The Debate - Pro-Captivity | A Whale Of A Business | FRONTLINE | PBS WATCH SCHEDULE TOPICS ABOUT FRONTLINE SHOP TEACHER CENTER THERE'S A POINT OF VIEW THAT THE FUTURE OF CAPTIVITY FOR MARINE MAMMALS IS HARD TO JUSTIFY. I think the mandate, quite to the contrary, is very strong for the future. I think that as our population becomes more and more crowded, more people are urbanized, if you will, there's less natural contact with animals living in the wild. I don't think that it's rational for us to assume that people are going to be able to get experiences with wild animals by all going into the wild, there's too many of us, we'll destroy what little habitat is left by trying to do that. I actually calculated once how many boat trips it would take to take all the Sea World guests that come to Sea World each year out to sea killer whales at Robson Bite, and it was over two thousand boat trips a day would have to go out of Robson Bite. Well that would be ludicrous.

So I think the mandate for the future , if want a public that's knowledgeable about wild animals and has some sensitivity about them, if we want our children to have a chance to see many of these animals, it's gonna have to be in places like Sea World and the rest of the zoos in the world. These are gonna be the places where people are gonna be able to get in touch with nature without destroying habitat. HOW ARE YOU GOING TO DEAL WITH THE POSSIBLY GROWING PHILOSOPHICAL POINT OF VIEW THAT THERE'S SOMETHING FUNDAMENTALLY IMMORAL ABOUT CAPTURING CREATURES FROM THE WILD AND PUTTING THEM IN PLACES LIKE THIS FOR MAYBE THE EDUCATION BUT PRINCIPALLY THE AMUSEMENT OF HUMAN BEINGS... We have to continue to communicate with the over 90 percent of the American public that feels that what zoos and aquariums are doing is the right thing. Over 90 percent of the American public feels that zoos and aquariums are essential to education, are important to learning about animals. Over 90 percent of the public feels that opportunities for children to see wild animals are almost entirely dependent upon zoos and aquariums.

So those are the people we have to talk to, there are gonna be always dissenters, and I recognize the value of dissent, but we can't cater to those needs, we have to look at the vast majority of people that want and enjoy what we do and see value in it. So that's where our focus has to be... Let's take it broader. When you look at the global umbrella, the International Union of Conservation Nature and all of the subset umbrellas that are really truly trying to look at resource management, biodiversity and within those groups of special survivorship committees and you're looking at close to 600 million people a year that are visiting zoological parks throughout the world, and about 50 percent of the funding that goes for NC2 research and conservation is coming from those institutions, the governments aren't paying for it and the public's not paying for it, the public is indirectly through their participation. So there's this huge mechanism going on that we have to involve people so that they can be involved and it is, when you get down to it, a little bit of resource management, because we are the only life form on earth that can affect the outcome of other organisms on the earth.

And if we don't take a leading role in teaching people about how to affect that, we're not gonna have those animals around. And we're not gonna have those resources around and we're not gonna have the fish stock around and we're not.. if we continue to let people fin sharks, if we don't people that's..it's a waste of a resource. We have to get these messages out, and there's very few vehicles or platforms that you can do that in where you can involve the public in. And I see this as a huge huge challenge for all of us, the science, the media, and folks like us that are daily entertaining people and teaching people and getting them involved. It's pretty exciting when you can have a long distance Shamu TV go to 14 million children at any given program, with an 800 number toll free that those kids can pick up the phone and talk right to the scientist, in the field. I mean, how else can we get those kinds of things going? And a lot of people will say you know, we'll just have movies and videos and documentaries.

Well, you know, I have to stop people and say well think about this for a minute, how many people attend the opera, how many people go to a soccer match, how many people go to a live event where they can experience it, feel it, and get it into their bodies so that have empathy for an issue. I think it's.. you have to have both BUT-- THIS IS BIG BUSINESS...A MASSIVE ENTERTAINMENT AND AMUSEMENT INSTITUTION. Business that survive are businesses that make money. It's--..there's nothing wrong with making money. There's nothing wrong with taking that money and putting it back in to the animals' habitats, putting it back into research and putting it back into the educational programs. That Shamu TV thing I just mentioned, our program, it costs about 85 thousand dollars each time we put it on. Who pays for that, We do. So yes, you make money but you spend money. The government isn't going to help endangered species, the government agencies are not gonna help the problems with the endangered manatee. They sit and let us take care of it because we have the resources to do it... ..US, BEING?

Sea World, the Miami Sea Aquarium, .. Marineland... WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ANHEUSER BUSCH DECIDES THAT IT'S NO LONGER PART OF THE CORPORATE STRATEGY, IT DOESN'T FIT THE CORPORATE MIX AND IT'S NOT GOOD FOR BASICALLY SELLING BEER? WHAT HAPPENS TO ALL THIS GOOD STUFF? Another corporation will do exactly the same thing. It's a vehicle that runs as an institution of education, again research and it's been in.. we've been doing this for years and years, and it grows in terms of all of our programs, we have more impact where we can impact more people, we can impact more science, we're funding projects now in Africa through our Busch Gardens parks, Belize, Macao and Brazil. We've put up a canopy walk in the Amazon. I mean I'm tooting our horn, but if it isn't for companies like this, it's not gonna happen. ANSWER THE CRITIC WHO SAYS THAT PLACES LIKE THIS SEND THE WRONG KIND OF MESSAGE ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HUMAN BEINGS AND SAY MARINE MAMMALS.

REINFORCING THE HIERARCHY BETWEEN HUMANS AND MAMMALS, THEY DO TRICKS, THEY LEAP UP AND DOWN AND THEY GET THEIR REWARDS FOR IT AND THEY'RE ESSENTIALLY JUST CLOWNS. AND THAT THIS IS THE MESSAGE THAT COMES. I consider that a very cynical point of view. I think that if you talk to the people that come to a park like Sea World or go to a zoo, there's certainly entertainment motive, people are going to be entertained. I think you'll find television, if a program's not entertaining it's probably not going to have much viewership. So even the news has to be entertaining nowadays. So entertainment's part of it. And the things you've alluded to are suggestive of entertainment but the strength, the staying power, the reason people peep.. keep coming back, it's the educational side, they learn something, there's depth. I think the sensitivity that people develop just out of close contact with an animal, you just have to go out to a community pool and see the eyes of children light up when they touch a dolphin for the first time. That's an experience that for many people that one touch will last a lifetime.

We had a woman that came here actually from Canada, that was with her family, she's dying, she apparently had three to six months to live, and it was her dream to touch a dolphin. And she came to Sea World and she wasn't able to reach from where she was, so one of the people at the pool noticed that she couldn't reach, and so they took her to one of the back areas where it was easier. She touched the dolphin, and her whole family, from that experience, was rejuvenated, it was like a celebration. There.. there is a need that people have to get in contact with nature, and we can't all go on ecotours, everybody isn't capable of doing that. And I think that everybody deserves the opportunity to be able to experience those very special things in life that are very meaningful to them as individuals, and for children, I think theseexperiences are a lifetime of value. WE TALKED BEFORE ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF TAKING ANIMALS FROM CAPTIVITY AND PUTTING THEM BACK INTO THE WILD.

WHAT IS THE FEASIBILITY OF TAKING THEM IN FOR A LITTLE WHILE AND TAKING THEM OUT --A SORT OF --I THINK SOMEBODY DESCRIBED IT AS THE PIPELINE BETWEEN CAPTIVITY AND THE WILD.... That's been done in one particular program with Dr. Randy Wells where he initially set a hypothesis and set a question on keeping ..compare juvenile male bottlenose dolphins for a short period of time, do some bio-acoustical work on them and then re-introduce them to the home known pod in Sarasota Bay on the west side of Florida. And he went through a permit process to do all that and it was scrutinized very heavily. And it fit most of the criteria to do that type of a program. And those animals after 18 months had difficulty in the first 48 hours to adapt, he follows them every six months, he's there every time checking on them, he has a commitment to the long term study on that so it has some sort of conservation value, it has some sort of a long term effect.

Doing short term collections of animals, it is probably you're going to ask the animal to acclimate to its new environment, then you're going to expect it to go back and fight the stressors of the environment they used to live in, which there are stressors out there too. And it doesn't make a lot of sense to do it in that type of a mode. There's been many reports written about long held captive animals and short, what is the benefits of re-introduction, and Dr. Ben Beck has mentioned that there's probably a hundred and.. I think 114, 120 re-introduction processes or programs that have been approved through this larger global umbrella, and most of them have been terrestrial or related to birds, and only about 18 of them have worked. So I think it's worthy of discussion but I think people have to be very careful about just creating an easy solution for somebody's uncomfortableness to something else. YOU SEEM TO BE SAYING THAT THERE'S NOT GOING TO BE A WHOLE LOT OF RETURNING OF SEA WORLD MAMMALS TO THE WILD. Yeah.

We return beached animals all the time....short term, we do long term rehab, meaning 18 to 24, 36 months with manatees in off Florida coast, and that elaborate process of re-introduction is very complicated right now because of habitat laws, specially orphans, 50 percent of the orphans that were taken to halfway houses off Kennedy Space Centre and then letting them go at certain times of the year with radio tags on and things like that. About half of them aren't making it, they're not.. they don't know how to forage, they don't know how to socialize, they don't know how to, when the water temperature gets cold they don't know where to go to the warm water, they're missing parts of their learning processes.

So I think the things that we're learning with the manatees and some of the common dolphins that come up on the west coast and some of the harbor porpoises that have been held in facilities in Europe for short term, what we're learning from them is their adaptability when we're radio tracking them and things, we're learning absolutely nothing from releases of animals at the Turks Caicos or where there's no followup or Bogey and Bacall where somebody cuts them from a net down in the Indian Banana River, I mean that's foolish, it's biological suicide, a roulette for the animals, you know, .. nobody has their best interests at heart so it has to be done very very carefully because you.. you're responsible for those animals. CAN YOU SUM IT UP -- WHAT IS YOUR VIEW OF THE FUTURE FOR RELEASING.. THE BIG TICKET, HIGH VALUE ANIMALS LIKE YOUR ORCAS. We're not going to release any of the animals in our collection because they have been in our collection for long periods of time and we're not gonna put them at risk where they can die. WHY HAVE YOU ARRIVED AT THAT POSITION?

The animals that live in an environment where they're dependent upon humans have adapted to that environment, and it's a very easy environment to live in. It isn't one that requires anywhere near the abilities that's required of wild animals, so to take an animal from that environment if it's been there long term and then try to adapt it to going into the wild, is ..does not make sense. There has to be some compelling reason to add this animal to the wild population, if the wild population is healthy, then there's really no point to it, in other words if they had a conservation motive, then it would make sense, but otherwise the animal is better off staying where it is. APPLY ALL THIS TO THE CAMPAIGN TO FREE WILLY. AND WHAT CONCLUSION WOULD YOU DRAW? IS KEIKO A CANDIDATE FOR LIBERATION...? Keiko is not a good candidate, he's been dependent upon humans for his food, his interaction, he's an animal that's adapted to living in an oceanarium environment and has done so successfully for many years. He's an animal that's also deprived of social experience, he doesn't live with other killer whales.

To try to somehow train this animal to then go and survive in the wild doesn't make a lot of sense, he can't possibly benefit the wild population. What would be best for him, I think, is to have an opportunity to live in healthy environment, an oceanarium somewhere where he could live with other killer whales and experience a positive social environment, get to do some of the things that killer whales do when they're together. He's been deprived of that, and for that I'm sad. He deserves better than that, and I would hope that the people that care for him would eventually see the value in getting him.. getting him a good home right where he is. WHAT THEN DOES SEA WORLD MAKE OF THIS --A BIG MONEY CAMPAIGN, TO MOBILIZE PEOPLE'S EMOTIONS BEHIND A FREE KEIKO, FREE WILLY? Well I think you have to look at it from a lot of different aspects, and I hope the people that are contributing monies realize that the end result is practical, as opposed to just a pipe dream, so that they're being fair in their treatment of their mode of giving. WELL THAT'S SORT OF TELLING ME WHAT THEY THINK BUT--- WHAT DO YOU THINK?

I just think that's a tremendous amount of money being raised on an animal that probably would, as Jim said, is probably not a very good candidate at all. I think the money can be better served doing a lotta other things. I think of course caring for the animal is important in itself. But again it's.. there.. is that a higher priority or is that just one or two or three people's selected their project of their life or something, I don't know, I mean is this truly in the best, the best interest of that animal and the wild population. I don't think so. Set | Define Set at Dictionary.com set verb (used with object), set, setting. 1. to put (something or someone) in a particular place: to set a vase on a table. 2. to place in a particular position or posture: Set the baby on his feet. 3. to place in some relation to something or someone: We set a supervisor over the new workers. 4. to put into some condition: to set a house on fire. 5. to set fire to a house. 6. to put in the proper position: to set a chair back on its feet. 7.

to put in the proper or desired order or condition for use: to set a trap. to distribute or arrange china, silver, etc., for use on (a table): to set the table for dinner. 9. to place (the hair, especially when wet) on rollers, in clips, or the like, so that the hair will assume a particular style. 10. to put (a price or value) upon something: He set $7500 as the right amount for the car. The teacher sets a high value on neatness. 11. to fix the value of at a certain amount or rate; value: He set the car at $500. She sets neatness at a high value. 12. to post, station, or appoint for the purpose of performing some duty: to set spies on a person. 13. to determine or fix definitely: to set a time limit. 14. to resolve or decide upon: to set a wedding date. 15. to cause to pass into a given state or condition: to set one's mind at rest; to set a prisoner free. 16. to direct or settle resolutely or wishfully: to set one's mind to a task.

17. to present as a model; place before others as a standard: to set a good example. 18. to establish for others to follow: to set a fast pace. 19. to prescribe or assign, as a task. 20. to adjust (a mechanism) so as to control its performance. 21. to adjust the hands of (a clock or watch) according to a certain standard: I always set my watch by the clock in the library. 22. to adjust (a timer, alarm of a clock, etc.) so as to sound when desired: He set the alarm for seven o'clock. 23. to fix or mount (a gem or the like) in a frame or setting. 24. to ornament or stud with gems or the like: a bracelet set with pearls. 25. to cause to sit; seat: to set a child in a highchair. 26. to put (a hen) on eggs to hatch them. 27. to place (eggs) under a hen or in an incubator for hatching. 28. to place or plant firmly: to set a flagpole in concrete. 29.

to put into a fixed, rigid, or settled state, as the face, muscles, etc. 30. to fix at a given point or calibration: to set the dial on an oven; to set a micrometer. 31. to tighten (often followed by up): to set nuts well up. 32. to cause to take a particular direction: to set one's course to the south. 33. Surgery. to put (a broken or dislocated bone) back in position. 34. (of a hunting dog) to indicate the position of (game) by standing stiffly and pointing with the muzzle. 35. to fit, as words to music. to arrange for musical performance. to arrange (music) for certain voices or instruments. 36. to arrange the scenery, properties, lights, etc., on (a stage) for an act or scene. to prepare (a scene) for dramatic performance. 37. Nautical. to spread and secure (a sail) so as to catch the wind. 38. to arrange (type) in the order required for printing. to put together types corresponding to (copy); compose in type: to set an article. 39. Baking.

to put aside (a substance to which yeast has been added) in order that it may rise. 40. to set milk with rennet. 41. to cause (glue, mortar, or the like) to become fixed or hard. 42. to urge, goad, or encourage to attack: to set the hounds on a trespasser. 43. Bridge. to cause (the opposing partnership or their contract) to fall short: We set them two tricks at four spades. Only perfect defense could set four spades. 44. to affix or apply, as by stamping: The king set his seal to the decree. 45. to fix or engage (a fishhook) firmly into the jaws of a fish by pulling hard on the line once the fish has taken the bait. 46. to sharpen or put a keen edge on (a blade, knife, razor, etc.) by honing or grinding. 47. to fix the length, width, and shape of (yarn, fabric, etc.). 48. Carpentry. to sink (a nail head) with a nail set. 49. to bend or form to the proper shape, as a saw tooth or a spring.

50. to bend the teeth of (a saw) outward from the blade alternately on both sides in order to make a cut wider than the blade itself. verb (used without object), set, setting. 51. to pass below the horizon; sink: The sun sets early in winter. 52. to assume a fixed or rigid state, as the countenance or the muscles. 54. (of the hair) to be placed temporarily on rollers, in clips, or the like, in order to assume a particular style: Long hair sets more easily than short hair. 55. to become firm, solid, or permanent, as mortar, glue, cement, or a dye, due to drying or physical or chemical change. 56. to sit on eggs to hatch them, as a hen. 57. to hang or fit, as clothes. 58. to begin to move; start (usually followed by forth, out, off, etc.). 59. (of a flower's ovary) to develop into a fruit. 60. (of a hunting dog) to indicate the position of game. 61. to have a certain direction or course, as a wind, current, or the like. 62. Nautical.

(of a sail) to be spread so as to catch the wind. 63. Printing. (of type) to occupy a certain width: This copy sets to forty picas. 64. Come in and set a spell. noun the act or state of setting or the state of being set. 66. a collection of articles designed for use together: a set of china; a chess set. 67. a collection, each member of which is adapted for a special use in a particular operation: a set of golf clubs; a set of carving knives. 68. a series of volumes by one author, about one subject, etc. 70. a number, company, or group of persons associated by common interests, occupations, conventions, or status: a set of murderous thieves; the smart set. 71. the fit, as of an article of clothing: the set of his coat. 72. fixed direction, bent, or inclination: The set of his mind was obvious. 73. the set of one's shoulders. 74. the assumption of a fixed, rigid, or hard state, as by mortar or glue. 75.

the arrangement of the hair in a particular style: How much does the beauty parlor charge for a shampoo and set? 76. a plate for holding a tool or die. 77. an apparatus for receiving radio or television programs; receiver. 78. Philately. a group of stamps that form a complete series. 79. Tennis. a unit of a match, consisting of a group of not fewer than six games with a margin of at least two games between the winner and loser: He won the match in straight sets of 6–3, 6–4, 6–4. 80. a construction representing a place or scene in which the action takes place in a stage, motion-picture, or television production. 81. the bending out of the points of alternate teeth of a saw in opposite directions. a permanent deformation or displacement of an object or part. a tool for giving a certain form to something, as a saw tooth. 82. a chisel having a wide blade for dividing bricks. 83. Horticulture. a young plant, or a slip, tuber, or the like, suitable for planting. 84. the number of couples required to execute a quadrille or the like.

a series of movements or figures that make up a quadrille or the like. 85. Music. a group of pieces played by a band, as in a night club, and followed by an intermission. the period during which these pieces are played. 86. Bridge. a failure to take the number of tricks specified by one's contract: Our being vulnerable made the set even more costly. 87. to adjust (a clock or other instrument) to a position 7. to determine or establish: we have set the date for our wedding 8. to prescribe or allot (an undertaking, course of study, etc): the examiners have set ``Paradise Lost'' 9. to arrange in a particular fashion, esp an attractive one: she set her hair, the jeweller set the diamonds in silver 10. (of clothes) to hang or fit (well or badly) when worn 11. Also set to music. to provide music for (a poem or other text to be sung) 12. (printing) Also set up. to arrange or produce (type, film, etc) from (text or copy); compose 13.

to arrange (a stage, television studio, etc) with scenery and props 14. to describe or present (a scene or the background to a literary work, story, etc) in words: his novel is set in Russia 15. to present as a model of good or bad behaviour (esp in the phrases set an example, set a good example, set a bad example) 16. foll by on or by. to value (something) at a specified price or estimation of worth: he set a high price on his services 17. (foll by at) to price (the value of something) at a specified sum: he set his services at £300 18. (also intransitive) to give or be given a particular direction: his course was set to the East 19. (also intransitive) to rig (a sail) or (of a sail) to be rigged so as to catch the wind 20. (intransitive) (of the sun, moon, etc) to disappear beneath the horizon 21. to leave (dough, etc) in one place so that it may prove 22.

to sharpen (a cutting blade) by grinding or honing the angle adjacent to the cutting edge 23. to displace alternate teeth of (a saw) to opposite sides of the blade in order to increase the cutting efficiency 24. to sink (the head of a nail) below the surface surrounding it by using a nail set 25. (computing) to give (a binary circuit) the value 1 26. (of plants) to produce (fruits, seeds, etc) after pollination or (of fruits or seeds) to develop after pollination 27. to plant (seeds, seedlings, etc) 28. to place (a hen) on (eggs) for the purpose of incubation 29. (intransitive) (of a gun dog) to turn in the direction of game, indicating its presence 30. (Scot & Irish) to let or lease: to set a house 31. (bridge) to defeat (one's opponents) in their attempt to make a contract 32. a dialect word for sit 33. the act of setting or the state of being set 35.

a condition of firmness or hardness 36. bearing, carriage, or posture: the set of a gun dog when pointing 37. the fit or hang of a garment, esp when worn 38. the scenery and other props used in and identifying the location of a stage or television production, film, etc 39. (printing) Also called set width the width of the body of a piece of type the width of the lines of type in a page or column 40. (nautical) the cut of the sails or the arrangement of the sails, spars, rigging, etc, of a vessel the direction from which a wind is blowing or towards which a tide or current is moving 41. (psychol) a temporary bias disposing an organism to react to a stimulus in one way rather than in others 42. a seedling, cutting, or similar part that is ready for planting: onion sets 43. a blacksmith's tool with a short head similar to a cold chisel set transversely onto a handle and used, when struck with a hammer, for cutting off lengths of iron bars 44.

a group of people who associate together, esp a clique: he's part of the jet set 3. (maths, logic) Also called class. a collection of numbers, objects, etc, that is treated as an entity: 3, the moon is the set the two members of which are the number 3 and the moon (in some formulations) a class that can itself be a member of other classes 4. any apparatus that receives or transmits television or radio signals 5. (tennis, squash, badminton) one of the units of a match, in tennis one in which one player or pair of players must win at least six games: Graf lost the first set 6. the number of couples required for a formation dance a series of figures that make up a formation dance 7. How To Write A Novel Using The Snowflake Method A one-sentence summary of the character’s storyline The character’s motivation (what does he/she want abstractly?) The character’s goal (what does he/she want concretely?) The character’s conflict (what prevents him/her from reaching this goal?) The character’s epiphany (what will he/she learn, how will he/she change?

A one-paragraph summary of the character’s storyline An important point: You may find that you need to go back and revise your one-sentence summary and/or your one-paragraph summary. Go ahead! This is good–it means your characters are teaching you things about your story. It’s always okay at any stage of the design process to go back and revise earlier stages. In fact, it’s not just okay–it’s inevitable. And it’s good. Any revisions you make now are revisions you won’t need to make later on to a clunky 400 page manuscript. Another important point: It doesn’t have to be perfect. The purpose of each step in the design process is to advance you to the next step. Keep your forward momentum! You can always come back later and fix it when you understand the story better. You will do this too, unless you’re a lot smarter than I am. Step 4) By this stage, you should have a good idea of the large-scale structure of your novel, and you have only spent a day or two. Well, truthfully, you may have spent as much as a week, but it doesn’t matter.

If the story is broken, you know it now, rather than after investing 500 hours in a rambling first draft. So now just keep growing the story. Take several hours and expand each sentence of your summary paragraph into a full paragraph. All but the last paragraph should end in a disaster. The final paragraph should tell how the book ends. This is a lot of fun, and at the end of the exercise, you have a pretty decent one-page skeleton of your novel. It’s okay if you can’t get it all onto one single-spaced page. What matters is that you are growing the ideas that will go into your story. You are expanding the conflict. You should now have a synopsis suitable for a proposal, although there is a better alternative for proposals . . . Step 5) Take a day or two and write up a one-page description of each major character and a half-page description of the other important characters. These “character synopses” should tell the story from the point of view of each character. As always, feel free to cycle back to the earlier steps and make revisions as you learn cool stuff about your characters.

I usually enjoy this step the most and lately, I have been putting the resulting “character synopses” into my proposals instead of a plot-based synopsis. Editors love character synopses, because editors love character-based fiction. Step 6) By now, you have a solid story and several story-threads, one for each character. Now take a week and expand the one-page plot synopsis of the novel to a four-page synopsis. Basically, you will again be expanding each paragraph from step (4) into a full page. This is a lot of fun, because you are figuring out the high-level logic of the story and making strategic decisions. Here, you will definitely want to cycle back and fix things in the earlier steps as you gain insight into the story and new ideas whack you in the face. Step 7) Take another week and expand your character descriptions into full-fledged character charts detailing everything there is to know about each character. The standard stuff such as birthdate, description, history, motivation, goal, etc. Most importantly, how will this character change by the end of the novel? This is an expansion of your work in step (3), and it will teach you a lot about your characters.

You will probably go back and revise steps (1-6) as your characters become “real” to you and begin making petulant demands on the story. This is good — great fiction is character-driven. Take as much time as you need to do this, because you’re just saving time downstream. When you have finished this process, (and it may take a full month of solid effort to get here), you have most of what you need to write a proposal. If you are a published novelist, then you can write a proposal now and sell your novel before you write it. If you’re not yet published, then you’ll need to write your entire novel first before you can sell it. No, that’s not fair, but life isn’t fair and the world of fiction writing is especially unfair. Step 8) You may or may not take a hiatus here, waiting for the book to sell. At some point, you’ve got to actually write the novel. Before you do that, there are a couple of things you can do to make that traumatic first draft easier. The first thing to do is to take that four-page synopsis and make a list of all the scenes that you’ll need to turn the story into a novel.

And the easiest way to make that list is . . . with a spreadsheet. For some reason, this is scary to a lot of writers. Oh the horror. Deal with it. You learned to use a word-processor. Spreadsheets are easier. You need to make a list of scenes, and spreadsheets were invented for making lists. If you need some tutoring, buy a book. There are a thousand out there, and one of them will work for you. It should take you less than a day to learn the itty bit you need. It’ll be the most valuable day you ever spent. Do it. Make a spreadsheet detailing the scenes that emerge from your four-page plot outline. Make just one line for each scene. In one column, list the POV character. In another (wide) column, tell what happens. If you want to get fancy, add more columns that tell you how many pages you expect to write for the scene. A spreadsheet is ideal, because you can see the whole storyline at a glance, and it’s easy to move scenes around to reorder things. My spreadsheets usually wind up being over 100 lines long, one line for each scene of the novel.

As I develop the story, I make new versions of my story spreadsheet. This is incredibly valuable for analyzing a story. It can take a week to make a good spreadsheet. When you are done, you can add a new column for chapter numbers and assign a chapter to each scene. Step 9) (Optional. I don’t do this step anymore.) Switch back to your word processor and begin writing a narrative description of the story. Take each line of the spreadsheet and expand it to a multi-paragraph description of the scene. Put in any cool lines of dialogue you think of, and sketch out the essential conflict of that scene. If there’s no conflict, you’ll know it here and you should either add conflict or scrub the scene. I used to write either one or two pages per chapter, and I started each chapter on a new page. Then I just printed it all out and put it in a loose-leaf notebook, so I could easily swap chapters around later or revise chapters without messing up the others. This process usually took me a week and the end result was a massive 50-page printed document that I would revise in red ink as I wrote the first draft.

All my good ideas when I woke up in the morning got hand-written in the margins of this document. This, by the way, is a rather painless way of writing that dreaded detailed synopsis that all writers seem to hate. But it’s actually fun to develop, if you have done steps (1) through (8) first. When I did this step, I never showed this synopsis to anyone, least of all to an editor — it was for me alone. I liked to think of it as the prototype first draft. Imagine writing a first draft in a week! Yes, you can do it and it’s well worth the time. But I’ll be honest, I don’t feel like I need this step anymore, so I don’t do it now. Step 10) At this point, just sit down and start pounding out the real first draft of the novel. You will be astounded at how fast the story flies out of your fingers at this stage. I have seen writers triple their fiction writing speed overnight, while producing better quality first drafts than they usually produce on a third draft. You might think that all the creativity is chewed out of the story by this time.

Well, no, not unless you overdid your analysis when you wrote your Snowflake. This is supposed to be the fun part, because there are many small-scale logic problems to work out here. How does Hero get out of that tree surrounded by alligators and rescue Heroine who’s in the burning rowboat? This is the time to figure it out! But it’s fun because you already know that the large-scale structure of the novel works. So you only have to solve a limited set of problems, and so you can write relatively fast. This stage is incredibly fun and exciting. I have heard many fiction writers complain about how hard the first draft is. Invariably, that’s because they have no clue what’s coming next. Good grief! Life is too short to write like that! There is no reason to spend 500 hours writing a wandering first draft of your novel when you can write a solid one in 150. Counting the 100 hours it takes to do the design documents, you come out way ahead in time. About midway through a first draft, I usually take a breather and fix all the broken parts of my design documents. Yes, the design documents are not perfect. That’s okay.

The design documents are not fixed in concrete, they are a living set of documents that grows as you develop your novel. If you are doing your job right, at the end of the first draft you will laugh at what an amateurish piece of junk your original design documents were. And you’ll be thrilled at how deep your story has become. Over the years, I’ve taught the Snowflake method to hundreds of writers at conferences. I’ve also had this article posted here on my web site for a long time, and the page has now been viewed over 2,400,000 times. I’ve heard from many, many writers. Some people love the Snowflake; some don’t. My attitude is that if it works for you, then use it. If only parts of it work for you, then use only those parts.I write my own novels using the Snowflake method. Make no mistake — it’s a fair bit of work. For a long time, I did it the hard way, using Microsoft Word to write the text and Microsoft Excel to manage the list of scenes. Unfortunately, neither of those tools knows about the structure of fiction.

Finally, I realized that it would be a whole lot easier to work through the method if the tools were designed specially for fiction. So one day I decided to create that software. I wanted something that would automate every step that could be automated. The result was a commercial software package I call Snowflake Pro . It makes my own Snowflaking incredibly easier, and it’s now doing the same for zillions of other writers. Snowflake Pro makes the Snowflake method fast, easy, and fun. It runs on Macs, Windows, and Linux. Currently, I’m running a special promotion that gives a 50% discount on this cool and fun tool for anyone who owns a copy of my book Writing Fiction for Dummies . Ways To Use The Snowflake Are you struggling right now with a horrible first draft of your novel that just seems hopeless? Take an hour and summarize your story in one sentence. Does that clarify things? You’ve just completed step (1) of the Snowflake, and it only took an hour. Why not try the next few steps of the Snowflake and see if your story doesn’t suddenly start coming to life? What have you got to lose, except a horrible first draft that you already hate?

Are you a seat-of-the-pants writer who finally finished your novel, but now you’re staring at an enormous pile of manuscript that desperately needs rewriting? Take heart! Your novel’s done, isn’t it? You’ve done something many writers only dream about. Now imagine a big-shot editor bumps into you in the elevator and asks what your novel’s about. In fifteen words or less, what would you say? Take your time! This is a thought game. What would you say? If you can come up with an answer in the next hour . . . you’ve just completed Step 1 of the Snowflake! Do you think some of the other steps might help you put some order into that manuscript? Give it a shot. What have you got to lose? Have you just got a nightmarishly long letter from your editor detailing all the things that are wrong with your novel? Are you wondering how you can possibly make all the changes before your impossible deadline? It’s never too late to do the Snowflake. How about if you take a week and drill through all the steps right now? It’ll clarify things wonderfully, and then you’ll have a plan for executing all those revisions. I bet you’ll get it done in record time.

And I bet the book will come out better than you imagined. If the Snowflake Method works for you, I’d like to hear from you. You can reach me through the contact page on my web-site. Acknowledgments: I thank my many friends on the Chi Libris list and especially Janelle Schneider for a large number of discussions on the Snowflake and much else. Best regards, Randy Ingermanson, Ph.D. Want to Know More About the Snowflake Method? Check out my latest best-selling book, How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method. This book is a different kind of teaching tool. It uses a story to SHOW you how to write a novel, rather than to TELL you how to write a novel. I used the Snowflake Method to help me write the book, and at the end, you get to see the Snowflake document I created for the book, exactly the way I wrote it. If you learn best by seeing examples, you might like this book. It’s about a young woman who’s been dreaming all her life about writing a novel. Her parents always told her that fiction writing was “impractical,” and they made her get a practical college degree.

But now that she’s married and has two kids in school, she decides to do something just for herself, for once in her life. She’s going to write that novel and nobody is going to stop her. The only thing blocking her is herself. Available in paper and in e-book. SnowCrystals.com SnowCrystals.com Photos .. Videos .. Books .. Science .. Art .. History .. Geography No two alike?... not any more! Check out our "Identical-Twin" snowflakes ! Looking for an awesome gift?... How about a beautiful snowflake book ? Snowflakes fall with a fascinating variety of shapes and patterns -- including stellar dendrites, hollow columns, triangular crystals, and many more. Click here to see the common crystals as well as some exotic varieties. Explore>>>>>> I grow my own snow crystals in the snowflake lab, where I can create my own designs, including some you will not find in nature. Click here to see how this is done. Explore>>>>>> Click on this image to watch snow crystals as they grow in snowflake lab.

It takes about 15-60 minutes to grow a large snowflake, and this process is compressed to around 10-30 seconds using time-lapse photography Explore>>>>>> How are snow crystals made, and why do they have the shapes they do? Why are they all so different, and how come the six branches grow so similarly? Click here to learn how all this works. Explore>>>>>> Ice and water are all around us, and they are fascinating to learn about. You too can grow your own snowflakes, make some snowflake fossils, or investigte the mysterious ice spikes. Click here to find out how.. Explore>>>>>> About the author Kenneth G. Libbrecht is a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). A North Dakota native, Ken studies the molecular dynamics of crystal growth, including how ice crystals grow from water vapor, which is essentially the physics of snowflakes. He has authored several books on this topic, including The Snowflake: Winter’s Frozen Artistry, The Secret Life of a Snowflake, The Art of the Snowflake, and Ken Libbrecht’s Field Guide to Snowflakes. He can be reached at kgl@caltech.edu.

SnowCrystals.com has been bringing you snowflake photos and facts since February 1, 1999. Over 26 million visitors so far! Click here for copyright information. Building Web Pages With HTML 5 | WIRED Building Web Pages With HTML 5 subscribe 6 months for $5 - plus a FREE Portable Phone Charger. 9 hours There is no future. There is no past. There is only Donald Glover rocking this look. bit.ly/2jEg1wW Time of Publication: 8:45 pm. 8:45 pm Building Web Pages With HTML 5 Depending on who you ask, HTML 5 is either the next important step toward creating a more semantic web or a disaster that’s going to trap the web in yet another set of incomplete tags and markup soup. The problem with both sides of the argument is that very few sites are using HTML 5 in the wild, so the theoretical solutions to its perceived problems remain largely untested. That said, it isn’t hard to see both the benefits and potential hang-ups with the next generation of web markup tools. Contents OK, now you can use HTML 5, but should you? What’s different about HTML 5?

First off, what do we mean by HTML 5? Ideally, we mean the whole thing — new semantic structural tags, API specs like canvas or offline storage and even some new inline semantic tags. However, for practical reasons (read: browser support issues) we’re going to limit this intro to just the structural tags. As cool as Canvas, offline storage, native video or the geolocation APIs are, they aren’t supported consistently across all the browsers yet. “But wait,” you say, “most browsers don’t support the new structural elements either!” This is true, but the vast majority of them will happily accept any tag you want to make up. Even IE 6 can deal with the new elements, though if you want to apply styles using CSS, you’ll need a little JavaScript help. The one thing to keep in mind when you’re applying styles to the new tags is that unknown tags have no default style in most browsers. They’re also treated as inline elements. However, because most of the new HTML 5 tags are structural, we’ll want them be behave like block elements. The solution is make sure that you include display:block; in your CSS styles.

To help make some sense of what’s new in HTML 5 today, we’re going to dive right in and start using some of the new structural elements. Finally, a doctype anyone can remember The first thing we need to do to create an HTML 5 document is use the new doctype. Now, if you’ve actually memorized the HTML 4 or XHTML 1.x doctypes, you’re better monkeys than us. Whenever we start a new page we have to bring up an old one and cut and paste the doctype definition over. It’s a pain, which is why we love the new HTML 5 doctype . Are you ready? Here it is: <!DOCTYPE html> Shouldn’t be too hard to commit that to memory. Simple and obvious. Case insensitive. The idea is to stop versioning HTML so that backwards compatibility is easier. Whether or not that pans out in the long run is a whole other story, but at least it saves you some typing in the mean time. Semantic structure at last OK, we have our page defined as an HTML 5 document. So far so good. Now what are these new tags we’ve been hearing about?

Before we dive into the new tags, consider the structure of your average web page, which (generally) looks something like this: <html> <head> ...stuff... </head> <body> <div id="header"> <h1>My Site</h1> </div> <div id="nav"> <ul> <li>Home</li> <li>About</li> <li>Contact</li> </ul> </div> <div id=content> <h1>My Article</h1> <p>...</p> </div> <div id="footer"> <p>...</p> </div> </body> </html> That’s fine for display purposes, but what if we want to know something about what the page elements contain? In the above example, we’ve added IDs to all our structural divs. This is a fairly common practice among savvy designers. The purpose is two-fold — first, the IDs provide hooks which can be used to apply styles to specific sections of the page and, second, the IDs serve as a primitive, pseudo-semantic structure.

Smart parsers will look at the ID attributes on a tag and try to guess what they mean, but it’s hard when ID names are different on every site. And that’s where the new structural tags come in. Recognizing that these IDs were common practice, the authors of HTML 5 have gone a step further and made some of these elements into their own tags. Here’s a quick overview of the new structural tags available in HTML 5: <header> The header tag is intended as a container for introductory information about a section or an entire webpage. The <header> tag can include anything from your typical logo/slogan that sits atop most pages, to a headline and lede that introduces a section. If you’ve been using <div id="header"> in your pages, that would be the tag to replace with <header>. <nav> The nav element is pretty self-explanatory — your navigation elements go here. Of course what constitutes navigation is somewhat debatable — there’s primary site navigation, but in some cases there may also be page navigation elements as well. The WHATWG, creators of HTML 5, recently amended the explanation of <nav> to show how it could be used twice on the same page.

For more on nav and a lively debate about HTML 5, see Jeffrey Zeldman’s article on the nav element . The short story is that if you’ve been using a <div id="nav"> tag to hold your page navigation, you can replace it with a simple <nav> tag. <section> Section is probably the most nebulous of the new tags. According the HTML 5 spec , a section is a thematic grouping of content, typically preceded by a header tag, and followed by a footer tag. But sections can also be nested inside of each other, if needed. In our example above, the div labeled “content” would be a good candidate to become a section. Then within that section, depending on the content, we might have additional sections. <article> According the WHATWG notes, the article element should wrap “a section of content that forms an independent part of a document or site; for example, a magazine or newspaper article, or a blog entry.” Keep in mind that you can have more than one article tag on the page; for example a blog homepage might have the last ten articles, each wrapped in an article tag.

Articles can also be broken into sections using the section tag, though you’ll want to be somewhat careful when planning your structure otherwise you’re liable to end up with some ugly tag soup. <aside> Another fairly nebulous tag, the aside element is for content that is “tangentially related to the content that forms the main textual flow of a document.” [1] That means a parenthetical remark, inline footnotes, pull quotes, annotations or the more typical sidebar content like you see to the right of this article. According to the WHATWG’s notes it seems like <aside> would work in all those cases, despite the fact that there’s considerable difference between a pull quote and tag cloud in your sidebar. Hey, no one said HTML 5 was perfect! <footer> Footer should also be self-explanatory, except perhaps that you can have more than one. In other words, sections can have footers in addition to the main footer generally found at the bottom of most pages. Putting it all together OK, let’s rewrite our original example using the new tags: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> ...stuff...

</head> <body> <header> <h1>My Site</h1> </header> <nav> <ul> <li>Home</li> <li>About</li> <li>Contact</li> </ul> </nav> <section> <h1>My Article</h1> <article> <p>...</p> </article> </section> <footer> <p>...</p> </footer> </body> </html> Much cleaner and easier to understand, right? A couple of notes: we could have wrapped our <h1>My Article</h1> headline in header tags. I opted not to since the h1 element already conveys the heading, but if you also had a pub date, byline or other data atop your post, the collective group of tags would be a good candidate for adding a header container tag. If you’d like to see this technique in action, check out this page on my site about snorkeling in Bali . Also note that we could add a second footer element below the article element to contain things like next/prev navigation, related posts or other content.

Styling the new tags In most browsers, all you need to do is simply define your styles as you normally would in order to apply styles to these new elements. But make sure to add the display:block; rule to every element — for now anyway. In time, as browsers begin standardizing support for the new elements, that won’t be necessary. For example let’s apply some styles to our header: header { display: block; font-size: 36px; font-weight: bold; } Keep in mind that you can still add class and ID attributes to these tags. So, if you wanted to style one navigation section separately, you’d simply add a class or ID to the tag like so: <nav class="main-menu"> Then you can apply a style: nav.main-menu { font-size: 18px; } Compatibility with older browsers But wait, what about IE? None of these styles are working in IE 6. If you still need to support legacy browsers like IE, there is a fix. IE 6 parses and displays these tags just fine, but it won’t apply any CSS to them. The fix is to use a bit of JavaScript.

All we need to do to get IE to style our HTML 5 tags is use the createElement method so IE 6 becomes aware of the new tags. Add this bit to the head of your HTML 5 file. Or alternatively, you can save it in a separate file and include it that way. <script> document.createElement('header'); document.createElement('nav'); document.createElement('section'); document.createElement('article'); document.createElement('aside'); document.createElement('footer'); </script> I know what you’re thinking: “Hey, you didn’t specify a MIME type for that script tag.” You don’t need to do that in HTML 5. In HTML 5, all scripts are assumed to be type="text/javascript" so there’s no need it clutter up your script tags with attributes anymore (unless your script is something other than JavaScript). That fixes the IE problems, but we’re not out of the woods just yet. It turns out that there’s a bug in the Gecko rendering engine that causes Firefox 2 and some versions of Camino to choke on these tags as well. There are two ways to work around this bug, neither of which are ideal. For more details check out this article on HTML5doctor .

The same article also has a handy script with all the HTML 5 elements already to go. Bear in mind though that Firefox 2 usage stats are quickly falling below 10 percent of all web traffic, so simply ignoring this bug might be a possibility depending on your site’s audience. OK, now you can use HTML 5, but should you? The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that it depends on the site. If you’re charged with recreating the CNN homepage, well, you might want to hold off for a bit until browser support improves. But if you’re revamping your blog, we say go ahead. There are even some WordPress plugins that can help if you’re using that particular publishing system. Here’s an HTML 5 theme by Jeff Starr. Also, check out the sites featured on HTML 5 Gallery and view source to see what they’re doing. However, if IE’s shortcoming are holding you back, consider this: even Google is using the HTML 5 doctype on their main search page. Even if you don’t use all the new structural tags you can at least take advantage of things like shorter script declarations, and some of the non-structural semantic tags that we’ll cover next time around.

Go on to Lesson 2 ! From the HTML 5 Tutorial series Lesson 1: Building Web Pages With HTML 5

Question: (Aside from a back and a front) how many sides or points does every snowflake have?
Answer: Six