And my point here is that Amber Benson is also a screenwriter, director, producer, webisode involved, AND an on-paper novelist too. This is a woman to study (Google her up). She has a lot to teach. So let's see if we can learn.
The last few entries I've done here have been long and full of abstract advice and arcane demands on writers to do the impossible (sometime before breakfast at least if not before coffee).
Now once again, lets get back to the practical by looking at a writer, her novel and the background she brings to the craft.
How does a writer actually WRITE? Where does the flowing poetry of images and words come from? What level of an Urban Fantasy needs poetry, or poetic justice, and where do you put the dense philosophy of the theme? Do you dare touch Religion?
Where do ideas come from and how do you organize them into fictional formats that can be understood by readers?
As I keep telling you, it's the writer's subconscious that does most of the work. And as I learned from Red Skelton and Jack Benny, the best material is stolen. The trick is to steal only from the best.
But after you've stolen your ideas from say, The Bible, or Isaac Asimov, what do you do with them?
You put them into your subconscious. You've watched me say that a lot.
Amber Benson's novel Death's Daughter is a flawless amalgam of her background, her life, and her career coming to high focus in a blazing burst of artistic freedom. It's just not so easy to see that art that comes from a well stocked and disciplined subconscious. But if you can see it, how do you do it?
I have no clue how she did it other than her public biography, but I do know how others have done it. Each person has to store stuff in their subconscious via a different mechanism. Writing (un-storing the stuff in your subconscious) is the opposite of the storing procedure, but they are related.
So HOW do you store stuff in your subconscious? How do you train your subconscious to regurgitate these marvelous classic ideas all wrapped up and organized to be just like something famous, but different.
What is the mechanism within the human mind that can achieve this feat?
If you can explain how you do it, please drop a comment on this post.
Meanwhile, I want to talk a little bit about the various ways I've seen accomplished writers do it, how I was taught, and how I find it works best for me.
This process of programming the subconscious to produce Art you can sell is a "feat" -- like an athletic feat, or like an adagio dance exhibition, a Chopin concert at Carnegie Hall, or recording a perfect operatic aria. It is a feat you must train for. And even so you might not equal or break a world record ever in your lifetime.
First you must establish a regimen in communicating with your subconscious.
The relationship between conscious and subconscious is, as I see it, best described by THE STRENGTH CARD, of the Tarot. It's usually a picture of some kind of beast (a lion or mythic creature known for ferocity) being petted and gentled (and dominated quietly) by a "defenseless" Maiden figure.
The beast represents the subconscious. The Maiden represents some part of the conscious mind -- perhaps the level of CUPS or perhaps WANDS. (or both)
There was an article recently on research into dog intelligence.
http://news.aol.com/article/dogs-as-smart-as-2-year-old-kids/609181
A dog may be as smart as a 2.5 year old, but the dog will be socially mature and still be only that smart.
Studies have shown that if a dog's owner is aggressive, the dog will become aggressive.
Dogs are copy-cats. (oy)
My dog learned the household routine. Even though I was never aware of how very routinely identical my daily procedures had become (I've since changed to inject variety) until my dog showed me by EXPECTING what would ordinarily come next.
Dogs recognize patterns and get disturbed if the pattern is broken.
Art is all about patterns. Poetry is about patterns. Poetic justice is all about patterns. If there isn't poetry inside your novel, the novel is missing an important ingredient because our real, normal world runs on poetry.
Dogs maybe can't "learn" in the way humans do but they can be trained, just like your toddler can be trained but not really "taught" (yet).
A toddler is not going to respond to all these magnificent abstractions I love to indulge in. The reasons for holding your hand crossing a parking lot don't mean a thing to a toddler. The statistics about toddlers killed in parking lots, the statistics about toddlers kidnapped, the stats on those maimed for life, zilch, nada, nothing.
But insist the first time, and never miss insisting on that little hand in yours, and next thing you know the 3 year old will force his hand into yours. The 5 year old - not so much - but dogs don't get to the 5 year old level (though some primates do!).
And your subconscious is about 2-3 years old, give or take. Forever.
Your subconscious doesn't CARE about all my beloved abstractions and meta-cognition and subtle value system comparisons. Subconscious is totally primal (which is why Blake Snyder kept saying make it PRIMAL).
The subconscious is where the "helpless" nightmare comes from, and why horror novels are so popular! We all have a scared little 2 year old inside somewhere who doesn't understand the world and still nurses lingering echoes of infancy's true helplessness. Adults still have some of that, which is why dark- mysterious- incomprehensible- insurmountable makes such a great movie!
So subconscious can be trained but not taught.
How do you train subconscious to produce poetry, art, music and stories complete with theme and structure?
It's that pattern recognition function built in as a survival mechanism!
Dogs have pattern recognition, even through time. (this comes after that) And people do too, on just that same very primal level where "reason" is not a factor.
That's another reason Blake Snyder was always saying get down to the PRIMAL level even a caveman could understand, before technology, before international trade, before Wall Street cartels.
Inside our sophisticated world wise behaviors, we are driven by the most primal issues of love, loyalty, reproduction, life, death, protection, possessing, command of power.
The story comes from the subconscious of the writer, and must be presented in such a way that the subconscious of the reader can recognize the pattern, the primal pattern.
Not SIMPLE pattern. PRIMAL pattern.
Life and Death are very primal, and not at all simple, but still very much what our subconscious is designed to handle magnificently.
That's why life and death are the subject of so many novels, and the stakes in so many plots. You don't have to explain what's so important about it. Using something that primal is almost a cop-out because it's so easy to grab for Life, Death, and Devil archetypes to drape your story on.
But Amber Benson has gotten away with it gracefully in HER NEW NOVEL "Death's Daughter" -
and thereby hangs the tale of a lesson in writing.
And the lesson in writing is READ.
As you train your toddler to hold your hand in a parking lot (pattern recognition triggers habitual action), so you can train your subconscious to steal IDEAS when reading a good PRIMAL novel (pattern recognition triggers habitual action).
The first step in training your subconscious is to sort your to-be-read stack into Good, Better, Best. (some of these will be re-reading projects)
You should pick writers and books that you want to emulate, or that have sales statistics you want to achieve. Most likely, the ones with the sales statistics you want to achieve will contain elements you seriously dislike or balk at. Those elements are very possibly the source of the sales statistics, so study them and reinvent them in new guises that you do like.
There are two kinds of fiction you should read to train your subconscious.
One is the really slick, highly professional, so well synthesized you can't reverse-engineer it to see how it was done.
Another is the awkward, not-quite-right, fumbling, jerky neo-pro product you most often see these days in the e-book form because Manhattan isn't publishing midlist and beginner writers as much as they used to.
That's not casting aspersions on e-books! I've reviewed a number of e-books that are better constructed than you generally find from Manhattan! The e-book has stolen from Manhattan the right to be the home of the mid-list as well as the beginner, launching what will soon be stellar careers.
Manhattan will soon be in financial trouble because they are not fostering the new beginners and will not have their loyalty (loyalty is primal, remember?)
Reading to train your subconscious to write is very different from reading to enjoy a good read.
As you start doing this exercise, your ability to enjoy any novel will falter and may disappear. If you persist, a new and very intense pleasure will emerge as you read interesting novels that also tickle your pattern-recognition nerve.
You start by reverse engineering a number of your most favorite novels until you can see their moving parts as detailed here in previous posts.
One tried and true technique is to take colored highlighters or pens and highlight or underline words, phrases and sentences. Don't do it just mentally. The physical act of marking is what communicates to the subconscious. Just thinking about it won't achieve the same communication level.
Mark DESCRIPTION, DIALOGUE, EXPOSITION, NARRATIVE in separate colors. A really top flight writer like Andre Norton will use all 4 in almost every sentence. Some words will carry both exposition and narrative in one word.
Mark the PROTAGONIST ANTAGONIST and/or NARRATOR.
Later flipping through those pages, you'll see the proportions of words allotted to each character. It's important to get that proportion right.
Mark the BEGINNING, MIDDLE and END of each scene, and note in the margin the SITUATION CHANGE for PLOT and for STORY.
See my two entries on SCENE STRUCTURE at
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html
And note that my "definition" of scene is echoed in this web page on stage vocabulary.
http://cla.calpoly.edu/~smarx/courses/Vocabulary.html
Note particularly where it says BLOCK A SCENE because we haven't discussed that yet, here, but we have covered the components of blocking. Blocking a scene is very VERY important in action narrative, and when you read DEATH'S DAUGHTER, you should watch for the techniques so smoothly and subtly applied.
Color code 2 or 3 of your favorite novels in each of the categories
1)very advanced that you want to emulate, and
2)beginner's work that you COULD emulate.
DO THE SAME THING watching television. Take a notepad, note down the scenes and how each changes the situation. Capture the plot outline as you watch. (this is where you wish you knew shorthand).
If you need to know what a "plot outline" is, I gave you a couple of examples in WHAT DOES SHE SEE IN HIM http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html
Now, after this intense exercise, never let yourself read anything without mentally coloring in the components as DESCRIPTION, DIALOGUE, EXPOSITION, NARRATIVE, scene blocks etc. After you've done the actual coloring, subconscious will begin to spot them for you, and train your conscious not to miss them! (like the 3 year old who will insert a hand into yours crossing a parking lot)
Once subconscious has started to do that, and you can't read anything without being aware of the components, go to sleep assigning your subconscious the task of having AN IDEA when you wake up.
The first few IDEAS it produces will be like a puppy piddling in the corner. Think of the STRENGTH CARD, and remember how you tame the fractious, spoiled, savage beast of the subconscious with kindness, repetition, firmness, consistency, just as you train a toddler. Reward good behavior. Ignore the bad. Make friends.
When an idea comes pre-formulated to the pattern you are training into your subconscious, write it down (that's the reward for subconscious, getting written down). Do the plot outline for the novel, just as we've covered in these posts such as WHAT DOES SHE SEE IN HIM. With practice it shouldn't take more than half an hour, maybe 20 minutes, to jot down the outline (my examples came out as fast as I could type; it just takes practice) and they don't have to be consecutive minutes.
Let subconscious do the part that's "the same" and you do the part that's "different."
Now, where to start training?
AMBER BENSON!!! I just wrote my January 2010 column (that's another lesson in publishing - it's August and I'm late turning in the January column.) And except for a quick Noel Tyl astrology mention, the January column is all about DEATH'S DAUGHTER and why it's an "important" novel in the guise of just another Urban Fantasy.
But one little 1500 word column couldn't begin to scratch the surface of "all about" Death's Daughter. There's so much more to say. We shouldn't get to that until after you've read it and reverse engineered it.
Amber Benson's novel DEATH'S DAUGHTER is a perfectly structured, breezy-easy read targeting the most primal archetypes, Death, Devil, God, normal human woman who just wants a normal life.
The world Benson has built for this novel is soooo Buffy and sooooo Different from Buffy. The world's mechanisms, the tone, the brightness, the attitudes, the philosophy behind everything is all different from that famous TV show, but awakens soothing echoes of the Buffyverse pattern. And yes, there's the constant thrum of a Romance in there too! "What does she see in him" is handled gorgeously.
If you're familiar with the Buffyverse, you will pick this up right away. And you'll see how Benson's universe is unique. You'll also find a purely cinematic structure articulating the skeleton of this novel. And you'll find the poetry, the art, a musical rhythm to the pacing, and so many tightly and smoothly integrated patterns even I couldn't count them all.
DEATH'S DAUGHTER is a leap-for-joy FIND for the writer looking for a really tough nut to crack on reverse-engineering.
But it didn't just spring full grown out of nowhere. Here's Benson's bio from the back of the novel.
“Amber Benson cocreated, cowrote and directed the animated supernatural Web series Ghosts of Albion with Christopher Golden, which they followed with a series of novels, including Witchery and Accursed, and the novella Astray. Benson and Golden also coauthored the novella The Seven Whistlers. As an actress, she has appeared in dozens of roles in feature films, TV movies, and television series, including the fan-favorite role of Tara Maclay on three seasons of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Benson wrote, produced, and directed the feature films Chance and Lovers, Liars and Lunatics.”
TV, Web production, feature film, print media. And all that experience is neatly, tightly integrated into DEATH'S DAUGHTER.
Christopher Golden once taught me a lot about this structure stuff, and how the subconscious needs to be disciplined to separate material into distinct stories. I don't know that's where Benson learned it, or if she came to Golden already knowing it. Or maybe she was born knowing it (some people are just talented that way).
I highly recommend making DEATH'S DAUGHTER one of your novels to reverse engineer to see what it's made of and how its moving parts are joined by the theme. Yes, it'll be as hard as if it were written by Andre Norton or A. E. Van Vogt because it's so well integrated. But your subconscious may pick up the patterning for the multi-media creation, which could make your fortune.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Showing posts with label Blake Snyder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blake Snyder. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Six Kinds of Power in Relationship
Blake Snyder in his two SAVE THE CAT! books on screenwriting
points out that to keep a story moving, to keep the character arcs changing throughout the 110 page screenplay (or for that matter, a 400 page novel) you need to start the main character off at the point in his/her life when he/she is forcibly confronted by 6 things that need fixing.
Starting at that point keeps the plot from dying or unraveling in your fingers, which some new writers misinterpret as writer's block. It's really not writer's block, but writer's skill deficit.
For truly sterling examples of this complex writing technique producing a truly simple but not simplified plot, see Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files novels.
OK, The Dresden Files novels are not strictly speaking "Romance" because there isn't a Couple whose relationship dynamics create the plot -- but to me, Dresden the written character is some kind of grandiose hunk! The TV Dresden was starting to grow on me, but it got cancelled. And on TV the troubles that beset Dresden had to be reduced to episode size and watered down for the TV viewer who doesn't know magick.
THE DRESDEN FILES - here's the first 3 in a boxed set:
There are so far I think 12 Dresden novels and more coming. Like C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner universe novels, this is a series to savour, but Foreigner is more Alien Romance than Dresden is (so far -- you never know about trends that will re-shape a long series).
But both Foreigner and Dresden sustain a focus very tightly on the main character and that character started out with at least 6 things that need fixing.
Here's another long series that grew out of things to fix piling up on the main characters -- and this one is HOT Romance with magic as a societal force to be reconned with (Vampires hot for Werewolves though it's forbidden!) This is the first 3 in the series -- and the next one to come out is dedicated to me and is set in an interstellar society, real Alien Romance growing out of an urban fantasy series! The working title is DEMON IN THE DARK.
This is Susan Sizemore's urban fantasy Prime series, and you really don't want to miss any of them.
And here's the latest in the series
And I'm reading an ARC of the next one already.
What these 3 disparate (long running) series have in common is the choice of the initial moment in the main characters' lives when their story STARTS.
Choosing the wrong place to start is one of the most widespread classic errors that beginning writers make. I see it in writing workshops all the time. 9 out of 10 submissions will give me no choice but to explain that this manuscript has NO CONFLICT and it has no conflict BECAUSE it starts in the wrong place in the character's life, a place where "the story" of that character has not yet begun.
So a character floats into your mind and starts demanding you tell his/her story. You gotta do it, but where do you start?
Generally speaking in real life, troubles come in strings, disasters come in sets of 3's strung out over 12-18 months. (everyone knows this pattern even if they are certain astrology is silly)
Ever heard of literary license? When telling a character's story, while the character is telling you how things happened one thing at a time over years, you must take "literary license" and COMPRESS the troubles into thematically inter-related bunches to create a series of long novels -- or even one, great, fat novel.
And Blake Snyder got it right. The magic number is 6. That's two different transits each happening 3 times.
That's why troubles come in 3's. The outer planets go over a point in a natal chart, go retrograde back over that point as the Earth rounds its orbit, then (retrograde is an optical illusion, you know) the transiting planet goes "direct" and crosses that natal point again. If all the energy doesn't blow through on first contact, it may trickle through in 3 parts, or 2 parts. That's why the pattern is hard to see. Sometimes one or two pieces are missing.
Since the most powerful and memorable and re-readable novels and screenplays are about plots driven by Relationships not just mere Characterization, we should look into the details of Relationships for plot-drivers.
One kind of transit that always generates serious trouble in people's lives is the exquisitely slow transits of Pluto. Pluto is about power (yes, I know they demoted it from planet status - but that doesn't matter. "Nevertheless, it moves!")
And as discussed at some length previously here, Neptune is the plot-driver for the Romance experience.
Also, in Kabbalah, 6 is all about Love. I talk about that in detail in my books on Tarot that have never been published yet, The Not So Minor Arcana: Wands and The Not So Minor Arcana: Cups.
So if we look into the structure of power in relationships to find the 6 things to fix, we should find some plot-drivers that really have legs! And they will automatically be thematically related because they all manifest Pluto. Pluto "rules" or is associated with Scorpio, the natural 8th House, and thus is very much all about the more primal side of sexuality.
Keeping your 6 things to fix thematically related is yet another trick for avoiding writer's block. You will always know what comes next and why it's interesting because it's all about power.
Choosing those 6 things to fix in a thematic bundle is the secret to keeping the surprise twists coming and coming, and holding the interest of an audience, sometimes not just through one novel but way past a dozen novels in a series.
That secret of choosing plot-driver sets meshes perfectly with the way I explained using Scene Structure for pacing last week.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure.html
Plotting is an artform, not just a set of technical, mechanical tricks. The tricks are the brushes, pigments and canvass you use to bring your characters to life.
Art is a SELECTIVE recreation of reality. Verisimilitude is not the same thing as reality itself, but verisimilitude awakens a sense of being within a different reality. I covered that in the following post:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/verisimilitude-vs-reality.html
Linnea Sinclair has developed a knack for explaining how to develop characters and I highly recommend you read her blog entries on that subject. I'm sure they are as scattered as my own have been, so maybe she'll drop a list of them as a comment on this blog entry.
Linnea Sinclair showed you a lot about Worldbuilding in her post
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/world-building-for-writers-or-why.html
I'm hoping the others on the blog who've discussed worldbuilding will drop the URLs of their posts into the comments on this post.
So this examination on Power as a plotting tool isn't so much about characters and their internal conflicts, but more about Relationships between or among characters and how internal conflicts buried deep in a character manifest (unexpectedly) in external Relationships, creating Blake's "6 Things That Need To Be Fixed" formula for the opening of a story.
In previous posts here, I've explored the ways that professional fiction writers can use Astrology and Tarot (not believe in it; use it) to enhance their artificial worldbuilding so that the result is believable even when not plausible.
My posts on Tarot based on Kabbalah, Astrology and Worldbuilding as well as other writing craft techniques will soon be edited, expanded and collected into volumes and made available as e-books and POD versions on paper.
The first set will be 5 volumes on Tarot with the envelope title The Not So Minor Arcana.
The Astrology and Worldbuilding sets will come later.
(see my Friendfeed box on the right column of this blog to find how to subscribe to me and be notified how to get these compilations, or just subscribe to this blog). But you can read much of it now by digging it out of this blog. Search on Tuesday - the day I post. Or you might start with these:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/07/astrology-just-for-writers.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/07/astrology-just-for-writers-part-2.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/10/astrology-just-for-writers-part-3-genre.html
There are 5 parts of Astrology for Writers so far, plus numerous references to Astrology as it can be used to create verisimilitude where there actually is none (i.e. a fantasy world you just built).
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2007/12/10-pentacles-cake-comes-out-of-oven.html (follow the links in this post back. Swords and Pentacles have been covered in 20 posts).
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/source-of-expository-lump.html is a key post in my Worldbuilding and writing craft series.
So you see, we've been building up to this more difficult subject of Relationship as a plot driving mechanism, one component craft technique at a time. The underlying purpose of all this analysis is to find a way to boost Alien Romance's respectability in the general media.
Keep your eye on the objective and the boring work will just get done. It's like watching TV while knitting. Do you really need to look at your hands?
So now let's knit together 6 kinds of Power that can make for problems (or solutions) in a Relationship while keeping the plot twisting, but keep our minds on AR on TV.
----------------------
1) Control of the Agenda
2) Veto Power
3) Who holds the "gun" (real or figurative)
4) The Magic Address Book; The Golden Rolodex
5) Potentially embarrassing (fatal?) secrets
6) Purse Strings
----------------------
1) Control of the Agenda
This may be the most famous kind of power there is in a relationship between one character and a larger group of characters. But it operates within couples, too.
It can be very subtle. And the more subtle the power over the agenda is, the more devastating a chokehold it can be.
Many people aren't even aware there is an agenda in every encounter, nevermind that it can be controlled without their knowledge.
Take an example ripped from the headlines today.
Congress is getting ready to thrust upon us a "Healthcare Reform" bill -- a huge bill, but none of them voting for it or against it will have read it because they couldn't understand it anyway.
The inner workings of Congress and the Senate are all about Agenda Control and everyone who browses the news understands how that works. It's seniority and majority party, getting Committee appointments, plus a lot of 18th Century customs that have lasted.
They never bring a bill to the floor unless they know how the vote will go. That means bills don't even get voted on unless the agenda is fully under control of the majority party.
That's pretty much how corporate executive committees work, too.
OK, we all understand that and can use it in stories.
But politicians love power and don't seem to know there is any other way to think. Some men seem to believe it's unmanly to think any other way, even in a Relationship.
When people say they don't want the government dictating their health insurance terms, or they don't want a government run single-payer system, Congress responds, "Oh. Yeah, I see your point. Well, don't worry. We'll GIVE YOU LOTS OF CHOICES so your health insurance will be your own choice."
As far as politicians are concerned that totally fixes the problem because it defuses your objection but they retain control of the agenda. Husbands on the road to divorce do this to their wives.
Congress did that with the Medicare Prescription insurance bill, and created a system where dozens of private companies "provide" prescription insurance as a proxy for the government, and "give you choices" none of which are adequate to anyone but the average person, and of course profitable to the offering company. But you must choose from the list presented to you, which is further limited by state laws. No matter which way you choose, the company wins. The agenda was set, but not by you.
Think about that power-play maneuver of retaining control of the agenda by limiting choices but forcing the other to choose from that menu and claiming that means freedom of choice.
Choosing among choices created by someone else is not the same thing as creating your own.
Think how that control of the menu of choices works in terms of a Romance relationship. Think how it might seem to non-humans.
What are the politicians doing? They know no other way to relate to voters except by exerting power over voters (so they can get elected).
How do they flimflam voters into thinking that the government is giving them FREEDOM OF CHOICE by giving them LOTS OF CHOICES?
It's like the dropdown menus in a program. THESE are the choices you get to choose from because that's all the choices the programmers could think to offer (or know how to offer or find profitable to offer).
GIVING the choices is "setting the agenda." This is what you have to choose from and if you want something else, or a little of this and a little of that, you can't have it.
The character who sets the choices before you is setting the agenda.
The character who chooses from that array of choices is the one without POWER in the transaction, no matter how large or varied the menu of choices.
The person who sets the agenda retains the power to LIMIT what you may choose from, and to force you to make a choice from that pre-set list where every item on it benefits them not you.
If you think about it, that's how the news media works (always has worked that way). "All the news that's fit to print" is still an agenda-enforcing chokehold because they choose what's fit and what's not. The internet is changing that business model faster than the media can adjust. The power centers in our cultures are shifting HARD.
So our taste in fiction has to shift, just as hard.
Think what non-human civilizations that had that power-center shift happen generations ago might be like. Then think of them arriving on earth to watch our comedy of errors.
Centralized Agenda Control is how business meetings are run at the corporate level - the one in charge sets the agenda, and anyone speaking outside that list of topics is out of order. Do that too often and presto - you're fired.
Local Town Council meetings are supposed to work that way but often frizzle out into shapeless shouting. Not good drama.
From a child's point of view, families are run from a centralized agenda (which is why we tend to run our families that way once we grow up -- don't know any other way).
"What's for dinner, Mom?" "Rice and Beans; or Beans and Rice, take your pick."
"Where are we going this year on vacation, Dad?" "The Jersey shore. Or there's that beach in Maryland you liked last year." "I don't want to go to a beach. I want to go to a Dude Ranch." "Not this year. Too expensive. And dangerous. There's a nice beach in Connecticut."
See? You can choose. You have freedom of choice, and you're BEING GIVEN A VOTE (given is the operative word). But you can't choose to stay home because you're a kid and can't stay alone. You can't have what you want because it's not on the menu. Choose a beach - any cheap beach. We're listening to you, but we're setting the agenda.
That's how people in our society use power and the process can generate a problem your main character must solve.
OK, so suppose we're writing Romeo and Juliet.
Juliet votes for the Connecticut beach and meets Romeo there. The entire plot and conflict of Romeo and Juliet stemmed from the fact that the parents set the agenda (but of course the parents didn't see it that way; they had their agenda set for them by society and the legitimacy of feuding as a way of life). For Romeo and Juliet, the resolution was that the kids didn't allow the parents to set their agenda.
So the position of Agenda Setter is the single most powerful position in any relationship, and that power is the most far-reaching and difficult to counter when it is exercised with subtlety. "Give the less powerful many, many MANY choices" and they'll never notice they have no freedom to choose.
So problem #1 for your main character can be either what choices to offer others, or whether to let someone else populate the menu of choices. How does your main character break out of that power-grip and assert his/her own agenda? Is your main character even aware he/she has been manipulated into a position of powerlessness? Or is holding only part of the power enough? What changes in your character's world to make it not-enough?
2) Veto Power
This is obvious. It's the power to say "NO" and make it stick.
But again, in our culture, it's socially and politically incorrect for certain people to use this power in certain ways. Thus the person with power can end up in a complex spiderweb trap with no way to exercise their power.
For an example, just read up on the lastest UN Security Council resolutions. That "Veto Power" was given to the 5 permanent members as a way of keeping them from exercising it. Say no to what others consider reasonable and you're dirt.
So one of the 6 problems your main character might have is a Veto Power they can't use. Or if they do use it anyway, the trouble generates the plot.
Take Romeo and Juliet again -- their veto power was suicide.
That's kind of like the DOOMSDAY MACHINE in Star Trek (actually, it's an old military concept). A weapon so powerful it could destroy both sides. You can't use it, and threats with it seem vapid. Well, Romeo and Juliet is a play Aliens might consider when threatening humans with a pre-set agenda of choices.
3) Who holds the "gun"
"The Gun" is a weapon somewhat short of Veto Power or a Doomsday Device, but hardly a precision tool in most hands. (Lone Ranger and Have Gun Will Travel fangirl here!)
The gun is a tool for doing damage of some sort. But it isn't enough to simply have a gun -- WHO holds that gun is the most important part of the threat to the power structure of a dynamic Relationship. The character of the gun-holder is the focus in this problem to be solved.
Take for example, an unarmed man in a sports suit and an armed man in an Armani suit. They are fleeing through a forest chased by a S.W.A.T team (maybe aliens who caught them spying on their beached UFO?).
The Armani Suit tries to use veto power on the Sports Suit who is busy setting the agenda for tricking the aliens into making a choice from a menu of one item.
Armani waves the gun with authority saying, "The man who holds the gun gets his way." Sports Suit snatches the gun right out of Armani's hands levels it at Armani and notes that, "The man who holds the gun gets his way, right?"
It isn't who has the weapon that matters to the plot. It's who controls it. Who knows how to use it.
People who are masters with weaponry don't have to carry weapons. Anyone who wishes to contend for control of the agenda will bring plenty of weapons for everyone. Let them sweat under the weight. They'll get tired and it'll be easier to vanquish them.
So Problem 3 might be that the character who understands a particular weapon (doesn't have to be a gun -- could be a whole space ship with no overt weapons, or a sword, or a length of electrical cord, or a magical chant) does not currently possess that weapon.
Or the complication might be that the person who does possess the weapon doesn't understand the weapon. A character with no shooting-range experience is more deadly when waving a gun than a trained Marine. The Marine will hit what she aims at, and that fact can be very comforting when things get dicey.
4) The Golden Rolodex
Well, Rolodex makes software these days, but the cliche reference is to the cardfile or listing of the ones who will respond to a message as expected and wanted. "I need a speedboat by this afternoon." "Ah, well, I know a man ..."
The person who always "knows a man who" is the one with great power in every relationship. The go-to guy/gal.
I had a cousin with the family golden rolodex. When she sent invitations to a party, the whole family turned out from 3 states around. When somebody else threw a party, hardly anyone came. When I needed to throw a graduation party for one of my kids in New York, I called her in New Jersey. The whole family turned out from 3 states around - and California too.
It's a cliche, but it works. If you need some outlandishly unique operation to go down just the way you want it, you need to know someone who knows everyone and can select who to ask.
Thanksgiving Dinner makes a great plot-event for solving one of the 6 problems.
The character in a Relationship who knows all the email addresses, phone numbers, and URLs is the most powerful person in the relationship, even more powerful than the agenda setter in certain circumstances.
Take for example, the classic situation of the suddenly widowed woman who doesn't even know how to notify her husband's relatives that he has died. The husband paid all the bills. She doesn't know the phone company's phone number, or how to pay the water bill, or where that information is filed, or how much they owe on the house.
The person who knows which people know each other, who knows all their skill sets and their family situations, their political leanings, and personal hobby horses - that person has POWER in every relationship.
Corporations discovered this by scientific research and changed the Personnel Department into the Human Resources department.
I recall when they first started sending questionnairs to employees demanding the employees confess all their hobbies and incidental interests and skills because the employees' skills were the wealth of the corporation. No shit, they really did that and it upset people. Today people comply without thinking about the invasion of privacy -- the power they are giving up for no money. (Well, maybe it'll pay off if the company out of the goodness of their hearts decides to offer a RIF'd worker another position in a different profession.)
So the general reader knows that not being on the good side of "the man who" could be a major one of the 6 problems your main character must solve, especially if he's slipped outside the set Agenda and gotten himself fired.
5) Potentially embarrassing (fatal? Awkward?) secrets
This can be leverage. See the TV show Leverage which is a sort of remake of Mission: Impossible. Knowledge is power. The TV show (USA NETWORK - CHARACTERS WELCOME)
also uses psychology and knowledge as power.
As with Romeo and Juliet, the solution to being blackmailed is to refuse to let another character set the agenda. Just out the info yourself.
Ah, but the price!
One of the 6 problems that have to be solved might have to do with who knows what about which.
Trust issues come in here. Can this character who caught you sleeping with your boss's wife be trusted to keep her mouth shut?
Perhaps in Romance, the Sexual Blackmail potential of secrets is the hottest way to focus attention on the interface between Power and Sex, and distinguish both from actual Romance.
Laughter, embarrassment, and physical danger all have something in common, which is why sex or a giggling-fit often come right after a big physical fight.
PAIN is the element in common. Laughter happens right at the edge of subtle emotional pain. Embarrassment is likewise right at the edge of a kind of potentially fatal emotional pain (something that can change your life and your basic character if rammed through to the logical finish). Embarrassment taken to dramatic conclusion is social-rejection, shunning, and that can be fatal. Ostracism is worse than jail because you can starve or freeze and nobody cares.
For a character who has a hot secret, in their past the potential consequences IF IT WERE KNOWN can make a really good Problem #5 to be fixed.
What is the resolution of, say, the problem where someone falls in love and does not confess before the wedding day that he's in the witness protection program and every characteristic that made his Bride fall in love with him (taste in art, love of music, clothing, even profession) was made up for him. His real self just isn't like that at all.
Does your character say "I Do" before or after confessing? Does someone swoop in with the information? Does the Bride shrug it off saying, "I knew that from the first day we met," because she's a telepath from outer space spying on Earth?
In fact, THE SECRET as a problem works best of all when two characters in a telepathic bonding discover secrets about the other. Each one figured they must know everything about the other because of the telepathic bonding. What a shock.
6) Purse Strings
Well, the financial control in a couple relationship has been used to enslave women since forever. Ho-hum. Cliche.
Oh? But what about the woman who has financial control. Today, in the USA, according to a number of polls I've seen, it's usually the woman who handles the finances. That's one reason so many ads are aimed at women. Women make the purchasing decisions.
And then there's the widow(er) who doesn't even know where all the spouse's bank accounts are but thought she did. Think about variations on Madoff's wife's position. Not the reality. The potential drama in the position depending on how the cash flowed through that family.
If you really need to understand a situation, "follow the money" is the most productive way to spend your investigative dollar.
Any number of Columbo episodes, and even Murder She Wrote, were based on following the money, finding the purse strings, and thus finding the seat of power in the dynamic relationships being exposed because of a murder.
One great example of a murder mystery series that's a sizzling romance is Faye Kellerman's Decker and Lazarus series:
Oh, yeah, don't forget there's plenty of variations on this purse-strings problem to explore with the same-sex couple with scattered assets and limited legal rights in certain states. Your main character could have the problem of getting actual hands on his/her rightful inheritance from a deceased spouse and become a suspect because of those efforts.
Then there's the college kid waiting for his parents to send money. Suppose they're fighting over how much support he should get. Suppose the parents get a divorce, and don't inform him until after the decree?
Or take international politics. There's the Fantasy TV show KINGS, for example, where the war between neighboring countries is promulgated by the guy funding the King, and when the King wants to make peace, the funds go into war-mongering and palace intrigue and skulldugery where the profits are. You think the King was fooled? Watch that show. Love, Romance, Infidelity, Intrigue, the stuff of human relationships.
I think some of these short summer-replacement series are actually concocted with the idea of making the profit from selling the DVD's. Follow the money.
The power of control of the wealth works wonderfully well on the interstellar scene because it's something we all have intimate knowledge of and can believe as a motive even for aliens. It's primal enough that we can infer that even aliens would have "resource control" as a goal.
Purse Strings don't just control coined money. The "Purse Strings" power-mongering is about any sort of concrete resource control. Oil interests don't seem too enthusiastic about solar panel deployment for power generation, do they? Remember the TV show Dallas? Suppose you wrote an episode of that today, in the "alternative energy" revolution?
Consider the Wild West stories of the cattlemen vs. the sheep runners.
Water rights are still a huge bone of contention in the West USA (Colorado lakes are down to I think it's about a third of where they should be at this time of year; Colorado feeds Arizona and California water, and hasn't enough left for itself.)
A recent FORBES article pinpoints some of the calculation fallacies behind the concept of the locavore (eating local produce). This is an article fraught with story ideas because of all the things there are to "fix" that you can choose from, and the equivocal facts. The article contends that it's more "green" for England to import lamb from New Zealand than to raise sheep locally.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0803/opinions-energy-locavores-on-my-mind.html
Business Week online is also a fertile source of Six Things To Fix for your main character.
http://www.businessweek.com/
And those are two of the most obvious places for writers to watch for plot driving things to fix involving purse strings and power.
These magazines are all about power and the power-structure that we are so embedded in that we are as oblivious to it as we are to the air (unless there's a storm wind or a bad smell).
The reader/viewer's obliviousness is the writer's most powerful tool for inserting the surprising twist that is nevertheless obvious in retrospect.
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So there are 6 areas of Power in Relationship fraught with dramatic potential. And that's derived from only half of Pluto's possible effects and we barely touched on what Neptune can do to perceptions.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
points out that to keep a story moving, to keep the character arcs changing throughout the 110 page screenplay (or for that matter, a 400 page novel) you need to start the main character off at the point in his/her life when he/she is forcibly confronted by 6 things that need fixing.
Starting at that point keeps the plot from dying or unraveling in your fingers, which some new writers misinterpret as writer's block. It's really not writer's block, but writer's skill deficit.
For truly sterling examples of this complex writing technique producing a truly simple but not simplified plot, see Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files novels.
OK, The Dresden Files novels are not strictly speaking "Romance" because there isn't a Couple whose relationship dynamics create the plot -- but to me, Dresden the written character is some kind of grandiose hunk! The TV Dresden was starting to grow on me, but it got cancelled. And on TV the troubles that beset Dresden had to be reduced to episode size and watered down for the TV viewer who doesn't know magick.
THE DRESDEN FILES - here's the first 3 in a boxed set:
There are so far I think 12 Dresden novels and more coming. Like C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner universe novels, this is a series to savour, but Foreigner is more Alien Romance than Dresden is (so far -- you never know about trends that will re-shape a long series).
But both Foreigner and Dresden sustain a focus very tightly on the main character and that character started out with at least 6 things that need fixing.
Here's another long series that grew out of things to fix piling up on the main characters -- and this one is HOT Romance with magic as a societal force to be reconned with (Vampires hot for Werewolves though it's forbidden!) This is the first 3 in the series -- and the next one to come out is dedicated to me and is set in an interstellar society, real Alien Romance growing out of an urban fantasy series! The working title is DEMON IN THE DARK.
This is Susan Sizemore's urban fantasy Prime series, and you really don't want to miss any of them.
And here's the latest in the series
And I'm reading an ARC of the next one already.
What these 3 disparate (long running) series have in common is the choice of the initial moment in the main characters' lives when their story STARTS.
Choosing the wrong place to start is one of the most widespread classic errors that beginning writers make. I see it in writing workshops all the time. 9 out of 10 submissions will give me no choice but to explain that this manuscript has NO CONFLICT and it has no conflict BECAUSE it starts in the wrong place in the character's life, a place where "the story" of that character has not yet begun.
So a character floats into your mind and starts demanding you tell his/her story. You gotta do it, but where do you start?
Generally speaking in real life, troubles come in strings, disasters come in sets of 3's strung out over 12-18 months. (everyone knows this pattern even if they are certain astrology is silly)
Ever heard of literary license? When telling a character's story, while the character is telling you how things happened one thing at a time over years, you must take "literary license" and COMPRESS the troubles into thematically inter-related bunches to create a series of long novels -- or even one, great, fat novel.
And Blake Snyder got it right. The magic number is 6. That's two different transits each happening 3 times.
That's why troubles come in 3's. The outer planets go over a point in a natal chart, go retrograde back over that point as the Earth rounds its orbit, then (retrograde is an optical illusion, you know) the transiting planet goes "direct" and crosses that natal point again. If all the energy doesn't blow through on first contact, it may trickle through in 3 parts, or 2 parts. That's why the pattern is hard to see. Sometimes one or two pieces are missing.
Since the most powerful and memorable and re-readable novels and screenplays are about plots driven by Relationships not just mere Characterization, we should look into the details of Relationships for plot-drivers.
One kind of transit that always generates serious trouble in people's lives is the exquisitely slow transits of Pluto. Pluto is about power (yes, I know they demoted it from planet status - but that doesn't matter. "Nevertheless, it moves!")
And as discussed at some length previously here, Neptune is the plot-driver for the Romance experience.
Also, in Kabbalah, 6 is all about Love. I talk about that in detail in my books on Tarot that have never been published yet, The Not So Minor Arcana: Wands and The Not So Minor Arcana: Cups.
So if we look into the structure of power in relationships to find the 6 things to fix, we should find some plot-drivers that really have legs! And they will automatically be thematically related because they all manifest Pluto. Pluto "rules" or is associated with Scorpio, the natural 8th House, and thus is very much all about the more primal side of sexuality.
Keeping your 6 things to fix thematically related is yet another trick for avoiding writer's block. You will always know what comes next and why it's interesting because it's all about power.
Choosing those 6 things to fix in a thematic bundle is the secret to keeping the surprise twists coming and coming, and holding the interest of an audience, sometimes not just through one novel but way past a dozen novels in a series.
That secret of choosing plot-driver sets meshes perfectly with the way I explained using Scene Structure for pacing last week.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure.html
Plotting is an artform, not just a set of technical, mechanical tricks. The tricks are the brushes, pigments and canvass you use to bring your characters to life.
Art is a SELECTIVE recreation of reality. Verisimilitude is not the same thing as reality itself, but verisimilitude awakens a sense of being within a different reality. I covered that in the following post:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/verisimilitude-vs-reality.html
Linnea Sinclair has developed a knack for explaining how to develop characters and I highly recommend you read her blog entries on that subject. I'm sure they are as scattered as my own have been, so maybe she'll drop a list of them as a comment on this blog entry.
Linnea Sinclair showed you a lot about Worldbuilding in her post
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/world-building-for-writers-or-why.html
I'm hoping the others on the blog who've discussed worldbuilding will drop the URLs of their posts into the comments on this post.
So this examination on Power as a plotting tool isn't so much about characters and their internal conflicts, but more about Relationships between or among characters and how internal conflicts buried deep in a character manifest (unexpectedly) in external Relationships, creating Blake's "6 Things That Need To Be Fixed" formula for the opening of a story.
In previous posts here, I've explored the ways that professional fiction writers can use Astrology and Tarot (not believe in it; use it) to enhance their artificial worldbuilding so that the result is believable even when not plausible.
My posts on Tarot based on Kabbalah, Astrology and Worldbuilding as well as other writing craft techniques will soon be edited, expanded and collected into volumes and made available as e-books and POD versions on paper.
The first set will be 5 volumes on Tarot with the envelope title The Not So Minor Arcana.
The Astrology and Worldbuilding sets will come later.
(see my Friendfeed box on the right column of this blog to find how to subscribe to me and be notified how to get these compilations, or just subscribe to this blog). But you can read much of it now by digging it out of this blog. Search on Tuesday - the day I post. Or you might start with these:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/07/astrology-just-for-writers.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/07/astrology-just-for-writers-part-2.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/10/astrology-just-for-writers-part-3-genre.html
There are 5 parts of Astrology for Writers so far, plus numerous references to Astrology as it can be used to create verisimilitude where there actually is none (i.e. a fantasy world you just built).
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2007/12/10-pentacles-cake-comes-out-of-oven.html (follow the links in this post back. Swords and Pentacles have been covered in 20 posts).
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/source-of-expository-lump.html is a key post in my Worldbuilding and writing craft series.
So you see, we've been building up to this more difficult subject of Relationship as a plot driving mechanism, one component craft technique at a time. The underlying purpose of all this analysis is to find a way to boost Alien Romance's respectability in the general media.
Keep your eye on the objective and the boring work will just get done. It's like watching TV while knitting. Do you really need to look at your hands?
So now let's knit together 6 kinds of Power that can make for problems (or solutions) in a Relationship while keeping the plot twisting, but keep our minds on AR on TV.
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1) Control of the Agenda
2) Veto Power
3) Who holds the "gun" (real or figurative)
4) The Magic Address Book; The Golden Rolodex
5) Potentially embarrassing (fatal?) secrets
6) Purse Strings
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1) Control of the Agenda
This may be the most famous kind of power there is in a relationship between one character and a larger group of characters. But it operates within couples, too.
It can be very subtle. And the more subtle the power over the agenda is, the more devastating a chokehold it can be.
Many people aren't even aware there is an agenda in every encounter, nevermind that it can be controlled without their knowledge.
Take an example ripped from the headlines today.
Congress is getting ready to thrust upon us a "Healthcare Reform" bill -- a huge bill, but none of them voting for it or against it will have read it because they couldn't understand it anyway.
The inner workings of Congress and the Senate are all about Agenda Control and everyone who browses the news understands how that works. It's seniority and majority party, getting Committee appointments, plus a lot of 18th Century customs that have lasted.
They never bring a bill to the floor unless they know how the vote will go. That means bills don't even get voted on unless the agenda is fully under control of the majority party.
That's pretty much how corporate executive committees work, too.
OK, we all understand that and can use it in stories.
But politicians love power and don't seem to know there is any other way to think. Some men seem to believe it's unmanly to think any other way, even in a Relationship.
When people say they don't want the government dictating their health insurance terms, or they don't want a government run single-payer system, Congress responds, "Oh. Yeah, I see your point. Well, don't worry. We'll GIVE YOU LOTS OF CHOICES so your health insurance will be your own choice."
As far as politicians are concerned that totally fixes the problem because it defuses your objection but they retain control of the agenda. Husbands on the road to divorce do this to their wives.
Congress did that with the Medicare Prescription insurance bill, and created a system where dozens of private companies "provide" prescription insurance as a proxy for the government, and "give you choices" none of which are adequate to anyone but the average person, and of course profitable to the offering company. But you must choose from the list presented to you, which is further limited by state laws. No matter which way you choose, the company wins. The agenda was set, but not by you.
Think about that power-play maneuver of retaining control of the agenda by limiting choices but forcing the other to choose from that menu and claiming that means freedom of choice.
Choosing among choices created by someone else is not the same thing as creating your own.
Think how that control of the menu of choices works in terms of a Romance relationship. Think how it might seem to non-humans.
What are the politicians doing? They know no other way to relate to voters except by exerting power over voters (so they can get elected).
How do they flimflam voters into thinking that the government is giving them FREEDOM OF CHOICE by giving them LOTS OF CHOICES?
It's like the dropdown menus in a program. THESE are the choices you get to choose from because that's all the choices the programmers could think to offer (or know how to offer or find profitable to offer).
GIVING the choices is "setting the agenda." This is what you have to choose from and if you want something else, or a little of this and a little of that, you can't have it.
The character who sets the choices before you is setting the agenda.
The character who chooses from that array of choices is the one without POWER in the transaction, no matter how large or varied the menu of choices.
The person who sets the agenda retains the power to LIMIT what you may choose from, and to force you to make a choice from that pre-set list where every item on it benefits them not you.
If you think about it, that's how the news media works (always has worked that way). "All the news that's fit to print" is still an agenda-enforcing chokehold because they choose what's fit and what's not. The internet is changing that business model faster than the media can adjust. The power centers in our cultures are shifting HARD.
So our taste in fiction has to shift, just as hard.
Think what non-human civilizations that had that power-center shift happen generations ago might be like. Then think of them arriving on earth to watch our comedy of errors.
Centralized Agenda Control is how business meetings are run at the corporate level - the one in charge sets the agenda, and anyone speaking outside that list of topics is out of order. Do that too often and presto - you're fired.
Local Town Council meetings are supposed to work that way but often frizzle out into shapeless shouting. Not good drama.
From a child's point of view, families are run from a centralized agenda (which is why we tend to run our families that way once we grow up -- don't know any other way).
"What's for dinner, Mom?" "Rice and Beans; or Beans and Rice, take your pick."
"Where are we going this year on vacation, Dad?" "The Jersey shore. Or there's that beach in Maryland you liked last year." "I don't want to go to a beach. I want to go to a Dude Ranch." "Not this year. Too expensive. And dangerous. There's a nice beach in Connecticut."
See? You can choose. You have freedom of choice, and you're BEING GIVEN A VOTE (given is the operative word). But you can't choose to stay home because you're a kid and can't stay alone. You can't have what you want because it's not on the menu. Choose a beach - any cheap beach. We're listening to you, but we're setting the agenda.
That's how people in our society use power and the process can generate a problem your main character must solve.
OK, so suppose we're writing Romeo and Juliet.
Juliet votes for the Connecticut beach and meets Romeo there. The entire plot and conflict of Romeo and Juliet stemmed from the fact that the parents set the agenda (but of course the parents didn't see it that way; they had their agenda set for them by society and the legitimacy of feuding as a way of life). For Romeo and Juliet, the resolution was that the kids didn't allow the parents to set their agenda.
So the position of Agenda Setter is the single most powerful position in any relationship, and that power is the most far-reaching and difficult to counter when it is exercised with subtlety. "Give the less powerful many, many MANY choices" and they'll never notice they have no freedom to choose.
So problem #1 for your main character can be either what choices to offer others, or whether to let someone else populate the menu of choices. How does your main character break out of that power-grip and assert his/her own agenda? Is your main character even aware he/she has been manipulated into a position of powerlessness? Or is holding only part of the power enough? What changes in your character's world to make it not-enough?
2) Veto Power
This is obvious. It's the power to say "NO" and make it stick.
But again, in our culture, it's socially and politically incorrect for certain people to use this power in certain ways. Thus the person with power can end up in a complex spiderweb trap with no way to exercise their power.
For an example, just read up on the lastest UN Security Council resolutions. That "Veto Power" was given to the 5 permanent members as a way of keeping them from exercising it. Say no to what others consider reasonable and you're dirt.
So one of the 6 problems your main character might have is a Veto Power they can't use. Or if they do use it anyway, the trouble generates the plot.
Take Romeo and Juliet again -- their veto power was suicide.
That's kind of like the DOOMSDAY MACHINE in Star Trek (actually, it's an old military concept). A weapon so powerful it could destroy both sides. You can't use it, and threats with it seem vapid. Well, Romeo and Juliet is a play Aliens might consider when threatening humans with a pre-set agenda of choices.
3) Who holds the "gun"
"The Gun" is a weapon somewhat short of Veto Power or a Doomsday Device, but hardly a precision tool in most hands. (Lone Ranger and Have Gun Will Travel fangirl here!)
The gun is a tool for doing damage of some sort. But it isn't enough to simply have a gun -- WHO holds that gun is the most important part of the threat to the power structure of a dynamic Relationship. The character of the gun-holder is the focus in this problem to be solved.
Take for example, an unarmed man in a sports suit and an armed man in an Armani suit. They are fleeing through a forest chased by a S.W.A.T team (maybe aliens who caught them spying on their beached UFO?).
The Armani Suit tries to use veto power on the Sports Suit who is busy setting the agenda for tricking the aliens into making a choice from a menu of one item.
Armani waves the gun with authority saying, "The man who holds the gun gets his way." Sports Suit snatches the gun right out of Armani's hands levels it at Armani and notes that, "The man who holds the gun gets his way, right?"
It isn't who has the weapon that matters to the plot. It's who controls it. Who knows how to use it.
People who are masters with weaponry don't have to carry weapons. Anyone who wishes to contend for control of the agenda will bring plenty of weapons for everyone. Let them sweat under the weight. They'll get tired and it'll be easier to vanquish them.
So Problem 3 might be that the character who understands a particular weapon (doesn't have to be a gun -- could be a whole space ship with no overt weapons, or a sword, or a length of electrical cord, or a magical chant) does not currently possess that weapon.
Or the complication might be that the person who does possess the weapon doesn't understand the weapon. A character with no shooting-range experience is more deadly when waving a gun than a trained Marine. The Marine will hit what she aims at, and that fact can be very comforting when things get dicey.
4) The Golden Rolodex
Well, Rolodex makes software these days, but the cliche reference is to the cardfile or listing of the ones who will respond to a message as expected and wanted. "I need a speedboat by this afternoon." "Ah, well, I know a man ..."
The person who always "knows a man who" is the one with great power in every relationship. The go-to guy/gal.
I had a cousin with the family golden rolodex. When she sent invitations to a party, the whole family turned out from 3 states around. When somebody else threw a party, hardly anyone came. When I needed to throw a graduation party for one of my kids in New York, I called her in New Jersey. The whole family turned out from 3 states around - and California too.
It's a cliche, but it works. If you need some outlandishly unique operation to go down just the way you want it, you need to know someone who knows everyone and can select who to ask.
Thanksgiving Dinner makes a great plot-event for solving one of the 6 problems.
The character in a Relationship who knows all the email addresses, phone numbers, and URLs is the most powerful person in the relationship, even more powerful than the agenda setter in certain circumstances.
Take for example, the classic situation of the suddenly widowed woman who doesn't even know how to notify her husband's relatives that he has died. The husband paid all the bills. She doesn't know the phone company's phone number, or how to pay the water bill, or where that information is filed, or how much they owe on the house.
The person who knows which people know each other, who knows all their skill sets and their family situations, their political leanings, and personal hobby horses - that person has POWER in every relationship.
Corporations discovered this by scientific research and changed the Personnel Department into the Human Resources department.
I recall when they first started sending questionnairs to employees demanding the employees confess all their hobbies and incidental interests and skills because the employees' skills were the wealth of the corporation. No shit, they really did that and it upset people. Today people comply without thinking about the invasion of privacy -- the power they are giving up for no money. (Well, maybe it'll pay off if the company out of the goodness of their hearts decides to offer a RIF'd worker another position in a different profession.)
So the general reader knows that not being on the good side of "the man who" could be a major one of the 6 problems your main character must solve, especially if he's slipped outside the set Agenda and gotten himself fired.
5) Potentially embarrassing (fatal? Awkward?) secrets
This can be leverage. See the TV show Leverage which is a sort of remake of Mission: Impossible. Knowledge is power. The TV show (USA NETWORK - CHARACTERS WELCOME)
also uses psychology and knowledge as power.
As with Romeo and Juliet, the solution to being blackmailed is to refuse to let another character set the agenda. Just out the info yourself.
Ah, but the price!
One of the 6 problems that have to be solved might have to do with who knows what about which.
Trust issues come in here. Can this character who caught you sleeping with your boss's wife be trusted to keep her mouth shut?
Perhaps in Romance, the Sexual Blackmail potential of secrets is the hottest way to focus attention on the interface between Power and Sex, and distinguish both from actual Romance.
Laughter, embarrassment, and physical danger all have something in common, which is why sex or a giggling-fit often come right after a big physical fight.
PAIN is the element in common. Laughter happens right at the edge of subtle emotional pain. Embarrassment is likewise right at the edge of a kind of potentially fatal emotional pain (something that can change your life and your basic character if rammed through to the logical finish). Embarrassment taken to dramatic conclusion is social-rejection, shunning, and that can be fatal. Ostracism is worse than jail because you can starve or freeze and nobody cares.
For a character who has a hot secret, in their past the potential consequences IF IT WERE KNOWN can make a really good Problem #5 to be fixed.
What is the resolution of, say, the problem where someone falls in love and does not confess before the wedding day that he's in the witness protection program and every characteristic that made his Bride fall in love with him (taste in art, love of music, clothing, even profession) was made up for him. His real self just isn't like that at all.
Does your character say "I Do" before or after confessing? Does someone swoop in with the information? Does the Bride shrug it off saying, "I knew that from the first day we met," because she's a telepath from outer space spying on Earth?
In fact, THE SECRET as a problem works best of all when two characters in a telepathic bonding discover secrets about the other. Each one figured they must know everything about the other because of the telepathic bonding. What a shock.
6) Purse Strings
Well, the financial control in a couple relationship has been used to enslave women since forever. Ho-hum. Cliche.
Oh? But what about the woman who has financial control. Today, in the USA, according to a number of polls I've seen, it's usually the woman who handles the finances. That's one reason so many ads are aimed at women. Women make the purchasing decisions.
And then there's the widow(er) who doesn't even know where all the spouse's bank accounts are but thought she did. Think about variations on Madoff's wife's position. Not the reality. The potential drama in the position depending on how the cash flowed through that family.
If you really need to understand a situation, "follow the money" is the most productive way to spend your investigative dollar.
Any number of Columbo episodes, and even Murder She Wrote, were based on following the money, finding the purse strings, and thus finding the seat of power in the dynamic relationships being exposed because of a murder.
One great example of a murder mystery series that's a sizzling romance is Faye Kellerman's Decker and Lazarus series:
Oh, yeah, don't forget there's plenty of variations on this purse-strings problem to explore with the same-sex couple with scattered assets and limited legal rights in certain states. Your main character could have the problem of getting actual hands on his/her rightful inheritance from a deceased spouse and become a suspect because of those efforts.
Then there's the college kid waiting for his parents to send money. Suppose they're fighting over how much support he should get. Suppose the parents get a divorce, and don't inform him until after the decree?
Or take international politics. There's the Fantasy TV show KINGS, for example, where the war between neighboring countries is promulgated by the guy funding the King, and when the King wants to make peace, the funds go into war-mongering and palace intrigue and skulldugery where the profits are. You think the King was fooled? Watch that show. Love, Romance, Infidelity, Intrigue, the stuff of human relationships.
I think some of these short summer-replacement series are actually concocted with the idea of making the profit from selling the DVD's. Follow the money.
The power of control of the wealth works wonderfully well on the interstellar scene because it's something we all have intimate knowledge of and can believe as a motive even for aliens. It's primal enough that we can infer that even aliens would have "resource control" as a goal.
Purse Strings don't just control coined money. The "Purse Strings" power-mongering is about any sort of concrete resource control. Oil interests don't seem too enthusiastic about solar panel deployment for power generation, do they? Remember the TV show Dallas? Suppose you wrote an episode of that today, in the "alternative energy" revolution?
Consider the Wild West stories of the cattlemen vs. the sheep runners.
Water rights are still a huge bone of contention in the West USA (Colorado lakes are down to I think it's about a third of where they should be at this time of year; Colorado feeds Arizona and California water, and hasn't enough left for itself.)
A recent FORBES article pinpoints some of the calculation fallacies behind the concept of the locavore (eating local produce). This is an article fraught with story ideas because of all the things there are to "fix" that you can choose from, and the equivocal facts. The article contends that it's more "green" for England to import lamb from New Zealand than to raise sheep locally.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0803/opinions-energy-locavores-on-my-mind.html
Business Week online is also a fertile source of Six Things To Fix for your main character.
http://www.businessweek.com/
And those are two of the most obvious places for writers to watch for plot driving things to fix involving purse strings and power.
These magazines are all about power and the power-structure that we are so embedded in that we are as oblivious to it as we are to the air (unless there's a storm wind or a bad smell).
The reader/viewer's obliviousness is the writer's most powerful tool for inserting the surprising twist that is nevertheless obvious in retrospect.
------------
So there are 6 areas of Power in Relationship fraught with dramatic potential. And that's derived from only half of Pluto's possible effects and we barely touched on what Neptune can do to perceptions.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
6 Tricks of Scene Structure
The "scene" is, once complete and wholly integrated into the story, an invisible unit, with nicely blurred edges. You can't learn scene structure just by reading completed stories, novels or screenplays.
It is especially hard to learn scene structure from very well written stories. The scene "edge" is not always or only where the camera cuts to a different location.
This was brought to my attention recently when I read a very good story that had major scene-structure problems. This novel would be a candidate for mass market paperback distribution if that scene structure problem were solved. As it is, it's winning prizes in self-publishing, indie, and small press venues.
But I don't know what to say to this author. There's so much RIGHT with this novel, but the scenes FAIL.
I've been trying to remember (with little success) when and where I learned scene structure, how to fix a failed scene, how to avoid failing to begin with, and how to teach these skills.
Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! and SAVE THE CAT! GOES TO THE MOVIES provide serious clues about "Primal" storytelling and accessibility that would make sense even to a "caveman" (no offense). Follow Blake's blog at http://www.blakesnyder.com/
Here's how I put the whole "what's a scene" problem together after reading Blake's books on screenwriting.
Let's start with an analog of the story constructing process.
The hot desert sun of July edges the distant horizon, rising steadily into a cloudless sky. Night puddles behind bright outlines etched against the desert.
A pile of cinder blocks in an empty lot with a tarp casually thrown over the top grows a long shadow.
An old truck full of workmen with dirty, hard-used tools in the back drifts to a lazy stop before the pile of blocks. One guy gets out and unrolls a huge paper onto the hood of the truck, squints at the blocks, at his paper, and nods.
Then a cement truck pulls up.
Before sundown, low walls have grown up in the desert outlining a building where there had been nothing.
Now, weeks later, there's a whole building with an inside and outside, windows and doors, even a roof. But the cinder block walls are bare, the mortar outlining the cracks, starkly visible.
Go into the living room. Bare cinder block walls, raw cement floor.
It's going to be a place where characters live. But right now you can see every structural element including the plumbing, electric conduits, fiberoptic cables, telephone lines, even rebar hanging out in spots.
It's easy to see what this thing is and how it was created.
Now along comes the plasterer and puts up chicken wire, insulation, then smears gooey stuff all over, then comes the guy with the textured towel and makes ridges and bumps in a low-relief pattern, and then the painter with lovely colors.
Then comes the inhabitants of the house to make it a home, and they add light fixtures, drapes and curtains, pictures, and macrame hangings, carpets and deep chairs, mirrors, TV-game console, magazine rack, umbrella stand.
That completed room is a novel or screenplay. It contains the characters.
You watch the characters go through the antics of their lives, but you aren't aware of the CINDER BLOCKS hidden inside the WALLS.
Without those cinder blocks, there would be no antics.
Those cinder blocks are the SCENES.
A good, well structured scene is held to other scenes by "rebar" -- the metal rods that hold cinder-block construction together (in earthquake prone areas rebar is code because without it the wall will fall down if shaken).
You can hammer away at a well constructed story and never find the scene seams.
To understand how the building that showcases your characters is made, you need to see it "under construction."
And that's why it is so very helpful to read books or manuscripts that just don't quite measure up -- that have something "wrong" with them. You can see the raw construction hanging out.
This is a hard point for many writers to grasp.
Every scene in your novel or screenplay HAS THE SAME IDENTICAL STRUCTURE.
There is a thing called 'THE SCENE' -- and that's all it is, a cinder block.
It's virtue and usefulness lies in the fact that it is identical to all other scenes.
Now, we know how a standard cinder block is constructed, with holes in a nice rectangle. (yes, they come thin, with patterns, and so on, but those are other things made out of the same material, not what you build walls out of).
We also know that from these rectangles, you can build a huge variety of shapes and sizes of buildings or architectural elements like garden walls.
They're all the same, but you can make a thousand different shapes out of them.
That's the quality of a well structured scene.
So what is the standard "scene" shape?
1. Like an entire story, it has a BEGINNING, a MIDDLE, and an END. Each of these points has a clear, defining formula for what it must contain.
2. Like an entire story, it clearly demonstrates the characters ARCing, or changing in a way that can be identified and verbalized. In screenwriting, this is designated by a + or - sign for the increase or decrease in emotional TENSION that the scene produces.
3. Like an entire story, the scene must ADVANCE THE PLOT. At least ONE PLOT MOVING EVENT must transpire. One of the classic 6-things-that-have-to-be-fixed must move toward being fixed.
4. Like an entire story, the scene must ADVANCE THE STORY. Something has to happen (be learned, be said, be extracted from evidence or testified to) that changes what life means to the main character in the scene.
5. Like an entire story, THE ESSENCE OF SCENE IS CONFLICT + RESOLUTION
6. We'll get to this last item at the end because you really won't like it and I want to run for cover before you throw this all back at me.
I've never seen that list anywhere that I can remember. I just made it up from bits and pieces I've learned here and there, so I may have left out something really important.
But for sure, count on it, every item on that list is absolutely essential in order to have a "scene" at all.
When I see a scene that violates one of those essential parameters, I generally don't bother to finish the book (there are exceptions).
In art, there are always exceptions. In highly commercial art exceptions are extremely rare and if successful usually start whole new genres. (Urban Fantasy; Cyberpunk; Acid Rock -- all started as "exceptions." But remember that the BEETLES had a grounding in classical music and that was their key to success.)
Also note that each of these 5 essential elements of a scene is not at all specific to any genre, story format, delivery medium, style, or historical period.
All cinder blocks are identical, and that's the property that makes them useful.
----------------
So to analysis.
Every scene must start with a Narrative Hook (just like any novel must)
The Mid-Point of the scene must (in Blake Snyder's words) RAISE THE STAKES, just as the mid-point of a screenplay or novel must.
The middle point of the scene must be as pivotal as the mid-point of the whole story. The EXACT MIDDLE (by word-count) must be the point where SOMETHING CHANGES.
The END of a Scene must be a cliff-hanger matching the Narrative Hook that started it and planting a set-up or foreshadowing of what will happen at the beginning of the next scene.
MUST-MUST-MUST
Like as if I were artificially forcing this exact and unvarying structure upon all hapless beginners.
No, far from it.
These are not artificial rules imposed on story structure by some all-powerful gatekeeper publisher.
These rules have been discovered by trial and error since the first caveman tried to hold the attention of his terrified kids and tribesmen during a thunder storm. HOLD THE ATTENTION -- that's the key, and it is (as Blake Snyder keeps saying) PRIMAL.
This BEGINNING - MIDDLE - END structure of a scene is like the square corners of building blocks. It has to be that way to be able to join together with the other scenes and hold the whole structure up.
2. ARC -- characters must somehow act, interact with each other or the environment, and react during a scene. The character's attention focus, emotional pitch (from complacency to terror is one example) or maybe relationship to other characters must CHANGE. That change must be CAUSED BY CONFLICT TUMBLING TOWARD A RESOLUTION.
Characters don't just jump up and fulminate for no reason. As in the whole story's structure, characters have internal conflicts that they project into their external environment (just like real people).
3. The plot is the sequence of events that happen in the story. The first event happens. The next thing happens because the first thing happened. And onwards to the last thing that happens, which happens because the first thing happened in an unbroken line of consequences.
In really sophisticated fiction, it can sometimes be hard to see the connecting links between events. The harder it is to see the connections, the smaller the potential audience and the less those people will actually talk about and recommend this story.
Each scene must contain a PLOT EVENT that connects the beginning scene to the ending scene.
It doesn't have to be a straight line, but the straighter the line of cause and effect the bigger the audience.
4. EACH SCENE starts with a narrative hook that pulls the reader/viewer into a CONFLICT, a sub-sub-conflict of the over-arching conflict the story is hurtling on to resolve. WITHIN THE SCENE the conflict of the whole story must advance THROUGH the mini-conflict of this scene.
The END OF the scene resolves the scene's conflict and hands the momentum on to the next scene.
The "cliffhanger" is a good model, though not as widely known as it was in the days when every feature film in a theater was accompanied by two or more "serials" -- Buck Rogers comes to mind. Each serial installment would end with a (sometimes literal) cliff hanger.
The new STAR TREK movie played on that motif graphically with people falling off the edges of things and hanging by one arm for a while.
Living On The Edge might have been the theme of that new STAR TREK MOVIE.
The NEXT SCENE starts with the character inching back up off the edge of the cliff and going on with the story.
It is that gasping TENSION the pure anticipation of disaster, or of the mere fact that SOMETHING must "happen next" that makes the final line or image of a scene.
The END of a scene must IMPLY action, not deliver it.
The Narrative Hook has to promise that something will happen. The Ending has to have it actually happen (fall off the cliff), but promise that SOMETHING ELSE will "happen next" -- i.e. either fall all the way or get pulled back by a friend, or muscle back up, or "with a mighty leap" solve the problem.
When there's nothing that can "happen next" that originated in the beginning of the story -- then you're at the end and you better stop writing scenes.
5. THE ESSENCE OF SCENE IS CONFLICT
That's the biggie and the one that divides the professional from the amateur.
This is where the size of the potential market for a story is determined.
You can "get away with" including whole scenes that do nothing but convey exposition, set the atmosphere, characterize the characters, fill in back story, lend artistic resonance, or describe the location.
But every time you do that, you narrow your potential audience, and you shed readers you did hook because they get bored.
You will be left only with readers who already are interested in your characters, backstory, history, artistic lyricism, gorgeous flowing prose.
If that reader happens to be an editor with money to invest, you could sell this thing. But will the reviewers be able to get through it?
That's not to say that this shapeless fluff of exposition, backstory, character depth, words for the sake of pure art, or location for the sake of strange-places is not the SUM AND SUBSTANCE of what you have to sell.
Atmosphere, style, ambiance, rich detail -- all that is what readers actually read FOR.
But all those nebulous things are the cement and gravel out of which your cinder blocks are made, and sometimes ingredients in the mortar that holds the whole story-structure together.
They are ingredients, shapeless in themselves and useless for story telling until you add that personal element (like water for the cinder blocks) and bake them to structural hardness just like cinder blocks. Mix and pour your ingredients into a mold, bake them good and hard, and you will have a scene.
The 5 item list I've sketched here describe the shape of that mold.
That mold is the same shape for every scene. The ingredients sometimes differ a little, just as some cinder blocks have a higher quality than others, some tend to crumble around the corners, some have a rougher texture than others.
And like cinderblocks, some have a Lacy pattern and are thin, just for decorative purposes (poems, epigraphs, vignettes, episodes, even COMMERCIALS).
Your completed story is like the wall of that room we started with. Once you get done painting the texturized plaster, nobody but another writer will know that the wall stands up so nice and vertical because it's made of many identical blocks.
So, now you're ready to write an actual scene, to practice putting those 5 requirements together all in one scene. You think walking and chewing gum is hard, just wait until you try writing a scene that fits all these requirements. Pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time while skipping rope!
But you're ready to try it now -- so the first thing you will think to ask yourself (if you're a professional writer) is, "Well, how LONG does this have to be?"
So we come to that dreaded #6 on this list of parameters that govern scene structure.
Every fiction market has a specific preferred length for the whole story.
6. Scene Size
That length is governed by the parameters of the marketing process. The length of books is governed by the cost of a signature. A signature is that folded sheaf of papers they glue together at the binding to make a book. If you go ONE WORD over the end of the final signature, it costs the price of an ENTIRE SIGNATURE to include that one word.
Hence writers learn the discipline of "right sizing" their work.
I discussed the practical marketing problems for fiction in several posts including this one:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html
Words are elastic. You can say the same thing in less space by choosing synonyms that are shorter (Anglo-Saxon origin rather than Latin), by restructuring sentences with fewer modals, and there are myriad tricks for shortening (or lengthening) text to fit the signatures.
Another sizing trick is to choose shorter names for characters you mention a lot -- or nickname them. Saves tons of trees if you're in print media.
E-books don't have that problem, but there is a "handy" number of K's for an e-book that sells better than longer ones or shorter ones.
So if your genre dictates a total, overall length to aim for, what size should your scenes be? All the genres are different lengths, right? So the scenes should be different lengths, too?
Think hard about this.
What is the main purpose of a scene?
I don't mean "to advance the plot" -- though that is a purpose every scene must achieve.
But why must a scene advance the plot? What's the purpose of an ironclad requirement to include a plot-advance in every scene?
A scene does not have to fill backstory, create atmosphere, explain character motives, or lay clues to the mystery. You don't have to include exposition in every scene, explaining the politics the characters are embedded within. But you MAY do any or all of those in any given scene.
What is the purpose of having SCENES? Why not one long flowing narrative?
And what has that purpose to do with figuring out the length a scene has to be, the size of your cinder blocks?
Look at that wall again. Do different walls of different heights and lengths have different size cinder blocks in them? How versatile that one common size structural element, the cinder block!!!
We know the purpose of the cinder block. It's rectangular because that makes it strong. It's actually 2 squares stuck together. It has holes to make it light. The holes are all in the same place in each block so you can thread the blocks onto rebar, then pour cement down and solidify that wall so it won't fall on you if the earth quakes.
The purpose of a cinder block is clear from it's STRUCTURE.
So what's the purpose of breaking your narrative into scenes?
Here's a clue. The purpose of a scene is the same as the purpose of a commercial on TV.
That's right: a) grab attention, b) hold attention, c) deliver a message, d) make the viewer remember that message (only the part you want them to remember).
Look at our list of 5 essential ingredients in a scene again.
Narrative Hook (grabber), Character Arc (holder), Advance Plot and Story (deliver message), cliff hanger ending (seat that message good and hard - make them want the next message).
The purpose of having scenes at all is to a) GRAB ATTENTION and b) HOLD ATTENTION, then TEACH SOMETHING, and MAKE THEM REMEMBER IT AND WANT MORE.
Who is "them?"
Human beings.
So scene length has a purpose founded in the essence of human behavior.
There are parameters that describe the fundamental essence of human attention in terms of the nervous system, and the brain.
If your fiction is to "entertain" (i.e. grab attention of) human beings you must work within the parameters of the human attention span.
And that's pretty elastic, actually. It's different for different people at different ages and from different cultures, or in different nervous states (a person about to get married isn't going to sit still for tedium).
So, since caveman days, we have developed a kind of average or median, an artistic estimation of attention span.
Lately, that has been encoded into some very commercial ventures (Sesame Street comes to mind - founded on the idea that you'll get more information across to children if you use the attention span of the child at the age when they want to learn this particular fact.)
The film industry invests millions upon millions to make a film. Making their money back plus a profit depends on holding audience attention. Major amounts of scientific research (but also mostly trial and error) has gone into determining how long a scene should be in order not to lose the audience's attention.
Lose attention in scene 3 and scene 5 won't impress this audience. Lose my attention in scene 3 and you aren't going to get a review from me. Lose your editor's (or producer's) attention in scene 3 and you did all that work for nothing.
Likewise, way back in the 1940's, as films were really taking off as a preferred entertainment vehicle, WRITERS figured out how to emulate that scene length that is most likely to hold the attention of the most people.
What is that secret scene length?
Oh, you are going to hate me. Boy are you gonna hate me for this one.
You see, all 5 of the ingredients I've mentioned above are actually pretty easy to do -- but they are nigh to impossible to accomplish within this attention-span determined limit.
And since your attention span (being as how you are either a writer or an inveterate and eclectic reader or I would have lost your attention before this) is likely much longer than the average person's, you won't believe me either.
And if it's not true, why do it -- because it's hard.
SCENES MUST BE SHORT DURATION
But how short must a scene be?
This is what I learned directly from A. E. Van Vogt
when I was in (on paper) correspondence with him (and I've since lost those historic letters).
A narrative scene must be NO MORE THAN 750 words.
That's about 3 manuscript pages.
A screenplay scene must be NO MORE THAN 3 pages.
Isn't that an odd coincidence?
The narrative scene is "3 pages" because when you create manuscript for a publisher, the "page" should be set up with margins and line spacing so that it has a 60 character line and 25 lines per page, which gives you a "page" of 250 "words." And it supplies enough room for editing and copyediting and book designing squiggles in the margins and between lines. Your WORDS aren't all that will ultimately be on your "page."
OK, today, with electronic files, it's not quite like that, but that's where the 3-page limit on a scene came FROM.
Also remember that way back, publishing only used the "fixed font" because that's all a typewriter could do - but also because the spaces between the letters has to be FIXED in order for length to be determined by the book designer. (figuring the printed length is called doing a "cast off.")
Screenplays must even today be submitted in COURIER, a fixed-font, for exactly that reason. RUN TIME can be determined as 1 minute per page if the page is in FIXED FONT.
So why 3 pages of narrative = 3 pages of script that is mostly white space?
A "word" in publishing isn't a grammatical unit. The word "a" is a single character plus the space after it (right, spaces count as characters).
But if you have a 100,000 word manuscript, in English, on average your words are "6 characters" -- or a printer's word, not a grammatical unit.
The purpose of all this old typewriter driven calculation is simple.
The editor has to be able to look at the final page number of the manuscript and KNOW instantly what the cover price has to be if they buy this manuscript. Then reading the first page, the middle page, and the final page, the experienced editor can tell whether the company can make a profit selling this book by estimating the size of the book's potential market.
It all has to do with "signatures" as noted above. If the editor knows they are dealing with a seasoned professional writer, and the MS seems too long for current pricing -- they KNOW they can depend on that writer to shrink the manuscript to the "right size" in a jiffy and without argument by subtracting SCENES.
Likewise if the manuscript is too short. A professional writer can "right size" it up without "padding" by adding SCENES.
Because the manuscript was constructed of SCENES, the writer who knows which holes the rebar went through can pull out a scene and move essential information to another scene, or pull out information from a scene and create another scene to convey that information.
An amateur writing on pure inspiration would be stumped by this rewrite order and it would take more than a weekend to achieve the adjustment. And then the result would introduce incoherencies into the story line.
Your reputation and your next contract depend on being able to do these things FAST.
You achieve that by making your original construction out of well constructed scenes.
So why do 3 pages of narrative = 3 pages of script?
TIME.
That's what they have in common.
An average reader will cover about 250 words a minute (1 page) overall when fully engaged.
Fast readers can top 800, and slow ones might be more like 100 words a minute. But a real person reading VARIES speed according to the kind of material -- so on average over a 450 page novel, it'll come out to about 250 words a minute (maybe including interruptions like phone calls and the baby crying).
A good director will bring in a film at about 3 minutes per scene -- some a little longer to fondle a beautiful moment, some a little shorter to "get on with it." But about 1 minute per manuscript page is the average over a 110 page screenplay.
Commercials have shrunk to 15 seconds. Twitter is 140 characters (which most readers can grab without actually "reading" each word).
Multi-tasking is the core training of our 3 year olds.
ATTENTION SPAN IS SHRINKING IN THIS CULTURE.
If your writing can hold attention for 3 whole minutes to convey a scene, you are really REALLY good!
So now I'll duck and run for cover. 5 elements in 3 minutes -- that's miraculous! But you gotta do it.
I will post this lesson on http://editingcircle.blogspot.com in a couple of weeks and you can post your scene attempts as comments and get commentary.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
It is especially hard to learn scene structure from very well written stories. The scene "edge" is not always or only where the camera cuts to a different location.
This was brought to my attention recently when I read a very good story that had major scene-structure problems. This novel would be a candidate for mass market paperback distribution if that scene structure problem were solved. As it is, it's winning prizes in self-publishing, indie, and small press venues.
But I don't know what to say to this author. There's so much RIGHT with this novel, but the scenes FAIL.
I've been trying to remember (with little success) when and where I learned scene structure, how to fix a failed scene, how to avoid failing to begin with, and how to teach these skills.
Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! and SAVE THE CAT! GOES TO THE MOVIES provide serious clues about "Primal" storytelling and accessibility that would make sense even to a "caveman" (no offense). Follow Blake's blog at http://www.blakesnyder.com/
Here's how I put the whole "what's a scene" problem together after reading Blake's books on screenwriting.
Let's start with an analog of the story constructing process.
The hot desert sun of July edges the distant horizon, rising steadily into a cloudless sky. Night puddles behind bright outlines etched against the desert.
A pile of cinder blocks in an empty lot with a tarp casually thrown over the top grows a long shadow.
An old truck full of workmen with dirty, hard-used tools in the back drifts to a lazy stop before the pile of blocks. One guy gets out and unrolls a huge paper onto the hood of the truck, squints at the blocks, at his paper, and nods.
Then a cement truck pulls up.
Before sundown, low walls have grown up in the desert outlining a building where there had been nothing.
Now, weeks later, there's a whole building with an inside and outside, windows and doors, even a roof. But the cinder block walls are bare, the mortar outlining the cracks, starkly visible.
Go into the living room. Bare cinder block walls, raw cement floor.
It's going to be a place where characters live. But right now you can see every structural element including the plumbing, electric conduits, fiberoptic cables, telephone lines, even rebar hanging out in spots.
It's easy to see what this thing is and how it was created.
Now along comes the plasterer and puts up chicken wire, insulation, then smears gooey stuff all over, then comes the guy with the textured towel and makes ridges and bumps in a low-relief pattern, and then the painter with lovely colors.
Then comes the inhabitants of the house to make it a home, and they add light fixtures, drapes and curtains, pictures, and macrame hangings, carpets and deep chairs, mirrors, TV-game console, magazine rack, umbrella stand.
That completed room is a novel or screenplay. It contains the characters.
You watch the characters go through the antics of their lives, but you aren't aware of the CINDER BLOCKS hidden inside the WALLS.
Without those cinder blocks, there would be no antics.
Those cinder blocks are the SCENES.
A good, well structured scene is held to other scenes by "rebar" -- the metal rods that hold cinder-block construction together (in earthquake prone areas rebar is code because without it the wall will fall down if shaken).
You can hammer away at a well constructed story and never find the scene seams.
To understand how the building that showcases your characters is made, you need to see it "under construction."
And that's why it is so very helpful to read books or manuscripts that just don't quite measure up -- that have something "wrong" with them. You can see the raw construction hanging out.
This is a hard point for many writers to grasp.
Every scene in your novel or screenplay HAS THE SAME IDENTICAL STRUCTURE.
There is a thing called 'THE SCENE' -- and that's all it is, a cinder block.
It's virtue and usefulness lies in the fact that it is identical to all other scenes.
Now, we know how a standard cinder block is constructed, with holes in a nice rectangle. (yes, they come thin, with patterns, and so on, but those are other things made out of the same material, not what you build walls out of).
We also know that from these rectangles, you can build a huge variety of shapes and sizes of buildings or architectural elements like garden walls.
They're all the same, but you can make a thousand different shapes out of them.
That's the quality of a well structured scene.
So what is the standard "scene" shape?
1. Like an entire story, it has a BEGINNING, a MIDDLE, and an END. Each of these points has a clear, defining formula for what it must contain.
2. Like an entire story, it clearly demonstrates the characters ARCing, or changing in a way that can be identified and verbalized. In screenwriting, this is designated by a + or - sign for the increase or decrease in emotional TENSION that the scene produces.
3. Like an entire story, the scene must ADVANCE THE PLOT. At least ONE PLOT MOVING EVENT must transpire. One of the classic 6-things-that-have-to-be-fixed must move toward being fixed.
4. Like an entire story, the scene must ADVANCE THE STORY. Something has to happen (be learned, be said, be extracted from evidence or testified to) that changes what life means to the main character in the scene.
5. Like an entire story, THE ESSENCE OF SCENE IS CONFLICT + RESOLUTION
6. We'll get to this last item at the end because you really won't like it and I want to run for cover before you throw this all back at me.
I've never seen that list anywhere that I can remember. I just made it up from bits and pieces I've learned here and there, so I may have left out something really important.
But for sure, count on it, every item on that list is absolutely essential in order to have a "scene" at all.
When I see a scene that violates one of those essential parameters, I generally don't bother to finish the book (there are exceptions).
In art, there are always exceptions. In highly commercial art exceptions are extremely rare and if successful usually start whole new genres. (Urban Fantasy; Cyberpunk; Acid Rock -- all started as "exceptions." But remember that the BEETLES had a grounding in classical music and that was their key to success.)
Also note that each of these 5 essential elements of a scene is not at all specific to any genre, story format, delivery medium, style, or historical period.
All cinder blocks are identical, and that's the property that makes them useful.
----------------
So to analysis.
Every scene must start with a Narrative Hook (just like any novel must)
The Mid-Point of the scene must (in Blake Snyder's words) RAISE THE STAKES, just as the mid-point of a screenplay or novel must.
The middle point of the scene must be as pivotal as the mid-point of the whole story. The EXACT MIDDLE (by word-count) must be the point where SOMETHING CHANGES.
The END of a Scene must be a cliff-hanger matching the Narrative Hook that started it and planting a set-up or foreshadowing of what will happen at the beginning of the next scene.
MUST-MUST-MUST
Like as if I were artificially forcing this exact and unvarying structure upon all hapless beginners.
No, far from it.
These are not artificial rules imposed on story structure by some all-powerful gatekeeper publisher.
These rules have been discovered by trial and error since the first caveman tried to hold the attention of his terrified kids and tribesmen during a thunder storm. HOLD THE ATTENTION -- that's the key, and it is (as Blake Snyder keeps saying) PRIMAL.
This BEGINNING - MIDDLE - END structure of a scene is like the square corners of building blocks. It has to be that way to be able to join together with the other scenes and hold the whole structure up.
2. ARC -- characters must somehow act, interact with each other or the environment, and react during a scene. The character's attention focus, emotional pitch (from complacency to terror is one example) or maybe relationship to other characters must CHANGE. That change must be CAUSED BY CONFLICT TUMBLING TOWARD A RESOLUTION.
Characters don't just jump up and fulminate for no reason. As in the whole story's structure, characters have internal conflicts that they project into their external environment (just like real people).
3. The plot is the sequence of events that happen in the story. The first event happens. The next thing happens because the first thing happened. And onwards to the last thing that happens, which happens because the first thing happened in an unbroken line of consequences.
In really sophisticated fiction, it can sometimes be hard to see the connecting links between events. The harder it is to see the connections, the smaller the potential audience and the less those people will actually talk about and recommend this story.
Each scene must contain a PLOT EVENT that connects the beginning scene to the ending scene.
It doesn't have to be a straight line, but the straighter the line of cause and effect the bigger the audience.
4. EACH SCENE starts with a narrative hook that pulls the reader/viewer into a CONFLICT, a sub-sub-conflict of the over-arching conflict the story is hurtling on to resolve. WITHIN THE SCENE the conflict of the whole story must advance THROUGH the mini-conflict of this scene.
The END OF the scene resolves the scene's conflict and hands the momentum on to the next scene.
The "cliffhanger" is a good model, though not as widely known as it was in the days when every feature film in a theater was accompanied by two or more "serials" -- Buck Rogers comes to mind. Each serial installment would end with a (sometimes literal) cliff hanger.
The new STAR TREK movie played on that motif graphically with people falling off the edges of things and hanging by one arm for a while.
Living On The Edge might have been the theme of that new STAR TREK MOVIE.
The NEXT SCENE starts with the character inching back up off the edge of the cliff and going on with the story.
It is that gasping TENSION the pure anticipation of disaster, or of the mere fact that SOMETHING must "happen next" that makes the final line or image of a scene.
The END of a scene must IMPLY action, not deliver it.
The Narrative Hook has to promise that something will happen. The Ending has to have it actually happen (fall off the cliff), but promise that SOMETHING ELSE will "happen next" -- i.e. either fall all the way or get pulled back by a friend, or muscle back up, or "with a mighty leap" solve the problem.
When there's nothing that can "happen next" that originated in the beginning of the story -- then you're at the end and you better stop writing scenes.
5. THE ESSENCE OF SCENE IS CONFLICT
That's the biggie and the one that divides the professional from the amateur.
This is where the size of the potential market for a story is determined.
You can "get away with" including whole scenes that do nothing but convey exposition, set the atmosphere, characterize the characters, fill in back story, lend artistic resonance, or describe the location.
But every time you do that, you narrow your potential audience, and you shed readers you did hook because they get bored.
You will be left only with readers who already are interested in your characters, backstory, history, artistic lyricism, gorgeous flowing prose.
If that reader happens to be an editor with money to invest, you could sell this thing. But will the reviewers be able to get through it?
That's not to say that this shapeless fluff of exposition, backstory, character depth, words for the sake of pure art, or location for the sake of strange-places is not the SUM AND SUBSTANCE of what you have to sell.
Atmosphere, style, ambiance, rich detail -- all that is what readers actually read FOR.
But all those nebulous things are the cement and gravel out of which your cinder blocks are made, and sometimes ingredients in the mortar that holds the whole story-structure together.
They are ingredients, shapeless in themselves and useless for story telling until you add that personal element (like water for the cinder blocks) and bake them to structural hardness just like cinder blocks. Mix and pour your ingredients into a mold, bake them good and hard, and you will have a scene.
The 5 item list I've sketched here describe the shape of that mold.
That mold is the same shape for every scene. The ingredients sometimes differ a little, just as some cinder blocks have a higher quality than others, some tend to crumble around the corners, some have a rougher texture than others.
And like cinderblocks, some have a Lacy pattern and are thin, just for decorative purposes (poems, epigraphs, vignettes, episodes, even COMMERCIALS).
Your completed story is like the wall of that room we started with. Once you get done painting the texturized plaster, nobody but another writer will know that the wall stands up so nice and vertical because it's made of many identical blocks.
So, now you're ready to write an actual scene, to practice putting those 5 requirements together all in one scene. You think walking and chewing gum is hard, just wait until you try writing a scene that fits all these requirements. Pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time while skipping rope!
But you're ready to try it now -- so the first thing you will think to ask yourself (if you're a professional writer) is, "Well, how LONG does this have to be?"
So we come to that dreaded #6 on this list of parameters that govern scene structure.
Every fiction market has a specific preferred length for the whole story.
6. Scene Size
That length is governed by the parameters of the marketing process. The length of books is governed by the cost of a signature. A signature is that folded sheaf of papers they glue together at the binding to make a book. If you go ONE WORD over the end of the final signature, it costs the price of an ENTIRE SIGNATURE to include that one word.
Hence writers learn the discipline of "right sizing" their work.
I discussed the practical marketing problems for fiction in several posts including this one:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html
Words are elastic. You can say the same thing in less space by choosing synonyms that are shorter (Anglo-Saxon origin rather than Latin), by restructuring sentences with fewer modals, and there are myriad tricks for shortening (or lengthening) text to fit the signatures.
Another sizing trick is to choose shorter names for characters you mention a lot -- or nickname them. Saves tons of trees if you're in print media.
E-books don't have that problem, but there is a "handy" number of K's for an e-book that sells better than longer ones or shorter ones.
So if your genre dictates a total, overall length to aim for, what size should your scenes be? All the genres are different lengths, right? So the scenes should be different lengths, too?
Think hard about this.
What is the main purpose of a scene?
I don't mean "to advance the plot" -- though that is a purpose every scene must achieve.
But why must a scene advance the plot? What's the purpose of an ironclad requirement to include a plot-advance in every scene?
A scene does not have to fill backstory, create atmosphere, explain character motives, or lay clues to the mystery. You don't have to include exposition in every scene, explaining the politics the characters are embedded within. But you MAY do any or all of those in any given scene.
What is the purpose of having SCENES? Why not one long flowing narrative?
And what has that purpose to do with figuring out the length a scene has to be, the size of your cinder blocks?
Look at that wall again. Do different walls of different heights and lengths have different size cinder blocks in them? How versatile that one common size structural element, the cinder block!!!
We know the purpose of the cinder block. It's rectangular because that makes it strong. It's actually 2 squares stuck together. It has holes to make it light. The holes are all in the same place in each block so you can thread the blocks onto rebar, then pour cement down and solidify that wall so it won't fall on you if the earth quakes.
The purpose of a cinder block is clear from it's STRUCTURE.
So what's the purpose of breaking your narrative into scenes?
Here's a clue. The purpose of a scene is the same as the purpose of a commercial on TV.
That's right: a) grab attention, b) hold attention, c) deliver a message, d) make the viewer remember that message (only the part you want them to remember).
Look at our list of 5 essential ingredients in a scene again.
Narrative Hook (grabber), Character Arc (holder), Advance Plot and Story (deliver message), cliff hanger ending (seat that message good and hard - make them want the next message).
The purpose of having scenes at all is to a) GRAB ATTENTION and b) HOLD ATTENTION, then TEACH SOMETHING, and MAKE THEM REMEMBER IT AND WANT MORE.
Who is "them?"
Human beings.
So scene length has a purpose founded in the essence of human behavior.
There are parameters that describe the fundamental essence of human attention in terms of the nervous system, and the brain.
If your fiction is to "entertain" (i.e. grab attention of) human beings you must work within the parameters of the human attention span.
And that's pretty elastic, actually. It's different for different people at different ages and from different cultures, or in different nervous states (a person about to get married isn't going to sit still for tedium).
So, since caveman days, we have developed a kind of average or median, an artistic estimation of attention span.
Lately, that has been encoded into some very commercial ventures (Sesame Street comes to mind - founded on the idea that you'll get more information across to children if you use the attention span of the child at the age when they want to learn this particular fact.)
The film industry invests millions upon millions to make a film. Making their money back plus a profit depends on holding audience attention. Major amounts of scientific research (but also mostly trial and error) has gone into determining how long a scene should be in order not to lose the audience's attention.
Lose attention in scene 3 and scene 5 won't impress this audience. Lose my attention in scene 3 and you aren't going to get a review from me. Lose your editor's (or producer's) attention in scene 3 and you did all that work for nothing.
Likewise, way back in the 1940's, as films were really taking off as a preferred entertainment vehicle, WRITERS figured out how to emulate that scene length that is most likely to hold the attention of the most people.
What is that secret scene length?
Oh, you are going to hate me. Boy are you gonna hate me for this one.
You see, all 5 of the ingredients I've mentioned above are actually pretty easy to do -- but they are nigh to impossible to accomplish within this attention-span determined limit.
And since your attention span (being as how you are either a writer or an inveterate and eclectic reader or I would have lost your attention before this) is likely much longer than the average person's, you won't believe me either.
And if it's not true, why do it -- because it's hard.
SCENES MUST BE SHORT DURATION
But how short must a scene be?
This is what I learned directly from A. E. Van Vogt
when I was in (on paper) correspondence with him (and I've since lost those historic letters).
A narrative scene must be NO MORE THAN 750 words.
That's about 3 manuscript pages.
A screenplay scene must be NO MORE THAN 3 pages.
Isn't that an odd coincidence?
The narrative scene is "3 pages" because when you create manuscript for a publisher, the "page" should be set up with margins and line spacing so that it has a 60 character line and 25 lines per page, which gives you a "page" of 250 "words." And it supplies enough room for editing and copyediting and book designing squiggles in the margins and between lines. Your WORDS aren't all that will ultimately be on your "page."
OK, today, with electronic files, it's not quite like that, but that's where the 3-page limit on a scene came FROM.
Also remember that way back, publishing only used the "fixed font" because that's all a typewriter could do - but also because the spaces between the letters has to be FIXED in order for length to be determined by the book designer. (figuring the printed length is called doing a "cast off.")
Screenplays must even today be submitted in COURIER, a fixed-font, for exactly that reason. RUN TIME can be determined as 1 minute per page if the page is in FIXED FONT.
So why 3 pages of narrative = 3 pages of script that is mostly white space?
A "word" in publishing isn't a grammatical unit. The word "a" is a single character plus the space after it (right, spaces count as characters).
But if you have a 100,000 word manuscript, in English, on average your words are "6 characters" -- or a printer's word, not a grammatical unit.
The purpose of all this old typewriter driven calculation is simple.
The editor has to be able to look at the final page number of the manuscript and KNOW instantly what the cover price has to be if they buy this manuscript. Then reading the first page, the middle page, and the final page, the experienced editor can tell whether the company can make a profit selling this book by estimating the size of the book's potential market.
It all has to do with "signatures" as noted above. If the editor knows they are dealing with a seasoned professional writer, and the MS seems too long for current pricing -- they KNOW they can depend on that writer to shrink the manuscript to the "right size" in a jiffy and without argument by subtracting SCENES.
Likewise if the manuscript is too short. A professional writer can "right size" it up without "padding" by adding SCENES.
Because the manuscript was constructed of SCENES, the writer who knows which holes the rebar went through can pull out a scene and move essential information to another scene, or pull out information from a scene and create another scene to convey that information.
An amateur writing on pure inspiration would be stumped by this rewrite order and it would take more than a weekend to achieve the adjustment. And then the result would introduce incoherencies into the story line.
Your reputation and your next contract depend on being able to do these things FAST.
You achieve that by making your original construction out of well constructed scenes.
So why do 3 pages of narrative = 3 pages of script?
TIME.
That's what they have in common.
An average reader will cover about 250 words a minute (1 page) overall when fully engaged.
Fast readers can top 800, and slow ones might be more like 100 words a minute. But a real person reading VARIES speed according to the kind of material -- so on average over a 450 page novel, it'll come out to about 250 words a minute (maybe including interruptions like phone calls and the baby crying).
A good director will bring in a film at about 3 minutes per scene -- some a little longer to fondle a beautiful moment, some a little shorter to "get on with it." But about 1 minute per manuscript page is the average over a 110 page screenplay.
Commercials have shrunk to 15 seconds. Twitter is 140 characters (which most readers can grab without actually "reading" each word).
Multi-tasking is the core training of our 3 year olds.
ATTENTION SPAN IS SHRINKING IN THIS CULTURE.
If your writing can hold attention for 3 whole minutes to convey a scene, you are really REALLY good!
So now I'll duck and run for cover. 5 elements in 3 minutes -- that's miraculous! But you gotta do it.
I will post this lesson on http://editingcircle.blogspot.com in a couple of weeks and you can post your scene attempts as comments and get commentary.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Snow Dogs And Happily Ever After
Before we discuss a possible format for an Alien Romance complete with HEA, here's my speaking schedule for Westercon ( http://www.westercon.org/ fiestacon this year in Tempe, AZ.)
LIT/MED-What Universe Are You In? Fri 10a-11a, Palm E room
w/ Jacqueline Lichtenberg (moderator), Dani Kollin, Etyan Kollin, Janice Tuerff
LIT-How Are Small Presses Fri 11a-noon, Palm E room
w/ Jacqueline Lichtenberg (moderator), Adam Niswander, Michael D’Ambrosio
MED-Star Trek Movie Review Fri 2p-3p, Palm F room
w/David A. Williams (moderator), Alan Dean Foster
LIT-It Was A Dark & Stormy Night Fri 4p-5p, Abbey South
w/ Jacqueline Lichtenberg (moderator), Kevin Andrew Murphy, Moira Greyland,
Shirley Runyon
AUTOGRAPHING Fri 5p-6p, Dealers Room
LIT-Writer’s Support Groups Sun 11a-noon, Boardroom
w/ Jacqueline Lichtenberg (moderator), Rick Novy, Dennis McKiernan
FAN-Effect of Web on Fanzines Sun noon-1p, Jokake room
w/John Hertz (moderator)
FAN-SF/F Websites Sun 2p-3p, Augustine
w/ Jacqueline Lichtenberg (moderator), Lee Gilliland, Lee Whiteside
-----------------
And on another note which is actually in the same key:
I picked up on Twitter and "Re-tweeted" (relayed to my followers)
LIKE SO: RT @victoriastrauss Should bookstores be publishers? http://tinyurl.com/mrdatl
Twitter makes these tiny-urls for you when you post a long url and there are several companies now that make condensed URLs.
So Victoria Strauss found an article by Literary Agent Richard Curtis on whether bookstores SHOULD be publishers. Here's a quote from the article she found.
QUOTE
As if all that were not enough, Amazon has now become a publisher, too. First, there's its Encore program "whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate. Amazon will then partner with the authors to re-introduce their books to readers through marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon.com Books Store, Amazon Kindle Store, Audible.com, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers."
ENDQUOTE
http://www.ereads.com/2009/06/should-bookstores-be-publishers-too.html is the blog.
Victoria Strauss also found announcements of other closings in publishing, and coincidentally I'm on a panel at Westercon about small "presses" (which is today a misnomer; it's small publishers, and I suspect one day every blogger will be considered a small publisher.)
To keep up on interesting developments I come across this way, just "follow" me on twitter. http://twitter.com/JLichtenberg look at my profile to find all my tweets.
----------------
OK, so back to researching the future of Romance on page and screen by scrutinizing and analyzing old movies.
I saw a 2002 Disney movie titled SNOW DOGS and just couldn't resist transposing it into an Alien Romance as I watched it. It is soooo SF-Romance!
Snow Dogs with Comedy, Drama, a clean family style, Nichelle Nichols for a treat, and starring: Cuba Gooding Jr., James Coburn Director: Brian Levant. You can still get the DVD on Amazon.
If you've been following how I've been developing the Alien Romance potential for TV and film, and you happen to have seen this "family" movie, you'll know what's coming here. It's really irresistible.
Here's the IMDB link to all about this movie.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0281373/
Here's the Product Description from Amazon:
-----------quoted from Amazon---------------
Make no bones about it -- Disney's SNOW DOGS is a hilarious action-packed comedy your whole family will love. Eight adorable but mischievous dogs get the best of dog hater Ted Brooks (Cuba Gooding Jr.) when he leaves his successful Miami Beach dental practice for the wilds of Alaska to claim his inheritance -- seven Siberian huskies and a border collie -- and discover his roots. As Ted's life goes to the dogs, he rises to the occasion and vows to learn to mush with his inheritance. Totally out of his element, he faces challenges he's never dreamed of. There's a blizzard, thin ice, an intimidating crusty old mountain man named Thunder Jack (James Coburn), the Arctic Challenge Sled Dog Race that's only two weeks away, and a life-and-death rescue. This fish-out-of water, tail-wagging comedy is nothing but doggone good fun and a celebration of family -- both human and canine!
-------------end Amazon Quote---------------
Compare that description to SAVE THE CAT GOES TO THE MOVIES and find the category it belongs to. (more on that later -- think it out for yourself first.)
Now substitute "Earth" for Miami Beach and "Alien Planet" for Alaska.
Notice the description has left out the ROMANCE which is the B-story in this film as written.
That's a lesson for all writers -- THIS is how you generate and pitch a Concept. THIS is how you "outline" a story you're going to write. Watch the movie, then read that description again. It hits the exact plot-points you need to put in your outline before you write and be sure that you build up to each plot point. All the B-story is support for the A-story and does not belong in the initial outline or Concept, but is generated by that concept.
Novel writers don't learn to do the sequence in this direction, or haven't until recently. Read that blog post by Agent Richard Curtis, think about how marketing has changed.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html is a blog where I discussed modern marketing.
The novels that get the promotion, the novels that you as an author would find easiest TO PROMOTE, the novels that sell, the novels that attract busy reader's attention -- those novels today resemble games, films, and TV shows more and more.
Market structures have always been morphing, and every generation puts its own stamp on what's popular. But I suspect never in all human history have "markets" (for everything) changed and changed again, 100% replaced in shorter and shorter intervals. This was predicted by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock which I discussed in that blog entry on marketing fiction in a changing world.
This means that never before in human history has there been such an opportunity to overthrow the existing order because the walls between genres are melting and morphing.
Instability like that is a threat in the areas where we have actually got it right -- but in the area of Relationships, I doubt any expert would say that humanity has optimized our ability to establish and hold relationships.
Love is all about relationship -- and it's very hard to get to love without going through Romance (one day we should discuss the astrology behind that).
So let's see what we can do with the example of Snow Dogs to create a template for Alien Romance with broad appeal. A "template" would be a pattern that, if all of us on this blog used to create a screenplay or novel, would generate 7 or more totally original, completely different stories. They wouldn't compete, they would expand a genre.
It would be easy to make the Romance the A-story and transform this movie into an Alien Romance.
So here's a description of Snow Dogs based on the assumption that you know or remember this movie.
In Snow Dogs, the very successful and popular Miami Dentist Ted Brooks (whose mother is played by Nichelle Nichols, the woman who raised him, not his deceased biological mother) is served with a legal notice that he's inherited something in Alaska from his MOTHER and Nichelle Nichols confesses that he was adopted (oh, she's GOOD in this film!).
For more on Nichelle Nichols see my blog post on High Concept:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/medium-is-message_19.html
Thus stressed, Ted Brooks flies to Alaska to be present at the reading of the Will in a tiny out-back town, complete with Bush Pilot who turns out to be his real father.
That's the A-story. Ted, his Miami Beach mother Nichelle Nichols, his Alaskan father who is a white man, his dead biological mother's photo (she was black as Ted is) and her heritage of dogsled racing.
The B-story goes like this: as soon as Ted gets to Alaska, flown into the little town by the Bush Pilot he doesn't know is his father, he meets a WOMAN HIS AGE who takes him out to the house he inherited. He insists he go in alone, so she leaves him. He goes in and meets the friendly Border Collie, then gets attacked by the Alaskan Huskies his deceased mother owned.
Between the Bush Pilot (James Coburn was FANTASTIC in this role!) and the young woman, Ted learns to "mush" and learns the words to command the dogs from his father. She teaches him how to harness the dogs so they'll cooperate.
Then Ted discovers he loves dogsledding, and just as he's really enjoying it, he drives off a cliff and has a (very comic book) slide down a mountainside, gets rescued by the Bush Pilot who takes him to a refuge cave where he confesses Ted was conceived during a dog sled race, but that there was nothing at all between his real mother and the Bush Pilot, and tries to convince Ted that he doesn't care that Ted is his son. (Oh, Coburn is good, but what would you expect?)
Ted goes home to Miami. On TV in Miami, he sees the local annual dogsled race. Nichelle Nichols drops the photo he kept from his biological mother's things which is of Ted's biological mother with her dogsled trophy. The frame breaks revealing a photo tucked behind the trophy photo. This older photo shows his mother with the Bush pilot and newborn Ted. Ted realizes his real father, the Bush Pilot, lied, and he was indeed present at his birth and he did care for his mother, and he cares for Ted too. His real father lied.
So Ted goes back to Alaska and arrives during the race, as a storm is blowing in, just as it did during the dogsled race when he was conceived.
The young woman tells him that his father is lost out on the race course in the storm -- that just as he did that first time, his father has passed by the camp where the racers would wait out the storm, and driven on into the blizzard. After the storm, Ted's father has failed to show up at the finish line with the others.
That kicks off the Act 3 action where Ted takes his sled, his mother's dog team (sans the lead dog which his father took for his team), and finds and rescues his father who has taken refuge in that same cave where Ted was conceived. Bt this time his father has a broken leg. Ted's a Dentist, but he splints the leg nicely. Then it turns out that his mother's lead-dog Demon was in a bad temper because he had a rotten tooth, so Ted pulls the tooth, justifying the whole "Miami Dentist" part of his characterization.
Meanwhile, Ted's Miami mother, Nichelle Nichols, flies to Alaska and the young woman takes gentle care of her as they wait to see if Ted will make it back to town alive.
Of course (this being a Disney movie) Ted and his father make it back to town, Ted almost kisses the young woman in public (being Disney, only almost) and then there's a very quick but moving wrap-up sequence where Ted marries her, establishes his Dental practice in Alaska with his wife as receptionist (now very pregnant), and two of the dogs arrive with puppies following them, and Ted's Dental Assistant from Miami is helping him with patients. And there's a great scene with Coburn and Nichols -- the end-note is TOTAL HEA!!! But the bulk of the plot is comedy-action.
Frankly, the tag-ending providing the HEA (a real tear-jerker) would make a fine novel, all by itself. One part of this story is seen through a magnifying glass (Notice of his biological mother's death all the way through to rescuing his biological father), and the much larger and more complicated part is seen through the wrong end of a telescope. But it works.
Now, if instead of dogsledding there was some non-human skill-set that a human talent would be adaptable to and that talent was substituted for Dentistry, it would work perfectly as an Alien Romance.
Let's say the human is female, and the reason she is pulled off Earth is that tests show she has a gene for being SOMETHING (immune to alien diseases? learning languages? Telepathy?) that makes her valuable on Earth's first-contact team. But she's no astronaut and never dreamed of ever going "out there" just as Ted was happy and successful as a Miami dentist and had no intention of going dog sledding in Alaska.
So Our Heroine goes out there, and has to learn to (SOMETHING ALIEN), and does, and in the process establishes a Relationship with an alien male, just as Ted established a relationship with the Alaskan young woman.
Our Heroine and the Alien Male are the A-story here, and the B-story is her winning some sort of respect from the Earth-Team that has been ordered to take her out-there in spite of her ineptitude because of her talent.
The team returns her to Earth safe and sound but changed by the experience. Something happens on the alien planet, and she muscles her way back to the alien planet (possible only because the B-story characters help) to deal with unfinished business with the Alien Male.
She wins a permanent place on the Alien Planet (as Ted opened his Dentistry office in Alaska) doing what makes her happy with her talent, not necessarily what Earth-gov would prefer her to do.
I'm thinking that a really good setup would be that the Aliens are the "flying saucer" aliens who have been kidnapping kids, and now she has to go there to be the psychological counsellor to those kids and ease them back into Earth society, but proves that's impossible for the kids (they'd be miserable and a disruptive influence). Then she goes back and settles down to take care of the kids who can't be repatriated.
The Alien guy would be someone in charge of settling the matter of the kidnapped Earth kids, maybe someone from a new alien government that ousted the aliens that believed in "studying" humans by kidnapping kids. The new gov't thinks this deed was an attrocity.
That would make a feature film -- and the foundation for a TV series like maybe THE WALTONS IN SPACE? THE KING AND I IN SPACE?
If you get a chance, grab the DVD of Snow Dogs (it's also being rerun on TV) (maybe netflicks has it, or it can be viewed online?) and watch the whole film with the Alien Romance possibilities in mind.
In Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT GOES TO THE MOVIES, check out the category that SNOW DOGS belongs to on the free pdf file:
http://www.blakesnyder.com/downloads/STCGTTM_AtGlnceFnlRev2.pdf
Snow Dogs is not listed, but I would place it under FOOL TRIUMPHANT in the sub-category FOOL OUT OF WATER (a variant of Fish Out Of Water), which is the category headed by LEGALLY BLONDE. What do you think of that placement? And would that category and its formula lend itself to a platform for an Alien Romance that would have an appeal outside Romance fandom as Star Trek had an appeal outside of SF fandom (mainly to women who wouldn't crack an SF novel if their life depended on it -- those very women who INVENTED Alien Romance in ST 'zines!) ?
Blake Snyder's category depends on the MAIN CHARACTER being a CHARACTER (as in USA CHARACTERS WELCOME) who responds to a challenge with zest, joi de vivre, and the flexibility to learn, making "a fool of herself" in public in the process, and yet triumphing over the learning process in the end.
Note that Crocadile Dundee also belongs to this category. Scrumptious alien male, a fish out of water in Manhattan.
It seems to me that the category lends itself to Alien Romance so smoothly that I think we could see our breakthrough using this type of vehicle.
And as I pointed out, all of us could write the screenplay or novel structured like a screenplay from this template, and not compete with each other for shelf-space.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.slantedconcept.com/
http://facebook.com/jacqueline.lichtenberg
http://twitter.com/jlichtenberg
LIT/MED-What Universe Are You In? Fri 10a-11a, Palm E room
w/ Jacqueline Lichtenberg (moderator), Dani Kollin, Etyan Kollin, Janice Tuerff
LIT-How Are Small Presses Fri 11a-noon, Palm E room
w/ Jacqueline Lichtenberg (moderator), Adam Niswander, Michael D’Ambrosio
MED-Star Trek Movie Review Fri 2p-3p, Palm F room
w/David A. Williams (moderator), Alan Dean Foster
LIT-It Was A Dark & Stormy Night Fri 4p-5p, Abbey South
w/ Jacqueline Lichtenberg (moderator), Kevin Andrew Murphy, Moira Greyland,
Shirley Runyon
AUTOGRAPHING Fri 5p-6p, Dealers Room
LIT-Writer’s Support Groups Sun 11a-noon, Boardroom
w/ Jacqueline Lichtenberg (moderator), Rick Novy, Dennis McKiernan
FAN-Effect of Web on Fanzines Sun noon-1p, Jokake room
w/John Hertz (moderator)
FAN-SF/F Websites Sun 2p-3p, Augustine
w/ Jacqueline Lichtenberg (moderator), Lee Gilliland, Lee Whiteside
-----------------
And on another note which is actually in the same key:
I picked up on Twitter and "Re-tweeted" (relayed to my followers)
LIKE SO: RT @victoriastrauss Should bookstores be publishers? http://tinyurl.com/mrdatl
Twitter makes these tiny-urls for you when you post a long url and there are several companies now that make condensed URLs.
So Victoria Strauss found an article by Literary Agent Richard Curtis on whether bookstores SHOULD be publishers. Here's a quote from the article she found.
QUOTE
As if all that were not enough, Amazon has now become a publisher, too. First, there's its Encore program "whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate. Amazon will then partner with the authors to re-introduce their books to readers through marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon.com Books Store, Amazon Kindle Store, Audible.com, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers."
ENDQUOTE
http://www.ereads.com/2009/06/should-bookstores-be-publishers-too.html is the blog.
Victoria Strauss also found announcements of other closings in publishing, and coincidentally I'm on a panel at Westercon about small "presses" (which is today a misnomer; it's small publishers, and I suspect one day every blogger will be considered a small publisher.)
To keep up on interesting developments I come across this way, just "follow" me on twitter. http://twitter.com/JLichtenberg look at my profile to find all my tweets.
----------------
OK, so back to researching the future of Romance on page and screen by scrutinizing and analyzing old movies.
I saw a 2002 Disney movie titled SNOW DOGS and just couldn't resist transposing it into an Alien Romance as I watched it. It is soooo SF-Romance!
Snow Dogs with Comedy, Drama, a clean family style, Nichelle Nichols for a treat, and starring: Cuba Gooding Jr., James Coburn Director: Brian Levant. You can still get the DVD on Amazon.
If you've been following how I've been developing the Alien Romance potential for TV and film, and you happen to have seen this "family" movie, you'll know what's coming here. It's really irresistible.
Here's the IMDB link to all about this movie.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0281373/
Here's the Product Description from Amazon:
-----------quoted from Amazon---------------
Make no bones about it -- Disney's SNOW DOGS is a hilarious action-packed comedy your whole family will love. Eight adorable but mischievous dogs get the best of dog hater Ted Brooks (Cuba Gooding Jr.) when he leaves his successful Miami Beach dental practice for the wilds of Alaska to claim his inheritance -- seven Siberian huskies and a border collie -- and discover his roots. As Ted's life goes to the dogs, he rises to the occasion and vows to learn to mush with his inheritance. Totally out of his element, he faces challenges he's never dreamed of. There's a blizzard, thin ice, an intimidating crusty old mountain man named Thunder Jack (James Coburn), the Arctic Challenge Sled Dog Race that's only two weeks away, and a life-and-death rescue. This fish-out-of water, tail-wagging comedy is nothing but doggone good fun and a celebration of family -- both human and canine!
-------------end Amazon Quote---------------
Compare that description to SAVE THE CAT GOES TO THE MOVIES and find the category it belongs to. (more on that later -- think it out for yourself first.)
Now substitute "Earth" for Miami Beach and "Alien Planet" for Alaska.
Notice the description has left out the ROMANCE which is the B-story in this film as written.
That's a lesson for all writers -- THIS is how you generate and pitch a Concept. THIS is how you "outline" a story you're going to write. Watch the movie, then read that description again. It hits the exact plot-points you need to put in your outline before you write and be sure that you build up to each plot point. All the B-story is support for the A-story and does not belong in the initial outline or Concept, but is generated by that concept.
Novel writers don't learn to do the sequence in this direction, or haven't until recently. Read that blog post by Agent Richard Curtis, think about how marketing has changed.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html is a blog where I discussed modern marketing.
The novels that get the promotion, the novels that you as an author would find easiest TO PROMOTE, the novels that sell, the novels that attract busy reader's attention -- those novels today resemble games, films, and TV shows more and more.
Market structures have always been morphing, and every generation puts its own stamp on what's popular. But I suspect never in all human history have "markets" (for everything) changed and changed again, 100% replaced in shorter and shorter intervals. This was predicted by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock which I discussed in that blog entry on marketing fiction in a changing world.
This means that never before in human history has there been such an opportunity to overthrow the existing order because the walls between genres are melting and morphing.
Instability like that is a threat in the areas where we have actually got it right -- but in the area of Relationships, I doubt any expert would say that humanity has optimized our ability to establish and hold relationships.
Love is all about relationship -- and it's very hard to get to love without going through Romance (one day we should discuss the astrology behind that).
So let's see what we can do with the example of Snow Dogs to create a template for Alien Romance with broad appeal. A "template" would be a pattern that, if all of us on this blog used to create a screenplay or novel, would generate 7 or more totally original, completely different stories. They wouldn't compete, they would expand a genre.
It would be easy to make the Romance the A-story and transform this movie into an Alien Romance.
So here's a description of Snow Dogs based on the assumption that you know or remember this movie.
In Snow Dogs, the very successful and popular Miami Dentist Ted Brooks (whose mother is played by Nichelle Nichols, the woman who raised him, not his deceased biological mother) is served with a legal notice that he's inherited something in Alaska from his MOTHER and Nichelle Nichols confesses that he was adopted (oh, she's GOOD in this film!).
For more on Nichelle Nichols see my blog post on High Concept:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/medium-is-message_19.html
Thus stressed, Ted Brooks flies to Alaska to be present at the reading of the Will in a tiny out-back town, complete with Bush Pilot who turns out to be his real father.
That's the A-story. Ted, his Miami Beach mother Nichelle Nichols, his Alaskan father who is a white man, his dead biological mother's photo (she was black as Ted is) and her heritage of dogsled racing.
The B-story goes like this: as soon as Ted gets to Alaska, flown into the little town by the Bush Pilot he doesn't know is his father, he meets a WOMAN HIS AGE who takes him out to the house he inherited. He insists he go in alone, so she leaves him. He goes in and meets the friendly Border Collie, then gets attacked by the Alaskan Huskies his deceased mother owned.
Between the Bush Pilot (James Coburn was FANTASTIC in this role!) and the young woman, Ted learns to "mush" and learns the words to command the dogs from his father. She teaches him how to harness the dogs so they'll cooperate.
Then Ted discovers he loves dogsledding, and just as he's really enjoying it, he drives off a cliff and has a (very comic book) slide down a mountainside, gets rescued by the Bush Pilot who takes him to a refuge cave where he confesses Ted was conceived during a dog sled race, but that there was nothing at all between his real mother and the Bush Pilot, and tries to convince Ted that he doesn't care that Ted is his son. (Oh, Coburn is good, but what would you expect?)
Ted goes home to Miami. On TV in Miami, he sees the local annual dogsled race. Nichelle Nichols drops the photo he kept from his biological mother's things which is of Ted's biological mother with her dogsled trophy. The frame breaks revealing a photo tucked behind the trophy photo. This older photo shows his mother with the Bush pilot and newborn Ted. Ted realizes his real father, the Bush Pilot, lied, and he was indeed present at his birth and he did care for his mother, and he cares for Ted too. His real father lied.
So Ted goes back to Alaska and arrives during the race, as a storm is blowing in, just as it did during the dogsled race when he was conceived.
The young woman tells him that his father is lost out on the race course in the storm -- that just as he did that first time, his father has passed by the camp where the racers would wait out the storm, and driven on into the blizzard. After the storm, Ted's father has failed to show up at the finish line with the others.
That kicks off the Act 3 action where Ted takes his sled, his mother's dog team (sans the lead dog which his father took for his team), and finds and rescues his father who has taken refuge in that same cave where Ted was conceived. Bt this time his father has a broken leg. Ted's a Dentist, but he splints the leg nicely. Then it turns out that his mother's lead-dog Demon was in a bad temper because he had a rotten tooth, so Ted pulls the tooth, justifying the whole "Miami Dentist" part of his characterization.
Meanwhile, Ted's Miami mother, Nichelle Nichols, flies to Alaska and the young woman takes gentle care of her as they wait to see if Ted will make it back to town alive.
Of course (this being a Disney movie) Ted and his father make it back to town, Ted almost kisses the young woman in public (being Disney, only almost) and then there's a very quick but moving wrap-up sequence where Ted marries her, establishes his Dental practice in Alaska with his wife as receptionist (now very pregnant), and two of the dogs arrive with puppies following them, and Ted's Dental Assistant from Miami is helping him with patients. And there's a great scene with Coburn and Nichols -- the end-note is TOTAL HEA!!! But the bulk of the plot is comedy-action.
Frankly, the tag-ending providing the HEA (a real tear-jerker) would make a fine novel, all by itself. One part of this story is seen through a magnifying glass (Notice of his biological mother's death all the way through to rescuing his biological father), and the much larger and more complicated part is seen through the wrong end of a telescope. But it works.
Now, if instead of dogsledding there was some non-human skill-set that a human talent would be adaptable to and that talent was substituted for Dentistry, it would work perfectly as an Alien Romance.
Let's say the human is female, and the reason she is pulled off Earth is that tests show she has a gene for being SOMETHING (immune to alien diseases? learning languages? Telepathy?) that makes her valuable on Earth's first-contact team. But she's no astronaut and never dreamed of ever going "out there" just as Ted was happy and successful as a Miami dentist and had no intention of going dog sledding in Alaska.
So Our Heroine goes out there, and has to learn to (SOMETHING ALIEN), and does, and in the process establishes a Relationship with an alien male, just as Ted established a relationship with the Alaskan young woman.
Our Heroine and the Alien Male are the A-story here, and the B-story is her winning some sort of respect from the Earth-Team that has been ordered to take her out-there in spite of her ineptitude because of her talent.
The team returns her to Earth safe and sound but changed by the experience. Something happens on the alien planet, and she muscles her way back to the alien planet (possible only because the B-story characters help) to deal with unfinished business with the Alien Male.
She wins a permanent place on the Alien Planet (as Ted opened his Dentistry office in Alaska) doing what makes her happy with her talent, not necessarily what Earth-gov would prefer her to do.
I'm thinking that a really good setup would be that the Aliens are the "flying saucer" aliens who have been kidnapping kids, and now she has to go there to be the psychological counsellor to those kids and ease them back into Earth society, but proves that's impossible for the kids (they'd be miserable and a disruptive influence). Then she goes back and settles down to take care of the kids who can't be repatriated.
The Alien guy would be someone in charge of settling the matter of the kidnapped Earth kids, maybe someone from a new alien government that ousted the aliens that believed in "studying" humans by kidnapping kids. The new gov't thinks this deed was an attrocity.
That would make a feature film -- and the foundation for a TV series like maybe THE WALTONS IN SPACE? THE KING AND I IN SPACE?
If you get a chance, grab the DVD of Snow Dogs (it's also being rerun on TV) (maybe netflicks has it, or it can be viewed online?) and watch the whole film with the Alien Romance possibilities in mind.
In Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT GOES TO THE MOVIES, check out the category that SNOW DOGS belongs to on the free pdf file:
http://www.blakesnyder.com/downloads/STCGTTM_AtGlnceFnlRev2.pdf
Snow Dogs is not listed, but I would place it under FOOL TRIUMPHANT in the sub-category FOOL OUT OF WATER (a variant of Fish Out Of Water), which is the category headed by LEGALLY BLONDE. What do you think of that placement? And would that category and its formula lend itself to a platform for an Alien Romance that would have an appeal outside Romance fandom as Star Trek had an appeal outside of SF fandom (mainly to women who wouldn't crack an SF novel if their life depended on it -- those very women who INVENTED Alien Romance in ST 'zines!) ?
Blake Snyder's category depends on the MAIN CHARACTER being a CHARACTER (as in USA CHARACTERS WELCOME) who responds to a challenge with zest, joi de vivre, and the flexibility to learn, making "a fool of herself" in public in the process, and yet triumphing over the learning process in the end.
Note that Crocadile Dundee also belongs to this category. Scrumptious alien male, a fish out of water in Manhattan.
It seems to me that the category lends itself to Alien Romance so smoothly that I think we could see our breakthrough using this type of vehicle.
And as I pointed out, all of us could write the screenplay or novel structured like a screenplay from this template, and not compete with each other for shelf-space.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.slantedconcept.com/
http://facebook.com/jacqueline.lichtenberg
http://twitter.com/jlichtenberg
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Collateral Repairs
You've heard of collateral damage. Now let's consider collateral repairs.
The phrase "collateral repair" has been used in other ways, but I want to propose a writer's jargon application of the term which dovetails with Blake Snyder's explanation of screenplay structure.
Collateral repairing would be some sort of healing, fixing, anti-damage side-effect that an action might have as an unexpected consequence or side-effect, not the goal of the action.
When you are focused on goal-directed behavior (like a hero in a story solving a problem), you move through the world on automatic pilot, doing everything else without thinking, by habit, by knee-jerk reflex.
That means that most of what you do when acting in a goal directed fashion reveals your essential character, who you really are rather than who you want the world to think you are.
Your actions reveal who you actually are because they aren't deliberate, well thought out, not intended to have specific long term consequences in your life or any one's.
Your actions in pursuit of a goal with long term consequences may head you into trouble, into a learning and growing experience, a "story." But your negligent, habitual actions show (without telling) what lessons of life you think you've already mastered.
Writers can use this widespread human trait in sketching a character in conjunction with the Window Character Linnea Sinclair told us about in her post at
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/windows-to-soul.html
where she reported on Writer's Boot Camp with Todd Stone.
The cleanest example of Collateral Repairs that I can think of is a scene in a Superman movie where Clark Kent is going to work at the Daily Planet, walks down the street amid a series of slapstick comedy mishaps and deals with them using his powers subtly while pretending to be the clueless clutzy reporter.
Now, true, in that scene, Clark knows he's helping people, and deliberately hiding his powers. He knows he's on Earth to help people. But his "goal" is to get to work, to remain in character as Clark. All his actions as he walks down the street are just aside from his progress toward his goal, and in some cases endanger achieving that goal. The people he helps are not part of the main plot.
So we see the Hero beneath the outward seeming. Clark Kent can't just waltz by humans, ignoring what's happening to them, and he can't just ignore the results of his own casual actions. My point is that Clark sees a problem that isn't his own and that isn't on his agenda today, and he reaches out to help. He doesn't ponder, deliberate, calculate, or negotiate a reward - he just DOES what comes naturally to him. And thus we get to know the real Clark Kent, maybe better than he knows himself.
Blake Snyder (http://www.blakesnyder.com ) calls the technique of characterizing by collateral repairs SAVE THE CAT! You can find links and explanations on Snyder's website.
The opening pages of a script set up the characters and the problem, the overall situation. Snyder calls that "laying pipe" -- laying the channel through which the reader will be drawn into the story.
The most essential element in sucking a reader into a story is the characters.
So Blake says the character you want sympathy for has to "save the cat" -- do an act which may be irrelevant (or even counter-productive) to the plot, but that displays the inner nature of the character. The particular trait displayed has to be relevant to the climax of the story and has some thematic link to the B story.
Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden character is a solid case in point.
I was sent a review copy of a RoC trade paperback which Amazon is promoting titled MEAN STREETS. It's an anthology of 4 novellas about currently famous action characters.
The lead story, "The Warrior" is by one of my favorite authors, Jim Butcher, and extends the story of his TV Series/ Novel private eye character Harry Dresden, Wizard.
In 2007, I reviewed Butcher's Dresden novels in my book review column, and did one column where I interviewed Butcher in person.
http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2007/rrbooks2007info.html
Butcher's Harry Dresden novels are long, complex, multi-threaded plots where Harry Dresden has three or more life-threatening cases or affairs in progress at once, and usually emerges beaten, bedraggled, bloody and alive. Harry doesn't exult over his vanquished enemies.
So it must have been a real writing challenge for Butcher to produce a novella sized Dresden story with one plot thread and one single point to make. After the discipline of working with the Harry Dresden TV series (on Sci Fi channel but now on DVD (I have the DVDs and have really enjoyed them)
Butcher probably had a better idea of how to write a complete Dresden story at novella length. "The Warrior" succeeds marvelously at this length and is very like a TV episode. I recommend you read that novella before reading my analysis. There are some spoilers in this discussion because the COLLATERAL REPAIRS part comes at the end of this Dresden story.
See my blog post on spoilers -- it is my stance that no really good story can be spoiled by knowing in advance what happens or what some other reader thought happened.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/03/prologues-and-spoilers.html
"The Warrior" is almost entirely and purely a characterization exercise. It's all about Dresden's sense of proportion and his personal values. No two readers will interpret it alike. And it's an instant classic that can't be spoiled. But if you like, page down to END SPOILER and continue reading.
----------BEGIN SPOILER-----------------
The story opens as Dresden makes a mistake. He's been sent photos that seem to be a threat against Michael, the retired wielder of a Holy Sword. Currently, Dresden has custody of two of these Holy Swords, but not the authority to wield them. Dresden wants to protect his unarmed friend, Michael, and takes Michael's old sword to him, showing him the pictures someone sent him. A stalker is after Michael's family and friends.
Michael refuses the Sword.
Dresden moves through the city investigating who the stalker might be, trying to Private Eye the problem away, and as he does so, he does a few little things he barely notices doing -- he's just moving through the city concentrating on the real threat, the stalker.
Michael's daughter is kidnapped by the stalker and the ransom is both Swords.
Now these Swords are an Honor, a Holy Calling, each belonging to an Archangel (the real kind) and a fabulous amount of magical power is inside each Sword. They are unique. They are special. And they have the power to protect the innocent, maybe save the world. They must not fall into the "wrong" hands. Dresden is their guardian. He takes that seriously.
Dresden doesn't even think about it for two seconds. He'll give the kidnapper the swords to get the girl back. He has no ego-investment in being in possession of both of these Swords, but he respects and believes in their power.
At the exchange, a fight breaks out. Dresden and Michael win, but Dresden has to remind Michael not to hit the kidnapper too hard.
The last scene is where the meaning of this story, and its commentary on Dresden's character, come clear. Dresden has once again conquered a serious enemy tackling the enemy head-on, though this time a mere mortal human being who isn't even a Wizard. He's sitting in the balcony of a cathedral waiting for Michael and others to finish patching up the kidnapper when the Archangel Gabriel appears sitting next to him.
Dresden barely blinks at that. He lives in a world where such beings are natural. The Archangel Gabriel talks idiomatic English and points out to Dresden that even though he does not wield one of the Swords, he is nevertheless a Warrior fighting successfully for the Light. Then Gabriel enumerates the results of Dresden's easy, unthinking peripheral actions along the way through the story.
What Dresden thought he was doing, what he thought the problem was (stalker; kidnapper after the Swords) was not the most important thing Dresden did that day. The side-effects, the collateral repairs in the world that Dresden made by his apparently trivial knee-jerk responses to situations actually did far more to bring goodness into the world than his titanic conflicts with the magical Forces of Evil.
-------------END SPOILER---------------
Dresden, no matter how he thinks of himself, is The Warrior.
And you and I learn a lesson from Dresden. Everything we do, but most especially the things we do without thinking about them, -- the negligent, the peripheral, the habitual, -- all those little deeds are the ones that count in Collateral Repair of the world.
I read "The Warrior" after I found a message on the EPIC List from Morgan Mandel who had posted a blog about 8 reasons to comment on blogs. And in Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! and Harry Dresden's Sword problem, I found a reason Morgan doesn't have on her list (though her list seems to be growing).
http://morganmandel.blogspot.com/2009/01/seven-reasons-to-comment-on-blog.html
Her reasons to post comments on blogs pivot around the benefits that might accrue to the commenter.
Commenting on blogs for such reasons as she mentions would be the kind of "Goal Directed Behavior" you'd find in a Hero undergoing a story where he/she was about to learn something the hard way.
But commenting on blogs is usually (at least for me) a peripheral activity, a by-the-way done as a reflexive response on a subject I know something about -- sort of like Clark Kent blundering down the street or Harry Dresden acting from his heart, just because he can. And I think it's that way for a lot of people (political diatribes excepted).
Blogs are not central to most people's life goals, yet we who read blogs get something out of it, something intangible but worth the time. When a certain sort of person reads a blog entry and gets something out of it that's worth the reading time, he/she will drop a comment on that blog just to thank the blogger. Or a comment on a comment.
After reading Angel Gabriel's explanation to Dresden, I suspect that commenting on a blog comes into the category of being The Warrior.
Maybe only one person other than the blogger will read the comment, but the effect that comment might have on that one person could be enormously out of proportion to the effort it takes to write the comment. Your comment might save or redirect a life.
Often the comment becomes longer because in thinking how to say thank you, the commenter will put some effort into verbalizing a response that shows they read the blog entry and understood it. As a result, the commenter also gains a deeper understanding of himself and the issue -- as well as providing a "Scotty, you earned your pay for the month!" to the blogger.
I do think the main reason to comment on blogs (or to blog) is that somebody you've never met might read your comment, benefit from it without even knowing who you are. Thus you have a chance to repair the world in the most powerful way.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.slantedconcept.com
The phrase "collateral repair" has been used in other ways, but I want to propose a writer's jargon application of the term which dovetails with Blake Snyder's explanation of screenplay structure.
Collateral repairing would be some sort of healing, fixing, anti-damage side-effect that an action might have as an unexpected consequence or side-effect, not the goal of the action.
When you are focused on goal-directed behavior (like a hero in a story solving a problem), you move through the world on automatic pilot, doing everything else without thinking, by habit, by knee-jerk reflex.
That means that most of what you do when acting in a goal directed fashion reveals your essential character, who you really are rather than who you want the world to think you are.
Your actions reveal who you actually are because they aren't deliberate, well thought out, not intended to have specific long term consequences in your life or any one's.
Your actions in pursuit of a goal with long term consequences may head you into trouble, into a learning and growing experience, a "story." But your negligent, habitual actions show (without telling) what lessons of life you think you've already mastered.
Writers can use this widespread human trait in sketching a character in conjunction with the Window Character Linnea Sinclair told us about in her post at
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/windows-to-soul.html
where she reported on Writer's Boot Camp with Todd Stone.
The cleanest example of Collateral Repairs that I can think of is a scene in a Superman movie where Clark Kent is going to work at the Daily Planet, walks down the street amid a series of slapstick comedy mishaps and deals with them using his powers subtly while pretending to be the clueless clutzy reporter.
Now, true, in that scene, Clark knows he's helping people, and deliberately hiding his powers. He knows he's on Earth to help people. But his "goal" is to get to work, to remain in character as Clark. All his actions as he walks down the street are just aside from his progress toward his goal, and in some cases endanger achieving that goal. The people he helps are not part of the main plot.
So we see the Hero beneath the outward seeming. Clark Kent can't just waltz by humans, ignoring what's happening to them, and he can't just ignore the results of his own casual actions. My point is that Clark sees a problem that isn't his own and that isn't on his agenda today, and he reaches out to help. He doesn't ponder, deliberate, calculate, or negotiate a reward - he just DOES what comes naturally to him. And thus we get to know the real Clark Kent, maybe better than he knows himself.
Blake Snyder (http://www.blakesnyder.com ) calls the technique of characterizing by collateral repairs SAVE THE CAT! You can find links and explanations on Snyder's website.
The opening pages of a script set up the characters and the problem, the overall situation. Snyder calls that "laying pipe" -- laying the channel through which the reader will be drawn into the story.
The most essential element in sucking a reader into a story is the characters.
So Blake says the character you want sympathy for has to "save the cat" -- do an act which may be irrelevant (or even counter-productive) to the plot, but that displays the inner nature of the character. The particular trait displayed has to be relevant to the climax of the story and has some thematic link to the B story.
Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden character is a solid case in point.
I was sent a review copy of a RoC trade paperback which Amazon is promoting titled MEAN STREETS. It's an anthology of 4 novellas about currently famous action characters.
The lead story, "The Warrior" is by one of my favorite authors, Jim Butcher, and extends the story of his TV Series/ Novel private eye character Harry Dresden, Wizard.
In 2007, I reviewed Butcher's Dresden novels in my book review column, and did one column where I interviewed Butcher in person.
http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2007/rrbooks2007info.html
Butcher's Harry Dresden novels are long, complex, multi-threaded plots where Harry Dresden has three or more life-threatening cases or affairs in progress at once, and usually emerges beaten, bedraggled, bloody and alive. Harry doesn't exult over his vanquished enemies.
So it must have been a real writing challenge for Butcher to produce a novella sized Dresden story with one plot thread and one single point to make. After the discipline of working with the Harry Dresden TV series (on Sci Fi channel but now on DVD (I have the DVDs and have really enjoyed them)
Butcher probably had a better idea of how to write a complete Dresden story at novella length. "The Warrior" succeeds marvelously at this length and is very like a TV episode. I recommend you read that novella before reading my analysis. There are some spoilers in this discussion because the COLLATERAL REPAIRS part comes at the end of this Dresden story.
See my blog post on spoilers -- it is my stance that no really good story can be spoiled by knowing in advance what happens or what some other reader thought happened.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/03/prologues-and-spoilers.html
"The Warrior" is almost entirely and purely a characterization exercise. It's all about Dresden's sense of proportion and his personal values. No two readers will interpret it alike. And it's an instant classic that can't be spoiled. But if you like, page down to END SPOILER and continue reading.
----------BEGIN SPOILER-----------------
The story opens as Dresden makes a mistake. He's been sent photos that seem to be a threat against Michael, the retired wielder of a Holy Sword. Currently, Dresden has custody of two of these Holy Swords, but not the authority to wield them. Dresden wants to protect his unarmed friend, Michael, and takes Michael's old sword to him, showing him the pictures someone sent him. A stalker is after Michael's family and friends.
Michael refuses the Sword.
Dresden moves through the city investigating who the stalker might be, trying to Private Eye the problem away, and as he does so, he does a few little things he barely notices doing -- he's just moving through the city concentrating on the real threat, the stalker.
Michael's daughter is kidnapped by the stalker and the ransom is both Swords.
Now these Swords are an Honor, a Holy Calling, each belonging to an Archangel (the real kind) and a fabulous amount of magical power is inside each Sword. They are unique. They are special. And they have the power to protect the innocent, maybe save the world. They must not fall into the "wrong" hands. Dresden is their guardian. He takes that seriously.
Dresden doesn't even think about it for two seconds. He'll give the kidnapper the swords to get the girl back. He has no ego-investment in being in possession of both of these Swords, but he respects and believes in their power.
At the exchange, a fight breaks out. Dresden and Michael win, but Dresden has to remind Michael not to hit the kidnapper too hard.
The last scene is where the meaning of this story, and its commentary on Dresden's character, come clear. Dresden has once again conquered a serious enemy tackling the enemy head-on, though this time a mere mortal human being who isn't even a Wizard. He's sitting in the balcony of a cathedral waiting for Michael and others to finish patching up the kidnapper when the Archangel Gabriel appears sitting next to him.
Dresden barely blinks at that. He lives in a world where such beings are natural. The Archangel Gabriel talks idiomatic English and points out to Dresden that even though he does not wield one of the Swords, he is nevertheless a Warrior fighting successfully for the Light. Then Gabriel enumerates the results of Dresden's easy, unthinking peripheral actions along the way through the story.
What Dresden thought he was doing, what he thought the problem was (stalker; kidnapper after the Swords) was not the most important thing Dresden did that day. The side-effects, the collateral repairs in the world that Dresden made by his apparently trivial knee-jerk responses to situations actually did far more to bring goodness into the world than his titanic conflicts with the magical Forces of Evil.
-------------END SPOILER---------------
Dresden, no matter how he thinks of himself, is The Warrior.
And you and I learn a lesson from Dresden. Everything we do, but most especially the things we do without thinking about them, -- the negligent, the peripheral, the habitual, -- all those little deeds are the ones that count in Collateral Repair of the world.
I read "The Warrior" after I found a message on the EPIC List from Morgan Mandel who had posted a blog about 8 reasons to comment on blogs. And in Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! and Harry Dresden's Sword problem, I found a reason Morgan doesn't have on her list (though her list seems to be growing).
http://morganmandel.blogspot.com/2009/01/seven-reasons-to-comment-on-blog.html
Her reasons to post comments on blogs pivot around the benefits that might accrue to the commenter.
Commenting on blogs for such reasons as she mentions would be the kind of "Goal Directed Behavior" you'd find in a Hero undergoing a story where he/she was about to learn something the hard way.
But commenting on blogs is usually (at least for me) a peripheral activity, a by-the-way done as a reflexive response on a subject I know something about -- sort of like Clark Kent blundering down the street or Harry Dresden acting from his heart, just because he can. And I think it's that way for a lot of people (political diatribes excepted).
Blogs are not central to most people's life goals, yet we who read blogs get something out of it, something intangible but worth the time. When a certain sort of person reads a blog entry and gets something out of it that's worth the reading time, he/she will drop a comment on that blog just to thank the blogger. Or a comment on a comment.
After reading Angel Gabriel's explanation to Dresden, I suspect that commenting on a blog comes into the category of being The Warrior.
Maybe only one person other than the blogger will read the comment, but the effect that comment might have on that one person could be enormously out of proportion to the effort it takes to write the comment. Your comment might save or redirect a life.
Often the comment becomes longer because in thinking how to say thank you, the commenter will put some effort into verbalizing a response that shows they read the blog entry and understood it. As a result, the commenter also gains a deeper understanding of himself and the issue -- as well as providing a "Scotty, you earned your pay for the month!" to the blogger.
I do think the main reason to comment on blogs (or to blog) is that somebody you've never met might read your comment, benefit from it without even knowing who you are. Thus you have a chance to repair the world in the most powerful way.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.slantedconcept.com
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