Ultimately, what went wrong?  The first problem the script faced was on-the-nose dialogue.  If you think about that phrase for a minute you’ll probably guess it’s origin.  The dialogue just punches you in the nose.  It lacks subtlety.  It’s meaning is black and white.  It’s too precise and rigid.  It means what it means and absolutely nothing else.  In other words, it’s too direct, too often.

Audiences like to work a little.  A phrase that means more than one thing allows the audience to tease out additional emotion.  Sometimes writers call this layered dialogue, because it coveys multiple meanings in a highly compressed way.  One of the best dialogue writers in movies is Quentin Tarantino.  The dialogue feels natural, it loops around and spirals.  It doesn’t get right to the point every time.  When you first listen to it, you’re simply enjoying it at a superficial level.  Maybe it’s too friends teasing each other, something anyone can resonate with easily.  Yet, if you stick around long enough you realize something else is at work there.  Let’s take Pulp Fiction for example.  The dialogue between Sam Jackson’s character and Jon Travolta’s character is about nothing on the surface.  You got two guys telling stories and teasing each other.  Yet, as they talk more we realize much of the story is about another character, Marcellus Wallace.  Through their dialogue about him throwing a man out the window we see how dangerous he is, without even meeting him.  Then we learn that Travolta will be taking his wife out to dinner.  The sense of tension and anxiety rises.  That’s good dialogue.

Often great dialogue involves people talking about one thing on the surface, but something else entirely below.  Chinese films are fantastic with this technique because they have to avoid the censors.  Watch any movie coming out of China in the 1990′s, like Raise the Red Lantern or Eat Drink Man Woman, and you quickly realize the characters are always talking about something bigger.  They might talk about the necessity of duty to family and somehow critique the one party system at the same time.  There’s nothing like real pressure to forge a writer’s skills in subtlety.

The second major problem with Man of Steel is a fragmented or episodic plot.  It moves from one action set piece to another.  The action never slows down and gives the audience time to pause and take it all in.  It also borders on the absurd.  How can one man see so many disasters in such a short time?   It’s one thing to travel the world looking for problems to fix, it’s another to have your father randomly taken away by a hurricane while insisting he save the family dog from the car.

It was downhill from there.  Usually, I like more and bigger action, but it fails here, because I never really care about the characters, any of them.  For a movie that’s supposedly about hope and inspiration, it’s largely hopeless.  Clark is beaten down as a boy, picked on, seen as a freak, but none of his enemies have a real personality, or even a name.  They’re faceless bullies.  The requisite jocks are there, as well as the fat bully, and the girls gossiping.  His enemies are as faceless as the Viet Cong in a bad Vietnam war flick.  This failure kills any story.  If a writer can’t personalize enemies then you have nothing worth giving a shit about.  If someone walks into a subway and shoots someone, it’s a news story, but if he shoots his own brother, it’s fiction.  We want to care about our heroes and even our enemies.  The enemies must stand out.  Method actors call it personalizing or finding something unique.  The same archetypes appear again and again in stories.  There are only so many ways that kids can learn that life is hard.  A parent can die.  A best friend can die trying to help them or because of their mistake.  Bullies can pick on them.  Yet those scenes must have traits that distinguish them from the archetype, something that makes them unlike all the other bullies out there.  Think back to when you got picked on as a kid.  Maybe the kids used some phrase that cut right to the heart of why you were different and it hurt like a motherfucker.  Think about the bullies in a Christmas Story.  You remember the red headed kid right, the one with the braces?  He’s the one that ultimately cried when the smallest kid snapped and fought back, beating him until he bleed.  That’s a personal bully, not a generic clone.

Another stand out problem is the internal logic of the film.  Audience are constantly asking questions, even if it’s subconscious.  Any movie must answer those questions in a satisfying way or risk alienating people.  Even worse is when you never answer the questions at all.  You never want your audience smarter than your story.  The movie is filled with answers that don’t add up.  Let’s take a few examples of hairbrained logic in the film’s structure.

Let’s go back to Clark’s father’s death again.  Was there was no way Superman could have just saved the dog from the car himself without anyone seeing?  I can think of a few ways right off the bat and I bet other people in the audience could too.  All I could think was, man, I’m smarter than Superman.  Not good.

The most egregious error in logic that Clark has no examples of good people, other than his father.  This makes his intense desire to save people meaningless and unbelievable.  In male super hero dominated movies it’s often the girl who gives the hero a reason to believe.  Woman symbolize hope and love.  They show us the tender side of life, a soft contrast to the violent and brutal ways of men.  Clark’s father is too good, so he’s not a real beacon of hope.  He’s a wise old man, someone who seems too good to be true, too perfect.  He’s flawless and we don’t trust flawless folks.  We need someone his own age, someone who risks getting beat up or hurt to defend him, for no other reason than it’s the right thing to do.  In other words, he needs a friend, someone to give him a reason to think humans aren’t all dumb bullies and religious nuts.  None of the kids is on Clark’s side.  He has no love interest until later in the film and even then it’s tenuous at best.  He desperately need someone to give him a reason to see the good in people.

A writer has to beat down his hero.  That’s his job.  In fact, I often think that our only job as a writer is to make our characters suffer.  Yet watching this film made me realize that it’s also about giving them hope and joy, something to keep them going through the hard winters.  None of that happens here and so I just never believe that Superman would want to save us.  The way the story is laid out, he’d probably agree with General Zod, if Zod wasn’t such a card board cut out himself.  Oh look, a military leader who thinks he’s superior and hates the wishy-washy ways of politicians and wants to commit genocide of an inferior race.  This is a terrible cliche.  There are countless examples of men like this throughout history and all of them were utterly fascinating and unique, unlike Zod.  Kim Jong Il loved fine wine and Sushi cut off live fish.  He hated America and yet he loved basketball and American films.  Stalin never slept in the same room twice.  Hitler was a vegetarian who never drank and who was incredibly lazy.  He rarely got up early ever and worked only a few hours a day.  There is simply no excuse not to make your villain unique as well.  They wasted a fine actor’s skills here.  Michael Shannon just has nothing to sink his teeth into at all.

More internal logic errors abound.  An alien ship comes down and it proves hostile, so we try to attack it, with basic missiles and guns.  Not once does someone even raise the question of a nuke, our most powerful weapon.  Perhaps it’s too dangerous, because the ship landed in a major metro area but the idea never even comes up.  Other examples are the basic plot of Superman’s origin itself, as represented in the movie.  The comics and other films have mostly touched on the origin story in passing and probably for good reason.  It’s basically preposterous.  This one focuses on it directly and that means we want real answers.  At no time did I ever buy that Superman might be the only one who could make it off the planet.  I did not see why his mother or father wouldn’t or couldn’t go with him.  I saw no reason that a race of aliens that spread out to the stars would suddenly abandon all other colonies and live on a single planet.  I didn’t believe that if they had hundreds of colonies not one of them would survive without its mother planet, Krypton.  I can’t see any reason they would mine the planet’s core.  It goes on and on.  There are plenty of good answers the writers could have come up with to all of these questions.  They didn’t bother.  The only one they did give is when Superman asks his father why he didn’t come too?  “I’m a product of this society and I share it’s destiny,” he says or some such hokey shit like that I can’t remember exactly.  Huh?  That’s the same level of crappy logic when Anakin Skywalker asks his mother why she won’t come with him in the later Star Wars films.  Anakin rescues here from slavers who torture her.  She is free yet she says “my place is here.” As a slave?  What?  Makes no sense.

When writers fail to answer the questions the story poses inherently, then a story just falls apart at the seams.  I wanted to like this movie.  I stuck it out, even as I saw other folks leaving.  I’ve rarely seen people just walk out of a film, especially a popcorn summer movie where the action often doesn’t have a deeper meaning.  I’ve seen people stay for worse films.  It wasn’t even the worst movie I’ve seen this year, not by a long shot.  Man of Steel, as I said, had flashes of brilliance and moments that made me feel but they were gone too fast.  I think people walked out because Superman means more to them.  He symbolizes the best parts of ourselves.  He’s a Christ figure, something we wish we could live up to and rarely can.  The writers knew this, they just chose to tell us that, over and over, instead of showing us.  That’s why this movie hurts more and people take off before it’s over.  We wanted to believe but we ultimately got something that didn’t really work.  That made the fall of the man of tin much, much harder and more unforgivable.

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It takes place in China in 2086, during the outbreak of a civil war that leads into China becoming the world’s first direct democracy, a society with no centralized control and where everything is voted on by all the people.  It’s one of the most important times in my future history and one that’ve I’ve looked forward to writing about for a long time.

NOTE:  This is an alpha version.  It may have typos, inconsistencies, plot strands missing and anything and everything else wrong with it.  That said, I’m putting it out here because I’m liking the way it’s reading so far, but all or none of this stuff might not make the final version of the book for a variety of reasons, whether it is good or not.

The Jasmine Wars

by Daniel Jeffries

Age of Transcendence: Book Two

version 0.0.2013.06.015.001.ALPHA

Chapter ONE: Red Sun in Morning

Shanghai, 2086

A thirteen year old Guan Yu remembered the hard red sun in the morning and the fierce rain that followed.   He woke up early to the sound of his mother and other women crying and saw the swollen sun, low in the sky.  Above the sprawl of a small plastic Hutong at the edges of the greater Shanghai, the clouds moved fast, filled with rage.

There was a lot of noise in the house already.  Voices.  Movement.  Shuffling.  He’d gotten into his clean white funeral clothes early.

His oldest brother was dead.

Guan felt sad, but Bojing broke the law.  It wasn’t written law, but people knew what not to do in China.  Everyone knew.

His mother cried when she told him.  He didn’t understand crying.  Like his father had always said, “emotions are for inside.”  Only women could cry and they should do that in private.

He remembered how news of his brother’s death came as an instamessage to his mother.  Nobody came to tell her in person.  They just flicked a note shorter than a Bai Juyi poem.  “Bojing died of complications in custody.”

She’d cried for days in her room.  When she was around him, she’d restrained herself, holding her head up and dressing impeccably every day, her hair perfect.

He looked out the window and thought about his brother’s face.  He told the village personality to bring up pictures of him, but it was having trouble.  Three different pictures projected on the window, but they were disappearing from the net, erased by the authorities’ net-stalkers.  He waved the pictures away.

His other brother, Feng, burst into his room and closed the door.  Guan turned slowly.

“I need you to hide this,” his brother said through gritted teeth.

Guan looked down at the small biosoft array in Feng’s grip.  It fit comfortably in his big hand, with subtle curves for his fingers.  Guan could just make out the Blue Sun logo on his brother’s most prized possession.  It was a knock off, fabbed up in an industrial grade synth with pirated blueprints, but still powerful and coveted.  It was almost impossible to tell fakes from the real thing these days, despite government crack downs.

Guan looked at him and said nothing, showing no emotion.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“You gotta take this.  It’s got everything.  They can’t find me with it.  They’ll crack it.”  His brother stepped forward and stood over him, looking down.  He pressed the array forward.

At fifteen, Feng had a few years and a few inches on him.  He had a fighter’s reach and heavy knuckles.

“Take it.”

Guan wanted the little machine but he knew what it meant to have it.  “No.”

“What do you mean, no?  You always wanted it.”

Guan just stared back.  The red light streamed through the windows and painted everything with its fire.  His brother’s eyes blazed.

“You better hide it yourself.  Before they get here.  I don’t want to know where it is,” said Guan.

“You’re a shǎbī, you know?  Maybe I’ll hide it in your room.  They come looking I’ll tell ‘em where it’s at.”

“They won’t believe you.”

“Zǒugǒu.   Only do what you’re told, eh?   No thoughts of your own?  Just a little dog running around, licking boots.  One day they’ll come for you to.  Dogs get kicked.”

His brother stared at him but turned and left with the incriminating machine.

****

The rain slashed down.  Cheap umbrellas glowed, their handles bright in the dark afternoon.  Some of the older men wore coated bamboo hats and carried nothing, walking with their hands clasped behind them.  Lights blinked softly on everyone’s AR shades, subtle flickering as data packets hit them.  Guan could hear the rain battering the plastic roofs.  The big drops rebounded when they hit the streets, smearing everyone’s funeral whites dirty with dark mud.

All of the neighbors were out.  They crowded the narrow, winding streets.  The houses were all marked with media paint, that flickered with comforting sayings for the dead.   Guan was a pallbearer, but the casket of his older brother didn’t feel heavy at all.  There was nothing in it.  They police never released his brother’s body.  They wouldn’t.  Everyone knew you didn’t die of natural causes in custody.

Guan could see Feng on the opposite side of the simple casket.  He was looking around nervously, his shades blinking frantically, filling with feeds from the swarmnets.

Guan looked around.  He knew he couldn’t see the bugs his brothers spread all over the city, but he knew they were there, tiny moving relays and routers, all of them blazing with forbidden information.  He’d seen red PRC drones hovering through the city streets spraying to kill the illegal bugs, but they couldn’t kill them all.

When they couldn’t kill the invisible insects they killed people like his brother.

Despite its lightness the casket was starting to weigh on him.  Maybe he should have taken the array.  But there are rules.  And rules are there for a reason.  His father always said that.

The casket was cut-rate, not at all like the big, ornate ones he’d seen at other funerals on the vids.  It had some animated Shanghainese flickering on it, but not much else.  No pictures.  No photos or vids of the dead playing on its cheap resin skin.

Everyone brought flowers, hundreds of them, all of them white or the artificial translucent ones popular now, filled with firefly luciferin so they glowed softly in the late afternoon.  People carried them and it looked beautiful, the flowers bobbing up and down as is floating on a stream.   Feng had brought red flowers, an insult and a commentary.  Colored meant good fortune for people who’d lived a long life.  Bojing was eighteen when he died.

Suddenly there was a commotion up ahead.  Yelling.  The crowd rolled.  Shouting.  Boots pounding.  The crowd parted, spreading to both sides.  Men in light blue armor pushed through the crowd with hard and angular pulse rifles.  Two of them carried brightly shining shock sticks.  They hit people at random and they collapsed, as a sticks overloaded their nervous systems.  Guan could see the glowing police badges blazing above them in the dark sky.

Feng turned to run and the crowd split to let him through.  Hands helped him navigate.  Two of the police broke into a run.  The men in the crowd made it hard for the cops to get through, interfering subtly.

“Oh sorry.”

“Sorry.”

They all made like they couldn’t figure out which way to go, getting in the men’s way, but getting out of the way of his brother, who was running all out now.  The police pushed and shoved.  The two men with shock sticks waded into the crowd swinging wildly.  The crowd fell back when one of the cops raised his rifle.

Guan lost his grip on the casket as the crowd surged.  With two missing pall bearers it crashed into the ground, spilling the cheap paper stuffing inside it onto the dirty street.

The tallest cop tackled Feng and they slid along the ground, spraying rain and mud.  A short, fat cop caught up and kicked Feng in the ribs, while the taller one wrenched his arms back.  They sprayed his hands with blue restraining glue and yanked him up.  His mother was screaming and crying, trying to get to him.

“No, you can’t take him.  Please.  Please.”

Two of the cops shoved her back.  They had snake’s eyes, icy and pitiless.

“Don’t take him.  He’s just a boy.  He hasn’t done anything.  He doesn’t know anything.  He’s a good boy.  I swear it.  Please.”

But they weren’t listening.

The rain came down even harder, slicing into the crowd.

***

“I won’t let them take you,” said his mother.  She had a round face, like a pearl, and just as white.  Her hair stood out dark against her soft features.   Guan looked up at her and said nothing.

She looked at him, her eyes big and luminous, the color of bloodstone.   Most women had fake eyes now.  Hers were real, she’d told him a dozen times proudly.

“Just be quiet,” she said.  “Do like I said.  And if anything happens, you run.  You don’t look back.  Run to where I told you.  You pay attention to what I say.”

He nodded.

She kissed his face.

It shocked him.

She’d never kissed him before.  She’d never hugged him.  You didn’t do that in China.  Then she kissed him again.  He didn’t know what to do but bow his head.

Her dress flowed all around her, the animations in it subtle and monotone, like chalk drawings on black crepe paper.  She took his hand and lead him through the tall gold gates of the local communist party boss’ house.  A fence kept it walled off from the community surrounding it.  Compound eye cameras started down at them, swiveling.  Battle Drones scanned them with blue light as they passed.   Guards stood everywhere, unmoving, holding light weight rifles, made from graphene infused plastic.  More guards patrolled the terraced upper floors of the mansion, its decks ornate, gold and red and gilded.

The local boss, Chonglin, sat on a chair, big as a throne.  He was surrounded by guards.  Kan men gu.  Dogs watching the entrance.

Chonglin was a thin man with a huge smile that seemed permanent.  The rings on his fingers glittered as he sticked another slice of roast pheasant into his tiny mouth.  He had a heavy brow and small eyes.  He wore a scarf, threaded with beads of colored light.  Everything about his jacket was ornate, the bright red fabric laced with intricately painted dragons.

When she got close enough the guards halted her with a gesture.   Chonglin smiled widely at her and said nothing, but the smile died at his eyes.  Looking her over, he carefully and meticulously wiped his hands with a gold laced napkin.   Then he went back to eating.   She stood patiently while he devoured the rest of his pheasant slowly.

Guan watched his mother standing there, her hands at her sides, her head slightly down.  Then he looked at the beautifully prepared pheasant.  They’d never had pheasant.  The synth they had was controlled.  It only made what it was supposed to make, based on strict centrally managed software locks.

Chonglin obsessively wiped his hands after every few bites and the only sounds were the drones overhead and the breeze.  The guards next to him stood unmoving.  When he was finished he sat and picked his teeth, not looking at her.  After a few minutes, he placed the pick down in a special holder, with a considered motion.  A guard brought a bowl of soapy water and he carefully washed his hands and took his time drying them.

Finally, he spoke, turning towards her, his salesman’s smile returning.

“They say cleanliness is half your health.  Very important to be clean don’t you agree?”

His smile seemed almost warm, as if he had just invited them over for tea and a long smoke.

“Oh, essential, but so hard to stay clean these days,” his mother said.

Chonglin nodded.  “Yes.  There’s dirt everywhere, hiding in all the nooks and cracks.  You have to scrub hard to get it out.”

“Yes, and sometimes the stains won’t go away, not matter how hard you scrub.  Sometimes we just have to live with stains.”

They were quiet for a moment.

He looked at her, his hands folded.  “Mmmmmm.  Well, they tell me you have something to say.”

“Everyone says you’re a reasonable man,” said his mother.

He said nothing.

“Chonglin Ching-Kuo,” she said, using the formal honorific of his name.  “My other boys have paid the price.  They broke the law.  I understand they got…what was right.  But my last son is all I have.  He’s a young boy.  Not smart.  He barely even talks.  Please.  He refused to help his brothers.  He’s a good boy.  Look at him.  He’s all I have left.  Don’t take him.”

Chonglin looked over the mother and the son.  He picked his teeth for a minute.  Then he said: “Young boys grow up.  And when he does, he’ll be like his brothers.  He’ll want to spread their poison.  He’ll want to spread lies and foreign thoughts.”

He slammed the table suddenly, his smile gone.

“No.  He’s not that way.  He wouldn’t help his brothers when they came to him.  He knows what’s right.  Please.  He’s nothing.  Just a small boy.  He’s no threat to anyone.”

“Dissent runs in the family.  You wipe it out by wiping out the whole family.  Arrest them both.”

The guards started to move but Guan’s mother was fast, moving suddenly, a leopard leaping.  One moment she was standing next to Guan and the next she was on the boss, her arm around his neck.  Guan’s mouth fell open.  He’d never see his mother move like that.

Her hands glowed brilliant red, her short fingers laced with tiny explosive rings, powerful enough to rip down half the mansion.

Guan took a step back, shocked, unsure what to do next.

“Go, Guan.  Go.  Run.”

He stood frozen and she shouted at him again.  She held the boss tight.  The guards all had their guns raised at her.  They weren’t paying attention to Guan.

“Go,” she screamed and he took off running, leaping over a low wall, lined with cherry trees and running all out.

“Anyone moves,” she said “and the house comes down.  Go, Guan.  Go like I told you.”

Even though she’d told him not to, he turned around to see his mother one more time.  She was distracted by his moment of weakness, looking towards her only son for a second too long and the boss slipped her grip and threw her off him.  A soldier blasted her and her head exploded in red streaks like fireworks, her body flying back.

Guan ran harder now.

“Get him.  Get him.  Don’t let that little wángbādàn escape.”

Guan ran fast, his head swimming, his mind on fire, feeding his legs.  He was always faster than his brothers.  He ran through the gate and headed down the streets she’d shown him, the way streaming up on his glasses, lighting the ground with translucent overlaid footsteps.   He could hear them coming for him, as he ducked into the first alley.

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Q: One aspect of your work that clearly stands out is your character development.  In review after review on Amazon, readers point out your characters more than almost any other trait of your books.  What do you think it is that makes readers connect so deeply with the people in your stories?  What have you learned about character development that many other authors seem to miss, particularly sci-fi authors?

A: I don’t know what works well with my characters. I try to use an equal mix of dialogue and reflection to build out a character. I think one thing we can overlook as authors is that our characters have families, occupations, and pockets full of things. They often feel naked and friendless to me. They don’t carry anything with them. They are just used to move along the plot. I work very hard to avoid these traps, however tempting they can be.

Q: Many articles have talked about you as if you were an overnight success, which seems a little unfair, considering you wrote a number of books before Wool.  Can you talk a little bit about some of the challenges you’ve faced as you worked at becoming a full-time author?

A: My biggest challenge was to write every day. It required getting up early in the morning to write before work, sitting in a conference room on my lunch break and writing for an hour straight, and generally staying indoors when it was gorgeous outside. You have to really love what you are doing or have a strong will to stick with this for years with no sign of it ever leading to a career. I had to write and consider myself a writer. I had to endure a lot of eye-rolling and people avoiding my table at book signings. It really helps to have family members and a spouse who believe in you and enjoy your work.

Q: Something you said in your Wired interview stuck with me long after I read it.  You recalled going to a writing conference and hearing a panelist say “You just write! You stop dreaming of writing. You stop talking about writing. You stop wishing you were writing. And you write!”  Tell us about the internal shift that happened at that moment.  What changed about how your approached writing after that?

A: The author was the mother half of the Charles Todd team. She shamed me. That’s what happened. She shamed the entire room of us, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I realized that the only thing preventing me from writing a novel was myself. I was getting in the way. Mrs. Todd slapped that person inside of me, knocked him down, and I stepped over his lifeless body and got to work.

Q: There are some who argue that self-publishing just resulted in a glut of bad writing hitting the market.  Donald Maass, one of the most well-known and respected sci-fi agents, said “Self-publishing is not a good idea. Sorry.”   Do you think the self-publishing movement is good for readers and writers or is it somewhat of a mixed bag?

A: I think it’s the best thing to happen to readers and writers since the proliferation of the printing press. Donald Maass must think the internet would be better if a board of editors okayed every website proposed. The proliferation of URLs does nothing to clog up the internet, just as the outpouring of books does nothing to hurt the publishing industry. More content means more chance of something new and interesting cropping up. All it takes is a single enterprising and adventurous reader to turn up the next gem. And these days, many books are self-published without first querying someone like Mr. Maass. We are doing quite fine without his services. Readers are as well.

Q: If a writer is thinking about self-publishing, what are the most crucial steps for him or her to take?   How can he or she avoid getting lumped in with some of the sloppier work that’s out there?

A: Revise, revise, revise. And then edit, edit, edit. I do seven or eight full passes on my work before I’m satisfied. And then I send the draft to my wife, my mom, anyone who will read it. I take their feedback and do another couple of passes. I send the work to a half dozen beta readers, who look for mistakes in exchange for an early read and a free book. And then I do another set of passes, one for each beta reader.

I put all my efforts into the writing, revising, and editing. I spend almost no time on my blurbs. I found success with my own cover art. I hit the bestseller lists before I started hiring out anything, so it can be done. It just requires patience and diligence.

Q: Steven Pressfield wrote an excellent article analyzing the differences between the deal you made with a traditional publisher for e-pub rights to Wool and the deal EL James made for 50 Shades of Grey.  Pressfield really framed it as if it were a watershed moment in publishing history in terms of economics and author empowerment.  Did you have any idea of the importance of that decision at the time?  Was it more a question of just being in the right place at the right time, or was there a larger strategy at work?

A: I realized the importance to me at the time. I never wanted to sign away lifetime rights to my digital editions. The economics don’t make sense. In the past, books have had three or six months to sell. Now, they have decades. Centuries. Signing that away, watching your prices shoot up and rights never revert feels like putting a young and healthy horse out to pasture. You’d have to pay me far more than a book is worth to have me do that.

As much as I admired Steven’s article, I think it sold Mrs. James short and gave me too much credit. The numbers relied on units sold. I don’t think Mrs. James would have sold that many books without Random House behind her. She was very smart to sign the deal she signed. I was dumb lucky to sign mine. I think we’re both happy with how things turned out.

Q: Who were some of the authors who influenced you growing up, be they sci-fi or otherwise?  What about their work did you connect with?

A: The authors who influenced me the most are the ones who taught me about what it means to be human. Steven Pinker, Judith Rich Harris, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins. I grew as a writer when I dove into non fiction. My plot ideas and characterizations improved.

Q: What’s your take on the singularity, an idea beloved by futurists like Ray Kurzwiel and lampooned by others like Doctorow as the “rapture of the nerds?”   Where do you think mankind is headed, ultimately?   Are we in for a massive disaster or do we reach the stars and evolve into supermen, a la the Culture in Iain M Banks novels?

A: I don’t think it’ll ever happen. Science fiction authors and futurists are always overly optimistic. Take any date and double it. We spend too much of our time, money, and resources warring with one another to make the sort of progress we geeks would love to see.

I think humanity will dwindle due to apathy more than collapse from disaster. Fears of a population explosion are overblown. We have a population collapse looming, as more and more people choose to have fewer and fewer children. The UN population report has us topping out and then going into a major decline. The greatest hurdle humanity will face will be a future of such opulence and leisure that nobody wants to grow up, nobody has more than two children, many don’t have kids at all, and crumbling cities sit empty and begin to rot. I think this will take thousands of years, however, and much of what we see will appear like progress over this time. Our ethics will improve and expand. Our lives will get better and better. There will just be fewer people around to enjoy it all.

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If you want to become an artist, someone who says what’s really on your mind, tells the truth, doesn’t compromise, and lives authentically then you’ve got to slay self-delusion with absolute ruthlessness.  In other words, you’ve got to become self aware.  Before you can really change what’s wrong you have to know what’s wrong.  To do that you have to be able to see clearly.  It’s probably no surprise that most of the time you can’t/don’t/won’t.  Much of the time we’re like people trying to change a clock by moving it around the room.  We see the world through a constant distortion field that we can’t perceive.  We’re a collection of beliefs and thoughts that are unexamined hand-me-downs and reactions to the particular circumstances we grew up in.  We’re tossed around by echoes of the past and visions of the future like a small ship caught in a terrifying sea storm.

Psychologists call this state of self-deception cognitive dissonance. What the hell is that, you wonder? That’s where we believe something that’s just not true, despite all evidence to the contrary. How does this happen?  Well, we don’t like to feel pain.  So we make shit up.  We look for internal harmony with beliefs that just can’t and won’t fit together.  Most of us are master of self deception.  Even worse, most of us don’t know how much we lie to ourselves.  If you pay close attention you’ll be surprised at how often you whisper something to yourself that doesn’t really line up with reality.  In particular we tend to overestimate our skills and downplay our weaknesses.  This self-delusion is death to an artist and it must be destroyed with total ruthlessness.  As an artist you have to gut yourself and look inside and not be afraid by what you find there.  You have to see your story naked as if someone else wrote it.

I talk with writers just starting out quite often.  Actually I try to avoid this as often as possible because 99.9% of the time I find the same sets of self delusions that are common to anyone starting out and unfortunately many people who’ve been at it for awhile.  What usually happens is someone emails me or comes up to me and says they want my opinion, they want criticism of their idea and story.  They say they want to understand what it takes to become an artist.  They say all that, but they don’t really want it at all.  What they really want is for me to tell them their idea is perfect, their first draft is already wonderful and that the don’t have to actually dedicate any time to writing.  They secretly hope that books will just magically write themselves and appear by their bedside one day, after waking up from a good night’s rest, with a quote from Stephen King on the cover saying that this is a breathtaking new author.  They’re hoping they’re different and that writing is easy.  It’s not.  It’s fucking hard work.  It takes time.  There are so few exceptions that they are statistically meaningless.

How do you fix this?  You face the truth.  You look at your work like it was somebody else’s.  You tear apart your assumptions until they stand up to questioning and scrutiny.  You accept nothing at face value.  Over and over again, you set aside your fear, sadness, rage and depression and you take a look at what is being said and you try to find the core value hidden in the criticism you’ve received.  Often you can do this by looking for patterns.  If a number of people have said the same things, you should start there.

This is all hard work.  You will fail at it much of time, even after you get good at it. If you’re just starting out writing, I hate to tell you this but the chances are your self delusion knows no bounds.  Hearing this now and knowing it, even at the intellectual level, is a good start.  It will save you time.

Now, if you are thinking of sending me something or asking me about your work and you’re a new writer, or even someone who’s been at it for a bit but have not broken through, let me save you some time by predicting and answering your questions ahead of time.

Q: How’s my idea?

A: More than likely it’s not polished, too long, too wordy, focused on irrelevant details, rambling and been done before.  Work on it.

The very first thing you need to get right as a story teller is your premise.   There are several techniques out there to learn how to do this.  Pick one.  Work with it.  Try them all.  Some say it has to be one sentence or two or three.  Some will insist it’s phrased a certain way like “when so and so happens, this happens.”  It doesn’t really matter.  I prefer to get it down in one sentence, a la the Truby methodology.  Some people think that you can’t describe your story in a sentence or two.  I encourage you to reexamine that belief.  You most certainly can.  In fact, it’s safe to say that if you don’t, your premise won’t just be unfocused and rambling, your story will too.  You don’t want that.  Work on it.  Work on it over and over until almost everyone you pitch it to says man that’s a good idea.  Do that BEFORE you start actually writing anything else.

Q: Is writing a lonely life like Hemingway said?

A: Yes.

Q: Can I ameliorate some of the loneliness by writing with other people or in groups?

A: No.  Writing is done by yourself, with as few other distractions as possible.  Disable the internet, except for research, turn off the TV, your music, your phone, put down the alcohol and the drugs, get away from your friends and family.  Focus.  By yourself.  This is the essential part of writing and it is not a team sport.

Q: Can I kill the loneliness by socializing, drinking, taking drugs, hanging out, and/or doing something else?

A: No.  It never goes away when you are actually writing new material.  It’s can only be overcome again each day by WRITING.

Q: Is writing with groups a good idea?

A: Almost never.  See above two answers.

Q: Should I go to writing conferences?

A: This is generally a complete waste of time, unless you are just socializing or have a polished story to sell.  You are better off writing, reading, or reading something about writing, rather than talking about writing.

Q: What about writing seminars?

A: These can be excellent, depending the teacher and their method.  Anything that focuses on craft is important to your development.

Q: How’s my first draft?

A: It’s a mess.  Seriously.  Unless some miracle has happened, it’s not that good.  In fact it needs a lot of work.  This was true for Shakespeare, Hemingway, Faulkner and whoever else you feel like throwing on the list.  Their first drafts sucked.  Yours does too.  And no, you are not special.  Sorry.  Does this mean you never churn out a chapter or a few chapters that are great due to some wave of unexplained inspiration?  Nope.  Of course that happens some time.  There might be a number of bright, shining spots in your work.  It’s just that it probably doesn’t hang together very well.  Taken as a whole it doesn’t work yet, even if you went through an outline phase first.  So put it aside and then work on it again.

Q: I can write a funky non-standard query letter and that will really stand out to agents/publishers.

A: No.  It won’t.  It will most likely make you look like an amateur.

Q: There are no rules to writing.

A: Wrong.  There are a lot of them.

Q: My story transcends the rules.

A: No it doesn’t.  Very few writers can transcend the rules of good story telling like creating powerful conflict, rising tension, and a character that goes through a profound change by story’s end.  If they do transcend, they might find a brand new way around one of them, at most two, but not more than that in a single work or over a career.

Q: I got a bunch of negative criticisms and bad reviews.  None of these idiots know what they’re talking about.  They’re all just biased, mainstream story lovers and stupid.  They didn’t understand that I was going for something different and unique.  My story is actually amazing and everyone else just can’t see what I am trying to do.

A: No. More than likely they’re right.  It’s not that critics are never wrong.  Some stories are so different that people may not be ready for them, because they have no context to judge it against.  Chances are your story is not one of those.  If it is one of those, you’ve already moved well beyond the thinking I’m outlining here.  You know your first draft sucked, you know what scenes you really struggled with, what themes had to get tossed out because they didn’t work.  In short, you’re self aware enough to know that it will take some time for people to get it.  This happened to Melville.  People hated Moby Dick.  Unfortunately, even knowing it may not be enough.  He was so distraught that people hated it, that he gave up writing for the rest of his life.  It’s hard to live with the realization that something you feel like you worked hard on sucks.  It’s painful.  And that’s why we lie to ourselves, swear it’s everyone else.  Look, the publishers who rejected Harry Potter were wrong, but these are the outliers.  Most of the time, the public gets it right.  Really.  They’re not all knuckle-dragging morons who can’t figure out what they like and don’t like.  In reality, there is something wrong with your book and you need to dig in, put aside your rage and fear and LISTEN.  After that, MAKE CHANGES.  There are no exceptions to this order of operations.  Or just leave it like it is, because it’s already perfect.

Of course, none of this applies to you right?

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Was it the Arab Spring that inspired them?  Many leaders have admitted they feared their own Arab Spring.  I don’t think, that’s not the whole story though.  To me it is something more.  For so many reasons this should not be happening.  The current President, Thein Sein, a former military commander himself, who was hand picked by his predecessor, a ruthless authoritarian monster Than Shwe, who got rich and fat on the country’s slim profits.  It was supposed to be a slow opening up, a “disciplined democracy.”  Yet it’s been swift and decisive.  In 2011 he freed a prominent democracy leader, “the Lady” Miss Suu Kyi, a national icon.  It wasn’t long ago that even her name was unspeakable.  Yet years of misinformation campaigns and attempts to discredit her failed to put even the slightest dent in her popularity with the people, who admire her for her refined beauty and her willingness to give up her family and her freedom for the freedom of the whole.  Reforms have come swiftly, after Thein Sein met with her in private.  Neither party will discuss what was discussed.  Things are moving at a ripping pace that has stunned the world.  Her party won 43 of the 44 seats it contested, by huge margins, trouncing the general’s party, the USDP.  Obama was the first US President to ever visit there.  And now we may just have a thriving democracy right on China’s doorstep, a foothold in what will likely increasingly become the center of the world in years to come.

Burma sits at the nexus of Southeast Asia bordered by China, Thailand, India, Laos and Bangladesh.  It could be a passage to all of them, but for 50 years it was a backwards land, scorned by the world, as North Korea is today, a pariah.  Now it stands to gain much and become a massive center of trade, transport, mining, manufacturing and tourism.  It’s rich in minerals, oil, precious stones and natural gas.  It has some of the most beautiful Buddhist temples anywhere in the world, that have rarely been seen by outsiders.  It has thousands of them, often not far from each other, all of them absolutely breathtaking.  You can see some of these stunning Myanmar Buddhist temples here.  I’d love to see them up close one day.  It’s one of the strangest and most beautiful stories I’ve seen in years and after always hearing so many horror stories, it’s sometimes nice to hear something the doesn’t make you sorry to be a human being.

It’s important to understand that not all life is consistently predictable.  As a sci-fi author, that’s hard to admit.  Yet, life is made up of trillions and trillions of variables.  Often we seen the same patterns over and over.  If you’re a betting man, you probably even think the country will fail.  But they might not.  The truth is that sometimes the darkness does fall away and the light is reborn.  You can’t say something is inevitable, unless it’s death or taxes.

The people are of course cautious.  Rightly so.  They’ve been abused for so long.  They’ve had their hopes dashed before.  It’s hard to find an adult male who hasn’t been to prison for saying the wrong thing.  Yet, as the reforms have held, for two years now, people gradually come out of their shell.  It’s people deal with tragedy different from the west.  Most of them are Buddhist.  They often feel that if this life is miserable, then perhaps the next life will be different.  If nothing else, Buddhists understand suffering.

For now, I chose to believe.  For once, Universe make me right and let me see our better natures win out against the darkness.

The post Why Myanmar May be the Most Interesting Place in the World Right Now appeared first on Me Uploads.

This morning I published my book on Amazon.com.  You can snag a copy of the Scorpion Game here if you want.  Smashwords is pending inclusion in the premium catalogue.  This is my moment, the one where I am officially an author because I have something to sell.  A massive swirl of emotions swept through me when I hit that button.  The book is live.  Yet, this moment was built from a series of other moments.  One of them almost derailed the whole process.

There is nothing worse than making all of the right decisions and then making the wrong ones at the end, at the crucial moment.  I saw this in sports the other day, when LeBron James made two simple mental mistakes and lost game two of the Eastern Conference Finals.  As great as LeBron is, he already knows he cost them the game, after scoring and defending perfectly all game.  As a true artist, he already knows it.  Make no mistake the man is an artist.  In the last few seconds, he had two turnovers when he needed to score or pass to the open man.  Those two mental mistakes cost them they game.  LeBron knows he fucked up, but he isn’t dwelling on it.  As a true artist, he is focused on now, focused on today, I guarantee you that.  He’s fixing it.  A great artist knows how to not make the same mistakes twice.  He will have a different mental attitude tonight.  They might not win, but if it comes to him when it counts, he will deliver.

The decision that almost derailed my book at the last second, was the cover.  The last few days I completely redid it and threw out a cover I’d been working on for months.  It was the right thing to do.  I hit the open shot.  I almost dropped the ball though.  How?  Well, I’ve done an incredible amount of the work on the book.  I cut out whole subplots, rewrote almost every chapter, moved things around; all of it for the good of the book.  I commissioned an artist to paint my cover and he delivered a beautiful painting.  I went to work in Photoshop to add the text.  I know the program well, so I’m not afraid to get in there and get dirty.  But, a month later I was still noodling with my cover, secretly unhappy.  Finally, I showed it to my wife.  She’s a real designer, the kind of person who feels physical pain when things are a millimeter off.  In half a day, she knew what was wrong.  The image was distracting from the text, the text had no place to sit easily based on the composition, the colors were wrong. Etc.  In short, the painting that I’d paid not an unsubstantial amount of money for was worthless to me.  I could either go with the sub-par cover that I had, after putting in all that work, or redesign it from the ground up.

I did the right thing at the crucial moment.  I started over.  I threw out the image.  It will only be for promotion now and posters, but it ain’t the cover.  Luckily, I didn’t need to commission another artist and spend weeks on it.  A part of me already knew that at the unconscious level.  I had created an alternative design weeks before in a drunken haze.  I showed it to my developmental editor Rich Mcdowell and he said, “I’d buy that book,” but he didn’t like the one I’d been working on for so long.  My alternative wasn’t perfect, but it had the right elements to make it work, unlike the others one.  My wife went to work on it; making the design subtler, adding designer flourishes.  It was a war for a day between us, but we got it done.  And it looks great.  It looks great in all kinds of sizes, which is important for the modern consumer.  If it doesn’t look good at the thumbnail level, then it doesn’t look good at all.

My friend laughed at me when I told him the story.  “After all that you went through on the damn cover, you threw it out.”  Yup.  I’ve thrown out much bigger things.  As an artist you have to be ruthless.  For that you need incredible self-awareness.  You need to make the right decision at the crucial moment, not the easy one.  The easy one is always wrong.  Always.  That’s your litmus test.

You can see the two covers below.  It will probably be obvious which one I chose, but I’ll let you, the people, decide.  Maybe I’m wrong.  If I am, I’ll change it.  And I will never look back and feel anything for the stuff left on the cutting room floor.

Now, what will you do at the moment of truth in your own life?

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It happened strangely, unexpectedly, as it often does.  I was sitting in my home office, when I was still working for myself.  I was watching Osho on YouTube.  He’s an iconoclastic guru with a hypnotic voice.  Later I realized I could have been watching anyone quite frankly.  I was taking another call from another problem client I was sick of it all.  What was the point?   80-20 rule.  20% of your clients will give you 80% of your hassle.  Osho’s voice was there in the background, droning, insistent, on low.  I wasn’t really listening and then I was.  I was suddenly, totally and completely awake and aware.  I could hear every sound in the room, every bird, ever insect in the distance.  “I have to go,” I said suddenly, to the person on the phone and it was a command from deep in my belly.  I hung up.

I stood up, at once dazed and yet totally self aware at once.  Everything seemed luminous and lit from within.  I laughed.  I laughed so loudly and brilliantly and I didn’t care.  I didn’t need to listen to Osho anymore so I flicked the video off.  I sat down and listened to the silence for a moment, surging all around me, the loving, absolute and perfect silence that controls and gives meaning to all things.  I laughed again, loving the sound of it and it boomed out to mingle with the insects chirping and the birds circling in the endless sky.  I stood up again and realized I didn’t need anything that I had, that it was all a prison behind my eyes.  I walked outside and left the door unlocked.  I didn’t need anything and I didn’t care if someone came and stole it all.  I had no plan to ever come back to it.  I knew I could simply leave it and that it didn’t matter in the least.  It was all nothing.

I started walking.  There was nowhere to go and nothing to do.  It didn’t matter which way I went.  I looked around me and everything was suffused with light.  The trees especially seemed filled with energy that whirled and pulsed, electric, alive.  I stood and looked at them, no longer in any hurry, no longer with anything to do.  I could sit there and really see for once.  I didn’t know where to go, so I just walked.  I found myself at an old bridge that hangs across a canyon and I sat down on it.  I’m afraid of heights but I didn’t care.  I sat down and just felt the power of understanding crashing through me.  I could not smile any bigger.  Children and families came across the bridge and I heard their laughter and loved them.  I knew that I could just get up and keep walking and never look back.  I didn’t have to call anyone or do anything or wind anything down.  It would all take care of itself.  I could sit on park benches for the rest of my life and just feel this wonderful feeling forever until I died.

I knew then that death was nothing but the stripping away of everything that is false in us, everything that is not us, our possessions, our hopes and dreams, our thoughts, our fears, our friends and lovers.  How arrogant for us to think that we continue as we are now forever in some mythical afterlife.  All that we are now is just a passing form, one of trillions and trillions in the universe, all of it an endless dance.  Thinking these forms should live forever was the essence of sickness and arrogance and clinging to illusions.  It’s the cause of so much suffering.  There was no need for me as Dan Jeffries to continue indefinitely, because there is no me.  I realized that the Buddha didn’t remember all his past lives, he remembered all lives everywhere, because he was all lives that ever were or would be.  Everything was infinitely and intricately connected.  There was nothing outside of God.  There was no you or me, or life or death, it was all just a play of form, nothing but dust.  It was all meaningless and yet it was all filled with so much meaning.  All of these thoughts hit me not as thoughts but as feelings.  They hit me with absolute certainty.  There was no need for thoughts.  None of it was theory or speculation.  It just was.  My mind was completely silent and at peace.

And so I was at a crossroads.  I knew I was done.  I had figured out what everyone was trying to figure out.  There was nothing else to know.  I didn’t need to help anyone because everyone would come to the same understanding in time.  The universe is nothing if not patient.  It waits out the eons as all of the stupid, destructive, ignorant species that rise and fall all over, in countless galaxies, making the same mistakes and then collapsing back into nothing.  Its plan is perfect.  It simply works, playing out again and again forever.  There is nowhere to go and nothing to do.

And yet, I couldn’t let go.

I thought, there are a few things I wanted to do in this life.  I wanted to write.  I had something to teach people, even though I don’t like teaching at all.  I wanted to do a few more things that it would take this exact point in existence to achieve.  Like all things that exist I will never exist again, exactly as I am now.  There is only one Daniel Jeffries and there will never be another.  The molds are destroyed, as they are for everyone, always.  And so I sighed and stood up and started to walk back to my house, having already made my decision.  I could see the color and energy leaking out of the trees, feel my vision fading so that everything looked normal again.  It stayed with me for a time, like a buzzing, a soft background noise.  And then one day it was gone, just a memory.

People always think that enlightenment is for someone else.  Even Buddhists think it’s for the Buddha, not them.  But the Buddha didn’t stick around to tell us things because he wanted us to follow him, he stuck around because it’s possible for everyone and everything to understand, to see.  And yet I’d walked away.  And it was gone.

But it’s never really gone.  You see, you can’t lose what you already have.  It is just dormant, waiting for me to finish.  Patient.  Always patient.

So one day, if you know me and suddenly you can’t reach me and I’ve disappeared, don’t be afraid.  Don’t go looking for me.  I’m not coming back.

But one day, you just might go down to park and see an old man, with a gnarly beard, smiling on a bench, just smiling, with nowhere to go and nothing more to worry about and he might look familiar.

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First off, before we go any further, you need to know that this only applies to major characters.  Minor or secondary characters don’t need to change during the story.  In fact, they probably shouldn’t.  Too many characters shifting around can confuse readers, making it hard to know who to focus on.  Not every character can have the kind of depth that comes from true character change over time.  And they don’t need it.  It’s all right for your stories to be peppered with the happy barista at the coffee shop, the tough guy at the bar, the severe boss, all of who never change at all.  When the the reader reaches the last page they’re still the happy barista and the tough guy.  But your main characters need to make the ultimate shift.

One more thing to know: There is one exception to the rule.  Tragedy.  In other words, the character fails to make the massive change the story demands.  That means they never realize their true potential and they fail at their life’s purpose.  Lots of stories end this way.  Usually it’s the villain who faces this fate.  Sometimes it’s the hero, though audiences really don’t like this very much and you’ll have a hard time selling it.  Do it, if it’s the right thing for your story, but avoid making your hero the failure if you can, at least in the most important parts of his life.  He can not be perfect in all aspects of his life.  He might have a failed marriage or a gambling habit or drink heavily.  But the big changes are what we care about.

The story arc moves simply for major characters.  He or she goes from loveless to lover, ruthless to compassionate, selfish to selfless.  Now all you have to do is line up all the odds against them.  Make sure the story is almost maliciously keeping people from their goals.  As Eckhart Tolle once said “life is there to frustrate you.  That’s it’s purpose.” In fact, once you know this, it might seem like it can ruin the best stories for you.  But always know that deeper understanding of stories always leads to even deeper understanding.

In real life, we all start out as something other than we were meant to be.  It’s the same in fiction.  This is really the only type of story we care about as readers.  We only want to see the big changes in life.  Minor fixes don’t mean much to us, because we’re all trying to realize our own purpose .  We want an instruction manual on how to do it and that’s what stories give us.

Once you know this, you can easily analyze stories and figure out how they’ll go.  That doesn’t mean there won’t be twists along the way.  There should be, actually.  Keep us guessing.  Let’s take a look at my current darling, Game of Thrones, a story I’ve studied a lot.  Take Jaime Lannister.  He’s cold blooded, conceited, and selfish when the story starts.  He’s having an affair with his sister.  He throws an eight year old out the window to cover their affair.  He’s hardly a redeemable character, but that’s exactly what the story will do for us.  Expect it.  Here’s how.  He’s humbled during his journey with Brianna of Tarth.  When they’re captured by highwayman, he talks them out of raping her.  He loses his hand for his good deed.  I don’t have to read the plot summary on Wikipedia to know that Jaime is on a redemption arc.  As soon as he turned into a POV character in the third book, this was written in the stars.  For a story to really break through and touch millions of people, to rise above all the other stories being produced on the planet right now, it must deliver this big change for all the main characters.  Jaime must become a good man and try to make up for his past sins.  This is what we want and what we need.  A good author knows this.  He delivers every time on this front, even if he drops the ball in a few other places.

Do this one little thing and your readers will love your stories.  They’ll feel like they’ve taken a journey and discovered something deeper about your characters and more importantly about themselves.

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Make no mistake, our system was never perfect.  But we did a lot of things right.  We were the first nation to require all kids to go to school.  As the 20th century started, we passed compulsory education laws and by 1920, 72% of all kids went to school.  Moves like that made all the difference in the world, singlehandedly bootstrapping entire generations out of farming and manual labor.  Back then we used to give teachers and individual school districts the chance to make their own decisions.  Each state acted like an idea factory.  The best ideas won and spread to other states.  That’s why I never worry when conservative school districts do stupid things like force Creationism into text books.  Eventually, Darwinism weeds foolish ideas out of existence.

Unfortunately, in 1965 we passed the first standardized tests laws.  I say unfortunately because we couldn’t leave well enough alone and just stop there.  We kept going as more bad ideas beget more bad ideas and more laws.  As the 80′s rolled around, we formed the National Commission on Excellence in Education to study how we could do better than the Japanese and other countries that we felt were rising to take our place in the world.  Their report, called A Nation at Risk, underscored the xenophobic paranoia of other nations set to steal our future.  In 2001 we did something about it and passed the No Child Left Behind laws, that stripped most teachers of their freedoms and forced them to spend most of the school year teaching children to memorize nonsense and throw it back up.  What’s left out is critical thinking.  The laws focused almost exclusively on reading, writing and math, the skills thought to deliver economic success for individuals and nation states.  Of course, all of those skills are crucial but they are absolutely not the most important factor in creating the next generations of entrepreneurs and free thinkers.  That takes critical thinking.  It’s not memorizing Shakespeare, but understanding what Shakespeare means.  Critical thinkers are the people who produce real change.  The question everything.  They look at the world, see what’s broken and come up with a new way to fix it.  Unfortunately, now kids will need to learn these skills out of the classroom.  Maybe if they’re lucky, they’ll learn them in college, but that’s probably too late.  Maybe it’s always been this way, but it wasn’t for me.  I was lucky enough to find one teacher that taught me critical thinking at a young age.  Even when I was a kid it was already a rare skill.  Now it might be almost impossible with the way education is structured.

The most important teacher I ever had was Mr. Dawson.  This man was a true teacher, someone who spent his entire summers traveling the world and reading every book you could imagine.  He used to teach the freshman English class so he could find the critical thinkers.  That was a more structured class with a lot of memorization.  But he was looking for the right kind of student, ones with inquisitive minds, who wanted to learn something.  He selected me and others for AP English and that was a very different type of class.  We sat in a circle.  There were no tests.  We wrote long papers that required thought and understanding.  When we debated in class we had to defend our points with clear examples.  We broke down film and literature like were were breaking down the football highlights on ESPN.  It was back then that I learned how to think and that’s made all the difference in the world. I’ve been able to adapt to changes, get jobs in multiple fields, and understand the inner workings of political, social and physical dynamics.  When I don’t know how to do something I just figure it out by looking at it critically, asking questions and mastering it by trial and error.  I believe most people are capable of this and probably a hell of a lot more.

Just think what it would be like if we were training the next scientists to think freely instead of just count?  What could they discover by thinking outside the prison of current thought patterns?  Maybe the next cancer breakthrough never comes, because we never taught our kids how to really look and understand. What unknown inventions might the world miss out on because people are taught to follow rules slavishly instead of finding the ones that need changing?  What if teachers were taught classes in logic and critical thinking?  How much more could they pass on to their children? I don’t have all the answers, as much as I like to delude myself sometimes that I do.  Once that nonsense fantasy has passed me by, I usually realize that I don’t know one tenth of one percent about anything.  By I do know one thing.  I’m not worth a shit when it comes to proof reading.  That’s all right.  I’ll trade that for big picture viewpoint any day.

We have a future.  It’s not too late.  We can turn things around.  We need to recognize that people need a complete education, one that takes into account all aspects of life and thought.  Art is as important as math.  Literature is as important as science.  Logic is as important as anything.  We have some wonderful shoulders to stand on.  If you’re lucky enough to be born an American, you started with a leg up on a lot of the world.  Most of the inventions that power the modern world were made right here.  Things like the light bulb, television, radio, airplanes, computers, the internet, they were all made right here.  American history is filled with brilliant critical thinkers who looked at the world and saw that it could be different.  And they did something about it.  They made things happen.  They blanketed the night with electric light, sent signals bouncing around the globe, sent man into space and probes to the outer reaches of our solar systems.  They created the skyscraper and the railroad and massive hunks of metal that can fly in the sky.  These are miracles that we take for granted every day.  They are all around us and they were created by critical thinkers.  We need more of them.  They were always in short supply anyway.  Now they’re an endangered species.

We need to turn this thing around, ignore the siren song of standardized results and refocus on critical thinking and imagination, the true hallmarks of American genius.

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