Alternative Christmases

When is Christmas not Christmas? When its equivalent appears under another name in a holiday episode of a TV series or movie franchise. TV Tropes has a page on this phenomenon:

You Mean Xmas

It's not unusual for TV series to have "Christmas" episodes even if they're set in a time or place where Christmas doesn't exist. An episode of XENA, WARRIOR PRINCESS featured "A Solstice Carol." MY LITTLE PONY: FRIENDSHIP IS MAGIC has "A Hearth's Warming Tale," set on the holiday celebrating the occasion when the three types of ponies worked together to save the fledgling realm of Equestria from the terrible Windigos. (This story combines elements of A CHRISTMAS CAROL and IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE.) Then there's the infamous STAR WARS holiday special, set on the Wookie home planet at the season of Life Day. (I've never seen this film, so all I know is what's summarized on TV Tropes; it has never been re-aired, because it's so abysmal that Lucas himself loathes it.) The inhabitants of Fraggle Rock celebrate the Festival of the Bell in "The Bells of Fraggle Rock," at the time of year when the Rock slows down and would freeze forever if the Fraggles didn't ring their bells to awaken the Great Bell. The characters in DINOSAURS have Refrigerator Day, appropriately commemorated by lavish feasting. Although BEAUTY AND THE BEAST takes place in the world as we know it, members of the secret underground community where Vincent (the Beast) dwells celebrate "Winterfest" instead of Christmas. Print fiction features a similar phenomenon. There's a Midwinter Festival in Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar universe. The people of Discworld have Hogswatchnight, as portrayed in detail in Terry Pratchett's HOGFATHER. The world of Steven Universe is an exception to this pattern. Its canon establishes that the invasion of the alien Gems thousands of years ago altered Earth so radically that Christianity doesn't exist, so there's no Christmas, Easter, Valentine's Day, etc. However, virtually every temperate-zone culture in the world has a winter solstice celebration with such elements as feasting, lights, greenery, and bells, so it seems likely that the people in this series would have one, too. If they do, apparently the producers and writers simply haven't considered it necessary to mention.

In the animated special ARTHUR'S PERFECT CHRISTMAS, Arthur's bunny friend gets so stressed out by his divorced mother's frantic attempt to make Christmas perfect that he wants to invent their own family holiday instead, "Baxter Day." An episode of SEINFELD popularized the anti-Christmas holiday of Festivus, which includes the Airing of Grievances (when everybody complains to everybody else about offenses committed through the year) and an aluminum pole instead of a tree. In short, the human spirit seems to crave festivity at the dark of the year.

A satirical essay by C. S. Lewis imagines what the ancient Greek historian Herodotus would have made of the modern British Christmas. Herodotus concludes that Exmas and Crissmas can't possibly be the same holiday, because even barbarians wouldn't go through all that expense and bother for a god they don't believe in:

Xmas and Christmas

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Believing in Happily Ever After Part 5 TV Series Once Upon A Time on ABC

Part 4 of this Believing in Happily Ever After sequence of blog posts is
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-4.html

It has links to the previous 3 parts and the Verisimilitude vs. Reality series.

In Verisimiltude vs. Reality and other posts linked in that series, we delved into the real world the reader lives in and looked at how that real-world environment shapes the enjoyment of a fictional environment.  Eventually, we'll look even deeper into various methods a writer uses to handle theme and how the chosen method affects the size and shape of the audience the writer might reach.

The purpose of this study is to deliver a Happily Ever After ending experience to readers/viewers who flatly disbelieve in the possibility.


Part of the real-world environment a reader lives in is the fiction (video, text, big screen, radio) the reader is immersed in.

The TV Series Once Upon A Time on ABC is part of that environment. 



I was reminded forcefully of this in November 2011 by the announcement of the death of Anne McCaffrey, creator of the Dragonriders of Pern.  Her biography page says she was born April 1st, 1926, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at 1:30 p.m. and her first novel was published by Ballantine Books in 1967. 

My first story was published by Fred Pohl in World of If Magazine of Science Fiction in January 1969. 

In April of 2011 Copperheart announced that filming of  the first Pern novel, Dragonflight, would begin in 2012. 

http://collider.com/david-hayter-dragonflight-dragonriders-of-pern/85654/ 

The Friday after the announcement of her passing was a #scifichat devoted to Santa, and what SF presents SF readers would give to other SF readers.  But the second hour of the chat became a remembrance of Anne McCaffrey, not just Pern but all her other wonderful novels.  The discussion branched out into writers she had influenced and what her success with Pern introduced to the entire field.

McCaffrey broke through with not just the overt sexuality of the Dragon/Rider relationship in the Pern novels, but the emotional bonding of a true, committed, to-the-death relationship.  That angle resonated with the audience of the 1970's.

I don't know what they're planning to do with the film, but there are Pern fans involved in creating it.  From the discussion on twitter, though, I gather different readers remember different components of those novels. 

Some people had avoided the Pern novels because they thought the novels were fantasy.  They aren't.  They're science fiction that looks like fantasy.

Fast-forward to 2012 and take a close look at the TV Series Once Upon A Time.

Is it fantasy or science fiction?  Is it Paranormal Romance?  Is it kid-lit?  What is this series?  Is it even important?

Note how it does 2 things that have become standard fare on Television.

a) It rewrites "history" as "steam punk" does -- but focuses on the fairy tale universe of Snow White and Prince Charming with the Wicked Witch (complete with mirror and poison apples), not the Victorian era.

b) It juxtaposes this "fantasy" world of the rewritten storybook with our everyday reality, (like Urban Fantasy often uses 2 universes with a door between).  You may remember how Forever Knight handled flashbacks to hundreds of years ago. 

Yep, I said "between" -- which isn't quite like "Between" of the Pern novels through which Dragons teleport their Riders to fight Thread.

But the principle is the same as Star Trek's transporter, Warp Drive, or any number of "devices" that let characters travel from one spot to another fast enough not to slow the plot down.

Once an audience has been introduced to these techniques -- as in Time Tunnel, Quantum Leap, or Sliders -- producers doing another show can use that technique as a given and get on with their own stories.

So, despite McCaffrey introducing readers to Between in the 1970's, and Star Trek's transporter and warp drive coming online in the 1960's, the Pern movie will be regarded as borrowing or stealing the "device" of Between. 

The Pern novels start at the beginning of a period of warfare against "Thread" (a crop-destroying rain of organisms from space), in which misery, starvation, poverty, and perhaps the extinction of humanity on the planet Pern, are the apparent direction of life.  An apparently stable society is brought down around the heads of its ordinary people, and it's power brokers, while the disregarded powerless are elevated to hero status. 

It's very much what this reality faces today -- the impending or actually in progress meltdown of the global financial system.  Or the meltdown may be over by now and we just don't realize we've hit bottom and are going to climb again.

We also have impending war, and war in progress in a lot of places, war that brings the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

That's the reality the audience lives in, and would very much like to escape.

What's better than escaping Reality, though, is coming to understand it in a way that lets you carve out a life leading to your own Happily Ever After.  Fiction can provide that kind of "grip" on reality that steadies you down for the long haul up to a better life.

The Pern novels depict a world locked in a frozen feudal system, suddenly attacked by Thread, and saved by the superstitious, traditional, disregarded, way too expensive fossilized organization known as the Dragonriders.  Suddenly, the feudal lords can't protect their people, but the poverty-stricken, useless, and widely regarded as nut-fringe folks are the only ones who can protect people.

I think Pern can fly as a TV Series once it's been a successful movie.

Pern does not paint a rosey Happily Ever After picture.  It doesn't even give you a "Happily For Now" (HFN) ending.  The novels end on the upbeat of a challenge conquered, but with the vista of a new, bigger challenge yet to come.

The Hope in these endings is that during the "action" section of the novels, Relationships form that are solid, perhaps unbreakable, and enable the teams to face bigger challenges with the expectation of surviving.  Thus the Pern novels are perfect examples of Intimate Adventure. 

The secret of the Pern novels though is in the story the theme its founded on, and how that theme is shown not told. 

The Relationships formed have the seeds of real Happiness in them, and the overwhelming force of what might be described as karma.

The characters, dragons and humans, all go through a stepwise process of bonding with a soul mate, and the result always seems - after the fact - to have been inevitable, right, and just. 

Yes, Poetic Justice again:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/poetic-justice-in-paranormal-romance_22.html

The Pern novels are a perfect example of a) Paranormal Romance (the telepathic bonding with Dragons) and karmic marriages, and b) that there really is Justice in the world, and it always SINGS (music is a huge component of the Pern world).

Now,  contrast/compare the TV Series Once Upon A Time with the Pern novels of Anne McCaffrey.

Eventually, the Pern series does get to including time travel, so there is another comparison.

Once Upon A Time updates the fairy tale world of Snow White etc. using modern characters and relationships.  The story is thus more accessible or believable to the adult audience.

The thing is, when these fairy tales were originally circulating as folk-tales, they depicted the "real" or modern world the intended audience lived in.  Today, there aren't many "folk" tales, made up by non-professional story-tellers and passed around to be improved on by others.  Most of our fiction, even for children, is professionally created and designed for the broadest possible audience.  (YouTube is changing that; urban folk-legends and folk music is reviving!)

So it would seem appropriate to "update" the oldest tales again, and embue them with the moral lessons of today's world, rather than the original lessons inserted by the Brothers Grimm from extant folktales that probably date back before the 1500's.  It's done in every generation. 

Google "Snow White" and you'll find everything from a new forthcoming movie to scholarship by serious professors.  Folk tales are very revealing of the underlying culture.

So consider what this Once Upon A Time TV Series reveals about Hollywood's idea of our culture, of what we are, what we should be, and what we want to be.

There's a lot of philosophical material in this subject, some of it as yet untouched by writers looking for themes.

I want to point you to just one aspect of this series that you can ponder and maybe plunder for story material.

The premise of Once Upon A Time is that the Evil Witch curses the community of Snow White and Prince Charming to be transported to a place where THERE ARE NO HAPPILY EVER AFTER ENDINGS - not for anyone except the Evil Witch herself! 

And that place where it is a fact that the HEA does not exist and can never exist is HERE - in our everyday reality.

The Evil Witch is now the Mayor of a small town in the USA where people can't leave - they can't escape.  If they try, horrid things happen, driving them back.  The Mayor's word is law.  She's happy. 

The curse can be broken, but only by one woman who was born when the curse was hurled.  She was rescued and flung aside into our world before the curse trapped her, too.  

Only one small boy knows what's going on because he found the fairy tale book.  He lures the woman who can break the curse to the town, they wake Prince Charming from a coma, and then things get interesting.

The premise that sells this TV show to a major network may be taken to be  "this world's natural condition is that Happily Ever After can not happen."  That's why this world was the Evil Witch's chosen destination.  Or maybe the curse only applies to the one small town the Witch dominates?  It's fascinating how they dance around this topic, probably waiting for ratings responses to see which direction to take the show. 

They appear to be waiting to see if the majority subconsciously believe that Happily Ever After can't happen in this world.  And then they'll decide what to do about changing that situation. 

By using this premise as the main conflict, the series creators induce a hostile audience to watch (and become addicted to) a fairy tale about restoring the world's ability to produce a Happily Ever After ending to Romances.


They can wait to see the audience response to decide how "dark" to make this world, just as the TV Series Beauty and the Beast danced around the Romance -- the premise being that the couple could never be together (because he was a Beast who had to hide "below" in darkness). 

The Once Upon A Time TV series may be the breakthrough Event (the Overton Window Event) we've been looking for.  It may be another try at the Beauty and the Beast audience, and it might succeed in reaching beyond that audience.  Another show in this line of development is Lois And Clark.   The dramatic problem with all these show-premises is that once the inherent conflict is solved, the show is over.  If you don't solve it, the audience loses interest.  If you do solve it, your job as writer/producer is over and you don't get paid anymore.  The only way to avoid solving the problem is to turn the plot in a "dark" direction, away from the Happily Ever After. 

The beginning of Once Upon A Time takes our theme, our main problem, and puts it "on the nose" the exact way the TV Series Leverage treats its theme ("The rich and powerful take what they want: we steal it back for you.")

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/tv-shows-leverage-and-psych.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-2.html

But the TV Series Leverage is structured for an endless sequence of adventures while the main characters barely hang onto life and sanity. 

The TV Series Once Upon A Time may herald a change in what's acceptable to particular audiences as Star Trek and Pern did in the 1970's.  The producers may tackle the conflict head-on and change our world into a world where Happily Ever After is an available option for most people, including fairy tale characters trapped in a town dominated by an Evil Witch. 

Oh, do remember, Star Trek was not popular in the late 1960's when it first aired for barely 3 years.  The explosion only came when it went into reruns and sifted into the consciousness of TV viewers during the 1970's.  Those were not the same people who were reading Pern, though there were overlaps.

Most people who read Pern (and Sime~Gen) watched Star Trek -- but most people who watched Star Trek did not read Pern or any other science fiction.  In fact, even when the Star Trek novels took off as New York Times Bestsellers (an unprecedented event I participated in by being the Agent who sold A. C. Crispin's Star Trek original novel Yesterday's Son), those who bought and devoured those tie-in novels did not follow the established Science Fiction authors who wrote them back into the authors' own worlds.

It took decades (a generation) to bring Star Trek tie-in readers into science fiction.

The main force that I think did it was Star Trek fan fiction (which is what my non-fiction book Star Trek Lives! is about). 

Writers of Star Trek fan fiction grew up to be Science Fiction and/or Fantasy professionals, an unthinkable result of indulging in writing fan fiction.  The explosion of the adult Fantasy novels mostly by women writers, many of whom had been fanfic writers or readers, opened the door for the modern treatment of sexuality and soul-mate bonding in Paranormal Fantasy. 

I don't think it's a cause-effect chain of events.  But there is a relationship that we can explore in later entries in this blog series.

In the mean time, watch Once Upon A Time, read the Dragonriders of Pern novels by Anne McCaffrey, and compare them.  And see what is done with Pern on film! 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

The TV Shows "Leverage" and "Psych"

"Leverage" is a show that could be mistaken for a USA Networks "Characters Welcome" show, but it's a TNT "We know drama" product. One revels in Intimate Adventure and the other avoids it strenuously.

Now remember from last week that the purpose of all fiction is to attract eyeballs so advertisers can warp behavior and extract money from viewers, but that purpose is strenuously resisted by all viewers/readers for a good reason.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/fix-for-publishing-business-model.html

So they're always trying to figure out "which genre" is more popular, more compelling for audiences.

The only problem is they're going about it all wrong because advertising only modifies the behavior of the younger demographic, not the elder, but the elder is more interested in fiction and has more money to spend (though not discretionary spending money, they buy bigger ticket items, but not much on impulse).

My post here last week gives a suggestion for re-thinking the advertising model.

This time let's look at a couple of TV shows designed to "leverage" the current advertising model.

According to Nielsen, these two shows are duking it out over audience share.

Here's a quote from the Nielsen's rating service Feb 4, 2010:

http://tvbythenumbers.com/2010/02/04/psych-plunges-from-premiere-leverage-mixed/41143

---------
Robert posted last week about the 20% ratings fall Leverage suffered against the season premiere of Psych. Last night Psych got hit hard in a post-premiere slump, and Leverage was mixed, but topped Psych in average viewers and closed the gap in adults 18-49.

Psych slid almost 35% to just 2.856 million viewers (vs. 4.367 million for the premiere). It’s A18-49 rating fell to a 1.1 from a 1.5 for the premiere. The “USA strategy of moving dramas off Friday was a success” pronouncement may have been a bit premature.

TNT might have hoped for a big rebound for Leverage, but it was effectively flat. Down 4% in viewers to 2.913 million (from 3.020 million last week). But it got a little boost in its A18-49 ratings to a 0.9 from a 0.8 last week.
-----------

Read that again and pay more attention to the thinking that produces sentences like this (never mind the numbers). What's important? What's the point that's being made? (take careful note of how boring you feel this writing is)

Also note because it's really important that there are over 330 million people in the USA alone, maybe a hundred million TV sets and households maybe more.

Only about 3 million watching a particular cable TV entertainment show?

Of course a fiction writer would be thrilled to sell 3 million copies of a book!

But the trend I've been tracing in these blog entries on Tuesdays is all about the convergence of TV, Film and text into one mammoth Fiction Delivery System.

Here is an item that supports that thesis.

http://filmnewsbriefs.com/2010/02/fnb-exclusive-fourth-floor-makes-development-deal-with-analog/?utm_source=Film+News+Briefs&utm_campaign=94ca7cee2e-TUESDAY_FEBRUARY_9_20102_8_2010&utm_medium=email

Analog Magazine - the venerable SF vehicle - made a deal with a production company named Fourth Floor. Here's a quote from that article

---------
Production company and management firm Fourth Floor Productions has closed an impressive deal with the legendary sci fi mag, “Analog,” to exclusively develop the periodical’s content for the next two years. Fourth Floor topper Jeffrey Silver told FNB that his company will have rights to the stories published in the monthly (there are usually six or seven pieces per issue), and already has writers working on several stories.
---------

But it costs less to produce a book or text magazine than a TV show. The secret to the writer's business model problem is the ratio of the size of the audience to the cost of delivery of the entertaining item. That was the business model problem the "Dime Novel" solved so elegantly, and we need to invent one of those solutions to fix our current Fiction Delivery System.

So we're talking about a niche audience for "Leverage" and "Psych." Note that these 2 shows are not SF and don't use much in the way of special effects. They are relatively cheap to make.

With a writer's eye, you can contrast/compare these two TV shows and see immediately that "Leverage" has a more dramatic beat and includes hot love affairs and crumbling love affairs, as does "White Collar" where the lead character's main motivation is to reconnect with the girl he loves (but she almost never appears onscreen).

Psych has a buddy-story but not enough really strong Romance or even an interesting love story that might become a Romance.

Love is used just as a character motivation in these "action-drama-comedy" TV offerings, a background element, or backstory element, not the main plot.

"Leverage" is a little different this season as an ex-wife incident puts emotional pressure on a very tattered main character. It's one of those impossible to resolve Situations such as "Beauty and the Beast" dealt with, or such as Ann Aguirre deals with in her second Corine Solomon novel Hell Fire.

Hell Fire (Corine Solomon, Book 2)

Hell Fire is an excellent novel, by the way, searing triangle romance, breathtaking paranormal elements, intimate adventure, mature point of view and really solid writing craft. I will review it in my print magazine column.

http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2010/ -- is the index to the archive for my print column that goes back to 1993.

I talked at length about Ann Aguirre's novel Doubleblind which held my attention despite having elements I dislike in it because it's well written:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/11/doubleblind-by-ann-aquirre.html

Back to television.

The development of the deeper intimate relationships in a story-arc (a format that was forbidden before "Babylon 5" and "Dallas" proved it could work in prime time) glues the audience to the screen, but Hollywood still doesn't quite get that point.

Producers who make these emphasis decisions dance around the edges of the importance of Relationship, never mind the central core of Romance and its place in developing the mettle of a character. And this has something to do with the lack of esteem for the Romance Genre, though how the puzzle fits together, I'm not sure.

Like "Lois and Clark" or "Beauty And The Beast" a show's audience deserts when the romantic tension is resolved -- which means the plot-line they were following was the Relationship, not the Action.

A show like "Murder She Wrote" has a contrasting dynamic. The audience comes for the puzzle-solving and the Relationships just form momentary obstacles to the problem solving and neat tag-lines.

So television is wary of diving into a serious romantic-tension driven plot line because the audience will desert the show if the show is successful!

If you draw the story-arc out too long, people get bored (B&B) and if you do what every good writer (like Ann Aguirre) knows how to do -- "don't pull your punches" and drive that Romance right to the altar, then the show is over and the audience goes away.

If a show is pulling huge audiences, the advertisers don't want it to be "over" regardless of how that would validate the drama and the characters. If a show is losing its audience, the advertisers desert it first and there's no time for the writers to complete the story-arc. The producer gets a bad reputation.

So basically, a TV show premise has to be structured such that it doesn't HAVE an ending. Like action-drama or mystery, each week brings a new problem that is resolved in 44 minutes of air-time, and there's no end to problems you can throw at the ensemble. The story-arc is spice, not substance.

Star Trek originally was an "anthology" show - episodes that can be viewed in any order and still make sense. After Babylon 5, Star Trek reincarnations went more with the story-arc plot, series of shows to view in a particular order with major changes just once a season.

In either case, Nielsen rules story development, not the rules of good fiction construction that I've been harping on in previous posts here.

As with the cancellation of StarTrek:TOS by NBC, those Neilsen numbers still aren't accurate. The polling organization doesn't change its methods fast enough to keep up with changes in audience preferences.

Star Trek's Nielsen numbers looked non-viable to NBC because the real bulk of the audience was clustered around TV sets in college dorms -- back in the days when there was only one TV set per dorm floor and "demographics" hadn't yet been invented. Nielsen didn't have any dorm TV's wired and there wasn't technology that could measure the number of people crowded around a single TV.

Today the problem lies with online downloads and various alternative methods of time-shifting and gaining access. College dorms have wifi, people watch TV on their notebook computers. Source doesn't matter.

In between it became VHS tapes that fans would make and mail to each other -- sometimes in foreign countries (where the people would have to buy the right kind of VHS to play the kind of tape made at the source). Shows barely surviving in Britain had huge audiences in the USA via this method. Nielsen couldn't measure that.

As I pointed out in my last entry

http://filmnewsbriefs.com/2010/02/fnb-exclusive-fourth-floor-makes-development-deal-with-analog/?utm_source=Film+News+Briefs&utm_campaign=94ca7cee2e-TUESDAY_FEBRUARY_9_20102_8_2010&utm_medium=email

people will do anything (really ANYTHING) to avoid having fiction interrupted by commercials, except maybe the Commercials made for the Superbowl.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100208/media_nm/us_superbowl_advertising which is titled Alongside gags, Super Bowl ads plumb male psyche

For the Superbowl, it's almost as if people have already accepted that the point is the ads, and the broadcast itself is just to keep you busy between ads.

Here's a quote from that article:
----------
That would be a major victory for any marketer. With a national audience that could reach an estimated one-third of 300 million Americans, the National Football League's championship game is the biggest day of the year for advertisers.

Sometimes known as the Ad Bowl or Buzz Bowl, prices for 30 seconds of commercial time during CBS's broadcast topped out at more than $3 million. Most deals were done in the $2.5 million to $2.75 million range, ad executives said.
---------

1/3 of America's 300 million! Compare that to the 1/10th or 3 million who might watch "Leverage" or "Psych."

That 1/3 point hasn't happened for any fiction feature I've heard of yet.
Presidential campaign speeches don't draw like the Superbowl.

There is a huge battle behind the scenes of our fiction delivery system between those who want an advertising supported fiction delivery system and those who want a fiction delivery system supported advertising model.

So those people who sat through commercials in college dorm TV rooms (so they wouldn't lose their place to the standing room only crowd) are now older and watch TV online, streaming, bootlegged, or buying the blu-ray later.

The younger people are also watching online streaming, even on smartphones if they can.

The TV audience is not sitting in living rooms clustered around with family members, watching only what everyone in the family wants to watch. Many homes have TV's in the bedrooms, too. Larger ones. With blu-ray, wi-fi etc. People can take their notebook anywhere in the house and watch via the family wi-fi network.

Just as with the avid but changing Trek audience, Nielsen isn't keeping up.

Nielsen actually serves the advertisers who want objective measures of the number of eyes they are reaching with their commercials.

The Superbowl is watched "real time" -- fiction doesn't have to be.

The advertisers only care about the people who accept fiction with commercials. So advertisers aren't motivated to follow the ever-squirming audience that wants to get away from commercials.

Naturally Nielsen has missed another Trek sized call.

This time it's the TV show Heroes.

I've been seeing this tweeted on Twitter by crew working on Heroes -- yeah, their jobs depend on renewal, true, but these folks really understand the fiction being created here. Here's one of the posts circulated by a champion tweeter.

NathalieCaron New Blog Post!: Save #Heroes, Save the World!! http://bit.ly/8ZACx2 #SaveHeroes

That's the tweet that alerted me to this blog post about what's going on, and it's no coincidence it's on a Star Trek blog. Here's the unshortened URL unfurled:

http://insidetrekker.blogspot.com/2010/02/save-heroes.html

According to that post, it seems to me NBC is about to make the same mistake with Heroes that it made with Star Trek and possibly for the same reason, technology.

This post shows how decisions are made about what you may, or may not, be allowed to choose from as your fiction fix of the day.

The decision isn't about you. It isn't about what you need out of your fiction, nor really even about what you want out of your fiction. The fiction itself isn't important at all in this equation.

It's about how much product they can move. Or perhaps more importantly, about how much product THEY THINK they can move (it's all estimation, even though the math has become very elegant).

How can we make it about the quality of the fiction, about the satisfaction you derive from that fiction?

They failed to recognize and utilize the Romance elements in StarTrek:TOS and gave it the ax because they measured the impact of the show incorrectly.

They have failed to exploit the Romance elements implicit in Psych. They are tip-toeing around the Romance elements in Leverage, developing the angst more than the healing properties inherent in Love Conquers All. And now they want to abandon Heroes without crystallizing the incredible power of Alien Romance inherent in a bunch of The Talented in desperate need of bonding to become sane!

How can we prevent "them" from making these mistakes?

The commercial fiction marketplace needs a new philosophy and business model, such as I started playing with last week.

What we, as fiction consumers, need is a marketplace driven by the dynamic of serving a small (niche) audience that is wildly energized and supremely dedicated to getting their hands on this piece of fiction (in whatever format).

What they, as fiction purveyors, need is a marketplace that is huge and ever-growing, serving a widely diverse a demographic with little or nothing in common, maybe not even language (AVATAR being one recent example -- remember I noted how movies are made for an international market and cross-cultural understanding).

These are diametrically opposed requirements, but I think I hit on one way to serve both needs in my previous post.

The problem is that the smaller market is most desperately determined to get the most expensively produced fiction but they can't afford it.

Two solutions are obvious.

Reduce the cost (computer applications are doing that - see what scifi channel has done with "Sanctuary");

... or increase the size of the market (by using a story that appeals all across demographics)

Seems to me Alien Romance is the key to that, AVATAR being an example of a sort.

So we see a really fumbling and faltering TV fiction delivery system, making bad decisions.

Meanwhile, if you've been following this blog or almost any other writing blog, you know more than you could ever want to know about e-book publishing.

But solving the puzzle of why Romance in general lacks the respect we see that it deserves may require paying attention to publishing from yet several more angles.

Here is a blog entry where a really good Literary Agent talks about what makes her take on a client after seeing a manuscript sample:

http://cba-ramblings.blogspot.com/2010/02/craft-story-and-voice.html

In this blog entry Rachel Gardner says:

---------
Story refers to the page-turning factor: how compelling is your story, how unique or original, does it connect with the reader, is there that certain spark that makes it jump off the page? Is it sufficiently suspenseful or romantic (as appropriate)? Does it open with a scene that intrigues and makes the reader want to know more? Story comes from the imagination of the writer and is much more difficult to teach than craft (if it can be taught at all).
-----------

And I commented:
---------
I think the big clue is in the idea that a "story" has to "be compelling".

As if compellingness is a property of story that can be infused into words on purpose! It's not.

Whether a particular person finds a story "compelling" depends on the person not on the story at all.

It's a subjective response, not objective.

Writers who try to make their story "compelling" on purpose (rather than make the plot compelling which is just craft) will likely freeze up, stop writing, or produce something awkward.

So just write your story. Then find the audience it compels.
-----------

My advice will lead to pleasing a niche audience supremely, but not an "Avatar" sized audience.

That blog entry compelled me to post that comment, but you likely won't find my comment among the dozens instantly posted! It is a very popular blog of a very good Agent who knows the business of being an interface between publishing and writers.

To solve our problem, you have to work with the VISION of what the business of Fiction Delivery is about from the point of view of those cogs in the wheels of the system.

The Agent is the Writer's point of entry into that system, and if the Agent believes that compellingness is a property of STORY not READER then you have to look at it from that perspective in order to understand why a show like HEROES gets canceled (or not) and why shows like LEVERAGE pull only 3 million viewers.

Get a hold on this VISION and you will begin to see the convergence of these various media into a single mammoth Fiction Delivery System.

See that and you may be more effective at directing your career and re-casting the view of Romance in the eyes of the world.

Careers in Fiction Delivery

Here is a blog entry I saw mentioned on twitter

JaneFriedman Sadly prescient: Career Reinvention for Publishing Professionals: http://bit.ly/bP16EV

The link leads to an article describing Andrew R. Malkin's meteoric career spanning decades inside publishing.

Here's that link unfurled. Read this carefully:

http://publishingperspectives.com/?p=11406
This is the story of a man who can talk PUBLISHING without ever referencing a compelling story, plot, worldbuilding, background, character arc, or any of the things that matter to us readers and writers.

From Andrew R. Malkin's perspective, publishing isn't about "compelling stories" at all.

At most, he mentions one author's name - and without a word about what delicious, beloved characters this author has made famous! He never talks about the fascinating relationships among characters, the drama, the penetrating themes or pithy language as sources of the success of his own efforts to market them.

This is a description of a "characters welcome" character, a career marketer, a kind of person that a writer never, ever, encounters, but upon whom a writer's career depends!

The writer deals with the Agent, the Agent deals with the Editor, the Editor deals with her Managing Editor or Committee -- the book is contracted, edited, copy edited, designed, assigned a cover -- turned over to publicity (some writers get to know their publicist; most don't) -- and then some layers beyond that publicist, the property reaches this man's hands where it lives or dies without having been read by most of the people who packaged the product.

It doesn't matter how COMPELLING your story is or how marvelously smooth the craftsmanship when this man causes success or failure of the book.

The same multi-layered business model structure is used by TV and Film industries, eventually causing films to live or die at the box office on the expertise of a man just like this one.

This is the structure of the "Fiction Delivery System" the very existence of which is hidden from the writer. The writer is never trained in how to leverage the existence of these decision makers upon whom his/her destiny depends. The reader/viewer never hears about these people.

Read this man's career carefully:

http://publishingperspectives.com/?p=11406

Here's a quote from this career track summary:
----------
Last April, I decided to make another leap in order to expand my knowledge and experience in the book industry at a critical time. I left a trade house, Rodale, for Zinio, a digital publishing distributor known for their technology and marketing services, originating in magazines.
---------

Read that blog entry describing his history and his shift into the electronic book publishing industry and you may come to understand better "what" is happening to ebook publishing as the big guys take over, and why they do what they do despite anything we can do or be or become.

If you regard TV and Book Publishing as IDENTICAL industries, you may see the pattern I can almost discern in the shifting Fiction Delivery System structure.

Note that TV also delivers non-fiction (as do films sometimes).

The Internet and the Web, especially social networking, are bringing these two delivery channels of the identical product (entertainment -- even non-fiction is a form of entertainment) together in ways that aren't clear yet.

Andrew R. Malkin is a fellow I wish was a fan of my novels! Or my favorite TV shows. I wonder what he does read.

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

Beauty and the Beast: Constructing the HEA

To some people it may seem somewhat narrow minded that readers of Romance insist on the Happily Ever After ending.

After all, HEA is so unrealistic, a childish fantasy. Thus people who read Romance must have something wrong with them, which means Romance as a field is not to be taken seriously, which is a topic we've discussed at length in this blog.

I think those readers are missing something important about the novel as an artform. As writers, our job is to explain what they're missing in "show don't tell" technique.

Whatever type of novel you prefer reading, you read it for the satisfaction, the validation of your world view in the artform.

The Romance as an artform is not different, even (or especially) when you cast the Romance plot against an alien background or involve a non-human character in the main plot thread.

The worldview that the Romance HEA validates is something like "No Man Is An Island" or in modern psychological research, that happier, healthier longer lives are lived by those who have firm and dependable Relationships.

Here's a recent report in a long list of such reports on marriage and health:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-heart-women5-2009mar05,0,5692637.story?track=rss
--------------
Reuters
March 5, 2009
Chicago -- Women in strained marriages are more likely than other wives to have high blood pressure and other risk factors for heart disease, researchers said today.
... and: The researchers found that women in marriages with high levels of strife were more prone to depression and metabolic syndrome, a cluster of symptoms including thick waist, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and abnormal blood sugar that significantly raise the risk of heart disease.
---------------

Oh? HEA is unrealistic, eh?

If a relationship crystallizes solidly, settles into a supportive and low-strife paradigm, then (science is beginning to discover) AS A CONSEQUENCE the future course of the partners lives will be ENHANCED by good health and an assortment of miseries that are absent. That is they will live "happily ever after" because of the formation of this Relationship.

There have been other studies that showed how women are physically healthier than men because of the maintaining of relationships with other women, particularly that of the confidant. Relationships cause consequences -- and good Relationships cause HEA.

Of course, humans being human, while you're living an HEA arc of a life, you will find other reasons to make yourself miserable. You never think of all the diseases and disorders and dysfunctions you DON'T have in your life, so you can't see that you are happy.

People who have this kind of very real misery in their life might want to read horror or tragedy -- soap opera stories of unrelenting misery -- to stay aware of the troubles they don't have, troubles worse than theirs. It's a way of convincing yourself you are happy. And there's nothing wrong with that. It can motivate changes in relationships to raise the odds of an HEA in life. HEA endings can do that too - spark aspiration.

So how does a writer construct an HEA ending?

Well, it's an ENDING.

There are 3 points in The Novel that have to be nailed before you can outline the novel. Beginning. Middle. End. Determine any one of those, and the other two become determined.

If the END must be "happy" - an up-beat ending - then the MIDDLE must be the worst point in the main character's life (utter ruin; total hopelessness; conquered, captured, vanquished, left for dead, stood up at the altar).

With a low Middle and high End -- the Beginning has to be the ORIGIN of the problem that nearly kills the main character in the Middle and which he overcomes to triumph in the end.

Solve this one problem and all his life-troubles are over for good. There's HEA potential in every other genre, even or especially Horror.

Plot is driven by Conflict. To have a conflict, you have to have at least two elements that conflict. This vs. That. An urgent MUST vs an equally formidable CAN'T.

In the Romance, the urgent MUST is provided by the attraction to the other party. Science has revealed why we feel that MUST.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090211/ap_on_sc/sci_love_science

is an article on discoveries about brain chemistry and love. I think I've mentioned that here before, and on goodreads.com in SFRomance.

Add to that the subliminal awareness that our very lives depend on founding solid Relationships, and when a candidate for that Relationship appears it becomes an urgent emergency to "catch" that guy or gal.

Theory has it that it's the reproductive urge that drives us into Relationships. And that certainly seems reasonable -- BUT, if you don't live long enough to have and raise kids, reproduction becomes a moot point. I think we are aware in every cell of our bodies that our minute to minute existence depends on solid Relationships.

Mystically, the First Chakra (staying alive) always trumps the Second Chakra matters of reproduction. Our priorities are ordered for us on that basic a level. This premise lurks far in the background of my Sime~Gen novels.




The brain chemistry study shows us why we have the objective of establishing solid relationships. Relationships protect basic health so that we can reproduce.

Sothe URGENT MUST part of the conflict: "here is a POTENTIAL PARTNER; I must have this person or die!"

Your very life depends (literally) on reaching out to and securing that person in your life. That is not melodrama, it's science.

For all HEA Romances, that piece of the formula is established by the genre rules. The Urgent Must has to be an attraction to a partner and everything else is "complication" or background.

Now, the writer gets creative and the genre walls disappear into the distance. The writer can explore the universe finding things to prevent the attaining of this objective. What obstacles prevent people from forming partnerships?

The art of the romance novel lies in the variegated CAN'Ts writers have hurled at their characters.

What the CAN'T actually is does not matter as much as that it is just about equal to the MUST. To craft the HEA, there has to be a tangible chance that the Relationship won't gel.

But success has to be plausible, so the CAN'T has to have a "fatal flaw" that makes it believable that the two people do overcome this obstacle.

It is very possible that the low prestige of the Romance Novel (and particularly the Paranormal or SF Romance) comes from the choice of obstacle.

Some people may pick up Romances where the obstacle is fabricated, and in technical parlance, "contrived" so that it can be overcome. The "paper tiger" obstacle.

As a result, casual readers may judge all Romance to be "thin" -- a puppet show where the strings are visible.

Judging an entire genre by one or two novels is fairly common. Have you ever done that?

So, the Romance HEA is crafted from a scientificly verified array of MUSTS vs. artistically invented CAN'Ts. The HEA point is where the MUST overcomes the CAN'T -- i.e. the point where the conflict is resolved.

So tell me why all Romance isn't classed as Science Fiction Romance? If all Romance has the MUST part of the plot formula as a scientific premise, why isn't every Romance considered SFR?
The answer to this puzzle may be found by reading something outside the genre.

I have here a novel, a police procedural which raised the question of the HEA requirement again.




FLIPPING OUT by Marshall Karp. It's an April 2009 book I got from the amazon.com VINE program in ARC. It's copyright is held by a film company. I already posted my (4 star) review on amazon.

The intriguing premise is that a famous mystery writer is in a scheme to buy a run-down house, fix it up, write a murder mystery set in the house, then sell the house at auction on the day the book launches (complete with fictional murder victim's outline in tape on the bedroom floor).

It's set against the background of Hollywood. HUGE amount of money involved in the house flipping scheme -- very interesting background, like Columbo, a glimpse of the rich and famous.

It is a pretty good cut and dried, well turned and well written police procedural mystery with a nice clue-trail.

You can solve the mystery before the detectives do, but not TOO MUCH before, and the ending comes with a nice tricky TWIST shocker-scene, after which you get told what the detectives knew before you knew it. It's a good twist ending and provides a nice film moment for the climax. It's a good book.

Ah, BUT!!! There are many buts I didn't mention in my amazon review.

Reading this novel right in the midst of reading a sequence of fairly good fantasy novels, I found the contrast striking.

The mystery formula also requires an HEA ending. The mystery has to be SOLVED, and the reader has to feel satisfied that they could solve it as well or better than the detectives (but not a lot better because then it's too easy).

So while I'm thinking about the HEA reader requirement in Romance, I'm reading this mystery and second-guessing the detectives.

And I realized WHAT'S MISSING from FLIPPING OUT. It's a factor that I find very satisfying in say, Faye Kellerman's Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus series. And that is characterization. It's a reason I like Columbo and Murder She Wrote, too. The mystery and its solution hinge entirely on the psychology and relationships of the victims, suspects AND the detectives!!

FLIPPING OUT provides a huge, stark, high relief contrast to the psychological drama type mysteries that I love. The stringent absence of the psychology dimension makes for a dry, clean, stark, and austere reading experience (very much like old fashioned neck-up science fiction, I discussed last week) that is, no doubt, very satisfying to the reader looking for that simple puzzle without any psychological tangles.

FLIPPING OUT puts the emotional lives of the bereaved, terrified and frustrated characters in the background while the foreground focuses on the puzzle itself. That's what this genre is supposed to do.

So this book is perfect of its kind, but unsatisfying to me. Yet it has the perfect ending for a mystery. The detectives solve the case which is equivalent to the HEA where the gal gets her guy and vice-versa.

At the halfway point, the darkest hour, the detectives think they solved it -- everyone above them thinks it's solved. The perp was the last person in the world they'd suspect. They're crushed. Then they discover they're wrong, and the perp is actually someone even more last-person-in-the-world than they'd expect.

FLIPPING OUT is likely to be a best seller, very popular, might even make a movie. The author's other novels have garnered serious respect, the sort we'd love to see SFR get as a genre.
What does FLIPPING OUT have that Science Fiction Romance doesn't?

Could it lie in the CAN'T rather than in the MUST part of the conflict formula?

One really great Romance that did make it onto TV as a series is BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.



This series spawned a plethora of fanfic on paper on on the web, and some really great fan novels, too. It grabbed the imagination of the SFR type reader-fan. But why did it fail on TV?

The premise stalled the plot.

The premise was that the couple could NEVER get together. That's not bad in itself. The CAN'T has to be formidable.

But the characters accepted the CAN'T. They didn't fight it. They didn't try scheme after scheme (like I LOVE LUCY plots). They didn't attempt to go public. They didn't plan to run away. Neither was willing to sacrifice to go live in the other's world.

Neither of the main characters was HEROIC about overcoming the plot premise CAN'T. And in the end, the writers tried to salvage that, change and evolve the premise by revealing that one of the characters was actually of non-human (alien from outer space) blood -- but by then the audience was losing interest.

They hadn't sold the BEAUTY AND THE BEAST series as SFR so the audience deserted them when they tried to turn it into SFR, making the problem solvable.

Why did the audience lose interest? Because the MUST didn't show any progress toward overcoming the CAN'T. The conflict was not moving to a resolution without breaking the original premise.

There couldn't be an HEA unless you changed the premise - which is of course what the fanfic writers did.

So contrast and compare FLIPPING OUT with BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and think about it. Too little psychology and the actions and reactions don't seem plausible enough to make a story interesting even if the plot is fascinating. Too much psychology and the story stalls dead in its tracks because there isn't the gumption to pay the price for conflict resolution.

To create the HEA effect (in any genre), the trick is matching the MUST (and its motives, conscious and subconscious) with the CAN'T (and its motives, conscious and subconscious), in such a way as to challenge each of the characters to overcome some internal barrier, to CHANGE (or ARC in screenwriting parlance) in a way that opens the opportunity for the MUST to overcome the CAN'T.

In the Murder Mystery Police Procedural the Must, Can't and HEA in the foreground is the whole, logical why-done-it puzzle. It's who knows whom and follow the money for motivation. The angst, grieving widowers, and fear of discovery are all way in the background, told rather than shown.

In the Alien Science Fiction Romance, the affairs of state, plot puzzles, science and logic of brain biochemistry are in the background, told rather than shown, while the angst, grief, fears, hopes, dreams, and fantasies are in the foreground, shown rather than told.

What is in the foreground and what is in the background very often determines the audience that will most appreciate the work of art.

Or the fanfic writers will reverse foreground and background to tell each other new stories.

For more on those psychological and spiritual internal barriers and how to construct them for your characters out of the material inside your reader's mind see my blog post:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/paradigm-shift.html

For a writing exercise related to setting up foreground and background and "worldbuilding" the background see my blog entry writing assignment and read the exercise posted as comments on

http://editingcircle.blogspot.com/2009/03/worldbuilding-trunk-ated.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.slantedconcept.com