Other posts directly on Worldbuilding:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/04/worldbuilding-building-fictional-but.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/worldbuilding-from-reality.html
(this is Part 1 of "worldbuilding from reality")
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/01/worldbuilding-for-science-fiction.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/worldbuilding-by-committee.html
And I've done whole sets of posts on Worldbuilding integrating Plot and integrating Theme into the entire composition. I'll have to collect them in a reference post soon. Meanwhile, here's a list of links to my posts on worldbuilding that don't have "worldbuilding" in the title:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/06/worldbuilding-link-list.html
One reason I harp on Worldbuilding as a writing craft subject, hitting at every angle, is that it is the single weakest skill of Romance Writers.
Most Romance writers work in some version of the "real" world -- even historicals have "facts" that delineate the world the characters live in and that the readers have to agree are "real facts" because they know them from "real world" sources outside the fictional reality of the story.
Writers study "researching" assiduously, (which is good, and necessary), but they don't learn how to use research to "make up" imaginary facts then "sell" them to the readers as real. That's the skill necessary for Paranormal Romance writing, and even for Science Fiction which goes beyond known science extrapolating into "what if science is wrong about this? Then what might be right?"
Most Historical Romance readers are magnificently well educated in historical cultures, and you just can't fool them.
The same is true of science fiction readers -- they know science, so you better know your science when you write for them or they can't suspend disbelief well enough to romp with your characters.
Fantasy and Paranormal Romance readers know anthropology, archeology, mythology, and a lot more -ologies -- so you better know your Magic systems from historical reality when you invent a new one. To invent a Magic System, you must first invent the world in which that magic system can plausibly function to get the effects on the characters you need.
Since the Romance readers have developed a taste for Alien Romance, Romance writers have had to learn this whole new skill set I call "Worldbuilding." It's a skill set that allows a writer to immerse a reader painlessly and seamlessly into a story set in a totally fictitious world, a completely impossible world, a world where a set of highly improbable character developments, and especially Relationships, are inevitable.
Such an impossible world, properly "built," becomes "Art" when it is built to reveal some higher truth, some fundamental aspect of our everyday reality that is masked from ordinary consciousness. Google+ and Google are amazing sources of oddball items you can use to achieve this kind of "Art."
Here is a recent book by a brain surgeon who experienced a "higher truth" about the structure of reality during a coma and wrote a book about it:
You can find a long article about this book here:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/11/18/the-science-of-heaven.html
As I've pointed out in my series of posts here on Astrology, Romance generally occurs to real people during a Neptune Transit. Astrologers associate a Neptune Transit with a blurred or erroneous perception of reality, but mystics have learned how such Neptune transits reveal Higher Truths - the reality behind our reality - in which "Happily Ever After" is the inevitable outcome of a well lived life. That is not a "reality" in which there are no rules, so a writer can just make up anything that occurs to them. In such Neptune governed realities, there are very strict rules indeed, but communicating those rules to your readers who live in "normal" worlds is an entire skill set peculiar to Science Fiction writers.
Science Fiction writers developed this skill set over the decades from the 1930's or so, and I learned at their feet. So I'm passing on what I've learned, only I'm using contemporary (to this writing) examples. You will pass this on using examples contemporary to that future time, but the essence is the same.
The fictional world you build has to start here and now in your reader's real world, and extend outward to that fictional realm of "far away places with strange sounding names."
If you need inspiration, here's a song for MP3 download of "Far Away Places With Strange Sounding Names":
And a biography of one of my favorite writers, Allan Cole, about when he was a CIA brat dragged to Cyprus where his father dealt in Cold War secrets and he dealt with a British school that didn't like Americans. The book reminded me of that old song, a primary inspiration for many of my novels because the song is an entry point into that "other" level of consciousness.
Closer to home and everyday reality, I've also done sets of posts on the whole new world we live in where writers have to do a lot if not all their own advertising, promotion, and marketing, often at their own expense.
That is the world your reader lives in, so you don't have to explain it when you are telling a story. But the trick of storytelling is that the teller has to know more about the subject than the listener, yet not tell or even show, all she knows to the reader. The key is to ignite the reader's imagination so the reader tells herself her own story -- not yours.
Think about it - do you want to listen to (and pay close attention to) someone who obviously knows less about their subject than you do?
A novelist, a writer, isn't exactly a 'teacher' per se. A writer is in a dialogue with their reader. Books are a conversation among those who are writing the books, and letting the readers kibitz. Eventually, those readers will have their say, too, either by writing a book of their own or by flinging a comment up on Amazon or somewhere, or just going off to imagine their own ending to your story.
Think about being at a party in a room full of people, and you're standing in a circle with a nice drink in your hand, holding forth on a pet subject.
To keep the others in the circle quiet and still while you make your point (i.e. advertise your wares) you need two things:
a) something to say
b) something you know that they don't, or that they haven't viewed from your perspective.
Perspective is what LUCKY IN CYPRUS shows you how to achieve. It's a book worth studying, just for that alone.
You need to offer to add something to your listener's understanding of a subject, even if it's not more than the mere fact that you agree with them but can say it better. If you can explain what they are feeling or knowing without words, they will grab that explanation and spread it around - often citing you as the source.
A lot of what goes on Google+ or Facebook is just that - "samplers" (little artworks with words) that state something people are thinking, but spin it a new way. People see what they feel stated in words and click "share."
So when you set out to write a novel, especially in a well-explored genre like Romance, you have to have something new to say -- at least something new to the expected readership.
What have you got to say that your readers don't already know? What have you got to say that your readers know in their guts but can't quite articulate for themselves? What can you add to the quality of their lives -- what can you give them to "share" or repeat to their friends saying, "You just have to read this book!"
What can you say that will make them remember your byline?
THAT thing -- what you have to say -- is what you put into your book trailer that gets it "shared" on YouTube.
Every novel is an argument set out step by step, enumerating things the reader already knows, then embroidering those things together into a new pattern, something memorable that encapsulates a Life Lesson (such as Love Conquers All). That life-lesson is the theme. And you get it from that "other" place the neurologist's book, The Science of Heaven, talks about.
That's where "theme" comes from - your visits to that other "place" which most people access only during sleep. But you never quite remember your dreams. Writers are the sort who can put those dreams into words (or pictures) so others recognize that other "place" they regularly visit. That's where "life's lessons" come from.
The life-lessons are pretty much the same over thousands of years, but the application can be very different and require a lot of original thinking. That original thinking can reveal major flaws or fallacies in those old life-lessons.
But sometimes, that original thinking involves understanding a long-term (decades or centuries long) cycle.
Human affairs, from love to politics, from religion to war, from law to justice, move in short cycles and long cycles. History, as all students of Romance Writing know, is remarkably cyclical.
Look at Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's St. Germain novels -- she shows us how women's rights in Rome differed from the previous Hellenistic culture, and how women lost rights in the Middle Ages, struggled in Victorian England, emerged again -- what's happening now in this world?
OK, so you get the picture. You must have something to say that a group at a party (or buyers of a novel) will stand still and listen to, appreciate, recognize as their own gut-level response to their "dreams" writ large. They will repeat to others what you've said, point to you and become your "word of mouth" advertising.
What you have to say must be original and different -- yet recognizable as what your listeners already know to be true, but can't quite say.
So find a repeating CYCLE manifesting in everyday reality that describes what they experience in their dreams, in their nightly visits to "heaven" as the nuerosurgeon described it, and demonstrate that dreams can be real -- or not depending on your theme!
In "Magic" it is taught, "As Above: So Below" -- and that's what this neurosurgeon was talking about with his coma experience of Heaven. He discovered there really is an "Above." He just doesn't know which is the cause and which the effect: brain or mind? And of course, the artist's question is: "Does it matter which is which?" That kind of question defines THEME.
Which brings us to an online video that is a waste of a bit more than an hour of your time that could pay off big if you can understand what it's saying that you can use in a Romance Novel.
This video is ADVERTISING, and it uses clever (even diabolical) techniques (skills) to open a vista into that "other" place evoked by the SONG (Far Away Places With Strange Sounding Names), visited by Allan Cole in his biography, and daringly admitted to by a neurosurgeon in his account of his coma.
This video "romances" its viewers with a whiff of their most cherished hopes and dreams - enticing, hooking, then finally getting to the point -- 'buy this and realize your dreams.' At the end of the video, notice particularly how the word "safe" is used. There are a hundred Romance Novel themes in that one word's usage alone. Study this video:
http://pro.stansberryresearch.com/1210THIRDLIA/LPSINC01/
It is a sales pitch that you've seen advertised all over the internet -- even on TV, I'll bet!
It's in a format I've seen used by sales pitches now for a couple of years. I absolutely hate it, and this particular one makes me squirm.
But it's so pervasive for a reason. It's latched onto something eye-stopping for a "hook" (Obama's Third Term), and then follows up with a lot more "hooks" -- all loaded with 'bait' to keep you hooked.
Then it "explains" as if giving you information you don't already have.
The information about previous Presidents and what they've added to the USA historically is accurate, cleanly presented, and nicely packaged, carefully selected to make this video's point.
And all of it is laced with more bait, but not "hard-sell" -- it's very cleverly written. This thing illustrates "worldbuilding" at its very best.
The video is a pitch for an Investment Company that wants people who have a lot of money to become "clients" -- to subscribe to a newsletter, and then hire the company to deploy investment capital for them.
HOW MUCH DO YOU THINK THEY PAID TO GET THIS VIDEO'S TEXT WRITTEN?
Could you make that much on a Romance Novel? Really?
If you are putting so much effort into mastering worldbuilding skills, don't you want to maximize your return on investment?
Do you think this sales-pitch video is not "worldbuilding at its best?" Do you think it's not "fantasy?" Do you honestly believe this video is not "romancing" these potential clients?
Remember the old adage I've been showing you how to use as a plotting tool, "If you want to understand what's happening, follow the money."
Look at this video. It has one stationary, public domain picture, and a set of words with a voice reading the words to you at a very slow pace.
Do you think it was cheap to make? Well, comparatively, maybe, but simple elegance is not CHEAP!
There are lots of other videos like this all over the internet using this exact format. They work. They get people to do whatever it is they're pitching.
Study how the argument is constructed. Really, sit through this video a couple of times and take notes on the structure of the argument.
See if you can find the most glaring grammatical error I saw. See if you can spot the "bait and switch" tactic -- OK, I'll give you a hint. It starts out talking about the oil drilling in the Dakotas that you've all heard about and know, then ends up trying to sell you on investing in natural gas which the earlier presentation on oil clearly indicates will plunge in price. Then it says you should buy the most risky investment I know of (distressed debt instruments) because they're "safe." But of course you can't invest in this safe investment by yourself - you don't know enough or have the skills. You have to hire them to do it for you - because, you see, it's safe.
This sales pitch format - filled with logic holes and ignoring known facts by just not mentioning them - is extremely effective in triggering the behavior desired by the pitcher. How would you use this methodology to "sell" the idea that "Love Conquers All" and "Happily Ever After" is the normal, ordinary condition of life that anyone can achieve?
If you've been watching TV shows like Leverage that I've discussed previously, you won't fall for the grifter's tricks in this video - and you'll learn how to use them to your own advantage without doing anything immoral or unethical.
By the time you get to that switch from oil to gas in the video, notice how you're ready to believe the video is giving you some real advantage in investing -- maybe because you're bored out of your mind with oil and the change in topic restores interest, but mostly because the speaker has gained credibility by telling you what you already know (that oil drilling is a big deal all of a sudden).
There's one passing shrug about green energy - pointing out the price differential with a very quickly shown table you don't have time to study. There's no handy way to roll the video back and re-watch a page or two to check you understood it, which is very clever disabling of online features.
The whole thing is full of tricks you have been learning to use in writing Paranormal Romance - tricks to get readers to believe the impossible. Some of those tricks are used to present the obviously true -- so the trick itself isn't obvious when the video gets to the obviously untrue.
The whole thing is a marvelous study in motivation-manipulation.
Remember, I've mentioned the science behind this kind of advertising many times.
We start with the raw math of Game Theory and the Overton Window (Google those terms if you haven't studied them yet) and layer on top of that the entire science of advertising. This video is predicting an Overton Window, or saying that such a window is open right now. And it's purporting to show you how to play this game to your advantage (by hiring this company to do it for you).
And deep inside this video, if you reverse engineer it using the clues I've been talking about in the Worldbuilding posts, you will find Edward Bernays that I've mentioned over the last few months.
Here's a neat article from npr on Bernays:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4612464
Look up Bernays on Wikipedia for more nifty bits and tidbits.
The techniques founded on Bernays principles are suavely orchestrated into this video. I can see how it was done. Can you? Yet? Study. Study hard.
And all those techniques are yours to use a) in your constructing of your Romance novel most especially Paranormal Romance, b) in your constructing of your advertising for your novel, and c) in taking contracts to write advertising like this for others selling things other than your novels.
Very few novelists make a living from novels -- advertising copy writers make a good living. This video is nothing but copyrighting and good, dramatic reading. Study it carefully.
A very large percentage of novelists make their major income from a day-job writing non-fiction -- in journalism (as Allan Cole did after his stint in Cyprus -- before his screenwriting career and his novel writing career), in paid blogging, or advertising.
Study this video and ponder your career moves based on whether you can master these copy-writing and advertising constructing skills to a level where you can sell those skills as your primary income source, so you can write your novels your own way.
But keep in mind that this video has been all over the internet for years before I decided I had to watch it. I had to watch it because it's all over. Every time it is offered in a side-bar, the company being advertised in it is paying a fee. They wouldn't keep doing that if the video didn't bring in customers. You want to understand what's happening -- follow the money. Closely.
Now, when you're ready for worldbuilding on a more sophisticated level, restudy that video after re-reading the Theme-Plot Integration series on the use of Fallacy as a plotting tool -- 6 of those posts went up here in January-February 2013.
By the way: I've recommended in many of these writing craft posts that beginners start learning to write by reading the biographies of writers (and autobiographies). This one cited here, LUCKY IN CYPRUS, is an excellent example. Note Allan Cole's eclectic interest in reading, in devouring a variety of subjects, the thirst for knowledge and for learning, the focus on first-hand experience, and the globe-trotting lifestyle at a young age. These elements are common to all the most successful writers. Read this biography closely. Here is Allan Cole's credit list on imdb.com
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0170426/
There's a couple people with that same byline. That imdb page is by the fellow who wrote LUCKY IN CYPRUS and the Sten Series of novels. See him on Amazon here:
http://www.amazon.com/Allan-Cole/e/B000AR9N24/
This kind of biographical history is a very firm predictor of commercial success in writing. There are apparent exceptions, of course, but the preponderance of evidence is on the side of a "colorful" early biography. With that in mind read my blog entries on Pluto.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/astrology-just-for-writers-part-10.html
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Showing posts with label Newsweek. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Newsweek. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Failure of Imagination Part III: Education
We're going to look at an article that surfaced in July 2010 in Newsweek Magazine, of all places, that unintentionally reveals a lot about the fiction marketplace and how that fiction market is morphing as we begin this new decade.
Who would think Newsweek would give writing lessons?
The overall general topic I've been tackling in these posts on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com is how to improve the general reader/viewer's opinion of the Romance Genre - particularly SFR and PNR.
Part I of this sequence on Failure of Imagination is not labeled Part I because I had no idea the topic would spread so far:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/where-expert-romance-writers-fail.html
Part I is about professional romance writers unable to imagine the HEA is actually a real part of everyday mundane life.
Part II is here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/failure-of-imagination-part-ii-society.html
Part II looks at our failure as a society to imagine solutions to some problems -- and therefore we must suspect we fail to imagine and actualize solutions to other problems. It's not a failure to solve A problem - it's a failure at problem-solving-methodology. I wrote this before the Newsweek article came out.
Part III is this post where we will look at why Americans are wearing such blinders on the Imagination.
We put blinders (those leather cups around the outside of the eyes) on race horses to help them concentrate on running where the jockey points them and not spook at every movement close by, especially when being put into the starting gate stall. They also protect the horse's eyes from flying mud kicked up by a horse next to them.
It's a kindness to the horse, and a way of getting the horse's best out of him/her.
But should humans be treated that way?
When some of our data-input channels (mental and emotional bandwidth?) are blocked by "blinders" do we perform "better?"
Well, if you prevent certain sorts of human behavior before the behavior is even conceptualized, the human might become more tractable, more easily directed into certain group coordinated activities like running in a herd.
How can you put blinders on a MIND???
I don't mean how can you get up the nerve, the gumption, the chutzpah to do that -- but rather how can a mind be "blinded?"
Well, it's psychological of course.
And isn't psychology what fiction is about -- while Romance genre specializes in microscopic examination of the psychological?
You know me and cliches. Here's another old one I haven't harped on before. "As The Twig Is Bent, So Grows The Tree."
People can be bent psychologically if you can get at them early enough in life. The rule of thumb is give me a child until he's 7 years old, and you can do anything you want with him after that. (Is that from the Jesuits?)
We know this from child-abuse studies. A person abused in childhood turns out to be an adult with "issues" -- if overcome, those issues can be a strength, but if not overcome then they can cut swaths out of the individual's total potential.
People are bendable. Thus humans can "adjust" culturally, physically, psychologically, to almost any environment and circumstance.
Humans inhabit this world from the Arctic to the Tropics, on tundra and in deep forest. Humans live packed into cities, and spread onto prairie. Humans live under dictators and alone in single families or tribes. Humans can do anything if they start young enough.
This is what gives us the scope to postulate human-alien Romances, galactic civilizations, lost human colonies on worlds peopled primarily by Aliens (Examples: C. J. Cherryh's fabulous FOREIGNER series and my own Molt Brother and City of a Million Legends. Find free chapters of my novels at http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com )
This bendable trait of human beings gives fiction writers much fodder for character development, story arc, plot and worldbuilding.
There's the story of overcoming childhood trauma -- the story of frigidity being overcome by Love -- the story of a weakness becoming a strength as someone takes their trauma and say, founds an organization to fight that issue in the general public.
Say a kid witnesses their elder sibling being killed by a drunk driver and grows up to found a National Chain of Bar & Grill joints which fight alcoholism and drunk driving, hiring real Psychologists to be bartenders?
There's no such thing as a life-event that is inherently ALL BAD. But there is trauma that changes people in ways they would rather not be changed.
As I've detailed in my series of posts here on Tarot and Astrology, all these life-events are just made of ENERGY - and it's how we bring that energy into manifestation and make choices which put the energy to use that determines whether the energy does more damage than good.
That's the essence of the "Beat Sheet" -- a "beat" is a BANG made by ENERGY - kinetic energy turned into sound. Or in the case of a story: emotional energy turned into action. It all has rhythm. The energy builds, the energy is released in a BEAT.
The rhythms of the world these fiction-beats are derived from are well depicted in Tarot and Astrology (and dozens of other fields of psychology) in a way that writers can use them to create characters, life stories, and plots.
Find the series of posts on Tarot and Astrology listed in these posts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_23.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html (this one lists a group of very esoteric essays I did for my professional Review column on Snyder's Beat Sheet - and Snyder agreed).
So people (humans and most of the aliens we write about) can be "bent" as children, and very often, without warning and at great inconvenience to the "benders" they can, as adults, "snap back."
And those snaps can be used by writers as beats for fiction -- beats that mirror the rhythmic drumbeats of real life.
So what has all this to do with Newsweek Magazine?
Well, Newsweek featured a story which came out of scientific research.
The importance of this article is largely in the fact that it is a subject taken up by Newsweek. People will read this who would not read the peer reviewed articles in a Journal.
Read this article on Creativity Quotient if you missed it in your dentist's office:
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html
----Quote From Newsweek--------
Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
----End Quote From Newsweek------
Go read that article.
Creativity Quotients had been steadily rising, just like IQ, until 1990 when among American children, the CQ scores suddenly bent down, and kept dropping.
For this CQ test, they target 8 year olds, 3rd graders.
Kids who were 8 in 1990 were born in 1982.
See my blog entry on the character of generations as described by the position of Pluto in their Natal Chart, and what that means for writers looking to target an audience.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/targeting-readership-part-one.html
followed by
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html
I just got an advertising email for a seminar on screenwriting about how to pitch your screenplay to producers. The pitch for the pitch-course asks, "Do you know how to answer the most common first question producers will ask in a pitch session?" If you can't answer it, you won't even be considered.
Q: What demographic does your screenplay target?
See my series on WHAT EXACTLY IS EDITING -- 7 posts in a row, Tuesdays starting August 3, 2010.
This Producer-pitch question is the editor's and agent's primary question.
Several tweets from Agents on twitter have pinpointed the first sentence of the query letter as crucial, and the information in that sentence has to be WHAT this novel is, meaning the demographic it's aimed at.
That doesn't mean you should write "This Novel is aimed at girls 8-14 years old" -- but it does mean that whatever you say has to IMPLY STRONGLY that you have a direct bead on a specific demographic and what that demographic is.
In fact, the first sentence of your pitch or query letter is an opportunity to show-don't-tell that you have the ability to "show don't tell" as well as that you know the demographic, can hit the demographic, and can specify that demographic.
Marketing is all about demographics, and today everything is so advertising supported that demographics is the be all and end all of saleability.
So in 1982 where was Pluto?
PLUTO IN LIBRA generation (assimilating out of justice?) Late 1971 - 1984 (Gen Y? sort of)
PLUTO IN SCORPIO generation 1985-1995 or so (video game generation?)
Those born in 1995 were 8 years old in 2003.
The Newsweek article points at video gaming and the TV as babysitter (a 1970's 80's phenomenon) as possible culprits in blunting American creativity.
But then it looks at the various attempts to "reform" our education system, and the current "teaching to the National Tests" format.
People born in 1984 are raising kids now. In fact many may have 6 year olds now. That critical first 7 years of bending the twig is in its second generation.
The Newsweek article makes some assumptions that writers working in Contemporary settings need to take into account.
The most glaring to me is the assumption that kids are the product of the school system, and how school is taught determines how the kids turn out.
Well, it's a big part, to be sure.
And perhaps in today's world, the current 20-somethings raising kids with both parents working 40 hour weeks (they should be so lucky these days), perhaps the school and daycare center is in fact the biggest influence on a child's direction of growth.
How many parents teach their kids to stand up to the teachers and show the teachers where the teachers are just plain wrong to teach "what to think" rather than "how to think" -- and just how far would the poor kid get with that? In fact, would it do the teachers any good? Teachers must do exactly what the Principle and Board and so on tell them to, not what they believe is right. Kids don't understand "the system."
How much face-time do you have with your 8 year old (and younger).
Will that sparsity of face-time with their parents make them turn out to have different "issues" than you do when they grow up?
Cruising the web, I saw an article about education advancements. Kids in K-8 grades are using handheld devices to interface with classroom servers. Teaching is high tech because the jobs these kids will eventually need to do will be even higher tech.
Even car mechanics work with "chips" now -- and if they don't do it right, your car stalls or accelerates out of control.
With all of these factors shifting in less than the span of a mere 20 years or so during which a person can go from being a child to being a parent, which way should we bend our children to give them the best chance in the world we can't even imagine?
Because our imagination fails, we don't know how to bend and blinder our children for their success - or even survival.
With the torrential information explosion, overload, blasting at us all from every direction, do our kids need to have "blinders" installed to protect them from the flying mud kicked up by the kid next door inventing something in their garage that will change the world?
Do we need more information, or less, or someone "up there" in authority controlling our information?
Do we need totally free access to anything anyone wants to put up on the Web (including things we'd rather our pre-adolescents not be exposed to?)
Do we need blinders so we don't see those things that would spook us and distract us from our job?
Or would such blinders "bend" our imaginations so that we can't even imagine that we might imagine a solution to a problem that nobody has ever imagined existed?
What if we imagine a solution to a problem that nobody has ever solved before?
Isn't that the beginning of a Ph.D. thesis?
Those questions each can be morphed into a Theme and used to generate incredible fiction very relevant to today's demographics.
But the writer needs to look at that Newsweek article from another perspective, the demographics of the writer's intended audience.
Pitch a "concept" at a producer who was 8 years old somewhere between 1990 and 2000, and if that "concept" is in the youngster's imagination-blindspot he/she won't be able to see it as a commercially viable concept.
You might have the best idea ever for a High Concept novel-film-TV show, a potential multi-media empire seething through the worldbuilding you've done. If the producer, agent, editor can't "see" it because their imagination has failed - then they won't buy it from you.
And that producer would be correct to pass over your property.
Why?
Because your property would fall into the imagination blindspot of the audience demographic that producer is aiming for. It would mean nothing to that audience, certainly not what it means to you.
So a writer must know what blinders her audience is wearing, blinders the audience is not aware exist. The writer must know the limits of the audience's imagination.
What happened when Star Trek first went on the air - say 1967?
It set off an explosion of imagination among young college students - 20 year olds born in the baby-boomer years.
PLUTO IN LEO 1939 - 1957 (Became The Flower Children of 1960's and '70's)
Pluto in Leo folks have a magnified emphasis on being leaders, commanders, examples that others follow. Pluto is a magnifier and Leo represents "The King" - the chief. Gene Roddenberry had Sun in Leo.
And Leo rules the natural 5th House, so it's associated with entertainment, and children and siblings, with personal CREATIVITY in general.
Star Trek dropped into the minds of 20-somethings who already had an excess of creativity. That generation, fans and non-fans, produced the Internet, the Web, home computers, satellite, GPS navigation, genetic engineering, even matter-transmission and the discovery of planets around other stars, all in the last 40 years or so.
That didn't happen worldwide. It happened in the USA. But then it started, and is now continuing to happen in other countries where Star Trek has reached. It's slacking off in the USA, and many patents corporations have filed are actually in the names of folks born and raised, even educated elsewhere.
Star Trek may not be the "cause" -- but its popularity, its appeal, is to the imagination. It energizes imagination that already exists. It can't be popular where that imagination fails.
But now the USA is not producing such imaginative people though other countries are.
So the position of Pluto in natal charts and other factors that exist worldwide doesn't account for the change the Newsweek article notes in creativity in the USA as opposed to creativity in other countries.
So where are these blinders on the imagination of USA youth being implanted? In school, by daycare, in sports and other group activities, or in the home, in TV, Internet, and gaming hours?
And what will happen when this generation, or two generations, snap back, rip off the blinders and look at the world again?
Did we implant these blinders on our children to protect them from the excess amount of change the information age has created?
Again, each of these (unimaginable) questions could lead to blockbuster novel sales, films, TV series. Who knows? Can you imagine that?
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Who would think Newsweek would give writing lessons?
The overall general topic I've been tackling in these posts on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com is how to improve the general reader/viewer's opinion of the Romance Genre - particularly SFR and PNR.
Part I of this sequence on Failure of Imagination is not labeled Part I because I had no idea the topic would spread so far:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/where-expert-romance-writers-fail.html
Part I is about professional romance writers unable to imagine the HEA is actually a real part of everyday mundane life.
Part II is here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/failure-of-imagination-part-ii-society.html
Part II looks at our failure as a society to imagine solutions to some problems -- and therefore we must suspect we fail to imagine and actualize solutions to other problems. It's not a failure to solve A problem - it's a failure at problem-solving-methodology. I wrote this before the Newsweek article came out.
Part III is this post where we will look at why Americans are wearing such blinders on the Imagination.
We put blinders (those leather cups around the outside of the eyes) on race horses to help them concentrate on running where the jockey points them and not spook at every movement close by, especially when being put into the starting gate stall. They also protect the horse's eyes from flying mud kicked up by a horse next to them.
It's a kindness to the horse, and a way of getting the horse's best out of him/her.
But should humans be treated that way?
When some of our data-input channels (mental and emotional bandwidth?) are blocked by "blinders" do we perform "better?"
Well, if you prevent certain sorts of human behavior before the behavior is even conceptualized, the human might become more tractable, more easily directed into certain group coordinated activities like running in a herd.
How can you put blinders on a MIND???
I don't mean how can you get up the nerve, the gumption, the chutzpah to do that -- but rather how can a mind be "blinded?"
Well, it's psychological of course.
And isn't psychology what fiction is about -- while Romance genre specializes in microscopic examination of the psychological?
You know me and cliches. Here's another old one I haven't harped on before. "As The Twig Is Bent, So Grows The Tree."
People can be bent psychologically if you can get at them early enough in life. The rule of thumb is give me a child until he's 7 years old, and you can do anything you want with him after that. (Is that from the Jesuits?)
We know this from child-abuse studies. A person abused in childhood turns out to be an adult with "issues" -- if overcome, those issues can be a strength, but if not overcome then they can cut swaths out of the individual's total potential.
People are bendable. Thus humans can "adjust" culturally, physically, psychologically, to almost any environment and circumstance.
Humans inhabit this world from the Arctic to the Tropics, on tundra and in deep forest. Humans live packed into cities, and spread onto prairie. Humans live under dictators and alone in single families or tribes. Humans can do anything if they start young enough.
This is what gives us the scope to postulate human-alien Romances, galactic civilizations, lost human colonies on worlds peopled primarily by Aliens (Examples: C. J. Cherryh's fabulous FOREIGNER series and my own Molt Brother and City of a Million Legends. Find free chapters of my novels at http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com )
This bendable trait of human beings gives fiction writers much fodder for character development, story arc, plot and worldbuilding.
There's the story of overcoming childhood trauma -- the story of frigidity being overcome by Love -- the story of a weakness becoming a strength as someone takes their trauma and say, founds an organization to fight that issue in the general public.
Say a kid witnesses their elder sibling being killed by a drunk driver and grows up to found a National Chain of Bar & Grill joints which fight alcoholism and drunk driving, hiring real Psychologists to be bartenders?
There's no such thing as a life-event that is inherently ALL BAD. But there is trauma that changes people in ways they would rather not be changed.
As I've detailed in my series of posts here on Tarot and Astrology, all these life-events are just made of ENERGY - and it's how we bring that energy into manifestation and make choices which put the energy to use that determines whether the energy does more damage than good.
That's the essence of the "Beat Sheet" -- a "beat" is a BANG made by ENERGY - kinetic energy turned into sound. Or in the case of a story: emotional energy turned into action. It all has rhythm. The energy builds, the energy is released in a BEAT.
The rhythms of the world these fiction-beats are derived from are well depicted in Tarot and Astrology (and dozens of other fields of psychology) in a way that writers can use them to create characters, life stories, and plots.
Find the series of posts on Tarot and Astrology listed in these posts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_23.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html (this one lists a group of very esoteric essays I did for my professional Review column on Snyder's Beat Sheet - and Snyder agreed).
So people (humans and most of the aliens we write about) can be "bent" as children, and very often, without warning and at great inconvenience to the "benders" they can, as adults, "snap back."
And those snaps can be used by writers as beats for fiction -- beats that mirror the rhythmic drumbeats of real life.
So what has all this to do with Newsweek Magazine?
Well, Newsweek featured a story which came out of scientific research.
The importance of this article is largely in the fact that it is a subject taken up by Newsweek. People will read this who would not read the peer reviewed articles in a Journal.
Read this article on Creativity Quotient if you missed it in your dentist's office:
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html
----Quote From Newsweek--------
Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
----End Quote From Newsweek------
Go read that article.
Creativity Quotients had been steadily rising, just like IQ, until 1990 when among American children, the CQ scores suddenly bent down, and kept dropping.
For this CQ test, they target 8 year olds, 3rd graders.
Kids who were 8 in 1990 were born in 1982.
See my blog entry on the character of generations as described by the position of Pluto in their Natal Chart, and what that means for writers looking to target an audience.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/targeting-readership-part-one.html
followed by
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html
I just got an advertising email for a seminar on screenwriting about how to pitch your screenplay to producers. The pitch for the pitch-course asks, "Do you know how to answer the most common first question producers will ask in a pitch session?" If you can't answer it, you won't even be considered.
Q: What demographic does your screenplay target?
See my series on WHAT EXACTLY IS EDITING -- 7 posts in a row, Tuesdays starting August 3, 2010.
This Producer-pitch question is the editor's and agent's primary question.
Several tweets from Agents on twitter have pinpointed the first sentence of the query letter as crucial, and the information in that sentence has to be WHAT this novel is, meaning the demographic it's aimed at.
That doesn't mean you should write "This Novel is aimed at girls 8-14 years old" -- but it does mean that whatever you say has to IMPLY STRONGLY that you have a direct bead on a specific demographic and what that demographic is.
In fact, the first sentence of your pitch or query letter is an opportunity to show-don't-tell that you have the ability to "show don't tell" as well as that you know the demographic, can hit the demographic, and can specify that demographic.
Marketing is all about demographics, and today everything is so advertising supported that demographics is the be all and end all of saleability.
So in 1982 where was Pluto?
PLUTO IN LIBRA generation (assimilating out of justice?) Late 1971 - 1984 (Gen Y? sort of)
PLUTO IN SCORPIO generation 1985-1995 or so (video game generation?)
Those born in 1995 were 8 years old in 2003.
The Newsweek article points at video gaming and the TV as babysitter (a 1970's 80's phenomenon) as possible culprits in blunting American creativity.
But then it looks at the various attempts to "reform" our education system, and the current "teaching to the National Tests" format.
People born in 1984 are raising kids now. In fact many may have 6 year olds now. That critical first 7 years of bending the twig is in its second generation.
The Newsweek article makes some assumptions that writers working in Contemporary settings need to take into account.
The most glaring to me is the assumption that kids are the product of the school system, and how school is taught determines how the kids turn out.
Well, it's a big part, to be sure.
And perhaps in today's world, the current 20-somethings raising kids with both parents working 40 hour weeks (they should be so lucky these days), perhaps the school and daycare center is in fact the biggest influence on a child's direction of growth.
How many parents teach their kids to stand up to the teachers and show the teachers where the teachers are just plain wrong to teach "what to think" rather than "how to think" -- and just how far would the poor kid get with that? In fact, would it do the teachers any good? Teachers must do exactly what the Principle and Board and so on tell them to, not what they believe is right. Kids don't understand "the system."
How much face-time do you have with your 8 year old (and younger).
Will that sparsity of face-time with their parents make them turn out to have different "issues" than you do when they grow up?
Cruising the web, I saw an article about education advancements. Kids in K-8 grades are using handheld devices to interface with classroom servers. Teaching is high tech because the jobs these kids will eventually need to do will be even higher tech.
Even car mechanics work with "chips" now -- and if they don't do it right, your car stalls or accelerates out of control.
With all of these factors shifting in less than the span of a mere 20 years or so during which a person can go from being a child to being a parent, which way should we bend our children to give them the best chance in the world we can't even imagine?
Because our imagination fails, we don't know how to bend and blinder our children for their success - or even survival.
With the torrential information explosion, overload, blasting at us all from every direction, do our kids need to have "blinders" installed to protect them from the flying mud kicked up by the kid next door inventing something in their garage that will change the world?
Do we need more information, or less, or someone "up there" in authority controlling our information?
Do we need totally free access to anything anyone wants to put up on the Web (including things we'd rather our pre-adolescents not be exposed to?)
Do we need blinders so we don't see those things that would spook us and distract us from our job?
Or would such blinders "bend" our imaginations so that we can't even imagine that we might imagine a solution to a problem that nobody has ever imagined existed?
What if we imagine a solution to a problem that nobody has ever solved before?
Isn't that the beginning of a Ph.D. thesis?
Those questions each can be morphed into a Theme and used to generate incredible fiction very relevant to today's demographics.
But the writer needs to look at that Newsweek article from another perspective, the demographics of the writer's intended audience.
Pitch a "concept" at a producer who was 8 years old somewhere between 1990 and 2000, and if that "concept" is in the youngster's imagination-blindspot he/she won't be able to see it as a commercially viable concept.
You might have the best idea ever for a High Concept novel-film-TV show, a potential multi-media empire seething through the worldbuilding you've done. If the producer, agent, editor can't "see" it because their imagination has failed - then they won't buy it from you.
And that producer would be correct to pass over your property.
Why?
Because your property would fall into the imagination blindspot of the audience demographic that producer is aiming for. It would mean nothing to that audience, certainly not what it means to you.
So a writer must know what blinders her audience is wearing, blinders the audience is not aware exist. The writer must know the limits of the audience's imagination.
What happened when Star Trek first went on the air - say 1967?
It set off an explosion of imagination among young college students - 20 year olds born in the baby-boomer years.
PLUTO IN LEO 1939 - 1957 (Became The Flower Children of 1960's and '70's)
Pluto in Leo folks have a magnified emphasis on being leaders, commanders, examples that others follow. Pluto is a magnifier and Leo represents "The King" - the chief. Gene Roddenberry had Sun in Leo.
And Leo rules the natural 5th House, so it's associated with entertainment, and children and siblings, with personal CREATIVITY in general.
Star Trek dropped into the minds of 20-somethings who already had an excess of creativity. That generation, fans and non-fans, produced the Internet, the Web, home computers, satellite, GPS navigation, genetic engineering, even matter-transmission and the discovery of planets around other stars, all in the last 40 years or so.
That didn't happen worldwide. It happened in the USA. But then it started, and is now continuing to happen in other countries where Star Trek has reached. It's slacking off in the USA, and many patents corporations have filed are actually in the names of folks born and raised, even educated elsewhere.
Star Trek may not be the "cause" -- but its popularity, its appeal, is to the imagination. It energizes imagination that already exists. It can't be popular where that imagination fails.
But now the USA is not producing such imaginative people though other countries are.
So the position of Pluto in natal charts and other factors that exist worldwide doesn't account for the change the Newsweek article notes in creativity in the USA as opposed to creativity in other countries.
So where are these blinders on the imagination of USA youth being implanted? In school, by daycare, in sports and other group activities, or in the home, in TV, Internet, and gaming hours?
And what will happen when this generation, or two generations, snap back, rip off the blinders and look at the world again?
Did we implant these blinders on our children to protect them from the excess amount of change the information age has created?
Again, each of these (unimaginable) questions could lead to blockbuster novel sales, films, TV series. Who knows? Can you imagine that?
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Urban Fantasy Job Hunting
The May 2009 issue of LOCUS, the newspaper of science fiction and fantasy, now (since it was sold to a professional publisher,) billed as "The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field," is devoted to Urban Fantasy.
http://www.locusmag.com/ is their online site.
I've written here before about the shift in popularity away from SF and toward Fantasy, which is allowing the development of the Paranormal Romance and SF Romance field. So, in the context of the release of the new Star Trek movie, let's talk a little about what Romance readers can expect and what writers can provide for them.
This is an exercise in worldbuilding by using a "connect the dots" technique on what we often term "the real world."
So here are some dots.
I've started to get the copies of Business Week that I was forced to spend airline miles on. The first issue is the May 11, 2009 issue. Putting Locus together with Business Week (and later with a NEWSWEEK article on Star Trek we'll get to later) started my mind percolating.
So let's think about choosing your background for your story in such a way that it excites readers, gets their minds percolating in a pleasurable way. That's what SF does -- makes you think, shows you how to think but not what to think.
You want to create a background that makes your reader anticipate a good read, an experience "just like" the latest book they loved, but different, unique and especially yours. You want your readers to memorize your byline and search the world for MORE of your stuff.
To do that, you have to pull thousands of little details together, details lurking in the background, or just off the edge of your potential reader's peripheral vision.
How do you do that? You read eclectically, often in a way that appears to your family, randomly! You collect a mental store of trivia others have never heard of.
If wide reading on many subjects repells you, you probably aren't going to be a fiction writer (maybe non-fiction in one field?) If trivia doesn't grip you, then you probably should look for another line of work. But assuming you think you have a few novels in you, think about two nearly mutually exclusive sources such as Business Week and Locus in one breath, then think BACKGROUND, and even "backstory."
Or if you're into film writing, think SET PIECE. And SETTING.
How does a writer cradle a ho-hum-yawn-not-again plotted Romance in a background that makes that old story new again?
You must do that because there really aren't that many stories, or or plots, or that many Romances either.
What hooks readers is how these particular, very individualistic characters adjust themselves to the harsh world they must live in, and still manage to nurture deep, rich and intimate Relationships.
Writers seem to be born with characters yelling in their heads, "TELL MY STORY NEXT!" I've seen 4 year olds do it with blunt crayons! Characters are often innate traits of writers. (there are exceptions; Hal Clement was one such. The hero of his novels was always the World and the Science. The characters just investigated and learned how the science works.)
But backgrounds, now there is where writers can get wildly creative if they have a big enough store of trivia.
Note how the 4 year old with blunt crayons always chooses a background they know.
As an adult, you need to tell your story against a background you know, too, but it does not (and perhaps even should not) have to be some place you have been, or are familiar with, such as the Trek Universe worked over so well by fan writers (like me and my Kraith Universe ( http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/kraith/ )).
Or it can be someplace you just make up or imagine as the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, imagined his Galaxy.
Or that place you imagine can be right here on earth, a place a lot of people (even your potential readers) have been or seen on TV ( 90210 for example).
In my August 2009 review column (which will likely be posted to the web for free reading in September 2009) I reviewed an international intrigue thriller that's likely to be a movie soon titled THE INCREMENT.
http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2009/ (scroll down to August and you'll see the book cover -- that's where the review links will be).
THE INCREMENT
Or see my review here:
http://www.amazon.com/Increment-Novel-David-Ignatius/product-reviews/0393065049/ref=cm_cr_pr_link_3?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&pageNumber=3
The author of THE INCREMENT, David Ignatius, says in his comments that though the book is partly set in Iran, and though he's actually been there, THIS IRAN is totally imaginary. He didn't say it was an alternate-reality fantasy world, likely because the marketing department would scream "LIMITING THE AUDIENCE" -- but that's actually what this book is and does.
Yet the new Star Trek movie is billed as "alternate universe" to the one we originally saw on TV and its successors, just as Kraith is an "alternate universe" to ST:TOS.
So that means THE INCREMENT is an URBAN FANTASY marketed as a contemporary international intrigue thriller and it even has some intricate relationships, though I wouldn't call it a Romance. A little re-writing and it could easily have been a Romance!
But it's being marketed at the top of the marketing pyramid with lots of publicity money behind it -- likely because it's not being marketed as what it really is, an Urban Fantasy!
OK, so how would a Paranormal Romance Writer follow in David Ignatius's illustrious footsteps? Of course if I really knew for sure, I'd have done that by now! But let's think about how it might be done.
START WITH TWO STEPS AND CONNECT THE DOTS:
1. Note via Locus that "Urban Fantasy" has begun to surface in a big way. I've been talking about BUFFY and other TV shows like REAPER and SUPERNATURAL (see my blog post here http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/04/puzzle-of-romance.html ) and the DRESDEN FILES (which I reviewed another novel from in the forthcoming October Issue -- you can see all my 2009 picks at http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2009/ ) and Locus is surveying a whole lot more. It's a trend.
2. NOTE via Business Week that the general media is now admitting but dancing around something SF writers have talked about since at least the 1950's -- probably much earlier but I haven't time to research it. I'll tell you about it below.
THEN REMEMBER my column here last week
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/writing-tips-tweets.html
where I talked about an emerging trend of using Tech to solve problems created by Tech.
Now, #2 above -- the BUSINESS WEEK headline on the cover, lower left corner, said THE U.S. HAS 3 MILLION JOB OPENINGS; "Why that may NOT be good news for the economy."
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_19/b4130040117561.htm
QUOTES FROM BUSINESS WEEK
-------------------
"...with 13 million people unemployed, there are approximately 3 million jobs that employers are actively recruiting for but so far have been unable to fill. ... People thrown out of shrinking sectors such as construction, finance, and retail lack the skills and training for openings in growing fields including education, accounting, health care, and government."
...
"The U. S. economy has changed dramatically over the past couple of years-- faster, it seems than the workforce can adapt. The evidence is clear in an underappreciated report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics known as JOLTS, for Job Openings & Labor Turnover Survey, which has been issued monthly since December 2000."
--------------------------
Now doesn't that depict a "harsh" world for characters to find meaningful relationships in?
All right, so let's hunt up some more dots to connect into this picture.
I often hear Bernanke's testimony before congress as I'm cooking because I have a TV I can see from the kitchen. I've heard him and Greenspan talking about retraining people for the new jobs of the 21st century -- and that all America has to do is pour money into community colleges to retrain our workforce.
I think it's a good thing that Obama's "stimulus" allocates money for community college retraining of adults project. Obama made a speech on retraining the workforce on Friday May 8, 2009. That WILL work for a lot of people and save families and lives and children's futures, not to mention the whole USA economy. It's a good thing, and something we need to do at any cost.
BUT.
And it's a great big but.
Read the article titled HELP WANTED in the May 11, 2009 issue of Business Week http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_19/b4130040117561.htm
Now think real hard. What is actually going on in this turbulent and bewildering shift in employment. Remember how I talked about the wireless connection for digital picture frames last week
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/writing-tips-tweets.html
Another trend, solving tech problems by ladling on more tech. But the picture frames solve the problem of the anti-tech grandma you want to show your children to.
The "smart" gadget, smart machine trend tells you something. Replacing computers, you have a smart-phone with a camera and web access. They put chips in cars now -- you almost hardly have to drive them anymore! Corner too fast, it levels out. Get too close to a bumper, the chip stops the car (OK, I can't afford such a high end car, but my first response is I don't want that! I want to be in control of my vehicle! So maybe I'm becoming anti-tech.)
But it's a trend. Smart machines, not monstrous computers you have to be a genius to keep running!
What is going on here?
Our society has hit some kind of limit that Congress and the Fed and others "in charge" either don't recognize or can't admit exists for political reasons.
Dig back into your pile of trivia stored in your mind. Do you remember why 100 is the AVERAGE IQ?
OK, IQ tests are rigged to reward people of a certain cultural background, but all that aside, the IQ test is supposed to measure not what you know but how fast you can learn. They've been tweaking the test to eliminate racial bias and so on; it's probably still not very good, but it's good for statistics.
Always remember statistics can tell you very accurately how large populations behave, but DO NOT WORK IN REVERSE. They can't tell you a thing about any given individual in that population! The math isn't designed to work in reverse!
But IQ tests when aggregated can tell you about the characteristics of millions of people, and predict the behavior of that population with high accuracy.
100 is the average because about half the people in the world score below 100 while half score above.
Scroll back and read what I said above about WRITERS. We're eclectic readers and collectors of vast piles of trivia. Why? Not because we're a whole lot smarter (IQ wise) than others, but because we get a pleasure hit out of "dabbling" in anything and everything. We're attracted to what we don't know.
It's more an attitude or character trait than a measure of learning ability, but as a group we tend to maximize whatever natural learning ability we might have. We perform at possibly over 90% of our personal potential for learning, while MOST people are lucky to use half what they were born with.
Marion Zimmer Bradley often said anyone who can write a literate sentence can learn to write fiction. So I'm not saying writers, per se, are extra-high intelligence (thought some, like Isaac Asimov, are/were). But writers are good at finding patterns in trivia! (I can't now recall if I talked about pattern recognition in this aliendjinnromance blog or in my review column, but some of you will remember that discussion.)
So here's a pattern from the dots.
Long ago, SF writers started depicting a future civilization when half or more of the people lived on the public dole (welfare).
Why?
In some novels it was because it really didn't take so many people to run the world, produce food, clothing, shelter, entertainment and luxuries for everyone. Machines (maybe robots) did most of the work, and the rest of us loafed. ( PBS NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT has done a week's worth of segments on household robots being developed in Japan that do laundry, dishes, & cleaning! By 2020 they'll be on the market.)
In other novels, the world was depicted pretty close to what I'm seeing in this Business Week article -- and possibly also in the Locus issue.
Business Week is saying essentially that though we have massive excess "workers" employers simply CAN'T fill jobs.
Greenspan and Bernanke (and now Obama) are always talking about solving that problem by simply retraining the work force. But employers have found that's getting to be less and less possible.
According to Business Week, retraining older workers has worked pretty well in Germany where the government provides a part of a new worker's salary for the first year so the employer can "retrain" them to what they need. But employers in Germany are quoted as pointing out that they need that government assistance because "you never know what'll happen" when you hire "someone."
That might be a way of saying without saying the extremely politically incorrect observation I'm making. (controversial or "edgy" premises sell large numbers of books!)
As tech progresses, it takes a higher and higher IQ to be able to learn the jobs needed to produce the dumbed-down tech like wireless picture frames.
The jobs that are being produced that really pay well are jobs that require an IQ above 100 to learn even if not to do on a day to day basis. Maybe in 10 years, that'll be 110 to learn and 105 to do daily.
Our workforce lacks the intelligence to be able to do the jobs we need done.
That's not a property of our culture or civilization or society. It's a property of the human brain -- but as I've pointed out in a previous blog post here, the human brain is mutable. As long as you keep requiring it to adapt, it will keep adapting. In older people, that adaptability wanes, but pushed hard you can get some adaptation. But not enough to make an IQ 98 person at age 12 into an IQ 105 person at age 55.
The jobs we need done require higher IQ than average to learn, and by definition you can't have more than half the people above average! (In SF though, you might be able to raise that average, which was done so many times in SF novels in the 1950's it became an unpublishable cliche.)
SF has been predicting, graphically, for decades, that our jobs outstrip out IQ, and our civilization could crash because of it.
But note, Grandma who needs a wireless digital picture frame isn't dumb, stupid, or low-I.Q.
She may have been a Bank VP or a factory manager, or even a science reporter (though these days that's not likely as women of that generation were barred from such professional success). But she may have been VERY smart. Only now she just can't learn to maintain a PC and plug a picture frame into its USB port and download her own photos.
Grandma may flinch visibly when someone says USB PORT. Thirty years ago she'd have had no trouble learning it.
There's your big problem. As you age, your original IQ trends downward. The older you are, the harder it becomes to learn, especially if you haven't been learning steadily in between. Routine jobs erode the ability to learn new things.
These wireless frames are hot sellers because they're EASY and both the younger people who are busy and older people who prefer to avoid learning -- and those who really can't learn -- love the whole concept. Hence they are best sellers, must have household tech.
Tech is making the world easier to live in but harder to create.
And so the threshold IQ level for being able to hold a job that's worth a living wage is going up and up. Soon, anyone with an IQ below 115 won't be worth anything in the labor market. Robots will do yard work, repave roads, build skyscrapers, all run from nice cool offices by Suits wearing diamond watches -- or diamond studded Bluetooth ear piece.
Now look at Urban Fantasy. Contrast that with old fashioned SF.
Actually, my September to December review columns are basically about just this subject -- SF and Urban Fantasy.
The way you tell if a story is Science Fiction or not is: "If you can leave out the Science and still have a story, it's not SF to begin with."
SF is waning in sales volumes of titles, really falling off the charts while Fantasy is booming.
What's the difference? They both tell the same STORY. Like I said above, same old ho-hum romance, different setting, goshwow story!
The difference between urban fantasy and sf is the science.
Today's science is much HARDER (required IQ to decipher concepts) than the science of the 1930's and 1940's. It didn't take as high an IQ to comprehend a scientific explanation then as it does now.
Science itself has become unpopular. What's "popular"? More than half the population likes it and wants it.
Now our science -- the exciting, cutting edge, speculative, goshwow science -- is comprehensible only to people with an IQ well above 100, which means to less than half the population.
We may have passed that halfway point sometime in the 1990's as the tech bubble inflated -- some day someone will make a graph and we'll see an inflection point.
Urban Fantasy heroes have to be brave, perhaps have integrity or grit or a streak of pure evil -- but they don't have to be smart. Even the geeks who run computer searches don't have to be smart. Hacking is not a trade for the high I.Q. people either -- you buy or steal your "hacking tools" which are programs someone with a high IQ makes and sells to hackers.
Urban Fantasy is about the potential achievements of ORDINARY PEOPLE -- people with an IQ of about 100 -- the average reader, maybe 105. These stories show how average-joe can achieve GREAT THINGS, (power, popularity, save the world, defend mankind from evil -- easy things to understand).
Science Fiction -- to have any modern science in it at all -- has to be about really REALLY smart people. The kind of people the average reader can't identify with. It's no fun to be out-classed, or to be shown a destiny you want but can't have because you're not smart enough even to understand the dumbed-down exposition in an SF novel.
In the old days, SF didn't have to be about such geniuses.
Here's another dot for our pattern. NEWSWEEK May 4, 2009, published a Star Trek article titled WE'RE ALL TREKKIES NOW. I commented on it online, and posted a link to my comment and got a whole bunch of new twitter followers! Here's the NEWSWEEK LINKS:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/195082 -- We're All Trekkies Now
My comment is labeled as posted
Posted By: JacquelineLichtenberg @ 05/08/2009 2:08:06 PM
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/popvox/archive/2009/05/07/round-up-of-newsweek-s-trek-coverage.aspx -- list of Star Trek coverage in NEWSWEEK, lots of stories.
The thesis of this Newsweek article (ignore the politics; that's just NEWSWEEK) is one that I totally agree with, and that's an important dot to this pattern. STAR TREK depicted humanity as capable of taking on the universe and prevailing. STAR TREK showed humanity as having outgrown war and embracing new contact with the unknown -- going where no one has gone before.
In the decades since ST:TOS, SF has been eclipsed by fantasy universes (on TV, in film, and in books) where humanity is depicted as threatened (in serious danger of being destroyed) by the Unknown -- and possibly unknowable. What I've called in this blog a picture of reality as a thin film over a seething cauldron of evil.
The self-perception (at least in America) has become one of being overwhelmed by a universe inimical to our existence.
So the problem employers are having filling jobs today reflects the general public's taste in entertainment. People are overwhelmed. By tech. By war. By government conspiracy or at least secrecy and incompetence. And now by the housing bubble bursting. Overwhelmed by evil is the same as overwhelmed by something that can kill you, destroy what you've accomplished in life (take away your pension).
Now do you see the technique? Deconstruct or reverse-engineer our everyday world into dots, then reconnect the dots into a DIFFERENT pattern. That will, if you use the genre structures we've discussed, give you that effect Hollywood is always looking for (and Manhattan lusts after), "The Same But Different."
To summarize, here are the dots for today's exercise:
1) URBAN FANTASY in Locus and Alternate Universe such as THE INCREMENT and STAR TREK
2) BUSINESS WEEK - 3 million jobs open with 13 million unemployed and Obama's solution is to "retrain" the workforce. (your characters are in retraining or teaching re-trainees).
3) NEWSWEEK - We're All Trekkies Now. Geeks have inherited the Earth and the White House. The Star Trek spirit of seeing an upbeat future awakens again -- or does it?
4) The popular theme of being overwhelmed (or almost overwhelmed) or needing protection from Evil that seethes beneath the surface of everyday life. Will that theme give way to Star Trek's HOPE theme, and if it does, what turbulence will disrupt romance?
5) Not mentioned here, but there's a trend of 30 and 40+ year old women FINALLY beginning to have children that might be relevant to building your SF Romance world.
So now re-connect the dots and do a little original worldbuilding.
Take your readers' awareness of the general IQ frustration (just think of the last time your computer made you feel helpless and you've got the emotion) as the background you're cradling your romance (or whatever genre; this process works for all genres) in, and tell a whopping good story about how IQ itself is a major stumbling block in intimacy in relationships.
You may generate more obstacles for your plot by creating characters to represent the various sides of the philosophical argument on the true nature of Humanity, and therein will lie your THEME.
Are humans like lemmings, carrying the seeds of their destruction within them (i.e. creating tech so "high" that we can't produce workers to maintain it but we become dependent on it for lack of basic grunt-work skills (spinning, weaving, farming, shepherding, metal working)? Or are humans infinitely adaptable, with brains that will re-circuit so that each generation's IQ 100 is actually HIGHER THAN the IQ 100 mark of the previous generation?
Is that what's happening already? It used to be parents had to get their kids to program the VCR. Now kids live online and text with their thumbs in coded words. Grown kids have to send pictures of their kids to their parents via dumbed-down-wireless-pictureframes. The parents won't twitter and the keener parents will just barely facebook but not myspace.
Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing are beyond today's 60 year olds.
The Web is the territory of the young (OK. I'm a misfit. So what else is new?)
How does the May/September Romance work out in a world with a generation gap like this? Will the Star Trek movie change anything?
You may, if you wish, post exercises on editingcircle.blogspot.com as comments for and get some input on how you do the exercise.
And remember, you don't have to AGREE with my analysis here - in fact it's better if you don't - in order to reconnect these dots into a new pattern and profit from the exercise. These dots could be a springboard into a hot Romance full of impossible things before breakfast.
Do you, as a writer, follow the trend -- or do you forge it?
And also remember, our objective in my last few posts here is to work the puzzle of how to get an SF Romance onto TV or into the movies to do for the genre what we have done (according to NEWSWEEK, anyway) for SF.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://www.locusmag.com/ is their online site.
I've written here before about the shift in popularity away from SF and toward Fantasy, which is allowing the development of the Paranormal Romance and SF Romance field. So, in the context of the release of the new Star Trek movie, let's talk a little about what Romance readers can expect and what writers can provide for them.
This is an exercise in worldbuilding by using a "connect the dots" technique on what we often term "the real world."
So here are some dots.
I've started to get the copies of Business Week that I was forced to spend airline miles on. The first issue is the May 11, 2009 issue. Putting Locus together with Business Week (and later with a NEWSWEEK article on Star Trek we'll get to later) started my mind percolating.
So let's think about choosing your background for your story in such a way that it excites readers, gets their minds percolating in a pleasurable way. That's what SF does -- makes you think, shows you how to think but not what to think.
You want to create a background that makes your reader anticipate a good read, an experience "just like" the latest book they loved, but different, unique and especially yours. You want your readers to memorize your byline and search the world for MORE of your stuff.
To do that, you have to pull thousands of little details together, details lurking in the background, or just off the edge of your potential reader's peripheral vision.
How do you do that? You read eclectically, often in a way that appears to your family, randomly! You collect a mental store of trivia others have never heard of.
If wide reading on many subjects repells you, you probably aren't going to be a fiction writer (maybe non-fiction in one field?) If trivia doesn't grip you, then you probably should look for another line of work. But assuming you think you have a few novels in you, think about two nearly mutually exclusive sources such as Business Week and Locus in one breath, then think BACKGROUND, and even "backstory."
Or if you're into film writing, think SET PIECE. And SETTING.
How does a writer cradle a ho-hum-yawn-not-again plotted Romance in a background that makes that old story new again?
You must do that because there really aren't that many stories, or or plots, or that many Romances either.
What hooks readers is how these particular, very individualistic characters adjust themselves to the harsh world they must live in, and still manage to nurture deep, rich and intimate Relationships.
Writers seem to be born with characters yelling in their heads, "TELL MY STORY NEXT!" I've seen 4 year olds do it with blunt crayons! Characters are often innate traits of writers. (there are exceptions; Hal Clement was one such. The hero of his novels was always the World and the Science. The characters just investigated and learned how the science works.)
But backgrounds, now there is where writers can get wildly creative if they have a big enough store of trivia.
Note how the 4 year old with blunt crayons always chooses a background they know.
As an adult, you need to tell your story against a background you know, too, but it does not (and perhaps even should not) have to be some place you have been, or are familiar with, such as the Trek Universe worked over so well by fan writers (like me and my Kraith Universe ( http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/kraith/ )).
Or it can be someplace you just make up or imagine as the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, imagined his Galaxy.
Or that place you imagine can be right here on earth, a place a lot of people (even your potential readers) have been or seen on TV ( 90210 for example).
In my August 2009 review column (which will likely be posted to the web for free reading in September 2009) I reviewed an international intrigue thriller that's likely to be a movie soon titled THE INCREMENT.
http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2009/ (scroll down to August and you'll see the book cover -- that's where the review links will be).
THE INCREMENT
Or see my review here:
http://www.amazon.com/Increment-Novel-David-Ignatius/product-reviews/0393065049/ref=cm_cr_pr_link_3?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&pageNumber=3
The author of THE INCREMENT, David Ignatius, says in his comments that though the book is partly set in Iran, and though he's actually been there, THIS IRAN is totally imaginary. He didn't say it was an alternate-reality fantasy world, likely because the marketing department would scream "LIMITING THE AUDIENCE" -- but that's actually what this book is and does.
Yet the new Star Trek movie is billed as "alternate universe" to the one we originally saw on TV and its successors, just as Kraith is an "alternate universe" to ST:TOS.
So that means THE INCREMENT is an URBAN FANTASY marketed as a contemporary international intrigue thriller and it even has some intricate relationships, though I wouldn't call it a Romance. A little re-writing and it could easily have been a Romance!
But it's being marketed at the top of the marketing pyramid with lots of publicity money behind it -- likely because it's not being marketed as what it really is, an Urban Fantasy!
OK, so how would a Paranormal Romance Writer follow in David Ignatius's illustrious footsteps? Of course if I really knew for sure, I'd have done that by now! But let's think about how it might be done.
START WITH TWO STEPS AND CONNECT THE DOTS:
1. Note via Locus that "Urban Fantasy" has begun to surface in a big way. I've been talking about BUFFY and other TV shows like REAPER and SUPERNATURAL (see my blog post here http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/04/puzzle-of-romance.html ) and the DRESDEN FILES (which I reviewed another novel from in the forthcoming October Issue -- you can see all my 2009 picks at http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2009/ ) and Locus is surveying a whole lot more. It's a trend.
2. NOTE via Business Week that the general media is now admitting but dancing around something SF writers have talked about since at least the 1950's -- probably much earlier but I haven't time to research it. I'll tell you about it below.
THEN REMEMBER my column here last week
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/writing-tips-tweets.html
where I talked about an emerging trend of using Tech to solve problems created by Tech.
Now, #2 above -- the BUSINESS WEEK headline on the cover, lower left corner, said THE U.S. HAS 3 MILLION JOB OPENINGS; "Why that may NOT be good news for the economy."
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_19/b4130040117561.htm
QUOTES FROM BUSINESS WEEK
-------------------
"...with 13 million people unemployed, there are approximately 3 million jobs that employers are actively recruiting for but so far have been unable to fill. ... People thrown out of shrinking sectors such as construction, finance, and retail lack the skills and training for openings in growing fields including education, accounting, health care, and government."
...
"The U. S. economy has changed dramatically over the past couple of years-- faster, it seems than the workforce can adapt. The evidence is clear in an underappreciated report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics known as JOLTS, for Job Openings & Labor Turnover Survey, which has been issued monthly since December 2000."
--------------------------
Now doesn't that depict a "harsh" world for characters to find meaningful relationships in?
All right, so let's hunt up some more dots to connect into this picture.
I often hear Bernanke's testimony before congress as I'm cooking because I have a TV I can see from the kitchen. I've heard him and Greenspan talking about retraining people for the new jobs of the 21st century -- and that all America has to do is pour money into community colleges to retrain our workforce.
I think it's a good thing that Obama's "stimulus" allocates money for community college retraining of adults project. Obama made a speech on retraining the workforce on Friday May 8, 2009. That WILL work for a lot of people and save families and lives and children's futures, not to mention the whole USA economy. It's a good thing, and something we need to do at any cost.
BUT.
And it's a great big but.
Read the article titled HELP WANTED in the May 11, 2009 issue of Business Week http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_19/b4130040117561.htm
Now think real hard. What is actually going on in this turbulent and bewildering shift in employment. Remember how I talked about the wireless connection for digital picture frames last week
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/writing-tips-tweets.html
Another trend, solving tech problems by ladling on more tech. But the picture frames solve the problem of the anti-tech grandma you want to show your children to.
The "smart" gadget, smart machine trend tells you something. Replacing computers, you have a smart-phone with a camera and web access. They put chips in cars now -- you almost hardly have to drive them anymore! Corner too fast, it levels out. Get too close to a bumper, the chip stops the car (OK, I can't afford such a high end car, but my first response is I don't want that! I want to be in control of my vehicle! So maybe I'm becoming anti-tech.)
But it's a trend. Smart machines, not monstrous computers you have to be a genius to keep running!
What is going on here?
Our society has hit some kind of limit that Congress and the Fed and others "in charge" either don't recognize or can't admit exists for political reasons.
Dig back into your pile of trivia stored in your mind. Do you remember why 100 is the AVERAGE IQ?
OK, IQ tests are rigged to reward people of a certain cultural background, but all that aside, the IQ test is supposed to measure not what you know but how fast you can learn. They've been tweaking the test to eliminate racial bias and so on; it's probably still not very good, but it's good for statistics.
Always remember statistics can tell you very accurately how large populations behave, but DO NOT WORK IN REVERSE. They can't tell you a thing about any given individual in that population! The math isn't designed to work in reverse!
But IQ tests when aggregated can tell you about the characteristics of millions of people, and predict the behavior of that population with high accuracy.
100 is the average because about half the people in the world score below 100 while half score above.
Scroll back and read what I said above about WRITERS. We're eclectic readers and collectors of vast piles of trivia. Why? Not because we're a whole lot smarter (IQ wise) than others, but because we get a pleasure hit out of "dabbling" in anything and everything. We're attracted to what we don't know.
It's more an attitude or character trait than a measure of learning ability, but as a group we tend to maximize whatever natural learning ability we might have. We perform at possibly over 90% of our personal potential for learning, while MOST people are lucky to use half what they were born with.
Marion Zimmer Bradley often said anyone who can write a literate sentence can learn to write fiction. So I'm not saying writers, per se, are extra-high intelligence (thought some, like Isaac Asimov, are/were). But writers are good at finding patterns in trivia! (I can't now recall if I talked about pattern recognition in this aliendjinnromance blog or in my review column, but some of you will remember that discussion.)
So here's a pattern from the dots.
Long ago, SF writers started depicting a future civilization when half or more of the people lived on the public dole (welfare).
Why?
In some novels it was because it really didn't take so many people to run the world, produce food, clothing, shelter, entertainment and luxuries for everyone. Machines (maybe robots) did most of the work, and the rest of us loafed. ( PBS NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT has done a week's worth of segments on household robots being developed in Japan that do laundry, dishes, & cleaning! By 2020 they'll be on the market.)
In other novels, the world was depicted pretty close to what I'm seeing in this Business Week article -- and possibly also in the Locus issue.
Business Week is saying essentially that though we have massive excess "workers" employers simply CAN'T fill jobs.
Greenspan and Bernanke (and now Obama) are always talking about solving that problem by simply retraining the work force. But employers have found that's getting to be less and less possible.
According to Business Week, retraining older workers has worked pretty well in Germany where the government provides a part of a new worker's salary for the first year so the employer can "retrain" them to what they need. But employers in Germany are quoted as pointing out that they need that government assistance because "you never know what'll happen" when you hire "someone."
That might be a way of saying without saying the extremely politically incorrect observation I'm making. (controversial or "edgy" premises sell large numbers of books!)
As tech progresses, it takes a higher and higher IQ to be able to learn the jobs needed to produce the dumbed-down tech like wireless picture frames.
The jobs that are being produced that really pay well are jobs that require an IQ above 100 to learn even if not to do on a day to day basis. Maybe in 10 years, that'll be 110 to learn and 105 to do daily.
Our workforce lacks the intelligence to be able to do the jobs we need done.
That's not a property of our culture or civilization or society. It's a property of the human brain -- but as I've pointed out in a previous blog post here, the human brain is mutable. As long as you keep requiring it to adapt, it will keep adapting. In older people, that adaptability wanes, but pushed hard you can get some adaptation. But not enough to make an IQ 98 person at age 12 into an IQ 105 person at age 55.
The jobs we need done require higher IQ than average to learn, and by definition you can't have more than half the people above average! (In SF though, you might be able to raise that average, which was done so many times in SF novels in the 1950's it became an unpublishable cliche.)
SF has been predicting, graphically, for decades, that our jobs outstrip out IQ, and our civilization could crash because of it.
But note, Grandma who needs a wireless digital picture frame isn't dumb, stupid, or low-I.Q.
She may have been a Bank VP or a factory manager, or even a science reporter (though these days that's not likely as women of that generation were barred from such professional success). But she may have been VERY smart. Only now she just can't learn to maintain a PC and plug a picture frame into its USB port and download her own photos.
Grandma may flinch visibly when someone says USB PORT. Thirty years ago she'd have had no trouble learning it.
There's your big problem. As you age, your original IQ trends downward. The older you are, the harder it becomes to learn, especially if you haven't been learning steadily in between. Routine jobs erode the ability to learn new things.
These wireless frames are hot sellers because they're EASY and both the younger people who are busy and older people who prefer to avoid learning -- and those who really can't learn -- love the whole concept. Hence they are best sellers, must have household tech.
Tech is making the world easier to live in but harder to create.
And so the threshold IQ level for being able to hold a job that's worth a living wage is going up and up. Soon, anyone with an IQ below 115 won't be worth anything in the labor market. Robots will do yard work, repave roads, build skyscrapers, all run from nice cool offices by Suits wearing diamond watches -- or diamond studded Bluetooth ear piece.
Now look at Urban Fantasy. Contrast that with old fashioned SF.
Actually, my September to December review columns are basically about just this subject -- SF and Urban Fantasy.
The way you tell if a story is Science Fiction or not is: "If you can leave out the Science and still have a story, it's not SF to begin with."
SF is waning in sales volumes of titles, really falling off the charts while Fantasy is booming.
What's the difference? They both tell the same STORY. Like I said above, same old ho-hum romance, different setting, goshwow story!
The difference between urban fantasy and sf is the science.
Today's science is much HARDER (required IQ to decipher concepts) than the science of the 1930's and 1940's. It didn't take as high an IQ to comprehend a scientific explanation then as it does now.
Science itself has become unpopular. What's "popular"? More than half the population likes it and wants it.
Now our science -- the exciting, cutting edge, speculative, goshwow science -- is comprehensible only to people with an IQ well above 100, which means to less than half the population.
We may have passed that halfway point sometime in the 1990's as the tech bubble inflated -- some day someone will make a graph and we'll see an inflection point.
Urban Fantasy heroes have to be brave, perhaps have integrity or grit or a streak of pure evil -- but they don't have to be smart. Even the geeks who run computer searches don't have to be smart. Hacking is not a trade for the high I.Q. people either -- you buy or steal your "hacking tools" which are programs someone with a high IQ makes and sells to hackers.
Urban Fantasy is about the potential achievements of ORDINARY PEOPLE -- people with an IQ of about 100 -- the average reader, maybe 105. These stories show how average-joe can achieve GREAT THINGS, (power, popularity, save the world, defend mankind from evil -- easy things to understand).
Science Fiction -- to have any modern science in it at all -- has to be about really REALLY smart people. The kind of people the average reader can't identify with. It's no fun to be out-classed, or to be shown a destiny you want but can't have because you're not smart enough even to understand the dumbed-down exposition in an SF novel.
In the old days, SF didn't have to be about such geniuses.
Here's another dot for our pattern. NEWSWEEK May 4, 2009, published a Star Trek article titled WE'RE ALL TREKKIES NOW. I commented on it online, and posted a link to my comment and got a whole bunch of new twitter followers! Here's the NEWSWEEK LINKS:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/195082 -- We're All Trekkies Now
My comment is labeled as posted
Posted By: JacquelineLichtenberg @ 05/08/2009 2:08:06 PM
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/popvox/archive/2009/05/07/round-up-of-newsweek-s-trek-coverage.aspx -- list of Star Trek coverage in NEWSWEEK, lots of stories.
The thesis of this Newsweek article (ignore the politics; that's just NEWSWEEK) is one that I totally agree with, and that's an important dot to this pattern. STAR TREK depicted humanity as capable of taking on the universe and prevailing. STAR TREK showed humanity as having outgrown war and embracing new contact with the unknown -- going where no one has gone before.
In the decades since ST:TOS, SF has been eclipsed by fantasy universes (on TV, in film, and in books) where humanity is depicted as threatened (in serious danger of being destroyed) by the Unknown -- and possibly unknowable. What I've called in this blog a picture of reality as a thin film over a seething cauldron of evil.
The self-perception (at least in America) has become one of being overwhelmed by a universe inimical to our existence.
So the problem employers are having filling jobs today reflects the general public's taste in entertainment. People are overwhelmed. By tech. By war. By government conspiracy or at least secrecy and incompetence. And now by the housing bubble bursting. Overwhelmed by evil is the same as overwhelmed by something that can kill you, destroy what you've accomplished in life (take away your pension).
Now do you see the technique? Deconstruct or reverse-engineer our everyday world into dots, then reconnect the dots into a DIFFERENT pattern. That will, if you use the genre structures we've discussed, give you that effect Hollywood is always looking for (and Manhattan lusts after), "The Same But Different."
To summarize, here are the dots for today's exercise:
1) URBAN FANTASY in Locus and Alternate Universe such as THE INCREMENT and STAR TREK
2) BUSINESS WEEK - 3 million jobs open with 13 million unemployed and Obama's solution is to "retrain" the workforce. (your characters are in retraining or teaching re-trainees).
3) NEWSWEEK - We're All Trekkies Now. Geeks have inherited the Earth and the White House. The Star Trek spirit of seeing an upbeat future awakens again -- or does it?
4) The popular theme of being overwhelmed (or almost overwhelmed) or needing protection from Evil that seethes beneath the surface of everyday life. Will that theme give way to Star Trek's HOPE theme, and if it does, what turbulence will disrupt romance?
5) Not mentioned here, but there's a trend of 30 and 40+ year old women FINALLY beginning to have children that might be relevant to building your SF Romance world.
So now re-connect the dots and do a little original worldbuilding.
Take your readers' awareness of the general IQ frustration (just think of the last time your computer made you feel helpless and you've got the emotion) as the background you're cradling your romance (or whatever genre; this process works for all genres) in, and tell a whopping good story about how IQ itself is a major stumbling block in intimacy in relationships.
You may generate more obstacles for your plot by creating characters to represent the various sides of the philosophical argument on the true nature of Humanity, and therein will lie your THEME.
Are humans like lemmings, carrying the seeds of their destruction within them (i.e. creating tech so "high" that we can't produce workers to maintain it but we become dependent on it for lack of basic grunt-work skills (spinning, weaving, farming, shepherding, metal working)? Or are humans infinitely adaptable, with brains that will re-circuit so that each generation's IQ 100 is actually HIGHER THAN the IQ 100 mark of the previous generation?
Is that what's happening already? It used to be parents had to get their kids to program the VCR. Now kids live online and text with their thumbs in coded words. Grown kids have to send pictures of their kids to their parents via dumbed-down-wireless-pictureframes. The parents won't twitter and the keener parents will just barely facebook but not myspace.
Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing are beyond today's 60 year olds.
The Web is the territory of the young (OK. I'm a misfit. So what else is new?)
How does the May/September Romance work out in a world with a generation gap like this? Will the Star Trek movie change anything?
You may, if you wish, post exercises on editingcircle.blogspot.com as comments for and get some input on how you do the exercise.
And remember, you don't have to AGREE with my analysis here - in fact it's better if you don't - in order to reconnect these dots into a new pattern and profit from the exercise. These dots could be a springboard into a hot Romance full of impossible things before breakfast.
Do you, as a writer, follow the trend -- or do you forge it?
And also remember, our objective in my last few posts here is to work the puzzle of how to get an SF Romance onto TV or into the movies to do for the genre what we have done (according to NEWSWEEK, anyway) for SF.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Evolutionary Tree and Worldbuilding
Folks:
Those who've read Linnea Sinclair's post for March 19, 2007, just previous to this one, will be particularly interested in the sentence in the article I'm discussing here that indicates humans evolved from prey not preditors. And prey do tend to form groups, herds, flocks, prides, etc. I can wonder if it's too simplistic to classify humans as preditor or prey when we clearly produce both.
An Item in the March 18, 2007 issue of Newsweek -- BEYOND STONES & BONES: The New Science of Evolution by Sharon Begley -- gives us an interesting twist on the biological part of the author's worldbuilding job (we not only have to make planets, but biospheres too).
There are some illustrations in the print article that don't appear in the free online article, but here's the link to the online article.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17542627/site/newsweek/
This model of human evolution opens a whole lot of possibilities for the evolutionary trees of other planets that we can just imagine -- and all the trouble Terran explorers could get into because they didn't understand where the planet was in this process when they landed.
Who's to say that two or three independently evolved versions of some sapiens species might not independently open negotiations with some alien explorers. That's been done in SF, but here we have a way to make it plausible to modern readers who are learning THIS model of human evolution in school (or not!).
What's important about this article is not the science it's explaining -- anyone following "the literature" would know all this already years ago. What's important about this article FOR WRITERS is that it's in Newsweek -- and thus now writers who are worldbuilding must assume their readers are familiar with this new theory of the evolutionary pattern.
Some may rely on it as the best current information, some my disbelieve it because they disbelieve, and others may misunderstand it. But now it's in Newsweek, the SF/F writer has to account for it in order to make the story plausible to the most readers.
Some of the items of greatest interest to me come near the end of the article.
a) (bottom of page 1 of online article) the record shows evolutionary changes seem to come in bursts, in fits and starts.
More than once in human prehistory, evolution created a modern trait such as a face without jutting, apelike brows and jaws, only to let it go extinct, before trying again a few million years later. Our species' travels through time proceeded in fits and starts, with long periods when "nothing much happened," punctuated by bursts of dizzying change, says paleontologist Ian Tattersall, co-curator of the American Museum's new hall.
b) (4th parag up from the end )
"We are all descended from maybe about 2,000 men -- perhaps 4,000 people. And I recall they genetically identified "Eve" the one woman who is ancestor to all modern humans. I don't know if that's still firmly established. "
c) (2nd parag up from the end) the most recent change in the human genome seems to have occurred 5800 years ago --
"The third (...gene...), called ASPM and also involved in brain size, clocks in at 5,800 years. That was just before people established the first cities in the Near East and is well after Homo sapiens attained their modern form. It therefore suggests that we are still evolving."
d) ( at the end of page 2 online) connect this to item a) above.
"Instead, evolution played Mr. Potato Head, putting different combinations of features on ancient hominids then letting them vanish until a later species evolved them. "Similar traits evolved more than once, which means you can't use them as gold-plated evidence that one fossil is descended from another or that having an advanced trait means a fossil was a direct ancestor of modern humans," says Wood. "Lots of branches in the human family tree don't make it to the surface.""
DISCUSSION:
a) as I originally set up the Sime~Gen mutation, channels appeared and disappeared quite a few times leaving no record (lots of great stories in times of chaos) -- and likewise the Farris mutation occurred independently in widely separated places, mostly only to fail because they are so fragile. Fan writers have largely ignored all those story opportunities! That may be because they were operating from the "old model" of human evolution mentioned in this Newsweek article while I had extrapolated ahead to the currently fashionable model explained here.
b) has little to do with S~G -- but in worldbuilding in general, that 2,000 male group of ancestors might be the crew and passengers of a crashed space ship. Given this model of evolution -- where modern traits appear and go extinct over and over at widely separated and disconnected places -- it's possible to extrapolate that just exactly that kind of "appear/disappear" evolution is going on on other planets, and somewhere OUR traits would appear and not disappear too quickly.
On the other hand "we" haven't been around very long -- who says we aren't going to disappear in this Global Warming phase, only to reappear again independently here when the climate is better, or on another planet. Of course, Global Warming could be terminated by a meteor strike or Supervolcano eruption.
Look at this "appear/disappear" model from a far perspective. Isn't it as if "something" is trying to use the anthropoid DNA template to "emerge" ??? hooo-hooo spookey.
c) You all do know this is the year 5767 of the Hebrew calendar -- that means that God finished creating humankind 5, 767 years ago, just when this calculation shows that the latest gene was added to our makeup, the key turning point in the record where language, art and culture emerge. (as I recall agriculture appeared about 7,000 years ago, and as much as 9,000 years ago some kind of human traveled from what is England today, across Greenland to the Eastern Canada and US shores (they left graves with peculiar red clay in them).
d) put the "fits and starts" concept of evolutionary progress together with the way a pattern seems to emerge here, there, elsewhere, die out, and emerge again independently -- correlate that with the mystical view of the universe and you can worldbuild for the next 30 years and not run out of permutations and combinations of worlds in which to tell stories.
Also don't fail to notice how the "fits and starts" concept of evolutionary progress doesn't exactly fit with the "genetic clock" calculations where genetic replication "mistakes" are made at a statistically predictable rate.
Now I do expect that in a few years, this entire model of evolution will hit the trash can as researchers dig up the connecting links among the dead ends -- but in the meantime, we can have a FIELD-DAY in SF writing.
And what haunts me in the whole thing is how obvious it is that WE (us Ancients) are likely to be one of those branches that peters out to extinction. Where have I seen that theory played with in SF?
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Those who've read Linnea Sinclair's post for March 19, 2007, just previous to this one, will be particularly interested in the sentence in the article I'm discussing here that indicates humans evolved from prey not preditors. And prey do tend to form groups, herds, flocks, prides, etc. I can wonder if it's too simplistic to classify humans as preditor or prey when we clearly produce both.
An Item in the March 18, 2007 issue of Newsweek -- BEYOND STONES & BONES: The New Science of Evolution by Sharon Begley -- gives us an interesting twist on the biological part of the author's worldbuilding job (we not only have to make planets, but biospheres too).
There are some illustrations in the print article that don't appear in the free online article, but here's the link to the online article.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17542627/site/newsweek/
This model of human evolution opens a whole lot of possibilities for the evolutionary trees of other planets that we can just imagine -- and all the trouble Terran explorers could get into because they didn't understand where the planet was in this process when they landed.
Who's to say that two or three independently evolved versions of some sapiens species might not independently open negotiations with some alien explorers. That's been done in SF, but here we have a way to make it plausible to modern readers who are learning THIS model of human evolution in school (or not!).
What's important about this article is not the science it's explaining -- anyone following "the literature" would know all this already years ago. What's important about this article FOR WRITERS is that it's in Newsweek -- and thus now writers who are worldbuilding must assume their readers are familiar with this new theory of the evolutionary pattern.
Some may rely on it as the best current information, some my disbelieve it because they disbelieve, and others may misunderstand it. But now it's in Newsweek, the SF/F writer has to account for it in order to make the story plausible to the most readers.
Some of the items of greatest interest to me come near the end of the article.
a) (bottom of page 1 of online article) the record shows evolutionary changes seem to come in bursts, in fits and starts.
More than once in human prehistory, evolution created a modern trait such as a face without jutting, apelike brows and jaws, only to let it go extinct, before trying again a few million years later. Our species' travels through time proceeded in fits and starts, with long periods when "nothing much happened," punctuated by bursts of dizzying change, says paleontologist Ian Tattersall, co-curator of the American Museum's new hall.
b) (4th parag up from the end )
"We are all descended from maybe about 2,000 men -- perhaps 4,000 people. And I recall they genetically identified "Eve" the one woman who is ancestor to all modern humans. I don't know if that's still firmly established. "
c) (2nd parag up from the end) the most recent change in the human genome seems to have occurred 5800 years ago --
"The third (...gene...), called ASPM and also involved in brain size, clocks in at 5,800 years. That was just before people established the first cities in the Near East and is well after Homo sapiens attained their modern form. It therefore suggests that we are still evolving."
d) ( at the end of page 2 online) connect this to item a) above.
"Instead, evolution played Mr. Potato Head, putting different combinations of features on ancient hominids then letting them vanish until a later species evolved them. "Similar traits evolved more than once, which means you can't use them as gold-plated evidence that one fossil is descended from another or that having an advanced trait means a fossil was a direct ancestor of modern humans," says Wood. "Lots of branches in the human family tree don't make it to the surface.""
DISCUSSION:
a) as I originally set up the Sime~Gen mutation, channels appeared and disappeared quite a few times leaving no record (lots of great stories in times of chaos) -- and likewise the Farris mutation occurred independently in widely separated places, mostly only to fail because they are so fragile. Fan writers have largely ignored all those story opportunities! That may be because they were operating from the "old model" of human evolution mentioned in this Newsweek article while I had extrapolated ahead to the currently fashionable model explained here.
b) has little to do with S~G -- but in worldbuilding in general, that 2,000 male group of ancestors might be the crew and passengers of a crashed space ship. Given this model of evolution -- where modern traits appear and go extinct over and over at widely separated and disconnected places -- it's possible to extrapolate that just exactly that kind of "appear/disappear" evolution is going on on other planets, and somewhere OUR traits would appear and not disappear too quickly.
On the other hand "we" haven't been around very long -- who says we aren't going to disappear in this Global Warming phase, only to reappear again independently here when the climate is better, or on another planet. Of course, Global Warming could be terminated by a meteor strike or Supervolcano eruption.
Look at this "appear/disappear" model from a far perspective. Isn't it as if "something" is trying to use the anthropoid DNA template to "emerge" ??? hooo-hooo spookey.
c) You all do know this is the year 5767 of the Hebrew calendar -- that means that God finished creating humankind 5, 767 years ago, just when this calculation shows that the latest gene was added to our makeup, the key turning point in the record where language, art and culture emerge. (as I recall agriculture appeared about 7,000 years ago, and as much as 9,000 years ago some kind of human traveled from what is England today, across Greenland to the Eastern Canada and US shores (they left graves with peculiar red clay in them).
d) put the "fits and starts" concept of evolutionary progress together with the way a pattern seems to emerge here, there, elsewhere, die out, and emerge again independently -- correlate that with the mystical view of the universe and you can worldbuild for the next 30 years and not run out of permutations and combinations of worlds in which to tell stories.
Also don't fail to notice how the "fits and starts" concept of evolutionary progress doesn't exactly fit with the "genetic clock" calculations where genetic replication "mistakes" are made at a statistically predictable rate.
Now I do expect that in a few years, this entire model of evolution will hit the trash can as researchers dig up the connecting links among the dead ends -- but in the meantime, we can have a FIELD-DAY in SF writing.
And what haunts me in the whole thing is how obvious it is that WE (us Ancients) are likely to be one of those branches that peters out to extinction. Where have I seen that theory played with in SF?
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
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