A compelling blog

Back when I was thinking about writing a novel, THE novel, the one that haunted me every morning for weeks when I woke up and then followed me to work, tickling details for scenes inside my brain ... back then I was trying to work through a problem. Many writers mention that working through a problem is part of their writing process, and it actually was happening to me every time I thought about writing this particular novel. My problem? How do you get a person to do something that he or she does not want to do? How do you really compel a person? Can you MAKE anyone do something that he or she doesn't want to do? And if you can MAKE them do something, how do you write about that accomplishment in a realistic way? The reason I was thinking about this problem was that in order for the protagonist of the novel to fall into the arms/trap of the hero/villain, she would have to do things that I was certain she would never ever want to do.
Now, on tv shows and in some movies, they show wives giving their husbands the "evil eye" or some such LOOK, and he magically bends to the wife's will, doing something he did not want to do. I've never had this experience, succeeding with the compel via a simple look; my evil-eye look is defective, or I wore it out by using it too often on my brother when we were growing up, without much success then either. And, I've heard people say that some children obey their parents, even doing things the children do not want to do, just out of respect for their parental units' wishes. I'm sure I did that a few times when I was a child, but I really don't see how parents nowadays can make that happen if a child were to really dig in his or her heels in any given situation (so many methods of "persuasion" are disallowed today: no screaming at them, no spanking or whacking with a wooden spoon, no sugary treats as rewards).
Child-rearing aside, how do you compel?

I made a list.
The basics are extortion, blackmail, and force; all illegal in modern society, all ubiquitous, all unethical. But they work.
Back to my novel, none of those options would work in my story if I was going to make the reader believe that the heroine was falling in love with the rapscallion at the same time that he was (somehow) getting her to do something she didn't want to do (steal a priceless Egyptian artifact from the small regional museum where she worked, if you must know).
The rest of the list reads like this (nouns and verbs mixed together here, GrammarBros): persuasion, logic, convince, persistent demands, plead, peer pressure, reward, bribe, lie about results/benefits of the desired action, call in a favour, beg for help, lie about the reality of the situation. I've been thinking about this a lot. 
Most of those options fail in the ethical realm too, because they abrogate the person's right to freedom of choice. If a person does not want to do something, don't they have the freedom to NOT do it in our 21st-century Canadian society? Now, I'm talking more about my experience with life than my novel. [I mean, in my novel the villain/pretty-boy is actually quite unethical, so I can use all the methods from the second list throughout the course of the novel, to bend her to his will. But will she bend? And why?]
IRL, since thinking about this, I have been less and less likely to try to manipulate a person so that they will do something they do not want to do. Nothing is really that important to me that I will step all over a person's freedom of choice, the only freedom we really have anymore in this world.
Way too serious, this blog, but it's something I've been thinking about, a lot, so I let it pour out tonight; thanks for staying tuned. Any other options you can think of, to compel? Share them in the comments: t'anx.

None too giddy

As I sit down to write my first blog, I'm thinking about tone, about how to keep a reader interested in my random ramblings, and how when I write I tend to lose much of the giddiness that fills my brain and my conversations on a daily basis. I know I've made people laugh (with me, and of course at me, or at my antics) from time to time, and I laugh at silly things like the movie Nacho Libre or Lego Indiana Jones or lolcats pictures; but when I write, serious old Alice creeps down my arms and seeps out the ends of my fingertips onto the keys. It's with irony that I chose the blog moniker Alice from one of the silliest books ever written to sign off on these blogs that will probably rarely read as silly. I don't want to force it, the giddiness, the silliness that have been filling my days with joy this 2010, and the last half of 2009, so I will just write, to get into the habit of writing, and hope that giddy Alice will peek out once in a while. Now, onto the blogging.
One of the best decisions I made about four years ago was to try a social experiment on myself, some CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) if you will. I don't have children, so I had to run this psychosocial test on myself. I found that the Canadian behaviour of saying "I'm sorry," "Sorry!" "sorry about that," "Oh, I'm so sorry" was diluting the real meaning of that word to the point where the phrase was more a verbal tick than any true indication of regret. I decided to try to reserve saying "I'm sorry" when I really meant it, when I was regretful or wanted to express a sense of loss. I say "try" because I am not always successful, of course, since hearing that tick all the time from fellow Canadians certainly makes it harder to avoid saying it. What do I say instead? "Excuse me" or "pardon me" in physically awkward situations, and other polite expressions of cordial good nature in appropriate circumstances (there's serious-Alice again). The best (and scariest) part about avoiding "sorry" is that when I removed that phrase from a situation in which I made a mistake, I had to start taking responsibility of my mistakes. I had to own the error, ("my bad" as some of the hip kids say these days); that owning was a terrifying prospect at the beginning of this experiment, or lifestyle change as the case may be. And do you know what happened when I started saying, "I made that mistake"? Nothing. Nada. Zip. Bupkis. People opened up to this statement of my human nature of erring, identified with me as a fellow flawed, vulnerable being, and I followed the owning of the error with the spoken resolution to fix the mistake or to do better next time, and everything was just fine. A revelation.
A liberating phrase, that I am so glad I found at some point in my life: "I made a mistake." Say it out loud, say it proud; I do, and it changed my life.