The Creation Of Plot

Writing essays, theses, dissertations, analyses, and so on and so sorth, is easy if you know the subject matter well enough to find faults in it. The challenge, in my opinion, is to write a novel that has a story that pertains to your subject matter (of expertise). The story must have the right characters with the right personalities, they must speak and do the right things, and plots must, metaphorically at the very leat, bring to life what you want to say in a manner that the reader understand what you are trying to say, which in turn brings perfect exposition and narratives. When you write, say, an essay on the shortcomings of today’s society, it is easy because what you know constitues the technical knowledge; what you know is what’s going on. However, while writing  novel you are met with a dilemma: it asks you whether you are good enough to recreate the brush strokes that paints the same picture as the society you are complaining about. Escapist tendencies within you will have you borrow from real life incidents, but imagination wrecks them all. You know what you want, but you fumble when you don’t know how to put down, conclusively mind you, the little things here and there that speak in soft whispers about the scene you are moulding. One misstep and interpretation takes a different highway altogether. Some of you might not know what I am talking about, so here’s an example. And I’m sure there are some people out there who can relate to it.

An important part of the novel I’m writing now has to do with a mentally frustrated village-school teacher who instigates his little students to plant a bomb in a nearby factory. When I ask someone for help, that person gushes forth with ideas, but the real trouble lies in packing them in to fit seamlessly. When I approached a friend for help, asking him how the mannerisms of the character should be, this is what he had to say:

•  The person in question (PIQ) must be very fidgety.
• PIQ must be untrustworthy, an if possible, a backstabber as well.
• H/She must be prone to making decisions on whims.

Easier said than one, I say! Of all the things I have left to do with the book, I now have to concoct sub-plots that bring out these aspects of the person’s character. An when you change one part of the book, its innate irreplaceability in the first place causes a chain reaction. 

From this experience, I learnt three things.

1. When you are sketching the boundaries of a plot, you must be in a position to predict what is going to happen rather than make it all up as you move along. This is because, when you begin from the outer periphery of the plot, you must work towars a centre wherein stands the climactic event that deterministically defines the plot and leaves no room for doubt about whatever is going to follow. Otherwise, you end up working towards a different centre and the message you want to convey becomes distorted by the contradictions that will arise.  
2. The second way is to work from the centre of that circle itself. The centre must be symbolic of the ideas that you are going to be propounding. If it has to do with communism, for example, take the world to be your television screen. Sit down and make note of the events that shaped the face of the Reds, and how little incidents from all over the place cascaded into consequential moments for them. Next, determine how the statesmen and the proletariat were individually impacted by these incidents. One such things are done, form your characters – give them mindsets, give them personalities that will have them reacting in the same way as those you had in mind. 
3. Never begin from the middle. When you do that, you have to work in two directions: one towards the centre that dictates all that you write about in the first place, and the reaches of your thoughts – which define your exposition and magnanimity with the extent to which the events unfold or are allowed to. When working towards the centre, you will come to define your characters. However, what your characters need to do comes to light only when you work towards the circumference, and so now, you have to shift your gaze. To introduce another sub-plot, you need to work towards the centre. At some point of time, you will agree, the whole thing collapses into a chaotic mass of disagreement. 

There does exist, however, one other way to create plots, but this idea is deserving only when you are writing something along the lines of Douglas Adams’ ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. The characters are belched out on the spot, and the plot is defined such that it meets the requirements of the climax as wished for by the author. This technique will seem very easy when you are going for a parody or a spoof of another established work, but in creating your own masterpiece, you need to know where you stand: at the beginning, at the end, or in the middle. If you are where you don’t want to be, immediately drop whatever you’re doing and shift your focus. Don’t let things take shape. If you’re working from the outside, then decide to shift your focus to the centre because it suddenly seems more compatible, don’t let your definition of the boundary hinder you. Define newer reaches if the central perspective demands it. At the end, the story must be understood in its full form only from one end – that way, only one interpretation is possible. If two ideologies seem discernable from two angles, different readers interpret different things and the message is lost. A book is always as good as the message it has: that is the point you work from. If you do everything right at every step, nothing can go wrong.

Monetary Aids: Boon Or Bane?

“…the government of the world must be entrusted to satisfied nations, who wished nothing more for themselves than what they had. If the world-government here in the hands of hungry nations, there would always be danger. But none of us had any reason to seek for anything more. The peace would be kept by peoples who lived in their own way and not be ambitious. Our power placed us above the rest. We were like rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations.” – Winston Churchill

Foreign aids, in times of distress resulting from large-scale calamities and famines, provide a temporary solution regarding the basic needs of the endangered people until proper order has been established by the home government. Therefore, looking at monetary aids from this perspective, foreign aids will seem to be the solution to global poverty. But, it is more of a bane than a boon. They will definitely help in the shorter periods of time (i.e. until order has been restored), but in the long term, they will only do to make beggars out of countries. What is important is that there must exist a development program which is sustainable in nature so that the economy prospers, making it possible for the people to earn their livelihood. For this, the mandatory conditions, at a glance, will be political stability at a broader (country) level, and social stability at an internal (society) level. This means that there has to be peace as the first step for making progress. The next step would be to focus on what is best suited for the nation to make economic progress, and then start working on a sustainable program for developing it. A good example would be Japan, which was reduced to rubble post-WW II. It, then, recorded Asia’s fastest industrial and economic growth, which was achieved through a minimal quantity of resources. Another example would be Singapore, depending mainly on industrialization and tourism. Both nations do not go to war, thereby ensuring external peace as well as eliminating causes for many an internal strife. Further, they have a disciplined approach to life that also helps.

Let us now come to a situation wherein foreign aids are imposed upon defenseless Third World nations, further crippling economies. This has been shown, through extensive research, to be profoundly crippling as far as the poor are concerned. An imposed aid can only function to generate devious bureaucracies, which in turn serve to sap the initiative that brought them about in the first place. Ultimately, the moral effect would be to, simply put, snap the enterprise of the common man, and draw potential intellectuals into non-productive activities. Foreign aids, concerning untimely occasions, will create a ‘moral tone’ in international affairs thereby denying one the hard-task of wealth generation, substituting it with indigenous handouts; what will ultimately be realized is a curbing of individual freedom and a suppression of popular choice. Of course, such actions do not go without its handful of defenders. What such men and women don’t understand is that such foreign aids are fundamentally bad, and that, far from being incremented, must be halted before more damage is done. What is even more grievous is that lobbyists in the halls of power argue that ‘aid’ must not be stopped because the poor would not survive without it. Willy Brandt, ex-chancellor of Germany, headed the Brandt Commission in 1980. The Brandt Commission Report was then generally well received for its ideas and programs on globalization and free trade. Excerpt: “For the poorest countries, aid is essential to survival”.

To quote further, at the International Conference on Financing for Development, held in Monterrey, Mexico, US President George W. Bush pledged to increment development assistance to poor nations, in terms of monetary aids, through the establishment of the new Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). The fund would set strict standards of accountability and long-term sustenance for the aid-acceptors and would reward select poor countries with as much as $5 billion in aid by 2007. Now, the proposed Account is a step forward because it builds on a consensus that development works best when poor countries have strong policies on governance and economic reform and take responsibility for reducing poverty and seeding sustenance so as to spur growth.

But what President Bush has failed to recognized it that the MCA also poses a great risk: by dealing with recipient countries only on such a cheap basis, the fund will surely undo significant progress in improving donor-recipient coordination. Backsliding in this area could condemn poor countries to court suspicious sources of money, thereby increasing the chances of corruption and subsequent collapse of order: simply put, back to square one. Also, one has to note that the United States has ventured into this aiding-market alone. Therefore, sensitive issues regarding failure of reception could have adverse effects on the donor’s economic scenario. Secondly, narrow focus on the development of top-few countries may generate funds so as to execute economic reformations – but only in those countries; the majority low-income nations will then face seclusion.

Of the Third World nations, Africa contains many lessons concerning the fraud of ‘aid’. It has gradually given up the ability to posses the self-sufficiency required in food production; it must be noted that African countries did enjoy that before developmental aids were invented. Since 1960, the per-capita food production has fallen steadily owing to dependence on international aids. Today (as of 2002), 70% of the people of the sub-Saharan nations live below the poverty line, with the result that the continent has the highest infant mortality rate, lowest average life-expectancy, lowest literacy rate, fewest doctors per head of population and the fewest children in school, on the planet. Since 1969, the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita has shrunk at a constant rate of 3.4% per annum! What people don’t see is that the poor do thrive without it in some countries, and that the suffering of miseries occurs not in spite of aid, but because of it. However, such statements undervalue the people of the poor countries concerned. As such, they are logically refutable when uttered by those who want us to believe that foreign aid works. At the tail-end of close to a hundred years of industrialization and allied developments, we are told that many countries have lost the ability to survive a moment longer unless they receive even larger amounts of aid. Let me ask you a question. If foreign aids really do work, then the poor countries must be better off now than when they started to receive the aids. Where is that improvement? There is a stark lack of concession that prudent management of resources, a willingness to share responsibility to fulfill common needs and improve living standards are just missing from the root agendas.

The truth is that the people in most of such countries seldom come in contact with the aids in any tangible shape or form. After the multi-billion dollar influx of money has been filtered through ‘officials’, ‘agency staff’, dishonest ‘commission agents’ and the like, there is very little left to go around. This trifle, furthermore, is then used up thoughtlessly by those in power who have no mandate from the poor. Small wonder, then, that the effects of ‘aid’ are so often vicious and destructive for the most vulnerable members of the society. Also, over fifty years of aid-work, the channels of resource transfer, titled ‘agencies’, should have dealt with the problems they were established to solve, closed shop and stopped spending funds from developed to developing countries. Solution: if the people ever are to receive their entitled quantities of aid, they must have the necessary and proper, in every sense of the word, communication with the government they have elected. Being irredeemably out of touch with the poor can only serve to make the situation worse.

In fact, these ‘agencies’ have sunk their roots deep enough so that they have grown year after year with even bigger budgets, and ever more projects to administer.

All the above-said notwithstanding, what is to be said about the successes of the foreign aids?

In the past half-century, the goal of these ‘aids’ has been to solely create and entrench a new breed of influential and wealthy gang of parasites. In this campaign, led chiefly by the IMF and WTO, ‘aid’ has perpetuated the rule of incompetent individuals, heading governments characterized by massive ignorance and irresponsibility. Foreign aids, therefore, has condoned the most consistent cases of human rights abuse. In the today of enlightened minds, the oustering of these evils can be achieved only if the victimized are willing to recognize ways to assist one another according to their needs and needs only. They must begin to act on their own set of agendas, in line of priorities they themselves have set. They, therefore, must not be aided, but must be provided with equal opportunities so as to aid themselves.