The Rule of Six

RWR, the official magazine of Romance Writers of America, has a regular article series called "Your Writing Coach," by Shirley Jump. In the April 2021 issue (alas, planned as the final print issue, with the publication switching to digital-only) Jump explains the "rule of six," a term originally derived from the advertising business. Since RWR articles aren't available to non-members, I want to summarize this thought-provoking concept here. According to research on human memory, the most items we can easily remember at one time equal five. Therefore, in the realm of consumer goods, when we think of popular brands of commonly used items, four or five spring to mind immediately. It's harder to think of a sixth or higher-numbered item in a category. The purpose of advertising is to implant certain products in the audience's "top of mind" awareness, so that if we're looking to buy a new refrigerator (for example) the client's appliance brand will pop up in the customer's consciousness first.

Jump connects this principle with the craft of writing by applying it to brainstorming story elements such as characters, plots, and motivations. The themes, tropes, and scenarios we think of first will be those we've encountered over and over in our recreational reading and viewing. To come up with something fresh, we have to push ourselves beyond "top of mind" responses. The article urges writers to consciously attempt to think of at least six answers to each brainstorming question. When we reach the point where it's hard to dig up an idea that's not a variation on one of the others, we're getting somewhere. The author says if those fifth and sixth ideas flow too easily, we aren't doing it right. As she puts it, "you really have to reach deep into your imagination to come up with something truly unique." Now, I read that comment with reservations, since I doubt any "truly unique" plot twists, character types, or motivations exist. Just browse TVTropes.org with your "unique" concept as a search term, and you'll probably discover it isn't "something that hasn't been done before." In my opinion, Jump is more on target when she recommends trying for "a really cool spin."

So, to invent a fresh answer to the "what's next" question in plotting, you'd list the ideas that come to you most readily and dig deeper for those fourth, fifth, and sixth possibilities. Jump demonstrates with a scenario of a sexy guy driving a minivan. What's he doing there? She moves from the obvious (dropping off children at school, his own or a relative's) to the progressively unusual (e.g., "he stole the minivan to go after his kidnapped best friend"). She suggests exploring six external and six internal goals, motivations, and conflicts for each major character. Done thoroughly, this exercise in itself should generate a wealth of plot ideas. She mentions flipping gender roles as one way to freshen up a familiar scenario or character type. Long ago, I read a Western romance with a twist on the often-seen plot premise of freeing a criminal from prison to perform a task or participate in a vital mission. The title was something like "The Virgin and the Outlaw." The virgin was a bachelor needing help on his ranch; the outlaw was a woman from out of town incarcerated in the local jail.

Suppose I want to conceive of an entertaining, conflict-generating "cute meet" for my hero and heroine? Their children or pets get them together. (Been done a million times.) They clash as strangers, maybe literally bumping into each other on foot or in cars, or arguing in a store or other neutral venue, then walk into a business or political meeting or a job interview to run into each other again. (Been done in a multitude of variations.) One of them hits the other with a car. (I included versions of that in one of my vampire romances and in a shapeshifter novel, and I've seen similar incidents in other paranormal romances.) A volunteer in an animal shelter encounters a werewolf mistaken for a dog. (Not my idea but the premise of a novella I once read, and I wish I'd thought of it first.)

If you search the phrase "meet cute" on TV Tropes, you'll find several dozens of these kinds of scenarios. And, as TV Tropes reminds us, tropes are not bad. "Tropes are just tools. Writers understand tropes and use them to control audience expectations either by using them straight or by subverting them, to convey things to the audience quickly without saying them." Because "human beings are natural pattern seekers," the existence of tropes is inevitable. To return to the RWR article about the rule of six, the trick is to put your own "cool spin" on the familiar patterns by refusing to settle for the first plot twist, goal, motivation, or character type generated by the "top of mind" phenomenon. While the outcome probably won't be "something that hasn't been done before," it will display your unique touch as an individual creator.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Accessible Writing

The April 2020 issue of RWR (magazine of the Romance Writers of America) contains an article titled "The Literary Craft of Accessibility," by Rebecca Hunter. She begins by analyzing the difference between literary fiction and genre fiction, for which she focuses on level of accessibility: "Literary fiction expects the reader to come to the book, while genre fiction books come to the reader." To put it simply, literary fiction expects the reader to work harder. It would be easy to conclude that denser novels are therefore of higher quality than less "difficult" works, a "false—and harmful—hierarchy" the author warns against. I readily agree that a "literary" novel may be difficult and dense for the sheer sake of difficulty, putting unnecessary roadblocks in the reader's path from the mistaken notion that lucid prose and a clear narrative thread equate to "dumbing down." And a genre novel can include deep themes that make a reader think and challenge her established assumptions.

Hunter undercuts her cautionary reference to false hierarchies, in my opinion, by contrasting "lyrical" and "thoughtful" with "fast-paced" and "light," the latter suggesting a "more accessible style." A genre novel can be accessible, yet sedately paced and deeply emotional. Some factors she lists as contributing to degree of accessibility include length of sentences, breadth of vocabulary, balance among action, atmosphere, and ideas, moral clarity or ambiguity, how clearly the characters and plot fulfill "expectations set in the beginning of the story," and "use of cliches, idioms, and other familiarities." I have reservations about some items on the list. For example, I don't think a novel has to lean heavily toward "action" to be accessible. Many romance novels don't, nor do many vintage favorites in other genres. GONE WITH THE WIND is one perennial bestseller that has many more reflective and emotional scenes than action scenes in the popular sense of the word. I find the mention of "cliches" off-putting; while familiar tropes, handled well, can be welcome, an outright "cliche" is another matter. Another feature, "amount of emotional complexity spelled out for readers," sounds as if excessive telling over showing is being recommended. Every writer must balance all these elements in her own way, of course, and Hunter does address the shortcomings of cliches and "telling." She points out that "frankly, there are lots of readers who like this familiarity and clarity." So an author needs to know her target audience well. "Each reader's preferences are different. . . .there are readers for all accessibility levels." Hunter also discusses theme, which she defines as "an open-ended question our story asks" and briefly covers the possibility of increasing a work's complexity by adding additional thematic layers.

Personally, I enjoy a book with a varied, challenging vocabulary and complex characters and emotions. What make me impatient are works that appear to be confusing for the sake of confusion, such as failing to clearly distinguish characters from each other or coming to a conclusion that leaves the reader with literally no way to be sure what happened—by which I mean, not an ambiguous ending deliberately designed to allow multiple interpretations, but one in which it's impossible to puzzle out the plain sense of what transpires on the page. As Marion Zimmer Bradley used to say in her submission guidelines, "If I can't figure out what happened, I assume my readers won't care." Levels of acceptable "accessibility," of course, vary over the decades and centuries according to the fashions of the times. Long descriptive and expository passages, common in nineteenth-century novels, would get disapproved by most editors nowadays, no matter how well written. Something similar to the opening paragraphs of Dickens' A TALE OF TWO CITIES ("It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. . . ."), although accessible in the sense of easily understandable, probably wouldn't be accepted by most contemporary publishers. It also used to be common for authors to include untranslated passages in foreign languages, especially in nonfiction but sometimes even in fiction. Most nonfiction writers up through the early twentieth century assumed all educated readers understood Latin and Greek. Dorothy Sayers inserted a long letter in French into her Lord Peter Wimsey mystery CLOUDS OF WITNESS; the publisher insisted on having a translation added. On the other hand, to cite a contemporary example, in Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January mysteries, set in Louisiana of the 1830s, January's erudite friend Hannibal often includes Greek and Latin quotations in his speech. They add flavor to the story's atmosphere, but understanding them is rarely necessary for following the story; when it is, Hambly clues us in as needed. Readers who'd be put off by this kind of linguistic play simply don't form part of her target audience, but then, such people probably aren't fans of historical mysteries in general, which require openness to navigating an unfamiliar time and place.

Hunter's article also doesn't discuss accessibility in relation to genre conventions. For instance, Regency romance authors probably assume their target audience has some familiarity with the period, if only from reading lots of prior novels in that setting. Science fiction, in particular, expects a certain level of background knowledge from its readers. We should know about hyperdrive and other forms of FTL travel, if only enough to suspend disbelief and move on with the story. Some SF stories expect more acquaintance with the genre than others. Any viewer with a willing imagination can follow the original STAR TREK, designed to appeal to a mass audience. Near the other end of the accessibility spectrum, the new posthumous Heinlein novel, THE PURSUIT OF THE PANKERA (the previously unpublished original version of his 1980 NUMBER OF THE BEAST), envisions a reader with a considerable fannish background. The ideal reader knows or at least has some acquaintance with Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom books and E. E. Smith's Lensman series. That reader also has a high tolerance for dialogue about the intricacies of alternate universes and the heroes' device for transiting among them, on which the text goes into considerable detail at some points. Optimally, that fan will also have read Heinlein's own previous work, at least his best-known books. This novel is not the way to introduce a new reader to Heinlein, much less to SF in general.

It seems to me that "accessibility" forms a subset of the larger topic of reader expectations. So the question of how accessible our work is (or needs to be) comes back to knowing the expectations of the target audience.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Robots Writing

The March 2020 issue of ROMANCE WRITERS REPORT (the magazine of Romance Writers of America) includes an article by Jeannie Lin about artificial intelligence programs writing prose, titled "The Robots Are Coming to Take Our Jobs." I was surprised to learn software that composes written material, including fiction, already exists. No matter how competent they eventually become, they can't quite take over our jobs yet, because (as Lin points out) U.S. copyright law requires that a work to be registered "was created by a human being." That provision, I suppose, leaves open the question of how much input a computer program can have into a work while it can still count as "created by a human being." Lin tested a program called GPT-2, which takes an existing paragraph of text as a model to write original material as a continuation of the sample work. The AI's follow-up to the opening of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE strikes me as barely coherent. On the other hand, the paragraph generated in response to a sample from one of Lin's own books comes out better, and Lin acknowledges, "The style was not unlike my own." The GPT-2, however, as Lin evaluates it, "is very limited. . . only capable of generating a paragraph of text and is unable to move beyond the very narrow confines of the lines provided."

Here's the website for that program:

OpenAI

The site claims its "unsupervised language model. . . generates coherent paragraphs of text, achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language modeling benchmarks, and performs rudimentary reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarization."

Here's an article about how AI writes content and some ways that technology is already being used—for instance, to produce sports reports for the Associated Press and other news outlets, financial reports, summaries of longer documents, personalized e-mails, and more:

Artificial Intelligence Can Now Write Amazing Content

Computer programs have also written novels, such as an autobiographical account of the AI's cross-country travels:

AI Wrote a Road Trip Novel

It may be reassuring to read that the result is described as "surreal" and not likely to be mistaken for a human-created book.

Nevertheless, there's a National Novel Generation Month (NaNoGenMo) competition in November for programmers trying to produce AI capable of composing novels. According to Lin's article, this challenge "has generated more than four hundred novels," although they're "more intriguing for how than were created than for their content." Here's the website for NaNoGenMo:

National Novel Generation Month

While I have no desire to cede my creative operations to a computer, I've often wished for a program that would take my detailed outline and compose a novel from it. The first-draft stage is the phase of writing I enjoy least; software that would present me with a draft ready to be edited would be a great boon. And apparently that's not an impossible goal, judging from a novel produced in collaboration between human authors and an AI, which advanced beyond the first round in a contest:

AI Novel

According to the article, "The novel was co-written by by Hitoshi Matsubara of Future University Hakodate, his team, and the AI they created. By all accounts, the novel was mostly written by the humans. The L.A. Times reported that there was about 80% human involvement." The process worked this way: “Humans decided the plot and character details of the novel, then entered words and phrases from an existing novel into a computer, which was able to construct a new book using that information.” Sounds like magic!

Still, we're in no danger of losing our jobs to robot authors yet. Aside from the novelty of the concept, I do wonder why we'd need AI-generated fiction on top of the thousands of books each year that already languish unread on Amazon pages, buried in the avalanche of new releases.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Going Deeper

A few weeks ago, the associate rector of our church delivered a sermon sparked by the question, "What do you want?" Beyond and beneath the superficial needs and wishes, what do you REALLY want out of life? As a recurring motif in the talk, she repeated several times, "Go deeper." The admonition to "go deeper" applies to writing, too.

In the January 2020 RWR (the magazine of the Romance Writers of America), Shirley Jump's regular column "Your Writing Coach" dealt with the topic, "Creating deeper motivation: The rule of six." What does your protagonist want and why? We have more than one motivation for almost everything we do, and in creating a believable protagonist, the writer should delve deeper. Jump recommends digging down for six layers of motivation, hence the title of the article. By the time the writer gets to number six, she says, the process should become hard. She also notes that the character's true, deepest motivation is not the one he or she recognizes on the surface. The first motivations that come to mind are likely to be external factors, while the last layers uncovered tend to be "the deeper internal motivations." One of her examples imagines a character who wants to save her grandmother's farm because that's the wellspring of her happy childhood memories. The deeper motivation not recognized by the character herself, however, is that the farm serves as her "security blanket" because she doesn't want to leave her familiar community.

Jump demonstrates the technique by analyzing the character of Shrek from the first movie in his series. First, he wants to get the intruders out of his swamp. To accomplish that purpose, he has to confront Lord Farquaad. Shrek is angry and "helpless to fix this himself." He's angry because he wants his sanctuary (the swamp) back. The root cause of this desire, according to Jump, is that he withdraws from other people and creatures to avoid pain (as demonstrated by his preemptive rejection of Donkey). She refers to "layering in" the characters' deeper feelings and motivations and also recommends making sure each scene conveys some aspect of those motivations.

Her "saving the farm" example brings to mind GONE WITH THE WIND. In the beginning, teenage Scarlett thinks she'll attain complete happiness if she marries Ashley. She barely hears her Irish father's passionate speech about the importance of land, the only thing that lasts. Her obsession with Ashley lingers until the very end, when she wakes up to the realization that her alleged love for him has been only a girlish fantasy all along. Meanwhile, though, a newly discovered motivation dominates her actual behavior and decisions—saving Tara. All her major choices (except marrying Rhett, and she admits she does even that partly for the money), such as tricking Frank into marriage and becoming a hardheaded businesswoman, are motivated by the need to support Tara and her family. The deeper motivation for that need is the role of Tara as a symbol of stability and material security. The deepest motivation breaks out in the iconic mid-point scene when she fiercely vows, "I'll never be hungry again."

The "layering" image strongly resonates with me, because that's how I tend to revise my fiction. Many writing experts advise that proper revision consists of cutting, that later drafts should be shorter than the first draft because rewriting should trim extraneous material. Well, not my revisions; my second drafts are almost always longer than the first. That's because I start with dialogue, action, and necessary description and exposition. The emotional, sensory, and to some extent descriptive elements of scenes are always on the "thin" side the first time around. I need to expand and enhance those elements to make scenes and characters come to life. Sure, I often cut on the micro level, since my sentences are often unnecessarily convoluted or wordy (maybe a side effect of having produced so much academic nonfiction over the years). On the macro level, though, the total word count nevertheless increases more often than it decreases. In my current WIP, the heroine faces the certainty of losing her job in six months because the business (an independent bookstore) is going to close. Therefore, it becomes vital, not just a pleasant prospect, to sell the graphic novel series she and the hero have created to a major publisher, so she'll have a financial cushion. Digging to the next layer down, getting that cushion is important to her not only for practical reasons but for emotional ones. Because her father's gambling addiction almost destroyed her parents' marriage in her teens and young adult years, she's obsessed with financial security. Her unhappy memories of those years also make it hard for her to trust the hero and lead her to leap to negative assumptions whenever it seems he might let her down. Those don't quite add up to six motivations, but the general idea is the same.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Work-Life Balance for Writers

Speaking of burnout (last week), coincidentally the current issue of RWR, the magazine of the Romance Writers of America, contains an article by multicultural romance author LaQuette, rebutting the assumption that "work and productivity is the only measure of success." It's titled "Passion, Productivity and Technology: Work-Life Balance." Since RWR articles can't be accessed by the general public, I'll list her points:

"Define your goals."

"Control your work; don't let it control you."

"Be honest" (with yourself about how much work you can realistically accomplish in a given time span).

"Maintain equilibrium in a healthy way" (by organizing your work schedule to leave time and energy for other things).

"Working lunches should not be a thing."

"Limit your access to work and work's access to you." (Self-explanatory in today's frenetic atmosphere of instant connection. Don't feel obligated to keep your phone on all the time or answer every e-mail the moment it arrives. Happily, that's a problem I don't have, because I don't own a smart phone. Just a dumb, basic flip phone, which I turn on only to make—rare—calls out.)

"Make time for the non-writing things you enjoy."

"Find a way to be social" (applies to introverts, too).

"Recognize and admit your issues; know it's okay to ask for help."

"Personal interests are important, too."

"Recognize the importance of goofing off."

As you may guess from these taglines, the author continually emphasizes, in a variety of terms, the importance of setting aside opportunities for relaxation, personal time, and fun. She summarizes, "All work and no play doesn't make LaQuette a dull girl; it makes her a snappy, disgruntled ogre...." I especially like the recommendation to goof off. I can do that!

That's goofing off in the context of a routine that also allows for a balance of work and other activities directed toward one's own personal goals, of course. However: "Let no one make you feel bad about taking your downtime seriously." The combination of "seriously" and "downtime" in the same sentence invites us to think hard about the apparent paradox.

I'm not sure I fully agree with LaQuette's broad statement, "Hard work to the point of mental, emotional, and physical collapse is what we're encouraged to do." It seems to me that our culture is beginning to repudiate that destructive mind-set. Otherwise, why would we see so many articles about work-life balance such as this one?

On a different topic, try to pick up a copy of the July issue of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the first moon landing, the cover story focuses on space travel, past, present, and future, with lavish illustrations.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Surviving the Gold Rush as a Writer

The latest issue of RWR (the members' magazine of Romance Writers of America) includes an article titled "The Key to a Lifelong Career" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, whose online articles on the business of writing can be found here:

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Her essay in the May RWR focuses on how to avoid burnout but ranges over a number of related topics—handling success (some writers try to replicate the process that led to their success without really understanding it and end up "working harder" without working "smarter"), reasons for burnout (e.g., pushing oneself to churn out too many books in a year), diminishing returns in income, what it means to find oneself in a mature market instead of a new one that's expanding at an exponential rate, overextending oneself in terms of expenses and how to reduce them, and switching one's writing business from a "manufacturing model" to an "artisanal model."

One section of this article is headed "Surviving the Gold Rush." The "gold rush" designates the exponentially expanding phase of a new market when it seems easy to get into the field and make bushels of money. Rusch writes in insightful detail about the rise of e-books and the early boom in independent publishing, followed by the leveling-off phase. She discusses the three stages in the typical way "markets develop over time": (1) The gold rush, when growth doubles, quadruples, or more each year. (2) The plateau, with large but not exponential growth. (3) The mature market, when growth still occurs, but it's slow and steady.

Personally, I never experienced the gold rush, at least nowhere near the extent Rusch describes. The closest I came to it happened in the early years with Ellora's Cave (now closed), when e-books were still an exciting novelty and EC was, although not the only game in town for that subgenre, the highest-profile and biggest-selling publisher of erotic romance for women. I was lucky enough to get in at a stage when, by publishing with EC regularly, I could count on a nice check each month. But the levels of success Rusch writes about—authors who earned royalties in the tens of thousands of dollars per month at the height of the "gold rush"—boggle my mind. Likewise, the allusions to authors becoming discouraged because their incomes dropped to half of that—still more per month than I made annually in my best years. In that respect, the indie superstars inhabit a different world from mine!

The priorities she recommends for hard-working writers concerned about potential burnout, however, apply to everyone. In order of descending importance, they are: self-care; spending time with loved ones; writing new words; publishing new words; whatever keeps you healthy and happy. While I can't point you to this particular article because it's in a members-only publication, you can find lots of related useful information and counsel in Rusch's posts at the link cited above. She provides plenty of specific details and hard facts, with numbers.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Emigrating To The Future

Lately, I've been scampering around the internet on a research project that actually relates to this whole issue of changing the perception of the Romance Genre in the minds of the general public.

I have 5 independent observations to toss at you, and a tentative conclusion that will no doubt change radically as I continue to delve into the past looking for the future. (few have ever accused me of living in the present!)

1.

I am observing, everywhere, how the perception of the Science Fiction genre and its fandom has changed.

SF is now mainstream.  People think it's scifi and have no clue what they're saying when they say that.  They think what's on the syfy channel is SF.  There are still a few who know better.  But basically, the battle SF fen fought through the 1960's and 1970's has been won so well and so thoroughly that people born in the 1980's are pretty much unaware it ever happened, nevermind what it was about or what the consequences of winning have been.     

On #scifichat on twitter on July 2, 2010 the discussion hinged on SF fandom.  Even with the usual well read and well rounded viewing habits of the participants, I discovered that even some of the older people had no idea what fandom is, where it came from, what it's customs are/were/will be or actually anything about it.

The most ignorant of those folks had very deeply entrenched opinions about fandom and were absolutely sure they knew what they were talking about, especially if they had University degrees in social sciences.

But I was talking about something they'd never heard of and couldn't believe ever had existed.(it still does).

With the restrictions on twitter (140 characters per tweet; and they block you if you tweet too much too fast - they always block me when I get into a #chat) I couldn't bridge that enormous cultural gap.

But I did get the impression nobody wanted to have that gap bridged.

They know what fandom is and therefore don't need to know anything else about it.

Fandom is (for them) just a random scattering of folks who are fanatical about some thing - any thing. True afficionados are just crazier than the others. And that's it.

They seem to feel that since it's never changed, it never will change - or that was the impression I got from their (twitter restricted) tweets. I'm sure others have the same problems I do with twitter (though I love the medium!)

Yet a couple decades ago, the wide, general public knew what fandom was, and knew it wasn't what people today think it was. The general public knew the truth that I lived. Now they don't.

So I'm not going to explain what fandom really is/was because today, people aren't interested.  To them it's irrelevant "history" that probably never existed. Besides, they believe, it couldn't possibly matter.

2.

Which brings me to another distressing point about "History" today.

I saw a "man/woman on the street" interview of younger people (20-somethings) for the 4th of July where people were asked what the 4th means -- they didn't know.

One hesitantly said Independence Day but wasn't sure.

Asked Independence from whom? Another whole set of folks didn't know. When prompted with random countries, (Greece, Japan) they'd guess any country except England.

When asked who lead the Revolutionary War army on America's side, they didn't know - not one said "George Washington" (OK, the network probably just left out the folks who did know the answers).

But the level of ignorance among a wide variety (apparent economic classes, ethnicities, and speaking accents) of people made my hair stand on end.

They had only one thing in common - what seems to me to be "youth" but surely doesn't seem that way to them. (20-30 somethings)

Certainly, the network had to search hard to find people that ignorant, but the fact that they found some makes my hair stand on end in a way it hasn't ever in my life. That's just terrifying. Worse was their attitude toward their ignorance -- as if it didn't matter at all. 

3.

In wandering the internet looking at the past as it is presented to today's public (who reads books anymore?) I discovered something I knew but hadn't remembered or considered important until I just looked at it.

Juxtapose these 3 turning points in History and see if you see a pattern.

The Science Fiction Writers of America was founded by damon knight (one person on that #scifichat on fandom knew that damon knight was never to be capitalized, the others likely hadn't ever heard of him) in 1965.  Google him up, or read his wikipedia entry. 

He had founded the N3F (National Fantasy Fan Federation) complete with charter and bylaws, officers and elections, as an amalgam of several local SF fan clubs in 1941.

The Romance Writers of America was founded (according to their website) in 1980. I don't know if there was a formally organized Romance Fandom prior to 1980, but there was The Romantic Times. What preceded that Romance version of Locus? 

4.

"Steam Punk" is huge right now. Has been burgeoning for a while. 

One online definition (they vary enormously) calls "Steam Punk" the intersection between technology and romance, and points to the 1980's as the origin. (when the Romance Writers organization was founded)

There were a large handful of TV shows that played fast and loose with myth and history and had a lot of marvelous fun with it all. Xena Warrior Princess (TV 1995) was one that comes to mind. Hercules was another.  The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne ( IMDB.COM describes it as "The fantastic steampunk adventures of the future science fiction writer and his friends, the Foggs and Passepartout.")

Books, TV shows, music, a thriving and burgeoning culture has grown up around playing fast and loose with "History" just for fun. A bunch I know on twitter are steam punk writers and fans.  It sells. 

The fun of it is that the reader/viewer knows what our "main universe" history really was, and sees this as alternative universe where great inventions of today were crafted out of more primitive technology. It's really GREAT FUN.

It's great fun if it is actually all in fun.

If everyone watching is in on the joke, it's fun. 

It was fun in the 1980's for readers educated in the 1950's who were 40-something and a little bored with the same-old-same-old.  Also correlate that change with the content of the Star Trek fanzines of the 1980's.  Everyone then loved having this history-bone tickled with these interesting twists. 

But the current 30 somethings interviewed "on the street" who didn't know what the 4th of July is about are the ones born in 1980 who grew up on this "all in fun" distortion of history, both in technology and in social evolution.

5.

There's another wonderful good-fun trend in Romance Genre, especially in Historical Romance.

We now depict heroines of the Victorian era and before as modern day women who fearlessly assert their rights as indepedent adult human beings.

Now way, WAY back in history, and in different parts of the world, the modern attitude women have toward themselves has in fact been a natural part of a woman's self-image and the place of the woman in the world.

Subjugation was really short and temporary, viewed over tens of thousands of years.

But - real history as it really happened produced many generations of women who were kept in the state of childhood - dependent for food, clothing, shelter and even name, identity, and most especially self-esteem and self-respect on some man. That does things to the inside of your head.

Older Romance novels (pre-1980 when the Romance Writers of America was founded and Steam Punk exploded onto the scene) depict that childish state of mind pretty well because (despite advances made during World War II) women did define themselves by their man.

Modern Romance novels do not depict the conflict, the clash, between the independent woman and the world around her the way it really was say from 1850 to 1960. 

The pioneering women of the 1600's and 1700's in the USA were more "modern" than the women left behind in England, France, Netherlands, Germany.  The ones that weren't died and took their men with them.  But that changed, and prior self-respect was forgotten, and had to be regained in the 1970's. 

OK, it's not much fun to read from the POV of such a subservient, immature woman today.  I have a diary written by my grandmother.  I've seen the real attitude from the inside.  Today's Romance novels set in that era are incorrect depictions of the women of that time (1800's, early 1900's). 

But depicting our modern viewpoint in that bygone era and then adding any sort of acceptance among the general culture (even of other women) is distorting history in the same way that not-teaching 4th of July via fiction, and not-depicting the development of technology the way it really did happen, distorts history.

That distortion is just fine, just great good fun, if everyone is in on the joke. But just think how much of your vision of the past has been gained from novels written recently (not in the era depicted), and how much is derived from (gasp) Hollywood.  Are you one of those in on the joke?  Or one the joke is being put over on?

----Putting it all together--------

The ignorance of a random sampling of the person-on-the-street juxtaposed to the obliviousness of SF reader/viewers who really are experts in the field, juxtaposed to Steam Punk, juxtaposed to the evolution of the Romance field seems very alarming.


Today, the Post Office is applying to raise the price of a stamp 2 whole cents at once because Congress has not passed the bill that would allow them to eliminate Saturday delivery.

Since 6th grade until the 1990's, I have lived for the snailmail delivery.

Today, I don't care when the mailman comes. Nothing urgent ever comes in the snailmail, and I don't pay bills by snailmail. I rarely file manuscripts by snailmail. I rarely get paid by snailmail, and I don't even open snailmail catalogs to shop styles.

All my friends and business contacts are online, -- even my family. We may send packages for presents -- but usually via Amazon or some other outfit that mails it for you. I do more than half my shopping online. 

I have emigrated to the future.

I have forgotten my native language.

I am so far removed from "that culture" that I couldn't write a novel set there. 

It's a laborious, impossible chore for me to find an envelope, address it, find a return address sticker (I still have a few), find a stamp (usually I go to a dropstore near me and pay extra), and mail a letter.

When I got online with Prodigy and later via AOL, I emigrated to the future and never looked back.

I was never very comfortable in the past. Coming to the future was like coming home at last.

When they launched Web 2.0 with all the social networking, I tried it out and I've reported to you about how I see it changing the world (again) into another new future that I like better than the old future.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/i-love-web-20.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/blogging-and-reading-and-blogging-oh-my.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-cb-radio-come-on-back.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/writing-tips-tweets.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html

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

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/fix-for-publishing-business-model.html

At some point, no doubt, a huge discontinuity, a generation-gap, a tech-gap will come along that I won't want to leap over.(yes, I want an iphone but don't have one - I want an ipad but don't yet have one - I do have an e-book reader that can get online via wireless phone connection and I will upgrade that soon). 

But so far, I just revel in this current world, and the future I see for it as people communicate with people in new ways.

This is the world I was born to live in, and I just don't want to look back. My attention is still focused on the future, the farther future the better I see it.

But I've been looking back recently, plucking out "dots" in the development that led to this world and seeing new patterns I hadn't noticed while galloping forward and leaping that gap.

And these last few weeks, I've had experiences like the 5 noted above where young people (even teens) who actually were born in this world have a very distorted idea of how the world got this way.

It's not that they don't know -- it's that what they know isn't true.

Well, not maybe "isn't true" because you don't really need to know "the truth" to arrive at useful conclusions.

It's that what they know isn't "true enough" -- not close enough, to be useful.  They're missing the pattern that makes the world make sense. 

What they are convinced of is a series of dots that form a line that does not lead from "then" to "now."

The distortion of history in modern fiction has given them a set of historical "dots" that don't make sense when you put them together into a pattern, but they're assured by everyone else that the dots they have do make sense.  So they see nonsense and are told it is sense.  

Since "then" is so irrelevant to "now" (because of the internet mostly) they aren't interested in resolving this confusion of sense and nonsense.  Why should they be?  I wouldn't be. 

Microsoft comes out with a new operating system and the world changes (again) and none of your old programs work anymore.  The past has to be dismissed, wiped out, expunged, because it'll only confuse you in trying to operate your new software.  In a month or two you won't remember the old commands. 

Forget the past, it'll only make the present unlivable. 

I can understand that because I was never interested in anything that happened before I was born, either.

I grew up in a world totally disconnected from that which my parents and grandparents grew up in.   And I had my eye on this world, "the future" where I wanted to go to live, where I do live now.

I really don't see why anyone born in say, 1980, should be at all interested in 1945 - or 1776 for that matter.

But in order to steer this world from where we are now to where I would like to see us go next, where life will be even easier, where people will be more friendly and less stressed out, better fed, healthier, -- in order to steer us there, those who are making the decisions need a line along which to extrapolate into that future.

They need some real "dots" from long ago, just a few, but ones that actually were the seeds of the present we live in and the futures we might craft from here.

Steam Punk worldbuilders haven't yet gotten the knack of re-creating the past to be possible seeds of the present - and contain the hints of our future.  Or at least I haven't seen those novels, and apparently the people I've encountered lately haven't seen them either. 

So the decision makers who are today in the prime of life don't have that line of dots from the far past that can lead us to the far future. 

The dots have been erased. Fandom was never organized and never had a constitution, elections, officers, and structure long before the Romance Writers of America existed. People built high-tech gadgets that did today's amazing things out of wood and iron, powering with steam. Women never had to knuckle under and remain children into adulthood.

Perhaps that's why "Lost Colony" stories, (like my own Molt Brother and City of a Million Legends -- see http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com for free chapters) are so popular.

Today's 20-somethings are actually living in one of these Lost Colony worlds where "Earth" is a myth and nobody knows where it is located. These people have a history that started about 10 years before they were born, not more, and they don't believe the stories their parents tell them.  In fact, their parents may park them in front of the TV instead of telling them stories of their family's history. (Yes, I know people are finding long lost relatives online via sharing family tree information, but you have to know something to find something.)

There's an attitude I've seen that anyone who remembers anything at all that happened or existed prior to 1980 just doesn't know what they're talking about.

"The way it is now is the way it's always been," seems to be the irrefutable new reality for a lot of people. 

And yet, wandering the web searching out events of various years, I've found a lot of stuff I remember -- but had forgotten just as I'd forgotten my native language when I emigrated to the future. 

I pointed one out to you recently --  that the Supreme Court handed down the legal ruling that killed the mid-list in 1979, about a year before the Romance Writers of America was founded.

http://www.sfwa.org/bulletin/articles/thor.htm

That decision created another huge canyon between the past and the future, changing the entire business model of publishing more radically than the internet and e-books yet have. It's one change I didn't want to see happen. I still prefer really "mid" mid-list style novels (which live on in the e-book field) and movies. 

If you want to follow my trek through history, you should read that article on the Supreme Court decision, then read about Lucille Ball on Wikipedia and what she had to do with Star Trek - and why that is important in shaping the world we live in today.

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

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

Follow all that and you'll see how CBS (the first network to turn down Star Trek) has now ended up owning and controlling Star Trek.  Just imagine how devoted they are to its success because of that.  The reason Molt Brother and City of a Million Legends don't have the sequels that were planned is that they were "inherited" by a publisher in just exactly the way Trek has been passed from owner to owner. 

Also note how the film studios ate each other just as the publishers ate each other.

Note how that has changed film exactly as it has changed publishing.

Read Wikipedia about how Lucille Ball was the central pole of the "mid-list" movie, what used to be called the B-movie, and how her taste shaped Star Trek, and the world we live in today.  The TV shows she chose to back were mid-list fare and she was very good at spotting what the public would go for. 

The whole story is there on sfwa.org and wikipedia if you have enough dots in your head about real history to make the pattern out of the dots in these articles.  

And now I need more data about the Romance genre writing careers of the 1980's. I live in the future. I've forgotten the 1980's and the language we spoke before that is gibberish to me now.  

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com