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During a conversation with my good friend Kris he mentioned that he believes that plot isn't that important to a good film. I think he may be on to something not just in regards to film but also to storytelling in general.

One of the easiest mistakes to fall into when constructing a story is to focus on the answer to the perceived important question, "what happens"?

The most important thing, I think, that happens in a story is that your protagonist changes or fails to change.

This leads to the two most common failures in all fiction. It leads authors to believe that things need to happen to their protagonist which can make their main characters incredibly passive. And also it can lead authors to believe the plot is more important than the emotion. Which can lead readers to think, "cool but why do I care"?

For what it's worth, and I'm sure I don't do this correctly at all. I think of the emotion first. My storys always come to me in this order:

1. Boy or Girl

2. Emotion (Eg. angry, happy, sad, confused)

3. Why? (high level version. Eg. Betrayal, love, money, something physical, something verbal)

4. Do I start with this or end with this?

And when I've got all of that in my head I start writing the character and the plot that it takes to get me to or from that place. Generally the single day short stories start with the emotion and explore that emotional moment. And the multi part short stories end with the moment of intensity.

But I tend to do all of this before I have even thought of who the character is. Before I've thought of the setting and so on.

I do think that this may well be the kind of thing that proves difficult for me when I write longer pieces. When I tackle something longer I tend to focus on the setting or plot idea because that's throughout. But I think that the short story grounding is probably right the character development is all. It just has to be more complicated character development if the book is longer. To an extent plot is the joke you give away which makes your book less interesting a second time round. Whereas character is the thing that keeps people coming back because there's always something new to learn and always something new to empathise with as your own condition changes.

The more important your plot is to your story the less lasting your story can be. The character development is the thing. Plot is basically irrelevant.

As long (or even short) time readers of gamboling will know I have a rather casual acquaintance with grammar. We have never really been friends, I know about grammar, grammar doesn’t know about me, and that annoys me. So I don’t waste too much of my precious time on something that never returns my calls.

I mention all of this because after my post on the subject of five items or fewer Nick asked me to prove why it made a difference and after thinking about it for a bit I think that a) I can’t and b) I don’t care. Nick has exactly nailed the point that I’ve been arguing for years with Kris that most of the things that the grammar Nazis* complain about doesn’t actually matter for sense.

I mean I know that in reality, as I did in that article, you can explain the difference between the two words. And I know that when I see a van which says, “warning this van continuously stops” I laugh because of course that would mean that it can’t ever move. But I still know what it means. I don’t just know “what it’s supposed to mean” I actually know “what it means”. I appreciate the wrongness after I appreciate the meaning. Therefore to all intents and purposes** I know exactly what it means.

So, I apologise for the post. Kris has his own blog, he can write his own grammar based posts from here on in. And while we are at it this is probably also a lot like the kind of post that Kris might write too: Cul de Sac as the story about the derivation of Cul de Sac is one he told me.

* I was going to, as a joke, write “grammar Natzi’s” but my credentials are probably so low you might think it was an accident so I didn’t.

** But clichés are right out.

In one of my short stories from the other week (A meeting in the park) I used the correct grammar for the number of balloons my spies could expect to find in the museum. They would find “fewer” rather than “less”. This is something that is increasingly difficult to deal with in the English language because it is seen incorrectly all over the shop – quite literally ho, ho.

In Supermarkets there is almost always a “Five items or less” queue when it should, by rights be “Five items or fewer”. I do happen to know of one special pace in the UK where this isn’t true. Apparently the Paisley branch of Marks and Spencer there are three queues, two of which are labelled “Five items or less” and one which is labelled “Five items or fewer”. Maybe we need a group trip?

So for those struggling with the grammar how does it work? The answer is “Fewer” is right if there is a whole number of things that you are describing”. You can’t have “less” children because there are only a fixed number of the little darlings, you must have “fewer”. And to counter that there is always “less” time not “fewer”, because time is on a continuum. Basically if fractions are possible use “less”, if not use “fewer”.

So lets see how this works in my Supermarket example, here’s what I bought from the Supermarket the other day.

0.52 grams of Apples
1.2 Kg of Rice
1.25 packets of cereal (there was 25% extra free).

But I still had to use fewer, because even though there appears to be fractions in each of the items descriptions, each of them is a single thing. Well except the apples, they were unwrapped and really meant that I had 7 items and so I had to go into a different queue anyway, even though I was rightly sure that they would appear on the bill as a single item, I couldn’t be sure that the person standing behind me tutting would see it that way.

If you feel the need for a creator to explain everything why don’t you need to explain the creation of the creator? God was begotten not made they say, you’re passing the buck I say.

People ask me what happened before the big bang. And I can tell them, time didn’t exist before the big bang so there isn’t a before the big bang for anything to happen in.

If we’re alone in the universe then what is the point people ask me. Well personally the idea that people are still moral without God is the biggest excitement of all. We have created this paternal figure to hand down judgement upon up because the idea that we might actually be in charge is too scary to comprehend. But the fact is we actually are in charge, and so to pretend otherwise now is even more scary. The world needs us to think more. We can no longer rely on the greatest minds of 2000 years ago. Now we must admit: Daddy’s dead, it’s time to grow up.

A lot of people are clamoring for gun control in America at the moment, but there is an important statistic that should be remembered in all of this. And it boils down to these two facts

1) More people own guns per capita in Canada than in America.

2) Far more people get killed in America per capita by guns.

Now, Canada does have tighter controls on who they let have guns than America does and certainly I agree that these controls should be implemented in America. But we all know that implementing them will be very difficult and still doesn’t mean less guns.
The base of the problem is cultural clearly. Something in the culture tells them that this is a way to deal with life.

What always happens in these situations in America is that the politicos go constitutional on everyone’s ass. The democrats call for gun control and the republicans sensing they can’t win the debate say that it was because of some movie / album / video game thus making it about freedom of speech. We’ve been there, done that got the “out of my fucking cold dead hands” tee shirt.

The solution has got to be outside the box. We have to do something that seems really crazy. More guns in schools. Woah there Alex what are you saying, like armed guards and stuff? No. People who think they have guns to defend themselves are part of the problem. We need to teach kids about guns and about how dangerous they are. Teach them that owning a gun makes you more likely to die in a gun crime rather than less. Teach them that killing others doesn’t help you feel better (I guess it can’t or why do they all kill themselves at the end)? It’s all about education.

But we’ve been there with education you’re all saying. Look how long we’ve been trying to make sex education a reality. Well yes so we have to trade something with the gun lobby. What we have to give them is, something so tasty they’ll just never see the punch coming. We make buying weaponry tax deductible.

What?

Yes tax deductible.

Why is this good? Well first we get to know where all the guns are. That’s one of the best bits.

Then we make it so that if you claim this benefit you have to allow the government to inspect how you keep them safely on your premises.

We should make it so there are two different rates of tax relief one for hunting weaponry and one for non hunting weaponry. So that later we can ban all not hunting weaponry rather than having to debate each time if certain guns are dangerous or not. Like we should really have to ask this question.

Finally we fix it so that the gun shop carries a large part of the tax burden if the individual fails to keep their gun securely. This way it is in the shops interest to check out their customer.

With all this we aren’t forcing registration, we’re not changing the constitution. We’re just saying, “oooh wouldn’t this tax break be nice”. And people will gladly trade in their liberties for money.

Now you may say that this will simply drive the trade underground. That bad guys will still need to get their guns from somewhere. But most guns are stolen from people. Not bought from distributors wholesale. If people are encouraged to keep them more safe then perhaps students won’t be able to get hold of them at least, and criminals will certainly find it harder too.

I know it probably sounds insane. But it might just work.

So if you want to argue with me about religion there is something that people try to do which is called, in my book, “having it both ways”. This is a problem that Richard Dawkins gets himself into. Richard Dawkins believes, as I do, that evolution is true. But the problem is that religious types know the weakness of the argument and they exploit it. Scientists can’t prove evolution, or at least haven’t yet. So religious types say, “you can’t prove it so you can’t use it”.

But the argument really should be like this:

Option 1

We both admit that you don’t need proof to believe in things. In which case evolution trumps god because it explains the way the world works far better than religion does

Option 2

We both admit that we should only use things that we can prove in our argument. In this scenario Evolution doesn’t exist, but neither does God.

Because Dawkins can’t conceive of Option 2, he lets God in by the back door. He attempts to say, “I’m allowed to say things are true that you can’t prove, but you can’t”.

So, yeah. I personally don’t mind what you believe in, but I think evolution sounds more likely than God.

Sometimes you see something that really changes your outlook. So be careful here because this video that I’m linking you to should hopefully change yours. Most people have a view of the world which is them and us. We live in the West, they live in the third world. But that is an outmoded view. This video is 20 minutes long, but it is fascinating. One of the most interesting things about it is how this guy uses data. He has sourced the data from publicly accessible sites and animated it. You can watch how China is catching up with America over time for example. The great thing is the way that the presenter commentates like a sportscaster as things are happening and yet is so human and feeling in his approach to the reality of the situations. Truly brilliant, and as he suggests if the data is freed then people might start to understand the realities.

His groups website, named after the London Underground phase “Mind the Gap” is here, and allows you to freely play with the data: GapMinder.org