Depiction Part 2: Conflict And Resolution

Depiction Part 2:
Conflict And Resolution
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Think about this and we'll get back to it below

In Depiction Part 1,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/09/depiction-part-1-depicting-power-in.html
we defined depiction at some length.  Here's a short excerpt to remember this working definition.

--------quote-------
It's the brain trick that lets us look at a scrambled page full of LINES and "see" a map, and understand it as a depiction of a territory (real or imagined).

Writers depict both concrete and abstract elements in mere words.  Readers agree to accept the emphasis the writer's selection of certain attributes and omission of other attributes to "depict" a character, situation, philosophy, threat, conflict, or the stakes in a transaction.

If the writer writes, "It was a dark and stormy night ..." the reader may KNOW there were some street lamps or car headlights (or carriage lanterns) but at the same time understand that the main character's emotional "place" is inside the primal threat-zone that dark and stormy nights were for cavemen.

The character is aware of the light, but seeing only the dark. 
---------end quote----------

So a depiction is NOT a photograph.  It is not a complete analysis.  A depiction deliberately leaves elements out in order to exaggerate the role of other elements in determining the materialization of results.

A depiction is a work of Art.  We've discussed fiction as Art and the methods the writer uses to create that Art -- the how, and the why of the writer's job has been covered in many long posts here, especially in the various series on Worldbuilding

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/04/index-to-theme-worldbuilding.html

...and how to blend the Worldbuilding skills into various individual craft skills (such as theme, characterization, etc). 

Once you've built your multidimensional alter-reality, you must then depict it for your reader.

To depict the World you have built, you must select certain attributes to mention outright and others to leave as implied.  That process produces a depiction of an alter-reality that depicts our own -- a First Derivative, mathematicians would call it.

So in Part 1 of this series we looked at how to depict Relationships. 

Romance is a process, Love is a Relationship.  There are all kinds of Relationship, "Buddy," "Adversary" "Mortal Enemy" "Brother-Rival" etc etc. 

And in every relationship we work with in fiction you will find the seeds of Conflict.

Conflict is the Essence of Story, but it generates Plot  (where Story is the character's change due to impact of Events, and Plot is the sequence of Events caused by a character's actions or inactions).

Books on story craft or writing will all use different words to refer to a moving-part of a story-construct, but all the vastly commercial kinds of fiction have the same moving-parts -- Setting, Character, Conflict, Theme -- and all the English language ones have 4 types of word-usages: Exposition, Narrative, Dialogue, Description. 

A writer's "Voice" is established by the proportions of those word-usages employed to convey the structural components.  That proportion establishes pacing, which is a part of the genre signature. 

We've delved deeply into the details of how to do each of these individual things, and how to pair them, blending two into one seamless whole.

Many beginning writers launch their first story attempts already able to synthesize these skills into a sellable page and chapter.

But very few of those confident in their story-telling skills have thought through or mastered the Art of Depiction.

Teaching writing workshops, I get manuscript after manuscript of very interesting, intriguing, wildly commercial stories with great premises, delightful imagination, and strong romantic intrigue -- but they are unsellable because they start with a massive Expository Lump, a huge pre-history of the entire world the writer has meticulously built or a long personal history of the characters and their ancestry.

It is easy to point to page 25 or 55 and say, "This scene is page 1 of this work."

But the author will not know how we (the professional writers at the table) all arrived at that same conclusion.  And it is spooky how much unanimity a group of professionals have when analyzing the same manuscript for a beginner.  The beginner often thinks it's a conspiracy -- even when the professionals haven't spoken to each other about this manuscript.

Most professional writers don't know how they learned to do that analysis, and just shrug it off as "experience."

I remember learning this technique, and hope I can explain it.

It isn't enough to point to an interior page and say, "This is page 1."

The author of the piece will fight that, tooth and nail, because you see the reader MUST KNOW all this other stuff before that point or the reader just won't understand.

And that's true, absolutely true. 

The professionals at the table will all suggest different solutions to the problem.  They all agree on the problem -- but never, ever, on how to solve it.

How you solve that problem changes the nature of the story, the plot, the target audience, and most of all the characters themselves, very often it changes the theme, and requires the Worldbuilding to undergo major revision.

The beginning writer must learn what to do with that initial expository lump before that lump is formed into words, before those words at set down -- in fact, before the World for this story is Built.

I am using the term DEPICTION to represent that arcane process of solving that problem of the Expository Lump that has to be conveyed before the story starts.  I've never seen this process described exactly this way in books on writing craft.

I wasn't taught it as such.  All my teachers (professional writers and editors) could do was point at where the story really starts and say, "cut all this other stuff, start here."

And my response was always a (very silent) "NO NO NO!!!"

So I invented this method of "Depiction" -- and many years later, I see what appears to me to be many other writers using this method.  The end result, regardless of the process of arriving at it, has to be that uniform STARTING PLACE that all pros agree is where the story starts.

Expository Lumps are often strewn throughout a novel.  This method of Depiction will solve those problems, too. 

Here are some previous post on Expository Lumps

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/source-of-expository-lump.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/sexy-information-feed.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/dissing-formula-novel.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-much-is-too-much-world-buliding.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/06/crumbling-business-model-of-writers.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/source-of-expository-lump-part-2.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/astrology-just-for-writers-part-10.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-11.html

Assuming you've been reading this Tuesday blog series since 2008, and have thought about those posts, here is the advanced lesson in depicting Conflict and depicting Resolution that will solve the problem of the 25 pages of throat clearing before page 1 of the story.

This method often does away with those "Introduction" or "Prelude" additions that editors resort to when they can't get the author to depict.  Understanding depiction and how to do it is not in the job-description of editors.  Those who can teach this come to editing via another path. 

Like everything else in Art and Story-craft, it's a learn-by-doing kind of thing, so we'll work with the "Real World" around us to extract elements that could be used in depicting a conflict and a resolution.

PAGE 1 of any piece of fiction starts with defining the Conflict.

That's actually what pros teaching writing workshops look for to spot that page 26 opening scene error.

The story starts where the Conflict kicks off the plot.

Depicting Conflict is the missing skill for such writing students.

The opening of any novel is where the This vs. That or Her vs. Him is first depicted.

Now remember -- a Depiction is not the whole, entire, complete, multiplex Situation.

Depiction is done by leaving important, vital, crucial elements out of the picture, then presenting elements of that picture that merely hint or suggest the presence of those crucial elements.

This artistic skill leverages the reader's simple, human tendency to make assumptions.

You give them this; they assume that.

It is the human brain's short-cut mechanism at work there.  It is the mechanism that causes us to be prejudiced and intolerant, and it is responsible for our ability to appreciate Art in all its forms and media.

So after you've defined the Conflict, you depict that conflict on Page 1.

Remember, an "outline" contains only the moving parts of the plot, Beginning, Middle, End Events. 

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/06/finding-story-opening-part-1-action-vs.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/07/theme-plot-integration-part-11-correct.html

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

Depiction as I'm using it here is the Art of creating Verisimilitude -- the illusion of reality.

It works the same way that caricature works -- the eye sees a few sparse lines and fills in the rest.  A caricature is not a photograph but a representation of certain, carefully selected features of the subject.

So when Depicting a Conflict for your opening, you carefully select Features of that Conflict to incorporate into your opening Dialogue, Description, Exposition (yes you are allowed to use some exposition, just not in lumps) and Narrative. 

Your Conflict, on Page 1, is distributed among those 4 language elements, and that single conflict must be present in all instances of those 4 language elements -- usually throughout the entire novel, no matter the point of view.  Conflict pervades the work -- that's what makes it a story.

How do you select what Features of your Conflict to include on Page 1 and which other features to explore in depth later?

To select the elements of Conflict on Page 1, you look at the last page (that you haven't written yet.)

That's where the outline comes in. 

The outline you scribbled down when you had this Idea flood into your conscious mind should have little except the 3 major points, Beginning, Middle, End.  The rest is commentary.

Example: 
1. Pandora sees a Box
2. Pandora Opens the Box
3. Pandora gets shut up inside that Box. 

The Conflict is Pandora Vs. The Box.  The Middle (the worst thing that could happen) is Pandora Opens The Box.  That doesn't resolve the conflict, it escalates it as a good Middle must.  The End resolves the conflict by blending Pandora and the Box into one, removing her "issues" from the world.

Of course the Situation just sits there begging for a sequel.  That's good plotting.

At this stage of Depicting a Conflict and its Resolution, the beginning writer will likely discover that the Last Page doesn't match the First Page she has in mind.

That is the conflict that is Resolved at the ending as envisioned is not the same conflict that begins on Page 1.

Many writers will handle this problem by ignoring it -- or pointing to Masterwork novels where many conflicts are braided into a complex mulch-layered plot to justify their choices.  Most beginning writers want to be that sort of Masterwork writer.  Depiction is the art form that must be mastered to create such a Masterwork.

It isn't that you must already be a Big Name writer to get away with bait-and-switch plotting.  It's that you must have the skills that make Names Big.  Some of those skills are writing skills.  Some aren't.  Writing skills can be learned.

So, take this rich, multidimensional, braided plot and multiple viewpoint story you have in mind, and choose a few, sparse elements of The Conflict to depict on Page 1.

Then craft the last page out of a specific Resolution to that Conflict.  Yes, you may have to revised that ending a few times as you write, but having a target depicted lets you revise that depiction as you go.  This is the skill that lets professionals hit deadlines, to predict when signing a contract how long it will take to write that novel. 

It's not that you always stick to an outline -- it is that you have an outline to revise as required. 

Given the immense World you have Built in your mind, how do you sort out which of the conflicts that seethe within that world to depict on Page 1.

You look to your THEME.  The Theme is the philosophical statement about life, the universe, and everything that this work of fiction makes.  It is the moral of the story, or the proposition to be debated. 

That statement about The Universe and its underlying Reality dictates how your Conflict will be resolved.  That statement defines the ENDING EVENT of the story.

For example, if you are writing a Romance, your philosophical statement, your Major Theme, is "Happily Ever After Is Attainable In Reality" -- or maybe "Only Happily For Now can be Attained, and that's enough."  or maybe "HFN is not enough."

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/06/writers-eye-finds-symmetry.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/beauty-and-beast-constructing-hea.html

If your theme is HEA is Real, then your Page 1 must depict the ABSENCE OF HEA -- people wanting something, misery for lack of whatever, a big problem that is major because of the absence of a partner (example: unwed pregnancy).

The Ending is then HEA Realized (wedding in the offing, commitment, birth, whatever solves the problem).

The Middle would then be the point in the focus couple's life where the partnership is just not working out - that internal and/or external forces drive them apart (deployed to Iraq, denied Military permission to marry).  Or maybe what drives them apart for the Middle Event is some kind of Political Campaign or issue.

Love And Politics always equals EXPLOSIVE ACTION.  In fact, Love and Politics is sometimes more explosive than Religion and Politics.

Perhaps your Couple is divided by their stances on hot-button-political issues of today, even though they live in a Galaxy Far Far Away.

By using today's Headlines, but depicting those headlines rather than just copying them into your story, you can lift today's social conflicts out into the galaxy, place them between human and non-human, and have a whopping series of novels that sells big.

How do you do that?  How do you "depict" a political conflict torn from today's headlines?

Remember, depiction is the art of lifting up certain elements and suppressing others.  It's not distortion, but point of view.

Each person sees the world around them from a unique point of view - their own.

Humans tend to regard what they see as the whole reality that is there -- but what they see is a selected depiction. 

We have a brain mechanism that selects reality for us, so we can free up brain space for handling more critical life-or-death decisions.  And that brain mechanism is the source of both our Art Appreciation and our deadly-to-each-other prejudices. 

So you, the author, must replicate the effect that point-of-view has on the Character's convictions.

Take, for example, our real-world political situation.  In order to avoid having to fill up our brains with thousands of data points, in the USA we "reduce" our reality to two political positions.  In other countries, there are many political parties with similarities to each other and some differences their constituents consider critical.  Voters there have to think about many more abstract concerns than those in the USA.

In Europe, for example, "Far Right" means Nazi.  In the USA, the "Far Right" means anti-Nazi.  But because of the Internet, many voters in the USA have adopted the European definition of "Far Right" and now point the finger at the Right in the USA as being Nazi oriented.  Those targeted by that finger object.  Conflict reigns.

Consider the Conflict breaking apart your Soul Mate Couple that has its origin in that kind of linguistic mislabeling.  They fall in love. 

The Conflict becomes clear. Opening Scene: they are walking to an ice cream shop after seeing a wonderful movie they both enjoyed, but it had a woman in it who went for an abortion for well-depicted reasons. 

The guy admits he always votes Republican, and that movie explains exactly why the Republicans have the correct approach -- because abortion shouldn't be legal. 

She, however, always votes Democrat because, after all, she's a woman, and "how dare you" is her bristling response -- nobody is going to tell her how to manage her own biology.

Why do I mention this?  Because International Sales and Translations are where the professional writer actually, finally, turns a profit.  It's vital to keep the world market in mind when crafting a depiction.  Abortion is a good example because the yes/no argument is very different in the rest of the world.  This intimate argument by a couple where marriage is a looming issue uncovers a Foreign Policy Issue between them which could break that couple up.

Should a man be allowed to force a woman to have his baby? 

If he's to be disallowed, who does the disallowing?  Government? Religion? Neighborhood busy-bodies? Doctors?

THEME: how do I get you to do what I want even if you don't want to?

MASTER THEME: There Are No Objective Criteria Of Right And Wrong Use Of Force (if I can get away with it, then I can do it). Or put another way Pride vs. Humility makes a great Conflict:




Today, in the USA, it's merely a case of seeing "people" (on TV mostly) doing things you don't want to let them do, and getting "The Government" to force them to behave the way you want.

Government is The Power that the people use to force other people to behave properly.

A long-long time ago, there was a comic strip everyone read because it was syndicated in all the newspapers, There Ought To Be A Law.

It DEPICTED (and from it you can learn the Art of Depicting) activities that nobody had the power to stop, so they'd throw up their hands and declaim, "There Ought To Be A Law" against that activity.

http://miamiarchives.blogspot.com/2012/09/there-oughta-be-law-comic-strip-1952.html

http://www.toonopedia.com/bealaw.htm

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

There Ought To Be A Law and They'll Do It Every Time (two syndicated comics) depicts a world where people can't use government to control other people's behavior, but they want to because something has to be done.

The urge to control other, misbehaving, people is universal among humans and a source of Conflict you can tap repeatedly.  Life and morality can be "depicted" as either a fight for control of others or the results of people being "out of control."

How many times do news stories about an urgent emergency requiring an Act of Congress contain the phrase "the situation is out of control."  And not one reporter challenges that by asking, "when was the situation in control?" or "who controlled the situation before this" or "was the old controller of the situation doing a good enough job?" 

Why does this situation need "controlling" from outside the situation? 

Watch The News -- watch it carefully and keep asking questions like that to find ways to depict your story's conflict and a satisfying resolution.

So here's half the conflict between the serious couple coming out of the movie Theater:

He says, "You can't be serious! You vote Democrat? YOU??? I don't believe it."

She says, "Republicans are superstitious idiots."

He says, "I am not!"

She says, "Then how could you possibly believe all those lies?"

He says, "What lies?  It's the Democrats who lie rather than take responsibility.  It's the Democrats who think government has to solve every problem with more and more money!" 

She says, "I do not think that!!!  How can you say that?"

Note that each of them is accepting the depiction of their own party as the truth about the other's party.

That is, the Democrats (whom she trusts as a primary source) depict the Republicans as superstitious idiots, so she repeats that depiction without treating it as a "depiction" (i.e. as a statement that leaves something out in order to emphasize something else.)

Anyone who identifies as Republican must be a superstitious idiot.  Anyone who identifies as Democrat must be a person who won't own up to responsibility for the results of their own actions -- "unintended consequences" means "I'm not guilty."

Neither one is penetrating that depiction of the opposite party.

Go watch some TV news and analyze for that tendency -- especially political ads.

So let's list some points He could point to as Democratic dogma.

a) Government Is The Solution
b) It's an Emergency therefore the usual rules are set aside and we can do "whatever it takes" (therefore to get rid of onerous rules, one has to create an emergency.)
c) Got a Problem? Give us a lot more money and we will fix it for you
d) It's just one rotten apple who broke the law. The system is sound.
e) It's proven science so the government must impose it on everyone
f) Only government can protect you from actions of your neighbor
g) If it should be done; then therefore government must do it because nothing else is powerful enough to accomplish it.
h) The Experts know, so we have to believe them and act as if they are correct
i) Income Inequality is a travesty that government must prevent
j) We must educate all children in identical values because otherwise we won't be able to control the resulting adults and then we'd have anarchy.

Now think about those (each could be the thematic foundation of a long series of long novels). 

Would any Democrat accept that phrasing as a statement of their own beliefs?

Would any Republican accept the opposite statements as their own beliefs?

We routinely use the brain short-cut mentioned above to avoid having to learn a lot of facts and then think with them -- and instead, we extract a couple visible facts and imagine what fills in the blanks.

That "fill in the blanks" process is "prejudice" -- it's the basis of "racism" (all Blacks are lazy bastards), "ageism" (all people over 60 are technical illiterates), and of War (all Germans are Krauts; all Japanese are Japs, all Muslims are Islamists).

Study the political fracas in TV Ad Blitzes to look for the "depiction" of your reality then compare that depiction with the underlying reality as you see it.

When you can see the pattern of how the Advertising "lifts" elements from the pea-soupy reality of the opposition (CONFLICT) party and presents to you a mere depiction OF THE CONFLICTING ELEMENTS, then turn to the huge World you have Built in your mind, and do that exact same thing to present your fictional world to your very real readers. 

That will generate your Page 1, your middle, and your Last Page conflict resolution.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
https://flipboard.com/profile/jacquelinelhmqg

Worldbuilding With Fire And Ice Part 7: Paranormal Romance

This blog entry is a direct sequel to last week's entry FINDING A GOOD PARANORMAL ROMANCE which was sparked by a twitter exchange.

http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/08/finding-good-paranormal-romance.html

This is Part 7 of a series of posts on Worldbuilding.  The previous parts are here:

http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/07/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part-6.html

And that Part 6 has a list of the links to the previous 5 parts of this discussion scattered over the last few years -- and there have been other series of posts on the art, science and craft of "worldbuilding" that is the single most major element behind writing in general -- but is far more difficult when done to cradle an Alien Romance, or any science fiction or fantasy story. 

This Part 7 is a worldbuilding entry sparked by a series of comments made on Twitter by Noah Murphy ‏@K23Detectives  -- someone to follow and pay attention to.

These tweets came to my attention as I was finishing last week's blog entry and thinking how Paranormal Romance stories and novels are one of the most natural, easy, and obvious blends of 2 genres.

The "Paranormal" usually infers "horror" -- stories about the creepy-awful menace that lurks just out of sight and awareness, the non-rational world of nightmare rather than dream.

Romance, on the other hand infers "pleasant satisfaction" - the uplifting, delightful, fulfilling promise of all that lurks just out of sight, the Happily Ever After, the non-rational world of dream rather than nightmare.

These two genres depict the exact same thing, but from different points of view, with different interpretations.  Ghost Hunters vs. The Ghost And Mrs. Muir.

So Paranormal and Romance fit together at the level of theme.

Last week I pointed out the parallel between what Glenn Beck has done and what Paranormal Romance has not done, but needs to do if we are to be able to find the good Paranormal Romance novels. 

And I ended off last week asking:
What topic lies within PNR that has the same relationship to PNR that the Mexican Border does to American History?  And where can we find someone to set on fire with that topic?

My thesis was that the PNRomance field needs an Oprah Winfrey or Glenn Beck to aggregate the audience so that audience can rely on the source to find the "good PNR" and not waste time and money on unsatisfying reads. 

And lo! like magic Noah Murphy's tweets pointed at a topic PNR probably hasn't delved deeply into, but which would form a solid foundation for Paranormal worldbuilding.

As I pointed out in previous posts, the biggest "weakness" I see in highly professional Romance writers who try their hand at mixing genres is in the worldbuilding. 

When you don't use the real world, contemporary or historical, as background for your story, you must invent the details of your background, (worldbuild) not look them up! 

But you must invent a set of details that go together, each arising from the other in a pattern that resembles the reader's perception of their real world (not the actuality, but the perception which is why Glenn Beck and Oprah Winfrey are folks to study, not because of their topics but because of the radically different worldviews of their respective audiences.)

So here's an example of a "topic" within Paranormal Romance which might be the igniting topic that could set the right spokesman on fire and create us a Glenn Beck of our own.

SEEING IS BELIEVING

If you've read my blog entries on the use of THEME, you recognize that statement as a THEME.  And it is a natural theme for a Paranormal Romance. 

Here are the tweets that stopped my eye and ignited my brain:

Noah Murphy ‏@K23Detectives
There's also a very major full on Chasidic black-hat Jewish hero in the book. But since his job requires him to deal with immodest women

Noah Murphy ‏@K23Detectives
He puts his personal feeling aside and just does his job but he believes god cares more about him helping then seeing immodest women.

And there were more tweets on this topic, an exchange on nudity and clothing styles, as well as porn and religion.  You meet some fascinating people on twitter!!! 

Noah Murphy is a writer working on a story that includes this Chasidic detective.

I know nothing else about that story, but the exchange about clothing styles came to me right after seeing an entire Chasidic lecture on the various warnings in the Torah about "following your eyes."

Naturally, I sought ways of arguing various sides of this thesis on SEEING being the root of temptation.

The thesis was that the admonition not to follow your eyes was based on an inherent feature of the human being -- that when you SEE an image or a thing, you want it, you grab for it.

It's true infants will grab at colored shapes -- it's how we learn eye-hand-coordination.

It's possible this attribute persists into adulthood, morphed by the rise of sexual awareness.

And we're all familiar with how the sight of something that looks delicious makes our mouths water, makes us WANT that delicious thing regardless of whether we were wanting it before we saw it.

SEEING is powerful.

We know that the structure of the human eye gives us a survival advantage - we see in color and in three dimensions.  Some other species have other kinds of advantages -- eagles have sharp far-sight, insects have segmented eyes that see in many directions at once, etc.

But the human eye linked to the human brain works marvels.

When it comes to the Paranormal Romance, we usually have to write something about those who are aware of the Paranormal dimension as contrasted with those who have no awareness.  And the interesting hook into a Paranormal adventure is that moment when someone unaware SEES and believes for the first time that the world is different than they had ever thought.

All religions have something in them that requires belief in something you can't SEE.

That's why so many use statues or other symbols, so that which is believed-in can become tangible, real because it's seen.

The practitioners of a religion (any religion) are often the ones who know the least about that religion.  So the topic that could ignite interest in the Paranormal Romance could be something as simple as "What really goes on when you SEE something?"

That's like "What's really going on at the Mexican/USA border?"  Innocent little question with a million topics connected to it.  It opens like a rose.

Mystical practitioners often call those who can see the future Seers -- not prophets who are shown by God, but people who just look and See.

Seeing is believing.  See a ghost, and your concept of reality adjusts. (show-don't-tell, remember?)

In a near-death experience, seeing your own body from the outside adjusts your view of reality.

Seeing something you've never seen before, never believed existed, makes you sensitive in a certain way.  You are more likely to See it again.

So why do practitioners of many religions want to conceal the human form (mostly the female, but in many cases also the male)? 

Most people have a completely eroneous assumption about why religions rule to conceal the human form or flesh.  In the era of "Enlightenment" (or the era of science as our god), when a religion says "don't expose your (whatever part of the anatomy)" we hear that the physical eye must not see the physical flesh.

What if that's not the true origin of the decree? 

What if it isn't the physical eyeball that is the problem? 

What if it is some other part of the human that must be concealed, a part the Enlightened are so certain does not exist?

What if the signal from the human eyeball reaches the human brain and ignites something above and beyond the human physical body? 

What if repeated stimulation of that part of you causes you to be unable to sense the presence of  God? 

Think about how constant exposure to a certain smell makes you unable to smell it anymore.  Smokers, for example, have no idea how much they stink! 

There's a principle in Magic quoted as, "As Above; So Below" (and it works vice-versa -- when you understand what's Below (in our real world) you can more easily understand what's Above, (in the astral plane and higher).

The theory of Magic holds that the world is created in congruent layers, that there is a single underlying pattern that repeats and repeats.  Maybe that's not true, but some part of the basic human being operates as if it were true, so writers who worldbuild with those congruent layers make readers believe every (silly) word they write.

So it's not farfetched to postulate that the Soul or the immortal part of you, the part that reincarnates, or that "Goes To Heaven" after you die, (or gets trapped as a ghost?) has "senses" that work like our real-world senses do.

You know how you can lose something in a familiar room -- your car keys for example.  The keys are sitting there in plain sight where you always put them, but you search four or five times before you SEE them.  They become invisible against the familiar, just as the smell of nicotine is un-smellable against the miasma that surrounds a smoker. 

The constant din in a noisy room, even a workplace, can be filtered out to the point where you aren't aware of it until a newcomer winces! 

So if our material-body senses work like that, perhaps the Soul's senses work the same way? 

A Paranormal Romance (Soul Mates; Happily Ever After ending Romance) writer could easily postulate that the real reason (unknown even to the Authorities currently running a religion) for the necessity of "modest" dress (defined differently by each religion), is based on the responses of the Soul, not the eyeball or the body.

Here's one from Kabbalah.  There is a concept in the mystical studies that indicates the spirit of God envelopes a couple during copulation and orchestrates conception.  That this whole process is a process of Souls much more sensitive than the process involving the body is.

Done one way, the child that results turns out a certain way.  Done differently, the resulting child is different.  Acting to prevent conception can have far-reaching consequences that has little to do with what we think of as "my life." 

In other words, sexuality has a Paranormal dimension.  It's a fabulous Fantasy premise that hasn't been explored -- just as Glenn Beck's Mexican Border Situation hadn't been explored.

So, it's possible to worldbuild a Paranormal Romance around the SEEING IS BELIEVING theme element that the best way to sensitize the Soul so it can percieve the presence of the Divine in the material world (and thus get Life to work more smoothly around you, e.g. finding your Soul-Mate and Living Happily Ever After), is to avoid certain SIGHTS.

That is one grand paradox fraught with ripe conflict!  Paranormal conflict!  Ghosts, Warlocks, Witches, Spells, Incantations, Goblins, Trolls, Vampires -- it all takes on a totally different twist when seen through the eyes that avoid certain sights in order to see other sights.  It might be like avoiding looking at oncoming headlights at night in order to be able to see the road. 

If you could pull that off, you could be writing a very sexy Paranormal Romance targeted at Glenn Beck's 30-million-strong audience.  Somewhere among them (probably the most skeptical ones trained best in critical thinking) might be the Oprah Winfrey of the Paranormal Romance field.

BTW: the "fire and ice" of the series title here might be thought of as Religion and Science, or maybe it's Science and Religion?  Either way, to worldbuild a cradle for a convincing story, you must have both in your world because they are pillars of our world.   

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Poetic Justice In Paranormal Romance Novels Part 3

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

Believing in Happily Ever After Part 4: Nesting Huge Themes Inside Each Other

Last week we looked at two conflict sets that form the basis for huge thematic statements that can be simplified down to something as stark and elegant as the underpinnings of the TV show Leverage. Now we'll see if we can combine these 4 thematic elements into a set of themes that generate conflicts and thus plots for large, multi-point of view novels as we began discussing in

Verisimilitude vs. Reality Part 2 September 13,2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-2-master.htmlVerisimilitude vs. Reality Part 3, September 20, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-3-game.html
The previous posts in this series were posted on:

October 4, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-1.htmlOctober 11, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-2.htmlOctober 18, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-3.html
Secret vs. Private + Standardized vs. Customized

You can "nest" those two sets of conflicts to produce a huge novel with a dizzying array of Point of View Characters.

You can nest them because they are philosophically related. If you can explicate that philosophical relationship all in Show and without any Tell (i.e. tell the story in pictures, in icons and images) you will have a masterpiece of commentary on the current human condition.

To start, note that in a Standardized culture anything about you that you don't hang right out in public is going to be regarded as grounds for suspicion about you.

Why is that?

Think about it.

In a Standardized culture, we're all alike. So if there's something about you that you aren't forthcoming about, then it must be something that identifies you as "Different" -- as unacceptable. It has to be something you're ashamed of, because after all we're all the same, so why would you keep it secret?

Once you've seen a naked woman, you've seen a naked woman.

Why would any woman "hide" their nakedness (or any part of their body) from you when all women are the same? Men, too, for that matter. What's to hide?

If you're not displaying your nakedness for all to see, you are keeping something secret. It's only logical.

There's physical nakedness, and there's psychological nakedness. In a Standardized culture, if you're not as naked as everyone else, you're not politically correct. You're keeping something secret.

In a Standardized culture (science fiction extrapolation to vast extreme for the sake of illustration), there can be no such thing as "private." There is only "secret." And in a Standardized culture, secret is evil.

Why is secret evil? Because something different might undermine the standardization of everyone.

In a Customized culture, on the other hand, there can be secrets and some of them may be about Evil, but most of what you don't know about another person is just private, and you're really not curious at all about other people's private business. You have your own private business to fill up the empty spaces inside you.

That's right, in a Customized (carry to extremes, remember? It's a principle of screenwriting) culture, a seriously totally customized culture, people would still be intensely curious about all kinds of things, but never about someone else's private business.

In a Customized culture, people don't dress or talk all alike. In a Standardized culture, they do.

In the 1950's, each year brought a specific fashion-necessary hemline length. If you couldn't afford a new dress (women didn't wear pants much), then you took up or let down the hemlines to within a half-inch of the specified proper fashion, usually sewing by hand. Standardization reigned in car-manufacturing, and in fashion. Uniform spelling was not just admired but an absolute requirement. Radio announcers had even become standardized for accent. (today you hear regional accents on TV announcers -- in the 1950's you didn't., though regional accents were more redolent.)

In the 2010's, walk along any street and see some women in pants suits, others in jeans, ankle length skirts, mini-skirts, all going the same place.

The other day I saw a video clip of a bunch of people walking out of the White House after a high level conference they were reporting on. I watched the women. They ALL wore skirt-suits (not a one of dozens wore a pants suit), and the skirts were above the knee in every case. Their dress for business wear had become standardized to a new standard. Even just 5 years ago, there were lots of pants suits in such shots. Remember Hilary Clinton wore and still wears pants suits more than anything else.

In between, there was a trend where women on TV non-fiction shows (there was a time when no TV anchor on a news show was female) all wore suits, sometimes with tailored shirts and ties, sometimes pants suits, but sometimes skirt-suits and they weren't mini-skirt suits.

I've taken a recent poll cruising news shows. All the newswomen are showing a lot of skin, cleavage, and often wear skin-tight dresses with cleavage and no sleeves, showing more of themselves than they would in a bathing suit. Just a few years ago, those same women wore suits with jackets when seen among men wearing suits with jackets. Today, female reporters stand on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (which is being bought by the Germans) among men in suits, but the women are showing cleavage and lots of skin, or if it's cold outside, they wear very tight sweaters.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/15/dboerse-nyse-idUSN1E76E16C20110715

And the Germans have a very different culture than the U.S.A. does. As much as German culture (via immigrants) has influenced us, we are still very different.

I'm not passing value judgements here. I'm surveying details that sketch the context of your reader's real-world, against which they judge the plausibility of your fictional world. I'm selecting details here that infer other types of details. Think about the reasons for these fashion shifts. This is how you "build" a world for your characters from the substance of your theme. When you build your fictional world from the elements of your reader's real world, the readers will believe your entire story - it will seem plausible. Your reader reads about how people dress, and your reader infers the value system of the culture in which those characters walk abroad.

Women wore suits to be like men, or to seek respect for not presenting themselves as a sex object.

There was a cultural conflict there generating that fashion choice -- the striving to be taken seriously. In prior times, women news reporters were never allowed to report on business stories or crimes (or from the locker room at a sporting event). Women reporters covered women's stories only. Nothing a woman said was ever taken seriously.

Today that cultural conflict is gone, and women are behaving as if they can be taken seriously and display as much skin as they (or the news producers) want. Yes, it seems the real reason for the cleavage display is that sex sells. Nothing rivets a man's attention like cleavage and the producers (even the women producers) of news shows see that in their ratings demographics. But the men don't wear wet T-shirts to display a six-pack.

I've seen prime time hard-news TV shows with a female anchor and a couple of female reporters, all showing a lot of skin, and reporting on serious news. Big change, and I haven't seen anyone note it even in passing.

The writer's eye must observe these things and translate the visuals into thematic substance.

Compare that cultural shift to the one described in the article I sited earlier in this Believing In Happily Ever After series about the increasing internet speeds and what enterprise has been able to do with that technological advance.

Here's the link again:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/07/speed-matters/

Microsoft and Google, the two publicly traded titans who, along with amazon.com, reign supreme in the Customized culture, actually operate on the old Standardized Worker-bee model. Though their products are created by wildly dressed individuals, they are developed and marketed by standardized workers, in standard business suits.

Consider that Facebook became a publicly traded company in 2011. Now Google has launched Google+ a serious competitor to Facebook. Google+ is another example of a user customizable service that's standardized on the back end.

I was talking with an employee of GoDaddy the other day about this very thing, and we agreed that GoDaddy is the Home Depot of the digital world (GoDaddy is a do-it-yourself website hosting service with customer service phone answerers who really know what they're talking about just as Home Depot clerks know what the products on their shelves actually do).

While GoDaddy is enabling individuals to create totally Customized (or templated Standardized; your choice) websites, they treat their employees like identical worker-bees, and pay really low wages, rewarding the best sales people with bonuses. (Sears does the same, as do many department stores).

At GoDaddy the art staff gets paid less than the customer service reps, according to my informant.

Well, that's how it used to be.  Things may be changing there, too.  See this?

http://mashable.com/2011/07/02/godaddy-sold/

GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain registrar, has been sold to three private equity firms in a deal valued at $2.25 billion, the company announced in early July 2011.


So these successful businesses (creating those rich folks who take what they want) are now hybrids of the Standardized and Customized cultures.

They sell customizable products (all the same out of the box; you make them different), but manufacture them in a Standardized Henry Ford style way. Do you smell a conflict generating a plot yet?

Now, you all know of the "privacy" issues on the internet, and the hacking incursions into bank records, even personal cell phones of celebrities.

Take that "real" world your reader lives in, slice and dice it just as you sliced and diced the TV Show Leverage which we discussed in Part 2 of this series.

Build an alien culture from one of these sets of themes, and a futuristic (extrapolated to extreme) human culture from the other set, put them in CONFLICT over a problem, resolve the problem, and you have a major novel that seethes with Romance one way or another, because the only thing that can Conquer this stuff is Love.

In the Standardized culture in which every instinct to Privacy is regarded as keeping illicit Secrets, the unique individual strives to 'break free' of a stultifying oppression. The Standardization is the problem.

In The Customized culture in which Privacy is treasured (what happens in the family, stays in the family), the Businessman who seeks to maximize profits via standardizing both workers and products, strives to hammer slippery individuals into shape and make everyone want the same thing. The Individualization, the sacredness of privacy, is the problem.

In a previous post we discussed the origins of the science of Public Relations. You should read the wikipedia article on PR and advertising.

Here are 3 posts on PR and altering the perception of reality in the way described above with fashion.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/glenn-beck-didnt-invent-overton-window.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/01/failure-of-imagination-part-4-teasing.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-to-change-perception-of-romance.html

Remember the principle, create a frustration then sell the solution and alter the general perception of reality.

To get the greater readership to accept the reality of the Happily Ever After ending, that ending has to become the solution to their greatest frustration -- like increasing internet speed and selling data connections by the megabyte.

The greatest frustration out there right now is the conflict between the innate (and I believe intrinsic in human nature) desire for individual uniqueness to be recognized (i.e. unconditional love) and the survival-instinct need to hunker down as one of the herd, to be a worker-bee and get a paycheck, to use the most popular brand of shampoo.

God Forbid anyone should think you're Different - because you know you are. That's CONFLICT the very essence of STORY. But more than that, it's the essence of Romance, because Romance starts with the impact of the vision of a future where you are not alone in your privacy.

The desire to be unique, and yet the same, and also recognized and appreciated for your individual uniqueness is the "problem" in the us vs. a problem conflict formula.

Right now, our genera population can't see Love Conquers All as the solution to that uniting problem in our culture.

Use Art to demonstrate that solution, and sell big time.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Believing in Happily Ever After Part 3: Standardization vs. Customization

Part 1 of this "Believing in Happily Ever After" series is:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-1.html
Part 2 is:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-2.html
Last week, we left off in the midst of examining the TV Show Leverage noting that Leverage has a "Tell Don't Show" opening that sets out the premise starkly, and explicitly states the theme.

The opening voice-over is:
"The Rich And Powerful take what they want.  We steal it back for you."

Now we're putting that TV show's premise and theme into the context of the world of the viewers it's aimed at, (you and me, actually, though Leverage is not a Romance.) 

Consider, this is a world in which huge social forces (not the least of which is the Internet and dot-com companies that  are going "public" on the stock exchange and wielding more power than any other kind of company before) are striving in two directions, creating conflict and a philosophical argument so big it's nearly impossible to see or define.

I parse it this way.  (do your own parsing).

I see, via Leverage's window on the philosophical/fiction-theme world, the conflict as Customization Vs. Standardization. 

Remember all the times I've sent you to read Alvin Toffler's non-fiction book, Future Shock.  He gave me the insight to be able to see things in this light now. 

Remember that the Essence of Story is Conflict. 

Plot is a sequence of events on a because-line -- because this happened we have a problem, which causes us to do this, which results in that, which causes us to do something else, and so on because-because- in unbroken chain all the way to problem-is-resolved. 

The conflict is Us vs. Problem. 

The conflict is resolved by a sequence of actions which resolve the conflict -- after the problem is solved, there is no further conflict.  (Happily Ever After) 

Out there in our everyday reality, the reality your reader lives in and uses to judge the 'plausibility' of your fictional worldbuilding, there are nested conflicts. 

We discussed nesting plots in Verisimilitude Vs. Reality parts 2 and 3, September 13 and 20, 2011.  

To create nested plots, you need nested conflicts, which means you divide one huge abstract theme into sub-themes, factoring a philosophical conundrum into smaller pieces and arranging them one inside the other, like Russian dolls.

So I'm looking through the window of a TV show (in this case Leverage, but this process works with any show, movie or novel) - and imagining the audience, the reality they live in, what they know about it and what they don't know about it.  I'm imagining the audience that Leverage is speaking to.

People love this show for a reason -- well, each person for a different reason -- but they see the show as trivial, as light entertainment, and of course it's not real.  But it's plausible for a reason.  We as writers need to know that reason.  Or reasons. 

The audience's emotional reactions come from their own unconscious assumptions and mostly from what they don't know about themselves.

Playing on that unconscious part of a reader's mind is called "art." 

Remember in the Big Love Sci-Fi series we discussed the social boundaries between Private and Secret shifting, melting and reforming.

That's one of the huge philosophical issues younger readers are unaware of but affected by emotionally.

So private vs. secret can be a thematic conflict line that generates a plot (thousands of plots).

Another conflict line even bigger than private vs. secret can be Standardization vs. Customization

So let's make a little list:

CONFLICTS:
 a) Secret vs. Private
 b) Customization vs. Standardization
 c) Statistics vs. Prejudice

Each of these 6 components of conflict represents a huge, complex, abstract, and powerful thematic concept.

Let's think about Customization vs. Standardization in our world and how we can use that nascent argument to create plot generating themes and conflicts.

In the 1800's the Industrial Revolution took off steaming into the 1900s where Henry Ford popularized The Assembly Line method of producing thousands of identical copies of a complicated thing.

The more complex machinery became, the less economically viable hand-building such machines became.  With Ford's advent, the frustration of business men and industrialists with "craftsmen" who worked slowly and methodically to produce a non-uniform (custom made) product was resolved.

Read Toffler's Future Shock and the description of how our public schools adopted the "covert curriculum" of hammering kids into identical "workers" for assembly lines, because that's what Big Business needed schools to do (and of course Big Business was and is the source of political campaign funds that can not be ignored).

So until the World Wide Web, Microsoft, AOL, Google, Blogs, email, ebooks, etc, Standardization was the Holy Grail of Business.

Products had to be made uniform -- all alike -- or it wasn't cost effective.

But people weren't all alike.  So business set out to create consumers who all wanted the same thing.

Radio advertising and then TV advertising worked to satisfy that requirement -- that uniform products required uniform consumers to want them, and uniformity was the solution to consumer's frustration with things that don't work.

Different Is Dead became the rallying cry of the 1940's and 1950's. 

The 1960's brought the Internet and Star Trek and Spock who was DIFFERENT!!! 

Star Trek portrayed on the ultra-uniform medium of series TV a UNIQUE INDIVIDUAL character.  He stuck out like a sore thumb, and was admired, respected, obeyed and even loved by his crew-mates for his differences. 

Vulcan was a culture that lauded the philosophy of I.D.I.C.  -- Infinite Diversity In Infinite Combinations.

The 1970's ushered in an era of (Alvin Toffler's Future Shock was published in the 1970's and is in new editions today) an era of CUSTOMIZATION.

Toffler predicted the cottage industry of telecommuting and even named it.  Today a lot of your customer service online is done via chat by workers working from home on customized schedules and individually varying computers.

Women's Lib and Martin Luther King all belong to this, but branch off into the conflict of Statistics vs. Prejudice.

Let's focus on this Customization vs. Standardization for a bit more.

This is a huge, multigeneration trend that most of your 20-something readers won't be aware of because this long perspective on history isn't taught in schools, nor is the philosophy behind it addressed below graduate level in college. 

We are now in the crunch-zone of this conflict.  Schools world wide hammer young kids into identical bricks. 

The counter trend is only found in private schools for the gifted or rejected, schools that let young kids wander around a rich classroom and pick up things to learn about as they become interested. 

Mass market education is still aimed at turning out identical product - workers for factories that no longer really exist. 

Note how the Federal Department of Education (I'm in the USA and use that perspective), could be viewed as a huge and bloated agency created by combining agencies and then not purging out redundancies but rather fighting turf wars for good paying federal jobs.  As a result of that, and various administrations (this is not party-specific) efforts to appease campaign finance sources and do the right thing by our kids anyway, we now have a Federal series of tests that all students have to pass.

That's standardizing people to function in a standardized world.

But as Toffler pointed out, we're not in a standardized world any more.

Small wonder we can't produce enough employable people.  Small wonder there are whole segments of TV viewerships who see their lives as mashed down and unjustly ruined by these huge forces -- "the rich" or "the government" or whatever huge thing their squeaky voices can't reach.

That plight produces emotions that are likewise widespread.  As a result, fiction that would not otherwise be popular, is popular. 

Think like a Romance Writer for a moment.  Can Romance be standardized?

Or is Romance the enemy of standardization?

Here's an article, I hope is still online, about facial recognition software, facebook, google, and online dating sites -- and the whole issue of using your "real" identity online.

http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/08/04/7254996-your-face-and-the-web-can-tell-everything-about-you

Remember the popularity of the Western Romance. 

What are Western Romances about?  Rugged individualists (not unlike the A-Team or the Leverage team).

Victorian Romance, Steampunk, you name it -- Romance is always about the misfit's unique qualification to succeed because of their differences not in spite of them.  (so is Science Fiction, for that matter)  And the TV show Leverage, the show Psych, the USA shows White Collar, Burn Notice, Royal Pains -- all of them feature unique individuals. 

This country was founded by folks who didn't fit the mold back home and went pioneering into the wilderness.  Those who survived to forge this country into a Nation were individualists who visualized a customized world, where each individual was valued for their unique qualities.

They lived in a "handmade world" where no two quilts were alike, no two butter churns were alike.  People wrote with quills - bird feathers - and no two of them are alike.  In fact, if you read original manuscripts from the 1700's even the most educated and erudite did not spell words in any uniform way, not even in the same document..  And precious few could read, though in the 1700's in America, that was changing.

Has anyone noted that there is a re-casting of the newspaper articles from the 1700's where folks were arguing about what kind of Nation we would become?  It's in modern English now because the originals are almost incomprehensible, (wild spelling, archaic words, involuted sentences like I write) and it became an overnight New York Times best seller.  The Federalist Papers.  It's on amazon.com. 

Standardization wasn't even a concept back then.  There was no conflict, not a lot of stories to write, about the vast sea of identical people and the one individual who stands out from "the masses."  "The Masses" as a concept didn't exist, though philosophical theorists were busily inventing the whole movement we label as "Liberal" or "Progressive" today. 

One novel series I do love from that era though is Cooper's The Leather Stocking Tales.  The story of two unique individuals reaching across a cultural gulf (European to Native American), against the backdrop of imported European armies fighting a war for territory.  By that era, Armies were rows of standardized troops moving in unison.  It may be that armies became the first standardization of people -- dating from Roman times, for sure. 

The power of Rome lay in that standardizing of troops, maneuvers, uniforms.  When Rome fell, England and Europe were left with Knights -- individuals in tin-can armor fighting for Honor.

Standardization , the assembly line, screws all the same size, brought vast wealth to this Nation, and a revolution to the world. 

It also brought the idea of Unions, of the rights of the peasants, the poor, the downtrodden, the "masses" of identical, expendable canon fodder peasants, into a political world. 

But we haven't won that battle yet.  The USA is still the only country with our style of government -- every other country that elects governments that actually govern uses the Parliamentary System of the country the USA broke away from, England.  The USA is still unique.

But there has arisen an entire society within the society of the USA - that might be a majority now - that values "fitting in" above "unique."  Some are so desperate to make sure everyone fits in and is thus happy that they're willing to use force to make others fit in, and that makes for great conflict to generate stories. 

That's the conflict most teen-romance features -- think Twilight.  Harry Potter.  The argument for the unique individual is presented in both those formidable series by the depiction of the environment and the people around the main characters, who stand out or are rejected by the masses of people who value being identical to others. 

Next week, in Believing in Happily Ever After Part 4, we'll look at how to link two of these "super-themes" -- themes so huge you can't pitch them in a voice over in front of a TV series and call it a premise.

Secret vs. Private + Standardized vs. Customized

See if you can find how these two huge conflicts blend into a nested theme structure. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Believing in Happily Ever After Part 2: The Power of Theme-Plot Integration

Now we launch into some very advanced writing lessons aimed specifically at Science Fiction Romance writers and Paranormal Romance writers.  But anyone who ventures into worldbuilding, such as historical writers and mystery writers, will find some valuable inspiration in this series about the Ending called "Happily Ever After."

Here's one of my early posts here on the Happily Ever After ending.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2007/02/happily-ever-after.html

Now this is an advanced writer's exercise.  We're going to employ the skills discussed in depth and detail in previous posts -- search for the tag Tuesday to pull up all my series on writing.

Here are some recent posts leading into this current discussion which also list posts from a while ago that laid down the foundation skills we're using here. 

The Big Love Sci-Fi series ran 8 parts from 6/21/2011 to 8/9/2011 and danced around the edges of this topic.

We discussed such dicey topics as Sex Without Borders, How Big Can Love Be in Science Fiction, the Mystery-Detective Romance, Modesty the Scrimmage Line of big Love, and then 3 parts on Unconditional Love and Science Fiction.

Here's the link to Part VI which has links to the previous parts of that series:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/07/big-love-sci-fi-part-vi-unconditional.html

In Part VI on Unconditional Love and Science Fiction I wrote:
---------quote---------
So SF has "proved itself" by having moved the boundaries of reality for many people now living. So they accept this new reality of iPhones and thus most SF no longer seems ridiculous or crazy.
---------end quote------

Here is a news item that reprises the changes in our world due to the internet and computers:

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/07/speed-matters/

It traces what we who lived through it barely remember except as a relief from frustration - the increasing speed of computers, the internet connections, and web-page loading.  The people who created those innovations thought the unthinkable because people were frustrated and would pay money to be relieved of frustration.

With the demise of Steve Jobs, the internet is now full of historical summaries of the changes wrought by his innovations. (*celestial round of applause to this master, serial-innovator*)  If you never owned a Trash80, go read about Steve Jobs and how he moved us beyond that much lauded machine.  

To change people's everyday reality, first make them fed up with the reality they've got, then offer to sell them a solution to their problems if only they'll change their IDEA of the boundaries of their reality. (buy a new computer; switch phone services).  That is a plot outline, or a war strategy.  There's no way to tell the difference.

My more recent posts that list prior posts to read to catch up on the topic of theme and story-structure are:

8/23/11 Source of the Expository Lump Part 2
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/source-of-expository-lump-part-2.html 

8/30/2011 Astrology Just For Writers, Part 10, Pluto The School of Hard Knocks
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/astrology-just-for-writers-part-10.html
9/13/11 Verisimilitude Vs. Reality Part 2 Master Theme Structure (on point of view shifting)
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-2-master.html

9/20/11 Verisimilitude Vs. Reality Part 3  The Game, The Stakes, The Template
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-3-game.html
10/4/11 Believing In Happily Ever After: Part 1 Stephen King on Potter Vs. Twilight

We've been working on the puzzle of  why the Happily Ever After Romance ending is too implausible for suspension-of-disbelief even by veteran science fiction/fantasy readers, and why Love Conquers All seems idiotic to the general public even though they verbally espouse that solemn belief. 

The essence of the problem seems to be that the Romance Genre simply assumes, without discussion, without challenge, without characters who espouse various sides of a heated debate on these topics, that all readers likewise assume these elements of fiction are actually built-in aspects of our everyday reality.

It's not that the HEA building block elements aren't true, or that they are rejected automatically by the scorning public, but that the writer does not argue the point, does not even know there's a point to be argued with the reader.

Arguing those unconscious assumptions in dramatic form was Marion Zimmer Bradley's greatest talent -- and it was a talent.  She didn't do it with conscious, deliberate intention.  It was simply how she presented her stories.

I studied under her tutelage for years, dissected her writing techniques since I was a teen, and I am just not as good at it as she is.  I have to do it consciously, so maybe I can demonstrate how you can teach yourself to do this.

Marion Zimmer Bradley never argued these two assumptions, The HEA and Love Conquers All, that I know of.  Scholars may dig something up that would demonstrate that's not true, but at the moment I can't point you to an example of exactly how to construct this argument.  I've never seen it done successfully - but I'm hoping some reader of this blog will comment with a link to a novel where this argument is laid out with stark clarity and convincing impact.

So let's delve into how to use theme to generate a plot that is part and parcel of this seminal argument.

Here's a perfect example to study because it's a TV show, ultimately very shallow, and very easy to dissect.

The TV show, LEVERAGE, TNT Sundays 8PM these days. 

You can find it on iTunes or Amazon. 
Leverage - all seasons




I've discussed Leverage previously.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/tv-shows-leverage-and-psych.html

I've watched a lot of Leverage episodes.  It's a typical TV Series, but has a story-arc with the lives and inner conflicts of the ongoing characters and their soap-opera style relationships.  It's not Romance, or even Intimate Adventure.  It's way too "dark" for that - the leader of the team is an unrepentant drunk, the team has a thief, a hacker, Muscle who solves problems with punches, and a grifter who plays the femme fatale with aplomb.

But the show is easy to dissect and understand for theme.  Not all good TV shows are this easy to dissect.  

As I've said in the series of posts noted above, theme is the part of the story where you say what you want to say.

It's the part where you put your opinion.  It's the part which carries the reason you want to write the story which ought to be the same as the reason the reader wants to read the story.  It's the part where, if you encode the theme-statement soon enough (1st page; 1st line in a novel) you can prevent people who will hate your novel from reading it. 

But to be truly effective, to evince an emotional response from your chosen readership, to sucker-punch the reader in a part of the mind/emotion complex that blocks you from "moving the boundaries of the reader's reality" so they can grasp the foundation principle Love Conquers All, your theme must be hidden from the reader's awareness.  Your theme must be "coded" -- usually in symbolism, which is one of the techniques we've discussed in previous posts.

See this post on icons and symbols:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/turning-action-into-romance.html 

The best place to hide anything is in plain sight.

That's what Leverage does to make it worth studying.  It hides its theme in plain sight, yet very much "off the nose" - a screenwriting term we'll return to in future posts. 

As a TV show Leverage is very similar to A-Team or It Takes A Thief, or today's White Collar that I rave about so much, or even Burn Notice.

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

That blog entry is about how to craft a "show don't tell" opening.

Leverage has a "Tell Don't Show" opening that sets out the premise starkly, and explicity states the theme in such a way that the real message is "off the nose" (i.e. in subtext).

The opening voice-over is:
"The Rich And Powerful take what they want.  We steal it back for you."

And then Leverage proceeds to explicate that theme (Class Warfare is Innate, or The End Justifies The Means,  Might Makes Right, or maybe Robin Hood Was Right) with relentless precision, scene after scene, show after show with never a foot placed wrong.  The TV Series Leverage is a beautiful thing to behold! 

Note the opening does not say "some rich people take what they want" or "we'll steal only if we have to and then make it right with the Law" -- it says all rich people take anything they want (listen to the tone of voice in that voice-over) regardless of how it harms not-rich people, and you are not-rich so you need us powerful/ruthless folks as Leverage to take back what is rightfully yours regardless of the ethics or morals of stealing.

The subtext is that if you're not-rich, it's someone else's fault, usually a rich person's fault.  Listen to the tone of voice, and read into it what you choose - but I hear that there is no way to solve the problem of being an impecunious victim of wealthy power abusers that is within the law, no way to get that wealthy except by breaking the law.  The law keeps you trapped in the ranks of the downtrodden.  If you're not rich, the law is not your friend.  (very hard to dispute, I will admit). 

It says we, the Leverage Team, violate the law, and any rules of morality that get in the way, to defend the helpless from the mighty. 

It says Might (riches) makes Evil and anything you do to battle Evil is Right. (again, very hard to dispute; but this blog piece is about using writing techniques to say what you want to say, not to evaluate what others have said, only how well they've said it.  Respond to the Leverage theme in a piece of fiction!  That's being part of the conversation among fiction writers.) 

The TV Series Leverage says Law must not prevail because it's always against the helpless.  A government of Laws is bad. (Law is made by the rich who buy politicians.)

A show broadcast in July had a rich man who was hated by his associates throw a party with a staged murder that the guests were to solve.  But someone murdered the host instead (for real), and left the head of The Leverage Team as the only witness and therefore the only suspect.  A policeman, hired to monitor events at the party, who was involved with the rich man's daughter, turned out to be the murderer at the instigation of the daughter.  THEME: Police are bad guys; Crooks are good guys.  People with power or money or both are always bad-guys.  Always. 

The absolutes in that summary of what this episode says come from a lack of a Good Guy/Gal who is rich, or a Bad Guy who is poor and downtrodden.  There are no counter-examples among the characters to muddy the thematic picture (make it "deeper" or more "realistic") which is another reason this is a great show to study. 

One thing I do like about the Leverage Series is the Conflict illustrated by the emotional responses of the characters who are essentially criminals at heart.  The leader of The Team was seriously disturbed when his team seemed to think that maybe he had in fact murdered the rich guy at the party.  That characterization provides you with the "argument" I'm talking about here.

Right inside the plot (rich guy murdered before eyes of Team Leader is a PLOT ELEMENT, and technically forms the part of the plot called a "complication") is the argument statement "well, since the crooks want their friends to believe in them, the crooks must be good guys."   The good guys are doing bad things, but it's okay because they're good guys.   

White Collar and Burn Notice state their premise up front in the opening.  Burn Notice says:  "When you're burned, you've got nothing" etc.  But the way each of these shows state the premise does not ram the theme down your throat the way Leverage does.

EXERCISE: State the premise of your most recent Work In Progress just that briefly.  

Leverage is "dark" and though the explicit violence shown on screen isn't any more emphatic than White Collar or Burn Notice, the way Leverage slams the theme into your face in the opening, then hammers it into your brain scene after scene, is a kind of subversive violence worth studying.  Few shows are quite as easy to dissect and understand, just because of how elegantly they employ this technique.

Caution: I'm not advocating that Romance Writers should use this "Leverage" technique to ram the Romance themes down the public's throat.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  But there's a lot to be learned very easily by studying the theme-plot integration of this simplistic TV show, Leverage.  The study will reveal how to construct a more subtle and complex piece of fiction.

But even a subtle and complex Romance work must have such a thematic statement of the premise to become marketable as "Mass Market."

Now, you will notice that Leverage is on TNT while White Collar and Burn Notice (and a raft of other shows I love) are on USA (character's welcome). 

Yet Leverage has "characters" who are deep, complex, gradually revealed season after season, and who are, perhaps against their wills, maintaining relationships. 

The relationships they maintain are basically within the Team, outside interests fleeting. 

I see Leverage as "dark" because the Team members are portrayed as not having a shot at Happily Ever After, or if they ever did, they blew it.

White Collar and Burn Notice show heroic (if shady) characters striving toward an HEA.  They have long range goals they believe will vanquish their frustrations and stabilize their lives into an HEA.

Leverage depicts a Team that sticks together because it's their only hope at a Happily For Now situation.

If you've been watching Leverage, you probably don't see it as "serious" as I do.  It's offered as, and taken as, "light entertainment" and "just for fun."  It's a "what if" story.  But for some people in the audience, people who see themselves as being mowed down by the powerful who take what they want (in today's economic climate, that's a huge number of people), Leverage (like A-Team before it) is an "if only." 

Superman in the 1940's was an "if only" for a lot of people with unsolvable problems.  The theme song of Smallville features the phrase spoken loudly and intelligibly over the music, "Rescue me." (a prime Romance theme).

In difficult times, people can have the stuffings knocked out of them by forces of government, law, wealth, big business, anything that their individual strength can't affect.  So fiction of this type thrives.  Leverage says hire thugs to do your dirty work, and it's okay if you're actually righteous yourself. 

The people the Leverage team works for are always in "the right" from the audience's point of view, the generally accepted morality of today.  The people the Leverage team goes up against are equally starkly and absolutely in the "wrong" according to the morality of today.  The Leverage team itself is shades of gray, very dark gray. 

This is nothing like the TV show Forever Knight where the Evil (vampire detective) was trying to "atone for sins." 

Superman was the benevolent Power, the image of what a human being could and should be, honorable, unimpeachable, un-bribable.  The Leverage team has their own sense of Honor. 


In Part 3 next week, we'll get a little deeper into the thematic structure of Leverage and how it "leverages" its audience's world into a story.

Do search your own Work In Progress to reshape it around a premise statement that encodes or symbolizes your own theme, and make it as clear and concise as these TV show examples.  This statement is the opening sentence of your query letter to agent or editor.  It defines your target audience and what payload you deliver to that audience.  The definition of the audience will determine whether the rest of your query letter will be read -- or not -- and what publishers might consider publishing the work, for which imprints that publisher handles.  

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com