Where is my hoverboard?

I have been thinking on this for a while, not specifically "Where is my hoverboard?" but on the general question that it implies. "Why is our world so boring?"

Fiction promises us in fantasy, Dragons, magic, Heroes and Villains. We are presented with a clear cut world where we know who the demons are and who we have to route for. But taking it out of fantasy read any thriller on the shelves at the moment and our world should be chock full of secret societies and conspiracies to over throw the government/steal all your money/bring on the apocalypse etc.

Yet the world keeps on turning. We are in a bit of an economic downturn but it is not exactly on par with being invaded by aliens. So what has gone wrong, are we not pretty enough for our alien overlords to bother with? Is it simply too much work to be setting up a secret society or just not enough profit to be found in beaming advertisements directly into peoples minds.

Re-creation

We often try too hard to capture something in writing much more description than needed. Often to the detriment of the narrative. There is a technique used in post-production where rather than try to reproduce a real world thing exactly, which would be time consuming and unnecessary for say a three second shot of a rainbow. They rather capture the essence of the thing in question. Take our rainbow example.

It is certainly possible to create a rainbow using a computer, one that would be indistinguishable to the real thing but it would be a time consuming process to capture the subtle hues that glimmer in a rainbow. So instead of wasting the money they ask not what is a rainbow but what do people expect a rainbow. Try it now, write down five words you would associate with a rainbow. Bright, Colourful, sparkling, beautiful, stunning etc I would be willing to bet that your list is somewhat like that one. Yet if you were to go outside and record one on film you might get snatches of the some of the above but only once in a blue moon would you get the 'Rainbow' that immediately comes to mind.

Did you know that silencers are not really silent? The more accurate term to describe them are suppressors. In the 'real' world the sound escaping one of them would be on par to a car door slamming. It is quiet enough to stop an inquisitive guard from immediately knowing that a gun had been fired but not to keep him oblivious. This is another example of playing to the audiences expectations. Because in Hollywood we have been told silencers are silent then they remain so.

So next time you are writing try to think that you don't need to perfectly craft a immaculate representation of what you are trying to describe but rather if you are able to get the quintessential essence of what makes up that thing then your writing will be the better for it. You are showing the object to the audience, not creating it from nothing and parsing it into their minds.

Different mediums

For the past week I have been wrestling with a short story that keeps jumping between being a story in prose and in script. I start writing it in prose form and then I am suddenly hit with a scene that would be almost impossible to write without destroying the flow of the narrative, yet this scene could easily translate to script. Likewise I will succumb and start writing it in script and come up against the limitations of that medium as well. I write in both mediums regularly so it is not a lack of experience that is driving my inability to get this story down it is simply that it is a story of the modern times.

Let me explain. When we write a story we write it for one specific medium, you do not write a piece of prose and start planning how it would look in script. This is generally why most novelisations of movies, of movies based on Novels find it incredibly hard to please their fan led audience of the former. Because the original story has been through many drafts to be distilled into a publishable story for that medium when it is translated it loses that refined quality and becomes a square trying to fit into a circular hole.
If the original author goes back to that story and presents the alternative version it can certainly help to appease fans, we call this 'reimagining' or a 'reboot' but both terms fall short of what is actually happening. Just as the method of transfer changes so does our understanding of the story. No two stories are alike. You can have the same story, written by the same author with the only difference being is the medium and they will never be the same story. Heraclitus famously said "You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you." and this is most true for a writer. So many things go into the crafting of a story, and one of the most important variables is the method of transfer to your audience. In other words, you should not even try to recreate your story, but write one that fits in your world that may use the same characters and plot line. If that makes sense :D

The best example I can think of this is with the BBC show 'The Thick of It' to its big screen adaption 'In the Loop', which has some amazingly funny lines 'Difficult Difficult Lemon Difficult'. It follows a similar plot to what you would find in the TV show, but the writers have realised that recreating the TV on the big screen with a bigger budget would lose the charm and wit of the original. So using the same cast, with some characters renamed but essentially the same but without the history of the TV cannon and others were transplanted completely. They recreated the world to fit the shape of the motion picture rather than scale up the TV show.

So my little short story that started this rant? I need to think of it as two seperate stories. Write the prose, and write the script. The concept of the story is quite vast so why not write two different stories in the same world rather than try to rehash one story to meet two mediums.

On Writing

This is something that got jotted down in my note book a few weeks back. I have just stumbled on it again and I rather like it so I thought I would share.

"You do not write stories. You grab them by by the horns and force them, quite unwillingly, onto the page. There it struggles constantly to be free of it's tormentor, taking chunks from itself and of you during the melee. It is only when you both lie breathless, and quite often lifeless, that you can survey wreckage and try to discover what manner of beast that now stains the page a bloody black"

Ultimate Security System

As a writing exercise I ask myself hypothetical questions and try and devise a perfect answer for it. At the weekend I gave my self this question: If I am an evil genius or a member of spy organisation what measure would need to be taken to make the security system unbeatable.

The first thing I concluded was that no system can be unbeatable but you can try to make it as secure as possible.

Each guard has a bullet proof/knife proof vest, this extends up to the neck reducing the risk of a choke hold or downward strikes. Also designed in such a way to make it incredibly difficulty to use standard techniques for breaking necks. Lining the inside of this jacket is heart rate sensors, and therein lies the crux of our defence.

These sensors should wirelessly feedback to a central server but also feedback to two other remote locations. The central and one of the remote servers are manned and monitored continuously. If one of these is compromised then the automated back up should catch it, other wise the other human monitored system can be used to compare against the other two for compromises. If one of these systems is compromised then the other two can be used to ensure that if one is hijacked then it is not fatal to the system. These systems talk to each and compare each others signal inputs. A final system should on top of this that is not connected to the others in any way but the signal. This is so that if the system is truly compromised and it is spread through them all it can be checked against the others still.

Finally a physical wire from the vest should be plugged into terminals around the complex. This relays the information in real time, comparing against the wireless signal and what is received at the servers.

All of these servers run analysis on the heart rates supplied to them. This goes against the mean supplied by the guards at monthly and irregular intervals in a variety of exercises. Even a slight variation to the numbers sent should prompt investigation. First through radio contact, if no response is given on the FIRST attempt of asking a 'swing' team should be sent consisting of a minimum of three guards who are regularly changed. This swing team should check on the heightened heart rate guard even if they answer afterwards. All of this is double checked via video cameras all of the guards carry. These should have similar redundancies to the heart rate monitors. This camera are monitored constantly and all grounds should be check by two individual separate parties prior to commencement of assignment and all signal issues rectified before acceptance.

The video should be interlaced with an encrypted stream that would render a repetition of the same feed easily identifiable. Guards should also be asked to produce predefined hand signals at irregular intervals and the swing guard should confirm at a distance in at even more irregular periods. This video should be reviewed on a 24 hour delay by a third, uninterested, party for any discrepancies.

That is what I came up with. It is not unbeatable but designed in such a way to cause the maximum amount of effort on behalf of the person who is trying to break it. If one guard is taken out then the system, if working correctly, will immedietly put the attack into lockdown. Of course other systems such as motion detectors should work in conjunction with the guards so that the criminal does not just slip by them.

Thats it, that was a fun writing exercise :D if any goverment agency, or evil genius, would like to hire me you have my email.

A-Level Results - Why exams are not getting easier

What most commentators are seemingly missing from this debate is the reason why students are getting better grades in the first place. Two things become apparent with the passage of time. A teacher will refine their own skills and knowledge of examination procedure, therefore making their  lessons more informative. Or as I often remarked when at a-level myself, 'We are learning to pass an exam, not the subject'.

The other much more important reasoning behind this increase in student pass grades is a shift in culture. Students are exposed to a whole different set of complexities that were not even dreamed of when I was in school. Lets think on this a moment, I am not that far out of A-level myself – some five years. Courses offering tuition is media studies were just taking off then, I think in fact that I remember one of my friends remarking that they were the first to go through the subject at the sixth form I attended. When we were in our formative years, discovering the world and all that was interesting in it, well there was not all that much to discover. Television was still bound to four channels, going to the cinema was considered a treat rather than something to do to fill time. Even reading was considered only acceptable to age appropriate books. Basically parents pushed their children to do three things.

Hello! Look New Blog!

Hello!

After two years of maintaining my squarespace blog I have made the transition to blogger, I would be lyng if I did not say that this decision was not partly based on financial reasons but I said a lot of things on that blog that I was proud of but I am at a new place in my life and as such felt that a new blog would be appropriate.

On this blog I will continue to post writing tips as I did on my previous blog but they will not be as regular as my previous posts. I want this blog to be more a reflection of myself than me droning on about what you should be doing. So I will be offering more encouragement rather than instruction. And lets not forget I will be be posting examples of my creative work when I write them!

As I said with the previous blog and I will repeat here, When I first started as a writer I would often need someone to talk to or give me feedback on my work but did not really have anyone in my life to take up that role, so if anyone wishes for an honest opinion of any of their work or just general guidance then feel free to contact me
Cheers,
Peter Michael Kerr