Reformed Villains

I love a good "redeemed villain" story, but creating a good (i.e., plausible and emotionally engaging) one isn't easy. The chief villain of Shakespeare's AS YOU LIKE IT, Duke Frederick, undergoes a sudden conversion at the end of the play, repents of usurping his brother's dukedom, and enters the religious life. Not very believable in real-life terms, but since the change of heart occurs in a romantic comedy, we can suspend disbelief. Usually, redeeming a bad guy is more complicated. How can his or her character arc be made convincing?

A traumatic backstory that arouses audience sympathy can help. So can showing hints of goodness in the character, however tenuous (the "save the cat" moment Jacqueline often mentions). Regina, the Evil Queen in the TV series ONCE UPON A TIME, commits several murders, both by her own hands and by proxy. Her reign is characterized by tyranny and cruel atrocities. She magically curses not only Snow White but the entire realm. Flashback episodes, however, show Regina as a victim of her dictatorial mother, who slew Regina's true love and forced her to marry the king. Although kind to Snow White at first, Regina developed bitter hatred for her because young Snow's carelessness betrayed Regina's secret love and led to his death. As mayor of Storybrooke in our world, Regina adopts Henry, illegitimate son of Snow White's daughter (who initially doesn't know her own true identity—yes, this series is complicated). Regina's love for her adopted child, at first mostly—though not entirely—autocratic and self-serving, gradually develops into a deeper, unselfish affection, which plants the seeds of her repentance and desire for redemption. While I enjoyed seeing the Evil Queen grow into the heroine she becomes by the end of the series, I did, however, have trouble suspending disbelief in her redemption at times, because she commits some horrifically evil deeds in the flashbacks. But the series does show her growth toward goodness as she struggles with the terms of her redemption and her reconciliation with former enemies. For instance, whereas in her youth she pursued implacable, disproportionate revenge against Snow White for the results of Snow's childish mistake, in a later season Regina demonstrates maturity in forgiving a mistake by another character that also threatens to destroy her happiness.

Jaime Lannister in the "Game of Thrones" novels and TV series doesn't have a "save the cat" moment early in the saga. Instead, he's introduced with a "shoot the dog" moment. Caught in an incestuous act with his sister, Cersei, he pushes the witness, young Bran, out of a window, maiming him for life. This is one of several evil deeds Jaime recently mentions in rebuttal to the lady knight Brienne of Tarth when she calls him a "good man." His self-awareness about his dark past highlights the change in him over time. Among other changes, his relationship with Brienne has evolved. At first, he treated her with mocking scorn; now they are friends and lovers. Some details by which the series lays groundwork for Jaime's redemption: He slew the former king, gaining the title "Kingslayer," from sound motives, effectively saving the country from a mad tyrant, but as the nickname indicates, he's regarded negatively for this act. Most of his evil deeds are inspired by love and loyalty toward his twin sister and their mutual children. Yet when she crosses lines in ways too extreme for him to accept, he breaks with her, showing that he possesses a core of honor and decency. The audience also feels sympathy for him when his sword hand is cut off. By the current climactic season, he has demonstrated his reformation in action by offering his services to the heroes trying to overthrow Cersei.

Some fans may feel his past crimes are too serious for any credible redemption, though. What does it take to achieve a plausible reformation and redemption arc for a character guilty of egregious evil? Is there ever a "moral event horizon" that, once crossed, can never be re-crossed?

For fans of vampires, werewolves, witches, and demons, Brian M. Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg edited an anthology on this very theme, THE REPENTANT (DAW, 2003). I reviewed it here in my "retro-review" monthly blog post series on VampChix:

VampChix

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Depiction Part 25 - Depicting Hatred

Depiction

Part 25

Depicting Hatred

by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

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

In Part 28, we looked at the sweeping, long wave of change in science fiction and fantasy genres in how Aliens and Supernatural Beings are depicted, and noted how one crude but unmistakable method of labeling a villain is to tell rather than show.  Just make him/her say "...and then I'll rule, forever!" preferably with venom and triumph gleaming.

Villains aspire to RULE.  That's how you know they are villains.

Did the Lone Ranger yearn to rule?  Does Superman want to rule Earth forever?  Did Captain Kirk secretly politic his way to Admiral status so he could step up to rule the Federation?

The Hero has no interest in Ruling.

The Villain wants nothing else but to Rule.

What was it in the character of The Evil Queen (in the TV Series Once Upon A Time) that changed to make her not-evil-anymore?

https://www.amazon.com/Once-Upon-Time-Complete-Season/dp/B01E7XSDOK/

When she was Evil Queen, she wanted to RULE - when she became Good, she did not hurt people to make them knuckle under.  She didn't steal hearts and put them in boxes anymore.  That Heart-Stealing bit is a graphic (show don't tell) of a very abstract set of concepts, and it is brilliantly done.

Do humans (maybe Aliens, too?) yearn to Rule people because they Hate those people?

Or is there something more complicated going on?

Remember, the master theme of Romance is Love Conquers All.

In the TV Series Once Upon A Time, they use True Love's Kiss to overcome impossible obstacles of magical origin.  True Love's Kiss undoes the most powerful spell.

All Romance is about how Love Conquers All -- so it is up to the writer to create a formidable obstacle for Love to overcome.

One formidable obstacle that has been the plot generating conflict in many of the very best Romances (especially in the Science Fiction or Paranormal Romance) is Hatred.

When the Couple first meets, it is Hate At First Sight.  The story experience transforms that hate into love as a series of misunderstandings is unraveled, and the depths of human (and/or non-human) psychology are penetrated.  Many of the very best Romances flip Hate into Love.

Love is generally considered the only thing that can dispel Hatred.

There are many psychological studies of affinity and aversion that can be used to plot such a Romance, so the more widely you read, the better you will write.

December 2016, I found an article in Slate
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/12/garry_kasparov_on_why_vladimir_putin_hates_chess.html

This article, Why Dictators Hate Chess, begs to be studied by those puzzling over the question posed in Depiction Part 28 - why do villains yearn to rule forever?  Or rule at all, for that matter?  Heros don't yearn to rule - why do villains?  What has Ruling to do with Love and Hate?

Notice that Love, Hate - and even Rule - are abstract concepts.  Remember that a stage play, TV Series or Movie is a "story in pictures."  The task of "Depicting" hatred is the task of making an emotion visible and concrete.  So a writer of Romance has to study Hate very closely to understand what the readership will interpret as "That One Is The Villain."  Or "That One Is The Obstacle Love Must Conquer."

Make the readers root for the Villain to melt in the bright shaft of love-shine, and you have a winner.   This works even in all the other genres.  See why every novel needs a love story.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/07/why-every-novel-needs-love-story-part-1.html

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

That article in Slate is an interview with the former world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, talking about Vladimir Putin and dictators (rulers) in general.

Note: the USA has a President, not a King, because a President does not rule and has no power to rule (if he obeys the law).  The USA does not have a "regime" and Presidents do not "come to power."  This is because a President has no power; voters do.

Presidents serve not as decision makers but as managers who create policies to carry out instructions of voters.  Presidents are supposed to do what the the majority of voters elected them to do.  Kings rule.  Rule means make others do what you want, whether they want to or not.

"Want" is an emotion, and like Love, Hate, is very abstract.  The writer's job is to make it concrete, a story in pictures depicted in text, in symbols.

Here is Part 4 of the Theme-Symbolism series with links to previous parts.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/01/theme-symbolism-integration-part-4-how.html

Here is a quote from the article in Slate:

Why Dictators Hate Chess
Garry Kasparov on Vladimir Putin’s meddling and America’s response.
By Jacob Weisberg

---------quote--------------
Interviewer: That also sounded to me like a chess player’s analysis. You’re the greatest chess player ever. Is Putin playing chess, or is he playing a different game?

Kasparov: No, I always wanted to defend the integrity of my game—when people said, Oh, Putin played chess, Obama played checkers. Putin, as with every dictator, hates chess because chess is a strategic game which is 100 percent transparent. I know what are available resources for me and what kind of resources could be mobilized by my opponent. Of course, I don’t know what my opponent thinks about strategy and tactics, but at least I know what kind of resources available to you cause damage to me.

Dictators hate transparency and Putin feels much more comfortable playing a game that I would rather call geopolitical poker. In poker, you know, you can win having a very weak hand, provided you have enough cash to raise the stakes—and also, if you have a strong nerve, to bluff. Putin kept bluffing. He could see his geopolitical opponents—the leaders of the free world—folding cards, one after another. For me, the crucial moment where Putin decided that he could do whatever was Obama’s decision not to enforce the infamous red line in Syria.

---------end quote-------------

What if this "game" were being played out on a Galactic canvas?  What if the Putin-Character were non-human, playing against Earth?

How would humans assess the Character of a Galactic Authority that was not "transparent."  What if that Authority abhorred transparency, but had no desire to "Rule" Earth or anything else?  Would the veil of mystery be taken as Villainy?

Is Kasparov's assessment of Dictators hating Chess universally valid, or is it a cultural trait that might not turn up everywhere?

Is the burning desire to Rule a certain sign of villainy?  Or is that a human thing?

It may be that wherever humans are involved, Ruling = Villainy.  Or put another way, absolute power corrupts absolutely.  No human is fit to exercise rule over another.  Maybe that's not universally true for non-human people -- and therein lies a complex tale.

For humans, though, the it certainly seems that the ambition to Rule, to Conquer and to Win Ruler-ship, is innate in our biology.

See Part 19 and Part 21 of Depicting which discusses how that innate human goal of Ruler-ship is related to Testosterone:

Part 19 - Depicting the Married Hunk With Children (especially daughters) (Testosterone effect)
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/11/depiction-part-19-depicting-married.html

Part 21 - Depicting Alien History (Testosterone revisited)
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/11/depiction-part-21-depicting-alien.html

This new scientific research on testosterone psychoactive dimension tells us a lot about why humanity self-organizes into hierarchy -- or behind a Leader -- or in allegiance to a King.

When beaten, a man knuckles under to his ruler -- not from cultural custom but from the abating of the biological urge to conquer.  When raising his own children, the man's need to take insane risks abates -- we call it maturity.

Not everyone experiences the urge to Rule in equal degrees, but don't forget women also have a need to dominate, to prevail, to get things to go their own way.  If that requires Ruling, then Rule She Shall, and she shall enjoy the heck out of it, too.

So humans are hard-wired to compete for Rulership, and nobody really wants their Rule to be temporary -- so Rule Forever is an innate goal, set in our genes.

Consider, Happily Ever After is the innate goal of Romance.  After What?  After Love Conquers All.

Conquers being the Keyword to ponder, along with "ever after" (i.e. forever).

Both the Villain's Quest and the Lovelorn's Quest are searches for a definitive, permanent, eternal solution to the problem.

The human male seeks to conquer a female.  The language of sexuality is fraught with the language of war, conquering, taking, having, getting.  The language of Romance is about convincing, wooing, maybe fooling, seducing.  The language of Love combines the two.

Love is about conflict, and the satisfactory and permanent settlement of that conflict.

It has been widely proposed that the opposite of Love is not Hate but Indifference.

Love manifests as an affinity, gravitating together, combining.

Hate manifests as a bond, focusing attention, defining goals according to the hated person -- to vanquish that hated person, to conquer or thwart or neutralize that hated and rejected person.  Where this is active hatred, there is no fleeing or giving up everything to get away.  Fear causes flight.  Hatred binds.

Like Love, Hatred comes in thousands of styles and flavors as well as degrees of visibility.  Sometimes a person who smolders with hatred doesn't even know the feeling is hatred.

Hate comes in a variety called Baseless Hatred -- where the feeling of being locked in a fight to the death is not caused by the person or situation that is ostensibly hated.  There is no objective real-world reason for the feeling, but that feeling dominates and motivates, oblitterating all other purposes in life.  Baseless Hatred very easily becomes an obsession detached from all rationality.

People blame external events, other people, random occurrances and situations for their emotions.  Not all humans do that, but ways of avoiding it are absorbed by children before they can talk.  Where emotions lie on the spectrum of values is a cultural norm, and as far as we now know, not biological in origin.

Baseless Hatred makes a good story dynamic for the Horror Genre, and for Action Genre where the point of the novel is to depict a righteous and sanctioned killing.  This is the sort of vanquishing you often see in videogames where you just "kill" anything that gets in your way.

Monsters are motivated by Baseless Hatred.

When writing a "slay the monster" story, you don't have to provide a comprehensible motive for the monster.  Nothing the hero did or said has anything to do with why the monster is fixated on killing the hero.  And the Hero doesn't hate the monster.

The monster has no power over the Hero, so the Hero does not hate the monster.  The monster is just a "force of nature" - a formidable adversary bent on destruction.

The adversary motivated by Baseless Hatred makes a great plot element for Action or Horror genre, but not for Romance.

Baseless Hatred is conquered by Love, but not love of the Monster.  Love conquers the Monster by binding the humans into an unbreakable defensive wall.  The love of one human for another conquers the Monster.

Once fully consumed by Baseless Hatred, the Monster is irredeemable, but harmless to those who Love.  Many good Love Stories revolve around rescuing someone from going down the path of Baseless Hatred.  The rescue process resembles the AA 12 step program, or deprogramming someone from a Cult. Those make very potent novels, but rarely produce the best of Romance.

Hatred that is based in reality, in the actions and situations that exist in truth, and that readers can recognize as legitimate causes for hatred, provides a much wider and richer spectrum of plots and stories for Romance writers.

The classic, as mentioned previously, is Hate At First Sight that eventually turns to True Love.

In real life, very often we hate that which has power over us.  Love has that kind of power, the power to change our very identity, or sense of self.

When you fall in love, you literally become someone new, someone different.

Humans do fear change, and do fear anything with the power to change them -- hence our fascination with werewolves and shapechangers.  Can you "change" so radically and still be you?

We also love novels about how Love At First Sight turns to hatred -- the escape from the clutches of a man you have given yourself to, then discovered he's Bluebeard incarnate.

So the opposite of Love is Indifference -- not feeling any bond at all.

So to depict hate, make sure your Character is deeply bonded, enthralled, captivated, obsessed with the object of hatred.

Depict a cause or basis for that hatred -- and ask what this Character would accept as proof that this "cause" is actually not the problem at all -- that what he/she thought was true is in fact not true.  You can't do that with Baseless Hatred -- and you can identify baseless hatred by the non-falsifyable nature of it.  Nothing would be a convincing proof that this is not a real source of the problem.

If you're writing Alien Romance, and you want to drive your plot with hate, then consider what makes humans hate (for cause).  Build Aliens who are different in that regard.

Consider the two posts on Testosterone in this Depiction Series.  A human who is beaten, vanquished, defeated utterly, will lose the desire to hurl himself against the one who defeated him, and will be generally less aggressive.

Among humans, the winner "rules" - the loser knuckles under.  Now, if the defeat is not utterly complete, the loser may smolder with hatred, and eventually burst into rebellion.

Is that how it works among your Aliens?

We hate that which rules us - (even sometimes if what rules us is Love!).  We just purely hate to "be ruled" -- whether it is forever or not.

Anyone who rules is justifiably hated.

Rulership is hated.  It is human to hate having free will thwarted by the will of another.

The Hero knows this, and has no desire to be hated, thus no interest in ruling.

What if Aliens ruled all Earth?  Would the Hero rebel?  Or would the behavior of the ruling aliens make a difference?

Hate is a bond comparable to Love -- maybe a little less binding, for Love Conquers All.

To depict Hate, don't tell the reader this Character hates that Character.  Don't put the word "hate" in dialogue.  If someone says out loud, "I hate you," you never believe it.  Teens hate their parents -- right?  How many times do they say it?  How many parents believe it?

To depict hate, show the Character behaving in opposition to what the Character sees as pure Evil, a force loose in the world that must be destroyed, something that must be conquered.  Show the Character choosing death rather than submission.  The reader will hate that which oppresses that Character.

It's not that simple, of course.  It is never simple where humans are involved.

Start into the messy tangle of Character Motivation by finding the target of the hatred, and decide if it is Baseless Hatred or hatred for just cause.  Then introduce Love into the dynamic to overcome the hatred.

Do your Characters hate that which they resent?  Do they hate that which has power and/or Authority over them?  Do they hate that which they are jealous of?  Or do they hate that which they admire?  Do they see Love as a threat because Love does conquer all?  Do they hate God because God has betrayed them by ignoring their entreaties because Ultimate Power should always be kind?  If they gain power, do they use it for kindness?  Do they hate kindness?

It seems to be in our biology to sacrifice everything to Rule, to be sovereign, to admit nothing in power over us.  And it seems we hate anything that has power over us.  But just as children need the discipline of their parents, so do we knuckle under to a Ruler, to a dominant power.  So it is for humans -- are we a special case in the Galaxy?  Ancient Wisdom indicates there are ways for the human spirit to tame the animal spirit -- the ways of Love.

These emotions drive the Story, and the reasons for the emotions drive the Plot.  We have discussed theme and plot at length previously.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/12/index-to-theme-plot-character.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/05/index-to-theme-plot-integration.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/11/index-post-to-art-and-craft-of-story.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-2-master.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Why Every Novel Needs A Love Story - Part 2 by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Why Every Novel Needs A Love Story
Part 2
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

In Part 1 of this series
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/07/why-every-novel-needs-love-story-part-1.html
we noted how the signature of a Strong Character is that the Character "arcs" -- or changes their emotional responses to situations because of some life-lesson learned "the hard way" in the "school of hard knocks."

Characters get pummeled by Events you create.  They learn from the Events (the plot) and they do not necessarily learn the best or most correct lesson the first time you hit them with an Event.

Characters that are strong at the beginning of the story get pummeled with Events until they break  -- think of Spock crying alone in the briefing room.  Leonard Nimoy knew Spock's strength had to be broken in order to engage viewer interest. 

Granite strength all by itself is not interesting.  So writers break their strongest characters.

Start with a weak character, someone gripped by the "I can't" or "I'm doing all I can, so how can you expect more of me?" attitude, hammer that character to pulverize them, and chronicle their path to becoming a strong character.  That's Character Arc.

So, Strong Characters can be weak at the beginning of the Arc, and the strength is revealed as you hammer them into becoming Strong.

What exactly is it that writers hammer at in either the strong or weak character that changes them, that morphs them along an Arc?

What causes people to change in real life?  What causes people to start to behave differently, and seem "out of character" for a while, until friends and family get used to the new person? 

What changes in life that re-formulates a person's behavior? 

I submit that the easiest attribute of a Character for a writer to depict as Arcing, or changing in a way that readers can see as realistic, is the ability to Love.

That is the "wall" that Events hammer at to Arc a character.

It is the ability to establish and maintain Relationships that distinguishes the Happy person from the miserable person.  We draw our strength of character from our "stance" among our people, our family, our co-workers, our buddies, our spouse, our children, our distant relatives, and just friends made via organizations.

How many times have you seen the story of the lone-gunman who shoots up a crowd and nobody expected it because "he kept to himself" and "he seemed like a nice guy" but he had no close friends (or the ones he had were likewise disconnected.)

As humans, we need to belong, to connect, to be surrounded by layers upon layers of people who know intimately, less well, distantly, and just feel general kinship with because we share a fandom, a reading taste, a craft etc.  We speak of "the Music World" and "the Golf World" -- and we say, "Welcome to my world." 

We live in "worlds" composed of layers of associates.

The entre into such a "world" is via the close, immediate, intertwined, personal Relationship.

Enemies, Adversaries, a policeman's quarry (think TV Series THE FUGITIVE), relationships can be incredibly intimate and even replace true love for a time.

Social networking has leveraged that layered-worlds structure of human life into a profitable business where you are their product which they sell to advertisers.

We are creatures of Relationship, embedded in a physical world composed of intricate layers of interlaced relationships.  Think of the way genetics has evolved -- almost all life on Earth shares basic building block genes.  (almost since there are non-carbon single-cell life near hot vents in the bottom of the ocean) 

Most all life on Earth is genetically related, which is why we can use animals to test new drugs and why we shudder at the mere thought of doing that!  We are all of one piece.

But we don't see that, at least not at the surface of our awareness.  We don't see into another person's emotional life, the internal structure of another person's decision making process, their most dearly held values, their unconscious assumptions about what is right and what is wrong.

That realm of the unconsciously held Value System is where the writer works.

Writers probe, explore, learn, and map their own unconscious minds, especially the Value System they imbibed with Mother's Milk.  We acquire our first values from our parents, but as life goes on, we acquire more layers of values around those.

Sometimes the later value acquisitions logically contradict earlier ones, but we hold onto all of them as our OWN -- we identify with the wild and incompatible mix of values we have created and call it our Identity.

Thus when a person's Values are attacked by another person (who may or may not have different values), it feels like a threat to LIFE ITSELF.  It feels like a threat to existence.  People will tolerate starvation or being shot at by hostiles better than they will having their unconscious Values contradicted.

Yes, mere words can trigger a counter-attack as if life and existence were at stake.

Politics and Religion are two topics that are rooted in that first learned, unconscious value system that most likely has been overlaid by Values acquired in college, which have been overlaid by Values acquired on the job. 

That's why they are explosive topics for family gatherings (and wondrous sources of Conflict that can advance a Plot). 

Today, in our modern world, Politics and Religion are mixing at depths not seen since the Middle Ages when The Church basically ran the Governments of Europe.

The Crusades were a show-don't-tell manifestation of the mixing of Politics (Kings) with Religion (The Cross). 

Today, the explosive mix is Science vs. Religion.  What sane person could possibly reject Evolution or want to teach Creationism in schools?  See?  "sane" -- "If you don't share my Values, you are not a Person." 

In other words, we tend to work on the assumption that the only people whose opinions count are the people who share our Values.

But nobody shares anyone's Values.  As described above, each individual person accumulates layers upon layers of different values and morphs the disparate mess into some kind of ball of wax which they use as their Identity. 

Each of us is unique -- but we want to associate only with those who are identical to us, at least in our intimate relationships. 

As noted in Part 1, look closely at the TV Series SUITS.  Suits works via the way the senior (Harvey Specter) sees himself in the junior (Mike Ross).  When Mike doesn't do what Harvey would do, Harvey is uncomfortable and acts out.

Now back to the Romance Novel, which is what this blog is all about. 

Consider the various ideas of what Love is. 

You will find Romance depicted as about co-dependence, as about feelings only, as about bodily functions only, as about paying attention only to me.  And all of these variations are real, and all matter, and all of them are necessary ingredients in Romance.

It is very true that you can have amazing Romance without a trace of Love at all.

"Love" (with a capital L) is a spiritual thing that transcends our innate insanities.  Love with a capital L is an experience of the Soul that changes the Soul -- i.e. that causes Character to Arc.

Real change happens when channels of the Personality open to Love.

That happens under different circumstances for different people at different times of Life.  Sometimes it is religious conversion, sometimes encountering a senior mentor, sometimes the birth of your first child, sometimes it is finding your Soul Mate.

People (and Characters) change not by becoming someone else, not by losing or gaining abilities or Talents, but by re-arranging their characteristics.

Thus a Character Arc Event causes an aggressive person who is likely to solve any problem by putting out a Hit on the opposition into someone who behaves more like Harvey Specter in SUITS and leverages the other person's emotional weaknesses.

The Aggression is still there, but the channel is different.

An alcoholic might morph into someone who eats or smokes too much, but holds a job and is kind to his kids.

All the traits remain, but the emphasis and utilization changes. 

Why does that happen? 

One of the key ingredients that forms our crazy-quilt pattern of Values is our Relationships.  There is a well studied trait of human perception (see the TV Series Perception) that causes us to see ourselves in others.

When you hate someone, when someone just plain drives you crazy, and you go around with an inner dialogue counting their failings and what they should do about it, then very likely (not always, but most of the time) you are seeing yourself in that person.

Other people are the mirror in which we see our own reflection.

But like with a mirror, you see a reversal of the image, and you can see what is behind you (e.g. in your subconscious).  You see deeper into yourself, into the dark underside of yourself, because the other person is so very different from you.

You see their faults, and their faults are visible because they are different.

Writers leverage that common human perception by creating Characters who are so very different from the reader that the reader is barely aware of the similarity.  When it strikes the reader just right, that difference allows the reader to identify with the character and walk in their moccasins. 

So people react emotionally to other people according to how they love or hate themselves.  But as noted above, Identity is a pearl composed of layers of contradiction accreted around a sharp-grain of pain that caused the acquisition of a Value.

That pain might be a parental smack, a deprivation from a toy, a forced-sharing with a sibling, and rewards of kindness, love, joy, celebration. 

Right and Wrong and what is more important than what (i.e. Values) are absorbed from parents via what the parents do, not what the parents say -- so Values are non-verbal and conveyed with a Sharp Pain that forces the pain to be wrapped by a Value that will henceforth prevent that Pain. 

So when we see someone who is Wrong -- we react to that wrongness.  How we react, what we do about Wrong People, is influenced by our ability to Love our own Self -- to admire our pearls that encase our Pain and create Values.

If we Love ourselves because we know how we have just barely managed to cope with our Pain, we are able to see others struggling (and sometimes failing) to cope with their Pain.  We know that sometimes a Pain does not get encased in a Pearl of Values - a lesson is not (yet) learned and successfully applied to life.

Lessons can be rejected, maybe never learned, because of some other Belief that is in the way, that contradicts or conflicts and thus causes Truth to be rejected. 

People who do not (yet) love themselves, see nothing but their own reflection in the mirrors of the people around them, and thus are in effect isolated, alone, unloved, and frustrated.  Such people may compensate by narcissism, which others interpret as self-love. 

How does a writer depict people caught in a House of Mirrors life where all they can see in those around them are hateful traits? 

Dialogue is the answer.  How a Character speaks, what opinions so desperately need airing, what opinions (and the vocabulary to express them) burst out with loud urgency, and to whom those opinions are expressed (with what collateral damage), depicts the Character's inner conflict, inner story, and subconscious Values.

A Character's emotional life is revealed in Dialogue. 

Here is an example to study, from a piece of non-fiction analyzing our current real world situation. 

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/03/16/1371324/-Adelson-and-Kristol-attempt-the-first-Liberum-Veto-in-US-history

The author is
 arendt 

-------quote from opening line----------
As the GOP sabotage and sedition continues, the US appears to be going the way of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth (P-LC) rather than the way of the Roman Empire.

If you know your history, this is not an insult; but, rather, a tragedy in progress. The P-LC was a powerful and progressive state during the early Reformation era, reaching its Golden Age in about 1575.

--------end quote------------

Note the sidling up to the chosen audience by characterizing an entire group of people "the GOP" as if they are all identical to one another.  This is a valid representation of what a person who lives a House of Mirrors existence actually sees in those around them -- no difference one to another, because they are all reflections of him/herself. 

The opening sentence here is brilliant in that it instantly and efficiently says, "Listen to me because I'm just like you." 

The rest of the historical thesis in this article is a brilliant analysis, considering the point of view. 

Take a Character who shares this writers contempt and disdain for those who see things differently and create some Events that would shatter his certainty that his view is the only laudable view.

It doesn't matter what views your Character holds, or opposes.  The writing exercise is to Depict a Conflict of Values and its Resolution. 

It will work better as a Novel if you choose some vast conflict of World Shattering importance that is utterly unrelated to the headlines of today.  Just lift out of this article the attitude of this writer -- not the content.

Your task is to create a Character who views Others with such contempt, then discovers that what he hates in them is actually inside himself, that he never perceived them at all.  As he comes to resolve his inner conflict, he begins the journey to being able to Love himself.

Where does that lead?  It will lead him to his Happily Ever After, but not in one or even a thousand steps.  Along the way, he will discover how those he held in contempt are actually struggling as he was.  He will find Love for them, and his way of speaking of them will change (his Character will Arc).

The changed attitude will not change the facts of the Situation, but it will open vistas of opportunity for different sorts of actions to change the facts.  (yes, it's a series of novels)

Once your Character understands how lovable his opposition is, even though they are flat out wrong, his actions will begin to be instructive rather than destructive, and solutions will appear that were never visible before.

The key to Character Arc is the introduction of Love which penetrates the Mirror Effect so that one Character can actually perceive what is inside another Character.  Thus begins all Relationship.

So every novel needs a love story, even if there is no Romance.  And every Romance, to create a realistic Happily Ever After needs a Love story -- the story of learning to Love yourself so that you can see through the mirror-surface and into the people around you.

That Love Story gives the fictional world the necessary verisimilitude to draw a reader into the Fantasy world.

Here are more posts on Alien Romance discussing verisimilitude, story arc, and Romance.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/11/index-post-to-art-and-craft-of-story.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/02/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-5.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/12/plot-subtext-integration-part-2-ruining.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Why Every Novel Needs A Love Story Part 1 by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Why Every Novel Needs A Love Story
Part 1
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg 

I talk a lot on this blog about how to depict character -- not just characterization, but how to show-don't-tell the "strength" of a character.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/08/reviews-9-sex-politics-and-heroism.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/greed-is-good.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/05/tv-show-white-collar-fanfic-and-show.html

One of the signatures of "strength" (as Editors define it when asking for "strong" characters) is the clearly defined "story arc" that the character travels throughout the story.

If you've been watching the USA series SUITS (on their "characters welcome" presentation) you have noted how, in the season finale in March 2015, showed couples finally articulating the emotions the viewers had seen were developing.

That finale came complete with a marriage proposal.

SUITS is a series about high-powered lawyers eviscerating each other while struggling to hang onto some kind of code of decency. 

It is not a love story.  It is not a Romance.  It is, however, all about Character Arc.

And it has been renewed for a summer 2015 run.

The show is also made available on streaming services, such as Amazon Prime.

Why do these high-profile dramas always tiptoe around the edges of a love story, even when they are about something incompatible with couple-formation?

The vague, general answer to that question is "verisimilitude" -- to make the created world of the characters seem like reality, so vastly un-real things can happen and seem real.

In real life, characters are people.  People have strong times in life, and weak times in life, and just slogging along day to day times in life.  Life goes in cycles.  Not all of a real life is a "story" -- your life's story is laced through the Events in your life, but most of life is not eventful.  Sometimes non-eventfulness is just what you want most.

A novel or TV Series, though, focuses on the periods of the main character's life when Events are hammering at the Character.  Some Events break the character in half and leave him/her helpless, and other Events temper the Character's strength.

We relate to those life segments because we have lived through them, or helped someone through them, or been elated or devastated by someone we know going through them.

Life is hard.  We all know that.  We go to fiction to look at life from a perspective that reveals how to survive, how to win, how to get to our own idea of "Happily Ever After."  The first thing we learn, reading our first juvenile fiction, is it is possible to win against all odds. 

A little older, we learn about the Character traits that merit winning.

After that, fiction opens up, no longer YA, no longer aimed at a particular age group but aimed at a personality type that is at a particular emotional maturity level.  Thus Genre is born, created by marketers looking to sell a stream of identical products. 

That's what books (or TV Series Episodes) are.  They are all identical, yet each is new and different.

So the life-lessons are sequenced and marketed to people at various maturity levels looking to get away from the rut of daily life and experience what it would be like to break through to the next higher maturity level.

How does a writer deliver that experience of "the next higher maturity level" without turning preachy, intellectual, abstract, philosophical, boring?

The most effective method for delivering an entertaining life-elevating experience to a reader is Character Arc.

The writer starts with a Character whose age, gender, spiritual awareness, politics, values, and life-situation resembles the intended reader's -- but differs enough so the reader can adopt an objective (this is not me) attitude.

That's paragraph one - or the infamous narrative hook.  The narrative hook has to be  fabricated out of the theme, the character, and the character's internal and external conflicts. 

Page One delivers an Event -- not necessarily a Life Event, but a Change of Situation.

Something happens, but not to the main Character.  On Page One the reader learns which character is the Main Character because the Main Character is the character whose actions happen TO someone else.  As in chess, the player playing White makes the first move.  The character who is arcing makes the first move, and thus becomes the Main Character.

Now, why does that Main Character have to be involved in a Love Story?

Love Story is not sex.  It is not Romance.  It is more like "Velcro of the soul" -- it is opening your heart and soul to another, becoming involved in that other's emotional, intellectual and spiritual life, values and Character Arc.

A Love Story is not just a story.  It is a plot.  The plot of the story, the internal conflict.

Look again at SUITS.  The pilot episode involved one guy (the Main Character) getting suckered into doing a drug-drop by a so-called friend, running for his life, and accidentally plunging into a job interview (all in a big hotel) where a Law Firm was interviewing for associates.  It turns out, being a Lawyer was his youthful aim in life.  He gets the job despite not having the proper degree and officially passing the Bar.

The guy who hires him does not love him.  He's into women.  But through the impact they have on each other, they learn to love themselves, and now (2015 seasons) Romance is ripening into Marriage.  That is story-arc.  One character's internal world changes because of the impact of being deeply involved in another character's internal world.

STORY is the sequence of emotions the Character experiences.  PLOT is the sequence of events outside the character that reflects and makes visible to the reader/viewer what is going on inside the Character.  Proposing Marriage brings Story and Plot together in one scene.

Keeping in mind that LOVE is not about sex, not about Romance, not about Winning or Losing or Commanding or Demanding or Controlling, we need to look at what Love is exactly so that we can see why every novel, TV Series, or story of any sort needs a thread woven through it that depicts Love. 

The simple answer is just verisimilitude -- to make any story powerful, there has to be something in it that "rings a bell" or resonates with the reader/viewer.  The fictional world has to have something in it that resembles reality -- then you can do anything and make it believable.

If Love is included, you achieve two objectives with a few spare words.  You create that verisimilitude, and you depict a world where happiness is possible (even if it doesn't exist).  Check out the TV Series Once Upon A Time about a world where Happiness exists, or does not exist.

We all want love, and most of us have experienced long stretches of years where we feel nobody loves us (least of all ourselves).  While going through such a period, it seems like a steady state -- that life will always be love-less, that nobody cares. 

That's not depression but realism.

Take a Character who is in such a period, and show-don't-tell how that Character will be able to break him/herself out of that loveless rut. 

If you, the writer, do not know how your Character can break out of a love-less life-cycle, all you have to do is check out today's major headlines, then dig into History, browse some blogs, and you will find examples of every mental/emotional state along that Character Arc. 

As a writer, you are an artist.  Artists discern patterns clearly that others see only dimly.  Artists depict what they see so vividly that others can recognize in the Art the same pattern they see in Life, but dimly.  Art triggers that wondrous AHA! moment. 

No matter what the conflict, theme, situation, your Character can triumph over all adversity by Arcing into a state of being more able to Love, more willing to Love, more open to Love.

In Part 2 of Why Every Novel Needs A Love Story, (next Tuesday)
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/07/why-every-novel-needs-love-story-part-2.html
we'll look at some seriously explosive inspirational material.  Meanwhile, think carefully about how you would define love -- because without Love there is no Romance.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Believing In Happily Ever After Part 7 - The Writer's Lifestyle and Voice

Part 6 (which has a link to part 5 which links to previous parts of this series) is dated April 10, 2012:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/04/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-6.html

At the end of Part 6 we began talking about the trajectory of a writer's career and how it can be affected by decisions about what to write.

Look again at that quote from the screenwriting blog discussed in Part 6

http://gointothestory.blcklst.com/2012/02/screenwriting-101-jonathan-lemkin.html 

If you take "the wrong job" just because you've let your lifestyle drive you into needing a check, you will find the quality of your work deteriorating and it'll be harder to get another job (by this, the screenwriter is talking about WORK FOR HIRE -the exact business model that is freaking out L. J. Smith's fans.)

Here's something I know about Marion Zimmer Bradley.  She did take just anything that came along, writing, editing, odd jobs, anything!  She had kids to feed and bills to pay and she scrambled and scraped for years before the career triumph of having one of her novels made into a TV miniseries.

If you've read the Darkover novels in publishing order, you know that the quality of her work increased over the years.

But she did what that screenwriter is advising writers not to do.

What's the difference? 

Over her lifetime, Marion was a practitioner of many religions, an expert at considerable depth at many philosophies and worldviews.  She understood Tarot, Astrology, Magic, Christianity, Paganism, and much more.  She understood what they all have in common, the conclusion that behind it all there is a strong Hand that guides events. 

The theory of what that Hand is, where it comes from, how it manifests, how it treats this person differently from that person, etc etc -- all these mysteries of life, was always an open question for her, but one thing she always knew throughout all her adventures in life -- something is 'assigning' us our problems, and solving them makes us better, stronger and more able to solve the next one.

At least, that's what I saw (remember the commentary above here about memoir writing and facts) -- that's what I saw in her. 

That basic concept about the nature of reality is woven into all the Darkover novels she wrote, and it is something I think I was born with.  And so when I encountered the Darkover novels, I resonated to the stories in a way that was different from how I responded to other novels written at that time.

Marion, for the worldbuilding behind Darkover, invented a term for the psychic effects we experience as real but which somehow just can't be proved (or disproved actually). 

Science as we know it today is based on a "law" that Francis Bacon popularized, the system of empirical science based on the law of cause and effect.

Our whole Aristotelian worldview (I do hope you remember that from the Tarot posts) is based on cause and effect, establishing that when you do this, then subsequently because you did this, that happens.  This causes that.

Current politically correct philosophy insists that because cause/effect has worked so well to improve life on earth, that therefore there can and must be nothing else in reality except cause/effect.

Any phenomenon that is observed that can not be analyzed down to a cause/effect basis just isn't real.  Therefore it must be ignored.

Well, Happily Ever After is just exactly such a thing! 

Nobody has ever been able to nail the CAUSE for which the inevitable and repeatable, achievable by anyone EFFECT is Happiness, nevermind Ever After-ness!

Finding and marrying a Soul Mate is not a project one can embark upon by reading the textbook and performing the required actions.

So Marion came up with a catch-all term to lump together the entire non-scientific (not anti-scientific!!!) world of actions and events. 

She called the psychic and spiritual world "the non-causitive sciences."

As has been observed in Astrology for thousands of years before "science" was invented, very often the EFFECT can precede the CAUSE.

That is, what happens as a result of an action can happen before the action is taken. 

In modern science, this can be accounted for if you have been following developments at the edges of theoretical physics where the realm of magic is converging on the realm of science.  But we've still a long way to go.

So how does this apply to L. J. Smith?  I have no idea because I don't know L. J. Smith personally.  But the Vampire Diaries fans are resonating to her Voice which has to be inflected by her deepest philosophical notions, possibly notions she isn't even aware she has.  I keep finding such notions lurking inside myself, a constant revelation, so I assume others have them too.

So how is it that one writer can observe in himself and his compatriots in Hollywood that taking a job (writing a script) that is just for the paycheck can cause a deterioration in quality and marketability of the byline when another writer (in novels at the time) finds the exact opposite, that taking whatever COMES TO HAND increases skill quality and marketability?

I have a theory (well, 2 actually )about how that could be.  It might not be true, and might not apply to any of the writers mentioned here -- but it would surely make a grand foundation for a novel series.

There is a principle of Magic that says that if a Magician turns his/her Talent to lesser tasks than the Talent was gifted to him for, then the Talent will dissipate, not be renewed by the Higher Power that gifted him with it.

That could be what the screenwriter was observing. 

But there's another way to look at this process.

In Magic, there is a principle known as the Law of Abundance.

It's pretty well illustrated by the Biblical story of Mana -- how in the desert, when the Tribes camped, in the morning the ground would be covered in a dew-like substance that could be picked up and taken home to eat.  When eaten it would taste like whatever the person craved, and sustain them perfectly in energy and vitamins.

From that story is derived the concept that we work for this Higher Power, God Himself.  God pays our salaries, not the person who signs the check.

We are gifted with a Talent to make our way in the world, and a Lesson that we must learn and take out of the world with us when we die.  What work we are assigned is the work needed to learn that Lesson, and our Salary will come to us via another channel. 

In other words wealth itself is mana, or a Gift. 

In yet other words, your salary is not caused by your work.

Salary, sustenance, income, wealth are not part of the Scientific Universe. 

Work, tasks, difficulties, traumas, job, unemployment, success and failure, are not causes that directly result in wealth or poverty.

So, if you live in a world where there exists such a thing (right alongside Science and interacting with it smoothly and invisibly) as the non-causative sciences, then you accept whatever tasks, work, job, script contract that comes to you, and you do that work with all your might, all your strength, every last iota of Talent, ability, craft, and no-stone-unturned meticulous effort.

If you work with that attitude -- that the task is yours because God assigned it to you -- then you will, little by little, achieve the purpose of your life.

Meanwhile, sustenance will be provided, sometimes wealth, but inevitably happiness will accrue (even in poverty!). 

But wealth and happiness (two often incompatible things unless your Soul has achieved its lessons in this life) have to be understood not as a result of  what you do but of what you are, what you've made of yourself on a Soul level.  And it isn't a simple, scientifically understandable paradigm. 

The laws of cause and effect as they operate in material reality (Pentacles of the Tarot) do not apply at the level of Cups or Wands -- at least not exactly and without modification.

If you live in a science-only world, where no spiritual dimension exists or functions, then you have to believe that if you take on a shitty job writing some crap script for a very small paycheck, then you, yourself have caused your reputation to deteriorate so you can't get more work BECAUSE you made a wrong decision about what work to accept.

If you believe that your actions and your actions alone cause you to get work, then you must believe that your actions cause you to not-get work.

The belief that there is nothing but simple cause/effect operating in the world can become your religion, and anything that challenges that belief (such as an inevitable Happily Ever After) must be rejected with religious fervor.

If on the other hand you can understand your reality as managed by and even driven by a Higher Power, then you will look at your monetary problem in another way. 

You might conclude that you were given wealth beyond your spiritual level of development to handle (e.g. that you didn't give the 10% to Charity you should have) and so find yourself in poverty.  You will then pray, make ammends, pray real hard, and take whatever work comes along and do it with all your Talent and all your might.

This is what happens when people find themselves out of work and, despite pounding the pavement, can't find any opening.  So they go volunteer at a Hospital as a candy striper or at a Soup Kitchen or Homeless Shelter -- or teach Bible Study on Sundays, or whatever -- just DO something for others.

And then a break happens, out of nowhere for no reason anyone can see, and the person's life picks up, barreling hell bent for leather toward a Happily Ever After.

That's the stuff out of which stories are made because that's how real life really works.  (I know real people who've been through that process and I've followed the astrology of it all.)

So if you find yourself young, with writing Talent or storytelling Talent, you can regard that Talent as a "lethal weapon" with which to "wipe out the competition" and achieve Great Things (and maybe die of a drug overdose in some posh, or foreign, Hotel Room). 

After all, "you" are just a lump of meat, and it's a dog-eat-dog world.  You're never going to be Happy Ever After because there is no such thing -- there can't be because there's no such thing as a soul.  After all, brain research can account for every human trait and experience, including near-death and out-of-body so that proves there is no God.  What you, yourself do with your own hands is the only cause of events in your life.  So use your Talent to elbow your way to the top of the heap -- at least you can breathe a little up there.

OR -- you can look at the entire matter from different perspectives, not just that one narrow "Scientific" perspective.

Why did I put scientific in quotes?  Because real science keeps an open mind.  No matter how well proven any theory might be, it is always possible that NEW EVIDENCE can prove that theory wrong.  Science doesn't "believe" -- science only knows, and that knowledge is only tentative.

The Real Scientist admits of the possibility of the non-causal sciences -- even if she hasn't seen any evidence at all of such a thing.

It's possible to think it, so it might be true.  It might not be likely, and you might not want to bet your life on it -- but...

See?

So now read the following from my review column -- The False Hobson's Choice:

http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/columns/0212.html

That's part of a Series on Justice, and you'll find the index to the year 2012 reviews here:

http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2012/

That's my review column I've been writing for the paper magazine, The Monthly Aspectarian which is posted to their website lightworks.com then after the exclusive they paid me for has run out, it is archived on my site, http://simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/   

Science and Magic are not different things, not incompatible.  They are different coordinate systems, each useful for describing the same Universe.

A coordinate system is like a Point of View.  When writing a novel, you can shift the genre (remember the post on genre I linked here above) by shifting the point of view.

And that brings us back to the top of this topic.  A writer's LIFESTYLE "informs" the writer's "Voice" -- but Voice and Lifestyle are not connected by Cause/Effect -- they are interlaced via the non-causative sciences view of the universe. 

Some Voices irritate, send shudders through you.  Others soothe.  Others are as @MiriamSPia noted, boring. 

Boredom is, as most students of Magic know, the strongest of all Wards.

You want to keep something secret?  Make it boring. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com  
http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20

Believing In Happily Ever After Part 6 - The Writer's Lifestyle and Happily Ever After

Part 5 of this series is:
http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/02/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-5.html

On this blog, I talk a lot about the business model of being a professional writer, about writing craftsmanship, and I talk a lot about the Romance story requirement of the Happily Ever After ending.

I talk a lot on this blog about fiction, fictional worldbuilding, and crafting a good story.

But let's take a moment to look at how a writer crafts the story of their own life.

On Twitter in February 2012, I sat in on one of my favorite chats, #litchat, where the topic was about a lawsuit (that seems to have merit as it describes egregious wrongdoing, but that seems to me to hold hidden threats to writer's freedom to create and communicate).

Here's the URL to a brief description of the issue:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=146661802

So #litchat kicked around the issue of "truth in memoir writing" quite a bit, showing that many writers and readers have only begun to think about this topic, and consider it deeply.

In this particular case it seems a memoir writer fabricated actions and events that never occurred - on purpose - just to popularize the book and allegedly donate money to a charity -- which may never have occurred.

The facts of the case seemed to capture more attention than the legal principle I find alarming -- that a court can decide what is or is not factual in a memoir -- (not autobiography, not biography, but memoir). 

Since I'm in the midst of writing a memoir this intrusion of law into subjectivity gives me a different perspective.  Call a spade a spade, I was freaked out by this lawsuit article!

The next day I ran into a post -- I think it was on google+ -- on a blog by a teenager who wants to become a writer (and likes the kind of stuff I like) who was just as freaked out by a discovery on literary contract law that I've known about since I was younger than she is. 

The post was about L. J. Smith (author of Vampire Diaries) losing control of her product, and her byline, and all her titles, having the publisher hire writers to write more stories in her universe under her byline.

That sort of thing has been "business as usual" in publishing, especially YA, longer than I've been alive, so ho-hum-yawn for me but a major freaking-out-discovery for this young writer-to-be. 

When I learned about this standard practice in publishing, I already had decided I wanted to be a writer (not that I would, but that I wanted to) but was only mildly curious that some of my favorite novel series (Nancy Drew for example) were written by a lot of different writers under the same byline.  I just wondered how they managed that miracle and wanted to be part of it. 

Here's the post by this very talented teen writer:

http://parafantasy.blogspot.com/2012/02/this-is-utterly-ridiculousi-cant-even.html

Now, keep in mind the memoir writer who "sold out" for money, the idealistic teenager getting a taste of real life as a writer -- considering the biggest thing in writing news these years is Harry Potter, and the writer writing all her own story and benefiting from it all, she has a reason to believe writers keep what they earn -- and put this together with how L. J. Smith is being hammered for being successful.

Think about Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and her legal battle to keep hold of her St. Germain as a Vampire concept.  (she won, but just barely, and only after years of court battles during which she had to switch to writing about Olivia and other female vampires who were "made" by St. Germain.)

When I learned about multiple YA authors writing a series under a joint byline with the worldbuilding and byline being created by publishers, I also learned that Films and TV drama were written the same way, though authors would get byline credit. 

I later learned that byline credit could be extremely fictitious, too!  But since I wanted to 'be a writer' I was merely interested in how they managed all that and still got paid.  (I now know that sometimes they don't get paid!  Getting paid is a different issue!) 

I do hope you've been following the blog by one of my favorite Hollywood writers who "tells it like it is" in Hollywood from a writer's point of view:

Here's an example:
http://allan-cole.blogspot.com/2012/02/follow-bouncing-beach-ball-part-two-and.html 

Yes, this is "The" Allan Cole!!! 

Here's the masthead of his blog:
---------
Tales sometimes tall, but always true, of Allan Cole's years in Hollywood with his late partner, Chris Bunch. How a naked lady almost became our first agent. How we survived Galactica 1980, with only the loss of half our brain cells. How Bunch & Cole became the ultimate fix-it boys. How an alleged Mafia don was very, very good to us. The guy who cornered the market on movie rocks. Why they don't make million dollar movies. And many more.
-------------

Now, with all this background in mind, I run into the following post on a blog that usually has very interesting, salient, and informative entries:

http://gointothestory.blcklst.com/2012/02/screenwriting-101-jonathan-lemkin.html

Here's the blog entry that caught my attention this time, just a quote in isolation from the context (which I am familiar with but don't think much about):

-----------------
THE SCREENWRITING BLOG OF THE BLACK LIST
Screenwriting 101: Jonathan Lemkin
Posted on February 14, 2012 by Scott

“If you let your lifestyle expend your last check, you then say yes to a really bad project to keep the checks coming. The quality of your work goes down, your reputation goes down, and it’s harder to get the next job. I’ve definitely taken the wrong job a couple of times, and it’s very hard to do your best work if you’re feeling like, ‘Oh, this is the wrong job.’”

– Jonathan Lemkin (Lethal Weapon 4), excerpted from “Tales from the Script”
--------------------

OK, now back to the main subject I blog about here, how to raise the reputation of ROMANCE GENRE - but in particular science fiction Romance, Paranormal Romance being a real focus (since I write vampires in love).

One of my followers on twitter @MiriamSPia (a writer, surprise-surprise!) commented on a guest post I did for another beginning writer who had asked on yet another blog post about the challenges of cold-pitching a project at an agent or editor at a convention (being SF fans, they are planning on being at the Worldcon in Chicago 2012 -- worldcon.org for info).

The Guest post was for @Madison_Woods and it's in two parts.  Here's the first part which discusses the origin of Genre showing how a new writer can use a particular understanding of genre to create a pitch that will sell.

http://madisonwoods.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/genre-tuesday-guest-post-from-jaqueline-lichtenberg-part-1/

It went up on Valentine's Day, at the same moment as the following post which I did for Alien Romances:

http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/02/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-5.html 

which discusses the TV Series ONCE UPON A TIME.

Miriam commented on twitter:
I think its that "happily ever after" may seem boring and peaceful to outsiders.

As I've established in my posts here about Happily Ever After -- and the other posts linked in those posts mostly about how a writer uses THEME to do "worldbuilding,"  my best analysis is that the ability to suspend disbelief and enter a world ( remember "liminal" from the Genre Guest post) where there is a genuine threat that a situation will finally resolve with a Happily Ever After Ending (yes, threat! - to some people happiness is more threat than reward) depends entirely on the ability to include GOD in your model of the universe.

That doesn't mean you have to be "religious" or "spiritual" or anything like that.

It simply means you need to be able to STIPULATE that maybe there could be such an extra-reality entity orchestrating events, creating souls.  Some people can't stipulate that premise -- it's just way to scary.  So they can't cross that "liminal" threshold that the Guest Poster prior to my Guest Post talked about in such scholarly terms. 

Here's the guest post about "liminal" experience:
http://madisonwoods.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/genre-tuesday-with-dr-harrison-solow/ 

To accept the idea that there is HAPPINESS in finding a SOUL MATE -- you need to accept the idea of SOUL, which means humans aren't just meat.  There's something else to us.

What that is, where it came from and how it works can be open questions, but they have to be questions somewhere in the reader's psyche.

Now, for those who have followed my posts here on Tarot and Astrology, you know that I've used these esoteric tools to show you how to do the worldbuilding (hopefully invisible to the reader) that supports the foundations of story upon which you can build a plausible relationship that hurtles toward an "inevitable" Happily Ever After resolution of the main conflict.

Here are index posts to those posts in case you missed them:

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

The sense of "hurtling" and the sense of "inevitability" of the Happily Ever After ending do come from using tools in those index posts, yes, but they also come from the way the writer herself lives her personal life, and her professional life.  Or maybe it's vice-verso -- that you live a certain way because you understand such tools.

As I pointed out, these aren't the only philosophical tools around that produce this effect.  Choose your own tools, but master them to the point where they are fully integrated not just into your novels but into your life.

Examine what this teenager writer-to-be has said, (and what the comments on that post add up to) about how precious L. J. Smith's "touch" on this Vampire Diaries material is.

Think about the severe shift in the "feel" of the Darkover novels after Marion Zimmer Bradley was no longer writing them -- that transition is less jarring because the turnover to her successor was gradual as she became too ill to do the actual work.

What exactly is that quality that we treasure so much in the VIBRATION that a particular writer injects into material?  We often term that the writer's "voice" and it's terribly illusive for new writers to get a handle on.

The truth is you can't hear your own voice the way others hear it (not even in recordings, and not when reading words you have written).

One vital ingredient in a writer's "voice" is how they live their lives, professionally and personally.

Look again at that quote from the screenwriting blog. 

If you take "the wrong job" just because you've let your lifestyle drive you into needing a check, you will find the quality of your work deteriorating and it'll be harder to get another job (by this, the screenwriter is talking about WORK FOR HIRE -the exact business model that is freaking out L. J. Smith's fans.)

Here's something I know about Marion Zimmer Bradley.  She did take just anything that came along, writing, editing, odd jobs, anything!  She had kids to feed and bills to pay and she scrambled and scraped for years before the career triumph of having one of her novels made into a TV miniseries.

If you've read the Darkover novels in publishing order, you know that the quality of her work increased over the years.

But she did what that screenwriter is advising writers not to do.

What's the difference? 

We'll look carefully at that difference next week in Part 7 of Believing In Happily Ever After.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

You can find my January 2012 release THE FARRIS CHANNEL and 11 other books in that series (some by Jean Lorrah), plus my other novels, 3 with audiobook versions at
http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20

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

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

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

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

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


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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com