Parts 1 and 2 of this series, were posted on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com the previous 2 Tuesdays.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/poetic-justice-in-paranormal-romance.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/poetic-justice-in-paranormal-romance_15.html
We're looking at creating a working definition of Poetic Justice that will fit Paranormal Romance to enhance the believability of the Happily Ever After ending.
So far, we have the following axioms to build into the Paranormal world:
1) Free Will
2) The Reality of the Soul (otherwise no Soul Mates)
3) Uniqueness of the Individual
4) Love Conquers All
5) Happily Ever After is possible though not guaranteed
6) Poetic Justice is real
In creating the plot of the Paranormal Romance Novel, look for ways to challenge the postulates you use these axioms to prove. That will give your plotting a scintillating bizzaz that will glue the reader to the words.
If you didn't learn how to construct proofs in beginning Geometry, pick up some books and learn how to do that. Working through geometry proofs is one of the most powerful cognitive disciplines for plotting any story, but it is especially applicable to all kinds of fantasy novels, from elves and trolls to dragons and demons and all the way to Urban Fantasy magic realism.
The more fantasy there is in your constructed universe, the more essential is the cognitive procedure internalized in elementary geometry.
So, last week we worked out a definition of poetry in terms of the Western musical scale based on 7 full tones, (we didn't discuss the 5 half-notes which add depth and texture) and came to the following:
-------------------
7 is a biggie, so the Western musical scale is a great analogy to use in worldbuilding.
Poetry and music are different level manifestations of the same thing. Poetry is not just the sounds of the words, but the abstract meanings. Concepts can be mapped onto this system of 7 or 7X7.
One of those concepts is "Justice."
Poetry is not about rhyming, but it is about harmony.
Poetry is as much about the groups-of-7 as it is about the intervals between those 7 elements in a group.
Poetry is about how very distinctively different things interact with, blend with, meld with, unite with each other.
Poetry is about how two can become one.
Poetry is about the underlying unity of reality.
Poetry is about Love Conquers All.
-------------------
So we know that Poetry is how Love Conquers All -- through harmony, through resonance, through the way that the two G strings on a guitar are the same note, an octave apart, and when you pluck one of them, the other picks up that energy through the air and vibrates its own note.
Poetry is about resonance - about how one event in one place and time stirs the substrata of reality setting off a resonating note among other events, other souls, in other places and times.
In other words, poetry is about how two distinct Events in different places and times can both be manifestations of the same thing.
So what's Justice?
Most people would say Justice is an evening or balancing of the Scales -- one event weighing the same as another, keeping the universe in balance.
That would work fine if the goal of life were to remain static.
The statue of the goddess blindfolded holding the scales of Justice is Roman based on the older Greek concepts. Our whole modern civilization in the U. S. A. is from the Roman (via England) which came from the Greek, which grew from Ancient Egypt - Persia (which is now Iraq/Iran). Babylon (Syria) figures in there. The Code of Hammurabi. Assyrian roots.
Hey, look, they all kind of knew each other, married into each other's clans, bled ideas and propagated ideas down the ages.
But this current version of Western Civilization owes much to Ancient Egypt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Justice
If you don't know about the Code of Hamurabi, it may be because you weren't a dedicated Star Trek fan looking up every Shakespeare and classical reference. Kirk loved Hammurabi -- saved his butt in a court of law.
Read this if you need a refresher:
http://public.wsu.edu/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_1/hammurabi.html
But note that the article admits the Hebrew Torah is more famous.
A lot of US Law is based on the Torah laws, or if not actually the Law itself, then the underlying concept of JUSTICE is what the US legal system lifted from these ancient documents. (I'm assuming you all know the elements and ingredients in the Magna Carta.)
So as a writer trying to convince a reader that some strange, made-up universe of yours would actually work in practice and is real (at least for the moment of the story), mine those ancient documents for the unused or abused, the disregarded or oddball interpretation that might sound strange to a reader, but would "ring true."
"Ring true" means poetry.
Pick up the resonance of ancient events, and harmonize modern fantasy events with them. It'll come out plausible.
So we're looking for poetic justice.
Does your universe need a portrait of the ideal state of human civilization as static? Or do you need, as most science fiction novels will, a sense of dynamic progress?
Are things, affairs of humans, wizards and elves, only "right" when they are in "balance" (i.e. static) -- or does your universe have a purpose, a goal that it hasn't reached yet?
If it is a universe which is progressing, what is it progressing from and to?
The reader doesn't need to know (doesn't want to) but you must have a notion of what your universe is about in order to select each detail to be consistent with that notion. Consistency builds verisimilitude.
Maybe you don't have this notion consciously -- maybe you have to write it to find out what it's about. Many great talented writers work that way. Others think they can and fail without knowing how disastrous their failure is.
So give the issue of Justice some conscious thought, then let it cook in your subconscious and see what worlds and universes you build.
The most fertile source of crazy ideas is the world around you and the ancient worlds from which it came.
The Romans as noted above, portrayed Justice as static, a balance, evil balanced against good. When you get the scales straight, one pan weighing the same as the other, you have achieved Justice.
But does your heart yearn for a world where Love Conquers All -- and I mean All. Shouldn't the Good outweigh the Bad? Shouldn't Justice mean there's more Good than Bad and the scales are tipped, skewed?
Does Justice mean "I win?"
Or does Justice mean "There is no right or wrong - just stalemate?"
Isn't that the formula for the Horror Genre novel? Evil can never be destroyed or transformed into Good - it can only be locked away, chained with sigils and signs, sealed with theSeal of Solomon and left sleeping for the next generation to deal with.
Can Love Conquer All in a universe where you can not destroy or transform Evil into Good?
Is that why elements of the Horror genre just totally ruin a good Romance novel? It's a "note" (tone, or sound) from a different scale. It isn't the same song Romance Novels are made of.
Think about my favorite Paranormal Romance genre - the Vampire Romance.
Until the advent of The Good Vampire - the vampire who was a decent human in life and who therefore fights the "curse" to behave decently (think of the TV Show Forever Knight and my Vampire Romance Those of My Blood) - any novel that had "a vampire" in it was automatically published under the Horror genre label.
Then all of a sudden, we had a slew of Romance novels about GOOD VAMPIRES - or vampires whose nature might be very "dark" but who were capable of love, affection, bonding.
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's St. Germain is one of the ground-breakers, and especially her novel which is more Historical Romance than Vampire Novel, Hotel Transylvania.
And now "vampire" does not automatically mean Horror genre.
There are panels at science fiction conventions about the Good Vampire.
What does it mean about the nature of our real reality -- and our culture's opinion about the existential nature of reality -- that we, as writers and readers, have transformed the darkest most evil mythological creature into a force for Good In The World????
That's only one example. Look around you. Good things are being transformed into bad (not actual evil; there really isn't much of that around, but there's plenty of dark stuff). But really awful things are being used for Good and transformed into Good.
Love, your ability to love, and your highest idealism is lighting up the farthest corners of this world -- often via the Internet, Web 2.0, and so on.
People help strangers in trouble on the other side of the world.
Is this a static world where the best we can hope for is a stalemate, a balance between Good and Evil?
Most Paranormal Romance novels today are about that age-old battle, armegeddon, between Good and Evil -- but in my reading, I've found that for the most part, writers are portraying the scales tilted with Good on the heavier side of the balance.
The static balance between Good and Evil is no longer the highest aspiration, the portrait of the ideal world, the Roman vision of the best we can do.
Today people live in a dynamic world where the scales of Justice are tilting toward the Good.
But in the real world of your reader's daily life, the scales actually are swaying wildly this way and that, averaging better maybe, but in any given life, swaying wildly.
So you can build your fictional Paranormal Romance world with a non-static portrait of Justice.
That means you must be able to portray your Good and your Evil in ways that the reader can distinguish one from the other and make an informed choice which side to root for.
If you, yourself, inside your own mind, are not able to define just what is Good -- in terms that don't simply mean "I win is good." then you won't be able to get your reader to ponder their own definition of good, and come away with an Aha! moment, or as I said in Part 1 of this series of posts, a religious experience.
So, in terms of the Paranormal Romance novel, what you're looking to deliver is the Happily Ever After moment portrayed as Poetic Justice.
That moment has to be when the Soul Mates come out of the Pluto transit which I discussed here on August 30, 2011, find the sun shining as the Neptune Transit of "falling in love" wanes, see that the honeymoon is over (even if they spent it in Jurassic Park running for their lives) and understand that they will live Happily Ever After.
The Poetry in that moment resides in Events previous to that moment that belong to the same "chord" made from the scale of 7 cardinal emotions.
If you've forgotten, here are some posts where I discussed the 7 cardinal emotions as depicted with the "Lower Face" of the Tree of Life.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2007/09/7-of-swords-conflict-avoidance.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2007/11/4-pentacles-almighty-cliche.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/10/astrology-just-for-writers-part-3-genre.html
The "Justice" of Poetic Justice resides in the Good that has resulted (and will likely yet result) because of the Soul Mates' survival, of what they did to survive, what they did to get themselves into that fix, in the whole backstory of how they were swept together by "fate" and events larger than themselves and could never have foreseen they'd arrive at this moment.
Poetic Justice is evidenced by a long, improbable, chain of Events on a " because line" (where each choice results in an event that causes another event which presents another choice etc in unbroken sequence) that finally results in the Soul Mates bonding and living Happily Ever After.
Poetic Justice says to the modern mind fostered by the scientific view of the universe that science doesn't know everything, that the universe makes sense, that life has a purpose, that it's not all random and haphazzard, that you can win if your heart is pure and your actions ethical. Poetic Justice says because you have lived the universe has changed in a significant way -- and changed to the Good.
Poetic Justice is how the writer says to the reader that life is meaningful, that there is a purpose, that your personal struggles are taking us closer to the goal.
It's not an easy thing to code into a novel's events without any expository lumps.
If you succeed, the payoff is huge in terms of reader loyalty to your brand.
The best way I know of to learn to do it is to analyze every movie you see and every book you read to see how others have done it for you. At the same time, you need to find ways in which the world out there, the "real" world, actually does behave poetically and justly. News stories, biographies, non-fiction, all that is fodder for the creative mind.
If you look for Poetic Justice in the real world, see it depicted in fictional worlds, can nail it consciously, eventually your subconscious will code it into the plots of your novels.
If you set out to write a novel, deliberately, to exemplify poetic justice, you will probably produce something so "on the nose" (so explicit) that it won't sell because it comes off "contrived."
If you see the world as poetic and just, that vision will resonate in the fictional events blasting into your consciousness as pure inspiration. Very likely, you won't even recognize that you've done it until years later. By then, you'll understand that the rigorous training you put yourself through paid off big time.
In fact, you may suddenly see the poetic justice in your own life.
Live Long and Prosper,
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Showing posts with label Poetic Justice The Movie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poetic Justice The Movie. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Poetic Justice In Paranormal Romance Novels Part 2
Last week
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/poetic-justice-in-paranormal-romance.html
we ended off with a load of loaded questions:
Is Justice a figment of the imagination? Or is it a property of Reality?
Is Justice real? Does it exist? Or is it imaginary?
Then there's the problem of what exactly is poetry? Does it mean rhyme?
Maybe the term "poetic justice" is an oxymoron?
And of course we have to add, "What does poetic justice have to do with Paranormal Romance, or any other sort of Romance?"
We developed a list of concepts for the worldbuilder of a Paranormal Romance novel to include in the premise of the universe so that the Happily Ever After ending will seem plausible even to those who are absolutely convinced it can never happen in reality.
1) Free Will
2) The Reality of the Soul (otherwise no Soul Mates)
3) Uniqueness of the Individual
4) Love Conquers All
5) Happily Ever After is possible though not guaranteed
6) Poetic Justice is real
I've mentioned here before that the main reason Romance novels as a whole don't seem realistic to most readers is that the genre has a rule against challenging the underlying premise of Romance.
The commercial concept "genre" is all about repeating a specific experience for a specific readership that comes to the bookstore looking for that exact experience.
Science Fiction genre is based on the emotional experience that science works, it solves problems when it's used by someone with knowledge and creativity.
Fantasy challenges the Science Fiction premise by using the SF premise and turning it on itself -- "What if everything you think is real actually isn't?" Fantasy has developed genre rules that aim it at readers whose assumptions about reality are in flux.
Romance genre in general is aimed at those who want to experience that ineffable, once in a lifetime, feeling of having a part of the brain activated that normally doesn't respond - the part that melds you to a Soul Mate.
Or we can look at it all from a different direction.
Science fiction, and in fact most Literature, reaches the largest audiences when the unconscious premise of the readers is directly challenged -- and definitively exonerated or blown to smitherines then reassembled into something new.
The Paranormal Romance is popular because it's doing just that -- challenging the widely accepted premise about reality that science can (and mostly has) explained everything..
Science Fiction flourished as the literature that challenged the absolute conviction of the majority that we can never, ever, "go to the stars" and that there are no civilizations "out there" for us to meet, no planets for us to colonize.
Now science (mostly via the internet) has convinced a majority that the galaxy or maybe the whole universe is what science fiction portrayed. Now we have actual discoveries of real planets, even probably earth-like planets around other stars. It is possible that there are "people" out there, or empty planets to colonize. "Life" at least is a near certainty among the stars, when a few decades ago it was a silly idea for the useless idiots of society.
But now along comes Stephen Hawking and declares we can never - ever - reach those planets because of the inherent nature of space-time.
So once again the majority view has become absolute and unassailable and unquestionable, as "majority" almost always is. There will be no interstellar civilization for us to join, or create. You can hardly sell an interstellar adventure these days. Even one without any non-human aliens like Joss Whedon's Firefly doesn't fly.
The torch of vital, creative imagination has passed to the realm of Fantasy, particularly Urban Fantasy which postulates MAGIC IS REAL. The interest in the Paranormal has surpassed the high water mark of the interest in interstellar civilizations.
Science declares absolutely, (and proves it convincingly) that magic is superstition and not real. Only stupid fools "believe in" Tarot, Astrology, Ceremonial Magic.
Science can explain every human experience as a bit of brain chemistry or brain-electronics, including out of body experiences and near-death experiences.
So creative writers take up the challenge.
What if Magic is not impossible? What if "reality" really is multi-layered, and magic and/or religion actually had it right and science has run up a blind alley?
What if we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater?
What if Ancient Wisdom actually was wise if not totally "right?"
So we have a plethora of Urban Fantasy novels portraying our everyday world as a thin film over a seething cauldron of (something -- Evil? Mystical Good? Armegeddon being fought or prevented?).
The Potterverse is probably the most widely known of these, with the magic users being schooled and interpenetrating our world with train station doorways in pillars.
We get through that door and into an otherwhere -- and find the same old/ same-old human stories of power use and abuse, of politics and skullduggery, of heroism and search for identity.
But you know what? If you look closely, you'll find Poetic Justice (and a good dollop of Love Conquers All) laced through the foundation of the Potterverse.
So how do we duplicate that popularity?
Nobody has ever found the magical combination for making a runaway best seller. For every success, there are several dozen contemporarily published novels or films that have the same elements, but don't capture the public eye.
Yet every really big, big success has these certain elements, including Poetic Justice.
Poetic Justice must be a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition, for popularity.
For famous films, study Saving Private Ryan and Elf. Both illustrate poetic justice in action.
I'm sure that if you hadn't studied this element before last week's post, you've looked for it now and can't find anything really popular that does not have this element.
If it's not Poetic Justice -- then it illustrates poetic injustice, which establishes the "reality" of the underlying concept of poetic justice. Even a story about poetic injustice illustrates the point.
Poetic Justice can be the source of the primary thematic statement for any work of fiction.
But how do you, as a writer, use Poetic Justice as a fictional element?
You need to settle on a working definition of Poetry and one of Justice. It doesn't have to be what you believe. It doesn't have to be what others believe, or part of any religion.
It just has to be a statement that your fictional characters illustrate graphically (i.e. in pictures, in actions, not in words).
It doesn't have to be unique, or new to your audience. Cliche actually works well when generating a theme from an axiom you're building into your world.
"What goes around, comes around."
"As you sow, so shall you reap."
"Hoist on his own petard."
"Gets his just deserts."
So let's hack out a working definition of poetry.
You know we're not talking about doggerel, or any cheap rhyming words that only work in one language.
We're talking about the abstract level of reality which is recognizable as things like "poetry in motion."
What exactly is that and where does it come from?
Poetry is like Soul, in that the whole world is made of it, so it's very hard to see that it's there.
In Judaism, the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, which are the story of the life of Moses, starts poetically.
In fact, the whole Torah is a poem -- it's a song that's sung, not read. That's right, it has a tune, and a rhythm, and all the words fit --- do you know how long it is? Check it out. That's epic.
Well, the story of this one man's life starts out, "In the beginning," and tells the story of God creating everything by simply saying words. And it ends with Moses' death. It doesn't end with entering the Land of Israel. Moses doesn't get to do that. He goes up on a mountain and dies in a place that is to remain unknown (so he won't be worshiped). He doesn't get to enter the Land of Israel, his life's work complete. But he gets to see it. It's not a tragedy - he gets to know how it all will come out and that his life's work will be complete, and why he can't be the leader into the Land of Israel. It's not a "Happily Ever After" because we know how it came out later. But it is poetry. It is poetic justice.
Isn't that cool? The whole of reality is described as a poem. We are the words that God is speaking (not spoke; is speaking) recreating this reality with the vibration of Voice every split-instant. We are a song.
If you take that view, and really think about last week's post where we explored how it is that we can be unaware that we have a Soul, just as maybe a fish is unaware of water, it's small wonder that the concept "poetry" is so difficult.
We are a song. How can we understand songs if that's what we are?
We are vibration. Science has dug down far enough to portray matter as vibrating particles. There is nothing but energy, vibrating energy -- it just seems solid.
So the music analogy, the music of the spheres, can give us a working tool for injecting our fiction with poetic justice.
Think of a musical chord. If you don't know, go look up how musical chords are formed. The individual tones relate to each other in a specific way (and yes, there are many 'scales' in different cultures; some seem like noise to the untrained ear.)
But the tones of a scale, and the chords made out of that scale, relate to each other in precise mathematically defined ways.
Here's a whole presentation on this subject:
http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/eecs20/week8/scale.html
When you put the tones of a chord together, they resonate to produce a unique sound, a recognizable sound.
Now, think of each tone in a scale as a personality trait. In Western music, we use octaves - 7 distinct tones.
Way back when, astrology only knew 7 "planets" -- Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. And that was enough to describe all the permutations and combinations of human personality, the ways we are the same and the ways we are different. (Today we have Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, too -- but they are regarded as "generational" -- so that everyone born in a given 20 year stretch mostly has these slow moving planets in similar enough places that the individuals of a generation move with commonality through life -- the Baby Boomer Generation is a real example.)
We are unique, each and every one of us, but we are all composed of combinations of the SAME 7 traits.
The combinations make us unique, not the ingredients.
There are 7 days in the week, and Kaballah identifies 7 levels to the Soul and 7 cardinal emotions to be mastered by the Soul in this life. You can go on and on identifying 7's - think Rainbow. The universe is made of groups of 7.
7 is a biggie, so the Western musical scale is a great analogy to use in worldbuilding.
Poetry and music are different level manifestations of the same thing. Poetry is not just the sounds of the words, but the abstract meanings. Concepts can be mapped onto this system of 7 or 7X7. One of those concepts is "Justice."
Poetry is not about rhyming, but it is about harmony.
Poetry is as much about the groups-of-7 as it is about the intervals between those 7 elements in a group.
Poetry is about how very distinctively different things interact with, blend with, meld with, unite with each other.
Poetry is about how two can become one.
Poetry is about the underlying unity of reality.
Poetry is about Love Conquers All.
Think about that, and next week we'll look at how to hack out a working definition of Justice.
Live Long and Prosper,
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/poetic-justice-in-paranormal-romance.html
we ended off with a load of loaded questions:
Is Justice a figment of the imagination? Or is it a property of Reality?
Is Justice real? Does it exist? Or is it imaginary?
Then there's the problem of what exactly is poetry? Does it mean rhyme?
Maybe the term "poetic justice" is an oxymoron?
And of course we have to add, "What does poetic justice have to do with Paranormal Romance, or any other sort of Romance?"
We developed a list of concepts for the worldbuilder of a Paranormal Romance novel to include in the premise of the universe so that the Happily Ever After ending will seem plausible even to those who are absolutely convinced it can never happen in reality.
1) Free Will
2) The Reality of the Soul (otherwise no Soul Mates)
3) Uniqueness of the Individual
4) Love Conquers All
5) Happily Ever After is possible though not guaranteed
6) Poetic Justice is real
I've mentioned here before that the main reason Romance novels as a whole don't seem realistic to most readers is that the genre has a rule against challenging the underlying premise of Romance.
The commercial concept "genre" is all about repeating a specific experience for a specific readership that comes to the bookstore looking for that exact experience.
Science Fiction genre is based on the emotional experience that science works, it solves problems when it's used by someone with knowledge and creativity.
Fantasy challenges the Science Fiction premise by using the SF premise and turning it on itself -- "What if everything you think is real actually isn't?" Fantasy has developed genre rules that aim it at readers whose assumptions about reality are in flux.
Romance genre in general is aimed at those who want to experience that ineffable, once in a lifetime, feeling of having a part of the brain activated that normally doesn't respond - the part that melds you to a Soul Mate.
Or we can look at it all from a different direction.
Science fiction, and in fact most Literature, reaches the largest audiences when the unconscious premise of the readers is directly challenged -- and definitively exonerated or blown to smitherines then reassembled into something new.
The Paranormal Romance is popular because it's doing just that -- challenging the widely accepted premise about reality that science can (and mostly has) explained everything..
Science Fiction flourished as the literature that challenged the absolute conviction of the majority that we can never, ever, "go to the stars" and that there are no civilizations "out there" for us to meet, no planets for us to colonize.
Now science (mostly via the internet) has convinced a majority that the galaxy or maybe the whole universe is what science fiction portrayed. Now we have actual discoveries of real planets, even probably earth-like planets around other stars. It is possible that there are "people" out there, or empty planets to colonize. "Life" at least is a near certainty among the stars, when a few decades ago it was a silly idea for the useless idiots of society.
But now along comes Stephen Hawking and declares we can never - ever - reach those planets because of the inherent nature of space-time.
So once again the majority view has become absolute and unassailable and unquestionable, as "majority" almost always is. There will be no interstellar civilization for us to join, or create. You can hardly sell an interstellar adventure these days. Even one without any non-human aliens like Joss Whedon's Firefly doesn't fly.
The torch of vital, creative imagination has passed to the realm of Fantasy, particularly Urban Fantasy which postulates MAGIC IS REAL. The interest in the Paranormal has surpassed the high water mark of the interest in interstellar civilizations.
Science declares absolutely, (and proves it convincingly) that magic is superstition and not real. Only stupid fools "believe in" Tarot, Astrology, Ceremonial Magic.
Science can explain every human experience as a bit of brain chemistry or brain-electronics, including out of body experiences and near-death experiences.
So creative writers take up the challenge.
What if Magic is not impossible? What if "reality" really is multi-layered, and magic and/or religion actually had it right and science has run up a blind alley?
What if we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater?
What if Ancient Wisdom actually was wise if not totally "right?"
So we have a plethora of Urban Fantasy novels portraying our everyday world as a thin film over a seething cauldron of (something -- Evil? Mystical Good? Armegeddon being fought or prevented?).
The Potterverse is probably the most widely known of these, with the magic users being schooled and interpenetrating our world with train station doorways in pillars.
We get through that door and into an otherwhere -- and find the same old/ same-old human stories of power use and abuse, of politics and skullduggery, of heroism and search for identity.
But you know what? If you look closely, you'll find Poetic Justice (and a good dollop of Love Conquers All) laced through the foundation of the Potterverse.
So how do we duplicate that popularity?
Nobody has ever found the magical combination for making a runaway best seller. For every success, there are several dozen contemporarily published novels or films that have the same elements, but don't capture the public eye.
Yet every really big, big success has these certain elements, including Poetic Justice.
Poetic Justice must be a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition, for popularity.
For famous films, study Saving Private Ryan and Elf. Both illustrate poetic justice in action.
I'm sure that if you hadn't studied this element before last week's post, you've looked for it now and can't find anything really popular that does not have this element.
If it's not Poetic Justice -- then it illustrates poetic injustice, which establishes the "reality" of the underlying concept of poetic justice. Even a story about poetic injustice illustrates the point.
Poetic Justice can be the source of the primary thematic statement for any work of fiction.
But how do you, as a writer, use Poetic Justice as a fictional element?
You need to settle on a working definition of Poetry and one of Justice. It doesn't have to be what you believe. It doesn't have to be what others believe, or part of any religion.
It just has to be a statement that your fictional characters illustrate graphically (i.e. in pictures, in actions, not in words).
It doesn't have to be unique, or new to your audience. Cliche actually works well when generating a theme from an axiom you're building into your world.
"What goes around, comes around."
"As you sow, so shall you reap."
"Hoist on his own petard."
"Gets his just deserts."
So let's hack out a working definition of poetry.
You know we're not talking about doggerel, or any cheap rhyming words that only work in one language.
We're talking about the abstract level of reality which is recognizable as things like "poetry in motion."
What exactly is that and where does it come from?
Poetry is like Soul, in that the whole world is made of it, so it's very hard to see that it's there.
In Judaism, the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, which are the story of the life of Moses, starts poetically.
In fact, the whole Torah is a poem -- it's a song that's sung, not read. That's right, it has a tune, and a rhythm, and all the words fit --- do you know how long it is? Check it out. That's epic.
Well, the story of this one man's life starts out, "In the beginning," and tells the story of God creating everything by simply saying words. And it ends with Moses' death. It doesn't end with entering the Land of Israel. Moses doesn't get to do that. He goes up on a mountain and dies in a place that is to remain unknown (so he won't be worshiped). He doesn't get to enter the Land of Israel, his life's work complete. But he gets to see it. It's not a tragedy - he gets to know how it all will come out and that his life's work will be complete, and why he can't be the leader into the Land of Israel. It's not a "Happily Ever After" because we know how it came out later. But it is poetry. It is poetic justice.
Isn't that cool? The whole of reality is described as a poem. We are the words that God is speaking (not spoke; is speaking) recreating this reality with the vibration of Voice every split-instant. We are a song.
If you take that view, and really think about last week's post where we explored how it is that we can be unaware that we have a Soul, just as maybe a fish is unaware of water, it's small wonder that the concept "poetry" is so difficult.
We are a song. How can we understand songs if that's what we are?
We are vibration. Science has dug down far enough to portray matter as vibrating particles. There is nothing but energy, vibrating energy -- it just seems solid.
So the music analogy, the music of the spheres, can give us a working tool for injecting our fiction with poetic justice.
Think of a musical chord. If you don't know, go look up how musical chords are formed. The individual tones relate to each other in a specific way (and yes, there are many 'scales' in different cultures; some seem like noise to the untrained ear.)
But the tones of a scale, and the chords made out of that scale, relate to each other in precise mathematically defined ways.
Here's a whole presentation on this subject:
http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/eecs20/week8/scale.html
When you put the tones of a chord together, they resonate to produce a unique sound, a recognizable sound.
Now, think of each tone in a scale as a personality trait. In Western music, we use octaves - 7 distinct tones.
Way back when, astrology only knew 7 "planets" -- Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. And that was enough to describe all the permutations and combinations of human personality, the ways we are the same and the ways we are different. (Today we have Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, too -- but they are regarded as "generational" -- so that everyone born in a given 20 year stretch mostly has these slow moving planets in similar enough places that the individuals of a generation move with commonality through life -- the Baby Boomer Generation is a real example.)
We are unique, each and every one of us, but we are all composed of combinations of the SAME 7 traits.
The combinations make us unique, not the ingredients.
There are 7 days in the week, and Kaballah identifies 7 levels to the Soul and 7 cardinal emotions to be mastered by the Soul in this life. You can go on and on identifying 7's - think Rainbow. The universe is made of groups of 7.
7 is a biggie, so the Western musical scale is a great analogy to use in worldbuilding.
Poetry and music are different level manifestations of the same thing. Poetry is not just the sounds of the words, but the abstract meanings. Concepts can be mapped onto this system of 7 or 7X7. One of those concepts is "Justice."
Poetry is not about rhyming, but it is about harmony.
Poetry is as much about the groups-of-7 as it is about the intervals between those 7 elements in a group.
Poetry is about how very distinctively different things interact with, blend with, meld with, unite with each other.
Poetry is about how two can become one.
Poetry is about the underlying unity of reality.
Poetry is about Love Conquers All.
Think about that, and next week we'll look at how to hack out a working definition of Justice.
Live Long and Prosper,
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Tuesday, November 08, 2011
Poetic Justice In Paranormal Romance Novels Part 1
We've been focusing on the plausibility (in real life) of the Happily Ever After ending, employing Astrology and every other philosophical tool we can find to explore how such a wish-fulfillment fantasy can actually be "real."
We added 2 posts on astrology just for writers, part 10 and part 11, to the collection in the last few months, finding ways a Paranormal Romance book can be constructed without ever mentioning astrology or Tarot.
I wrote:
The key the writer needs to grasp is how a character's free will choices combine with the prevailing influence in her life to produce events which, though decades apart in time and place, nevertheless are related poetically.
Two foundation concepts that make the Happily Ever After (HEA) ending plausible are Free Will and the Uniqueness of the Individual.
In the fishbowl analogy:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-11.html
we discussed how souls can meld while lives remain separate, though reflective and in harmony.
Now we need to consider how these 2 premises, Free Will and Uniqueness, apply specifically to the Paranormal Romance novel.
The most concrete manifestation I have yet found of how these two human properties combine to produce the Happily Ever After in real life is often called Poetic Justice.
Literature teachers sometimes demand that a "book review" written by students to prove they read the novel in question should point out how the ending demonstrates poetic justice. Old classic novels all had this element, though it's harder to find in recently published SF Fantasy or Romance.
If your education hasn't supplied that drill for finding the poetic justice in a novel, I suggest you adopt it as a regimen for a few years. It will give you a handle on the subconscious beliefs of the largest audiences.
Today's Paranormal Romance novels don't all demonstrate poetic justice.
The reason may be that the writers and editors aren't sensitive to it, or that they don't think the intended audience understands it, or wants it in life, or fantasizes about it, or yearns for it. Since finding Poetic Justice in fiction may not be taught in all High Schools as it once was, those writers and editors might be correct.
So the new writer's job becomes bigger and much harder. To break into the field of Paranormal Romance novel writing, you may need to explain what poetic justice is, where it comes from, how to recognize it in "real" life, and then blindside the reader with a revelation at the ending that will leave them gasping, in tears, or maybe even with a religious experience.
Yes, I said religious -- an encounter with God that brings the reality of the Eternal Soul out of Religion and into real life.
As I've said in this blog, one of the premises of Romance novels in general, but particularly the Paranormal Romance novel, is that the Soul is real.
The Soul may not be tangible, or even subject to definition in words, but it's real, just like gravity and Kepler's Equations are real.
Very often, an individual human's first awareness, first loss of virginity, is in the first blush of Love. The idea of Love At First Sight is based on that kind of touch to the Soul by another Soul.
Think about that. If nothing touches your Soul, you don't know your Soul is there, can't feel it as yourself, your Identity.
If your whole inner world is untouched by anything, anyone, outside you, you don't know you have an inner world at all.
Here's a theory of Soul. Souls are like candle flames. A family is a group of Souls that all have been ignited from one, ancestral, candle. Parents ignite your soul, you then ignite your children's souls. These are not the same flame. Each is individual, each dances in the breeze differently, each candle burns down at a different rate, slanting this way and that according to the substance of the candle and wick. But there is an underlying similarity, a commonality among Souls ignited by the same Flame.
The first Soul, Adam, was ignited by God's breath. We all have been ignited from Adam.
Think about the Soul conflagration that engulfs the whole Earth.
We are one flame, but each is a unique individual.
A child, among family, doesn't feel that "individual" until puberty when the be-all of existence is to separate from The Mother and become an independent individual.
When that sense of individuality is established, the first thing it does is reach out to TOUCH another Soul. Puppy love. Teen crushes.
When the reach is returned, the newly individualized Soul finally gets a sense of having a Soul by being touched by another Soul.
That's the first loss of virginity, something very special that never happens again in a lifetime -- until the actual Soul Mate touches and unites in that special way.
Finding a Soul Mate does not guarantee a Happily Ever After. But it awakens the yearning for it.
That's the yearning the Romance Novel can fulfill. By painting that vision vividly and with depth of detail, the Romance Novel writer can touch the reader's soul and open doors into possible futures. The inspiration can sustain a reader through the search for a real life Happily Ever After.
The Paranormal Romance novel can open bigger doors into a bigger world, just as the Science Fiction Romance Novel can ignite a curiosity about science and the role of science in Love.
The Science Fiction Romance novel deals with the adventures of a Soul in the single, shallow, layer of "reality" that science addresses.
For more on what part of reality science addresses, see my posts on Tarot. 20 posts on Tarot are listed in these posts, but we keep coming back to this subject as we do to astrology and religion.
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
The Paranormal Romance Novel deals with the other dimensions of reality portrayed in my Tarot posts.
The Paranormal deals with that which is above, beyond or maybe beneath the "normal."
The assumption is that what we ordinarily see as "reality" is actually only a thin film, a crust, or a "user interface" like the "skin" you can "download" to decorate your Yahoo page.
As in the Potterverse, the "muggles" or normal people, just have no clue what's really out there.
In Horror genre, what's "out there" is truly ugly and a serious threat of which most people must be kept ignorant. There's no way to conquer it at all. The most you can do is closet it away for future generations to deal with (think enchanted chains on the Vampire's coffin, sealed with the Seal of Solomon and magical sigils of angels.)
In Paranormal Romance novels, what's "out there" is scary at first, but with the strength of Love, it can be conquered and perhaps even turned to Good.
Love Conquers All is an assumption of all Romance, but truly vital in the Paranormal Romance story.
So a Paranormal Romance worldbuilder must include at least some axioms about such topics as:
1) Free Will
2) The Reality of the Soul (otherwise no Soul Mates)
3) Uniqueness of the Individual
4) Love Conquers All
5) Happily Ever After is possible though not guaranteed
6) Poetic Justice is real
Different writers can use different axioms to cover these elements, but failing to cover these elements and make all the components of the worldbuilding behind the story conform to whatever axioms you use will cause readers to respond that the story is "contrived" or "unrealistic" or the villains are cardboard or the hero and heroine are idiots not worth reading about. Yeah, that's the level of worldbuilding in SF or Paranormal or Fantasy novels that causes willing suspension of disbelief.
The reader doesn't have to believe in God, or find God real in their own life. The reader just has to be able to relate to the position of the characters on these subjects -- without any single word ever making these philosophical abstractions explicit in the novel.
If you miss any one of those elements, the Happily Ever After ending will seem more implausible to more readers than you might guess.
So let's see if we can find a poetic justice definition that can work for authors of Paranormal Romance. It's one thing to unravel a Romance story to find the poetic justice inside, and quite a different thing to portray poetic justice in your romance story. The one process is not the opposite of the other.
Now think about this: God is a paranormal element.
I don't think religion is a paranormal element. Religion is a word we use to designate an organization, or a belief system, more than a law of the universe. Religion is what other people tell you about God. So religion is a different subject that belongs to anthropology and culture, two other aspects of worldbuilding.
Here we're looking for the universal, underlying, principles of reality that can make a Paranormal Romance world seem utterly real to the readers for whom The Paranormal is ridiculous in daily life. The point of the exercise is to find a way to present and explain Poetic Justice to readers, editors, and the general public that adds to their sense of how real a fictional universe is.
Science Fiction writers specialize in imagining a universe where what we absolutely know for a fact turns out to be not at all true. Happily Ever After is in that category for a lot of readers, the same category as intelligent life on other planets.
We have to show not tell that the Happily Ever After with a Soul Mate is actually Poetic Justice, even though Happily Ever After is a ridiculous premise in real life.
If you just slap Poetic Justice into your Paranormal world, it will be one more thing readers have to suspend disbelief about. If you grow your version of Poetic Justice from the core premise of your world, it becomes one of the elements that convince readers your world is real.
So we have to find out what justice is and what poetry is, and why people in all cultures the world over cherish these notions while they only yearn for a Soul Mate and Happily Ever After and call those silly wishfulfillment fantasy.
Do you need God in your worldbuilding as an axiom? A postulate? A premise? Do you need God as an element in your fiction in order to portray Justice in the world?
Does "Justice" come from outside or inside "reality?"
What exactly is justice and how do you tell if it has manifested (yet)?
If you know enough mythology, you have many gods to choose from, fickle ones, ones that come from dysfunctional families, benign ones, neutral ones, bribable ones. You also have a cast of thousands of demons, elves, pixies, trolls, and a plethora of supernatural creatures to include or exclude from your world.
You can use (though you might not be able to sell it right now) Islam and the Prophet, or any Islamic concept of Justice and how it can be arrived at. All of those beliefs belong to the paranormal, and can be inventoried in a Paranormal Romance novel's worldbuilding.
You can study the era of the Prophets in Judaism -- theory is that at one time, during the days of the Temple, nearly everyone received Prophecy from God, but only a few got prophetic visions that pertained to the future history of Judaism, visions that were worth preserving. Most people got information about ordinary things or matters of personal concern. As far as I know, no Paranormal Romances have been set in that time and place -- could blow the whole Paranormal Romance publishing industry to the top of the charts.
Theory in Judaism, particularly Kabbalah, is that today people get real "prophetic" visions in dreams -- personally applicable information, on a routine basis. "Prophetic" doesn't necessarily mean "about the future" -- but it can mean just deep insight into the true meaning, the Paranormal meaning, of what's happening on the surface of events today.
So Prophecy is a Paranormal element that can be used in Romance worldbuilding, and has been. Many stories begin with a dream of the One who will be the Soul Mate.
Fantasy Romance is routinely lumped in under Paranormal Romance. But most people associate the word Fantasy with "impossible" or "unreal" -- or even consider it unhealthy to dwell on, mentally or emotionally.
That's why "wish fulfillment fantasy" is a pejorative.
Paranormal, however, is often associated with "crazy."
Which brings us to the question: Is Justice a figment of the imagination? Or is it a property of Reality?
Is Justice real? Does it exist? Or is it imaginary?
Then there's the problem of what exactly is poetry? Does it mean rhyme?
Maybe the term "poetic justice" is an oxymoron?
We'll explore this a little more next week in Part 2 of Poetic Justice in Paranormal Romance novels.
Live Long and Prosper,
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
We added 2 posts on astrology just for writers, part 10 and part 11, to the collection in the last few months, finding ways a Paranormal Romance book can be constructed without ever mentioning astrology or Tarot.
I wrote:
The key the writer needs to grasp is how a character's free will choices combine with the prevailing influence in her life to produce events which, though decades apart in time and place, nevertheless are related poetically.
Two foundation concepts that make the Happily Ever After (HEA) ending plausible are Free Will and the Uniqueness of the Individual.
In the fishbowl analogy:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-11.html
we discussed how souls can meld while lives remain separate, though reflective and in harmony.
Now we need to consider how these 2 premises, Free Will and Uniqueness, apply specifically to the Paranormal Romance novel.
The most concrete manifestation I have yet found of how these two human properties combine to produce the Happily Ever After in real life is often called Poetic Justice.
Literature teachers sometimes demand that a "book review" written by students to prove they read the novel in question should point out how the ending demonstrates poetic justice. Old classic novels all had this element, though it's harder to find in recently published SF Fantasy or Romance.
If your education hasn't supplied that drill for finding the poetic justice in a novel, I suggest you adopt it as a regimen for a few years. It will give you a handle on the subconscious beliefs of the largest audiences.
Today's Paranormal Romance novels don't all demonstrate poetic justice.
The reason may be that the writers and editors aren't sensitive to it, or that they don't think the intended audience understands it, or wants it in life, or fantasizes about it, or yearns for it. Since finding Poetic Justice in fiction may not be taught in all High Schools as it once was, those writers and editors might be correct.
So the new writer's job becomes bigger and much harder. To break into the field of Paranormal Romance novel writing, you may need to explain what poetic justice is, where it comes from, how to recognize it in "real" life, and then blindside the reader with a revelation at the ending that will leave them gasping, in tears, or maybe even with a religious experience.
Yes, I said religious -- an encounter with God that brings the reality of the Eternal Soul out of Religion and into real life.
As I've said in this blog, one of the premises of Romance novels in general, but particularly the Paranormal Romance novel, is that the Soul is real.
The Soul may not be tangible, or even subject to definition in words, but it's real, just like gravity and Kepler's Equations are real.
Very often, an individual human's first awareness, first loss of virginity, is in the first blush of Love. The idea of Love At First Sight is based on that kind of touch to the Soul by another Soul.
Think about that. If nothing touches your Soul, you don't know your Soul is there, can't feel it as yourself, your Identity.
If your whole inner world is untouched by anything, anyone, outside you, you don't know you have an inner world at all.
Here's a theory of Soul. Souls are like candle flames. A family is a group of Souls that all have been ignited from one, ancestral, candle. Parents ignite your soul, you then ignite your children's souls. These are not the same flame. Each is individual, each dances in the breeze differently, each candle burns down at a different rate, slanting this way and that according to the substance of the candle and wick. But there is an underlying similarity, a commonality among Souls ignited by the same Flame.
The first Soul, Adam, was ignited by God's breath. We all have been ignited from Adam.
Think about the Soul conflagration that engulfs the whole Earth.
We are one flame, but each is a unique individual.
A child, among family, doesn't feel that "individual" until puberty when the be-all of existence is to separate from The Mother and become an independent individual.
When that sense of individuality is established, the first thing it does is reach out to TOUCH another Soul. Puppy love. Teen crushes.
When the reach is returned, the newly individualized Soul finally gets a sense of having a Soul by being touched by another Soul.
That's the first loss of virginity, something very special that never happens again in a lifetime -- until the actual Soul Mate touches and unites in that special way.
Finding a Soul Mate does not guarantee a Happily Ever After. But it awakens the yearning for it.
That's the yearning the Romance Novel can fulfill. By painting that vision vividly and with depth of detail, the Romance Novel writer can touch the reader's soul and open doors into possible futures. The inspiration can sustain a reader through the search for a real life Happily Ever After.
The Paranormal Romance novel can open bigger doors into a bigger world, just as the Science Fiction Romance Novel can ignite a curiosity about science and the role of science in Love.
The Science Fiction Romance novel deals with the adventures of a Soul in the single, shallow, layer of "reality" that science addresses.
For more on what part of reality science addresses, see my posts on Tarot. 20 posts on Tarot are listed in these posts, but we keep coming back to this subject as we do to astrology and religion.
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
The Paranormal Romance Novel deals with the other dimensions of reality portrayed in my Tarot posts.
The Paranormal deals with that which is above, beyond or maybe beneath the "normal."
The assumption is that what we ordinarily see as "reality" is actually only a thin film, a crust, or a "user interface" like the "skin" you can "download" to decorate your Yahoo page.
As in the Potterverse, the "muggles" or normal people, just have no clue what's really out there.
In Horror genre, what's "out there" is truly ugly and a serious threat of which most people must be kept ignorant. There's no way to conquer it at all. The most you can do is closet it away for future generations to deal with (think enchanted chains on the Vampire's coffin, sealed with the Seal of Solomon and magical sigils of angels.)
In Paranormal Romance novels, what's "out there" is scary at first, but with the strength of Love, it can be conquered and perhaps even turned to Good.
Love Conquers All is an assumption of all Romance, but truly vital in the Paranormal Romance story.
So a Paranormal Romance worldbuilder must include at least some axioms about such topics as:
1) Free Will
2) The Reality of the Soul (otherwise no Soul Mates)
3) Uniqueness of the Individual
4) Love Conquers All
5) Happily Ever After is possible though not guaranteed
6) Poetic Justice is real
Different writers can use different axioms to cover these elements, but failing to cover these elements and make all the components of the worldbuilding behind the story conform to whatever axioms you use will cause readers to respond that the story is "contrived" or "unrealistic" or the villains are cardboard or the hero and heroine are idiots not worth reading about. Yeah, that's the level of worldbuilding in SF or Paranormal or Fantasy novels that causes willing suspension of disbelief.
The reader doesn't have to believe in God, or find God real in their own life. The reader just has to be able to relate to the position of the characters on these subjects -- without any single word ever making these philosophical abstractions explicit in the novel.
If you miss any one of those elements, the Happily Ever After ending will seem more implausible to more readers than you might guess.
So let's see if we can find a poetic justice definition that can work for authors of Paranormal Romance. It's one thing to unravel a Romance story to find the poetic justice inside, and quite a different thing to portray poetic justice in your romance story. The one process is not the opposite of the other.
Now think about this: God is a paranormal element.
I don't think religion is a paranormal element. Religion is a word we use to designate an organization, or a belief system, more than a law of the universe. Religion is what other people tell you about God. So religion is a different subject that belongs to anthropology and culture, two other aspects of worldbuilding.
Here we're looking for the universal, underlying, principles of reality that can make a Paranormal Romance world seem utterly real to the readers for whom The Paranormal is ridiculous in daily life. The point of the exercise is to find a way to present and explain Poetic Justice to readers, editors, and the general public that adds to their sense of how real a fictional universe is.
Science Fiction writers specialize in imagining a universe where what we absolutely know for a fact turns out to be not at all true. Happily Ever After is in that category for a lot of readers, the same category as intelligent life on other planets.
We have to show not tell that the Happily Ever After with a Soul Mate is actually Poetic Justice, even though Happily Ever After is a ridiculous premise in real life.
If you just slap Poetic Justice into your Paranormal world, it will be one more thing readers have to suspend disbelief about. If you grow your version of Poetic Justice from the core premise of your world, it becomes one of the elements that convince readers your world is real.
So we have to find out what justice is and what poetry is, and why people in all cultures the world over cherish these notions while they only yearn for a Soul Mate and Happily Ever After and call those silly wishfulfillment fantasy.
Do you need God in your worldbuilding as an axiom? A postulate? A premise? Do you need God as an element in your fiction in order to portray Justice in the world?
Does "Justice" come from outside or inside "reality?"
What exactly is justice and how do you tell if it has manifested (yet)?
If you know enough mythology, you have many gods to choose from, fickle ones, ones that come from dysfunctional families, benign ones, neutral ones, bribable ones. You also have a cast of thousands of demons, elves, pixies, trolls, and a plethora of supernatural creatures to include or exclude from your world.
You can use (though you might not be able to sell it right now) Islam and the Prophet, or any Islamic concept of Justice and how it can be arrived at. All of those beliefs belong to the paranormal, and can be inventoried in a Paranormal Romance novel's worldbuilding.
You can study the era of the Prophets in Judaism -- theory is that at one time, during the days of the Temple, nearly everyone received Prophecy from God, but only a few got prophetic visions that pertained to the future history of Judaism, visions that were worth preserving. Most people got information about ordinary things or matters of personal concern. As far as I know, no Paranormal Romances have been set in that time and place -- could blow the whole Paranormal Romance publishing industry to the top of the charts.
Theory in Judaism, particularly Kabbalah, is that today people get real "prophetic" visions in dreams -- personally applicable information, on a routine basis. "Prophetic" doesn't necessarily mean "about the future" -- but it can mean just deep insight into the true meaning, the Paranormal meaning, of what's happening on the surface of events today.
So Prophecy is a Paranormal element that can be used in Romance worldbuilding, and has been. Many stories begin with a dream of the One who will be the Soul Mate.
Fantasy Romance is routinely lumped in under Paranormal Romance. But most people associate the word Fantasy with "impossible" or "unreal" -- or even consider it unhealthy to dwell on, mentally or emotionally.
That's why "wish fulfillment fantasy" is a pejorative.
Paranormal, however, is often associated with "crazy."
Which brings us to the question: Is Justice a figment of the imagination? Or is it a property of Reality?
Is Justice real? Does it exist? Or is it imaginary?
Then there's the problem of what exactly is poetry? Does it mean rhyme?
Maybe the term "poetic justice" is an oxymoron?
We'll explore this a little more next week in Part 2 of Poetic Justice in Paranormal Romance novels.
Live Long and Prosper,
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
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