being used as a political weapon. We have situations where groups holding extreme yet strongly opposing views will both resist and subvert a compromise position proposed by the middle, which logically results in stalemate.

Staying with Australia (where I’ve lived since birth), we observed this stalemate in energy policy for over a decade. Every time a compromise was about to be reached, either someone from the left side or someone from the right side would scuttle it, because they would not accept a compromise on principle.

But recently, two events occurred in Australia that changed the physical, social and political landscape. In the summer of 2019/2020, we witnessed the worst bushfire season, not only in my lifetime, but in recorded history since European settlement. And although there was some political sniping and blame-calling, all the governments, both Federal and States, deferred to the experts in wildfire and forestry management. What’s more, the whole community came together and helped out irrespective of political and cultural differences. And then, the same thing happened with the COVID-19 crisis. There was broad bipartisan agreement on formulating a response, and the medical experts were not only allowed to do their job but to dictate policy.

Plato was critical of democracies and argued for a ‘philosopher-king’. We don’t have philosopher-kings, but we have non-ideological institutions with diverse scientific and technical expertise. I would contend that ‘understanding each other’ starts with acknowledging one’s own ignorance.