WHAT MAKES A GREAT STORY?

 

The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind. Because it depends on who you ask.

So, what makes a truly great story?

For many, it’s a tight plot with twists and turns, and an ending that ties loose ends.

For some, it’s a layered meaning that takes them to places they wouldn’t have gone otherwise.

For a few, it’s asking good questions that don’t get answered, but leave them thinking.

So, yeah. It depends.

 

For me, a great story opens a portal to greater understanding of my place while I navigate this life. I sort of named it “value.” A really great story has value much beyond momentary entertainment or distraction.

 

A great story asks something of me, and in return leaves me richer, the kind of riches money can’t buy. The last great story I read was Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. I didn't read it until eight years ago, many years after it was published and won the Pulitzer Prize. 

I’ve read many very good stories since. But great? That’s a rarity.

I’ve written what some have called good stories. I hope they are. I still hope to write a great story before I check out.

To Have or Not to Have THE BOOK PARTY?

 

I see this question on writers group chats. Should I have a book launch party? Where? How? Is it a must?

 

I really like this post by Liz Alterman. It tells of her personal experience of this very matter.

 

Let’s face it: unless you have written on a very hot topic and are a known expert on same, or you are already an established author for fiction, your book event will not draw a crowd of strangers. Your audience will be largely made of supportive friends who want to celebrate with you, a very nice thing. This, too, makes a book feel “launched.”

 

 

But there will be a few new faces, and each is a possible future friend. This, at least, has been my experience.

If the very idea of throwing a party where no one comes gives you night sweats, know that you don’t have to have book events. Many writers are not natural partiers. It’s okay either way.

 

Speaking for myself, I hope to have more books published. Parties will depend on what/where/when. I did like my previous events after I had done them and saw, as the book of Genesis says, that it was good.

THE BLACK HOLE OF EMAIL-VERSE

 

Email changed many things. The word mail shouldn’t be confused with the mail of yore.

 

For one, email is supposedly delivered in seconds. This means that not getting a reply for many days (think--more than ten) can feel like an insult, specifically with personal emails.

 

Email goes into the ether and, without a physical presence, depends on some form of acknowledgement of receipt. In personal email, this means a reply. In business, it can be an auto-receipt. Without either, it’s in the who-knows-if cloud.

 

The other day, my email program let me know two personal emails bounced for some technical reason. I re-sent them, and they didn’t get a “bounce” message the second time. Later, both friends asked me why I had sent twice, as they got it the first time.

 

At the mercy of this non-physical world, I could only mumble something about the bounce notifications having to do with some protocol/permissions that someone somewhere on the interwebs explained in terms neither I nor my friends understand.

 

Marvelous thing, this email business. But I confess I feel helpless sometimes when I can’t understand or imagine its path to my dear ones or the professionals I am dealing with.

 

The mystery of carrier pigeons is, at least, something the mind’s eye can envision. Ditto for physical mail.

 

But email remains a black hole. It swallows, and when it works, it spits out.

If You Think It— It Be REAL

 

Up until the age of seven or eight, I believed that if I thought something up in my imagination, it became real.

 

A fine example was The Mickey Mouse Affair. I was five years old when I told my best friend that I had a “real Mickey, round black ears and all.”

“Where?” she asked.

“He’s under my bed and only comes out at night after everyone goes to sleep.” I said.

My friend wanted one also. She told her parents, who then summoned me so I can admit I made it up. I insisted my Mickey was real.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know I had thought this up, or that I was embarrassed about fibbing and didn’t want to admit it. I knew I thought him, and also was convinced that now he was real.

 

Kids. This is part of the magical age.

 

Most people outgrow this, or channel it only into the creative arts. A sad and bad scenario for those who don’t grow up is when they apply this to politics.

 

Today, I use my imagination to write fiction, which, as far as I’m concerned, becomes real in its way.

©Carina Povarchik

ONE NATION UNDER GOD

 

With the United States approaching another birthday, (our 248^th) I got to thinking this line from the Pledge of Allegiance, which in its current form is only seventy years old. (More about this pledge’s history is here.)

 

“One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

 

The reality is that our nation is in fact more than one nation, if you subscribe to the notion of it being divided by many distinctive and legally sovereign states.

 

In reality, plenty of our nationals don’t see God’s presence at all.

 

Liberty is relative, with one percent of US citizens in prison, not all of them justly. The liberty of the rest is curtailed in many ways, not all of them wisely.

 

Justice: oh, dear. Justice, especially “for all,” is elusive. Not that other nations do better. But justice for all on this earth has yet to manifest here or anywhere.

 

And then it hit me: this pledge is less a statement of how it is. and more an aspiration of how it should be.

 

Let us wish it, and strive for it, and maybe get ever closer. I can pledge my allegiance to this as an aspiration, without reservation.

Happy Birthday USA