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