Showing posts with label Good vs.Evil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Good vs.Evil. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 08, 2021

Afterthoughts Part 2 Good and Evil

Afterthoughts

Part 2

Good and Evil


See? I told you there'd be more afterthoughts. 

Part 1 is:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2021/04/afterthoughts-part-1.html

Part 2 is in response to an observation on a Facebook writer's thread asking how you show a Good Character turning to the Dark Side. 

The discussion thread got all wrapped up in the writer's view of one specific character, but to solve the writing craft problem you need the underlying principle, not the surface decoration.  

Here's the basic PRINCIPLE: 

"Good" respects the Free Will and Personal Integrity of others, and will not use power of any sort to over-ride the Free Will choices of others (by lying or by withholding information). 

"Evil" is so focused on gaining (whatever - money, power, relief from fear, pain etc) that the Free Will (both the power of Will and the Freedom to choose to act differently than Evil wants) of others is not important enough to make Evil hold back on use of force, and tediously explain and teach and illuminate until the other changes their mind OF THEIR OWN FREE WILL.  

Evil has no patience. Good has nearly infinite patience. 

Evil has no recourse other than FORCE - while Good has a life-time-created stockpile of various options.  

So just show your GOOD character taking pain to avoid forcing another -- then in later scenes show that character oblivious to another's right to choose their own actions.  

For more clues, read Blake Snyder's 3 book screenwriting series SAVE THE CAT!  

Previous mentions of SAVE THE CAT! include:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/11/worldbuilding-from-reality-part-10-does.html


https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/11/worldbuilding-from-reality-part-10-does.html


https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/08/index-to-posts-about-using-real-world.html


https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/06/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-21.html

"Saving the cat" is the description of how to formulate an opening scene establishing the main character as "good" -- someone who would take a risk to help an innocent. See the SUPERMAN movies. 

First establish the "good" -- then the imperative reason that "good" has to impose his "good-ness" on another despite the resistance of the other -- then redeem your MC by showing the epiphany where he internalizes the difference in when to use force and when NOT to.  

If you need more clues - read some books on Martial Arts and/or training to use a Gun.  Law Officer training manuals.  

In Tarot it's called THE LORD OF SHORTENED FORCE - 5-Swords.

https://smile.amazon.com/Not-So-Minor-Arcana-Books-ebook/dp/B010E4WAOU/

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com


Thursday, November 03, 2016

Incarnations of Lucifer

Coincidentally (if there ARE coincidences in this life, especially in the realm of popular entertainment—maybe there's a trend here), two current TV series feature Lucifer in person: The long-running SUPERNATURAL, in which two brothers hunt monsters, fight demons, and save the world multiple times; the newer program LUCIFER, in which the Devil goes AWOL from Hell, runs a Los Angeles night club, and works as a civilian consultant for a female homicide detective. Aside from the teeth-grinding implausibilities of the show's versions of police procedure and the work of a therapist (Lucifer's psychologist), I'm enjoying the latter program very much for its characters. The flippant, hedonistic Lucifer has a core of deep-rooted morality, skewed though it may be. This Devil doesn't tempt people to sin. As the (unwilling) ruler of Hell, he punishes evil. When he encounters a Satanist cult in one episode, he rejects them with contempt. His main superpower in human form is to compel people to express their deepest desires. Lucifer in the SUPERNATURAL universe, on the other hand, is unrelentingly evil and, having been freed from the "cage" in which he was imprisoned, is presently roaming the Earth (played by Rick Springsteen as a rock star whose body the Devil has inhabited) with dire prospects for humanity.

In the world of LUCIFER, angels and demons (fallen angels) take physical form by producing fleshly constructs for the purpose—or at least that seems the usual method. Lucifer's mother, on the other hand, becomes corporeal by taking over the body and persona of a dead woman. In SUPERNATURAL, celestial and infernal beings visit Earth by possessing the bodies of living human "vessels." The difference is that angels have to get the host's permission (and demons often seem to destroy the vessels they occupy, judging from the typical outcome when a possessed person is exorcised). Both series postulate a dualistic universe. Good and evil seem to clash on an equal footing. Moreover, the very definitions of "good" and "evil" appear ambiguous. In SUPERNATURAL, many angels have no compunctions about sacrificing human lives in the service of what they conceive as the greater good. As for God, He has been simply absent for most of the series until the climax of last season. Even the highest-ranking angels had no idea where he went or why. In LUCIFER, God seems like the archetype of a strictly authoritative parent, at least as viewed by Lucifer and (by the opening of this season) his unfallen brother who's tasked with returning him to Hell. Both of them portray their "Father" as an inscrutable tyrant.

The universes of SUPERNATURAL and LUCIFER are dualistic in another sense, too. In each, the male Deity has a female consort. In SUPERNATURAL, she's opposite and equal, God's sister, the primal Darkness, co-eternal with Him. In LUCIFER, God has a wife, the Mother Goddess of the universe. However, they're not equal; He has the power to consign her to Hell. God's power doesn't seem unlimited, though, because He has ordered the angelic characters and Lucifer to return her to the infernal realm, and He doesn't take direct action when this command isn't obeyed.

These programs differ radically in their approach to spiritual and metaphysical issues from the older series TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL, one of my all-time favorites, far more conventional in its treatment of God, supernatural beings, and their interaction with humanity. One thing I like very much about TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL is that its angels were explicitly portrayed as another species, a separate creation from us, not the spirits of dead people as in the misconception that stubbornly persists in popular culture. The angels in SUPERNATURAL (but apparently not most of the demons) and LUCIFER also clearly belong to a different order of being from humanity. Why do these newer series depart so far from the orthodox depiction of celestial entities as purely good, as in TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL (not to mention the older program's consistently happy endings)? Has a fundamental shift in cultural attitudes toward spiritual matters occurred in the intervening decades? Or, more likely, has the extent to which the viewing audience will accept iconoclastic treatment of such topics changed, maybe from the influence of boundary-pushing cable programming? Also, TV programmers are always looking for something new to grab the public's attention, so the stretching of boundaries from the simple, financially driven motive of novelty-seeking may partly account for the difference.

The image of God presented in these two current series may strike many viewers as blasphemous. But despite their unorthodoxy, I'm encouraged by the fact that two major networks think it's worthwhile and profitable to offer programs that grapple with issues of ultimate metaphysical significance.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Tuesday, June 07, 2016

Depiction Part 14 - Depicting Cultural Shifts by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Depiction
Part 14
Depicting Cultural Shifts
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Here is the index post with previous parts of Depiction.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/04/index-to-depiction-series-by-jacqueline.html

A friend mentioned watching the new TV Series Lucifer, where the Devil asks what is the one thing you want -- and the plot unfolds from that choice.

I've started watching the show BEFORE Lucifer about a school for young magicians, THE MAGICIANS (which is fairly well made) so I've seen the trailers and the beginnings of Lucifer.

I thought the concept interesting, but in the context of what viewers now will understand about the world decades hence,  I am looking for what KIND of spouse they will imagine for themselves later.  What will the young teens watching these two shows conclude about "happily ever after" and "soul mates" later on in life?

Personally, I expect that in a few decades they will have thrown off most of the ideas presented in these shows, and in most fantasy novels, just as prior generations have. We, as humans, don't believe everything we're taught, especially not by parents or authority figures.

In the meantime, though, a great deal of (easily dramatized) headline material will be created by these viewers as the mature.

Here's one way to look at this whole spectrum of Marketing Fiction in a Changing World -- a subject we've discussed at length in these posts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/05/index-to-marketing-fiction-in-changing.html

Remember how people always say,  "I'm doing all I can" which essentially dismisses the petitioner as irrational for wanting more than "I can" -- saying I'm the helpless one and that's too bad for you.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/03/depiction-part-9-depicting-hero-by.html

OK, watching NYPD Blue season 1 from the 1980's I see a pivot point in a related attitude to the helplessness of "I'm doing all I can -- so how dare  you ask more of me!"

Today, absolutely everywhere, we hear the phrase "been taught" or even just "what we teach kids in schools."  Some politicians want to beef up the Department of Education because "what we teach kids has to be controlled so they'll behave properly" -- and other politicians demanding to dismantle the Department of Education and  "let" localities decide what to teach kids.

The unconscious assumption behind that language is that "permission" is required. Never in human history has humanity as a whole accepted "permission" as a limitation.  That's why we have Heros (to depict) and Villains (likewise to depict).

We have internal conflicts because, as a whole, humanity just does not "believe" what we are "told" or "taught" to believe.  We learn it, parrot it back for the test, then discard all -- or at least a few of us discard.

And among those few who discard what they've "been taught" we have major internal conflicts, sometimes psychologically crippling conflicts that cause what appears to be "irratic" or "irrational" behavior, temperamental outbursts and so on.  The subconscious retains some of what we've "been taught" no matter how the conscious discards it.

The subconscious can be reprogrammed though, and that happens with a great deal of DRAMA in life (Pluto is Drama, remember).  Dramatizing those lessons reprogramming the subconscious is what fiction writers do -- and it is the core material for Romance which is why Love Stories must be woven into most other genre fiction.

In truth, Love does Conquer All.  Exactly how that happens is what we write about.

So historically, schools have been putting all LEARNING into the same category as "what I can't do."  You can only do "what you've been taught."

Our current culture depicts kids and the adults they become as VICTIMS of "what they are taught."

Kids and even adults are victims so it is up to the Educators (who implicitly know best) to be sure that kids "are taught" only "right" things.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/science-teachers-grasp-of-climate-change-is-found-lacking.html

What has climate change to do with Romance?  Well, along with the unconscious assumptions underlying the dilemma of "what to teach them" (because if you teach wrong, they will suffer and it will be your fault, see last week's post)  we have the matter of teaching "you can't win" and there is no "Happily Ever After" so don't even try.

"You can't win" is taught by demonstrating authority, and telegraphing "allowed" as the key.  Authority must "permit" or "allow" or "provide" -- authority must act first or you can't "have" anything.

"There is no Happily Ever After" is transmitted the student's real life experiences of divorce, job loss, and the constant din of "it is not your fault; the system is broken."  You can't win because you're not permitted to -- permission is everything.

Here is last week's post on Authority, Responsibility and Power in Alien Romance -- how these nebulous concepts are essential to worldbuilding that can cradle a hot Romance.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/05/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-13.html

That "no such thing as Happily Ever After" carries over into what passes for adulthood these days, as people lose jobs to technology and "are doing all they can" to "find a job" and can only "do all they can" which is limited by "what I was taught."

It may be time to entertain the notion that the HEA is possible, but only to those with a Hero's attitude that if you are doing all you can, and it isn't enough, do what you can't anyway.

The whole idea of making college free telegraphs that the real objective is to be certain there is no such thing as a well educated adult running around in the world.

You can't "get an education" -- it isn't an object to be acquired.  It is a condition of the brain, created by exercise.  That exercise is not acquired by "being taught" but by "learning."

 You can learn to live Happily Ever After, but you can not be taught to do it.

Educated adults point out that permission to Live Happily Ever After is not necessary.  You have to do "more than you can" -- a successful marriage requires each give more than 100%.  

Humanity has talents distributed along a curve -- and only 1% are CAPABLE of a university education beyond Bachelor's.  If you try to put everyone through University, it will become grammar school, not University.  Those who want to "get an education" will be happy with their diploma from such a school -- those who want to "learn" will go elsewhere.

That 1%  that can not be kept from learning because they need no permission ignores the "all I can" limit and just does things regardless of whether they "can" or not, regardless of whether they've "been taught."

You can't TEACH that 1%.  What you think means nothing to them.
So perpetuating the idea that you "can't do" what you "have not been taught" is an attack on the 1% by the 99%.

So here's an idea to check out by watching old stuff on Amazon Prime or Netflix.

The 1980's (Reagan) era was a turning point in HEROISM.

Captain Kirk of Star Trek was a 1960's phenomenon popular with people born in the late 1940's -- people who grew to college age seeing their parents succeed against all odds, and thus convinced they, too, could succeed against all odds.  They just needed to learn  how, not to "be taught."

Kids born in the 1960's became 20-somethings in the 1980's experiencing families (and kids their age's families) that were more loosely constituted (sometimes parents lived together, not married), increasing divorce rate, both parents employed (that was rare in the 1950's before "labor saving devices" made "housework" less than a full time job), and families being moved across country as the Dad "climbed the corporate ladder."  Neighborhood friends, school friends, extended family -- all temporary.

Kids who turned twenty in the 1980's "knew" from experience that all personal ties are merely temporary, so don't invest your heart in other people.

The cell phone, Facetime, text chat, and so on, changed all that and today's children hold friendships no matter where they are physically.
Here's the essence of TV Drama popular in the 1950's and 1960's (Star Trek) and 1970's.

THE GOOD GUY WINS BECAUSE HE IS GOOD - NOT BECAUSE HE'S A GUY.

The feminist movement (1970's) destroyed that whole philosophy (fiction themes are philosophical statements) by blaming "winning" on "guy-ness" not on "good-ness."

So women learned to become "bad-ass" in order to win because goodness doesn't win.

Then another generation tackled the whole "goodness" thing with the idea that everything is relative and "fairness"="goodness" because fairness means everyone gets THE SAME THING regardless of their personal merit.

The concept of GOODNESS that drove the 1950's got thrown in the toilet.

Then GOODNESS was replaced with Political Correctness -- the values of which are reflected in the TV Series Lucifer where "Lucifer" is the the protagonist, who always wins.  Everyone else is the "problem of the week."

In the TV Series The Magicians the theme is stated as Magicians can't do anything about real world problems.  Goodness, and Power, are not part of "the real world."

Political commentary on TV "non-fiction" news often states that  "Race is important to Democrats, so therefore Hillary must win the Black vote."  Or some variant on "must win the XXX vote" where XXX is whatever block of voters they are trying to trick you into thinking "are all the same."

In our new 2016 reality there can be such a thing as a "race" all voting as a Bloc.  And it's not racism to say "they" all vote the same way.

A Theme for a novel series might be rooted in the concept that the phrase "win the Black Vote" is racist.  It's based on the idea that all members of a group are identical to one another.  All the "isms" make that assumption -- good novel themes come from those unconscious verbal habits.  That gives you the "internal conflict" for your main character.

And it is objectively true - can be measured by statistics.

Why do the stats show there is a "woman's vote" and a "black vote" and a "Jewish vote?"  WHY????

Because there really IS.

How did that happen?

Maybe by forbidding kids to read the entire textbook before going to Class 1 of the course?

Or perhaps by forbidding kids in grammar school from teaching themselves and defying "the teacher" in every particular and making the teacher PROVE what they are teaching before the class, and not simply parrot what they learned in Education Classes?  Just because it's written in a book doesn't make it true. Prove it.

Teachers teaching today WERE TAUGHT that they can only do "all they can" and so 99% of them don't dare do anything beyond that.   The remaining 1% of teachers are making waves,  big time.

Authoritarian is the word for what has changed our culture.

To "depict" that Cultural Shift in a way that has verisimilitude enough to carry your reader into your artificially built world, you need to know what it was "before" -- what it was in transition -- and what it is "now" relative to your story.

Here's a clue - about reducing stress on the beleaguered victims who are "being taught" instead of learning.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/solutions-for-stressed-out-high-school-students-1455301683

Then you need to explain that change to your reader.

One great way to grasp this idea is to watch the British TV Series, Downton Abby -- that starts in a 'before' culture and depicts the shift into World War I, and the gradual rise of socialism in the UK that changed the whole class-based, landed gentry culture of the 1800's.

Note the relative ages of the characters.  The elders were raised in a before-culture -- the adults are striving to maintain it -- the children are throwing off the traces and running wild into "the future."  And all are righteous about their beliefs and attitudes..

So, in tracing the cultural shift your reader understands, look for old fiction where THE GOOD GUY WINS BECAUSE HE'S GOOD NOT BECAUSE HE'S A GUY.

A good theme might be, "There never was any sexism, and there is no such thing as a 'women's vote' and never was."  Everything in your reader's reality (and yours) says that is nonsense.  Convince the reader otherwise.  The technique known as the "twist ending" is where you suddenly "twist" the fictional reality you've invented back into something resembling the reader's everyday reality.

Look for old fiction where the difference between THE GOOD GUY and THE BAD GUY is that the good guy is GOOD and the bad guy is BAD.  No shades of gray.

Shades of gray in theme material was injected in the 1970's and 1980's as viewer's real-reality shifted from "black and white."

That pivot point in development is important to understand.   It happens so gradually that the Characters don't notice until one day they wake up and the world has changed -- they can't talk to their grandchildren anymore.  New world. New language.

Depicting that generation gap lets you give your Worldbuilding a dimension that feels like reality to the reader.  It is verisimilitude.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/07/why-every-novel-needs-love-story-part-2.html

That post has a link to Part 1 -- and it's about depicting Verisimilitude.

What is good and what is bad can be a matter of thematic argument among the characters in a work, but GOODNESS always wins.

The writer's job is to show the reader (not tell!) the mechanism of reality (of the build world this character lives in) that CAUSES goodness to win.

The entire HELLENISTIC CULTURAL attitude underlies our modern USA culture -- teaching that winning is good, and that in order to win someone has to lose.

Today's school sports custom is to deny that there is such a thing as losing.  This will create a huge cultural shift, and perhaps we will see that as the current turning-18-year-olds vote.

The Hellenistic culture survives in that two-valued Aristotelian "logic" that divides the world into black and white.

Remember in the heyday of the Hellenists, the world was flat, on the back of a turtle, and if you sail to the edge you fall off.  This week, they discovered gravity waves as predicted by Einstein, when they observed two black holes colliding. This is not an either/or world, at the particle level or at the moral level.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Theme-Worldbuilding Integration Part 12: What Makes Evil Seductive? by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Theme-Worldbuilding Integration
Part 12

What Makes Evil Seductive?
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Is existence, all human experience, the condition of being human, a battle between "Good" and "Evil?"

Of such abstract questions are High Concept themes composed.

A writer is generally a writer because a born writer just can't not-write!

Writing, per se, is seductive.

But we still must somehow "make a living."  So it is with great trepidation that most of us realize that what we write is of no real use or interest to anyone else. What a bummer!

Still, life is not so terrible for born writers, provided one little trick is firmly mastered early in life.

The trick? REWRITING.

There are at least 4 Types of Writers (and any given person may morph from one to another throughout life).

TYPE A:  Isaac Asimov is a prime example. This type writes and sells "first drafts." Many beginners think that if their first drafts are not sell-able, then they "can't write."  But that's not true. It's just that they aren't TYPE A writers.  There are very few TYPE A writers working professionally in writing. Most of them are Journalists. Remember Asimov wrote mostly non-fiction best sellers.

TYPE B: Many more writers do their first drafts in their mind, then rewrite and refine it all mentally.  Eventually, they just type it up.  To an observer it all looks remarkably easy. When asked how they write such best selling material, they have no idea how to explain it.  This type of writer can't figure out what beginners don't know.

TYPE C: An even more populous category of writers first-draft mentally, then rewrite and refine by telling the story verbally to other people.  I've known a few who did that, but I am generally of a type.  Most of the Type C writers I know personally never publish.

TYPE D: The most populated category is the work-a-day writer who writes a first draft for personal satisfaction, then stores that in the proverbial bottom drawer and hammers out a sellable version of the story through the process known as drafting, or rewriting.

All of Type D's rewriting efforts that we will discuss today are done long before an agent or editor ever sees the manuscript. Much of the re-drafting is done before Beta Readers see any of it (or hear of it). Then Beta Reader input is digested and incorporated, producing more drafts.  Finally, after submission and acceptance, comes more drafting to hammer the work into shape for the specific publisher's existing market.

Here is a series of posts detailing exactly what an editor's job is from the point of view of a writer trying to appear professional.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vii-how-do.html

Part VII contains links to previous parts.

So what has the type of writer you are got to do with What Makes Evil Seductive?

Well, types A, B, and C either already know or don't want to know.

It's Type D writers who have to learn, know, observe, dissect, analyze, and understand such abstract ideas that compose the core material of a theme.

When writing for yourself, for personal satisfaction, to craft a story about an interesting person, you don't have to SHOW DON'T TELL, illustrate or dramatize the utterly abstract notion of Good or Evil, or even the conflict between them.

You don't need a theory of Good and Evil - what they are, where they came from, which side your protagonist is on, which side wins, - or any conscious statement of these abstract, underlying principles of Creation.

You don't need religion. You don't even need to know if you have a Religion, never mind what your Religion is.

You just write your story, and it is yours.

But if you intend to monetize the time spent writing, rather than just tossing it away as "recreational," then as a Type D writer,  you will have to think hard about abstractions.

There are 3 things to study separately before combining them into a coherent Worldbuilding exercise based on a cleanly stated Theme so you can show-don't-tell how your Characters' World is fully integrated with your Theme.

If these 3 things are clear in your mind when you begin a rewrite,  you will be able to convey the Unity of  your World and your Theme in one, penetrating, unforgettable, quotable scene.

1) What your intended audience assumes about the nature of Good, Evil and how they conflict.

2) What you assume about the nature of Good, Evil, and how they conflict.

3) What your Characters assume ab out the nature of Good, Evil, and how they conflict.

Here's one example about what audiences assume:

"The Good Guys Win Because They Are Good."

That's an envelope theme, and can be broken out into thousands of more specific themes, such as Love Conquers All.

Yes, Love Conquers All is a thematic statement about the nature of Reality -- it is made concrete by assigning the value "Love" to the initial variable "Good Guys."

To be a "Good Guy/Gal" the Character must be
a) capable of love,
b) using that capability when we first meet the Character (saving the cat), and
c) losing at first, taking it well, coming back in middle, hitting his stride at the 3/4 point, and winning in the end.

In our culture, "Winner" = "Good"

Being enamored of the romance genre novel, we generally tend to be seduced by Love.

Romance is the hint of the hope of love.  Romance seduces even the most wayward Character into Love.

We live in a world where Love = Good = Winner.  And Love starts with Romance, the quick double-take, the captured attention, the incessant obsession, the surrender to Love.

So, if the Romance Genre Novel is all about Love,
about Good,
about being good or becoming good,
about falling in love with "The Good Guy" who is the Winner-Guy (big, strong, hunk, powerful protector),
then why is the Bad Boy Romance so seductive?

Why do we drool over an unshaven, torn jeans, tough-guy biker running from the law?

Why is Darth Vader so popular?  Why are there so many Evil Guy costumes at ComicCon?

Why did the Vampire Romance explode so fast big three publishers had to invent spine-symbols for those books on the Romance shelves? Most Vampires in Vampire Romance were pretty good Good Guys, or struggling to be so. Remember the TV Series Forever Knight and that hot romance with a woman Coroner?

Or conversely, why is Cozy Romance so popular?

If "Winner" = "Good" does that mean "Loser" = "Bad" ?

What makes Evil seductive?

Today, the genre tropes and tastes, even the sub-genre names and symbols have shifted to market to a new generation.

Today, the Fantasy Genre is churning out, in books, TV and film, endless variations on Worlds  built around "Meta-Humans" or other mutations, some from parallel universes, some with "magical powers."

One such example is the TV Series The Magicians.

"The Magicians" stars Jason Ralph ("A Most Violent Year," "Aquarius") as Quentin Coldwater, a brilliant grad student who enrolls in Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy, a secret upstate New York university specializing in magic.

http://www.amazon.com/Unauthorized-Magic/dp/B019GFGXA0/

And of course, we have The Flash, Supergirl, and many others, both in comics, and now on TV and film.

The Worldbuilding provides the display case, the black-velvet backdrop, to show off the Strange People (the Aliens).  Some like The Flash or Supergirl are 'Good Guys" but in each case, there's some sort of "Bad Guys" for the Good Guys to fight.

What is so fascinating about these Variant Humans?

In most of the Built Worlds, "they" live secretly underneath or beside regular humans such as the reader/viewer.

In others, they have two identities, like Superman and Clark Kent.

Rarely are they publicly known and accepted, but we see that kind of Worldbuilding in novels today. I expect to see it on TV soon. We have had the TV Series Alien Nation where the aliens were known to have crash landed on Earth.

http://www.amazon.com/Pilot/dp/B005YVNGSI/

And there was the lovely TV Series Beauty and the Beast

http://www.amazon.com/An-Impossible-Silence/dp/B0126NA4V8/

So, today, the mass market audience has become accustomed to Aliens among or beneath us.

And the image of The Alien has morphed from Alien  = Bad Guy (early Hollywood, not cured by The Day The Earth Stood Still), to Aliens Are People, Too.

Thus today's Aliens (magical, Vampire, Supernatural, other dimensional, meta-human mutants by accident or genetic experiment) come in Good Guy and Bad Guy flavors.

Remember the TV Series V ?

http://www.amazon.com/V-Part-1/dp/B000U6LJ54/

What made that series interesting was the single Alien who saw how Evil was encroaching on his people and defected to the Human Resistance fighters (Good Guys).

So you see a group of 1980's TV Series here that etch the outlines of a cultural shift in the way your Romance reader audience regards and defines Good and Evil.

Perhaps the entire world culture has be 'seduced to the Dark Side of the Force?'

I doubt there is one, single, answer that a writer of any of the 4 Types can use to reach "all audiences."  But you don't need a General Relativity Theory to market a novel.

You don't need all answers or "the" answer -- you just need "an answer" that your Protagonist discovers he/she knows and believes, uses and applies to his/her problem, and WINS.

Happily Ever After is a plausible ending, a "win" if it is the optimal answer to the question posed on Page One, usually in Paragraph One.

The Good Guy/Gal is introduced on Page One at the moment in life when the general Battle of Good Vs. Evil impacts his/her life.

It is a pivotal moment that makes or breaks a life.  Some audiences lust to see a life broken, especially the life of a Good Guy/Gal.  Others yearn desperately to experience what it would be like if the "Good" quality of a human being CAUSED (because-line = plot) that person to Win.  The sure sign that winning happened is the moment when Romance turns to Love.

So what is seductive about Evil?

Find out what your audience thinks, what you think, and what your character thinks about why Evil is seducing them -- then craft the moment when Good chooses to do Good despite the apparently inevitable, and devastating cost.

Fabricate your fictional world in such a way that the Evil in it can be converted to Good, then show don't tell the process of converting.

For Romance Genre, that usually means taking your Bad Boy Hero and showing him what life is like on the Good Girl side of the tracks.

Let your Good Girl be seduced by your Bad Boy, leave him despite the cost in lost love, and by that leaving, awaken the Goodness within the Bad Boy.  The Awakening is shown not told in the moment when he 'saves the cat' at the end of the book. (Remember Darth Vader's death scene.)

That is the High Concept story we all love so much -- as in the TV Series V -- a minion of the Evil Guys has an epiphany and throws in with the Good Guys. He's a traitor to his Oath to Evil, but we see him as a Good Guy because of it. Poetic Justice.

In Romance genre, what makes Evil so sexually seductive is the potential for converting it to Good.  But what happens when Good is converted to Evil?

If you've first drafted such a novel, on rewrite, you need to write down very clearly, what is Good, what is Evil, and why they can't co-exist without conflict. You need 3 definitions to each of those three elements - your audience's, yours, and your Characters' definitions.

Conform each of the scenes in the novel to that set of definitions. The set of definitions is your Theme.  Theme is the core element in the Type D writer's rewrite process.  First Draft may be haphazzard and chaotic, dramatic power viciated by  contradicting themes. But the finished product must be pristine, single-pointed, clarity personified.

The Theme is what the book is about, what it says about Life, The Universe, and Everything. It is the Truth as the Character comes to see it at the end. The transition from delusion to truth in the Character's perceptions is the source of reader satisfaction.

In other words, the writer's job is to deliver the "Aha!" moment of illumination to the reader.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Is Harry Potter an Alien?

Whoo-hoo, the boy wonder is grown up!

I saw an interview with the actor on TV the other day -- in his real persona, he's scrumptious.

Teens everywhere have throbbing hearts. (so what else is new?)

I haven't read the final installment in the saga yet, though I will. I did see the Phoenix movie as I mentioned last week.

And I've been following all the hype in the media -- and the reporting on the hype.

Boiled down, the media sees the Harry Potter saga as "good vs. evil" and says that accounts for the popularity. (i.e. if it didn't have "good vs. evil" at the core, it wouldn't be popular - they say.)

So since today is Tisha B'Av (the 9th day of the Hebrew Month of Av), the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and subsequent to that, a day when major blows have fallen on the world, (not a superstition, but historical fact if you look at the dates via the Hebrew calendar) I wanted to explore this "good vs. evil" theme that is so very popular that it lies unquestioned as a model of the real universe we live in.

The premise is that there's more true "Evil" in the world than "Good" and it is the job of "Good" to fight "Evil" even though "Evil" is terrifyingly strong.

And it must be a fight to absolute destruction.

Where "Good" encounters "Evil" there must be combat to annihilation (not Love, not Romance, not persuasion, not understanding, not empathy, not compassion, not problem solving, but COMBAT TO THE DEATH.)

Good vs. Evil is the conflict in Dresden Files, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Supernatural -- maybe not Forever Knight so much -- but many Fantasy novels focus on the vision of the universe in which there is a thin crust of "good" over a seething cauldron of "evil" and it's the plight of a certain few humans to keep "evil" from breaking through.

Potter's fight gets personal, so does the fight of Harry Dresden (who jokes about having Potter's first name, then points out he was named for Houdini.)

Why is Harry Potter such a success when these other shows and novels (which many would say are better written, better crafted, or better backgrounded) have not had similar play?

And where does that view of the universe as floating on a seething cauldron of Evil come from?

Frankly, I don't know any answer to Potter's success exceeding that of other novels except publicity.

I saw an interview on the Lehrer News Hour with a top Children's Librarian and a publisher, and their consensus was that it's the MEDIA that made Harry Potter more successful than other equally good books about the same topics.

I read a statistic that readers who gobble up Harry Potter novels, still only increase the sale of other books by barely 10%. Potter is ALL they read. For the rest of their time it's computers, games, music downloads, text-messaging, maybe Potter fanfic.

Harry Potter is a tiny (itsy-teensy) fraction of Scholastic Publishing's annual gross sales (Scholastic is the US distributor). But those same interviewees mentioned above considered that this whole set of novels will become a classic that new crops of 11 year olds will be reading into the far future. They will continue to sell.

This "Good" must fight "Evil" is a general portrait of reality that is, I think, not "believed" so much as "assumed" by the general public. It's never challenged or discussed in grammar school where you learn your view of the universe.

Here the question of whether Harry Potter is an alien (and therefore a fit subject for "alien romance" (definitely of the djinn variety)) gets really abstract.

Harry Potter taps into a somewhat new twist on a very old mythology. The prevailing Group Mind, or general mindset in the world today (including among those without the education to know what the word "philosophy" actually refers to) has changed drastically in the last 50 years -- maybe 70 or so years.

We've never been so obsessed with "Evil" since maybe The Inquisition.

To see how it all fits together, we have to be able to step back from our Civlization -- way, way back -- and view ourselves as the result of the flowering of the Greek culture.

The Greeks took over from the huge world-conquering Egyptian culture that spread mathematics, science and learning throughout North Africa and the Middle East all the way around the top of the Mediterranean. According to some archeologists, there is an odd coincidence between the bare beginning of the fall of Egypt and the best guess date for the Parting Of The Red Sea.

That's just a theory, but we're fiction writers here and we play with history and pre-history all the time.

The Greeks invented "democracy" made mathematics even more useful than the Egyptians did for building big things, and worshipped gods whose family relationships have to be described today as "dysfunctional" -- the Greek ideals included naked games, homosexuality and even what today in America would be statutory rape of young boys.

The Greeks fell and the Romans ate up their culture and made it their own -- growing bigger than Greece ever had, reaching all the way to Britain (I've been reading the lastest of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Avalon series -- this one, Ravens of Avalon, by Diane Paxton).

Rome fell -- etc -- and after various invasions and so on, Britain erupted in fleeing Pilgrims who founded what eventually became the American Colonies - and then us.

Our modern Civilization is a direct descendent of Ancient Eqypt -- if you look at it like say, Francisco St. Germain (Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's vampire) might.

Ancient Egypt was ruled by "gods" who became incarnated and often produced the Heir Apparent mating with their closest sibling.

But Greek philosophy gave us a way of looking at the world which is now and always has been diametrically opposed to the MYSTICAL or MAGICAL way of looking at the world.

The Greeks laid the foundation for the later works in Britain by Bacon which promulgated the scientific method.

The notion is that the Universe is a mechanism -- a giant clock -- and nothing more. It's just a machine, and it runs by itself. There is no such thing as a "seething cauldron of Evil" and no Evil to fight. The "worst" behavior of their gods (Dyonisis comes to mind) was actually celebrated and lauded.

Almost all of science is based on this Helenistic Philosophy. Our civilization has had enormous success applying this philosophy (remember Science used to be called Natural Philosophy for a reason.)

Just skipping over the Assyrians and Babylonians -- we're looking at the invention of the Wheel as around 3,000 BCE, The Patriarch Abraham at around 2100 BCE (give or take), and Egypt invades Canaan at around 1950 BCE, and the Israelites being enslaved in Egypt around 1300 BCE -- with Moses leading the escape around 1250 (that can be argued vigorously on a lot of sides. The general figure for the length of the sojourne in Egypt is about 400 years, but slavery came at the end) And the fall of Egypt around 1065 BCE (they had a couple changes of "dynasty" in there, struggling to survive.)

First Olympic games in Greece around 776 BCE.

Founding of Rome about 753. About 509 BCE The Roman Republic is founded. 399 BCE Socrates is condemned to death for heretical teaching. 323 BCE birth of Euclid. Egypt still exists but it's not THE power in the ancient world. 170 Rome invades Egypt. (see Shakespear)

When one country invades and conquers another, the conquerer acquires a lot of the attitudes and valuable accomplishments of the conquered. The cultures blend with every intermarriage. Remember, the Romans didn't care what god you worshipped as long as you also worshipped the Roman gods and the Emperor got his due. That's cool, until it runs up against Monotheism, and the Egyptians had sun worshipping monotheists who were not a majority though.
In Israel, the monotheists were a majority.

So today's secular majority relying on a view of the universe that sees reality as an uncaring machine that can be manipulated by science if only we know enough -- that SHOULD be manipulated by science to subjugate the world to our Will -- is the direct descendent of the philosophy promulgated in Greece.

Why would the Greeks, Romans and their spiritual ancestors, the Egyptians, Babylonians and Assyrians, have wanted so very much to believe the universe is just a mechanism, and there is no such thing as "good" and "evil?"

Just read the mythology -- how their gods handled power and personal relationships (seduction but never romance.) Those powerful, unseen, Evil Entities who diced with human lives and had to be appeased with offerings are the contents of that "seething cauldron of Evil." They became the symbol of "Evil" because they had immense power over mortals, but no love for us.

Can't you see why the Greek Natural Philosophers would think it would be so much nicer if those gods didn't really exist? Or didn't have all the power? Pythagoras comes to mind.

Running counter to the development of our "Natural Philosophy" called modern science there was the philosophy of the line of the Patriarch Avraham and all the cultures and religions that sprang from him.

Now I can't give a reprise of the Qabalistic view of the universe here. You can get a lot of the "real thing" on chabad.org if you want it. If you google Kabbalah and variant spellings you'll get all kinds of kooky nonsense mixed in with the version I'm talking about, so start at chabad.org .

But the essence of the notion is that the Creator of the Universe not only Created the world -- but continues to do so moment to moment.

Existence itself is sustained by the deliberate application of Divine Will. Every single moment and every single event in your very personal life is a miracle. All of this is a Word being spoken by the Creator RIGHT NOW. And it's a song of love.

The essence of Qabalah lies within its notion of the purpose of human existence, the purpose of Life.

The premise is that all souls were created at the moment of creation -- there are no newer souls (unlike some other esoteric traditions). Souls reincarnate enough times to master all 613 Commandments in the first 5 Books Of Moses (the first 5 books of the Bible).

The purpose of mastering the Commandments is to use them to uncover the sparks of Godliness hidden within all the elements of our material reality.

The Creator Created the world twice (this is described in Genesis). The first time the blast of the pure essence of this Divine Being shattered the vessels that held creation. The pieces flew apart and fell "down" -- chaos -- the second time, we got Creation as we know it today.

But the Divine sparks of pure good attract the flotsam of the shattered vessels and become encrusted with this dross. The dross isn't Evil and it isn't bad, it's also a result of Creation and exists by the Will of the Divine which is Good and basically pure Love.

Our job is NOT to "battle evil" or to cram it back down under the thin crust of good, because there really is no such thing as "Evil" -- there is only this icky dross clinging to and smothering the light of Goodness.

Our task is not to destroy that dross but to TRANSFORM IT INTO GOOD --to peel away the dross and uncover the gold within and send those golden sparks of divine substance winging back upward, and thus elevate the dross.

The idea is to uncover the hidden goodness within every individual and situation and to elevate the not-so-good to be better. Life is not a punishment detail -- it's what our souls were created for.

We're designed for this world and this job. So it's FUN. It's joy in its purest form to find goodness and unleash it. (classic Romance writing lesson: what does she see in him? How do you know it's "love?" -- answer: each brings out the best in the other's personality.)

Philosophically, the Qabalistic notion has battled the two other notions down through the ages with first one then the other predominating.

So there are 3 major philosophies extant today (plus a zillion smaller ones).

The "seething cauldron" model of reality. The "just a mechanism" model of reality. And the "big mess to clean up" Qabalah model of reality. (the process of cleaning up that mess is called Tikun Olam, fixing the world. You do it by love, not combat.)

Everyone HAS a philosophy, though very few know what their own philsophy is, and most deny having one at all. But it's like breath - you can't live without it.

They say "there's no accounting for taste" but that's not true. Your "taste" comes from your philosophy which resides in your subconscious and jerks your life around unbeknownst to you -- i.e. creates such things as "love at first sight".

The "taste" for the Harry Potter tale wrapped in its FIGHT AGAINST EVIL is caused by the philosophy that the world REALLY IS a thin crust over a seething cauldron of Evil and all we can do is fight or run screaming.

I saw an interview on TV with people standing in line to get the last Potter book, and one young girl in costume told the camera "yes, magic is real" (and from the tone of voice it was clear she didn't mean that metaphorically - we're talking 12 year old girl here).

Something in our current civilization has convinced a huge number of people that Evil is real and the only righteous response to Evil is to Fight it.

And thus Harry Potter is a Hero to young children who have imbibed this subconscious assumption from parents, friends, teachers, books, movies, films, DVDs, and GAMES, maybe past lives too.

I mentioned "love at first sight" -- there is (in the magical view of the universe) a certain reality to the "recognition" and "attraction" to things and people from past lives -- and who represent a subconsciously held highest aspiration.

The world today is very much like Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover -- the world where there is an intransigent war between the technological civilization from Earth and the indigenous ESP based civilization of the planet Darkover. That war is on moral grounds.

Today we "believe in science" and look to our labs to produce solutions to every ill if we only throw enough money at them. But something inside says "no, that's not the whole truth" -- or "Wait! There's More! If you phone right now - " --

People reach back into prior lives (maybe from Atlantean times?) and find the dim etching of an almost memory of the Magical View of the universe -- and they want that view to be true.

Remember, in my blog entry about the Robert Heinlein Centennial, I said I learned that Heinlein had held memories of past lives even into his teens. It is common for young children of the Potter reading demographic to have echoing memories of past lives -- lived in a time when Magic was considered "real."

But that view of the universe also scares people terribly -- because in Greece and Rome, the most power over "reality" was wielded by insane entities called gods who did not know how to love.

Most of the people who are trying to learn Qabalah today don't understand the thousands of years of history that spawned these 3 major philosophies.

So they look at the world, see really BAD stuff all around, and accept the explanation that Evil has to be Fought. (to me that's like cutting starfish in half to get rid of them).

They want Magic to be REAL, so they can have a tool to Fight Evil (because Science can't Fight Evil, because Evil doesn't exist in the scientific view of the universe).

It appears, in our modern universe, those are your only choices, fight evil, condone it or foster it by ignoring its existence. (Qabalah teaches a fourth approach to the problem.)

So Harry Potter as an adult now becomes a really sexy attraction because he has acquired the Power to Fight Evil! He's become our Protector. And from the scientific view of reality, he truly is "alien" because of that Power -- and science is losing the battle against Evil because Science doesn't know it's in a battle.

You shouldn't have any trouble googling up some hot-sweaty-sexy Harry Potter fanfic on the web. Look it over and think about what these people are really writing about in their own lives. Then think about other ways to parse the problem so it can be solved.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/