Depiction Part 28 - Depicting A Grifter And His Mark by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Depiction
Part 28
Depicting A Grifter And His Mark
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Index to the Depiction Series is here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/04/index-to-depiction-series-by-jacqueline.html

During this long series on how to SHOW DON'T TELL many intangible story elements such as Nostalgia, Love, Hatred, Fury, Alien Culture, whole battlefields, Paranormal Forces, and so on, we have delved into the major headlines of the times, searched history, read a lot of novels, and thought deeply about lofty topics.

Now let's examine a kind of Relationship that generates story both in everyday real life and in novels. 

As Romance writers, we know that one of the greatest turn-ons in a Relationship is a disparity of "power" (the dominatrix, the he-man hunk, Kings, Princes falling in love with Cinderella, Pygmalion, etc.).

A Power disparity can also be a huge buzzkill for Romance of any kind.

Humans easily hate people who are "different" -- and one visible difference is wealth which translates into the power to solve or avoid problems which literally kill ordinary people.

The Aristocrat drunken gambler who commits a crime, meets the constable on the street and is offered a ride home.  The day-laborer drunken gambler who commits the same crime is pilloried, maybe beaten and abused first, certainly doomed to death or a life as a cripple.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/01/depiction-part-5-depicting-dynastic.html

Disparity of social position, often denoted by gender, also has worked that way in some cultures throughout history.  Even today there are places where the law discounts a woman's word and disallows women from owning or controlling wealth and the power that comes with it.

We see many headlines, pushed by expensive and slick Press Releases so that the headline appears from a number of sources simultaneously, thus hammering home the impression that this item is a)true and b)important.

The world of the Press Release, and the world of media editorial selectivity are both closed to your average novel reader.

We are admonished to "check your sources" -- to disbelieve Fake News because it come from this or that media outlet.  This admonishment is, itself, suspicious -- as audience, you "pay" all those people to check the truth of an item before disseminating it.  You pay with suffering through commercials and occasionally buying something.

Media editors and reporters (and Press Release writers who are Public Relations experts) are paid (often not very well) to nail down 3 sources on each news item, and each of the 3 must be "independent" of the others -- in other words, not reprinting the same Press Release.

Reporters are paid to sift through Press Releases and find the things you need to know -- then make phone calls, go to events, interview real people (not Public Relations representatives) and determine if the Press Release is true and that the wording gives the facts, without spin.

Every news story arriving in your inbox has multiple hours of depressing, often futile drudgery and boredom behind it.  Or if it does not, then it should.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/02/depiction-part-7-using-media-to-advance.html

The writer has to discover a view of human society in general (through history -- based on human nature), then use the art of storytelling to select details that sketch that view for the reader.

Art is a selective representation of reality -- and the screen used to select which details to include (and exclude) is called THEME. 

Here are some examples of THEME for a novel about a Grifter and his Mark.

1) The Media Always Lies

2) The Media Always Tells The Truth

3) The Media Spins A Narrative Tale To Control Popular Vote

4) The Media Serves The Wealthy Masters Who Own The Outlet

5) The Media Panders To Its Audience To Make A Profit

6) The Media Hires Honest Kids And Turns Them Into Grifters

7) There Is Nothing Wrong With Being A Grifter If You Use The Talent To Righteous Purpose

Notice those are statements.  THEME can also be stated as a Question - and the story does not have to ram an answer into the reader's mind. 

The idea that a scam artist can be righteous is the core of many TV Series, very popular ones, such as

It Takes A Thief

Remington Steele
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remington_Steele

Leverage

White Collar

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

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-4.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/12/sizing-up-competition-part-2-winning.html

The thesis behind these shows and so many similar ones is that the End Justifies The Means. 

You can lie, cheat, misdirect, fool, and manipulate people and it is perfectly righteous, justified, provided it is for their own good.

The thesis behind "for their own good" is that people don't know what is good for them. 

So humans who know what's good are morally obligated to do (any nefarious deed) to force ignorant humans to choose what is good for them - a free will choice. 

After so many decades of very popular, extremely well made TV Series based on the theme of "End Justifies Means" general audiences see nothing wrong with that. 

So you can use this ploy to depict truly admirable characters that the reader will embrace whole heartedly.

You can create a Character who believes that if you love someone, it is perfectly justified to trick them into loving you back. 

You dress to attract them, choose a perfume that doesn't make them sneeze even if it stinks to you, wear wicked high heels that sculpt your legs, laugh at their jokes, hide your intelligence, and pretend you like sports and getting drunk.  Wear a skirt you can't run in so they have you trapped. 

Or if you are a guy, you choose gifts to trigger gratitude so you can get her into bed, you take her to places you can't afford, laugh at her bad jokes, flatter and tease her into thinking you like her because of her formidable achievements not her bra size or pert ass.

In other words, when someone attracts your sexual interest, you may behave in ways you would not ordinarily choose to, for the purpose of attracting their sexual interest to you.  This is not considered dishonest until after the Honeymoon. 

Every human knows the "game" and is expected to discount the dis-information.  If you are naive enough to believe what you see, you get what you deserve. 

Most humans don't think those courting behaviors make the person into a grifter, or the beloved into a Mark.

Maybe your Aliens look at flirtation and the age old human mating dance that way -- as dishonest and abuse of power.

Yes, normal human behavior, perfectly well sanctioned by society and firmly counted on by the Mark, could easily be seen as reprehensible power abuse.

Aliens could easily define humanity by the disparity in "power" between the genders -- all women are weak, all men strong. 

To a human, a disparity of "power" in a relationship can be crazy-sexy or serious buzzkill.

The entire profession of Public Relations (PR) is founded on the use of advanced mathematics and "big data" to gain power over and control the behavior of large segments of the population (for their own good).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_relations#History

Statistics has been the mainstay of tricking people for a long time.  Things may be changing.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jan/19/crisis-of-statistics-big-data-democracy

Tricking people pays very well.

So tricksters have become more proficient as audiences have become more savy.

If you are constructing a Romance novel, consider whether one of your characters is 'conning' the other.  Then decide when in the novel you want your reader to twig to the trick. 

One way to be transparent to the reader while making an admirable, smart, savvy Character completely oblivious to the trick is to use the False Hobson's Choice.

First establish that the Character to be tricked understands their life and the world as a series of Free Will Choices -- but all options are listed in a menu that this Character does not know is populated with the options a powerful person approves of.

To be well and truly tricked, a Character must feel perfectly free to choose otherwise.  At the point in the novel where you reveal the trick (usually 3/4 point), the Character comes to understand that all the options available for Free Will Choice actually lead to exactly the same result, "You Are Screwed." 

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/03/theme-plot-integration-part-7-fallacy.html

The False Hobson's Choice has been discussed previously.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/05/theme-conflict-integration-part-2.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/10/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-5.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/04/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-7.html

The Hobson's Choice concept of a Free Choice where the only item on the options menu is 1 thing is an old tradition explained here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson's_choice

By extension, if all the items on the options menu are actually the same thing by different names, you also have the ploy of the Hobson's Choice, which gives power over the naive victim to the perpetrator.

You could set a hot Romance in a political election where your Main Character sleuths out the hidden (by PR tricks) fact that both candidates are beholden to the same Big Money Donor, and will implement that Donor's agenda. 

The "aristocrats" who pull the strings on today's Earth (most all countries) don't care who wins, but only that the people gladly accept the aristocrat's agenda as their free will choice. 

You can translate that Situation and the set of Themes to a setting such as an online Dating Service that might be manipulating marriages for the purpose of guiding human genetics.

Politics set in a Galactic Civilization would qualify as Science Fiction Romance, as would Romance set in a Genetics Lab.

Maybe a dating service is funded by a University Department that obtained the Grant for genetics research.

Maybe the University Department head is an Alien sent here to reshape human genetics (to what purpose?)

Or you can rip an issue from modern headlines that will likely persist for many decades, and set the story on some planet lightyears away where some human colonists crash among Aliens.

C. J. Cherryh's fabulous Foreigner Series uses that setting to entangle the reader in Alien politics.

Maybe your Alien Planet, infested with a small but growing colony of humans, belongs to a galactic consortium of planets.  The humans are a problem - politically, maybe genetically, maybe disease breeders, maybe disseminating some religion.  The Consortium insists the planet choose between being Alien Dominated or Human Dominated (but humans are a minority).

It would likely be a human who notes that all either/or choices between two elements that are equally odious are attempts to dominate by mental castration.

Either/or choices are based on the Aristotelian model of the universe which views reality as finite and "yes" as precluding "no." 

Human creativity sees the universe as infinite and infinitely malleable.  You will find a great depiction of this human view of the universe in Star Trek: The Original Series ( ST:ToS ) and all of Captain Kirk's various creative solutions to problems.  He solved the problem even if it meant violating the Prime Directive and got away with it.

Humans don't accept limits readily. 
A vast majority may accept Microsoft's dropdown menu choices, shrug off the grayed out ones, and make a free will choice from the black ones.

But Hackers do not do that.  If the program doesn't behave the way they want it to, they rewrite the program -- and they do it with pure glee.

That personality trait now gravitating toward "hacking" has been active in human history, probably since before there were humans.

It is human creativity.  You can't keep humans in a box for long.  Someone will figure out that if you wet the cardboard, you can poke through to the wider world.  If no choices on the menu are acceptable, create some new choices and write your own menu.  That's what humans do -- and nothing spurs a man to do that faster than winning a woman's love.

Most humans can be convinced they are helpless and without any recourse than the ones on the menu populated by their manipulators.  What if, among your Aliens, most Aliens were like our Hackers and only a few would accept pre-populated menus as the only choices?

An Alien Interstellar Consortium could never get away with demanding a human/Alien colonized world choose between being human dominated or alien dominated.  They would invent other choices, or un-invent the very concept of domination.

Here's the principle to remember as you are plotting your novel.

The Grifter Character tells the Mark what the problem is, and then reveals the only solution.

The pattern is clear in the Gypsy Curse Scam.  The Grifter finds a rich Mark, arranges for accomplices to inflict some bad-luck incidents on the Mark, then explains to the Mark that this run of bad luck is due to the Mark's money being cursed.  But don't worry, I know a Gypsy who can cleanse that cash for you.  Perhaps a demonstration is orchestrated to show how luck changes after the tainted item is cleansed.

The Mark hands over the cash, or jewels, or whatever, and never sees it again -- never sees the Grifter or any of his assistants again, has no idea where to find them.

It is the same thing as the handsome suitor who finally gets the woman into bed -- has his fun for a while -- and one morning just leaves.

The Grifter's main tool in getting what he wants is the false Free Will Choice - the Hobson's Choice - either take this horse or no horse at all.

Both options are equally unacceptable -- be a human dominated planet or an alien dominated planet; go to bed with me or wind up an old maid.

Most humans readily believe the choices listed on the menu are the only choices there are.  They don't look in the back of the stable to see what other horses might be there.  They don't jailbreak their iPhone to see what it can do with third party programs. 

Can curiosity and independence be bred out of humans by an Alien genetics program run through an online Dating Service? 

Can humans stranded on an Alien world be bred for compliance or defiance at the behest of the Aliens?

The trick in keeping humans happy is to convince the humans they have a variety of free will choices.  Give them choices.  Just make sure all the items on the menu are equally favorable to your purposes, so it doesn't matter what the human chooses.

Grifters leverage this human trait.  What would your Aliens think of humans who manipulate other humans that way?

Old Science Fiction used to rely on the Aliens having heard our Radio or seen our Television to learn our languages.  Yes, Earth leaks signal, but somehow I doubt this would be possible unless the Aliens were very close to Earth (our signals are weak). 

So, what would your Aliens make of current Television News broadcasts -- or can they get Cable or Satellite?  Would they understand the trickery?  Would they admire successful tricksters?  Would they scheme to insert "fake news" items onto the internet and wait to see if they become TV News items?

How could a writer use Fake News to introduce Soul Mates to each other?  Kidnapped by a UFO?

Watch the real news for short lists of your options - either it is this way or it is that way - try to find another way.  If "they" tell you what options you may choose among, create another option or three and you will have your Science Fiction Romance blockbuster title.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Cozy Science Fiction Part 1 by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Cozy Science Fiction

Part 1

by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

You all know the genre sub-division called Cozy Mystery.  I've been reading a lot of those lately, and enjoying the amateur detective/Romance genre blend. 

Here is a gorgeous example of a Cozy Romantic Mystery series.  

https://smile.amazon.com/Paradise-Valley-Mysteries-Box-Book/dp/B00XLYRBKE/

This is by the justly famous writer, Debra Burroughs.  

And boy are these great novels!  Fabulous series. Highly recommended.

The Paradise Mystery series starts with the lead Character, Emily Parker, facing life after her husband is murdered.  Beset by financial ruin and major trauma, she takes over her late husband's private detective business -- and begins to unfold, unwrap, delve into, and discover layer upon layer of "my world was never what it seemed to be."  She deemed herself "happy" -- and now finds what she thought her life was actually was only a thin, brittle facade.  She becomes a scientist of sorts, insistently researching the truth of the matter of her husband's death (and many other mysteries).  

So this series starts with a life catastrophe of the main character, but the world around her is stable.  The world is not what she thought it was, but it holds still while she figures out what is really going on.

"What is really going on..." is the main theme of the Alien Series by Gini Koch.  I've just finished reading her ALIEN NATION:

https://smile.amazon.com/Alien-Nation-Novels-Gini-Koch/dp/0756411432/

I find these two series, while very different, have a similar feel to them.

In the Paradise Valley Mysteries, the main Character's world has fallen apart leaving a shattered mess of apparently disconnected mysteries preventing her from building a new life.

In Gini Koch's Alien Series, the main Character Kitty finds "love at first sight" practically on the first page of book 1, and that love sucks her into situation after situation that is not what it seems, though the catastrophe she must avert each time is very real, and very destructive.  

Story is always about the point in a life's arc where things go wrong, go badly, go strangely, or just go to pieces.  Take Bilbo Baggins -- nice, stable, safe life until magical adventure comes calling.  Where the conflicting elements meet is where the story and the plot begin.  And sometimes your biggest conflict is with an ally.

So science fiction, often about combat or war, very commonly starts or contains a catastrophe.  

Here is a quote from a website page about Cozy Catastrophe Science Fiction:

http://bestsciencefictionbooks.com/cosy-catastrophe-science-fiction.php

-------quote----------

What is Cosy Catastrophe Science Fiction?

The Cosy Catastrophe, or Cozy Catastrophe depending on where you learned English, is a narrowly defined sub-genre that was hugely popular in the 1950s and 60s, especially in Britain. The term was first used by Brian Aldiss in Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, describing John Wyndham's books: “The essence of cosy catastrophe is that the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off.”

More generally, Cosy Catastrophe features an upheaval that significantly changes the world, usually many many people die, but the event itself is rather short lived and the characters in the story don't dwell on it. The world itself is an everyday sort of world, it's familiar (and therefore “cosy”), it's even sometimes a bit of a retreat—a new life where you get to quit your day job and steal luxury cars. The world may be falling apart, but you can still enjoy a cup of tea and rejoice in the fact that you don't have to deal with your boss on Monday.

- See more at: http://bestsciencefictionbooks.com/cosy-catastrophe-science-fiction.php#sthash.WhtNLdF7.dpuf

-----end quote----------

I cheerfully disagree with Brian Aldiss whose scholarship and fiction writing are impeccably British and unquestionably the foundation of the science fiction field.

I also disliked John Wyndham's novels -- not because they were badly done, but because they do not depict the essential realities of the world that I see.  

My disagreements with the 1940's founders of science fiction are mostly a matter of taste.  I see Aliens as potential Romantic Interest -- and maybe more than just interest.

And so while these great men have established the field of science fiction, and while I grew up reading their work, I see the world as energized by love, and driven toward union and family.  A stable world arises from stable love.  

"Happily Ever After" is one form of stability.  

So I see a market for science fiction where the Characters are fully engaged in their world, as Debra Burroughs and Gini Koch both depict.  Catastrophe may come to a Character's personal life, or to the world they live in, but in every instance the real story happens when the Character dives into the Catastrophe and sets things right again by doing the Impossible, thus changing the definition of Possible.

Where the Characters' actions affect their world, and where love conquers all (not where love retreats from all)  is where Science Fiction, Mystery, and Romance genres come together.

Not all science fiction plots contain a catastrophe - though that is a sub-genre that becomes popular in bleak times - but all science fiction contains a mystery and a voyage of discovery, an adventure outside ordinary life or what the Character has considered to be ordinary even if it is not.  Kitty, Gini Koch's main character, is always greeting the bizarre, unreal, monstrous challenges as "routine."  That is the attitude of the Science Fiction Character -- strange is normal.

This Brian Aldiss definition of Cozy Catastrophe Science Fiction does describe a popular, extant genre.  But here, on Alien Romance, we can explore the Literature of Ideas where the Idea we write about is Love Conquers All and the Idea that Happily Ever After is possible, even perhaps inevitable.

Mystery has always been a sister-genre to science fiction aiming at the same target audience.  Mystery and Science Fiction both appeal to people who love to think, puzzle, analyze, and play games with the writer to see if they can figure out the solution to the question the writer is posing before the Characters do.

In Mystery, it may be "who-dun-it" or maybe "why-dun-it" or a jousting match between detective (professional or amateur) and a criminal (mastermind or less).  Gini Koch does create marvelous Criminal Masterminds! 

In Science Fiction, it may be "how can we do this" or "how did "they" do that?" or "that's impossible -- unless..."

Science is all about mystery - about following clues and unraveling the tangle of Natural Law to make sense of reality.  And Mystery solving uses the scientific method.  

Fiction is all about people -- human or not -- who have problems they regard as formidable.  

The writer's job in fiction is to convince the reader that the Character's problems actually are formidable -- and pose the question, "What would you do in her place?"

In Romance, the question the writer poses is narrower, but because of the narrow focus (this guy or that one? This woman or that one? This spouse or none? Where is the path to happily ever after, behind door one or door two?) the issues Romance deals with are vastly more complicated, more complex, more nebulous and more urgent.  

Mystery, Science Fiction, Westerns, and Fantasy or Paranormal Romance are all "fiction" first.  

To have a story, you must have a Character who is living through events that impact the Character's sense of identity.  As the Character changes Identity to adapt to his/her new reality, the Character is said to "Arc."  Traits mature, but don't change or disappear.  A Nag will continue to Nag -- but about different things.  A Complainer will continue to Complain - but more effectively and efficiently.  

The "genre" label appropriate for any given Character's story depends in large part on the target market - on the group of Readers who buy that story, enjoy it, and look for more like it.  Remember, Hollywood and Publishing are always looking for "the same but different."  That's how genre develops.

Right across all the genres, Mystery, Science Fiction, Westerns, Thrillers, International Intrigue, and Fantasy/Paranormal, we see how the Character's initial idea of their identity changes under the impact of discovering that what they thought was so is in fact not-so. 

This discombobulation, consternation, cognitive dissonance element does not appear in all Best Sellers, or Literature that is not considered "genre."  A lot of people do not find it fun or amusing to be confused or disabused of their certainties.  Science Fiction readers love that feeling - "Oh, was I wrong, or what!"  Or they love to watch other people be astonished.  You see this in the Romance genre, too.  

For example, the "confirmed bachelor" who is convinced Romance is imaginary and he'll never marry is ripe for a "Love At First Sight" experience.  And the woman he "sees" is very likely also self-sufficient and settled into a career that has no place for "him."  The two collide with fireworks.  

As they re-arrange their self-images, they must re-arrange their lives, create a "we" out of "me."  

The thing with Romance is that it deals with Happiness -- or maybe just the pursuit of happiness.  The Romance master theme is "Bonding With Your Soul-Mate Leads To Happily Ever After."  

In the favorite, best selling theme structures of Romance genre you find implicit assumptions that The Soul is real -- that humans are more than animal bodies -- and that "Happiness" has to include some satisfaction on the Soul Level Of Existence as well as physical comfort.  When you leave the Soul Mate element out of the worldbuilding, you end up with soft porn, not Romance.  

One theme is that a woman must have a fulfilling career -- a sequence of positions in life which, when traveled through, produce Soul Satisfaction.  That's a "theme" as we have discussed exhaustively.  

An alternative theme would be that female humans do not have souls.  Or that if they do, being female means careers can not satisfy their souls.  Any anti-feminist statement you find outrageous enough to write about will do for a theme. 

If you're writing Science Fiction Romance, the worldbuilding would then include Aliens who a) have no souls, b)have souls and don't know it, c) have different sorts of souls, d) are reincarnated human souls either rewarded or punished for behavior when human by being reincarnated as this type of Alien.  

"What if ...?" Souls are real?  The reality of Souls is a thematic premise. It can be treated as Paranormal Romance, or nuts and bolts science fiction.

"What if ...?"  Souls are created by God, creates one branch of themes -- and another "Souls are not created by God because there is no God," creates another branch of themes.  

We saw "Souls Exist But Not Created By God" handled very well in The Flicker Men, which I reviewed here. 

 I reviewed this is some depth here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/09/reviews-19-by-jacqueline-lichtenberg.html

THE FLICKER MEN is a brilliant science based presentation of the concept "soul is real,"  a must read for Romance writers - mostly because it is not Romance.

Another way to find a readership to target is to study TV Series that flash to popularity then disappear without being copied.  Usually, several such TV Series will appear and vanish before one genre-bender like Star Trek comes along.  

Watching TV for the presentation of what you might term The Romance Problem (how do you sell the Happily Ever After premise to those who can't accept it?) can be instructive.

I stumbled upon such an odd TV Series on Amazon Prime last year.  Puzzling over why I liked it, I decided it was Cozy Science Fiction (not catastrophic).  

It is about a group of unmarried twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings who have substantial education and careers -- men and women alike, formidable people.  These are the sorts of people who make great Science Fiction heroes.  

Their adventures are "cozy" in that they don't involve space battles, explosions, destruction derbies, or fight-for-your-life situations at the core of their adventures.

Their trying, angst-focusing adventures are into the land of speed dating, coffee dating, dress up dating, or just trying to find someone to date.  At first, they are not looking so much for Romance as they are for someone to marry and settle down with.  

The TV Series is called Srugim, a Hebrew word meaning crochet or knit, the kind of stitching used to make an Israeli yarmulke.  The show is in Hebrew with English subtitles.  

When I was in college, I used to spend a lot of time in the campus theater where they showed foreign films in various languages, often without subtitles.  I loved it.  Today I watch streaming!  

So we in the USA have this foreign made TV Series, aimed at a foreign audience. Can you imagine a richer research environment for the Alien Romance writer?

You've seen the Cozy Mystery burst onto the scene, and decades ago Brian Aldiss defined the Cozy Catastrophe Science Fiction as being about people ignoring a catastrophe around them.  Romance often does that -- vanquishes the real world for a time.  

Maybe it is time for the Cozy Science Fiction genre to blossom, and I think the documented popularity of this TV Series import, Srugim, is indicative of how ripe the USA audience is for this type of show.  Yet, there aren't that many imitators easily found.

Here is an article about this HIT TV SERIES - that just vanished without spawning a genre (yet).

http://forward.com/sisterhood/123571/the-women-of-israels-hit-tv-show-srugim/

---------quote---------

... Accurate portrayals of Orthodox Jews in American films or on television are hard to come by. Good female characters are especially rare, usually appearing onscreen as either oppressed or unnaturally saintly (see “A Price Above Rubies,” “A Stranger Among Us”.)

But “Srugim” (written and directed by Laizy Shapira, himself an observant Jew) comes with complex female characters who have commitment issues, religious struggles, and romantic baggage (a lot of romantic baggage). Modern Orthodox young, single professionals can finally see themselves on onscreen. Although created by a man, the show is especially good at portraying the female characters’ complicated relationships with their tradition.

In the first episode of the series, Reut, the high-powered accountant, is seen both dumping a suitor who is uncomfortable with her salary and reciting Friday night Kiddush to the amazement of the men at the Shabbat table. While openly feminist, Reut is constantly being drawn to what she sees as a more normative Orthodox lifestyle. When she pretends to be married to another character in order to help him keep his job, she outwardly mocks her “fake homemaker” identity but inwardly is wistful.

----------end quote------

Do read this article with an eye to how it portrays the life and struggles of a human woman swept away to an Alien Planet, trying to find a stable identity.

Srugim is a TV Series about contemporary human beings in their workaday world, but illustrates just how to create an Alien Romance novel.  Still, it was a surprise "hit" and even bigger surprise that it is popular in the USA, too.  "They," the professional purveyors of entertainment, have no idea what they are dealing with when they touch our field.  

You may still be able to find this TV Series on Amazon Prime:

https://smile.amazon.com/Episode-01-English-Subtitled/dp/B00DTP198A/

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com 

Incarnations of Lucifer

Coincidentally (if there ARE coincidences in this life, especially in the realm of popular entertainment—maybe there's a trend here), two current TV series feature Lucifer in person: The long-running SUPERNATURAL, in which two brothers hunt monsters, fight demons, and save the world multiple times; the newer program LUCIFER, in which the Devil goes AWOL from Hell, runs a Los Angeles night club, and works as a civilian consultant for a female homicide detective. Aside from the teeth-grinding implausibilities of the show's versions of police procedure and the work of a therapist (Lucifer's psychologist), I'm enjoying the latter program very much for its characters. The flippant, hedonistic Lucifer has a core of deep-rooted morality, skewed though it may be. This Devil doesn't tempt people to sin. As the (unwilling) ruler of Hell, he punishes evil. When he encounters a Satanist cult in one episode, he rejects them with contempt. His main superpower in human form is to compel people to express their deepest desires. Lucifer in the SUPERNATURAL universe, on the other hand, is unrelentingly evil and, having been freed from the "cage" in which he was imprisoned, is presently roaming the Earth (played by Rick Springsteen as a rock star whose body the Devil has inhabited) with dire prospects for humanity.

In the world of LUCIFER, angels and demons (fallen angels) take physical form by producing fleshly constructs for the purpose—or at least that seems the usual method. Lucifer's mother, on the other hand, becomes corporeal by taking over the body and persona of a dead woman. In SUPERNATURAL, celestial and infernal beings visit Earth by possessing the bodies of living human "vessels." The difference is that angels have to get the host's permission (and demons often seem to destroy the vessels they occupy, judging from the typical outcome when a possessed person is exorcised). Both series postulate a dualistic universe. Good and evil seem to clash on an equal footing. Moreover, the very definitions of "good" and "evil" appear ambiguous. In SUPERNATURAL, many angels have no compunctions about sacrificing human lives in the service of what they conceive as the greater good. As for God, He has been simply absent for most of the series until the climax of last season. Even the highest-ranking angels had no idea where he went or why. In LUCIFER, God seems like the archetype of a strictly authoritative parent, at least as viewed by Lucifer and (by the opening of this season) his unfallen brother who's tasked with returning him to Hell. Both of them portray their "Father" as an inscrutable tyrant.

The universes of SUPERNATURAL and LUCIFER are dualistic in another sense, too. In each, the male Deity has a female consort. In SUPERNATURAL, she's opposite and equal, God's sister, the primal Darkness, co-eternal with Him. In LUCIFER, God has a wife, the Mother Goddess of the universe. However, they're not equal; He has the power to consign her to Hell. God's power doesn't seem unlimited, though, because He has ordered the angelic characters and Lucifer to return her to the infernal realm, and He doesn't take direct action when this command isn't obeyed.

These programs differ radically in their approach to spiritual and metaphysical issues from the older series TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL, one of my all-time favorites, far more conventional in its treatment of God, supernatural beings, and their interaction with humanity. One thing I like very much about TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL is that its angels were explicitly portrayed as another species, a separate creation from us, not the spirits of dead people as in the misconception that stubbornly persists in popular culture. The angels in SUPERNATURAL (but apparently not most of the demons) and LUCIFER also clearly belong to a different order of being from humanity. Why do these newer series depart so far from the orthodox depiction of celestial entities as purely good, as in TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL (not to mention the older program's consistently happy endings)? Has a fundamental shift in cultural attitudes toward spiritual matters occurred in the intervening decades? Or, more likely, has the extent to which the viewing audience will accept iconoclastic treatment of such topics changed, maybe from the influence of boundary-pushing cable programming? Also, TV programmers are always looking for something new to grab the public's attention, so the stretching of boundaries from the simple, financially driven motive of novelty-seeking may partly account for the difference.

The image of God presented in these two current series may strike many viewers as blasphemous. But despite their unorthodoxy, I'm encouraged by the fact that two major networks think it's worthwhile and profitable to offer programs that grapple with issues of ultimate metaphysical significance.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Timeless

Have you checked out the new TV series TIMELESS? So far, three episodes have aired. The intended appeal to the audience, I suppose, is that the characters visit a different point in history every week and have breathtaking adventures. The premise: The antagonist, Flynn, has stolen the prototype time machine for the purpose of changing the past—why, we don't know yet. The three heroes—a female history professor (devoted primarily to preserving the timeline as we know it), a soldier (tasked mainly with eliminating Flynn), and the engineer who's the main inventor of the time machine—pursue Flynn in a second time machine that fortunately happens to be available. The jumping to different dates in the past recalls QUANTUM LEAP, which is credited as one of the inspirations for TIMELESS. The heroes' chasing after a villain in a time machine brings to mind the movie TIME AFTER TIME, in which H. G. Wells travels to our present to catch Jack the Ripper.

What I like about the series so far is that it makes some serious attempt to deal with the risks of changing history. In QUANTUM LEAP, Sam usually had to "set right what once went wrong" in the lives of individuals, not on a broader historical level. One exception was his interference in Kennedy's assassination. From the audience's viewpoint, Sam failed; JFK still died. In the universe of the TV program, however, Sam at least succeeded in saving Jackie Kennedy, slain in their original timeline. In TIMELESS, the first three episodes take the heroes to the Hindenburg disaster, the assassination of Lincoln, and a day in 1962 in Las Vegas, where Flynn plots to steal the core of a nuclear weapon from the nearby atomic testing facility. Because one of the Hindenburg passengers who should have died survives, the history professor's ancestry changes; she returns to the present to find her dying mother in perfect health—but her sister erased from existence. In the nineteenth century, she fights the temptation to try preventing Lincoln's death. History does change, though, in that John Wilkes Booth doesn't kill the President; Flynn does. You'd think the murder of Lincoln by an unidentified assassin with an unknown model of gun would leave a conspicuous trace on the timeline, but no change in the status of the twenty-first century is mentioned when the heroes return to the present. So the show's attention to problems of altering history is selective—not surprisingly, since their main objective is suspenseful entertainment, not cerebral SF. Still, it will be interesting to see how they grapple with such problems in the future. The history professor wants to protect the timeline. The soldier wants only to eliminate the threat of Flynn by any means necessary. As for the African American inventor/pilot of the time machine, if left to his own devices he would try to change history for the better in some cases (he was in favor of saving Lincoln).

It appears that each episode will pose its own challenge for the heroes—thwarting whatever Flynn's goal for that particular visit to the past—and meanwhile contribute to the solution of the long-term story arc problem: Why is Flynn trying to change the timeline? So far, we've had only cryptic hints. What disaster could he be trying to prevent that would justify wreaking havoc on history as we know it?

The history professor plays the role held by the generic "scientist" in many TV programs and movies. Any scientist (e.g. the Professor on GILLIGAN'S ISLAND, the type TVTropes.org calls the Omnidisciplinary Scientist) is assumed for story purposes to have expertise in any field the plot requires, regardless of his nominal specialty. I'm not sure whether TIMELESS has mentioned what historical era the professor in this series specializes in, but she seems to know everything about every date they've landed in so far. And it's not as if the time travelers get long periods of respite between trips to do research. She even knows the name of one of Kennedy's mistresses who acted as a liaison between JFK and the Mafia in 1962. The audience just has to suspend disbelief in the breadth of the character's knowledge and go along for the ride (so to speak).

For a thrilling, ingenious story of an attempt to "fix" the past that makes things much worse, read Stephen King's 11-22-63, his novel about a time traveler trying to stop Kennedy's assassination. This book's theory of time travel has a twist I've never seen anywhere else: Every trip back through the portal (no matter who does it) resets the past to the default timeline. Pro, you can keep trying until you get it right; con, you have to start from scratch with every foray.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Depiction Part 14 - Depicting Cultural Shifts by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Depiction

Part 14

Depicting Cultural Shifts

by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Here is the index post with previous parts of Depiction.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/04/index-to-depiction-series-by-jacqueline.html

A friend mentioned watching the new TV Series Lucifer, where the Devil asks what is the one thing you want -- and the plot unfolds from that choice.

I've started watching the show BEFORE Lucifer about a school for young magicians, THE MAGICIANS (which is fairly well made) so I've seen the trailers and the beginnings of Lucifer.

I thought the concept interesting, but in the context of what viewers now will understand about the world decades hence,  I am looking for what KIND of spouse they will imagine for themselves later.  What will the young teens watching these two shows conclude about "happily ever after" and "soul mates" later on in life?

Personally, I expect that in a few decades they will have thrown off most of the ideas presented in these shows, and in most fantasy novels, just as prior generations have. We, as humans, don't believe everything we're taught, especially not by parents or authority figures.

In the meantime, though, a great deal of (easily dramatized) headline material will be created by these viewers as the mature.

Here's one way to look at this whole spectrum of Marketing Fiction in a Changing World -- a subject we've discussed at length in these posts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/05/index-to-marketing-fiction-in-changing.html

Remember how people always say,  "I'm doing all I can" which essentially dismisses the petitioner as irrational for wanting more than "I can" -- saying I'm the helpless one and that's too bad for you.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/03/depiction-part-9-depicting-hero-by.html

OK, watching NYPD Blue season 1 from the 1980's I see a pivot point in a related attitude to the helplessness of "I'm doing all I can -- so how dare  you ask more of me!"

Today, absolutely everywhere, we hear the phrase "been taught" or even just "what we teach kids in schools."  Some politicians want to beef up the Department of Education because "what we teach kids has to be controlled so they'll behave properly" -- and other politicians demanding to dismantle the Department of Education and  "let" localities decide what to teach kids.

The unconscious assumption behind that language is that "permission" is required. Never in human history has humanity as a whole accepted "permission" as a limitation.  That's why we have Heros (to depict) and Villains (likewise to depict).

We have internal conflicts because, as a whole, humanity just does not "believe" what we are "told" or "taught" to believe.  We learn it, parrot it back for the test, then discard all -- or at least a few of us discard.

And among those few who discard what they've "been taught" we have major internal conflicts, sometimes psychologically crippling conflicts that cause what appears to be "irratic" or "irrational" behavior, temperamental outbursts and so on.  The subconscious retains some of what we've "been taught" no matter how the conscious discards it.

The subconscious can be reprogrammed though, and that happens with a great deal of DRAMA in life (Pluto is Drama, remember).  Dramatizing those lessons reprogramming the subconscious is what fiction writers do -- and it is the core material for Romance which is why Love Stories must be woven into most other genre fiction.

In truth, Love does Conquer All.  Exactly how that happens is what we write about.

So historically, schools have been putting all LEARNING into the same category as "what I can't do."  You can only do "what you've been taught."

Our current culture depicts kids and the adults they become as VICTIMS of "what they are taught."

Kids and even adults are victims so it is up to the Educators (who implicitly know best) to be sure that kids "are taught" only "right" things.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/science-teachers-grasp-of-climate-change-is-found-lacking.html

What has climate change to do with Romance?  Well, along with the unconscious assumptions underlying the dilemma of "what to teach them" (because if you teach wrong, they will suffer and it will be your fault, see last week's post)  we have the matter of teaching "you can't win" and there is no "Happily Ever After" so don't even try.

"You can't win" is taught by demonstrating authority, and telegraphing "allowed" as the key.  Authority must "permit" or "allow" or "provide" -- authority must act first or you can't "have" anything.

"There is no Happily Ever After" is transmitted the student's real life experiences of divorce, job loss, and the constant din of "it is not your fault; the system is broken."  You can't win because you're not permitted to -- permission is everything.

Here is last week's post on Authority, Responsibility and Power in Alien Romance -- how these nebulous concepts are essential to worldbuilding that can cradle a hot Romance.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/05/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-13.html

That "no such thing as Happily Ever After" carries over into what passes for adulthood these days, as people lose jobs to technology and "are doing all they can" to "find a job" and can only "do all they can" which is limited by "what I was taught."

It may be time to entertain the notion that the HEA is possible, but only to those with a Hero's attitude that if you are doing all you can, and it isn't enough, do what you can't anyway.

The whole idea of making college free telegraphs that the real objective is to be certain there is no such thing as a well educated adult running around in the world.

You can't "get an education" -- it isn't an object to be acquired.  It is a condition of the brain, created by exercise.  That exercise is not acquired by "being taught" but by "learning."

 You can learn to live Happily Ever After, but you can not be taught to do it.

Educated adults point out that permission to Live Happily Ever After is not necessary.  You have to do "more than you can" -- a successful marriage requires each give more than 100%.  

Humanity has talents distributed along a curve -- and only 1% are CAPABLE of a university education beyond Bachelor's.  If you try to put everyone through University, it will become grammar school, not University.  Those who want to "get an education" will be happy with their diploma from such a school -- those who want to "learn" will go elsewhere.

That 1%  that can not be kept from learning because they need no permission ignores the "all I can" limit and just does things regardless of whether they "can" or not, regardless of whether they've "been taught."

You can't TEACH that 1%.  What you think means nothing to them.
So perpetuating the idea that you "can't do" what you "have not been taught" is an attack on the 1% by the 99%.

So here's an idea to check out by watching old stuff on Amazon Prime or Netflix.

The 1980's (Reagan) era was a turning point in HEROISM.

Captain Kirk of Star Trek was a 1960's phenomenon popular with people born in the late 1940's -- people who grew to college age seeing their parents succeed against all odds, and thus convinced they, too, could succeed against all odds.  They just needed to learn  how, not to "be taught."

Kids born in the 1960's became 20-somethings in the 1980's experiencing families (and kids their age's families) that were more loosely constituted (sometimes parents lived together, not married), increasing divorce rate, both parents employed (that was rare in the 1950's before "labor saving devices" made "housework" less than a full time job), and families being moved across country as the Dad "climbed the corporate ladder."  Neighborhood friends, school friends, extended family -- all temporary.

Kids who turned twenty in the 1980's "knew" from experience that all personal ties are merely temporary, so don't invest your heart in other people.

The cell phone, Facetime, text chat, and so on, changed all that and today's children hold friendships no matter where they are physically.
Here's the essence of TV Drama popular in the 1950's and 1960's (Star Trek) and 1970's.

THE GOOD GUY WINS BECAUSE HE IS GOOD - NOT BECAUSE HE'S A GUY.

The feminist movement (1970's) destroyed that whole philosophy (fiction themes are philosophical statements) by blaming "winning" on "guy-ness" not on "good-ness."

So women learned to become "bad-ass" in order to win because goodness doesn't win.

Then another generation tackled the whole "goodness" thing with the idea that everything is relative and "fairness"="goodness" because fairness means everyone gets THE SAME THING regardless of their personal merit.

The concept of GOODNESS that drove the 1950's got thrown in the toilet.

Then GOODNESS was replaced with Political Correctness -- the values of which are reflected in the TV Series Lucifer where "Lucifer" is the the protagonist, who always wins.  Everyone else is the "problem of the week."

In the TV Series The Magicians the theme is stated as Magicians can't do anything about real world problems.  Goodness, and Power, are not part of "the real world."

Political commentary on TV "non-fiction" news often states that  "Race is important to Democrats, so therefore Hillary must win the Black vote."  Or some variant on "must win the XXX vote" where XXX is whatever block of voters they are trying to trick you into thinking "are all the same."

In our new 2016 reality there can be such a thing as a "race" all voting as a Bloc.  And it's not racism to say "they" all vote the same way.

A Theme for a novel series might be rooted in the concept that the phrase "win the Black Vote" is racist.  It's based on the idea that all members of a group are identical to one another.  All the "isms" make that assumption -- good novel themes come from those unconscious verbal habits.  That gives you the "internal conflict" for your main character.

And it is objectively true - can be measured by statistics.

Why do the stats show there is a "woman's vote" and a "black vote" and a "Jewish vote?"  WHY????

Because there really IS.

How did that happen?

Maybe by forbidding kids to read the entire textbook before going to Class 1 of the course?

Or perhaps by forbidding kids in grammar school from teaching themselves and defying "the teacher" in every particular and making the teacher PROVE what they are teaching before the class, and not simply parrot what they learned in Education Classes?  Just because it's written in a book doesn't make it true. Prove it.

Teachers teaching today WERE TAUGHT that they can only do "all they can" and so 99% of them don't dare do anything beyond that.   The remaining 1% of teachers are making waves,  big time.

Authoritarian is the word for what has changed our culture.

To "depict" that Cultural Shift in a way that has verisimilitude enough to carry your reader into your artificially built world, you need to know what it was "before" -- what it was in transition -- and what it is "now" relative to your story.

Here's a clue - about reducing stress on the beleaguered victims who are "being taught" instead of learning.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/solutions-for-stressed-out-high-school-students-1455301683

Then you need to explain that change to your reader.

One great way to grasp this idea is to watch the British TV Series, Downton Abby -- that starts in a 'before' culture and depicts the shift into World War I, and the gradual rise of socialism in the UK that changed the whole class-based, landed gentry culture of the 1800's.

Note the relative ages of the characters.  The elders were raised in a before-culture -- the adults are striving to maintain it -- the children are throwing off the traces and running wild into "the future."  And all are righteous about their beliefs and attitudes..

So, in tracing the cultural shift your reader understands, look for old fiction where THE GOOD GUY WINS BECAUSE HE'S GOOD NOT BECAUSE HE'S A GUY.

A good theme might be, "There never was any sexism, and there is no such thing as a 'women's vote' and never was."  Everything in your reader's reality (and yours) says that is nonsense.  Convince the reader otherwise.  The technique known as the "twist ending" is where you suddenly "twist" the fictional reality you've invented back into something resembling the reader's everyday reality.

Look for old fiction where the difference between THE GOOD GUY and THE BAD GUY is that the good guy is GOOD and the bad guy is BAD.  No shades of gray.

Shades of gray in theme material was injected in the 1970's and 1980's as viewer's real-reality shifted from "black and white."

That pivot point in development is important to understand.   It happens so gradually that the Characters don't notice until one day they wake up and the world has changed -- they can't talk to their grandchildren anymore.  New world. New language.

Depicting that generation gap lets you give your Worldbuilding a dimension that feels like reality to the reader.  It is verisimilitude.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/07/why-every-novel-needs-love-story-part-2.html

That post has a link to Part 1 -- and it's about depicting Verisimilitude.

What is good and what is bad can be a matter of thematic argument among the characters in a work, but GOODNESS always wins.

The writer's job is to show the reader (not tell!) the mechanism of reality (of the build world this character lives in) that CAUSES goodness to win.

The entire HELLENISTIC CULTURAL attitude underlies our modern USA culture -- teaching that winning is good, and that in order to win someone has to lose.

Today's school sports custom is to deny that there is such a thing as losing.  This will create a huge cultural shift, and perhaps we will see that as the current turning-18-year-olds vote.

The Hellenistic culture survives in that two-valued Aristotelian "logic" that divides the world into black and white.

Remember in the heyday of the Hellenists, the world was flat, on the back of a turtle, and if you sail to the edge you fall off.  This week, they discovered gravity waves as predicted by Einstein, when they observed two black holes colliding. This is not an either/or world, at the particle level or at the moral level.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Theme-Plot Integration Part 16 - Affairs of State by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Theme-Plot Integration
Part 16
Affairs of State
by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Index to previous posts in the Theme-Plot Integration Series:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/05/index-to-theme-plot-integration.html

Believe it or not, we live in a storybook, and sometimes the "real" news headlines actually reveal that great secret.

In these writing-craft posts I focus on "how" to do the various tasks of the writing craft.  Most books on or about how to write just tell you to do this or that.  I've never found that helpful, so I am showing not telling how the writer's mind looks, sees, interprets and then uses the elements of audience appeal to create fiction that can become a Classic in its field. One sort of Classic that Romance dances around is Cinderella - the unknown girl marrying a Prince.

What Cinderella does not cover is the Pygmalion aspect -- what does Cinderella do once she is Queen and her Prince has died?  What is the difference between a working stiff and a Head of State?  Is there any difference that matters?

Study World History.  Previously I've recommended writing students read dozens maybe hundreds of biographies and autobiographies.

Here's a great biography to study if you have liked any of the Star Wars movies.

http://www.amazon.com/Skywalking-Films-George-Lucas-Updated-ebook/dp/B00292BIR6/

Now I'm saying combine World History with what you learned from Biographies, and add Contemporary History.

International Affairs are actually run as a story-plot generated by the internal conflict of the people who make the policy decisions (Heads of State, department heads, financial backers,  Powers That Be Behind The Scenes, Corporations...)

Here is a contemporary non-fiction book about our current shapers of Affairs of State that has gained much praise (and excoriation).

http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Feud-Clintons-vs-Obamas-ebook/dp/B00WPRBM1C/

We saw that reflection of neuroses of Heads of State in our world during World War II. As a close reading of Hitler biographies will reveal, he had a psychological "need" to "cleanse" -- and he projected that need into the environment.

The magnification of Pluto related forces (which I've discussed at length in these blogs as the source of War and Drama), unleashed the Final Solution.  His drive to execute the riffraff causing him to feel "dirty" created the Death Camps, burning people to ash in ovens.

Or just look at any of the TV Series Dramas that include Queen Elizabeth I, such as REIGN - which is about Mary Queen of Scots in France.
 http://www.amazon.com/The-Plague/dp/B00O3VCJK6

Those are caricature-sketches of  International Affairs, of course, but this is the point to grasp when you've got a THEME that needs to generate a PLOT.

The theme generates the plot by fueling the internal conflict of a Character who is in a position in life where his/her actions can manifest externally.

"Life" has cycles. There are times you are trapped inside yourself and nothing you think, do, or feel has any impact on the external world.  And there are times every twitch of your eyebrow is gossiped about from the mail room to the CEO's office.

Jupiter, Uranus, Pluto, all the planets are 'cyclical' -- the cycles impact different parts of your life at different times, and sometimes manifest externally.

USA Presidential candidates have three or four properties that I've noticed.
A) their Natal Charts have some tight Relationship to the USA Natal Chart(s).
B) their transits ignite pure dynamic Energy,
C) their Solar Arc contacts trigger off something usually interpreted as Sexual, Romantic, or Social during the Campaign or the ensuing Term of Office.

Nothing in a Natal Chart can really indicate whether the person "wins" or "loses."

Transits just indicate peaks and valleys from a baseline.

The Natal Chart shows whether the person is "channeling" Energy into their own interior (unlikely to do more than a few whistle stops on the campaign trail) or into their Environment (very likely to hit a peak popularity)  Sustaining that peak means successive transits must continue to sweep energy into the Environment.

Which candidate "wins" -- well, sometimes becoming President is a way of losing in "life."  It's a brutal, massively difficult killer of a job, and it uses men up in the peak of their lives.

So is becoming President (or King, Queen, Dictator) a "win?"  Or a "destiny?"

That question can be a THEME.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/08/how-to-use-theme-in-writing-romance.html

So here's a sub-theme to ponder.  A sub-theme is a theme derived from a main theme.  It's not "another" theme grabbed out of thin air because you "like" it.  A sub-theme is a theme that is an essential component of the Main Theme.

So, a sub-theme for "Is being Elected President a Win?" might be something like the Hitler story encapsulated above -- playing out a Character's innermost Needs, Drives, Ambitions, Frustrations, on the International Stage then showing his demise as poetic justice.

If the Character has a ruthless streak (Mars conjunct Pluto in the Natal Chart often produces something like ruthlessness when triggered by transit or Solar Arc), that Character might take the Force of an Economy and an Army and sweep out into the world to accomplish what their internal neuroses demand of them.

This is not a "modern" idea or a new one. You see it in the Ancient Greek plays, in all that's derived from them, in modern History books, and in today's Headlines, and even in the Blockbuster films and video games of today such as STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS.

Star Wars is the saga of a galactic war long ago and far away.  The reboot by Disney, The Force Awakens, shows how a new generation picks up the "conquer or be conquered" theme.

The film, Star Wars: The Force Awakens depicts the Good Guys as the Underdog, and the Bad Guys as the Mighty.  The Bad Guys have a Grandmother of all Death Stars that sucks up a whole Sun, then spits out a beam that can destroy planets and stars halfway across their Galaxy. And to be sure you understand that, you see them blowing up planets of Good Guys with their new weapon.

Bad Guys return with bigger, badder weapons -- the same weapons, the weapons of destruction, just bigger.

In good comic book fashion, the Bad Guys uniforms are still the same ineffective, comical "body armor" with visible seams -- the bad guys wear white.

The whole movie is about explosions, and destruction. In fact, it is about destroying antique buildings, wondrous relics, and treasured people.

It brings back Light Sabers but simplifies the whole arcane concept of THE FORCE into Dark and Light, without any morality involved. Might Makes Right (a theme) abounds all over the place.

Hans Solo and Leia have spawned a son who turns to the Dark Side, and with a face-to-face trick kills his father -- saber through the chest, just as in the King Arthur Legend, and sends him falling from an immense height echoing previous fallen villains and heroes.

Luke Skywalker is the object of the hunt, and we see him in the final scenes.  He's supposed to be raising more Jedi Knights - we learn nothing of the training he is supposedly giving.

Absolutely not one thing is being BUILT in this film, not ships, buildings, planets, or families -- nothing is growing and prospering. Destruction reigns supreme, center spotlight, destruction of things, of Characters, and of every tradition (except possibly the Light Saber, but it is treated as simply mechanical.)  Look at Affairs of State around us today. What is being built?  What do people in their twenties remember of a world building things?

We never see anyone making a new Light Saber.

In our real world, plenty of people have made new things -- the Internet, the Web, the cell phone, the smartphone, phablets, and services like Uber and Amazon Prime, Netflix.  Most of those were founded more than 20 years ago.  The target audience for Star Wars does not remember the founding of these technologies.

In this movie, there is no originality, no creation, no invention, no moment of wondrous accomplishment.  The old Millenium Falcon is resurrected, the new ship Hans Solo has is destroyed. The ending depicts mere survival as a laudable goal achieved.

In traditional science fiction, the young hero is a kid with a lab in his parent's garage -- or a young married man tinkering with tech in the basement.  The hero has been learning things, (as Luke Skywalker had been when we meet him whomping sand rats), gaining skills, and is full of unrealized potential.  The young Luke Skywalker was a typical science fiction Hero.  Rey is not. Her highest aspiration is survival.

The typical young science fiction hero meets up with his Problem. He grabs hold of it, and through much fun and games, uses his apparently irrelevant, socially unacceptable skills and accomplishments, expertise about useless subjects, to solve the problem.  Rey has a few useful skills, but using those skills is not the fulfillment of her personal dream.

Rising to Accomplishment, to become something more than mere potential, is what science fiction is about.

It's what "science" is about.

Science is organizing knowledge into patterns that can be applied to solve bigger problems.  And so is Building Character -- becoming a strong, self-reliant adult upon whom others can rely -- more a matter of organizing "who you are" into a Persona, the science of Maturation.

The internal character becomes a Character by becoming externalized into the world.  That is the link between Story and Plot, between internal conflict and external conflict.

That externalization is what a writer has to accomplish by taking the theme, a "thorn in the side" of a very particularized individual, and externalizing that theme, making it real to other Characters in the play.

In the case of Star Wars The Force Awakens, we have new young Good Guys taking over from the old young guys, and doing the same things over again -- for no apparent thematic reason than that Good Guys Must Always Be Underdogs.  In other words, our promising young good guys didn't WIN, didn't conquer the Dark, vanquish it, establish a stable and functional galactic civilization.

The theme the movie works out is that Evil Always Wins and the best any Good can do is to hold the line, to contain the Evil.

Whether that's true or not, you (the Romance Writer) can easily see that the target audience for this film lives in a world where they have never, ever, known or seen any other situation.  The highest aspiration of the USA leadership is to contain the enemy.

It pleases and amuses that young audience that their favorite fiction reinforces their assessment of reality -- i.e. Good Must Not Win Or It Becomes Evil.

In our Reality - winners are always "bad."

Large corporations are large (and old) because they have WON. That's evil by definition, because they always (in reality) do become "corrupt."  Likewise the rich.  Likewise the economic powerhouse of the USA has "won" and therefore has generated a new "underdog" now coming to destroy it.

Look at STAR TREK: THE ORIGINAL SERIES. Match what happens on that Trek series with what was going on in the Viet Nam war at that time -- keeping in mind some months lag between a Headline and a thematic statement being broadcast.

Read archaeology, back beyond Ancient Greek Plays, and you will find that cycle enshrined in the basics of our Literature, ancient mythology.

Rome fell -- for a reason.

Now, with all our new science and technology, can Humanity break that cycle of destruction?

Can our Affairs of State become the product of level headed sanity and benign morality?  Can Countries and Alliances become our idealized family of nations. Can Earth ever speak to the Galaxy with one voice?

Can we become constructors who do not destroy?

Those are themes that can be the "thorn in the side" of a major Character you promote to Head of State, and see if you can create a Galactic Civilization that is not a projection of some individual's internal neuroses, personal hell-transits, or life-cycle issues.

Science Fiction has postulated that Artificial Intelligence, A.I., could arise and yank command of the world from human hands because of our irrationalities being projected onto Affairs of State.

Would an A.I. who became Head of State (maybe of All Earth) be able to remain sane?  Is it "sane" to want to be such a Head of State? What would your A.I. Character/Hero go through to avoid being elected Head of State?

Would the A.I. Characters elect their own Head of State, create a civilization separate from Humanity.  Would the position destroy that A.I. Head of State's sanity?

Is there such a thing as "The Force" and if so could an A.I. command it?  Are the Jedi Knights like the Templars?  Does commanding The Force corrupt a Character?

We touched on the Templars as a fictional concept last week:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/04/reviews-25-assassins-creed-underworld.html

What could prevent absolute power from corrupting absolutely?

Pictures of things blowing up interspersed with inane bits of comic book dialogue do not fulfill the potential of the modern cinematic medium.

The establishment in Hollywood, with the megabucks to invest, are not the Underdogs.  Does that make them the Bad Guys?

They claim there is no audience interested in exploring traditional science fiction themes (which is why they expunged most of the guts out of Star Wars).  There are head-scratching moral questions always at the heart of real science fiction.  But what if a searingly hot Romance were the driving Force of such a movie?

What audience could such a mixed-genre science not fantasy movie target?

Remember AVATAR, while ostensibly science fiction, was dressed up as Fantasy, and that worked very well indeed.

Let your imagination roam, find a story in your heart that has an audience large enough for your movie to make a profit, write it as a novel easily transformed to a 90 minute script.  Be the Heroic Character.  See what happens next.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Theme-Character Integration Part 7 Defining Character Strength by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Theme-Character Integration
Part 7
Defining Character Strength
by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Previous parts in this sequence on Theme-Character Integration:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/06/theme-character-integration-part-6-hero.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/12/theme-character-integration-part-5-fame.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/08/theme-character-integration-part-4.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/08/theme-character-integration-part-3-why.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/07/theme-character-integration-part-2-fire.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/06/theme-character-integration-part-1-what.html

Here is a TV Series Episode that clearly and cleanly defines the interface between Theme and Character-strength.

The Series is INTELLIGENCE on CBS and the episode in question is titled ATHENS.

http://www.cbs.com/shows/intelligence/episodes/212922

This is Episode 9 of the First Season.

Why is that important?  Because strength of character is abstract, illusive, and a trait that is "revealed" one component at a time, not on the first page of a novel or the pilot for a TV Series.

"Strength" of character means one thing to an editor, producer, or agent, and another to the writer -- yet another to viewers/buyers.

What one person sees as strong another sees as weak.

The assessment of a character is very much based on the end-customer's View of the Universe and is idiosyncratic -- very, very personal.

Strength of Character is a Trait that can answer the question "What does she see in him" that is the core of Romance, but is especially relevant to Science Fiction Romance (my favorite kind).

INTELLIGENCE is a mundane science fiction romance -- and a pretty good one.

The couple in question is an ex-soldier who volunteered to have a "chip" inserted into his brain (which works because he has a certain rare genetic mutation) and the woman assigned to be his bodyguard and protector because he's worth maybe a billion dollars (remember the 6 Million Dollar Man?  this is an UPDATED version.)

So episode by episode (or for a novel, chapter by chapter) we have seen this man's character revealed as the attraction between the two Special Forces grade individuals heats up.

At first wary, the mutual respect is established and grown as each saves the other from harrowing circumstances, and they develop teamwork precision like a circus act where each puts his life in the hands of the others.

And meanwhile, respect grows with the management team sending them on missions, and the tech team that works the "chip" miracles.

So we have many "variables" of character traits filled in for both these people and a really neat ROMANCE blooming nicely. 

Now, remember this is a CBS drama, not USA CHARACTERS WELCOME.

There are two "beats" (see Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! screenwriting instruction series for beats definition) to pay attention to in order to learn to assess a "strong character" for the fiction market, and then to analyze many examples, then create some of your own.

Here's the story.  Gabriel, the fellow with the chip in his head, gets amnesia (long international terrorist plot business that's irrelevant).  When he wakes up in the middle of the attack on his headquarters without any memory of who these people are, he doesn't know the good guys from the bad guys.

3/4 through the episode, when he's now convinced the attackers are the good guys and he's helping them beat his real friends, the showdown scene, the turning point into the final act, is his bodyguard eye-to-eye with him trying to convince him that she is the "good-guys" side and the attackers are the bad-guys.

Gabriel's chip has been hacked in such a way that the data attached to his friends' personnel files has been changed to make them seem like bad guys, killers, victimizers of children.

The DATA shows the bad guys as the good guys.

Riley (his bodyguard) stares Gabriel in the eye and tells him to stop thinking and just FEEL -- telling him that his memory of facts is gone, but his FEELINGS originate in another part of the brain and are more reliable in sorting good from bad.

This is the NEW CULTURE PARADIGM we see in all these most  popular TV shows.

This entire generation of viewers has been educated from primary school to understand the world in terms of feelings and to put aside all facts in favor of what feels right.  (look for that theme if you haven't noticed it -- it sells big time in Romance).

We see in Romance -- if you read some written in the 1950's and 1960's then skip ahead to 2000, you will note this trend, then follow it back decade by decade until you locate the turning point in philosophy -- the theme that lust and passion are irresistible, that there's no use trying to use intellect to over-ride animal lust, and that all hook-ups or even marriage must have searing-passionate-animal-lust as the foundation.

That might correlate to the divorce-rate rise -- a statistical researcher might get a paper out of it.

But to sell fiction, you have to understand the world the reader thinks is real in order to invoke suspension-of-disbelief.  So pay attention to the cultural shift from THINK FIRST, and STOP CRYING OR I'LL GIVE YOU SOMETHING TO CRY ABOUT upbringings, to DON'T EVER OFFEND ANYBODY.

The worst crime children learn about in primary school is making someone feel bad by doing something better than they can do it.  Everyone gets a certificate of merit, a prize, a ribbon, just for showing up, so the incapable won't feel bad about being incapable. 

So we see this EMOTION trumps THOUGHT as a major, cultural assumption, a philosophy, and that makes it THEMATIC MATERIAL.

In this episode of INTELLIGENCE, we see one of the love-interest characters convince the other love-interest character that you can tell the good guys from the bad guys by how you FEEL and that all data, all facts, all thought is unreliable.

The story is rigged so that in this instance, that is actually true -- and that rigging is what makes this a beautiful example of THEME.

The "Character" element that integrates with the theme is that Gabriel - the chip-guy - buys it.  He relies on how he feels about Riley and throws in with his employers against the invaders.

And he wins the day back for them.

Then the STRENGTH of character scene comes at the end, final tag of the episode, where it is made crystal clear that emotions trump facts or thought.  How you feel is the only important and determining factor. 

So this series defines "STRONG CHARACTER" as someone with the courage to act on emotion-only against all the facts.  Facts are unreliable; emotions are the truth.

You know that the TV Series Intelligence is still using the same mechanism to create "strong characters" for an audience because this episode which showcases and defines "strong character" first wipes out Gabriel's memory of facts, then replaces the facts with lies.  When he's convinced the lies are truth, he still acts like Gabriel -- loyal and strong, and ferociously protective of children. 

The script bores right to the core of the definition of Strong Character by removing Intellect from Reliable Information Source.  By eliminating that one factor, the script reveals the unspoken cultural assumption of the definition of high moral fiber.  The best people strive to follow their heart, not their brain.  So lies don't matter (because nobody will pay attention to them), but feelings do matter.

If you dig back a few decades you will find all TV action-shows, all Science Fiction, and most Romance depicted the STRONG character as the one who followed Intellect, determined and cross-tested facts, and "did the right thing" regardless of how they felt about an issue, regardless of the emotional loss or pain they might cause themselves or anyone. 

Today the definition of what illustrates "strength of character" has done a 180.

However, the actual writing craftsmanship is still the same!

"Strong Character" in fiction is defined by the integration between the character's emotional life and the character's external, fact-based life.

The concept "Integration" means essentially that two elements merge to form a third, and that the proportions of each ingredient are defined so that the "third" they create has a recognizable consistency.  That's a marketing thing.  Large markets are created by producing consistent products that are all the same -- if you buy Tide to wash your clothes, and buy another package with exactly the same LABEL next month, you expect the new package to contain the same washing-power.  Likewise with books - if it says Science Fiction Romance or Paranormal Romance or Vampire Romance, it better deliver just like all the others under that label.

So today's market is looking for characters who have an unshakeable dedication to following their feelings and ignoring all intellectually ascertained facts.

It is the UNSHAKEABLE trait that is the defining ingredient in "Strong Character." 

No matter what happens, that integration point between intellect and emotion will not change in that character -- not amnesia, not maiming, not disabling, not disease, not helplessness, not imprisonment, not torture, not anything will alter the proportions of Intellect and Emotion behind plot-moving decisions and actions. 

That integration point is stable, meaning the character is both sane and admirable.

It's the exact same writing technique -- the exact opposite message.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com