I've been inserting posts in this blog about the Writer's Business Model for years. Here's one of many:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/06/crumbling-business-model-of-writers.html
The thesis I learned from Alvin Toffler's Future Shock decades ago is now a constantly growing reality for writers -- as a writer you are self-employed and a "small business." Well, micro-business. But a business none-the-less.
So I've also done posts on Marketing -- about which I really know nothing and have no education in that field. But I keep running into people with marketing expertise and learning from them.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html
I just had a writing student self-publish an item and come back to me bewildered about why 3 readers commented in public that they were disappointed, couldn't relate to the main character.
The writer felt the book was terrible. I counter-argued that the marketing was terrible -- the particular readers who thought from the blurb that they'd like the book did not like it because they couldn't relate to the main character. If the marketing targeted readers who could relate to that character, the readers would not be wailing out their disappointment. That's really how it works. Markets are divided by what kinds of characters they can relate to.
The same plot told from a different character's point of view could grab that audience.
There are rules for picking a protagonist, and I've detailed them in prior posts. But self-publishing is all about business model -- and the choice of protagonist is all about business model.
The business of writing is, however, still in massive flux. The audiences are changing faster than publishing can keep up.
Here is another take on the theories I'm kicking around, looking for how this all will settle out.
I've been blogging for some time about the WRITER'S BUSINESS MODEL constructed on shifting sands.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/02/amateur-goes-professional.html
Only new, small, startup, Indie with no baggage, NIMBLE companies can do the kind of things required by the new audiences. As a new writer, or an older writer going Indie, you have a chance nobody before you has had.
One important point to remember: release on many platforms not just Amazon or B&N or Smashwords (which reaches a lot) -- reach for wide availability, and plan to add platforms and outlets as the appear (remembering they will disappear, too).
I blogged on the state of TV fiction, noting the increasing # of commercials and the disappearance even of REPEATS -- how there are vast stretches on hundreds of channels (I did a lot of flipping and channel surfing) -- showing the shrinking market for TV fiction while netflix, hulu, Amazon and others are grabbing "content" to stream.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/07/targeting-readership-part-5-where-is.html
The title is WHERE IS EVERYBODY? because I saw a huge lacuna in the TV broadcast fiction flow. People who schedule TV and sell commercial time (I've known some) know when there's audience and when not! I don't. But I know they put stuff in front of eyeballs, and if they can't find eyeballs they don't put the stuff there.
I argued in that post that my observations showed a massive shift in habits of the viewing public.
I've done a series of blog posts starting in December 2012 focusing on the origin, development, and effect of PR into modern "Marketing" (i.e. commercial advertising) with lots more to say about that, and how an Indie writer can exploit that trend. I've learned a lot from examining this current election cycle.
THEME-PLOT INTEGRATION is the series title for those. There will be a few more in that series later.
Here's PART 4 with links to prior parts.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/01/theme-plot-integration-part-4-fallacies.html
I thought I was the only one to see what I was seeing in bits and pieces I could glean from TV and online ads about the election.
But one of the foremost media personalities with a track record in POLLING has (in disgust because he was oh-so-wrong) spat out the exact observation I (without the expensive input sources he has) made!
Here's his article on it (note the disgust he evidences - the confused distress in the semantics).
http://www.dickmorris.com/the-campaign-made-no-difference/
Billions spent on TV ads literally made no difference in people's political opinions.
What's astonishing to me is that I knew this before the billions went to TV ads, and he (who has all the info I don't have) didn't know it. Can that be true? Really? I seriously doubt it. He ran an internet campaign to collect millions to spend on political ads and spent it. Many other organizations did the same. It wasn't unpaid volunteer work. People got paid to write and produce those ads, to market-test them, to track the statistics, oh a lot of people made a living from those millions that had nothing to do with educating voters.
Note in this discussion that nobody spends money like that on ads selling books. Even a blockbuster movie doesn't get ad-blitz coverage like that. Fiction isn't profitable to advertise -- that's the only firm conclusion I know of. The few book commercials I've seen have been sparsely distributed. Today book trailers go up on YouTube and get distributed via social networks -- not TV. Cost-effectiveness is the reason.
Ad resistance is heartening to me because I see how TV ads have manipulated people into self-destructive behavior, and it seems while I wasn't paying attention, the trend has reversed.
It's dismaying because all the other evidence I have indicates people are just as amenable to self-destructive behavior as ever because they can't see fallacies in other people's reasoning because (many people in education have told me) of the lack of elementary school training in basic reasoning.
As I've pointed out in my series on Theme-Plot Integration, a writer who can identify and define a popular fallacy can sell a lot of fiction using that insight. Critical thinking is now a marketable commodity. Think about that!
Note that the fallacies I'm pointing out in the Theme-Plot integration series that writers can use are not about "fact-checking" (though that's a fertile field to plow). The facts behind a fallacy may or may not be solid -- it's the conclusion that's fallacious.
I see in the gaming community a glimmer of light.
Here is a group that is training mind-and-hand to not fall for specious tricks for the benefit of the tricker to the detriment of the trickee.
Some of my most popular blog entries here are
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/04/story-springboards-part-2-tv-shows.html
and this one with over 1500 views:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/tv-shows-leverage-and-psych.html
Those are about TV shows which focus on armoring viewers against con artist's tricks (i.e. advertising).
The fragmentation of audiences into different media (which left that silent hole in TV Fiction as I surveyed it during a period between "seasons" ) could be the counter to the whole thing of controlling the world by creating herd behavior.
Kickstarter.com is a beacon of real hope here, as is the whole social media trend. Indie self-publishing ebook industry is coming along. Amazon is making FEATURE FILMS!!!
People want to do what they want to do when and where they want to do it with whatever they happen to have at hand, and no back-sass.
People just won't deal with barriers like DRM.
However it may seem to outsiders, this behavior is not capriciousness or whim, it's the drive to a self-chosen goal.
What audiences have at hand these days is a smartphone. Various tablets likewise. There are platform wars going on by those whose business model requires proprietary control of their product. People just won't STAND FOR THAT.
So create your business model to cater to those who WON'T STAND FOR THAT.
Provide them a product that delivers the pleasure hit of a world where "I DON'T HAVE TO STAND FOR THAT!" And a life-model that shows how to stand independently within a bonded cooperative partnership -- where the partnership doesn't have to stand for that!
The success of C. J. Cherryh's FOREIGNER series is real evidence that I'm onto something here.
If you haven't been reading that, get #1 and work through it in numerical order. It's a series of trilogies, all about the same Main (POV) Character, telling his personal STORY -- but as he becomes a mover and shaker in a giant, multicultural environment. C. J. Cherryh is one of the best writers working today -- and this particular series is lightly laced with alien romance -- which you just don't see unless you know it's there. Sex is "go to black" and use your imagination. But the Relationship, the intimate personal relationship between human and alien is what drives the plot.
The aliens live in a world where "herd" creatures evolved to human levels (maybe beyond), but their "herd" instincts are different from anything on earth --- yet somewhat similar.
The human "herd" works the opposite of earth's animal herd -- we don't follow a leader. We all make individual decisions and if others make the same decision (usually for different reasons) -- we all SEEM TO RUN IN THE SAME DIRECTION -- but that's not what's happening.
Working with that in this changing world where what appeared to be a human herd (as detailed in the Theme-Plot Integration posts on fallacy spotting) can reach a very wide audience among those who JUST WON'T STAND FOR THAT (whatever 'that' may be in your novel). And toss in an alien civilization trying to puzzle out humans, and you can really confuse the aliens, getting a lot of mileage out of one thematic premise. C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner universe is a grand example.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://twitter.com/jlichtenberg
Showing posts with label Leverage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Leverage. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 08, 2013
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Story Springboards Part 2: The TV Shows FRINGE and ROYAL PAINS
Part One of this series is a Guest Post on Art Heists by a writer who is also a fan of the TV Series White Collar, It Takes a Thief, etc:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/01/story-springboards-part-1-art-heists-by.html
With all the shifts in Publishing since the big publishers all ate each other up and turned over the editorial policies to committees and bean counters, the entire structure of "Gatekeepers" has morphed into something truly different.
By "Gatekeepers" writers usually mean folks who can say "no" to an author and make it stick, keeping the author away from the author's natural audience. This can be at the Agent level, the Editorial level, the Marketing level inside the big publishers, or the Bean Counter level.
Many authors whose books finally make it into traditional publishing channels, find their next book being rejected because the computers (also a new kind of gatekeeper that grew to dominance in the 1980's with the chain bookstores) just aren't returning the numbers.
When that happens, writers often take special notice of the immense drain that pirating has had on their sales (immense).
Writers whose books take off to become New York Times bestsellers usually don't notice that drain so soon. They're too busy writing their next book. Publishers, though, notice. They just can't do anything about it, (yet).
Everything they've tried has failed, and now Amazon is picking fights with distributors over the pricing of ebooks -- mostly because of a button TAG they put on some pages where people can note that the price is too high, or DRM deters them from purchasing.
In this environment of being swept round and round the tornado of change in the fiction delivery system due to ebooks, Print on Demand (POD) and Kindle and Nook readers, writers who are burning up with something to SAY feel they are not able to "reach" their audience.
Many tools have been launched in the last couple of years, and all those tools come and go (such as self-publishing, social networking promotion campaigns, YouTube Book Trailers).
But the question remains. How do you "reach" the audience you are writing for?
You'll see statistics that people are watching less TV -- less network TV, less Cable TV, canceling cable subscriptions for internet-only TV -- and here comes Apple TV. But the networks still exist.
By all accounts, profits are being made -- OK, it's more like the airline industry if you track the stocks -- but people do acquire and absorb TV series. They just don't slave themselves to a network broadcast schedule, and on the whole, are determined to avoid sitting through commercials.
Video fiction is "churning" under the impact of the digital revolution just as publishing is. But people still want fiction, and they want a wider choice.
Just as publishing feels they are competing with fanfic posted free online, video-fiction purveyors feel they are competing now on an almost-even footing with the Indie Film Maker, and web-based webisodes, (even webinars compete with classroom instruction).
So what is the creator of fictional universes to do to reach the hungry audience?
What happens next, (yes, this kind of cycle is repetitive throughout history) is called "Market Making."
To get the notion into your head, think of the publishing history of Harry Potter. At first it couldn't get sold. Then it went to an obscure publisher working into an obscure readership (kids) - then Scholastic here in the USA, then kids with cell phones and Facebook accounts took it viral, then it exploded as a "Market" cohered, demanding more-more-more so more books came out creating the series, then movies. I'm sure eventually a TV Series.
Now go study Vampire Diaries (CW network - and the books), and its history.
Here's a blog post that arose out of the copyright dispute the originator of Vampire Diaries has had with the publisher.
http://parafantasy.blogspot.com/2012/02/this-is-utterly-ridiculousi-cant-even.html
I dropped a comment on that blog pointing to the blog posts here in recent weeks:
APRIL 10, 2012 POST BELIEVING IN THE HAPPILY EVER AFTER PART 6
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/04/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-6.html
APRIL 17, 2012 POST BELIEVING IN THE HAPPILY EVER AFTER PART 7
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/04/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-7.html
-----------
I did note that your blog shows that you are young, and so my posts based on this issue are not personally about you, but about how to train to enter the writing profession, what to expect, and how to maneuver into a position where you can negotiate from strength.
Those interested should read up on the trademark and copyright history of "Superman" and other movie Icons from the early days.
Originally, actors did not get "residuals" -- they didn't get paid every time a film was shown. Then came TV, and reruns, and actors revolved, marched in union picket lines, and won a % payment every time a film they are in is shown on TV. At that point, the number of commercials inserted in films went up (where else would they get the money to pay?)
Every new technology has smashed the creative artists that the business and marketing people use to create the product they market. Right now, skirmish lines are being drawn again. You've fingered one of the jig-jags in that skirmish line, the "work for hire" provision of the 1970's revamping of the copyright laws.
I believe your post shows brilliance and a huge potential as a writer. But it also points up the sore need for people to learn about the 1970's, and how well-meaning actions of that time, rooted in an understanding of the technology shift between 1920 and 1960, are shaping the skirmish lines today.
Artists (writers, actors, animators, film makers) can't win this battle if we don't know what the core of the battle is about.
What may happen is that, without understanding the import of the impact of the new technologies, the well meaning and morally correct actions may create an even worse problem for artists working in the world that will exist 40 years hence.
So boring as it is, the history lesson is necessary, but I'm not the one to teach that lesson!
I'm a science fiction writer, a futurologist, and my whole focus is on that world that will exist 40 years hence, and more.
You do not deserve to be bashed for bringing this point to the surface. You deserve to be celebrated.
But I for one am crushed that your taste for Vampire fiction has abated, because I write Vampire stories, novels, and now I've just turned in an anthology of Vampire stories by writers of Vampire fanfic who have gone pro with original universe stories.
Of course, I also write many other sorts of novels, so maybe you'll find one you do enjoy. House of Zeor might be a likely candidate. Or if you like doctor novels, try Unto Zeor, Forever.
--------------
So studying these Market Making works, and contrasting and comparing with the two TV shows Fringe and Royal Pains, what do we learn?
Consider the elements I focused on in this post:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-learn-to-use-theme-as-art.html
And here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/communicating-in-symbols.html
Now remember this post from my writing craft blog on constructing openings:
http://editingcircle.blogspot.com/2009/03/in-beginning.html
It's about the protagonist's goal at the opening -- and of course, how that changes by The End (i.e. how the character arcs).
In one of the comments, I pointed out how it is possible to telegraph the Protag's goal to the reader without the Protag actually knowing what his/her goal is. That is the goal that will be achieved at the ending in order to resolve the conflict, but the protagonist might have his/her conscious mind focused on a different goal, or even on avoiding the actual goal.
Now that "telegraphing" has to do with "symbols" and images and icons that we've discussed at length.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/turning-action-into-romance.html
That's my post on Icons and iconic book covers and movie posters.
Icons are two things simultaneously.
A) They are a shorthand representation of some complex, mostly subconscious, notion shared by a large group of people.
B) They are a means of planting, germinating and spreading that notion to the subconscious minds of others.
Think about that as the answer to the conundrum of Violence on TV being the cause of violence among children (and among the adults they will become) and the counter argument that no-way can mere stories affect the behavior of sane, well balanced, well parented children (or adults).
It's one of those chicken/egg problems.
In our current "Learn This In One Minute A Day" and "Computer Programming Made Simple" world, we default to the assumption that every question can be posed and answered as an either/or proposition (the duality view of reality, the binary view, the zero-sum-game view).
The question is formulated as "does violence on TV cause children to misbehave -- or NOT?" and then everyone rushes to take sides, without ever questioning the question itself.
Critical thinking (questioning the question is an example) is not taught in school by teachers who don't know their subjects but do have degrees in "Education" -- degrees they achieved because they didn't ever stand up in class and tell the Professor off for misleading the class into thinking that there exists such a process as "teaching."
In my personal view, there is no such thing as "teaching" -- but there is such a thing as "learning."
Brain research has shown how "learning" changes brain synaptic pathways, the generation of brain cells and their connections, the configuration of the brain is changed which is what learning is.
But where's the research that shows how "teaching" changes the teacher's brain?
THE KING AND I - wonderful book and film, (stageplay too) -- "by your students you'll be taught" -- sing it often.
So there's a world-view built on the idea that it's possible to "teach" without learning -- i.e. that imparting knowledge and skills is a one-way process.
More, that imparting knowledge and skills is a process that can be achieved on purpose, by training and skills in imparting knowledge etc.
In my personal world view that's nonsense. In my personal worldview knowledge and skills can be acquired. An environment rich in knowledge and skills may surround a person who is not (at a particular moment) being acquisitive, and that person will not acquire anything. When they turn acquisitive, they may acquire all kinds of things the "teacher" or "parent" had no clue they were imparting!
So as I see it, you can't deliberately, on purpose, make a person acquire a particular notion. People, even little ones, will take away from a situation the lesson that they, themselves, select -- regardless of what the teacher wants them to learn.
That is, kids are perverse and stubborn for the most part.
So how is it that notions get transmitted generation to generation? Where does culture come from and where does it reside within us?
I work on the model that culture resides in the subconscious which speaks the language of symbols.
By symbols we transmit notions.
Symbols in wide usage become Icons.
Icons that link a multitude of subconscious minds, giving them a "language" in common, create "markets." People who've found meaning in an Icon want to learn more about it.
"The Vampire" has become such an Icon today, and now The Zombie is cycling into that iconic role, and other "supernatural" and "mythological" creatures are being cycled into that niche.
Now look at the two TV Series, FRINGE and ROYAL PAINS.
FRINGE is about the structure of time, and the parameters of the Universes, collisions between Universes, the displacement of characters between universes, and how the human brain can be altered to facilitate Universe-travel.
FRINGE is a very complex, abstract, piece of "worldbuilding" -- and it actually has a "real science" base -- a "what if...?" question based on current suspicions about stars, galaxies, time, space, and sub-atomic particles.
The character of Peter has become iconic -- with the machine he gets spread-eagled into and transmitted across Universes. It's a Crucified position.
Who is "Peter"? He died in one universe, and his genius father then went to another universe where he was deathly ill and rescued him, brought him back to "our" universe where he'd invented a cure. Our character Peter grew up in our universe, only to discover he'd been kidnapped before he was old enough to remember. He tried to get back to his own universe, had problems (several seasons of TV shows worth of problems) and has been displaced into yet another universe.
In this built world of multiple universes, there are Time Cops of a sort, bald guys who flicker through Situations trying to straighten out the timeline. They tried to get rid of the individuals who were messing up the timeline. They tried to get rid of Peter - and he popped up in a lake in this third universe.
It's all very abstract, very confusing, and the "science" seems more ridiculous than the Star Trek science seemed in the 1960's. But guess what? Mundanes, people who don't particularly enjoy science fiction, watch and like this show.
It's a story about people, and about two Soul Mates with a cross-universe affinity. It's got a "mad scientist" stereotype with a twist, and with a heart who simply loves his son. For love, he will bend the universes into pretzels -- at least he will until he realizes the harm he's causing. Then he tries to fix it.
Now we're down to the thematic level with FRINGE. When you get to the level of people, what they do, what happens, and WHAT THEY LEARN FROM THE RESULTS OF THEIR ACTIONS, you are at the level of theme.
And that's where you encode the lessons learned into icons that communicate, generate markets, and proliferate imitations of a type of story.
FRINGE is a science based science fiction universe with a science fiction theme -- actions have consequences, choices have consequences, and even mad scientists are highly moral about taking responsibility for the results of their actions, especially actions based on knowledge they have that others do not have.
As with most science fiction, the TV series FRINGE just barely acknowledges the possibility there could be Divine fingers stirring up lives and events. If it's hinted at, it's more spooky than the science.
ROYAL PAINS is a totally mundane TV series about a doctor (Hank), a very creative Emergency Room physician with an ethical streak a mile wide who gets himself fired from a top tier job at a hospital because he put the immediate emergency of a poor patient ahead of an (apparently) less urgent medical issue of a very rich donor to the hospital.
That happened in the premier, and the TV Series Royal Pains is about this doctor's adventures when, on vacation in the Hamptons after getting fired, he solves a medical problem on the fly for a very rich person.
Hank goes into "Concierge" medicine, being on contract to the rich and famous who vacation in the Hamptons and ritzy surroundings. The "Royal Pains" of the title are the complaints of the rich and privileged, the very kind of people who, in the TV Series Leverage which we've discussed ...
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/tv-shows-leverage-and-psych.html
... are the ones who cause all the problems which the hero's group of barely reformed criminals must solve for the ordinary people who are the victims of the rich and famous.
In Royal Pains, most of the rich and famous, or rich and very not-famous-on-purpose (I mean that's really rich), turn out to be very nice people who don't deserve ill health, who do a lot of charity and public service, and are open to learning a lesson or two from Hank.
Hank "models" (without teaching) ways of solving problems and of getting along with people, of paying attention and taking people seriously even if they happen to be rich. Hank models respect for other human beings, regardless of what they appear to be on the surface.
We live in a world which is, right now, very conscious of the very different ways people live at different income levels. Hank completely lacks that consciousness.
He had a high paying job in a wealthy city. The next week he was impoverished, and on vacation only because he'd bought tickets already.
The next he was living in a mansion's cottage posher than anywhere he or his family could ever afford to live.
And he barely notices.
If he were a Magician, you would have to say he is living "On The Law Of Abundance."
He doesn't think about or worry about money or where it comes from. He focuses entirely on doing the right thing, the moral thing, the ethical thing.
Of course he has a brother who is an accountant who takes over the practical part of his life and creates the business known as Hankmed.
So where's the "Icon" -- it's "Concierge Medicine" -- and that business model is the modern doctor's equivalent of the writer's bizmod of the "self-published." He doesn't take insurance. His customers pay cash and never notice the expense. Or he treats people free because they're living hand-to-mouth.
Just as with the TV Series Leverage, the icon is the business model. But with the TV Series Royal Pains, we see a business model based on serving the rich and famous and thus imparting a notion to those who are receptive to it that their privileges are not due to their personal superiority. In the TV Series Leverage, the business model is based on the assumption that all the wealthy are irrevocably convinced of their inherent personal superiority, and the Team's mission is to disabuse them of that notion forcibly.
In the TV Series Fringe, we see an iconic Mad Scientist -- who has a sense of morality and an open hearted love for his son, who becomes an Icon.
In the TV Series Royal Pains we see a new icon, a Concierge Doctor who is part "McGiver" -- who has a sense of walking the world unthreatened, without fear, and with love for all.
Strip off the decorative details of either of these shows' Icons - each show with a nice, solid Market - and use the Icon as your springboard into a story in an original universe aimed at a Market that's already been Made.
Just be sure that your philosophical (i.e. thematic) statement is encoded in an Iconic Image that is understood by the target market. That can take some market-testing, but don't use people who know you personally.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/01/story-springboards-part-1-art-heists-by.html
With all the shifts in Publishing since the big publishers all ate each other up and turned over the editorial policies to committees and bean counters, the entire structure of "Gatekeepers" has morphed into something truly different.
By "Gatekeepers" writers usually mean folks who can say "no" to an author and make it stick, keeping the author away from the author's natural audience. This can be at the Agent level, the Editorial level, the Marketing level inside the big publishers, or the Bean Counter level.
Many authors whose books finally make it into traditional publishing channels, find their next book being rejected because the computers (also a new kind of gatekeeper that grew to dominance in the 1980's with the chain bookstores) just aren't returning the numbers.
When that happens, writers often take special notice of the immense drain that pirating has had on their sales (immense).
Writers whose books take off to become New York Times bestsellers usually don't notice that drain so soon. They're too busy writing their next book. Publishers, though, notice. They just can't do anything about it, (yet).
Everything they've tried has failed, and now Amazon is picking fights with distributors over the pricing of ebooks -- mostly because of a button TAG they put on some pages where people can note that the price is too high, or DRM deters them from purchasing.
In this environment of being swept round and round the tornado of change in the fiction delivery system due to ebooks, Print on Demand (POD) and Kindle and Nook readers, writers who are burning up with something to SAY feel they are not able to "reach" their audience.
Many tools have been launched in the last couple of years, and all those tools come and go (such as self-publishing, social networking promotion campaigns, YouTube Book Trailers).
But the question remains. How do you "reach" the audience you are writing for?
You'll see statistics that people are watching less TV -- less network TV, less Cable TV, canceling cable subscriptions for internet-only TV -- and here comes Apple TV. But the networks still exist.
By all accounts, profits are being made -- OK, it's more like the airline industry if you track the stocks -- but people do acquire and absorb TV series. They just don't slave themselves to a network broadcast schedule, and on the whole, are determined to avoid sitting through commercials.
Video fiction is "churning" under the impact of the digital revolution just as publishing is. But people still want fiction, and they want a wider choice.
Just as publishing feels they are competing with fanfic posted free online, video-fiction purveyors feel they are competing now on an almost-even footing with the Indie Film Maker, and web-based webisodes, (even webinars compete with classroom instruction).
So what is the creator of fictional universes to do to reach the hungry audience?
What happens next, (yes, this kind of cycle is repetitive throughout history) is called "Market Making."
To get the notion into your head, think of the publishing history of Harry Potter. At first it couldn't get sold. Then it went to an obscure publisher working into an obscure readership (kids) - then Scholastic here in the USA, then kids with cell phones and Facebook accounts took it viral, then it exploded as a "Market" cohered, demanding more-more-more so more books came out creating the series, then movies. I'm sure eventually a TV Series.
Now go study Vampire Diaries (CW network - and the books), and its history.
Here's a blog post that arose out of the copyright dispute the originator of Vampire Diaries has had with the publisher.
http://parafantasy.blogspot.com/2012/02/this-is-utterly-ridiculousi-cant-even.html
I dropped a comment on that blog pointing to the blog posts here in recent weeks:
APRIL 10, 2012 POST BELIEVING IN THE HAPPILY EVER AFTER PART 6
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/04/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-6.html
APRIL 17, 2012 POST BELIEVING IN THE HAPPILY EVER AFTER PART 7
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/04/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-7.html
-----------
I did note that your blog shows that you are young, and so my posts based on this issue are not personally about you, but about how to train to enter the writing profession, what to expect, and how to maneuver into a position where you can negotiate from strength.
Those interested should read up on the trademark and copyright history of "Superman" and other movie Icons from the early days.
Originally, actors did not get "residuals" -- they didn't get paid every time a film was shown. Then came TV, and reruns, and actors revolved, marched in union picket lines, and won a % payment every time a film they are in is shown on TV. At that point, the number of commercials inserted in films went up (where else would they get the money to pay?)
Every new technology has smashed the creative artists that the business and marketing people use to create the product they market. Right now, skirmish lines are being drawn again. You've fingered one of the jig-jags in that skirmish line, the "work for hire" provision of the 1970's revamping of the copyright laws.
I believe your post shows brilliance and a huge potential as a writer. But it also points up the sore need for people to learn about the 1970's, and how well-meaning actions of that time, rooted in an understanding of the technology shift between 1920 and 1960, are shaping the skirmish lines today.
Artists (writers, actors, animators, film makers) can't win this battle if we don't know what the core of the battle is about.
What may happen is that, without understanding the import of the impact of the new technologies, the well meaning and morally correct actions may create an even worse problem for artists working in the world that will exist 40 years hence.
So boring as it is, the history lesson is necessary, but I'm not the one to teach that lesson!
I'm a science fiction writer, a futurologist, and my whole focus is on that world that will exist 40 years hence, and more.
You do not deserve to be bashed for bringing this point to the surface. You deserve to be celebrated.
But I for one am crushed that your taste for Vampire fiction has abated, because I write Vampire stories, novels, and now I've just turned in an anthology of Vampire stories by writers of Vampire fanfic who have gone pro with original universe stories.
Of course, I also write many other sorts of novels, so maybe you'll find one you do enjoy. House of Zeor might be a likely candidate. Or if you like doctor novels, try Unto Zeor, Forever.
--------------
So studying these Market Making works, and contrasting and comparing with the two TV shows Fringe and Royal Pains, what do we learn?
Consider the elements I focused on in this post:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-learn-to-use-theme-as-art.html
And here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/communicating-in-symbols.html
Now remember this post from my writing craft blog on constructing openings:
http://editingcircle.blogspot.com/2009/03/in-beginning.html
It's about the protagonist's goal at the opening -- and of course, how that changes by The End (i.e. how the character arcs).
In one of the comments, I pointed out how it is possible to telegraph the Protag's goal to the reader without the Protag actually knowing what his/her goal is. That is the goal that will be achieved at the ending in order to resolve the conflict, but the protagonist might have his/her conscious mind focused on a different goal, or even on avoiding the actual goal.
Now that "telegraphing" has to do with "symbols" and images and icons that we've discussed at length.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/turning-action-into-romance.html
That's my post on Icons and iconic book covers and movie posters.
Icons are two things simultaneously.
A) They are a shorthand representation of some complex, mostly subconscious, notion shared by a large group of people.
B) They are a means of planting, germinating and spreading that notion to the subconscious minds of others.
Think about that as the answer to the conundrum of Violence on TV being the cause of violence among children (and among the adults they will become) and the counter argument that no-way can mere stories affect the behavior of sane, well balanced, well parented children (or adults).
It's one of those chicken/egg problems.
In our current "Learn This In One Minute A Day" and "Computer Programming Made Simple" world, we default to the assumption that every question can be posed and answered as an either/or proposition (the duality view of reality, the binary view, the zero-sum-game view).
The question is formulated as "does violence on TV cause children to misbehave -- or NOT?" and then everyone rushes to take sides, without ever questioning the question itself.
Critical thinking (questioning the question is an example) is not taught in school by teachers who don't know their subjects but do have degrees in "Education" -- degrees they achieved because they didn't ever stand up in class and tell the Professor off for misleading the class into thinking that there exists such a process as "teaching."
In my personal view, there is no such thing as "teaching" -- but there is such a thing as "learning."
Brain research has shown how "learning" changes brain synaptic pathways, the generation of brain cells and their connections, the configuration of the brain is changed which is what learning is.
But where's the research that shows how "teaching" changes the teacher's brain?
THE KING AND I - wonderful book and film, (stageplay too) -- "by your students you'll be taught" -- sing it often.
So there's a world-view built on the idea that it's possible to "teach" without learning -- i.e. that imparting knowledge and skills is a one-way process.
More, that imparting knowledge and skills is a process that can be achieved on purpose, by training and skills in imparting knowledge etc.
In my personal world view that's nonsense. In my personal worldview knowledge and skills can be acquired. An environment rich in knowledge and skills may surround a person who is not (at a particular moment) being acquisitive, and that person will not acquire anything. When they turn acquisitive, they may acquire all kinds of things the "teacher" or "parent" had no clue they were imparting!
So as I see it, you can't deliberately, on purpose, make a person acquire a particular notion. People, even little ones, will take away from a situation the lesson that they, themselves, select -- regardless of what the teacher wants them to learn.
That is, kids are perverse and stubborn for the most part.
So how is it that notions get transmitted generation to generation? Where does culture come from and where does it reside within us?
I work on the model that culture resides in the subconscious which speaks the language of symbols.
By symbols we transmit notions.
Symbols in wide usage become Icons.
Icons that link a multitude of subconscious minds, giving them a "language" in common, create "markets." People who've found meaning in an Icon want to learn more about it.
"The Vampire" has become such an Icon today, and now The Zombie is cycling into that iconic role, and other "supernatural" and "mythological" creatures are being cycled into that niche.
Now look at the two TV Series, FRINGE and ROYAL PAINS.
FRINGE is about the structure of time, and the parameters of the Universes, collisions between Universes, the displacement of characters between universes, and how the human brain can be altered to facilitate Universe-travel.
FRINGE is a very complex, abstract, piece of "worldbuilding" -- and it actually has a "real science" base -- a "what if...?" question based on current suspicions about stars, galaxies, time, space, and sub-atomic particles.
The character of Peter has become iconic -- with the machine he gets spread-eagled into and transmitted across Universes. It's a Crucified position.
Who is "Peter"? He died in one universe, and his genius father then went to another universe where he was deathly ill and rescued him, brought him back to "our" universe where he'd invented a cure. Our character Peter grew up in our universe, only to discover he'd been kidnapped before he was old enough to remember. He tried to get back to his own universe, had problems (several seasons of TV shows worth of problems) and has been displaced into yet another universe.
In this built world of multiple universes, there are Time Cops of a sort, bald guys who flicker through Situations trying to straighten out the timeline. They tried to get rid of the individuals who were messing up the timeline. They tried to get rid of Peter - and he popped up in a lake in this third universe.
It's all very abstract, very confusing, and the "science" seems more ridiculous than the Star Trek science seemed in the 1960's. But guess what? Mundanes, people who don't particularly enjoy science fiction, watch and like this show.
It's a story about people, and about two Soul Mates with a cross-universe affinity. It's got a "mad scientist" stereotype with a twist, and with a heart who simply loves his son. For love, he will bend the universes into pretzels -- at least he will until he realizes the harm he's causing. Then he tries to fix it.
Now we're down to the thematic level with FRINGE. When you get to the level of people, what they do, what happens, and WHAT THEY LEARN FROM THE RESULTS OF THEIR ACTIONS, you are at the level of theme.
And that's where you encode the lessons learned into icons that communicate, generate markets, and proliferate imitations of a type of story.
FRINGE is a science based science fiction universe with a science fiction theme -- actions have consequences, choices have consequences, and even mad scientists are highly moral about taking responsibility for the results of their actions, especially actions based on knowledge they have that others do not have.
As with most science fiction, the TV series FRINGE just barely acknowledges the possibility there could be Divine fingers stirring up lives and events. If it's hinted at, it's more spooky than the science.
ROYAL PAINS is a totally mundane TV series about a doctor (Hank), a very creative Emergency Room physician with an ethical streak a mile wide who gets himself fired from a top tier job at a hospital because he put the immediate emergency of a poor patient ahead of an (apparently) less urgent medical issue of a very rich donor to the hospital.
That happened in the premier, and the TV Series Royal Pains is about this doctor's adventures when, on vacation in the Hamptons after getting fired, he solves a medical problem on the fly for a very rich person.
Hank goes into "Concierge" medicine, being on contract to the rich and famous who vacation in the Hamptons and ritzy surroundings. The "Royal Pains" of the title are the complaints of the rich and privileged, the very kind of people who, in the TV Series Leverage which we've discussed ...
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/tv-shows-leverage-and-psych.html
... are the ones who cause all the problems which the hero's group of barely reformed criminals must solve for the ordinary people who are the victims of the rich and famous.
In Royal Pains, most of the rich and famous, or rich and very not-famous-on-purpose (I mean that's really rich), turn out to be very nice people who don't deserve ill health, who do a lot of charity and public service, and are open to learning a lesson or two from Hank.
Hank "models" (without teaching) ways of solving problems and of getting along with people, of paying attention and taking people seriously even if they happen to be rich. Hank models respect for other human beings, regardless of what they appear to be on the surface.
We live in a world which is, right now, very conscious of the very different ways people live at different income levels. Hank completely lacks that consciousness.
He had a high paying job in a wealthy city. The next week he was impoverished, and on vacation only because he'd bought tickets already.
The next he was living in a mansion's cottage posher than anywhere he or his family could ever afford to live.
And he barely notices.
If he were a Magician, you would have to say he is living "On The Law Of Abundance."
He doesn't think about or worry about money or where it comes from. He focuses entirely on doing the right thing, the moral thing, the ethical thing.
Of course he has a brother who is an accountant who takes over the practical part of his life and creates the business known as Hankmed.
So where's the "Icon" -- it's "Concierge Medicine" -- and that business model is the modern doctor's equivalent of the writer's bizmod of the "self-published." He doesn't take insurance. His customers pay cash and never notice the expense. Or he treats people free because they're living hand-to-mouth.
Just as with the TV Series Leverage, the icon is the business model. But with the TV Series Royal Pains, we see a business model based on serving the rich and famous and thus imparting a notion to those who are receptive to it that their privileges are not due to their personal superiority. In the TV Series Leverage, the business model is based on the assumption that all the wealthy are irrevocably convinced of their inherent personal superiority, and the Team's mission is to disabuse them of that notion forcibly.
In the TV Series Fringe, we see an iconic Mad Scientist -- who has a sense of morality and an open hearted love for his son, who becomes an Icon.
In the TV Series Royal Pains we see a new icon, a Concierge Doctor who is part "McGiver" -- who has a sense of walking the world unthreatened, without fear, and with love for all.
Strip off the decorative details of either of these shows' Icons - each show with a nice, solid Market - and use the Icon as your springboard into a story in an original universe aimed at a Market that's already been Made.
Just be sure that your philosophical (i.e. thematic) statement is encoded in an Iconic Image that is understood by the target market. That can take some market-testing, but don't use people who know you personally.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Believing in Happily Ever After Part 4: Nesting Huge Themes Inside Each Other
Last week we looked at two conflict sets that form the basis for huge thematic statements that can be simplified down to something as stark and elegant as the underpinnings of the TV show Leverage. Now we'll see if we can combine these 4 thematic elements into a set of themes that generate conflicts and thus plots for large, multi-point of view novels as we began discussing in
Verisimilitude vs. Reality Part 2 September 13,2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-2-master.htmlVerisimilitude vs. Reality Part 3, September 20, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-3-game.html
The previous posts in this series were posted on:
October 4, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-1.htmlOctober 11, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-2.htmlOctober 18, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-3.html
Secret vs. Private + Standardized vs. Customized
You can "nest" those two sets of conflicts to produce a huge novel with a dizzying array of Point of View Characters.
You can nest them because they are philosophically related. If you can explicate that philosophical relationship all in Show and without any Tell (i.e. tell the story in pictures, in icons and images) you will have a masterpiece of commentary on the current human condition.
To start, note that in a Standardized culture anything about you that you don't hang right out in public is going to be regarded as grounds for suspicion about you.
Why is that?
Think about it.
In a Standardized culture, we're all alike. So if there's something about you that you aren't forthcoming about, then it must be something that identifies you as "Different" -- as unacceptable. It has to be something you're ashamed of, because after all we're all the same, so why would you keep it secret?
Once you've seen a naked woman, you've seen a naked woman.
Why would any woman "hide" their nakedness (or any part of their body) from you when all women are the same? Men, too, for that matter. What's to hide?
If you're not displaying your nakedness for all to see, you are keeping something secret. It's only logical.
There's physical nakedness, and there's psychological nakedness. In a Standardized culture, if you're not as naked as everyone else, you're not politically correct. You're keeping something secret.
In a Standardized culture (science fiction extrapolation to vast extreme for the sake of illustration), there can be no such thing as "private." There is only "secret." And in a Standardized culture, secret is evil.
Why is secret evil? Because something different might undermine the standardization of everyone.
In a Customized culture, on the other hand, there can be secrets and some of them may be about Evil, but most of what you don't know about another person is just private, and you're really not curious at all about other people's private business. You have your own private business to fill up the empty spaces inside you.
That's right, in a Customized (carry to extremes, remember? It's a principle of screenwriting) culture, a seriously totally customized culture, people would still be intensely curious about all kinds of things, but never about someone else's private business.
In a Customized culture, people don't dress or talk all alike. In a Standardized culture, they do.
In the 1950's, each year brought a specific fashion-necessary hemline length. If you couldn't afford a new dress (women didn't wear pants much), then you took up or let down the hemlines to within a half-inch of the specified proper fashion, usually sewing by hand. Standardization reigned in car-manufacturing, and in fashion. Uniform spelling was not just admired but an absolute requirement. Radio announcers had even become standardized for accent. (today you hear regional accents on TV announcers -- in the 1950's you didn't., though regional accents were more redolent.)
In the 2010's, walk along any street and see some women in pants suits, others in jeans, ankle length skirts, mini-skirts, all going the same place.
The other day I saw a video clip of a bunch of people walking out of the White House after a high level conference they were reporting on. I watched the women. They ALL wore skirt-suits (not a one of dozens wore a pants suit), and the skirts were above the knee in every case. Their dress for business wear had become standardized to a new standard. Even just 5 years ago, there were lots of pants suits in such shots. Remember Hilary Clinton wore and still wears pants suits more than anything else.
In between, there was a trend where women on TV non-fiction shows (there was a time when no TV anchor on a news show was female) all wore suits, sometimes with tailored shirts and ties, sometimes pants suits, but sometimes skirt-suits and they weren't mini-skirt suits.
I've taken a recent poll cruising news shows. All the newswomen are showing a lot of skin, cleavage, and often wear skin-tight dresses with cleavage and no sleeves, showing more of themselves than they would in a bathing suit. Just a few years ago, those same women wore suits with jackets when seen among men wearing suits with jackets. Today, female reporters stand on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (which is being bought by the Germans) among men in suits, but the women are showing cleavage and lots of skin, or if it's cold outside, they wear very tight sweaters.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/15/dboerse-nyse-idUSN1E76E16C20110715
And the Germans have a very different culture than the U.S.A. does. As much as German culture (via immigrants) has influenced us, we are still very different.
I'm not passing value judgements here. I'm surveying details that sketch the context of your reader's real-world, against which they judge the plausibility of your fictional world. I'm selecting details here that infer other types of details. Think about the reasons for these fashion shifts. This is how you "build" a world for your characters from the substance of your theme. When you build your fictional world from the elements of your reader's real world, the readers will believe your entire story - it will seem plausible. Your reader reads about how people dress, and your reader infers the value system of the culture in which those characters walk abroad.
Women wore suits to be like men, or to seek respect for not presenting themselves as a sex object.
There was a cultural conflict there generating that fashion choice -- the striving to be taken seriously. In prior times, women news reporters were never allowed to report on business stories or crimes (or from the locker room at a sporting event). Women reporters covered women's stories only. Nothing a woman said was ever taken seriously.
Today that cultural conflict is gone, and women are behaving as if they can be taken seriously and display as much skin as they (or the news producers) want. Yes, it seems the real reason for the cleavage display is that sex sells. Nothing rivets a man's attention like cleavage and the producers (even the women producers) of news shows see that in their ratings demographics. But the men don't wear wet T-shirts to display a six-pack.
I've seen prime time hard-news TV shows with a female anchor and a couple of female reporters, all showing a lot of skin, and reporting on serious news. Big change, and I haven't seen anyone note it even in passing.
The writer's eye must observe these things and translate the visuals into thematic substance.
Compare that cultural shift to the one described in the article I sited earlier in this Believing In Happily Ever After series about the increasing internet speeds and what enterprise has been able to do with that technological advance.
Here's the link again:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/07/speed-matters/
Microsoft and Google, the two publicly traded titans who, along with amazon.com, reign supreme in the Customized culture, actually operate on the old Standardized Worker-bee model. Though their products are created by wildly dressed individuals, they are developed and marketed by standardized workers, in standard business suits.
Consider that Facebook became a publicly traded company in 2011. Now Google has launched Google+ a serious competitor to Facebook. Google+ is another example of a user customizable service that's standardized on the back end.
I was talking with an employee of GoDaddy the other day about this very thing, and we agreed that GoDaddy is the Home Depot of the digital world (GoDaddy is a do-it-yourself website hosting service with customer service phone answerers who really know what they're talking about just as Home Depot clerks know what the products on their shelves actually do).
While GoDaddy is enabling individuals to create totally Customized (or templated Standardized; your choice) websites, they treat their employees like identical worker-bees, and pay really low wages, rewarding the best sales people with bonuses. (Sears does the same, as do many department stores).
At GoDaddy the art staff gets paid less than the customer service reps, according to my informant.
Well, that's how it used to be. Things may be changing there, too. See this?
http://mashable.com/2011/07/02/godaddy-sold/
GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain registrar, has been sold to three private equity firms in a deal valued at $2.25 billion, the company announced in early July 2011.
So these successful businesses (creating those rich folks who take what they want) are now hybrids of the Standardized and Customized cultures.
They sell customizable products (all the same out of the box; you make them different), but manufacture them in a Standardized Henry Ford style way. Do you smell a conflict generating a plot yet?
Now, you all know of the "privacy" issues on the internet, and the hacking incursions into bank records, even personal cell phones of celebrities.
Take that "real" world your reader lives in, slice and dice it just as you sliced and diced the TV Show Leverage which we discussed in Part 2 of this series.
Build an alien culture from one of these sets of themes, and a futuristic (extrapolated to extreme) human culture from the other set, put them in CONFLICT over a problem, resolve the problem, and you have a major novel that seethes with Romance one way or another, because the only thing that can Conquer this stuff is Love.
In the Standardized culture in which every instinct to Privacy is regarded as keeping illicit Secrets, the unique individual strives to 'break free' of a stultifying oppression. The Standardization is the problem.
In The Customized culture in which Privacy is treasured (what happens in the family, stays in the family), the Businessman who seeks to maximize profits via standardizing both workers and products, strives to hammer slippery individuals into shape and make everyone want the same thing. The Individualization, the sacredness of privacy, is the problem.
In a previous post we discussed the origins of the science of Public Relations. You should read the wikipedia article on PR and advertising.
Here are 3 posts on PR and altering the perception of reality in the way described above with fashion.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/glenn-beck-didnt-invent-overton-window.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/01/failure-of-imagination-part-4-teasing.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-to-change-perception-of-romance.html
Remember the principle, create a frustration then sell the solution and alter the general perception of reality.
To get the greater readership to accept the reality of the Happily Ever After ending, that ending has to become the solution to their greatest frustration -- like increasing internet speed and selling data connections by the megabyte.
The greatest frustration out there right now is the conflict between the innate (and I believe intrinsic in human nature) desire for individual uniqueness to be recognized (i.e. unconditional love) and the survival-instinct need to hunker down as one of the herd, to be a worker-bee and get a paycheck, to use the most popular brand of shampoo.
God Forbid anyone should think you're Different - because you know you are. That's CONFLICT the very essence of STORY. But more than that, it's the essence of Romance, because Romance starts with the impact of the vision of a future where you are not alone in your privacy.
The desire to be unique, and yet the same, and also recognized and appreciated for your individual uniqueness is the "problem" in the us vs. a problem conflict formula.
Right now, our genera population can't see Love Conquers All as the solution to that uniting problem in our culture.
Use Art to demonstrate that solution, and sell big time.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Verisimilitude vs. Reality Part 2 September 13,2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-2-master.htmlVerisimilitude vs. Reality Part 3, September 20, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-3-game.html
The previous posts in this series were posted on:
October 4, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-1.htmlOctober 11, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-2.htmlOctober 18, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-3.html
Secret vs. Private + Standardized vs. Customized
You can "nest" those two sets of conflicts to produce a huge novel with a dizzying array of Point of View Characters.
You can nest them because they are philosophically related. If you can explicate that philosophical relationship all in Show and without any Tell (i.e. tell the story in pictures, in icons and images) you will have a masterpiece of commentary on the current human condition.
To start, note that in a Standardized culture anything about you that you don't hang right out in public is going to be regarded as grounds for suspicion about you.
Why is that?
Think about it.
In a Standardized culture, we're all alike. So if there's something about you that you aren't forthcoming about, then it must be something that identifies you as "Different" -- as unacceptable. It has to be something you're ashamed of, because after all we're all the same, so why would you keep it secret?
Once you've seen a naked woman, you've seen a naked woman.
Why would any woman "hide" their nakedness (or any part of their body) from you when all women are the same? Men, too, for that matter. What's to hide?
If you're not displaying your nakedness for all to see, you are keeping something secret. It's only logical.
There's physical nakedness, and there's psychological nakedness. In a Standardized culture, if you're not as naked as everyone else, you're not politically correct. You're keeping something secret.
In a Standardized culture (science fiction extrapolation to vast extreme for the sake of illustration), there can be no such thing as "private." There is only "secret." And in a Standardized culture, secret is evil.
Why is secret evil? Because something different might undermine the standardization of everyone.
In a Customized culture, on the other hand, there can be secrets and some of them may be about Evil, but most of what you don't know about another person is just private, and you're really not curious at all about other people's private business. You have your own private business to fill up the empty spaces inside you.
That's right, in a Customized (carry to extremes, remember? It's a principle of screenwriting) culture, a seriously totally customized culture, people would still be intensely curious about all kinds of things, but never about someone else's private business.
In a Customized culture, people don't dress or talk all alike. In a Standardized culture, they do.
In the 1950's, each year brought a specific fashion-necessary hemline length. If you couldn't afford a new dress (women didn't wear pants much), then you took up or let down the hemlines to within a half-inch of the specified proper fashion, usually sewing by hand. Standardization reigned in car-manufacturing, and in fashion. Uniform spelling was not just admired but an absolute requirement. Radio announcers had even become standardized for accent. (today you hear regional accents on TV announcers -- in the 1950's you didn't., though regional accents were more redolent.)
In the 2010's, walk along any street and see some women in pants suits, others in jeans, ankle length skirts, mini-skirts, all going the same place.
The other day I saw a video clip of a bunch of people walking out of the White House after a high level conference they were reporting on. I watched the women. They ALL wore skirt-suits (not a one of dozens wore a pants suit), and the skirts were above the knee in every case. Their dress for business wear had become standardized to a new standard. Even just 5 years ago, there were lots of pants suits in such shots. Remember Hilary Clinton wore and still wears pants suits more than anything else.
In between, there was a trend where women on TV non-fiction shows (there was a time when no TV anchor on a news show was female) all wore suits, sometimes with tailored shirts and ties, sometimes pants suits, but sometimes skirt-suits and they weren't mini-skirt suits.
I've taken a recent poll cruising news shows. All the newswomen are showing a lot of skin, cleavage, and often wear skin-tight dresses with cleavage and no sleeves, showing more of themselves than they would in a bathing suit. Just a few years ago, those same women wore suits with jackets when seen among men wearing suits with jackets. Today, female reporters stand on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (which is being bought by the Germans) among men in suits, but the women are showing cleavage and lots of skin, or if it's cold outside, they wear very tight sweaters.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/15/dboerse-nyse-idUSN1E76E16C20110715
And the Germans have a very different culture than the U.S.A. does. As much as German culture (via immigrants) has influenced us, we are still very different.
I'm not passing value judgements here. I'm surveying details that sketch the context of your reader's real-world, against which they judge the plausibility of your fictional world. I'm selecting details here that infer other types of details. Think about the reasons for these fashion shifts. This is how you "build" a world for your characters from the substance of your theme. When you build your fictional world from the elements of your reader's real world, the readers will believe your entire story - it will seem plausible. Your reader reads about how people dress, and your reader infers the value system of the culture in which those characters walk abroad.
Women wore suits to be like men, or to seek respect for not presenting themselves as a sex object.
There was a cultural conflict there generating that fashion choice -- the striving to be taken seriously. In prior times, women news reporters were never allowed to report on business stories or crimes (or from the locker room at a sporting event). Women reporters covered women's stories only. Nothing a woman said was ever taken seriously.
Today that cultural conflict is gone, and women are behaving as if they can be taken seriously and display as much skin as they (or the news producers) want. Yes, it seems the real reason for the cleavage display is that sex sells. Nothing rivets a man's attention like cleavage and the producers (even the women producers) of news shows see that in their ratings demographics. But the men don't wear wet T-shirts to display a six-pack.
I've seen prime time hard-news TV shows with a female anchor and a couple of female reporters, all showing a lot of skin, and reporting on serious news. Big change, and I haven't seen anyone note it even in passing.
The writer's eye must observe these things and translate the visuals into thematic substance.
Compare that cultural shift to the one described in the article I sited earlier in this Believing In Happily Ever After series about the increasing internet speeds and what enterprise has been able to do with that technological advance.
Here's the link again:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/07/speed-matters/
Microsoft and Google, the two publicly traded titans who, along with amazon.com, reign supreme in the Customized culture, actually operate on the old Standardized Worker-bee model. Though their products are created by wildly dressed individuals, they are developed and marketed by standardized workers, in standard business suits.
Consider that Facebook became a publicly traded company in 2011. Now Google has launched Google+ a serious competitor to Facebook. Google+ is another example of a user customizable service that's standardized on the back end.
I was talking with an employee of GoDaddy the other day about this very thing, and we agreed that GoDaddy is the Home Depot of the digital world (GoDaddy is a do-it-yourself website hosting service with customer service phone answerers who really know what they're talking about just as Home Depot clerks know what the products on their shelves actually do).
While GoDaddy is enabling individuals to create totally Customized (or templated Standardized; your choice) websites, they treat their employees like identical worker-bees, and pay really low wages, rewarding the best sales people with bonuses. (Sears does the same, as do many department stores).
At GoDaddy the art staff gets paid less than the customer service reps, according to my informant.
Well, that's how it used to be. Things may be changing there, too. See this?
http://mashable.com/2011/07/02/godaddy-sold/
GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain registrar, has been sold to three private equity firms in a deal valued at $2.25 billion, the company announced in early July 2011.
So these successful businesses (creating those rich folks who take what they want) are now hybrids of the Standardized and Customized cultures.
They sell customizable products (all the same out of the box; you make them different), but manufacture them in a Standardized Henry Ford style way. Do you smell a conflict generating a plot yet?
Now, you all know of the "privacy" issues on the internet, and the hacking incursions into bank records, even personal cell phones of celebrities.
Take that "real" world your reader lives in, slice and dice it just as you sliced and diced the TV Show Leverage which we discussed in Part 2 of this series.
Build an alien culture from one of these sets of themes, and a futuristic (extrapolated to extreme) human culture from the other set, put them in CONFLICT over a problem, resolve the problem, and you have a major novel that seethes with Romance one way or another, because the only thing that can Conquer this stuff is Love.
In the Standardized culture in which every instinct to Privacy is regarded as keeping illicit Secrets, the unique individual strives to 'break free' of a stultifying oppression. The Standardization is the problem.
In The Customized culture in which Privacy is treasured (what happens in the family, stays in the family), the Businessman who seeks to maximize profits via standardizing both workers and products, strives to hammer slippery individuals into shape and make everyone want the same thing. The Individualization, the sacredness of privacy, is the problem.
In a previous post we discussed the origins of the science of Public Relations. You should read the wikipedia article on PR and advertising.
Here are 3 posts on PR and altering the perception of reality in the way described above with fashion.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/glenn-beck-didnt-invent-overton-window.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/01/failure-of-imagination-part-4-teasing.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-to-change-perception-of-romance.html
Remember the principle, create a frustration then sell the solution and alter the general perception of reality.
To get the greater readership to accept the reality of the Happily Ever After ending, that ending has to become the solution to their greatest frustration -- like increasing internet speed and selling data connections by the megabyte.
The greatest frustration out there right now is the conflict between the innate (and I believe intrinsic in human nature) desire for individual uniqueness to be recognized (i.e. unconditional love) and the survival-instinct need to hunker down as one of the herd, to be a worker-bee and get a paycheck, to use the most popular brand of shampoo.
God Forbid anyone should think you're Different - because you know you are. That's CONFLICT the very essence of STORY. But more than that, it's the essence of Romance, because Romance starts with the impact of the vision of a future where you are not alone in your privacy.
The desire to be unique, and yet the same, and also recognized and appreciated for your individual uniqueness is the "problem" in the us vs. a problem conflict formula.
Right now, our genera population can't see Love Conquers All as the solution to that uniting problem in our culture.
Use Art to demonstrate that solution, and sell big time.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Believing in Happily Ever After Part 3: Standardization vs. Customization
Part 1 of this "Believing in Happily Ever After" series is:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-1.html
Part 2 is:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-2.html
Last week, we left off in the midst of examining the TV Show Leverage noting that Leverage has a "Tell Don't Show" opening that sets out the premise starkly, and explicitly states the theme.
The opening voice-over is:
"The Rich And Powerful take what they want. We steal it back for you."
Now we're putting that TV show's premise and theme into the context of the world of the viewers it's aimed at, (you and me, actually, though Leverage is not a Romance.)
Consider, this is a world in which huge social forces (not the least of which is the Internet and dot-com companies that are going "public" on the stock exchange and wielding more power than any other kind of company before) are striving in two directions, creating conflict and a philosophical argument so big it's nearly impossible to see or define.
I parse it this way. (do your own parsing).
I see, via Leverage's window on the philosophical/fiction-theme world, the conflict as Customization Vs. Standardization.
Remember all the times I've sent you to read Alvin Toffler's non-fiction book, Future Shock. He gave me the insight to be able to see things in this light now.
Remember that the Essence of Story is Conflict.
Plot is a sequence of events on a because-line -- because this happened we have a problem, which causes us to do this, which results in that, which causes us to do something else, and so on because-because- in unbroken chain all the way to problem-is-resolved.
The conflict is Us vs. Problem.
The conflict is resolved by a sequence of actions which resolve the conflict -- after the problem is solved, there is no further conflict. (Happily Ever After)
Out there in our everyday reality, the reality your reader lives in and uses to judge the 'plausibility' of your fictional worldbuilding, there are nested conflicts.
We discussed nesting plots in Verisimilitude Vs. Reality parts 2 and 3, September 13 and 20, 2011.
To create nested plots, you need nested conflicts, which means you divide one huge abstract theme into sub-themes, factoring a philosophical conundrum into smaller pieces and arranging them one inside the other, like Russian dolls.
So I'm looking through the window of a TV show (in this case Leverage, but this process works with any show, movie or novel) - and imagining the audience, the reality they live in, what they know about it and what they don't know about it. I'm imagining the audience that Leverage is speaking to.
People love this show for a reason -- well, each person for a different reason -- but they see the show as trivial, as light entertainment, and of course it's not real. But it's plausible for a reason. We as writers need to know that reason. Or reasons.
The audience's emotional reactions come from their own unconscious assumptions and mostly from what they don't know about themselves.
Playing on that unconscious part of a reader's mind is called "art."
Remember in the Big Love Sci-Fi series we discussed the social boundaries between Private and Secret shifting, melting and reforming.
That's one of the huge philosophical issues younger readers are unaware of but affected by emotionally.
So private vs. secret can be a thematic conflict line that generates a plot (thousands of plots).
Another conflict line even bigger than private vs. secret can be Standardization vs. Customization
So let's make a little list:
CONFLICTS:
a) Secret vs. Private
b) Customization vs. Standardization
c) Statistics vs. Prejudice
Each of these 6 components of conflict represents a huge, complex, abstract, and powerful thematic concept.
Let's think about Customization vs. Standardization in our world and how we can use that nascent argument to create plot generating themes and conflicts.
In the 1800's the Industrial Revolution took off steaming into the 1900s where Henry Ford popularized The Assembly Line method of producing thousands of identical copies of a complicated thing.
The more complex machinery became, the less economically viable hand-building such machines became. With Ford's advent, the frustration of business men and industrialists with "craftsmen" who worked slowly and methodically to produce a non-uniform (custom made) product was resolved.
Read Toffler's Future Shock and the description of how our public schools adopted the "covert curriculum" of hammering kids into identical "workers" for assembly lines, because that's what Big Business needed schools to do (and of course Big Business was and is the source of political campaign funds that can not be ignored).
So until the World Wide Web, Microsoft, AOL, Google, Blogs, email, ebooks, etc, Standardization was the Holy Grail of Business.
Products had to be made uniform -- all alike -- or it wasn't cost effective.
But people weren't all alike. So business set out to create consumers who all wanted the same thing.
Radio advertising and then TV advertising worked to satisfy that requirement -- that uniform products required uniform consumers to want them, and uniformity was the solution to consumer's frustration with things that don't work.
Different Is Dead became the rallying cry of the 1940's and 1950's.
The 1960's brought the Internet and Star Trek and Spock who was DIFFERENT!!!
Star Trek portrayed on the ultra-uniform medium of series TV a UNIQUE INDIVIDUAL character. He stuck out like a sore thumb, and was admired, respected, obeyed and even loved by his crew-mates for his differences.
Vulcan was a culture that lauded the philosophy of I.D.I.C. -- Infinite Diversity In Infinite Combinations.
The 1970's ushered in an era of (Alvin Toffler's Future Shock was published in the 1970's and is in new editions today) an era of CUSTOMIZATION.
Toffler predicted the cottage industry of telecommuting and even named it. Today a lot of your customer service online is done via chat by workers working from home on customized schedules and individually varying computers.
Women's Lib and Martin Luther King all belong to this, but branch off into the conflict of Statistics vs. Prejudice.
Let's focus on this Customization vs. Standardization for a bit more.
This is a huge, multigeneration trend that most of your 20-something readers won't be aware of because this long perspective on history isn't taught in schools, nor is the philosophy behind it addressed below graduate level in college.
We are now in the crunch-zone of this conflict. Schools world wide hammer young kids into identical bricks.
The counter trend is only found in private schools for the gifted or rejected, schools that let young kids wander around a rich classroom and pick up things to learn about as they become interested.
Mass market education is still aimed at turning out identical product - workers for factories that no longer really exist.
Note how the Federal Department of Education (I'm in the USA and use that perspective), could be viewed as a huge and bloated agency created by combining agencies and then not purging out redundancies but rather fighting turf wars for good paying federal jobs. As a result of that, and various administrations (this is not party-specific) efforts to appease campaign finance sources and do the right thing by our kids anyway, we now have a Federal series of tests that all students have to pass.
That's standardizing people to function in a standardized world.
But as Toffler pointed out, we're not in a standardized world any more.
Small wonder we can't produce enough employable people. Small wonder there are whole segments of TV viewerships who see their lives as mashed down and unjustly ruined by these huge forces -- "the rich" or "the government" or whatever huge thing their squeaky voices can't reach.
That plight produces emotions that are likewise widespread. As a result, fiction that would not otherwise be popular, is popular.
Think like a Romance Writer for a moment. Can Romance be standardized?
Or is Romance the enemy of standardization?
Here's an article, I hope is still online, about facial recognition software, facebook, google, and online dating sites -- and the whole issue of using your "real" identity online.
http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/08/04/7254996-your-face-and-the-web-can-tell-everything-about-you
Remember the popularity of the Western Romance.
What are Western Romances about? Rugged individualists (not unlike the A-Team or the Leverage team).
Victorian Romance, Steampunk, you name it -- Romance is always about the misfit's unique qualification to succeed because of their differences not in spite of them. (so is Science Fiction, for that matter) And the TV show Leverage, the show Psych, the USA shows White Collar, Burn Notice, Royal Pains -- all of them feature unique individuals.
This country was founded by folks who didn't fit the mold back home and went pioneering into the wilderness. Those who survived to forge this country into a Nation were individualists who visualized a customized world, where each individual was valued for their unique qualities.
They lived in a "handmade world" where no two quilts were alike, no two butter churns were alike. People wrote with quills - bird feathers - and no two of them are alike. In fact, if you read original manuscripts from the 1700's even the most educated and erudite did not spell words in any uniform way, not even in the same document.. And precious few could read, though in the 1700's in America, that was changing.
Has anyone noted that there is a re-casting of the newspaper articles from the 1700's where folks were arguing about what kind of Nation we would become? It's in modern English now because the originals are almost incomprehensible, (wild spelling, archaic words, involuted sentences like I write) and it became an overnight New York Times best seller. The Federalist Papers. It's on amazon.com.
Standardization wasn't even a concept back then. There was no conflict, not a lot of stories to write, about the vast sea of identical people and the one individual who stands out from "the masses." "The Masses" as a concept didn't exist, though philosophical theorists were busily inventing the whole movement we label as "Liberal" or "Progressive" today.
One novel series I do love from that era though is Cooper's The Leather Stocking Tales. The story of two unique individuals reaching across a cultural gulf (European to Native American), against the backdrop of imported European armies fighting a war for territory. By that era, Armies were rows of standardized troops moving in unison. It may be that armies became the first standardization of people -- dating from Roman times, for sure.
The power of Rome lay in that standardizing of troops, maneuvers, uniforms. When Rome fell, England and Europe were left with Knights -- individuals in tin-can armor fighting for Honor.
Standardization , the assembly line, screws all the same size, brought vast wealth to this Nation, and a revolution to the world.
It also brought the idea of Unions, of the rights of the peasants, the poor, the downtrodden, the "masses" of identical, expendable canon fodder peasants, into a political world.
But we haven't won that battle yet. The USA is still the only country with our style of government -- every other country that elects governments that actually govern uses the Parliamentary System of the country the USA broke away from, England. The USA is still unique.
But there has arisen an entire society within the society of the USA - that might be a majority now - that values "fitting in" above "unique." Some are so desperate to make sure everyone fits in and is thus happy that they're willing to use force to make others fit in, and that makes for great conflict to generate stories.
That's the conflict most teen-romance features -- think Twilight. Harry Potter. The argument for the unique individual is presented in both those formidable series by the depiction of the environment and the people around the main characters, who stand out or are rejected by the masses of people who value being identical to others.
Next week, in Believing in Happily Ever After Part 4, we'll look at how to link two of these "super-themes" -- themes so huge you can't pitch them in a voice over in front of a TV series and call it a premise.
Secret vs. Private + Standardized vs. Customized
See if you can find how these two huge conflicts blend into a nested theme structure.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-1.html
Part 2 is:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-2.html
Last week, we left off in the midst of examining the TV Show Leverage noting that Leverage has a "Tell Don't Show" opening that sets out the premise starkly, and explicitly states the theme.
The opening voice-over is:
"The Rich And Powerful take what they want. We steal it back for you."
Now we're putting that TV show's premise and theme into the context of the world of the viewers it's aimed at, (you and me, actually, though Leverage is not a Romance.)
Consider, this is a world in which huge social forces (not the least of which is the Internet and dot-com companies that are going "public" on the stock exchange and wielding more power than any other kind of company before) are striving in two directions, creating conflict and a philosophical argument so big it's nearly impossible to see or define.
I parse it this way. (do your own parsing).
I see, via Leverage's window on the philosophical/fiction-theme world, the conflict as Customization Vs. Standardization.
Remember all the times I've sent you to read Alvin Toffler's non-fiction book, Future Shock. He gave me the insight to be able to see things in this light now.
Remember that the Essence of Story is Conflict.
Plot is a sequence of events on a because-line -- because this happened we have a problem, which causes us to do this, which results in that, which causes us to do something else, and so on because-because- in unbroken chain all the way to problem-is-resolved.
The conflict is Us vs. Problem.
The conflict is resolved by a sequence of actions which resolve the conflict -- after the problem is solved, there is no further conflict. (Happily Ever After)
Out there in our everyday reality, the reality your reader lives in and uses to judge the 'plausibility' of your fictional worldbuilding, there are nested conflicts.
We discussed nesting plots in Verisimilitude Vs. Reality parts 2 and 3, September 13 and 20, 2011.
To create nested plots, you need nested conflicts, which means you divide one huge abstract theme into sub-themes, factoring a philosophical conundrum into smaller pieces and arranging them one inside the other, like Russian dolls.
So I'm looking through the window of a TV show (in this case Leverage, but this process works with any show, movie or novel) - and imagining the audience, the reality they live in, what they know about it and what they don't know about it. I'm imagining the audience that Leverage is speaking to.
People love this show for a reason -- well, each person for a different reason -- but they see the show as trivial, as light entertainment, and of course it's not real. But it's plausible for a reason. We as writers need to know that reason. Or reasons.
The audience's emotional reactions come from their own unconscious assumptions and mostly from what they don't know about themselves.
Playing on that unconscious part of a reader's mind is called "art."
Remember in the Big Love Sci-Fi series we discussed the social boundaries between Private and Secret shifting, melting and reforming.
That's one of the huge philosophical issues younger readers are unaware of but affected by emotionally.
So private vs. secret can be a thematic conflict line that generates a plot (thousands of plots).
Another conflict line even bigger than private vs. secret can be Standardization vs. Customization
So let's make a little list:
CONFLICTS:
a) Secret vs. Private
b) Customization vs. Standardization
c) Statistics vs. Prejudice
Each of these 6 components of conflict represents a huge, complex, abstract, and powerful thematic concept.
Let's think about Customization vs. Standardization in our world and how we can use that nascent argument to create plot generating themes and conflicts.
In the 1800's the Industrial Revolution took off steaming into the 1900s where Henry Ford popularized The Assembly Line method of producing thousands of identical copies of a complicated thing.
The more complex machinery became, the less economically viable hand-building such machines became. With Ford's advent, the frustration of business men and industrialists with "craftsmen" who worked slowly and methodically to produce a non-uniform (custom made) product was resolved.
Read Toffler's Future Shock and the description of how our public schools adopted the "covert curriculum" of hammering kids into identical "workers" for assembly lines, because that's what Big Business needed schools to do (and of course Big Business was and is the source of political campaign funds that can not be ignored).
So until the World Wide Web, Microsoft, AOL, Google, Blogs, email, ebooks, etc, Standardization was the Holy Grail of Business.
Products had to be made uniform -- all alike -- or it wasn't cost effective.
But people weren't all alike. So business set out to create consumers who all wanted the same thing.
Radio advertising and then TV advertising worked to satisfy that requirement -- that uniform products required uniform consumers to want them, and uniformity was the solution to consumer's frustration with things that don't work.
Different Is Dead became the rallying cry of the 1940's and 1950's.
The 1960's brought the Internet and Star Trek and Spock who was DIFFERENT!!!
Star Trek portrayed on the ultra-uniform medium of series TV a UNIQUE INDIVIDUAL character. He stuck out like a sore thumb, and was admired, respected, obeyed and even loved by his crew-mates for his differences.
Vulcan was a culture that lauded the philosophy of I.D.I.C. -- Infinite Diversity In Infinite Combinations.
The 1970's ushered in an era of (Alvin Toffler's Future Shock was published in the 1970's and is in new editions today) an era of CUSTOMIZATION.
Toffler predicted the cottage industry of telecommuting and even named it. Today a lot of your customer service online is done via chat by workers working from home on customized schedules and individually varying computers.
Women's Lib and Martin Luther King all belong to this, but branch off into the conflict of Statistics vs. Prejudice.
Let's focus on this Customization vs. Standardization for a bit more.
This is a huge, multigeneration trend that most of your 20-something readers won't be aware of because this long perspective on history isn't taught in schools, nor is the philosophy behind it addressed below graduate level in college.
We are now in the crunch-zone of this conflict. Schools world wide hammer young kids into identical bricks.
The counter trend is only found in private schools for the gifted or rejected, schools that let young kids wander around a rich classroom and pick up things to learn about as they become interested.
Mass market education is still aimed at turning out identical product - workers for factories that no longer really exist.
Note how the Federal Department of Education (I'm in the USA and use that perspective), could be viewed as a huge and bloated agency created by combining agencies and then not purging out redundancies but rather fighting turf wars for good paying federal jobs. As a result of that, and various administrations (this is not party-specific) efforts to appease campaign finance sources and do the right thing by our kids anyway, we now have a Federal series of tests that all students have to pass.
That's standardizing people to function in a standardized world.
But as Toffler pointed out, we're not in a standardized world any more.
Small wonder we can't produce enough employable people. Small wonder there are whole segments of TV viewerships who see their lives as mashed down and unjustly ruined by these huge forces -- "the rich" or "the government" or whatever huge thing their squeaky voices can't reach.
That plight produces emotions that are likewise widespread. As a result, fiction that would not otherwise be popular, is popular.
Think like a Romance Writer for a moment. Can Romance be standardized?
Or is Romance the enemy of standardization?
Here's an article, I hope is still online, about facial recognition software, facebook, google, and online dating sites -- and the whole issue of using your "real" identity online.
http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/08/04/7254996-your-face-and-the-web-can-tell-everything-about-you
Remember the popularity of the Western Romance.
What are Western Romances about? Rugged individualists (not unlike the A-Team or the Leverage team).
Victorian Romance, Steampunk, you name it -- Romance is always about the misfit's unique qualification to succeed because of their differences not in spite of them. (so is Science Fiction, for that matter) And the TV show Leverage, the show Psych, the USA shows White Collar, Burn Notice, Royal Pains -- all of them feature unique individuals.
This country was founded by folks who didn't fit the mold back home and went pioneering into the wilderness. Those who survived to forge this country into a Nation were individualists who visualized a customized world, where each individual was valued for their unique qualities.
They lived in a "handmade world" where no two quilts were alike, no two butter churns were alike. People wrote with quills - bird feathers - and no two of them are alike. In fact, if you read original manuscripts from the 1700's even the most educated and erudite did not spell words in any uniform way, not even in the same document.. And precious few could read, though in the 1700's in America, that was changing.
Has anyone noted that there is a re-casting of the newspaper articles from the 1700's where folks were arguing about what kind of Nation we would become? It's in modern English now because the originals are almost incomprehensible, (wild spelling, archaic words, involuted sentences like I write) and it became an overnight New York Times best seller. The Federalist Papers. It's on amazon.com.
Standardization wasn't even a concept back then. There was no conflict, not a lot of stories to write, about the vast sea of identical people and the one individual who stands out from "the masses." "The Masses" as a concept didn't exist, though philosophical theorists were busily inventing the whole movement we label as "Liberal" or "Progressive" today.
One novel series I do love from that era though is Cooper's The Leather Stocking Tales. The story of two unique individuals reaching across a cultural gulf (European to Native American), against the backdrop of imported European armies fighting a war for territory. By that era, Armies were rows of standardized troops moving in unison. It may be that armies became the first standardization of people -- dating from Roman times, for sure.
The power of Rome lay in that standardizing of troops, maneuvers, uniforms. When Rome fell, England and Europe were left with Knights -- individuals in tin-can armor fighting for Honor.
Standardization , the assembly line, screws all the same size, brought vast wealth to this Nation, and a revolution to the world.
It also brought the idea of Unions, of the rights of the peasants, the poor, the downtrodden, the "masses" of identical, expendable canon fodder peasants, into a political world.
But we haven't won that battle yet. The USA is still the only country with our style of government -- every other country that elects governments that actually govern uses the Parliamentary System of the country the USA broke away from, England. The USA is still unique.
But there has arisen an entire society within the society of the USA - that might be a majority now - that values "fitting in" above "unique." Some are so desperate to make sure everyone fits in and is thus happy that they're willing to use force to make others fit in, and that makes for great conflict to generate stories.
That's the conflict most teen-romance features -- think Twilight. Harry Potter. The argument for the unique individual is presented in both those formidable series by the depiction of the environment and the people around the main characters, who stand out or are rejected by the masses of people who value being identical to others.
Next week, in Believing in Happily Ever After Part 4, we'll look at how to link two of these "super-themes" -- themes so huge you can't pitch them in a voice over in front of a TV series and call it a premise.
Secret vs. Private + Standardized vs. Customized
See if you can find how these two huge conflicts blend into a nested theme structure.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Believing in Happily Ever After Part 2: The Power of Theme-Plot Integration
Now we launch into some very advanced writing lessons aimed specifically at Science Fiction Romance writers and Paranormal Romance writers. But anyone who ventures into worldbuilding, such as historical writers and mystery writers, will find some valuable inspiration in this series about the Ending called "Happily Ever After."
Here's one of my early posts here on the Happily Ever After ending.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2007/02/happily-ever-after.html
Now this is an advanced writer's exercise. We're going to employ the skills discussed in depth and detail in previous posts -- search for the tag Tuesday to pull up all my series on writing.
Here are some recent posts leading into this current discussion which also list posts from a while ago that laid down the foundation skills we're using here.
The Big Love Sci-Fi series ran 8 parts from 6/21/2011 to 8/9/2011 and danced around the edges of this topic.
We discussed such dicey topics as Sex Without Borders, How Big Can Love Be in Science Fiction, the Mystery-Detective Romance, Modesty the Scrimmage Line of big Love, and then 3 parts on Unconditional Love and Science Fiction.
Here's the link to Part VI which has links to the previous parts of that series:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/07/big-love-sci-fi-part-vi-unconditional.html
In Part VI on Unconditional Love and Science Fiction I wrote:
---------quote---------
So SF has "proved itself" by having moved the boundaries of reality for many people now living. So they accept this new reality of iPhones and thus most SF no longer seems ridiculous or crazy.
---------end quote------
Here is a news item that reprises the changes in our world due to the internet and computers:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/07/speed-matters/
It traces what we who lived through it barely remember except as a relief from frustration - the increasing speed of computers, the internet connections, and web-page loading. The people who created those innovations thought the unthinkable because people were frustrated and would pay money to be relieved of frustration.
With the demise of Steve Jobs, the internet is now full of historical summaries of the changes wrought by his innovations. (*celestial round of applause to this master, serial-innovator*) If you never owned a Trash80, go read about Steve Jobs and how he moved us beyond that much lauded machine.
To change people's everyday reality, first make them fed up with the reality they've got, then offer to sell them a solution to their problems if only they'll change their IDEA of the boundaries of their reality. (buy a new computer; switch phone services). That is a plot outline, or a war strategy. There's no way to tell the difference.
My more recent posts that list prior posts to read to catch up on the topic of theme and story-structure are:
8/23/11 Source of the Expository Lump Part 2
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/source-of-expository-lump-part-2.html
8/30/2011 Astrology Just For Writers, Part 10, Pluto The School of Hard Knocks
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/astrology-just-for-writers-part-10.html
9/13/11 Verisimilitude Vs. Reality Part 2 Master Theme Structure (on point of view shifting)
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-2-master.html
9/20/11 Verisimilitude Vs. Reality Part 3 The Game, The Stakes, The Template
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-3-game.html
10/4/11 Believing In Happily Ever After: Part 1 Stephen King on Potter Vs. Twilight
We've been working on the puzzle of why the Happily Ever After Romance ending is too implausible for suspension-of-disbelief even by veteran science fiction/fantasy readers, and why Love Conquers All seems idiotic to the general public even though they verbally espouse that solemn belief.
The essence of the problem seems to be that the Romance Genre simply assumes, without discussion, without challenge, without characters who espouse various sides of a heated debate on these topics, that all readers likewise assume these elements of fiction are actually built-in aspects of our everyday reality.
It's not that the HEA building block elements aren't true, or that they are rejected automatically by the scorning public, but that the writer does not argue the point, does not even know there's a point to be argued with the reader.
Arguing those unconscious assumptions in dramatic form was Marion Zimmer Bradley's greatest talent -- and it was a talent. She didn't do it with conscious, deliberate intention. It was simply how she presented her stories.
I studied under her tutelage for years, dissected her writing techniques since I was a teen, and I am just not as good at it as she is. I have to do it consciously, so maybe I can demonstrate how you can teach yourself to do this.
Marion Zimmer Bradley never argued these two assumptions, The HEA and Love Conquers All, that I know of. Scholars may dig something up that would demonstrate that's not true, but at the moment I can't point you to an example of exactly how to construct this argument. I've never seen it done successfully - but I'm hoping some reader of this blog will comment with a link to a novel where this argument is laid out with stark clarity and convincing impact.
So let's delve into how to use theme to generate a plot that is part and parcel of this seminal argument.
Here's a perfect example to study because it's a TV show, ultimately very shallow, and very easy to dissect.
The TV show, LEVERAGE, TNT Sundays 8PM these days.
You can find it on iTunes or Amazon.
Leverage - all seasons
I've discussed Leverage previously.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/tv-shows-leverage-and-psych.html
I've watched a lot of Leverage episodes. It's a typical TV Series, but has a story-arc with the lives and inner conflicts of the ongoing characters and their soap-opera style relationships. It's not Romance, or even Intimate Adventure. It's way too "dark" for that - the leader of the team is an unrepentant drunk, the team has a thief, a hacker, Muscle who solves problems with punches, and a grifter who plays the femme fatale with aplomb.
But the show is easy to dissect and understand for theme. Not all good TV shows are this easy to dissect.
As I've said in the series of posts noted above, theme is the part of the story where you say what you want to say.
It's the part where you put your opinion. It's the part which carries the reason you want to write the story which ought to be the same as the reason the reader wants to read the story. It's the part where, if you encode the theme-statement soon enough (1st page; 1st line in a novel) you can prevent people who will hate your novel from reading it.
But to be truly effective, to evince an emotional response from your chosen readership, to sucker-punch the reader in a part of the mind/emotion complex that blocks you from "moving the boundaries of the reader's reality" so they can grasp the foundation principle Love Conquers All, your theme must be hidden from the reader's awareness. Your theme must be "coded" -- usually in symbolism, which is one of the techniques we've discussed in previous posts.
See this post on icons and symbols:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/turning-action-into-romance.html
The best place to hide anything is in plain sight.
That's what Leverage does to make it worth studying. It hides its theme in plain sight, yet very much "off the nose" - a screenwriting term we'll return to in future posts.
As a TV show Leverage is very similar to A-Team or It Takes A Thief, or today's White Collar that I rave about so much, or even Burn Notice.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/05/tv-show-white-collar-fanfic-and-show.html
That blog entry is about how to craft a "show don't tell" opening.
Leverage has a "Tell Don't Show" opening that sets out the premise starkly, and explicity states the theme in such a way that the real message is "off the nose" (i.e. in subtext).
The opening voice-over is:
"The Rich And Powerful take what they want. We steal it back for you."
And then Leverage proceeds to explicate that theme (Class Warfare is Innate, or The End Justifies The Means, Might Makes Right, or maybe Robin Hood Was Right) with relentless precision, scene after scene, show after show with never a foot placed wrong. The TV Series Leverage is a beautiful thing to behold!
Note the opening does not say "some rich people take what they want" or "we'll steal only if we have to and then make it right with the Law" -- it says all rich people take anything they want (listen to the tone of voice in that voice-over) regardless of how it harms not-rich people, and you are not-rich so you need us powerful/ruthless folks as Leverage to take back what is rightfully yours regardless of the ethics or morals of stealing.
The subtext is that if you're not-rich, it's someone else's fault, usually a rich person's fault. Listen to the tone of voice, and read into it what you choose - but I hear that there is no way to solve the problem of being an impecunious victim of wealthy power abusers that is within the law, no way to get that wealthy except by breaking the law. The law keeps you trapped in the ranks of the downtrodden. If you're not rich, the law is not your friend. (very hard to dispute, I will admit).
It says we, the Leverage Team, violate the law, and any rules of morality that get in the way, to defend the helpless from the mighty.
It says Might (riches) makes Evil and anything you do to battle Evil is Right. (again, very hard to dispute; but this blog piece is about using writing techniques to say what you want to say, not to evaluate what others have said, only how well they've said it. Respond to the Leverage theme in a piece of fiction! That's being part of the conversation among fiction writers.)
The TV Series Leverage says Law must not prevail because it's always against the helpless. A government of Laws is bad. (Law is made by the rich who buy politicians.)
A show broadcast in July had a rich man who was hated by his associates throw a party with a staged murder that the guests were to solve. But someone murdered the host instead (for real), and left the head of The Leverage Team as the only witness and therefore the only suspect. A policeman, hired to monitor events at the party, who was involved with the rich man's daughter, turned out to be the murderer at the instigation of the daughter. THEME: Police are bad guys; Crooks are good guys. People with power or money or both are always bad-guys. Always.
The absolutes in that summary of what this episode says come from a lack of a Good Guy/Gal who is rich, or a Bad Guy who is poor and downtrodden. There are no counter-examples among the characters to muddy the thematic picture (make it "deeper" or more "realistic") which is another reason this is a great show to study.
One thing I do like about the Leverage Series is the Conflict illustrated by the emotional responses of the characters who are essentially criminals at heart. The leader of The Team was seriously disturbed when his team seemed to think that maybe he had in fact murdered the rich guy at the party. That characterization provides you with the "argument" I'm talking about here.
Right inside the plot (rich guy murdered before eyes of Team Leader is a PLOT ELEMENT, and technically forms the part of the plot called a "complication") is the argument statement "well, since the crooks want their friends to believe in them, the crooks must be good guys." The good guys are doing bad things, but it's okay because they're good guys.
White Collar and Burn Notice state their premise up front in the opening. Burn Notice says: "When you're burned, you've got nothing" etc. But the way each of these shows state the premise does not ram the theme down your throat the way Leverage does.
EXERCISE: State the premise of your most recent Work In Progress just that briefly.
Leverage is "dark" and though the explicit violence shown on screen isn't any more emphatic than White Collar or Burn Notice, the way Leverage slams the theme into your face in the opening, then hammers it into your brain scene after scene, is a kind of subversive violence worth studying. Few shows are quite as easy to dissect and understand, just because of how elegantly they employ this technique.
Caution: I'm not advocating that Romance Writers should use this "Leverage" technique to ram the Romance themes down the public's throat. Quite the opposite, in fact. But there's a lot to be learned very easily by studying the theme-plot integration of this simplistic TV show, Leverage. The study will reveal how to construct a more subtle and complex piece of fiction.
But even a subtle and complex Romance work must have such a thematic statement of the premise to become marketable as "Mass Market."
Now, you will notice that Leverage is on TNT while White Collar and Burn Notice (and a raft of other shows I love) are on USA (character's welcome).
Yet Leverage has "characters" who are deep, complex, gradually revealed season after season, and who are, perhaps against their wills, maintaining relationships.
The relationships they maintain are basically within the Team, outside interests fleeting.
I see Leverage as "dark" because the Team members are portrayed as not having a shot at Happily Ever After, or if they ever did, they blew it.
White Collar and Burn Notice show heroic (if shady) characters striving toward an HEA. They have long range goals they believe will vanquish their frustrations and stabilize their lives into an HEA.
Leverage depicts a Team that sticks together because it's their only hope at a Happily For Now situation.
If you've been watching Leverage, you probably don't see it as "serious" as I do. It's offered as, and taken as, "light entertainment" and "just for fun." It's a "what if" story. But for some people in the audience, people who see themselves as being mowed down by the powerful who take what they want (in today's economic climate, that's a huge number of people), Leverage (like A-Team before it) is an "if only."
Superman in the 1940's was an "if only" for a lot of people with unsolvable problems. The theme song of Smallville features the phrase spoken loudly and intelligibly over the music, "Rescue me." (a prime Romance theme).
In difficult times, people can have the stuffings knocked out of them by forces of government, law, wealth, big business, anything that their individual strength can't affect. So fiction of this type thrives. Leverage says hire thugs to do your dirty work, and it's okay if you're actually righteous yourself.
The people the Leverage team works for are always in "the right" from the audience's point of view, the generally accepted morality of today. The people the Leverage team goes up against are equally starkly and absolutely in the "wrong" according to the morality of today. The Leverage team itself is shades of gray, very dark gray.
This is nothing like the TV show Forever Knight where the Evil (vampire detective) was trying to "atone for sins."
Superman was the benevolent Power, the image of what a human being could and should be, honorable, unimpeachable, un-bribable. The Leverage team has their own sense of Honor.
In Part 3 next week, we'll get a little deeper into the thematic structure of Leverage and how it "leverages" its audience's world into a story.
Do search your own Work In Progress to reshape it around a premise statement that encodes or symbolizes your own theme, and make it as clear and concise as these TV show examples. This statement is the opening sentence of your query letter to agent or editor. It defines your target audience and what payload you deliver to that audience. The definition of the audience will determine whether the rest of your query letter will be read -- or not -- and what publishers might consider publishing the work, for which imprints that publisher handles.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Here's one of my early posts here on the Happily Ever After ending.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2007/02/happily-ever-after.html
Now this is an advanced writer's exercise. We're going to employ the skills discussed in depth and detail in previous posts -- search for the tag Tuesday to pull up all my series on writing.
Here are some recent posts leading into this current discussion which also list posts from a while ago that laid down the foundation skills we're using here.
The Big Love Sci-Fi series ran 8 parts from 6/21/2011 to 8/9/2011 and danced around the edges of this topic.
We discussed such dicey topics as Sex Without Borders, How Big Can Love Be in Science Fiction, the Mystery-Detective Romance, Modesty the Scrimmage Line of big Love, and then 3 parts on Unconditional Love and Science Fiction.
Here's the link to Part VI which has links to the previous parts of that series:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/07/big-love-sci-fi-part-vi-unconditional.html
In Part VI on Unconditional Love and Science Fiction I wrote:
---------quote---------
So SF has "proved itself" by having moved the boundaries of reality for many people now living. So they accept this new reality of iPhones and thus most SF no longer seems ridiculous or crazy.
---------end quote------
Here is a news item that reprises the changes in our world due to the internet and computers:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/07/speed-matters/
It traces what we who lived through it barely remember except as a relief from frustration - the increasing speed of computers, the internet connections, and web-page loading. The people who created those innovations thought the unthinkable because people were frustrated and would pay money to be relieved of frustration.
With the demise of Steve Jobs, the internet is now full of historical summaries of the changes wrought by his innovations. (*celestial round of applause to this master, serial-innovator*) If you never owned a Trash80, go read about Steve Jobs and how he moved us beyond that much lauded machine.
To change people's everyday reality, first make them fed up with the reality they've got, then offer to sell them a solution to their problems if only they'll change their IDEA of the boundaries of their reality. (buy a new computer; switch phone services). That is a plot outline, or a war strategy. There's no way to tell the difference.
My more recent posts that list prior posts to read to catch up on the topic of theme and story-structure are:
8/23/11 Source of the Expository Lump Part 2
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/source-of-expository-lump-part-2.html
8/30/2011 Astrology Just For Writers, Part 10, Pluto The School of Hard Knocks
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/astrology-just-for-writers-part-10.html
9/13/11 Verisimilitude Vs. Reality Part 2 Master Theme Structure (on point of view shifting)
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-2-master.html
9/20/11 Verisimilitude Vs. Reality Part 3 The Game, The Stakes, The Template
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-3-game.html
10/4/11 Believing In Happily Ever After: Part 1 Stephen King on Potter Vs. Twilight
We've been working on the puzzle of why the Happily Ever After Romance ending is too implausible for suspension-of-disbelief even by veteran science fiction/fantasy readers, and why Love Conquers All seems idiotic to the general public even though they verbally espouse that solemn belief.
The essence of the problem seems to be that the Romance Genre simply assumes, without discussion, without challenge, without characters who espouse various sides of a heated debate on these topics, that all readers likewise assume these elements of fiction are actually built-in aspects of our everyday reality.
It's not that the HEA building block elements aren't true, or that they are rejected automatically by the scorning public, but that the writer does not argue the point, does not even know there's a point to be argued with the reader.
Arguing those unconscious assumptions in dramatic form was Marion Zimmer Bradley's greatest talent -- and it was a talent. She didn't do it with conscious, deliberate intention. It was simply how she presented her stories.
I studied under her tutelage for years, dissected her writing techniques since I was a teen, and I am just not as good at it as she is. I have to do it consciously, so maybe I can demonstrate how you can teach yourself to do this.
Marion Zimmer Bradley never argued these two assumptions, The HEA and Love Conquers All, that I know of. Scholars may dig something up that would demonstrate that's not true, but at the moment I can't point you to an example of exactly how to construct this argument. I've never seen it done successfully - but I'm hoping some reader of this blog will comment with a link to a novel where this argument is laid out with stark clarity and convincing impact.
So let's delve into how to use theme to generate a plot that is part and parcel of this seminal argument.
Here's a perfect example to study because it's a TV show, ultimately very shallow, and very easy to dissect.
The TV show, LEVERAGE, TNT Sundays 8PM these days.
You can find it on iTunes or Amazon.
Leverage - all seasons
I've discussed Leverage previously.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/tv-shows-leverage-and-psych.html
I've watched a lot of Leverage episodes. It's a typical TV Series, but has a story-arc with the lives and inner conflicts of the ongoing characters and their soap-opera style relationships. It's not Romance, or even Intimate Adventure. It's way too "dark" for that - the leader of the team is an unrepentant drunk, the team has a thief, a hacker, Muscle who solves problems with punches, and a grifter who plays the femme fatale with aplomb.
But the show is easy to dissect and understand for theme. Not all good TV shows are this easy to dissect.
As I've said in the series of posts noted above, theme is the part of the story where you say what you want to say.
It's the part where you put your opinion. It's the part which carries the reason you want to write the story which ought to be the same as the reason the reader wants to read the story. It's the part where, if you encode the theme-statement soon enough (1st page; 1st line in a novel) you can prevent people who will hate your novel from reading it.
But to be truly effective, to evince an emotional response from your chosen readership, to sucker-punch the reader in a part of the mind/emotion complex that blocks you from "moving the boundaries of the reader's reality" so they can grasp the foundation principle Love Conquers All, your theme must be hidden from the reader's awareness. Your theme must be "coded" -- usually in symbolism, which is one of the techniques we've discussed in previous posts.
See this post on icons and symbols:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/turning-action-into-romance.html
The best place to hide anything is in plain sight.
That's what Leverage does to make it worth studying. It hides its theme in plain sight, yet very much "off the nose" - a screenwriting term we'll return to in future posts.
As a TV show Leverage is very similar to A-Team or It Takes A Thief, or today's White Collar that I rave about so much, or even Burn Notice.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/05/tv-show-white-collar-fanfic-and-show.html
That blog entry is about how to craft a "show don't tell" opening.
Leverage has a "Tell Don't Show" opening that sets out the premise starkly, and explicity states the theme in such a way that the real message is "off the nose" (i.e. in subtext).
The opening voice-over is:
"The Rich And Powerful take what they want. We steal it back for you."
And then Leverage proceeds to explicate that theme (Class Warfare is Innate, or The End Justifies The Means, Might Makes Right, or maybe Robin Hood Was Right) with relentless precision, scene after scene, show after show with never a foot placed wrong. The TV Series Leverage is a beautiful thing to behold!
Note the opening does not say "some rich people take what they want" or "we'll steal only if we have to and then make it right with the Law" -- it says all rich people take anything they want (listen to the tone of voice in that voice-over) regardless of how it harms not-rich people, and you are not-rich so you need us powerful/ruthless folks as Leverage to take back what is rightfully yours regardless of the ethics or morals of stealing.
The subtext is that if you're not-rich, it's someone else's fault, usually a rich person's fault. Listen to the tone of voice, and read into it what you choose - but I hear that there is no way to solve the problem of being an impecunious victim of wealthy power abusers that is within the law, no way to get that wealthy except by breaking the law. The law keeps you trapped in the ranks of the downtrodden. If you're not rich, the law is not your friend. (very hard to dispute, I will admit).
It says we, the Leverage Team, violate the law, and any rules of morality that get in the way, to defend the helpless from the mighty.
It says Might (riches) makes Evil and anything you do to battle Evil is Right. (again, very hard to dispute; but this blog piece is about using writing techniques to say what you want to say, not to evaluate what others have said, only how well they've said it. Respond to the Leverage theme in a piece of fiction! That's being part of the conversation among fiction writers.)
The TV Series Leverage says Law must not prevail because it's always against the helpless. A government of Laws is bad. (Law is made by the rich who buy politicians.)
A show broadcast in July had a rich man who was hated by his associates throw a party with a staged murder that the guests were to solve. But someone murdered the host instead (for real), and left the head of The Leverage Team as the only witness and therefore the only suspect. A policeman, hired to monitor events at the party, who was involved with the rich man's daughter, turned out to be the murderer at the instigation of the daughter. THEME: Police are bad guys; Crooks are good guys. People with power or money or both are always bad-guys. Always.
The absolutes in that summary of what this episode says come from a lack of a Good Guy/Gal who is rich, or a Bad Guy who is poor and downtrodden. There are no counter-examples among the characters to muddy the thematic picture (make it "deeper" or more "realistic") which is another reason this is a great show to study.
One thing I do like about the Leverage Series is the Conflict illustrated by the emotional responses of the characters who are essentially criminals at heart. The leader of The Team was seriously disturbed when his team seemed to think that maybe he had in fact murdered the rich guy at the party. That characterization provides you with the "argument" I'm talking about here.
Right inside the plot (rich guy murdered before eyes of Team Leader is a PLOT ELEMENT, and technically forms the part of the plot called a "complication") is the argument statement "well, since the crooks want their friends to believe in them, the crooks must be good guys." The good guys are doing bad things, but it's okay because they're good guys.
White Collar and Burn Notice state their premise up front in the opening. Burn Notice says: "When you're burned, you've got nothing" etc. But the way each of these shows state the premise does not ram the theme down your throat the way Leverage does.
EXERCISE: State the premise of your most recent Work In Progress just that briefly.
Leverage is "dark" and though the explicit violence shown on screen isn't any more emphatic than White Collar or Burn Notice, the way Leverage slams the theme into your face in the opening, then hammers it into your brain scene after scene, is a kind of subversive violence worth studying. Few shows are quite as easy to dissect and understand, just because of how elegantly they employ this technique.
Caution: I'm not advocating that Romance Writers should use this "Leverage" technique to ram the Romance themes down the public's throat. Quite the opposite, in fact. But there's a lot to be learned very easily by studying the theme-plot integration of this simplistic TV show, Leverage. The study will reveal how to construct a more subtle and complex piece of fiction.
But even a subtle and complex Romance work must have such a thematic statement of the premise to become marketable as "Mass Market."
Now, you will notice that Leverage is on TNT while White Collar and Burn Notice (and a raft of other shows I love) are on USA (character's welcome).
Yet Leverage has "characters" who are deep, complex, gradually revealed season after season, and who are, perhaps against their wills, maintaining relationships.
The relationships they maintain are basically within the Team, outside interests fleeting.
I see Leverage as "dark" because the Team members are portrayed as not having a shot at Happily Ever After, or if they ever did, they blew it.
White Collar and Burn Notice show heroic (if shady) characters striving toward an HEA. They have long range goals they believe will vanquish their frustrations and stabilize their lives into an HEA.
Leverage depicts a Team that sticks together because it's their only hope at a Happily For Now situation.
If you've been watching Leverage, you probably don't see it as "serious" as I do. It's offered as, and taken as, "light entertainment" and "just for fun." It's a "what if" story. But for some people in the audience, people who see themselves as being mowed down by the powerful who take what they want (in today's economic climate, that's a huge number of people), Leverage (like A-Team before it) is an "if only."
Superman in the 1940's was an "if only" for a lot of people with unsolvable problems. The theme song of Smallville features the phrase spoken loudly and intelligibly over the music, "Rescue me." (a prime Romance theme).
In difficult times, people can have the stuffings knocked out of them by forces of government, law, wealth, big business, anything that their individual strength can't affect. So fiction of this type thrives. Leverage says hire thugs to do your dirty work, and it's okay if you're actually righteous yourself.
The people the Leverage team works for are always in "the right" from the audience's point of view, the generally accepted morality of today. The people the Leverage team goes up against are equally starkly and absolutely in the "wrong" according to the morality of today. The Leverage team itself is shades of gray, very dark gray.
This is nothing like the TV show Forever Knight where the Evil (vampire detective) was trying to "atone for sins."
Superman was the benevolent Power, the image of what a human being could and should be, honorable, unimpeachable, un-bribable. The Leverage team has their own sense of Honor.
In Part 3 next week, we'll get a little deeper into the thematic structure of Leverage and how it "leverages" its audience's world into a story.
Do search your own Work In Progress to reshape it around a premise statement that encodes or symbolizes your own theme, and make it as clear and concise as these TV show examples. This statement is the opening sentence of your query letter to agent or editor. It defines your target audience and what payload you deliver to that audience. The definition of the audience will determine whether the rest of your query letter will be read -- or not -- and what publishers might consider publishing the work, for which imprints that publisher handles.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
