Okay, remember last week when I said I wasn’t going to write about what was going on in Egypt because it was too far out of my social comfort zone – ie. I didn’t know enough about the country or its culture to make it believable and I didn’t want to do the research needed to bring myself up to speed.

Still true, but…I just read a column by Dan Gardner about the psychology of the revolution happening over there which I found truly mind-opening. Maybe obvious to others, but to me the idea of a popular uprising’s success or failure turning on that indefinable swell of a bunch of uncertain people all polling each other to see whether they were going to take part – well, that’s just delicious.

Because Gardner’s column was so well-written, it sparked immediate images of individuals talking politics with their local butcher, their barber, their postal worker, the neighbor they never normally speak to, taking their emotional pulse, their commitment to change.

Doesn’t have to be in Egypt. (Though I just had a great flash of a quick piece following the thoughts of an Egyptian man thinking about the revolution against Mubarak and how it’s finally time and this will be glorious. He prepares, runs into Tahrir Square screaming, and gets gunned down. Because the story is set in 2010, not 2011. He was a man before his time and pays for it.)

It doesn’t even have to be a country-wide revolution to overthrow a dictator. How about an office that’s being run by a petty tyrant? The workers one day have had enough…or have they?

Jorge, who’s recently witnessed the dressing-down of a co-worker that hit so close to Jorge’s situation it made him almost pee his pants, catches the eye of two other workers and believes they feel the same thing. He ventures the idea around the water cooler that if all the workers were to go to the vice-president, they could probably get the petty despot turfed.

Two of the workers at the water cooler get excited by the idea. The third says nothing. Jorge’s scared. If that third worker tells the boss… And if Jorge presses others to join him, the chance of one of the others telling the boss… And if they do start to organize and the boss senses something and implements some countermeasures…

Lots of inherent drama there. The main story decision beyond this would be deciding if this was going to be a “power to the people”/”triumph of the little guy” kind of story or a “you can’t fight the system”/”corporations are ultimately soul-destroying monsters that can’t be beaten” kind of story. That would be your voice – how you tend to see the world, at least on the day or days you’re writing the story.

I was tempted to go into some different story-generating ideas today, but there’s so much stuff in the paper, it’s just too easy. So I’ll save the other methods for a slow news day.

So what’s happening in the news? Well, we’ve got the whole situation in Egypt. Many many story ideas there if you have the either the knowledge of the region, or can spin something that doesn’t require extensive knowledge but can catch the flavor of the events (e.g. an SF or fantasy riff off the events), or just have a great idea and are willing to do enough research to make it feel real. (We’ll cover how to do that kind of research another time.)

Me, I don’t know modern Egypt or its politics well enough to write what I’d consider a plausible story, so that one gets a pass.

How about US politics? Always something going on there, especially with Sarah Palin and the Tea Party gadding about. Nah, I’ve done one of those and one was frankly enough for me.

Up here in B.C. we’ve got this story about a bunch of sled dogs who were shot because business was off and the owner couldn’t afford to keep them. He apparently appealed to the SPCA for help a number of times and also tried to give them away privately, but sled dogs who’ve been raised on a tether to be sled dogs apparently don’t adapt well to being pets. There were no takers. The business owner pulled out his gun and…

Yeah. Possibilities there. Not for a straight-up story about the sled dogs, because I think the real events are tragic and touching enough by themselves. But translate the situation from dogs to humans… Hm. What kind of habituation for humans would ruin them for anything else? Would they have to be slaves? Do I need to posit a future or fantasy society?

No, let’s think wider. What intrigues me about the whole sled dog story is the idea of a creature becoming so used to one kind of life that they can’t adapt to anything else and have to be discarded. My gut says that happens a lot. Corporate downsizing, obsolete equipment, maybe a kid who’s taught to learn one way and changes schools where everything’s different. Failure to adapt.

What about romance? Could you have a dominant person in a relationship suddenly decide for some reason that the specialized kind of loving her partner has been providing isn’t needed any more? I’m not thinking kinky, though you could certainly go that route. I’m thinking that she (we’ll make it a she because if it’s a he-dominant it could get too creepy) has trained her man to be ultra-sensitive to her needs but now she’s gone through a life change where she needs her man to be strong and independent and made her work a little. And her partner can’t adapt.

Okay, as I flesh this out, I’m thinking it would either be very tongue-in-cheek, or erotica, or take place in an SF or fantasy society, or…be just very cynical and dark. This would not be a healthy relationship. At it’s core it never would have been.That’s my gut sense. And maybe that’s a healthy gut sense, because heaven knows this thing with the sled dogs was not an essentially healthy relationship. At least not for the sled dogs. Not in the end.

This wouldn’t be my favorite kind of story because I see it ending on a gut-punch note. But sometimes I believe you have to write these kind of stories too. You start with the basic setup. Here I think the POV character would be the changing/dissatisfied dominant lover. She’s been trying to pawn off her male sensitive guy on her other acquaintances, even strangers, but nothing’s worked. The world has changed. It doesn’t want this highly sensitive submissive male any more. The story, because this is a short story, remember, would probably be about their final confrontation. Maybe he’d try all his old tricks to understand and soothe her. Maybe she’d be half-soothed and half driven crazy by it.

And maybe…maybe… I’m feeling it here, half-writing it in my head and feeling its flow. Maybe the resolution is that she discovers he’s not as weak and submissive as she thought and she breaks down. He leaves her. Then comes back. Teaching her a lesson. They’re moving on together in a new, changed relationship.

Interesting. I could do that. Might do that. Or you could. Take the idea and run with it. It’ll be completely different when it passes through your brain, your heart, your fingers.

Have fun.

Rather than go to the news today, I’ll just look at my own life. Things just happen, you know? If they affect you deeply, there’s a good chance that the emotion will filter into the writing and that’s good! If you can make people feel with your stories, then you’re at least half way home.

So…events in my life. We have two teenagers in the house. Wonderful kids. Love them to bits. Most interesting thing I’ve noted over the years, though , is that no matter how well one of them is doing at any given point in time, you can count on there being a massive emotional swing the other way in the future. These are the teenage years, after all.

Latest swing involved one of them stomping out of the house and not coming back until very late at night.

And the question again is – what kind of story? Domestic drama? Deep contemplative literary piece about growth, stages of life? YA fiction about [fill in the blank]. SF piece that takes place in another time or on another planet and delves into how teens there handle the anger or growing pangs of the teen years (I’m sure you can spin off some interesting or frightening imaginings).

Me, I’m going with a mystery this time around because the main emotion I experienced was fear. I feared for my child’s emotional stability, for their physical safety out wandering the midnight streets, for their future if we couldn’t work these issues out.

Posit blowup based on (creating fiction scenario here to protect the privacy of my loved ones), say, the discovery of suspicious powder in a daughter’s purse. Suspect cocaine. Major confrontation and blowup re the daughter’s friends and dragging in her behavior for the last number of months.

So she runs out.

That’s the setup. Big storytelling decision here is whose point of view (p.o.v.) to follow. The daughter’s? The mother’s? The father’s? The bad guy’s? A neutral observer (3rd person omniscient)? Some mix of the above? Chances are that you’ll immediately gravitate towards one as being the most natural for you, but it’s worthwhile taking a moment to consider the others. The story ideas that come out may surprise and excite you.

For me, the most obvious p.o.v. would be as the father. I’d probably have him chase the daughter out, have him discover her mixed up with bad guys or kidnapped or hut, and he’d rescue her.

But looking through my list of other possible p.o.v.’s, the next one I’m most attracted to is a mix of p.o.v.’s. Why? Because I’m not coming up with an ultra-complicated plot here. This is the suburbs. And I don’t feel like I’ve got some deep message about life to present. So the fun of this story for me would be in the visceral thrill of the search, the danger, the crossed wires of the different p.o.v.’s (for example, the daughter meets up with her dealer who she believes loves her though he really doesn’t, and the father is tracking the same dealer whom he believes to be one of his daughter’s few upstanding friends). Hopefully it all dovetails into a nice action sequence that has the good father rescue the daughter while the bad guy drug dealer, in some kind of ironic come-uppance, ends up getting shot, stabbed, forcibly overdosed, or bitten to death by mad dogs let loose from the yard of a neighbor the father really can’t stand (might throw in the dogs’ p.o.v. too).

I see a frenetic kind of back and forth p.o.v. swap at the end with a nice little black humor coda.

Where would you take this idea?

Holidays approaching.  Can you say, Yeah! I knew you could. And whether you’re celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Eid-al-Adha, Bodhi Day, Winter Solstice, or some other wonderful time, you should know that, along with all those e-readers you’re buying for your friends and family, you can now give the gift of an e-book to go with it.

Most of the e-books sites I checked out, Barnes & Nobles, Sony’s Reader Store, Apple’s iTunes, seem to be doing standard gift cards that you can give to people who redeem them when they purchase their e-books.  Amazon.com does that too, but it’s also offering you the ability to gift a specific book.  That’s kind of cool.  It means that now, rather than giving your Aunt Elizabeth a gift card that she’ll spend on the season two DVDs of The Ghost Whisperer, you can give her the particular book you loved so she’ll actually used the Kindle you bought her and understand why it’s something to fall in love with.

Did I mention that about half my reading is now on my Kindle.  Next into the house will be my wife’s iPad.  (Shh.  Don’t tell her yet.  It’s a surprise.)  We’ll then have the top two e-readers on the planet.  Maybe they’ll mate and produce all sorts of interesting e-kids.

Should be something to see.