Worldbuilding with Fire And Ice Part 6: Values Twist

Here are the previous parts in this series:
The first 3 are from a very different "angle" than 4, 5, and now 6 involve.  We'll get back to this mix of Sex and Politics, weaving in Romance, Love and goshknows what else, a little at a time.  These posts are the foundation upon which to build facility with the use of THEME as discussed in previous years.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part-i.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/11/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part-ii.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/11/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/07/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part-4.html
http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/07/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part-5.html

Part 7 is scheduled for August 14th, 2012, and Part 8 for October 9, 2012.

We're dissecting and discussing a single World War II film made in 2005 titled THE GREAT RAID.  We started this discussion in WORLDBUILDING WITH FIRE AND ICE PART 4: STORMS OF DEATH  That post has links to previous worldbuilding posts. 

Death is an odd topic for a Romance blog, but a necessary one if you are a Romance writer.  This discussion will lead us deep into worldbuilding to show-don't-tell theme, so you never have to explain philosophy in words.  It is, however, the presence of conflicting philosophies shown by Values that makes Art live for generations. 



Now we'll look at some ways this 2005 film shows the pivot point in audience values, the twist between the 1940's and 2012. 

--------Values Twist -------------

By focusing on an accurate portrayal of the actual historical Events -- using some of the old footage, too -- THE GREAT RAID casts an air of authenticity.

Unlike many modern films and TV series, this film does not totally rewrite History into the opposite of what it was.  Even in the 1940's there were many women like the nurse/resistance-leader in this film.  There were many Japanese who didn't respect the Catholic church enough to stop when confronted by a Priest (but there were also many who would have stopped.)  The explosions might be a bit bigger than the usual WWII actual explosion, but that's Hollywood. 

The prisoners of war in this film might have looked a little handsomer than starved men would look - and there were no issues of lice, no swarms of mosquitos, no rats, and other jungle-island pests depicted in the film.

In a film made in the 1950's, you wouldn't find the icky realities portrayed graphically either. 

In this 2005 film, we watch as a Japanese garrison commander (portrayed as cruel and evil as any Nazi is ever portrayed by American films) orders 10 men executed because 1 man disobeyed a regulation of the prison camp. 

He lines up the men, swaggers a bit, and makes the others watch as their comrades (some of which the viewers now know) are shot in the back of the head.  Yes, it's a cliche scene, too, but it's well staged.

Here's the twist: in a 1950's war movie, you wouldn't see blood gouting from the ruined skulls at the headshots.  In this 2005 film, you don't see the blood gouting -- and the shooter, who stands way too close to the men he's shooting doesn't get spattered with obvious gore.

Note that this execution is not done by firing squad so that the person who murders another in cold blood will never be sure it was his bullet that murdered the prisoner.  In a firing squad, only one rifle is loaded with live ammunition, and the squad stands a good distance from the victim.  The victim's face is covered, and any onlookers don't see the expression -- nor does the victim see the squad.  This procedure is considered clean and merciful insofar as possible under those circumstances, preserving humanity.

In this 2005 film, one Japanese solder stands BEHIND the prisoners he, by himself, is executing, and shoots them drug cartel style.  We do see the line of victims fall one by one, but the camera is at a good distance -- there is no emphasis on the gore, the anguish.  It's distanced physically and thus emotionally, but it is raw and direct.  To half the audience it depicts the Japanese executioner as evil; the other half of the audience simply sees a scene that could have been more interesting if it were more realistic (realistic like a videogame, maybe).

In a 1950's film, the cliche scene would be a closeup on the commander of the prisoners listening to SHOTS FIRED outside the wall.  We wouldn't see the people lined up, nor see them fall. 

This is a cinematic TWIST at this pivot point in audience sensibilities. 

There are many examples of this kind of twist in this film, but let's get back to the Religion aspects because they are stark, and relevant to the worldbuilding issues writers face today. 

All human cultures we know of have SOMETHING in that niche Religion occupies.  Today, in the USA about half the people are on a campaign to expunge religion from public consciousness, even though at least 70% (according to an annual survey) believe there's something more to life the universe and everything than can be measured and quantified by science. 

Hence we have the popularity of shows like the syfy channel's ghost hunters and other shows about the Paranormal.  We also have a raft of TV series where paranormal creatures (Vampires, werewolves etc) are taken for granted, or a best kept secret of the town or show's main characters only.  We have comedy like PSYCH which parodies the psychic, and real psychics who help the police, too.  People are pushing hard to penetrate the veil between the reality science shows us and the "other" side whatever that may be, but at the same time denying the possibiity that God is real.

That is a brief sketch of the audience a new writer is inheriting now.  That ambivalence needs to be built into the fiction if it is to reach across those audience boundaries and unify an audience.

So let's look at some of the dialogue in THE GREAT RAID.  If you watched it as I recommended on July 3, 2012, find your notes on the dialogue.

"My future isn't in your hands." 

That is very profound, and very pre-2000 audience appeal.  But it's phrased ambiguously.  Some will hear that the person's future is in their own hands.  Some will hear it as declaring the future is in God's hands.

"You have to believe in something stronger than yourself."

A priest says that to a worried soldier. 

Our 2012 culture is trending away from such beliefs in God -- maybe toward the Supernatural or Paranormal but away from the concept that a single Creator still commands every little event in our lives, and most especially our Destiny.

If ONE mind is behind all reality, one would expect that when we look at Reality we'd see a coherent pattern.  In a way, we do.  We've deciphered genes and found how all life on earth is woven of certain patterns replicated in many dissimiliar creatures.  We are soooo one organism infesting this Earth.  Yet Death (the main subject we've  been addressing in Parts 4, 5 and here in Part 6, of this series) seems sporadic, unpredictable, unjust, and a destroyer of the Happily Ever After ending to any Romance.  No rational course of action can avoid Death -- therefore how can you say that life is commanded by a Creator?  Or at any rate by a Creator who cares?

"It isn't safe to bring them here."

This line turns up as they strategize how to complete the rescue mission.  If they extract the prisoners, they have to take them someplace, and it better be someplace that won't be destroyed by the incoming US invasion force clashing with the Japanese defenders.

Of course, the reason for the Raid is that the POW camp is not safe either.

These soldiers are not volunteers, as we have today.  They were drafted.  So it isn't right to say that because they're soldiers they know the risks, they signed up to do this risky job, and they willingly put their lives on the line for the defense of Freedom.  They didn't.  They were forced - most of them anyway.  We had very few career military in that fight.  We did, at the beginning of the war, have volunteers who rushed to sign up to defend the country after Pearl Harbor.  But by the end, it was drafted army.

So in the context of this 1940's situation, that line of dialogue can pass by you without making any impression.

Even in the context of 2005, prior to 9/11, you wouldn't notice that line of dialogue.

But it's the spike around which the entire value-system pivot is rotating.

Today, as I noted previously in this discussion of THE GREAT RAID, it has become immoral (and in many cases illegal) to put anyone at risk of anything for any reason.  All risk is being expunged from life.

The sole property that a Happily Ever After ending must have to be valid is that it must be absolutely risk-free. 

That's our real-life, real-world post-9/11 view.  Consider the TSA -- what is their reason for existing?  They submit anyone to any indignity on any statistic's whim simply to "keep us safe."  Nobody ever considers that the public would willingly risk another plane crash into a building in order to get rid of the pat-downs and other "unreasonable search and seizure" the TSA was created to impose.

Consider the scene in THE GREAT RAID where the prisoners are lined up outside, and because 1 had violated a regulation, 10 are shot.

That is a standard method of controlling hostile crowds.  It is used in every totalitarian state because it works (include the old Fantasy world standby of the Kingdom in totalitarian).  Think about the French Revolution. 

If you don't know much about the French Revolution, you can have a great time and learn too by reading Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's St. Germain novel set in 1792 at the time when Thomas Paine was writing two books that literally shaped the post 2008 culture of the USA.

Here's the Vampire novel of the French Revolution:


And here is some of Thomas Paine's writing.  He wrote in the 1790's and you can get everything he wrote on Amazon Kindle for 99cents (a bit more if you want it on paper!). 



Just imagine where we'd be if the Founding Fathers in the 1700's (or the farmboys who fought WWI and WWII in the 1900's) had been as obsessed with safety as we are today.

We flinch at everything.  Our food is dangerous, full of pesticides (it really is) and now we keep getting e. coli and other infections in salad, which is the only healthy food left to eat!  We sue our doctors if they give us the wrong medicine (many are very deadly).  We want to crack down on "illegal aliens" because the drug dealers shoot each other in the street (that's real! I live near it all.) 

We are becoming psychologically incapable of accepting RISK.  Our mental model of what life must be is "safe" -- i.e. sans all risk. 

The pioneers who trundled across the prairie in Conestoga wagons lived with risk and death every moment of their lives -- and voluntarily chose to take the risk to get land of their own upon which they could do as they chose.

They took that risk to get out of the control of Kings and other kinds of governments that wanted to keep them as "peasants."  That is, a class of poor farmers who could be controlled by such tactics as killing a bunch as punishment for what 1 person did as THE GREAT RAID shows a Japanese commander doing to control a prison camp. 

How many of you have been in a grammar school class where the teacher punished the whole class because a couple noisy kids were cutting up?

That's what teachers are now taught to do -- I think it's largely because we no longer have any teachers at all, we have Educators who don't know a subject they are teaching, but only how to teach. 

Your audience is familiar with the tactic of punishing the whole class, or an entire group, for the misbehavior of a couple.  That's why the TSA seems so logical.  People don't think it's wrong to impose a burden on everyone because of something a few people did -- or MIGHT DO. 

That attitude toward controlling groups is a huge Value Twist between the 1940's and the 2000's.  And 2005 is a pivot point, as this film depicts.

Today, nobody questions the premise that a group must be controlled by force, and if you have a group of opinionated indivduals as Americans tend to be, you absolutely must control them.

Nobody asks WHY control a group?  Why bother?  The assumption is in place that the individual can not and will not control himself.  The absolute proof of that is the way a handful of men from another country hijacked aircraft and crashed them to make explosions and kill people. 

Since we must be safe at all costs (literally all costs) and the threat lies with our individualism we must be hammered into a group, then the group hammered into a mold that behaves itself.  Thomas Paine made that clear, but what he didn't foresee was how fearfulness would invade our command structure.

That's one main Value Pivot you see in this 2005 film.  When a bully (such as the Japanese Commander we see in this film -- and I'm not implying there weren't such Commanders among the Japanese) gains power and is given the task of controlling individuals each with personal, individual self-esteem, the only tactic he can possibly envision is to KILL 10 for every 1 who misbehaves.  FEAR -- instilling fear -- is the main tactic of the bully.

A bully is a bully because he/she lacks self-esteem (and some other character strengths that can be acquired under kind teachers).  Lack of self-esteem leads to feeling powerless, which leads to fear, which leads to lashing out at someone weaker in order to feel a sense of power as a substitute for self-esteem.

Or it can work the other way.  The fear can lead to knuckling under to the Bully, backing away and backing down until backed into a corner -- when for fear of life itself, the fearful person lashes out blindly.  If the attack succeeds and vanquishes the bully, the Victim can oh-so-easily become another Bully. 

OK, that's very simplistic, but when you are creating a character, keep-it-simple is the rule.  Your audience understands bullies, even better maybe than the 2005 audience did.  But we also now understand the Victim better than we did.  The Victim also lacks self-esteem, or has it but has lost access to it from repeated abuse, and is therefore ripe to become the Bully they fear.

THE GREAT RAID depicts this subtle psychological connection between seeking safety, fear, power abuse, and the "glory" of rising to an occasion requiring valor, honor, teamwork that isn't forced on the individuals from above but rises from below as a leader is chosen and followed.  That one line of dialogue where the US soldier commanding these untried trainees discusses glory just says it all.  That is the kind of dialogue writing we strive for, and seldom reach.   

You can exploit the modern audience's familiarity with the safety/fear/crowd-control-by-punishing-all-for-transgression-of-one connection as a writer because Bullying has made headlines as it rises into High School.  It used to be shed by 8th grade, now you see it all the way into college, and students are being bullied to the point where they will commit suicide, or take up a gun and hose down a cafeteria full of people. 

This is the reality your reader lives in.  When you incorporate that into a worldbuilding exercise, you produce a world they can believe in.  Then you can do anything.  You have power.

The scrambling, screaming, overwhelming need for safety at all costs is the signature of lack of self-esteem at the core of the bully personality.  People with high self-esteem are Leaders.  They're not fearless.  They're not risk-averse.  They live risky lives and fail a lot, often enough to get used to it as the pioneers of the Old West got used to arrows springing up in the side of their horse-troughs. 

A Leader with high self-esteem does not become a Bully when handed the job of getting people to work together to common purpose.  He doesn't have to fire 10 others every time 1 person violages a rule.  He doesn't have to hide behind metal detectors and guards.  It isn't that he's ignorant of the threats that are coming at him.  It's that he can handle it.  That is the attitude of the Hero in a really hot Romance. 

Or you can flip all this upside down and write about the connection between punishing all for the transgression of one and its obverse, what the philosophers term Collective Salvation -- the bedrock principle behind the hammering repetition of the word, Fair, by so many in the media today. 

I'm not saying here one side is "better" than the other, just that this is a SOURCE for writers looking for a defined conflict that can "reach" a wide audience.  But to use such nebulous conflicts as Values, you must be conversant with both sides of the argument, really understand the positions from the inside, create characters who espouse those positions from comprehensible human necessity, and then you must argue the fine points of the positions just as this film does, "off the nose" -- in symbols, in brief throw-away dialogue, in a hesitation before acting, in a riveting glance before swallowing an objection and saying, "Yes, Sir!" 

"It isn't safe" is substituted for the more likely 1940's line, "It's not far enough away."  If you're writing a novel, one of your characters will say "It's not safe," and another will counter, heatedly, "Who cares!" and a third will put in, "Here, that's far enough away from ground zero."  In a film, you can have only 1 line of dialogue making that point about Values. 

Here's a wikipedia entry on Collective Salvation in case you've missed it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_salvation

It's harder to write about because there are not that many who understand it, but soon it may be a full half of the USA that accepts this philosophy as reasonable. 

That's another huge Values Pivot represented in THE GREAT RAID. 

Hitherto, WWII has always been about individual salvation.  Now history is being rewritten to make the entire 2-theater conflict about collective salvation.  It's subtle, at the moment, though, and you can still argue it in fiction. 

You may want to watch that movie again with all that in mind.  There are a number of terrific Romance novel concepts in this film.

Part 7 in this series is scheduled for August 14th, 2012, and Part 8 for October 9, 2012.  We're going to move way beyond this film and what you can learn from it. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Worldbuilding with Fire And Ice Part 5: The Great Raid

In Part 4,

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/07/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part-4.html


we began looking at the 2005 film, THE GREAT RAID and ended off allowing a week to find it and watch it carefully.  Now I will assume you've seen it recently enough to remember it.  You will remember it differently than I do, and you will remember different scenes than I do.  Comparing our descriptions of this film, and its highlights, will reveal something important about storytelling. 

War is all about death, yes, but it's about survival too.  More, it can also be about defeat and/or victory.

The key historical record of the Pacific in World War II was originally titled BATTLE FOR THE PACIFIC, and it was a TV series decades ago when TV was new.  HBO has redone it, and now you can get it on Amazon by episode or by season, watch it on your Kindle Fire.  The old title now has been co-opted by a video game, which odd fact (co-opting) actually says something about the writing craft topic we're discussing. 



The Iwo Jima battle depicted in THE GREAT RAID is only a small part of that overall war theater's action, but anyone who wants to write fiction should have a working knowledge of how that war for the islands was fought.  It's strategy and tactics melded to drama, and you can use it to shape a similar battle on another world.  In fact  you can use it to go to an alternate universe, then back in History, and write a whopping love story that knows no bounds.  Here's a (long and still going) series that does a great job of that by Taylor Anderson:



Taylor Anderson

When you write about death, you come face to face with the inevitable human questions about "what comes after death?" 

I can't answer that question -- at least not any better than you can!  So the rest of this discussion will be on fitting your worldbuilding into the audience's mindset and changing assumptions. 

Remember how Gene Roddenberry employed the writing-rule of not answering questions with his Star Trek episodes, but just ASKING the questions - posing the conundrum or riddle for  viewers to gnaw on. 

Again here's Part 4 - which has links to previous parts of this series.
 http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/07/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part-4.html

That question, "What Comes After Death" and the need to ask it with its imperative to answer it somehow, is one course of bricks in the foundation of all human culture.  That's why we are currently innundated with novels about Vampires and other long-lived or immortal Beings.  Our culture has been disturbed.  Religions have been challenged, some displaced, some fighting back, some evolving, some disappearing, and some new ones being founded.  This is far more than a "disturbance in the Force" -- this is a disturbance in culture. 

If, in your worldbuilding for your story, you are going to build a culture (rather than use what you think you know about contemporary culture around you), you must have a "course of bricks" for each of the layers of bricks your readers' culture rests upon.  That congruence of shape and size between the cultures of your imaginary world and your readers' "real world" experience gives your story verisimilitude. 

If you build the imaginary culture in the same size and shape as your reader's real world culture, the reader will feel subliminally comfortable there, and every crazy thing you include will be plausible and entertaining not distressing or confusing.  The potential power this gives writers over readers' subconscious minds is obvious.  Pause for a moment of awe about that then use that power wisely! 

To suck a reader into your world using the power of verisimilitude, you must first learn the world your reader lives in.  Most of us are blissfully unaware that we have a culture, nevermind what it actually is!   We bandy the world culture about as if we all mean the same thing by it.  We don't. 

READ:
"The Silent Language" -- and your eyes will open.



From the perspective of the cultural anthropologist, Atheism per se is a "religion."  Agnosticism is the position which allows for "I don't know" as the answer to most of the ineffable questions about Death.  But even that position can be hardened into a superstitious dread, a flinch from all religion and even just spirituality which isn't formalized into a verbalized system of beliefs.

The writer who is a worldbuilder has to take into account what seems plausible and entertainingly novel to the target audience.

There's not much that's "novel" about death, but we are in an era when death is a riveting fascination, not something hidden offstage.  In our current TV and film fiction, blood doesn't just appear on a wall, we see the living person decapitated, the blood fountain in drops, THEN the blood on the walls. 

Look at all the violent videogames -- the thesis is that if there's a problem where someone wants to do something other than what you want them to do, the ONLY solution is to kill them.  The better killer wins and is celebrated, covered in glory. 

But we hold a contradictory philosophy at the same time: "stay safe at all costs."  Oddly, this philosophy is showcased in THE GREAT RAID, too.  Keep in mind that this film came out in 2005.

In 2012, putting anyone in danger of anything is immoral.  More on that in Part VI of Worldbuilding With Fire And Ice. 

In 2005, the release year of the film THE GREAT RAID, near the end of the film, there's a line of dialogue defining what the commander of this group of US soldiers understands about what they're doing there.  He says his men deserve their chance at glory, and when challenged defines glory not as the opinion others have of you, but the opinion you have of yourself for the rest of your life because in the moment of challenge, the moment of facing death, you did the RIGHT THING.

Now this is a philosophy, and it underlies most of this film very solidly making it a good 10-star level film.

The one hole I might poke in it could be from the actual real-life, true story it's based on, and that is the "senselessness" of who dies.  In a fictional story, if someone dies "senselessly" (without good reasons being depicted in show-don't-tell), the editor sends it back for rewrite.  But in "real life" people die with no apparent reason in sight, and in war the "senselessness" almost becomes the point of the story -- war is senseless.  The best people die for no reason. 

The HEA or Happily Ever After ending requires that there be sense and reason driving destiny, so that when a "happy" point in life's arc is reached, the characters got there in a way they can understand.  With that understanding comes confidence in foreseeing the far vista of their future unrolling in sensible and understandable ways.  Therefore they know they will be "happy ever after." 

Finding that pattern and those "reasons" in real life and laying down the foundation for them congruently in your story is difficult because life, as we know it, just doesn't seem to have that sense to it.  The business of the artist is to find that pattern in real life, just a shadowy hint of it is enough, and replicate that in fiction in such a way that readers can find that shadowy shape in their own lives.  That's the secret to writing the re-readable book or the classic film.

We are studying THE GREAT RAID because I think it is just such a classic film.  It shows us something we would not otherwise look for in real life.

This is a war film.  It's about who survives and who dies, not really so much about why.  So as such it deserves 10 stars, or the highest IMDB rating -- because the only thing that's missing is the "poetic justice."  That lack is very revealing of that shadowy pattern we need to discern. 

Note again the release date - 2005.  That means the film represents the views of the target audience -- a broad swatch of the public -- around the year 2000 when it was being marketed and developed. 

In the twelve years since 2000, the American pubic has undergone a sharp and drastic reversal of philosophy.  The most visible symptom of this reversal is the way all mention of God has been labeled as unacceptable in public -- almost the way any mention of the word "sex" was banned in public in the 1940's (the era this film depicts).

Now naked sex scenes are required in print and on film, and any gesture or word depicting faith, God, or any religion except maybe satanism is banned. 

I'm not commenting on whether that public reversal of values is "good" or "bad" -- I'm focusing on how public values of that kind affect a professional storyteller's worldbuilding choices, as well as plot elements placed in the foreground and plot elements placed in the background.

The 2005 film is a terrific example of this change.  It makes no comment on that change directly.  Its commentary on the subject is totally "off the nose" (film scriptwriting term you must master.  See Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series). 

THE GREAT RAID tells the story of a group of US soldiers rescuing 511 US soldiers who were held prisoner by the Japanese on Iwo Jima for three years. 

Those soldiers  came to believe they were utterly forgotten, written off as dead by the USA -- until their encampment was left unguarded for a little while, and they broke into the Japanese command station and discovered a warehouse fulll of Red Cross boxes filled with food that had been meant for them.  Then they realized the Japanese were eating well and deliberately starving the American prisoners.  The prisoners were riddled with malaria, and survived on the small amounts of quinine smuggled to them by the Philipine Resistance fighters.  Many prisoners in this camp were unable to walk.  The able bodied had been taken elsewhere. 

Meanwhile, we follow a group of raw trainees, essentially farmboys drafted into the war, who've never been in a real battle.  They are assigned to run ahead of the invasion by US forces (the battle of Iwo Jima that is so famous) and get the US prisoners of war out of the way of that impending battle. 

Sweep a random few dozen men off America's streets today, and you won't be able to 'whip them into shape' in 6 weeks as was done during World War II.  The typical American male of fighting age today is not in good enough physical shape to do this kind of work (not many "farmboys" left).  (That statistic from an article I saw recently on the problems the Armed Forces are having recruiting - it's not a lack of volunteers but a lack of robust health among the volunteers.)

In THE GREAT RAID, the prisoners are held in an encampment full of tanks and armed Japanese, a prime strategic target the US forces must neutralize in order to take that island.  But in doing that, they would also be slaughtering those US prisoners.  There are no experienced US forces to spare to rescue the prisoners.  So they send in the raw team that's well trained but never seen battle.  Do or die they must get those men out of the area before all hell breaks loose.  If they fail, they themselves will be sitting on ground zero of an area slated for destruction.

WATCH THIS TRAILER VIDEO:
http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi2547031577/ 

It's important to watch that video especially if you did just watch the whole movie.  Note what's excerpted, and how the concept can be set out in just a few words of dialogue.  Just 29 seconds of the trailer and you know what that entire movie is.  That's a CONCEPT. 

Remember, this is WWII -- there are no computer chipped munitions that only kill what they are aimed at, and all targetting was kinda approximate. 

The Love Story is between a prisoner in the camp who has malaria and (unknown to him) the woman he loves who is married to someone else.  She's a nurse, and who has stayed behind in the Philipines to run a resistance cell that smuggles quinine to the POW's.  The casting is great.  She's a tall blonde among these short-dark folks, really conspicuous for a spy!     

The thesis in this film is that old saw, "There Are No Atheists In A Foxhole" -- that saying is from WWI, and it essentially means that when facing death amidst horror, suddenly the most skeptical among us will pray, whether they believe or not.  It's probably not 100% true today, and it's certainly not "politically correct" to suggest it is 100% true, but it's a real life observation.  This 2005 film makes the point that in the 1940's this saying was still very true.  

In one scene, there are two solders about to go into this battle.  One has one of those Catholic devotional cards in hand.  He gives it to the other solder saying he has plenty.  The other guy asks what he should do with it, kiss it?  He tucks it away.  After the battle, he offers to buy the card for $10 (a small fortune at that time!) but the owner refuses to sell.  He says his mother gave it to him and he only has the one.  The other guy complains, "But you said you had plenty of others."  "I lied." 

This exchange straddles the values of the 1940's (he wouldn't have lied in 1945), and the values of the 2000's when he would have lied, but wouldn't have given him the card.  Today, the headlines are full of armed forces officialdom putting major obstacles in the way of religion in the military.  Even the Chaplain corps which was sacrosanct in the 1940's has trouble today. 

Another such cliche scene that straddles the values is the cliche scene where the hostile occupation forces storm a church and a lone priest stands in the door, or the street intersection, and holds up a hand.

In older films, the charging forces STOP.  In the 2005 film, the charging forces just run right over the priest, batting him aside with casual cruelty. 

Perhaps half the audience now responds to that casual, symbolic batting aside of impotent religion as a good thing, as "progress."  I'm not saying here whether this is good or bad, only that it is a kind of visual symbolism that writers must master.  It keeps the "philosophy" off the nose.  It keeps the discussion of values as subtext which different viewers interpret differently -- thus enlarging the potential audience.   

Half the audience gasps at the sacrilege proving the occupying force is evil, and the other half gasps at the brilliant proof that silly superstition can't stand against armed might.  To win the videogame, you have to be faster and better at killing the opposition regardless of right or wrong.  Understand your audience, and speak to them in all their languages. 

In several scenes, especially the cliche scene where the captors shoot 10 prisoners because 1 prisoner tried something against the rules the captors imposed, you see US soldiers cross themselves.  Mostly, they get killed right after that.  But religious display is not going to be seen in many near future films (Tim Tebow notwithstanding.)

In the middle of THE GREAT RAID, we see the malaria ridden prisoner getting help writing a letter (in pencil on scrap paper) to the woman he loves, and a bit of their story is discussed but not shown.  We understand this love story instantly.  It's a cliche so that they can just plant it and spend no scenes detailing it.  But it does say that love doesn't stop just because of war.  Lovers torn apart by war is a seminal theme, and you can use it in any fictional universe you build and it will work without explanation. 

At the end of the film, the malaria ridden soldier is rescued, but by the time he's transported to the town now captured and held by US forces, he dies just moments before the woman he was writing to (the nurse, resistance leader) gets to him through the chaos in the streets.  His friend hands her the letter he helped write, the letter where he ends off confessing he loves her.

It's a tear-jerker scene, and it's a cliche war-movie scene.  In fact the whole movie has to be labeled cliche. How could it not be a cliche?  It's about the battle for Iwo Jima.  How many films, books, stories, have been made about that?  It's all been done and said many times, so it's cliche by definition. 

http://www.worldwar2facts.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Iwo-Jima-Memorial-Sunset-233x300.jpg

But in 2005, there were already a lot of young people who hadn't studied all the details of World War II, in both theaters of war -- Europe and Pacific.  The first time you see a well worn cliche, it's fresh, startling, brilliant and can change your life forever. 

In the process of becoming a cliche, a scene or situation gets written and practiced many times, all the awkward bits worn down until the modern version is polished smooth and shiny -- better than the original if you haven't seen all the intermediate drafts.

THE GREAT RAID does the cliche scenes very well, which is why I give it 10 stars. 

But it also depicts the pivot point where our public values spun into a new direction. 

Pick out a few lines of dialogue you think represent that values twist-point and we'll discuss them next week in Worldbuilding With Fire And Ice Part 6: Values Twist. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Worldbuilding with Fire And Ice Part 4: Storms of Death

Here's a post with a list of prior Worldbuilding posts.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/06/worldbuilding-link-list.html

In that listing, I skipped the previous posts in this series, which includes the explosive mixing of Politics and Religion, Fire and Ice indeed:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/11/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part-ii.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/11/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part-i.html

Now we'll extend this series to talk about sex and violence, love and war, Romance Amidst Destruction,   about how we, as human beings, come to understand not just "the meaning of life" but the meaning of our own personal existence. 

That very personal connection with the purpose of life is what all good stories are about.  Story is about how a character, any character, comes to understand their own idiosyncratic, answer to these questions of "ultimate concern." 

So we're going to look at a war movie (I do so love a good war movie, any war!)

This one under our microscope is the 2005 film THE GREAT RAID.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0326905/combined

On Amazon you can rent it cheap. 



I'll include "spoilers" in the discussion below, so if you haven't seen this film, at least go read about it.

This is a 2005 movie, and should be a  10-star film on IMDB's scale, but it's pulling only 6 stars at IMDB at the moment.  It has a few scattered mentions of God, a Catholic church (of which there were many in that area of the Philippines at that time), and a red-hot Romance without a preponderance of naked sex scenes.  In fact, the two lovers (man and woman, where the woman is married to someone else) never really lay eyes on each other during the film until the end, and there's heart-wrenching disappointment at the senselessness in who dies and who survives.  She, however, is a hero in her own right, as post-1970's female characters are supposed to be. 

Early in this series of writing tutorials on Alien Romance -- science fiction romance, or fantasy romance, or Paranormal Romance -- I mentioned that Romance writers who dive into the established field of Science Fiction and Fantasy often get readers pointing fingers of ridicule at them.

My aim with these posts on Worldbuilding is to remedy that situation because what I've always been writing is actually Science Fiction Romance, but with the Romance part disguised so that Science Fiction editors wouldn't necessarily notice it.

I grew up on nuts-n-bolts SF, and loved every bit of it, BUT was just deeply convinced that "they" (the young guys writing that stuff) were doing it "all wrong."  And what they did wrong was the Relationship part, and the total absense of Romance.  Romance is what fuels every human endeavor, and Love is what all life is about.  Love is what the material universe is made out of -- it is the very substance of the universe.

That is what I understood, and what I wanted to see in the fiction I read, but I could not abide "Romance genre" writing that excluded nuts-n-bolts science as well as fantasy premises about "The Ineffable."

In other words, as I saw it, the main failing of early (1950's) science fiction was a lack of WORLDBUILDING.

What I saw as the main failing in attempts by (trained, expert and wonderful) Romance writers to set a story on a space ship, or in a parallel universe, back in time, or in a dimension where Magic works, was a lack of WORLDBUILDING.

Not all writers fail in that dimension.  There are multitudinous examples of towering successes, but how does a new writer learn to a) do the worldbuilding and b) not include too much of their wondrous worldbuilding and impede the story/plot pacing? 

There is a tense balance point, a traveling point as dynamic as the point at which a figure skater's blade touches the ice -- or skims the melt above the ice, just kissing the medium and flying in graceful swoops above that "reality."  A writer crafting a story has to do that, but first the writer has to run the zamboni over his created world.  That last polish before sending the characters out to skate a composition is often the step new writers leave out.

So we're going to look at this "incorporation" process -- how to blend all the elements you've built into a platform that won't attract the audience's attention but will support your characters. 

I'm particularly focused on this right now because I'm involved in the worldbuilding portion of constructing a "shared world" in which many anthologies of stories will be written. 

The world we're building is called SILVER MOON and the first volume, now being written, is called A GATHERING STORM.  That storm is a war where the entire population of a north section of a continent goes to war with the population of the southern region.  That and the location of a few major cities, and the co-existence of both magical and scientific philosophies was all we started with. 

The salient issue for worldbuilding is that this is a world about to go into a massive paroxysm of war, so the worldbuilding writers contributing stories are examining the sources of massive wars, population migration, (the 4 Horses) and the effects of such Events on cultural elements (such as burial customs, detective work both government official and private eye, prophecy, beliefs, the spur to the development of science for use in warfare, and how normal people just hacking out a living manage to survive it all.) 

Each of so far 28 writers on the team have vastly different life experiences, educational backgrounds, and writing genre expertise -- all different sorts of genres, so this world's anthologies will be of various genres.

Living among expert worldbuilders brings some of these worldbuilding techniques to sharp focus. 

You can start with the physics of a star coalescing out of space dust, or of a planet heaving and seething to develop oceans enough to spawn life, of life evolving along certain tracks leaving the dominant intelligent species with biology that isn't human, and then let that biology spawn cultures (plural; cultureS, lots of them that clash and go to war).

Or you can start with 21st century Earth humans, plain people we know, and destroy everything (post-apocalyptic) then start over with or without remnants, legends and memories of the prior civilization. 
There's no telling how many times such things have happened on Earth alone, nevermind on all those planets they are now discovering for all the new SF/F/Romance writers to play on.

In my review column for themonthlyaspectarian.com I write about how the best SF is built on current headlines, and non-fiction books about various international situations, such as the monetary crisis, or national situations such as "lets reform the tax code."  Ray Bradbury, who passed away in June, 2012, wrote straight-line extrapolation of his current headline issues and became famous for his cautionary tales and grimly horrid future visions.  His novels stand in contrast to Robert A. Heinlein's novels, ript from the exact same headlines and extrapolated in a hyperbolic curve into a much brighter and more optimistic view of the future.  Many of Heinlein's visions (the moving sidewalks in airports for one) have come true, while Bradbury's visions have (thank God) not come true entirely, (yet). 

International Headlines and non-fiction about the doings of humanity are good starting points for worldbuilding.  Well-read readers will find it easy to slip into a world that is built from the familiar headlines, but does not seem to be related to their reality. 

No matter where you start worldbuilding, you end up writing about LIFE. 

Even if you're writing about Vampires, you don't have a story until you are writing about LIFE -- of  some sort. 

When you write about LIFE you have to write about DEATH. 

Here's an excerpt from an article posted online by a Rabbi who was given 6 months to live by his doctors.  The article has the eye-stopping headline, HOW TO DIE.

http://www.aish.com/sp/pg/How_to_Die.html
----------QUOTE----------
Today I continue, thank God, to feel perfectly fine. My team of doctors is still wondering how that happened. I tried to explain to them that I am on a medication that has proven successful for thousands of years, although it's healing properties haven't yet been scientifically identified. Having successfully prescribed it to others many times, I put myself on the "Recitation of Psalms" program. I asked friends and family to join because I have oft times witnessed the miracle of the power of prayer. And although I continue to be aware of the fact that some day I will die, I continue to go about my life's tasks of studying and teaching Torah, of lecturing and writing in the hope of bringing people closer to God and to Judaism – because I'm convinced that it is in the merit of mitzvahs that I can best hope for continued miracles.

My primary focus isn’t on “How to Die;” thank God it’s on how to live.
----------END QUOTE-------------

When you write about death, you come face to face with the inevitable human questions about "what comes after death?" 

I can't answer that question -- at least not any better than you can!  So the rest of this discussion will be on fitting your worldbuilding into the audience's mindset and changing assumptions. 

We'll pause here until next week, so you have a chance to watch THE GREAT RAID.  As an exercise in writing craft, note down the lines of dialogue that leap out at you, the scenes that bespeak the 2005 origin of the film about the 1940's, and what all that means about the books that will be popular in 2015. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Targeting Readership Part 4

Last week, I posted a list of previous posts on Worldbuilding in case you'd missed some:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/06/worldbuilding-link-list.html 

I'm on the program at ChiCon7, and I just volunteered to do a number of writing-craft panels on Worldbuilding.  Apparently it's a core interest for new writers today, and boy have I got a lot to say on that.  There will be 3 more posts on it here in July. 

Worldbuilding won't do you any good unless you build the world to intrigue an audience.  So lets look at how to do that.

Targeting Readership Part 1 is:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/targeting-readership-part-one.html

Part 2 is inside this post:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html

Part 3 is inside and woven into the following post in my Astrology Just For Writers series which by mistake has the same number as the previous part but is really Part 7:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-6.html

As I've established in earlier posts in this sequence on Targeting a Readership, Publishing looks at the age of the main protagonist to determine the demographic of the target audience.  That process may be an error, but it's what they do, so writers have to take it into account. 

Here are some clues about how to capture the older demographic -- which Hollywood insists you must do to have a 4-bagger, a film that appeals to a wide enough audience that it can make money.  A kid's film has to appeal to grandparents who'll take the kid to the theater! 

So how do you target such a broad and undefined audience? 

You pick a theme you can treat from a variety of "angles" with each character portraying a different, but plausible, opinion. 

Well, I've been saying that here for a while, but it begs the question, "What theme?" 

I ran into an intriguing post on Google+ -- a "sampler" (an image with WORDS), and the words were a quote from Richard Dawkins: "Faith is belief without and against evidence and reason; coincidentally that's also the definition of delusion."

It had drawn 375 comments (really high #) after only a few hours. 

I looked at it, nodded, thought, "good theme for a long novel" and scrolled on by.

Then I checked my Yahoo news feed page where I follow Discovery News.  And I found the following bit of research in an article about a survey of faith vs. age:

http://news.discovery.com/human/god-faith-aging-120429.html
-----------QUOTE----------
Participants answered three main "belief" questions, including their level of belief (from strong to atheistic), their changing beliefs over their lifetime and their attitude toward the notion that God is concerned with their personal lives.
-------END QUOTE ---------

At first I'd thought the article would miss the idea that "faith" might (or might not) change with age.

In fact, they did ask about how people's attitude toward faith in God had changed with age, and they found that as people age, they tend to find belief that God exists to grow.

Today, in the USA, there's a cultural trend or shift taking place toward disregarding, disrespecting or just ignoring elders.  Most people will deny that, but if you're old enough to remember your mother's attitude toward her mother who had been born in say 1890, you might have a different feeling for how things have changed.

Could seeing a parent experience an increased faith that God is real be a source of the scorn for the Wisdom that comes with age, that can only be acquired via decades of experience?

I used to think (when I was very young) that Wisdom was either a myth or something you were born with, or not.  I found my elders due "respect" simply for surviving all they had survived -- but I didn't think they were smart enough to learn from experience. 

That changed in my twenties.  And today I can look back and see how my elders went from being young to being older-and-wiser-because-of-being-old. 

I see a "because" relationship between surviving the blows of life and finding Wisdom.

Now, the Wisdom that is found might well be a Wisdom that convinces the elder that God is a myth propagated by those who would control vast populations in order to drain their wealth and keep them poor and ignorant. 

Or it might be the opposite, the conviction that God is real after all, and the myth-spinning is indeed a smokescreen put up to keep people from learning how very real God is.

Or it might be that old brains just deteriorate and lose the ability to do critical thinking.

Look at all those possibilities, invent a CHARACTER to portray each point of view.

Remember, the characters need to change as a result of the events in the story -- events cause character change, the change in the character then causes another event, and that process is called "plot." 

Character Arc -- especially in a Paranormal Romance story -- is not separate from plot, but integral to it. 

In any realistic Romance (and SF or Paranormal Romance must be more realistic than reality because of the odd-ball elements) there has to be that pesky "meet the parents" scene with the potential in-laws interrogating the hapless suitor.

This gives you the multi-generational character spread you need to tackle the thematic issue of "Does The Conviction That God Is Real Require Discarding Critical Thinking?" 

Of course, if all your readers are well versed in Kaballah, that's a no-brainer and you have no story because critical thinking (in that world view) is required. 

If you are writing a novel you want to sell to the film industry, you must include an international audience, and this study did survey people in a lot of countries.

Here's another quote:

-----------QUOTE----------
Support for the concept that God is concerned with people in a personal way ranged from 8 percent in the former East Germany to 82 percent in the Philippines. About 68 percent of individuals in the United States held that personal view of God.

Over the study period, just five of the countries showed a consistent growth in their belief in God: West Germany, Israel, Japan, Russia and Slovenia. Meanwhile, 16 countries showed a consistent decline in belief: Australia, Austria, East Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Norway and Poland. Some countries showed a mixed pattern, with some measures moving toward belief and others away. [See full list of countries ranked by God belief]
http://www.livescience.com/19972-atheism-belief-god-countries-ranked.html
"Belief in God has decreased in most countries, but the declines are quite modest, especially when calculated on a per annum basis," the researchers write in their April 18 report of the survey.

Though modest, this decrease could add up to a real effect over time.

"If the modest, general trend away from belief in God continues uninterrupted, it will accumulate to larger proportions and the atheism that is now prominent mainly in northwest Europe and some ex-Socialist states may spread more widely," they write, adding that it is possible the trend could go the other way, with belief in God seeing a rebound.
----------------END QUOTE ----------------

If you know about the political trends in these countries, you can probably put political parties to the characters' beliefs (or anti-beliefs).  Today there are more political parties than just Communist that advocate atheism.  Don't try that unless you really know what the attitudes of those parties are. 

The point here is that the readers -- or film audiences -- will be composed largely of people whose beliefs are in flux.

People who are changing belief attitudes generally experience uncertainty or even fear, free floating anxiety, and other emotional symptoms they don't want to name.

Fiction is a wonderful way to calm down when anxious, but the writer has to understand the sources of anxiety better than the reader does to pull off that trick.

Explain and discuss the growth of Wisdom, and how useful, practical, accurate and trustworthy that new Wisdom might be, all in show-don't-tell -- in images, symbolism, and character "Aha!" moments. 

This is where theme infiltrates worldbuilding.

If you take the general theme, "As You Age, You Begin To Understand How Life Is Orchestrated By God" -- then you build a World where this or that Religion dominates, and maybe people convert from one to another Religion as Love happens.  You find your characters, some on this side, some on that, and some in transition, and you will discover what conflicts have to play out because of the theme.

Changing any parameters of the worldbuilding (such as the tenets of the Religion you're dealing with) will force a change in the nature of the Conflict driving the characters to act and resolve that conflict.

To capture the widest possible readership or audience, you must have a character for each audience segment to root for -- and that character must achieve some kind of triumphant resolution of his/her conflict. 

All of the characters conflicts must resolve in a SINGLE EVENT - in one scene, not a chain of scenes.

A good example to study for this plot structure does not involve Religion much, unless you consider "Circus Flying" a religion (which in this book, you could!) is Marion Zimmer Bradley's circus novel, CATCH TRAP. 



This novel is ostensibly about a gay couple in the era when gayness per se was anathema, but it was especially forbidden in the largely Catholic world of Circus performers.  That's their conflict -- they must choose between their love and their art, and discover that art is fueled by love (not sex, love, though there's plenty of gay sex in this novel.)

This is one of the novels Marion Zimmer Bradley used to teach me the craft of writing.  I watched her wrestle the ending into that single scene structure, raising the powerful punch of the ending and clarifying the theme.

This novel is an example of how multi-generation changing belief systems should be handled.  This is not about Religion, which is why you can learn to write about Religion by studying how this book is put together, you can gain an objective perspective.  This book is about a change in CIRCUS PERFORMING as profound as the change in our society from Atheist to Believer and just as generation-specific.

It took her 20 years to write this book - drafting and re-drafting, changing the characters and the plot.  But the plot had to have two disparate parts, two basic conflicts joined by the theme of Art must be fueled by Love, and in her mind sexuality was inseparable from Love (in mine, it is not.)  This is a master-work you likely can't duplicate (yet), but Religion is going to be central to the next generation's favorite entertainment. 

See the Pluto by generation in various signs in the post for Tuesday, October 20, 2009
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html

That blog post also tracks Neptune through the signs and what that might imply for our generations. 

Pluto was in Sagittarius 1995 - 2008 (and there was a baby-boom in the USA in the mid-1990's).  Sagittarius is the Natural 9th House in Astrology, and the 9th House represents philosophy  (12th is "Religion" as in "The Church" the institution; 9th Represents the concepts intertwined with Justice, with Jupiter and kindness.)

9th House is also international publishing, communicating over vast distances (not the discovery of planets out there -- re-energizing the modern youth into wanting to communicate with "them.")

This is the generation that will find the matter of belief in God, and how that changes with age, to be very entertaining.  They'll want to read about religious conversion, and maybe conversion from atheism to some belief -- or vice-verso. 

Also remember that Uranus makes a complete circuit around the Sun every 84.3 years or so, and mystics attribute the beginning of venerable wisdom to living through your 80's.

According to the study quoted above, people seem to awaken to the reality of God in their 50's, so what's left to learn in your 80's? 

Neptune takes 165 years to circle the Sun, so whatever it tracks won't turn up in your characters unless you're writing about Vampires and other immortals.  You wouldn't do that, would you?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Worldbuilding With Fire And Ice Part III

Whew! Now the election's over we can drop politics because it's not important anymore, right? Ooooo. Ummmm. Oy, I don't think so.

CAUTION: don't for a moment think that I'm a "Conservative" -- or for that matter "Progressive" or "Liberal" -- the "politics" that describes my personal philosophy does not exist on this Earth and as far as I know never has yet. I'm not arguing either side of this issue.  I'm examining why the HEA is so universally scoffed at. 

We began in Part I of Worldbuilding With Fire And Ice on October 26, 2010, discussing Glenn Beck and noted:

Maybe he's right - maybe not. Our question is, "Does it matter?"

And to whom does it matter? And what can we do with that information?

In my blog post "Glenn Beck Did Not Invent The Overton Window" (October 19, 2010, aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com ) I mentioned that I disagree (personally) with some of what Beck is "selling" (and he uses a "hard sell" technique right out of his enemy's playbook). But I don't disagree with all of it.

So what do I disagree with and why should you care?

As I pointed out in the October 19th 2010 post on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com Glenn Beck is moving the Overton Window, or trying to, or maybe just doing it inadvertently in response to commercial demands and pressures.

He got the concept of the Overton Window from a Think Tank which got it from some mathematicians researching how to describe the behavior of large numbers of people making decisions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice_theory
That mathematics is employed by advertisers to make people buy products. It's proven stuff and it works.

The Mackinac Center http://www.mackinac.org/7504 -- uses this math to describe the political behavior of people by the millions while advertising uses it to shape preferences for brands of toothpaste or perfume. There isn't enough profit in novels to afford to hire those folks to sell a novel -- but film producers definitely use their services.

This math is not just statistics, it's a method of changing what the majority hold to be true and unquestioned. It can change what is deemed "politically correct."

And it has.

The entire technique is rooted in a view of the universe based on the "zero-sum-game" -- which is why this branch of mathematics came from and informs game-theory. (which is why video games have become so popular; they depict and infuse the player with the zero-sum-game philosophy).

That the physical universe is a zero-sum-game becomes an unconscious assumption.

That the social universe is a zero-sum-game becomes an unconscious assumption.

That the economic universe is a zero-sum-game becomes an unconscious assumption.

Nowhere in our mainstream, Hollywood films, Manhattan publishing, nowhere in the big money, high capital cost/high profit margin business models do we see evidence of anything but a zero-sum-game model of the universe.

The biggest TV audiences are drawn by sports - and every professional sport is based on the zero-sum-game model of reality. I win means you lose.

I win causes you to lose.

"There Can Be Only One"

In Part II we noted that it seems (to me, and others) that the Socialist and Communist views of the world are based on this zero-sum-game model.

The reason that some people are poor is that other people are rich.

That's connected as cause-effect. The only way that rich people get rich is by taking away from (oppressing) "workers" who work themselves to death for bare subsistence wages and there is no way for these hard working, upstanding, deserving workers to get rich other than to demand justice from the rich who have stolen the product of the worker's sweat and tears.  (That's not all pure fantasy either.  There is proof it has happened, but not that it must be the only way it can ever happen.) 

The theory is that there is a limited amount of "rich" -- You win means I lose.

Well, I won't stand for that. I'm taking your win away from you right now! And that's only justice. I demand justice.

The clear, clean, beyond question obviousness of this point of view is simply irrefutable.

If you are inherently incapable of questioning the unconscious assumption about the nature of reality rooted in the zero-sum-game model, you can not rationally come to any other conclusion than that the rich are rich because they suck the life-juices out of the poor.

The rich are "winners" and the poor are "losers."

Put another way, the poor are "losers" BECAUSE the rich are "winners." AND THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!!!

It's simply too obvious to be denied by any rational person.

The HEA, the HAPPILY EVER AFTER ending, can not be had by all!

It's pie in the sky. Only certain "chosen" golden children ever dare aspire to happiness, and YOU ARE NOT CHOSEN. Therefore you must fight yourself, using all your energy to subdue your inner self. See the example I found involving oral sex in Part II (posted November 2, 2010 on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com).

But why is it obvious?

Well, look at marriage, especially through the prism of that item on oral sex in marriage. Look at our most intimate relationships. Look at how parents raise children. Look back on how your parents raised you.

From the child's point of view, "because I said so" is how parents rule -- and parents get their way because they're big.

If parents "negotiate" with a child before the child is really old enough to process all the variables at once, the parent is seen as weak, incompetent, manipulatable, and the child gets an inflated view of Self.

There is a corporate executive training program that companies pay thousands and thousands of dollars to put their trainees and new hires through. The program teaches "YOU DON'T GET WHAT YOU DESERVE; YOU GET WHAT YOU NEGOTIATE."

And it teaches the art of negotiation as a form of warfare.

Warfare has always been practiced as a zero-sum-game. Our professional sports are modeled after warfare. Corporate culture is modeled on football.

Our culture has forced us to adopt the zero-sum-game model of the universe by excluding any other style activities from your notice (yes, such activities exist but you are flimflammed into not-noticing or not-recognizing them).

Now look at the dust-up recently on bullying in the school yards and how much damage that does to children that then subsequently shapes their potential as adults.

Parents have come out passionately against bullying in school yards. Teachers and school administrators must stop the bullying - it's the school's responsibility to protect my child against bullies.

But where do bullies come from?

How many really creative people have admitted in biographies that they were bullied, and thus forced to learn a response?

How many chimp studies have examined chimp tribes and bullying, or jockeying for pecking order among say, ducks.

Should we intervene in the society of children to stop bullying?

It's an unexamined assumption among parents that their child must not be bullied.  (which doesn't mean it's wrong; just not thought out carefully)

It's an unexamined assumption among the parents of children that do the bullying that their child is showing leadership potential, a winner's profile, not a loser's profile, and their pride (however secret even from themselves) knows no bounds. WINNER means NOT LOSER.

Why must our children not "be bullied?"

Recent research on mice has shown us a possible chemical mechanism for the end result of having been bullied.

See my post on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com on October 12, 2010 titled GENETIC MECHANISM BY WHICH LOVE CONQUERS ALL

Yeah, we're still on the HEA subject.

The mice that had repeated lost fights with other mice in that experiment showed a later life tendency to be timid, not to fight for their place, and not to explore.

Dissection of their brains revealed a chemical in the submissive mice's brains, wrapped around their genes, that wasn't present in the mice that had not lost the fights. These chemicals wrap around the genes and allow or suppress expression of the genes.

So we have a purely chemical (not spiritual or soul-based) explanation of how it is that kids who are bullied in school yards grow up to become submissive - and don't explore.

"Explore" for a mouse is a kind of boldness.

We're talking about the kind of boldness that makes human beings explore questions, that makes human beings question unconscious assumptions being "sold" to them by clever mathematicians manipulating the Overton Window. To question authority, such as teachers.

Because of human creativity, artistic talent, a lot of bullied kids turn out to be the boldest questioners. Maybe they get bullied because they are artistic?

But most don't turn out to be artists.

Allowing school-yard bullying while assuring the parents "we're doing all we can" (God Forbid anyone in this world should heroically exceed their abilities and actually grow as a person and a hero by doing something they can't do - something outside their job description!) is one of many ways to create a pliable and obedient population.

Allowing schools to teach "the truth" (carefully editing textbooks) keeps children from being confused, feeling threatened, and needing to think before deciding or expressing an opinion.

They grow up to be adults who want "the government" (or someone) to keep them safe.

Since they never learned in school that one of the basic principles that made the USA successful as a country is that the police do not prevent crime, they expect to live in a crime free world where police prevent crime.

However, in principle, the police (and all criminal statutes) are aimed only at people who have actually done criminal deeds -- and thus the police (an arm of government) can act only after the fact, lest government gain power over individuals. That is, the majority must never inhibit the exploration activities of any individual. Freedom of thought, religion, speech - all rests on the concept that the Police must not prevent any activity.

Under no circumstances can any arm of government ever be allowed to prevent anyone from doing anything. Government must not be allowed control.

Yeah, they don't teach that in school any more, but it was a core principle in the civics classes in my grammar school, and today it is a fully examined and questioned assumption of mine -- though it started out as unquestioned.

Today, however, "Crime Prevention" (another sobriquet promulgated by those with a very specific political agenda) is lauded, and when it fails people are so offended they throw out their elected officials who failed to prevent crime.  Remember we're talking about the plausibility of the HEA here.  You can't have happiness if your expectations regarding safety and predictability are not met. 

We're missing a social mechanism that damps down if not prevents aberrant behavior, keeps it at a tolerable level where expectations are mostly met.

Today huge, massively funded federal agencies are devoted to public safety - and to protecting consumers.

The government's role is primarily to protect us (seal the borders, for example). Very often we are being protected from ourselves -- pharmaceuticals legal in Europe can't be sold here because they would undercut the market of some big pharma company here, but we're told we are being protected from potential harm caused by our own bad decisions.

But big corporations are seen as bullies because they're big.

Glenn Beck showed (I caught a quick clip of this channel surfing) a cartoon line-drawing animation that is being shown in schools to instruct kids on the relationship between corporations and government.

The government was shown as a small image, a neat, clean straight line drawing, of I think, a building. The corporation was shown as a huge, round, blown-up quasi-human image -- something like humpty-dumpty is often drawn. Bloated and distorted.

The corporations were noted to be bigger than government, and positioned by artistic composition to be menacing the little government.

Any reasonable person, especially someone bullied as a child, would conclude that government must be grown bigger to face down the ugly big bully corporations. That's how we conquer schoolyard bullies - we grow larger, hit harder or get friends to gang up on them with us. 

This is a truth that becomes internalized as an unquestioned assumption.  Government must grow or the world won't be safe.  (maybe so, but who knows?) 

Worse, the assumption becomes unconsciously processed because of the graphics - and I could see the art of this Overton Window mathematics behind that composition in the cartoon. As I said previously I don't see what most viewers see when I watch TV. This image of the relationship between government and corporations becomes UNQUESTIONABLE TRUTH, not merely an assumption, a hypothesis or a theory subject to revision according to new facts unearthed. 

An assumption can never be called into question because you don't know it's there.

It has been presented to the very young in their own language, the language of the bully in the play yard, and presented to be true by authority in the form of the teacher.

Every time a parent says, "listen to the teacher" "sit still in class" "don't act out" "don't pester the teacher with questions, you'll get bad grades" -- every time a parent reinforces a teacher's authority, the result is more assumptions driven into the child's mind that will become unquestionable assumptions later in life (which might be good if the assumptions stay reliable throughout the child's lifetime). 

Was this done to you?

Are you doing it to your children?

Have you ever had to change any "fact" you learned in school?

Look at this:  http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/08/11/discovery-pushes-human-tool-use-years/
Every so often, we have to revise what we know to be true.  Are you preparing your children to do that?

What has all that to do with the HEA?

If you live in the world I've described above, you have been taught by these zero-sum-game based philosophical methods that you are not qualified to live the HEA - that it's not realistic to expect your life to reach HEA.  It's not even "right" to try because if you get an HEA life, that means you took it away from someone else! (zero-sum-game - there isn't enough happiness in the world to go around - you win, someone else loses.) 

It's not realistic because not everyone can be a winner.

How do you know that?

Because in that same grammar school class that taught you about big bad corporations, you learned that only some kids in class can get an A, and a few more a B, most will get C's, and a few D's and F's -- or whatever numerical or euphemistic substitute for those grades is used.

The use of euphemisms like "needs improvement" "excels" etc does not mask the fact that it's a zero-sum-game. School is graded on a curve, and eventually we learn what that means. A few are chosen to be winners, and all the rest of us lose because those winners took away our right to win.

There can be only 10% or fewer A's, or "Excels" in a class. Not everybody can "excel" or "excel" means nothing.

Whether they know it or not, all teachers are taught that statistically humans fall on a bell curve and it's their job to sort out the top 10% for college bound.

The rest are "workers." Oppressed, you will see, if you read the first part of this series WORLDBUILDING WITH FIRE AND ICE on October 26, 2010.

The only way you can ever begin to even wonder if any of that is true is to question the assumption that reality is a zero-sum-game, inherently, intrinsically and realistically, there really is only so much good crop land, only so much drinkable water, only so much gold mine country, only so much uranium, only so much zinc, copper, oil, and only so many can be happy.  The only way to be happy is to "win" -- so that means half lose. 

But if you win, you did it by being a bully, so you have to be miserable with what you've won.  Which half of humanity then can have an HEA? 

We have to organize into countries big enough and mean enough to fight and win those critical resources or we will die.

Our big, muscular HE-MAN MEN must "fight for us" and win, so we can be protected to raise our children to fight and win.

It's all about competing and winning. Competition is the only correct way to organize human beings. It brings out the best in us.

We MUST compete with each other, and we must be the winner.  And only winners then get to have children. 

Therefore, if you hold the unconscious assumption (possibly implanted, possibly actually true) that you are not a winner, you have only one logical recourse - rise up and smite the winners and take what they have (i.e. raise taxes on the rich).

In that universe, there can be no HEA for anyone.

If you win Happily Ever After, it won't bring you happiness because you got it by taking it away from someone else. And you know in your heart that the someone you deprived will rise up and take what you took from them.

Why would it bother you that you caused someone pain so you could win? If you didn't snatch what happiness you can, someone else would take it - probably waste it, too. After all, you can do better with resources than others.

If you live in a universe where the only way to satisfy your heart's desire is by preventing someone else from satisfying their heart's desire -- i.e. you have to GET A MAN by "winning" him away from some other woman in a contest of beauty or fellatio, and the only way to hold a man (whether he prefers to be held or not) is by doing something you'd really rather not do because "men can't help it" -- then your happiness is achieved at the expense of someone else's misery.

Now we elevate this discussion to a dimension few are willing to access.

As far as I know, the only universe of discourse where the zero-sum-game assumption about reality can be questioned (not dispensed with, just questioned) is the universe where the Soul is real.

The part of you that prevents you from exulting totally in causing others misery is what we call the Soul.

OK, maybe SPIRIT. Conscience?

Maybe some other term applies. But it's a non-tangible, immortal part of Self that matters more than "here and now" because its joy and its pain is eternal. It's the part of you that's miserable when you lose, and can't be happy when you win because that means someone else lost.  It's the non-sportsman in you.  It's where your Charity comes from, where your Hope and Joy reside. 

And there is some part of every human's awareness that connects to that dimension.

But that connection is like a switch. It's not always open. Sometimes it rusts shut.

In my personal philosophy, judging whether that rusted-shut switch's condition is good or bad for you is above my pay grade.  I just use it in characterization.

I think there are people who need to be cut off from their awareness of the existence of their Soul, Spirit or whatever you want to call it, at least for part of their life.

There are people who need to be fully in touch. Sometimes switch's rust can be dissolved by Love.

Most people are sporadically and partially aware, or just aspire to repeat moments of contact through an open connection.

Whoever you are and however you are, you're just fine. You'll change when you're ready - opening or closing that contact as you need to in order to accomplish your purposes in life and beyond.

My attitude is, it's none of my business. I have enough on my own plate.

But given the notion that there exists such a thing as a non-material part of a human being, the whole "model of the universe" thing changes.

The worlds you can, as a writer, build to tell stories in become richer, deeper, more complex, harder to handle, but ever so much more realistic (to me anyway).

If the Soul is real, there may in fact be SOUL MATES -- in which case, the HEA becomes an inevitable end-point for each of us, not a ridiculous fantasy that's not "realistic."

If you live your life wearing blinders, refusing to question the zero-sum-game model of the universe because answers would be dangerous, confusing, or doom you to being a loser, then you don't dare accept the HEA except as a pie-in-the-sky fantasy achievable in real life only by the chosen few, and then only temporarily.

If you live your life totally aware of your own Soul, and can see the Soul behind the eyes of others, and know there is a Divine Spirit somehow intimately interacting with this world and your personal life, then when you get to the HEA in a novel that reflects the particular Soul hypothesis you are using, you are emotionally satisfied.

If you live your life putting your blinders on to function in a corporate environment, in the world of science, and peeking around them during your family time, then quickly taking them off for an hour once a week to worship, then the HEA will attract you, reassure you, seem somehow RIGHT, but it's just a novel. Real life is not so simple. But you'll never stop striving for your own happiness without taking it away from others.

Awareness of Soul makes people unable to tolerate being the agent of deprivation and pain to others.

Now, it's true, many people who scoff at the notion of Soul and are committed to explaining all human behavior with brain chemistry and science, people who have been successful commanding the Overton Window to move to where they want it, are equally unable to tolerate being the agent of pain to others.

In fact, MOST of the people involved in "Progressive" or "Liberal" causes, helping the poor, running free clinics, fighting AIDs in Africa, bravely standing up to corporate bullies with Green Peace ships are purely motivated to alleviate human suffering everywhere once and for all and forever.

And frankly, I'd stand with them, put my life on the line with them. I hold nothing back from these causes. They are my causes and always have been. Green energy, anti-global warming measures, reducing our collateral ecological damage -- walking softly in the world, caring for our environment, all of that is core principle with me.

But how many of them are fighting with all their might because they see the world as a zero-sum-game while at the same time feeling their Souls aching for the unfortunate, the poor, and the victims of corporate greed (which is also very real).

How many of them have a good solid plan for what they'll do when they've WON and thus caused someone else to lose? 

On the one hand, you feel your Soul, you know it's real.

On the other hand, you feel your Body, and you know you must fight for the resources to stay alive.

Something is telling you it isn't right, it isn't just, that some people don't have and it's up to everyone to keep all humans safe.

You demand your HEA and won't give up your zero-sum-game fight-and-win scenario.

There's a High Concept film in that conundrum. Think about it.

Turn around now and take another look at politics.

My stand on politics is that no politician should ever be allowed to hold public office.

The steering decisions for a whole country, state, even county, should not be made by compromise. You can't find the right answer to a problem by partially giving up a principle.

I don't want anyone fighting for me, or fighting for my rights, or my anything.

You can't get anything worth having by winning.

So what do you do instead?

Become more interested in what is right rather than who is right.

Argue until you, cooperatively as a group, figure out a right answer. (not THE right answer - there are lots of right answers, usually only a very few really wrong ones)

Govern by consensus not compromise?  That's never yet worked, though compromise has sputtered along for the 200 years or so the USA has used it.  We need to think some more.  

The problem is this Overton Window thing that allows a few people to manipulate consensus to be what they want it to be. So everyone has to be armored against unconscious assumptions in grammar school, trained to be very aware of their personal philosophy but knowing theirs isn't any better or worse than anyone else's.

We'd have to immunize our children to the Overton Window.  It would take a new philosophy.  (Isn't that what SF/F writers are supposed to be doing?) 

Some philosophies though, are more effective and efficient at producing an HEA style life.  Fiction exploring the possibilities could be a "pen mightier than the sword" moment for humanity. 

Think of the Blind Men And The Elephant. The men are all correct, all have an opinion that isn't the truth, but they won't know it until they stop fighting and start cooperating to create the total holographic, 3-dimensional image from all the fragmented points of view.

Right now, we don't combine our philosophies, we fight to win by cramming our philosophy down someone else's throat.

The zero-sum-game assumptions require that we must fight.

Look again at this entire election process and the results, scrutinize everything that's being said, everything "they" are making you feel, and try to see how to question the underlying zero-sum-game philosophical assumption they are cramming down your throat.

Ask yourself who benefits if you swallow their assumption that all life is fighting and not everyone can win.

Now think about all the discussions we've had about Love, and how Love Conquers All isn't just a novel theme, it's actually true about real reality.

Love is the most powerful binding force in the universe.

If the universe is constructed in such a way that Love Conquers All, how can it possibly be a zero-sum-game?

If "All" is conquered, there is only one winner -- ALL.

What is "all"? - it includes you but is not limited to you.

You see why I don't want politicians fighting for me? The more fighting, the less Love.

Fighting doesn't conquer anything, least of all All.

You can't win by fighting, just as you can't get rid of starfish in your clam beds by cutting the starfish in half and throwing the halves back in the water.  The more you fight, the more enemies you have. 

When you start to fight, you lose. If you win, you're miserable because you caused someone else misery. If you lose, you're miserable because you don't have what you went after.

It's the zero-sum-game model of the universe that causes people to reject the HEA, to be unable to feel the emotion generated by novels that lead, however logically, to the HEA.

The zero-sum-game model of the universe has become an unquestionable assumption at the bottom level of our subconscious minds.  You don't even know you believe it, or how it limits your actions. 

To gain acceptance for the HEA, artists must successfully challenge the zero-sum-game philosophy by worldbuilding with Fire and Ice.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com