The U.N. is worse than disaster. The U.N. creates conflicts. Look at the disgraceful U.N. Human Rights Council: It transmits norms which are harmful, anti-liberty and anti-Semitic, among other things. The world would be better off in its absence.
Sometimes, by using the most over-the-top, ridiculous plot device you can imagine, you get some interesting little conflicts and cool things that you might not otherwise have a chance to explore.
The organizers first job is to create the issues or problems, and organizations must be based on many issues. The organizer must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act. . . . An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent.
Do I create conflicts for myself? Sure I do.
I don't start with the characters. I start with the series of events that will provide the conflict and how it can be resolved. Characters are incidental.
It is wrong to make anyone into an enemy; it is wrong to scare the people of one's own country with that enemy and try to rally some allies on that basis.
All you need to know about plotting is twofold. 1. Give your characters goals. 2. Don't let them reach those goals.
Editing is the same as quarrelling with writers - same thing exactly.
The rule for finding plots for character-centered novels, which is to ask: 'So what's the worst possible thing I can do to *this* guy?' And then do it.
I think there are some people who are just kind of born to create drama and then capitalise on it.
People like to invent enemies. It spares us the need to address complex worldviews.
I think people have to set up little battles. They have to demonize people whom they disagree with or feel threatened by. But it's the ideological framing of the debate that scares me.
I'm not much interested in extrapolating science and technology; I merely use extrapolation as a means of putting people into new quandaries which produce colorful pressures and conflicts.
TV producers want ratings and are willing to do nearly anything to get them. They gin up artificial conflicts and create an urgency for even the most minor of economic data points.
It doesn't matter if I go on CBS, PBS or Fox. Whoever is interviewing me is going to want to create some conflict in the story, or it's not interesting. That's just the way the news is.
You won't have a story unless you have conflict, which means if there's no conflict in a situation, people look for a way to make some.
Stories need stupid decisions that, at the time, seem absolutely rational and necessary. Without stupid decisions, the world isn't thrown out of balance, and so there's no need for a 'rest of the story' to balance it back.
TV loves to bring in affairs - as soon as you have a relationship, let's screw it up.
What I have to outline is action and plot because I'm not particularly good at that.
Every non-political human grouping of whatever kind, legal, social, religious, economic or other becomes at last political if it creates an opposition deep enough to range men against one another as enemies.
I think 'Scarface' is a great film, but if you have a character like Tony Montana, you don't identify with him at all. I think it's very interesting instead to identify yourself with a character you don't like all the time. You can create a tension between the fiction and the viewer. You force the spectator to wonder about his actions.
Sometimes you have to set the angle within the match, but you gotta give a reason for one guy to be loved and one guy to be hated.
There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.
I want to manufacture a feud.
Please remember one lesson of the 20th century. One cannot force happiness, impose happiness on nations by imposing any kind of utopia on others. The Communist model of society was a kind of imposed utopia for which the Russian people in particular paid a great price. Still, sometimes we see that attempts are being made to impose some other kind of model on the entire world - maybe a Westernized or Americanized model... This is not the way to go because this can only create conflict.
