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Perpetual Motion 101

What people believe prevails over the truth.

-Sophocles

  PERPETUAL MOTION 101

A Tutorial by Alex Pucher

  Today I am going to teach you how to build a machine. To be more specific, you will be constructing a perpetual motion machine. You know, one of those mythical creations that seemingly defy the laws of thermodynamics? After years of research and more than a handful of arguments, I discovered the truth of the matter, but it took overcoming a good bit of perspective to get there. They do exist, and you, dear reader, will have your very own, bona fide perpetual motion machine in short order. First, you need the ground rules for the purposes of this discussion. Here they are:

It must function independently once in motion, without continuous input of additional energy.

It must produce more energy than it consumes.

It must appear to be unceasing, or even accelerating in nature.

Got it? Good. Get out your note pad and a No. 2 pencil. The lesson begins… now.

Years ago I learned about the problems that the world faces: water shortages, food production difficulties, resource depletion, and of course, climate change. It all scared the hell out of me. I even sent a few “the sky is falling” emails to my friends hoping I could get them to see the light. I needed to do something, anything, to help the cause of saving the planet, but what? Most of the mechanisms that support our society are the root causes of our current conundrum. You know the suspects: oil, coal, deforestation, etc. Since those were the prime culprits, they would be my point of attack, and in my research I found this marvelous magical device called the perpetual motion machine that would surely solve the world’s energy and pollution crisis. Logically, I went to work but for some reason couldn’t make the machine operate, well, perpetually.

Discouraged, I stopped sharing my thoughts, believing that the universe surely trumped my hope. But deep down I wanted, no, needed more. My truth was that such a thing should exist, somewhere in the universe, and that the only reason we are missing it is because we are looking with the wrong eyes.  So I researched, and I read, and I ran directly into the fact that I was not the first to have such grand plans as perpetual motion. The idea dates back to farmers wishing for endless power to turn their mills without the aid of water from a stream that is only as reliable as the seasons. The idea, I found, had a long and unsuccessful tradition, of which I had unwittingly become a part.

It turns out that such machines are also considered to be impossible by the scientific and engineering communities. That, though, did not deter me from the fantasy that there must be a way. So I kept looking for the truth. I knew that the heart of the matter would prove me right. I restarted my talks with everyone and anyone who would listen and even got into a dispute with a highly regarded scientist who told me, yet again, that “It’s impossible.”

“But why?” I asked. “Nothing in the universe is perpetual; it’s only a matter of perspective that makes something appear to be perpetual, like a galaxy or a star or a thousand-year-old tree.”

Bingo! Not until that moment did I realize that the truth was there. I had only been looking with the wrong eyes, just as wrong as the scientist who told me that I was attempting the absurd. Both of us had been circling the truth, both on the opposite side of the argument and both of us equally wrong, and the truth, as I soon learned, was far more essential than either of us ever could have imagined. What stood in the way of perpetual motion was perspective.

At the core of these perspectives, and all perspectives for that matter, is the truth. For me, I knew that there was a definitive answer to whether a perpetual motion machine could be built, regardless of the ideas of knowing historians, scientists, or engineers. Once I adjusted my perspective, I found that there have been several successful perpetual motions machines built in the last several hundred years. James Cox built a clock perpetually powered by shifts in atmospheric pressure in the 1760s, though this has been dismissed as perpetual because it relies on atmospheric pressure. I say that’s rubbish because what in the universe acts independently of all other things? But fine, I suppose that’s just my perspective. Let’s move on. Around 1806, a man named Jean–André Deluc built a voltaic pile, which rang a tiny bell for 12 years before he dismantled it, believing he had proven his point. But what kind of work does a ringing bell perform? And based on what perspective is 12 years perpetual? A mallard duck with a life span of about decade, perhaps? Fine, once again we are down to debatable perspectives, since we are viewing this with human eyes. What, then, did I find?  What is the truth at the center of perspective? The answer came straight from the universe in which human perspective said it was utterly impossible. My friends, I give you the atom.

That highly regarded scientist, the one who said with utmost certainty that I was wrong, is made up of trillions upon trillions upon trillions of tiny perpetual motion machines, spinning away endlessly and doing the work that makes up every single thing that we know, including the laws of thermodynamics. Beneath the surface of perspective, created by a narrative of debate among learned professionals and enthusiastic inventors, a miniscule but profound truth does its work – out of sight and out of mind.

Now that you know the history, you may now begin your work. You may be thinking that I haven’t shown you anything yet, that none of this is useful at all. Not so, dear friend. Actually, I have given you everything you need to start your perpetual motion journey, and unlike my journey which was fueled by fear and longing for a different future than was clearly written in harsh truths on the wall, your journey is limited only by your imagination. With your tools in hand, are you ready to embark?

Before you depart, remember those three rules:

It must function independently once in motion, without continuous input of additional energy.

It must produce more energy than it consumes.

It must appear to be unceasing, or even accelerating in nature.

Your tools? Truth, and perspective.

For just a moment, think of your absolute favorite book. Ruminate on it a moment, and tell me what the truth of the story was. Got it? Good. Now, did the author ever explicitly state the truth in the story? Probably not.The truth is buried by perspective, some right, and some wrong, and all of that perspective is in the way of discovery. What likely makes that book your favorite is the perspective speaking directly to you, and the truth has been cleverly hidden so that you may find it for yourself. Because of those perspectives and that ultimate truth, the story lives on in you with no additional input and even grows within you over time. The book is a journey to the truth, not entirely unlike my quest for perpetual motion.

Write your stories. Fill them with perspectives so colorful and vibrant that readers will remember the characters for the rest of their lives. Keep in mind, though, that those perspectives are only a piece of the puzzle, and can be and often should be wrong. Remember that the truth, whether it’s in the world around us or in the universes that you create, is an unspoken truth that works relentlessly as a function of that universe, with all perspectives revolving around it. If you apply your collection of perspectives properly, your story will accomplish a feat reserved for a mass of properly aligned atoms. Your story will become more than the sum of its parts. Your story will become self-sustaining. It will do more work than the work you put into it. It will be a machine in motion in the reader’s mind. Perpetually.

    Want to know more about the mechanisms behind perpetuality?

Read Perpetual Motion by Arthur W.J.G. Ord-Hume

[fictionblog]

Designed by Blair Romain

[fictionblog]

Designed by Blair Romain

[fictionblog]

Designed by Blair Romain

[fictionblog]

Designed by Blair Romain

[fictionblog]

Designed by Blair Romain

[fictionblog]

Designed by Blair Romain

[fictionblog]

Designed by Blair Romain

[fictionblog]

Designed by Blair Romain

[fictionblog]

Designed by Blair Romain

[fictionblog]

Designed by Blair Romain

[fictionblog]

Designed by Blair Romain

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Designed by Blair Romain

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Designed by Blair Romain

[fictionblog]

Not Your Average Book Review

During one of our top secret super editor meetings (okay, it's not as cool as it sounds, but we do talk about cats a lot), April, Alex, and I were trying to come up with an idea to spark some life back into the Fiction Fix blog. Truthfully speaking, each of us became a little too busy to pay attention to our whimpering step-child "the blog," but it was constantly on our minds. What could we do to liven things up and maybe get our staff members involved in the process?

The same boring topic was brought to the table as always when discussing what we could write about: book reviews. Being a literary magazine and appealing to an audience that reads, we figured... well, everyone likes reading books. But not everyone wants to read book reviews. Plus, our staff are so insanely busy with work, school, and life that most don't have time to dedicate to writing thoughtful reviews. We can't blame them; we're riding the same crazy boat.

I found myself chuckling and saying, "Well, I would read or write them if they were a sentence long. Maybe something like, 'This book was good.'"

I was met with silence.

And then... brilliance ensued!

Alex totally dug the idea, saying that it reminded him of a short story attributed to Ernest Hemingway that went, "For Sale. Baby shoes. Never worn." April thought that we could extend the idea even further and allow readers to write book reviews as haikus. What better way to talk about your favorite book, pique our audience's interests in said book, utilize writing creativity, and not have to sift through loads of prose to get to the good details. And thus, the six word and haiku book reviews were born.

What you will see in the following weeks are all reviews written by our very own staff members. I took on the project in one of my design courses for graduate school and have to admit I've become a bit attached. But now, I am ready to release them to you and the world. So please, sit back, enjoy, and share with your friends our first installment of the haiku book reviews.

-Blair Romain

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What Are You Reading?

My favorite course in college was a fiction workshop. There were many classes and professors that I loved, but considering that I took my friend Ari's workshop seven times – three post baccalaureate – it was the clear winner.

As you can no doubt guess from the course title, the fiction workshop was a place for authors to share their fiction with other authors, so we wrote a lot. But we also read. Every time I took the workshop, Ari very clearly spelled out the importance of reading:

"Be ready for me to ask you what you're reading right now," he told us. "You can't write unless you read. So you better have an answer."

Ari thinks anywhere is a potential reader's haven. Waiting your turn at the DMV? Read. Sitting in the hall outside your next class? Read. (Although some might argue that studying would be a better idea in that venue.) Sitting in a theatre and waiting for a movie to start, stuck in an interminable traffic jam, accompanying your spouse to a social event you'd rather not attend – read, read, read. And where do you keep your book? Well, what's that patch pocket sewn onto the back of your jeans for? I'm not quite that kind of girl; I prefer a suitcase-size purse that can hold a thousand page novel, hardback. Either way, we're both prepared to read anytime, anywhere.

But my love of books extends past accessorizing. I'm just a tad OCD, and I keep lists of just about everything, including books I've read. I started my book list on May 29, 1996 (yes, it's that specific – I warned you), and it includes the titles of all the books I've read since then, plus how long it took me to read them. Currently, I'm reading 903, 904, and 905. (Before you get too impressed, it's not 905 different books; I've read some of those titles up to twelve times.)

My list also keeps track of what I read by the year. While I know I'm crazy for doing it, the list does have its uses. For instance, when I was in the writing doldrums last summer, a quick check of my list showed that what I mostly read for a couple months were American founding documents, how-to books on e-publishing, and several reference books that I reviewed for a publication company. While they did enthuse me in some ways, the story that I was writing at the time suffered. I just couldn't get it to move because that creative part of my brain wasn't getting the stimulation it needed.

Now, while I would have had an easy answer (or three) if Ari had asked me what I was reading, I knew that it wasn't enough. I heard about people signing up for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and I thought they were nuts. And it's because I didn't have the proper inspiration at the time. Even reading about brilliant authors and the writing process wasn't enough, as helpful as it is with the craft. I needed fiction, good fiction – stat!

When I looked over my list, I realized what my problem was, and the solution came from a fellow avid reader, who showed me a book she thought I would like. I decided to go for it, and that's all it took to get my idea factory churning again – and in a big way. In the space of two months, not only was I inspired to dig my red pen into a thorough revision of the story that had almost died over the summer, but two new novel-size premises were born. And then the biggie: I signed up for NaNoWriMo this year – and finished early.

So my question is: What are you doing to feed the writing monster? If you give it plain oatmeal and milk, it's just going to turn into a sleepy kitten and take a nap. And that's cute and all, but it won't help you write. No, more important than reading any old thing is reading the stuff that keeps your creative juices flowing. What matters is that you read the books that stir your soul and make you itch to pick up your pen or typewriter or writing tool of choice. Then scratch away, my friends. Scratch away.

-Sarah Cotchaleovitch

[fictionblog]

What a Scanner Sees

To celebrate the end of the semester (and to cure a stubborn case of writer's block), I visited some friends at FSU for a change of scenery. While I was there, we watched A Scanner Darkly, a film based on the dystopian science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. One quote in particular—from which the novel takes its title—got me thinking:

“What does a scanner see?” he asked himself. “I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me—into us—clearly or darkly?”

As it happens, writing is a common side effect of thinking, and what resulted was a question: Is the internet becoming detrimental to literature? With self-publishing and social networking, writers can circulate their work at any time they choose and easily promote it. In the aforementioned quote from A Scanner Darkly, the word “scanner” refers to mechanical devices, not readers.  But as individuals living in the Digital Age (and therefore drowning in an overflow of blogs, tweets, texts, and Facebook statuses), it can be argued that readers have become scanners as a result of having so much published text to sift through. Dueling blog posts by Jeff Goins and Daniel Swensen might provide some insight into the evolution of literature and its audiences.

Jeff Goins makes that claim in his article, “Why The Hunger Games Is the Future of Writing,” advising writers to mimic Suzanne Collins’s “short, terse” prose because “we live in a world of distractions,” and “most people are reading at the attention level of a sixth grader.” Goins proposes that in order to adapt to how people read, we must change the way we write. Sounds logical enough. But is literature really going to mimic The Hunger Games’ simplistic brevity, just to satisfy our increasingly divided attentions? Our “world of distractions” is mostly connected through social media. At the touch of a button, anyone’s work can become The Latest Thing (just like A Scanner Darkly’s “holo-scanners”) practically overnight. In his rebuttal article, “Why Hunger Games Isn't the Future of Writing,” Daniel Swensen contests Goins’s claim:

Hunger Games isn't the future. It’s now. It’s the Latest Big Thing. The market is already flooded with YA titles trying to cash in on the success of Twilight, and editors and agents are plumb sick of it. Thanks to the success of the book and the movie adaptation, soon the market will be flooded with YA titles trying to cash in on the success of Hunger Games, and editors and agents will be sick of that. You don’t embrace the future by imitating the last known success.

As Swensen mentions, the instant gratification bred from this Click-the-Link-and-Presto! culture has created a bit of a gold rush. Writers hastily produce work and publish it, hoping a similar idea doesn't get popular first. I can’t count how many times I had to re-work a manuscript because I spotted a novel mocking me from the New Releases shelf at Barnes and Noble, sporting a similar concept along with its glossy cover. Unfortunately, this gold rush opens the door for under-developed stories and simplistic writing trying to cash-in on the latest trend. Anyone who has seen Barnes and Noble’s Paranormal Romance section and its cornucopia of uninspired Twilight knock-offs will know what I mean. One has to wonder: will these trends have a lasting effect on literature? They certainly shouldn't be ignored. These trends have relevance because they not only indicate popular topics, but how our culture perceives them. For example, in the wake of The Hunger Games’ success, not only is there an abundance of dystopian books lining the shelves, but most of their narratives are first-person, present-tense, mimicking Collins’s series. Along with the success of social-networking, this trend indicates that as a culture, we are obsessed with knowing one another’s thoughts and opinions as soon as they happen.

Swensen states that “the key to maintaining reader interest” in this distracted world is “Good writing. Not big fonts, short sentences, or simplistic storylines.” But what Swensen neglects to address is that short sentences are capable of being considered “good writing,” provided they are thoughtfully crafted, a well-known example being McCarthy’s The Road. Simple prose can be powerful because, as Goins points out, we live in a world of distractions. We are bombarded with tweets and statuses and blog post drivel like this every day. With so much to read, what captures a reader’s attention, from the most flippant to the most analytical, is unapologetic authenticity.

According to Jeff Goins, “edgy writing rings true” and resonates with readers. But I think the inverse of that statement is more accurate. The truth can be edgy, and that’s what makes it so fascinating. Writers have the power to subject their fictional characters to otherwise unethical or implausible social experiments. Dystopias like the ones portrayed in The Hunger Games, The Road and A Scanner Darkly are all examples. Such tales present us with a wealth of profoundly thought-provoking situations that generate important discussions for the progression of humankind.

Regardless of whether it is fiction or nonfiction, more than short or winding sentences, what we crave is substance. It doesn’t matter if that truth is beautiful or hideous. The Digital Age doesn’t mark the beginning of a literary apocalypse because, in the long run, literature won’t be stylistically altered by trends like The Hunger Games. Trends are fickle, but authenticity endures.

Writers need to remember that, to earn a reader’s attention, their prose must contain truth; one which allows the reader to perceive something “clearly rather than darkly.”

-Ali Huffman