First Amendment Rights

 

            This has been a very hot and much used topic in the United States for many years.  It is also a topic that is used when comparing the freedom of speech in the US to countries like China.  And when you talk about extremes the less restrictive laws of the US are well above those of China.  Of course those of us in the US think that we are the least restrictive but Canada actually is even less so. 

            The reason that I have chosen to talk about this now is that it fits nicely behind my last blog about fibbing.  Now a storyteller who is writing fiction is allowed to stretch the truth.  They are, as a matter of fact, expected to.  But what of the press in the US today, are they allowed to stretch it?    It seems to me that with freedoms come responsibility.  A rule of law states that you have the right to scream your head off about pretty much anything that you want, but you are not allowed to yell fire in a crowded theatre.   Therein lays the responsibility.  But how is it that the press has come to a point that allows them to incite the public and to mislead them for the sake of garnering readership.  Is it not their job to report a story and not to create it? 

            The story that has my ire up is one written on one of the internet news pages that came from a television story.  The headline read; “Funeral director revives man.”  Now when I read that I got a picture in my mind of an undertaker discovering that a man in his parlor was not dead and that the funeral director revived him.  The truth is that a man who happened to be a funeral director was the first on the scene of an automobile pedestrian accident.  The pedestrian appeared to have been killed.  The man saw a passing ambulance and flagged it down and the ambulance crew, using a defibrillator, revived the pedestrian.  The only thing that the funeral director did was to flag down the ambulance.  He did not by any stretch of the imagination revive the man and the fact that he happened to be a funeral director was absolutely immaterial.  So someone needs to explain to me how the story submitted by this irresponsible reporter is any different than any fiction writer who uses an actual event to structure his story around.  The answer is NONE. 

            I for one think that there needs to be some movement on the part of the press to reign in these over zealous reporters before the government decides that it too needs to be regulated in much the same way as the irresponsible CEO’s of the banks are about to be.  When we ask the government in China to relax their laws regarding freedom of speech the request would carry a lot more weight if we could show that our freedoms are not disruptive.  After all they are a country of over a billion people and we only have a little over three hundred million.  Too many people with too much freedom can become chaotic without the element of responsibility. 

            I welcome comments on this as I know that there may be many who will have opposing viewpoints.   

Fibbing for fun and profit

        We have all had experiences that we have told others about and most of us (probably all of us but I wanted to leave you an out) have embellished it to some extent on the retelling.  Every once in a while a person finds that they have a talent for telling stories.  I don’t know where mine came from but it was probably a defense mechanism that I developed for dealing with my father.  Well you know when you get a D on the report card you have to have something to say or you are stuck at home for the next semester.  I must also tell you that my father was a stickler for the truth so I also developed a sense for how far I could stretch a truth.  It doesn’t stretch very far.   So at some point in my life I learned that telling a story just for the fun of it was not only entertaining for me but others seemed to like it as well. But that truthful person that my father pounded into me caused me to develop a caveat.  When I find that I have convincingly told a tale to someone I have to find a cool way of letting them know that they have been had.  You usually know that this has occurred when I ask you if you would now like to buy a bridge.  Oh and the sneaky smile that comes across my face is a clue also. 

            Once when a friend of mine, Jim Bowman, and I were sitting in the seaman’s club at the Indian Head Propellant plants Explosive Ordnance Disposal School two young seamen came to our table to ask if we were in EOD.  Bowman being the story teller that he was admitted that we were.  The tale was that we were in the school and not yet graduated.  They wanted to hear about it so we invited them to sit and of course there was the obligatory beer that they provided while we spun the tale.  Bowman started it by telling the lads that we had just returned from an inspection of the South Vietnamese Army and had learned of a new weapon that the Viet Cong were using against our aircraft.  He then turned to me and asked me to describe it to them.  I quickly related to them how this was a new development on an old system and it was effective because it was not radar guided and so not detectable and that it was silent because it had no propulsion system.  Bowman then came back in and described an over sized arrow.  Due to its size of course it took much more than a man to launch it so they had trained elephants to do that.  It was at that point that one of the young men decided that we had conned them out of the beer. But we did still have his friend.  It took a few well placed looks and words for him to get the point across to his friend and they left.  This story is true although the story that we told the young men was obviously concocted.  But you see how the mind of a true fibber works and that one must be skilled in the art of fibbing if one is to write fiction.  Oh I did mention that my book is fiction didn’t I, wink, wink. 

            Now that I have retired and have taken up the pursuit of writing as a third career I am telling stories and putting them on paper.  I find that this part of the task is pretty simple for me but the profit portion so far has eluded me.  I thought that you wrote the great American novel and then just waited for a publisher to come frothing at the bit to negotiate with me for the rights to publish it and that I would have a movie producer waiting in the wings to make it into a movie.  I have not found it too difficult to distribute my books but I have found that the getting paid part is not that easy.  Well when I say distribute I did not mean to imply that my book is in distribution at book stores and libraries even though it is on Amazon and in a few public libraries.  Of course I had to list it on Amazon myself and donate them to the libraries.  Now let me explain that profit is defined as monies being made in excess of expenses. I know that you already knew that but it is important for the purpose of this article to re-state it because I think that many of us who publish our own material lose site of that definition.   That being said I must disclaim anything that I might have said to imply that I have yet made a profit. 

            But I have a solution to the profit part.  I am going to write another book and spend a lot of money getting it edited, printed, published and distributed.  And I am going to keep doing it until the publishers and movie guys get it through their heads that I am serious. 

 

Until next time.  

On being an author

I have changed my blogspot address to be more compatible with my website and therefor more compatible with my writing in general rather than with just my current book. 

I began writing over twenty years ago while taking college classes.  All degrees require English courses and there are many available.  The one that intrigued me the most was called creative writing.  Well being a government employee at the time who was required to write justifications for positions and equipment allocations I was already doing that to some extent.  Now I will come some short of saying that those writings were untruthful but if they had been investigated to any great extent my section would not have received some of the equipment that we did.  So I enrolled in the creative writing class.  My professor's name was Sarah Gogle.  I say this for two reasons, one I am amazed that I remember her name at all and two that I now blog on Google.Well maybe it wasn't that interesting after all.   

Anyway one of my first assignments in this class was to write a one page story describing a conflict.  I thought and thought and could not think of a suitable conflict that I could describe in only one page.  Then while watching a baseball game on television it came to me.  So I wrote the short story that is now one of many on my web site's free ebook collections of short stories.  These stories can be downloaded for free by going to www.everettede.com and clicking on the link for short stories.  The story that I wrote was titled fastball and was nothing more than a five pitch confrontation between a pitcher and a batter.  The lesson here is that there is conflict in our lives each and everyday and each conflict is worthy of the written word.    

The next thing that I learned in this class had more to do with learning about myself than about writing itself. For the next assignment the class was asked to write a short story and each person would bring enough copies of each story for each of the other class members.  The average length of the stories provided by other class members was four.  My story was seventeen pages long.  It seems that my gift of gab translates well to paper as well.  Oh and I type nearly as fast as I speak so I can simply sit at the computer and have a conversation with myself or, as in this case I just ramble on.  This is actually really cool because no one can get up a walk out on me.  If they don't like what I am writing they simply delete it but I will never know that they did that so my ego remains intact. 

At any rate today I had a conversation with my friend Cliff and he had the courtesy to tell me that he enjoyed my writing and that he read my blogs.  So I was encouraged to start this up again.  I will try to write something at least once each month and most of what I write will be about writing or publishing, however I will no doubt throw a tantrum occasionally over something that I read or see on the Internet. 

I will close this with the same closing that I used when I wrote the articles on communication between men and women for single vision magazine.  

Have a good understanding.