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