Review: For Dad

Some of us keep journals. Others keep vlogs (that is, videos of us speaking to a camera about our personal thoughts). They're personal. They're helpful in getting through some situations that are simply not comprehensible in any other fashion. Even more importantly, they are the tool we use when we dare not express our thoughts aloud with someone else.

It's sort of the duty of maturing adolescents to assert themselves and challenge authority figures. They need to figure out how hard to push, when to push, and how to be good, responsible people. And then there's learning how to deal with loss or death.

Techniques in good story telling involve many dynamics. Building tension is one such technique to keep the audience's attention. That requires having a good premise. The characters need to have charisma but they also need to have flaws.

There need to be contrasts. "For Dad" offers them from the perspective of the adolescent, full of promise juxtaposed to the comatose adult. We wonder what the outcome will be. A good story has an ending that's a surprise each time you experience it. Should the audience expect this conclusion?

Enter the adolescent girl, probably 15 or 16. Her father has just slipped into a coma. In "For Dad," we meet the unnamed heroine of the video journal. She is saddened at the loss. She poses one ultimatum after another to her sleeping father in an attempt to force him back into consciousness and reunion with the family. But those ultimatums are deals she makes after filling him in on what's been happening in her current world without him.

It's fascinating how much we learn from our parental experiences. Those are the foundations upon which we decipher how to navigate Life. Our protagonist has her first boyfriend. He wants her to break up with him. And she expresses what she realizes Dad will say in response to that situation. It shows she has a good foundation upon which to reason through good decision.

Her journal takes us through nearly a year and a half of fighting through the range of emotions that come from loss - grief, anger, depression, determination, resolve, acceptance. But she continues to bargain with Dad to wake up while also keeping him up to date on her progression through learning how to live and be vital again.

That includes being a teenager and going to the mall. Although they aren't the focus, we see the seasons passing. She meets a guy. She likes him. Opportunity lost. Opportunity regained. Bargain with Dad to wake up so he can meet the guy.

In her determination to get Dad back, she rummages through some of his belongings that were boxed and stored. She finds some things that were hidden. Best not kept for public viewing, especially for teenagers.

Seasons come and go. Dad's birthday comes around. It's celebrated by her with a nose ring and black lipstick - and more bargaining. But all the while, a return to living is evolving in the protagonist's life. More bargaining; more pressing the story forward. The tension is rising. It keeps us riveted to this story coming from a young perspective, one filled with promise.

Being vital culminates in taking a bike trip with the new boyfriend and a few other friends. They start from home on a journey to the coast, 400 miles away. She's still challenging Dad. She's still bargaining with him. When she makes that 800-mile round trip adventure, it will be tantamount to Dad's having gone on his own adventure and the both of them will complete their journeys and reconvene to celebrate.

Sure enough, her determination, her faith, have a payload. She receives a text message that Dad woke up. Since she's still on her own bike trip and three hours away from home by car, she (now a licensed driver) uses the car of one of the members of the group to get home. She's excited. She's so thrilled that she doesn't realize some of the things she's doing that are putting them in harm's way.

This is a short-short. The tension isn't predicated on what's not told (names, location, time of year) as much as it is on what's going to happen. Identifying with the experiences is also easy. No matter what the race or gender, the scenarios are of the human experience.

Sponsored Links:

• In a Word - CCJP digital subscription
  
• Creating Tension: Make Your Speculative Fiction Novel A Page-Turner (Writer's Toolbox)
  

Dealing with Writer's Block

The subject was writer's block and how to overcome it. It can be a problem when you're on deadline and the right nut-graph just isn't working, no matter how it's revised. Or the wording just isn't coming to you. Or the message of the content simply isn't there.

There are so many explanations for each of these situations. Maybe you're trying too hard on that nut-graph. Maybe you should write it as you would an elevator pitch. Incidentally, write as you think without trying to revise as you do so. That is, write spontaneously. Once you're done simply spray-wording, go back and review what's there. Or just take a few minutes to step away from the thing and then return to it with a refreshed perspective. No, a few days, a few weeks, are simply not what I'm talking about.

There are many reasons for writer's block. Sometimes it's a matter of your brain is trying to process too much information all at one time. Your mind keeps jumping from one subject to another as it darts from one piece of the picture you're trying to paint to another that isn't associated with the first. Then you find yourself with the unenviable task of immediately trying to make to two communicate with one another when in actuality they are quite disparate. You find you're trying to sort through the chaos and there simply is no sense to any of it.

Meanwhile, your fingers are producing little to nothing. Maybe this is the time to simply write down the thoughts. It isn't necessary to make a formal list. Just write down the topics that are popping into your head. Once you've got a good list of those ideas, they can be massaged by organizing them into a logical sequence. And then those bullets can become paragraph headers so that both you and your reader can more easily follow the the train of thought and the message. Remember, it's the message that you ultimately want to communicate. Those sentences are merely little pieces of the message.

At other times, it's a matter of the words simply not coming to you at all.

Just write. Then put it aside. Come back to the content a day or so later and take a peek at it just to see what spilled out. It could be there's something salvageable in all of that stuff. If not, it was a great lesson in journaling. Better yet, you kept the momentum going for putting the words to paper. You were productive. You may even have a list of topics to write about at another time. At least you got those words saved somewhere and you created several starting points.

Another stumbling block is knowing the definition of the word. You want to be absolutely certain it's the right word. You find yourself doing more research about a single, insignificant (in comparison) word instead of writing the message. Or you've used the same word so many times that even you are getting bored with it. It's starting to sound contrived. Is your thesaurus handy?

You know, writing is like a job. You don't want a throng of traffic constantly interrupting you while you're trying to concentrate on what you're doing. So it is with niggling other stuff. Picking up the dry cleaning, paying that bill on time, vacuuming the floors, finding the coins to do the laundry, the appointments that need to be kept - for the entire week. Some of those can be put onto a page in your date minder. Some of them can wait until your work time is over and it's time to take a break. Some of it isn't going to be resolved in the minutes that are distracting you from your current task. Unlike a tsunami, the consequences of ignoring them will not be fatal. So let them wait and simply focus on your "write" time.

Maybe the answer to the situation is to give yourself a writing time allowance - so many minutes (maybe two hours) at one sitting and then off to handle some of those other things until a little later, when you can return to what you were doing with a fresher mind.

Sponsored Links:

• The Writer's Block: 786 Ideas to Jump-Start Your Imagination
  
• Around the Writer's Block: Using Brain Science to Solve Writer's Resistance