Write Lightning is a blog from writer Deb Thompson.
Everyone is welcome here.
(Some links or topics may not be completely kid-appropriate.)
Everyone is welcome here.
(Some links or topics may not be completely kid-appropriate.)
Mon, Nov 23 2015
It's all fun until the brains are real.
Twitter is full of tweets that advertise someone's new novel, but I've been also seeing tweets that comment about recent terrorist attacks. The problem is that it has become increasingly tough to tell one kind of tweet from the other. The suspense, action and intrigue we loathe in the real world is also the sort of thing we tend to seek out when it comes to our personal entertainment. And the language used to describe both these kinds of tweets is often similar, full of adjectives such as "shocking" and "horrifying".
We're often advised as writers to hype the fiction we create, to allow the main character(s) to become entangled in the worst situation they could possibly experience. Then we writers are encouraged to kick things up a notch by saddling the character with a rabid dog, a barbed wire-topped cyclone fence and a sprained wrist. It's fun. Isn't it? But try living in a real world full of limited fresh water, tainted crops, floods. power-mad despots, and suicidal zealots drunk with visions of a self-earned place in glory. It makes those silly, staggering zombies and retro-reptilian land-grabbers from distant galaxies seem tame by comparison.
posted at: 13:24 | category: /Writing Life | link to this entry
Twitter is full of tweets that advertise someone's new novel, but I've been also seeing tweets that comment about recent terrorist attacks. The problem is that it has become increasingly tough to tell one kind of tweet from the other. The suspense, action and intrigue we loathe in the real world is also the sort of thing we tend to seek out when it comes to our personal entertainment. And the language used to describe both these kinds of tweets is often similar, full of adjectives such as "shocking" and "horrifying".
We're often advised as writers to hype the fiction we create, to allow the main character(s) to become entangled in the worst situation they could possibly experience. Then we writers are encouraged to kick things up a notch by saddling the character with a rabid dog, a barbed wire-topped cyclone fence and a sprained wrist. It's fun. Isn't it? But try living in a real world full of limited fresh water, tainted crops, floods. power-mad despots, and suicidal zealots drunk with visions of a self-earned place in glory. It makes those silly, staggering zombies and retro-reptilian land-grabbers from distant galaxies seem tame by comparison.
posted at: 13:24 | category: /Writing Life | link to this entry