Depiction Part 4: Depicting Power in Culture by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Depiction
Part 4
Depicting Power in Culture
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

 

This post is about developing Rules of Engagement to depict a culture different from our own, yet thematically related in a way that allows the reader/viewer to walk into the story and see the whole thing as "real" even though the "world" you have built is truly alien. 

This skill-set of depiction arises out of the Theme-Worldbuilding Integration series.

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

The previous posts on Depiction are:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/09/depiction-part-1-depicting-power-in.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/09/depiction-part-2-conflict-and-resolution.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/09/depiction-part-3-internal-conflict-by.html

In short: depiction is show-don't-tell brought into a high, subtle, "off-the-nose" artform. 

Depiction is the author being sneaky and not letting their own opinion leak through into the worldbuilding.  No two readers will assess what is depicted the same way.  But what they do assess is the part of the book they will remember longest.

That's why, when you go on social networks and try to get someone to help you remember the title or author of a book you halfway remember, and relate this vivid scene or starkly memorable character, what you get back is scattershot attempts to help, and not the book you are looking for.

The part you remember is the part you found in the depiction.

As a writer, you can't use depiction to make your point. 

But if you do not have a point, and you are not trying to make that point, most readers will get bored and drop the story in the trash. 

If you don't stick to the point you depicted on Page 1, and STOP once you've made that point (nail The End), if you let bits and pieces remain in the final draft that should have been deleted for use in another book with another point, you will get very angry readers giving you 1-star reviews on Amazon.

The clarity of "point" that most readers want has to be made off-the-nose.  It is via that point depicted that the reader enters this alternate Reality and rides with you to The End.

One of the issues that many readers have with Romance Novels is the HEA, the Happily Ever After ending that just is not plausible in their own everyday reality.  The lack of plausibility is often (not always) traceable to the depiction of the HEA. 

The HEA is the resolution to a problem that the reader believes can not be resolved.  The resolution of the conflict has its roots on Page 1, in the way the conflict is depicted.  Do Page 1 right, and the reader suspends disbelief and actually believes the HEA (at least for a few seconds). 

The Depiction series of posts on this blog is about mastering the techniques of depiction in order to create an HEA that is not a HFN (Happily For Now), and yet is absolutely believable by readers living in a harsh reality.

To that end, we are examining how to depict culture. 

Cultures are based on abstract ideas like religious ideas that the cultural pressures (peer pressure) make desirable. 

If you live the beliefs of the culture around you, you are taking the easiest path to developing Relationships.

In Science Fiction, we focus mostly on the individual who is an oddball, a maverick, an outcast, a 'drifter' type in a Western, a "First-In Scout" (an explorer with no ties to anyone).  We focus on the Loner who has no problem with being a loner.  And Science Fiction is mostly about depicting by stark illustration what value such loners have to society and ultimately to the culture.

The Loner is not always the person so unstable they are about to freak out and murder a mob of people just because they're angry.

The Loner is depicted as honorable, kind, just, and strong. 

Being a Loner is not the problem a Science Fiction Novel is written to solve.  The Main Character of a Science Fiction Novel does not experience being a Loner as a PROBLEM.  He/she is not "in conflict" with the situation of being alone. 

The Science Fiction hero's Loner situation usually comes about because of being at odds with the Establishment.  He's the Scientist who believes there really is life on Mars, or UFO's have visited Earth, or human activity really is not creating climate change, but natural forces of Earth itself are causing what we observe.

The Science Fiction Hero is the oddball, tin-hat crazy who turns out to be correct, and the plot-driving major conflict depicts his determined effort to prove he is correct -- or depicts his efforts to just get away from those who want to make sure he never proves he's correct.

His opposition has a "vested interest" (an emotional need) to know beyond doubt that this Science Fiction Hero's ideas are crazy, and thus untrue.

The HEA rejection mechanism is psychologically similar, so pay attention. 

The Powers That Be in our modern culture have that kind of "vested interest" in convincing the majority that the HEA is not possible.  The Universe structure which makes it obvious to us that the HEA is possible lies at odds with the Universe structure that gives the Powers That Be power over us.

Here are a few posts on the HEA.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/04/education-of-action-romance-hero.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/do-your-lovers-live-hea.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/big-love-sci-fi-part-vii-unconditional.html

So the typical Science Fiction Hero (this blog is about Science Fiction and/or Paranormal Romance, the hybrid genre), is alone, at least at or before the start of the story. 

What does it mean "alone?" 

It means not just having no family ties, or being free of obligations, debts, and other strings, but also it means being sovereign over your own mind, heart, body, and course in life. 

The Science Fiction hero is a person who has become a Strong Character because of being a Loner.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/10/strong-characters-defined-part-3-tit.html
Part 3 has links to previous parts in the Strong Character series.

So it is natural for the Science Fiction Hero to become the Most Desirable Hunk in the Romance heroine's world.  He's a REAL CATCH -- and unattached to boot. 

Why did it take so long for Romance to discover Science Fiction?  (it all started with Star Trek, you know, and the Vampire Romance)

So when you set out to build a world around your story, you hide the point deep inside the worldbuilding.  Your point, as a writer, is an unconscious assumption of your characters, and a given of their culture. 

You get to state your point baldly in a single sentence that takes up half a line at most -- and is placed near the end or actually at the end of the novel.  It is Blake Snyder's "theme-stated" beat (see SAVE THE CAT! trilogy of books on screenwriting.)  Your point is inside your theme and is depicted within the characters' culture.

In Science Fiction, you often have two or more cultures to play with, and usually they are at odds with one another creating the main external conflict.  That's how most science fiction turns out to be about wars.

So a culture that is the outgrowth of war has to have its most prominent identifying beliefs focused on the use and abuse of Power.

Remember Star Trek's Klingons.  A good day to die.  The relish of the fun of combat.  Social interactions based on dominance displays. 

The original depiction of the Klingons (designed to work in the tiny space allowed in a TV episode), was very comic-bookish, too cliche, too facile.

So as the popularity of the Klingons grew, we saw different foreheads, a more thoughtful explanation of their values, and development of the language by a fan, and the addition of culturally specific weapons depicting tradition.  The culture acquired a history, depth, and real people. 

And all of it is based on the combat stance in personal relationships.  So Klingon culture has a whole lot of rules about who can do what to whom, when and how much.

The unfolding of Klingon culture from a line-drawing sketch of something to oppose the Enterprise into a galactic dominating, swaggering, and mighty culture with real people, and a character named Worf who grew up in a human family is a good model to study for depiction of opposition, and for worldbuilding a culture in order to depict a "worthy opponent."

Note how as Star Trek developed, this formidable opponent was nearly destroyed, and was rescued by Kirk et. al., then became an ally of the Federation that Kirk represented.  That "arc" of development of the Relationship between the two cultures is DEPICTED, -- shown not told.

One could make the case that early Klingon versions were bullies, or the most admirable trait in Klingon culture was bullying. 

We discussed bullying in the Theme-Worldbuidding series:

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

The anti-bullying culture subscribes to some simple rules of them to detect bullying situations. 

"Don't hit below the belt"

"Don't pick on someone smaller than you" (in size, power, reach, ability)

This picking on someone smaller than you is what Israel is depicted as doing to the Palestinians especially in Gaza.

See how easily depiction can be used to paint a picture which remains indelible in the mind long after a conflict is over?

The USA culture despises the Bully and righteously rejects bullying.

But how many Americans actually know what Bullying is? 

Most people don't think philosophically, or theoretically.  In life as in fiction, people want concrete, clearly defined edges to the ideas that form the world.

So they know what bullying is because they've seen it in school yards, or on Gang dominated streets.  Maybe they've seen it in domestic abuse.  They know it when they see it, but they don't analyze it to figure out what it is, and how to "depict" it in a Alien Culture (non-human culture).

Lifting out the essence of a concept like Bullying and using that essence to generate a non-human fictional culture is Art.  It is what Artists do for a living -- depict the world from a different angle than the reader/viewer has ever seen.  The artist does this to reveal an inner, hidden truth.

So conspiracies and International Intrigue, subterfuge and obfuscation make wonderful raw material for the Artist.

Remember how Leonardo DaVinci would look at a slab of marble, and see the statue buried inside it, then free that statue by paring away the dross?

That's what artists do -- take away the dross to reveal something hidden inside. 

So take the Middle East situation as an example.

Most people look at that mess and say Israel is a Bully -- because clearly they have a strong economy, high tech weapons, and can fend off the worst that Gaza can throw at them.  A few Israelis died, and thousands of Gazans died, so who's the bully? 

Obviously tiny little Israel is a horrible bully for keeping the Palestinian borders closed, and policing every movement they make.

That's Leondardo DaVinci's view from outside the block of marble. 

What does the artist see looking at this mess?

The artist sees the Gazans as the bullies. 

Isn't that startling? 

You can make the case that the Palestinians are more powerful than Israel if you understand the hidden connections and the history.  If you don't believe the history, you can't see the Gazans or the Hamas infestation in Gaza as the bullies.

The Palestinians have been made into a political football, or hot potatoe, by the much larger countries and factions surrounding the area.  They are the boxing glove worn by Iran and bigger countries in order to punch Israel without being hurt themselves.  They have been armed, deprived, and ginned up with religious fervor to be used as a weapon against a tiny country. 

Or so the argument goes.

Those who argue that Israel is the bully, say that Israel threw the Palestinians out of their homeland. 

Those who argue that Hamas and Palestinians are the bully, say that when Israel was forming as a State under U.N. Mandate, the Jewish refugees had no problem accepting the residents of the area as citizens of the new state.

But the Powers That Be in the surrounding countries lied to the residents to make them flee the new Israelis.  And then those Powers That Be refused to accept the refugees they had made homeless. 

There are conspiracy theorists who hold that those same Powers That Be planned to use those refugee homeless to attack and destroy the fledgling country Israel, a pushover without an army, populated by shell-shocked, starved people rescued from concentration camps.

Artists, especially those writing novels, love conspiracy theorists.  Such Drama!!!

Regardless of the actual motives of those Powers That Be, or even which countries they were from, the net result is a population of Stateless People, people not protected by a government, and without a land franchise of their own.

That population has grown, but as it has grown, it has not produced world class universities, patents, trade goods, intellectual property, or anything to add to the world GDP.  Trillions of dollars of the world's wealth has been poured into the Palestinian populace, and nothing has been added to the world Gross Product, the wealth of humanity. 

They are poor, and make a profession of being poverty stricken. 

So obviously anyone who attacks them is a bully. 

So what is a bully to do when the weakest kids on the block are given powerful weapons and attack as a mob?  Is the bully required (by cultural rules of engagement) to refrain from fighting back?  To refrain from self-protection?  To refrain from pre-emptive strikes to disarm?

The Palestinian situation makes a wonderful Situation to study for an interstellar war simply because the actual war is all about something totally different than Israel vs Palestinians.

What exactly it's all about -- aha, that's a matter for the Artist to chip away and reveal.  If you're stumped, go look again at the Klingons and the Romulans. 

Take this Situation, set it out amidst the stars of this galaxy, create different species, religions, billions of years of history, ancient ruins, Great Shrines of sacred planets,

Observe the Middle East melting down, and observe the techniques used to cause that to happen.  Look deeply into the religious wars, the many religious factions within factions -- there are as many flavors of Muslims as there are flavors of Christians, and Jews are no slouches in the flavors department.  A new faction seems to arise every week or so.

Are you looking at a religious war, or is the religious war an excuse to hold a good war the way the Klingons love to do?

How would Klingons (or Romulans) react to finding out they were someone else's patsy, a tool to hammer an enemy and escape retribution?

Which side is the bully and which the victim is a question few readers are comfortable pondering.  The reader wants you to tell them the answer.

There's a basic human psychology principle behind that reader preference.

People who bully in other areas of life become truly upset when they see what they think is bullying happening before their eyes.  They become upset because they can't look at themselves and acknowledge their own bullying tendencies. 

The psychological principle behind this is rooted in the subconscious.  What we hate other people for is the very thing we loathe so much in ourselves that we bury it deep in the subconscious. 

The Artist knows that when you see a flaw in someone else, it is because you have that flaw in you.  It's a reliable principle.  If you don't have that flaw, it won't irk you in others even when it is there.

So human cultures establish rules-of-thumb to measure or judge behavior objectively. 

You can tell a busy-body "Mind Your Own Business" by citing that cultural rule of privacy without getting personal, insulting, or obnoxious.  It's a generally accepted principle, not something you just made up.

The Prize Fighter waits for the guy he decked to get back on his feet before attacking again.  There's an ethical reason for that, and a moral one, but a referee enforced cultural rule. 

"Pick on someone your own size."  -- yes, you must fight, but only people who are an even match. 

One time there was a strike in Football, and instead of the scheduled match they televised a match between a professional team and a college team -- the college team got creamed.  And spectators didn't enjoy the sight.  They never did that again.

Do we enjoy such sights of uneven matches these days?

Check YouTube. 

There are a lot of Video posts by teens are of uneven matches.  There is that "trend" of walking up behind someone and sucker-punching them to the deck -- and it is done to older, more frail, or less fit (even handicapped) people.  The objective is to deck the other person WITHOUT WARNING, and that's pretty much like the old American Indian idea of counting coups by sneaking into another tribe's camp and stealing or marking their horses, leaving trace that their defenses are porous.

The message from the more powerful to the less powerful is "I am BETTER than you, so don't mess with me."

The message is MIGHT MAKES RIGHT.

That is the bully's message to the weak.

Is that now the new cultural mantra we all must live by?

Or do we still know that the weakest contestant in such a transaction is the bully him/herself.

Yes, bullies are cowards.  That's one of the oldest principles, and the origin of the advice parents always gave kids beset by the class bully -- just punch him back good and hard.  Deck him in front of his cronies.  That's the end of him because he'll react with cowardice not heroism.

Bullies are all about their Pride, so they focus on Who Is Right. (see the illustration at the top of this blog).  They do that because they are afraid they are wrong.  The Hero, the Strong Character (or one getting stronger) is focused on What Is Right, and always curious to find any error, misconception, or mistake.  The Hero is about correcting mistakes, and takes joy from each mistake found and corrected.  That's a hero.

Both Science Fiction and Romance are about heroes.  But very often, a combination of SF and Romance depicts a coward becoming a hero.  Many World War II movies depicted that character arc showing the flinching coward becoming a "real man" by finding inner courage.

On the TV Series DEFIANCE,


where several species of aliens have landed on Earth, each with their own culture and customs.  There is an alien culture where males are unquestioned in their (brutal) dominance of females. 
Exposure to Earth's ideas has given the wife of one prominent businessman some ideas about just becoming the boss.

She has framed him for crimes, had him imprisoned, nearly killed him in the street, humiliated him before other males of his species, used his son by her as a patsy and commanded the business interests behind the screen of his son.  She wants dominance in a MIGHT MAKES RIGHT culture that attributes its strength to dominating its women absolutely.

Their religious leader opposes her, and she frames him for murder of several women (wives of the prominent and powerful) and he is publicly executed.  She does this right in front of her husband.  The acting is absolutely superb and makes the show worth watching all by itself.

Now these are not "real" aliens, you understand -- they are Hollywood Aliens created to DEPICT a THEME.

At the inter-cultural interfaces among the various species, ideas cross over.  Each culture has its own definition of bullying, and of the value of the bully to a culture.

And yes, just as humans have a zillion cultures, likewise each alien species has different cultures.

The location is the USA, vastly transformed by destruction at the arrival of these aliens, and continuing threats.  The various aliens and all the different kinds of humans clash, and form uneasy alliances, and in some cases get along quite well.

The entire series is about Power -- who has it, who doesn't, what to do with it.

In the sparse, superficial language of Television Series, this series depicts Power In Culture.

The devastation depicted wipes the whole Israel/Palestinian conflict off the map.  The series doesn't give much about what's going on in the rest of the world, but clearly nothing that was going on is still going on.  Nobody turns up from China or a new Caliphate to take over the US, Canada and Mexico.

The focus is close up on a group of people (and non-humans) just trying to survive long enough to learn to get along.

And it's very much a "Strong Man" and "Gang" dominated society, very much like the "failed state" scenario we saw in The Balkans, and are seeing now in Libya, Somalia, some African areas, and Iraq, etc.  But Iraq might yet pull together something.

Still, DEFIANCE is a science fiction series depicting the failed state pulling itself together -- sort of.  It takes a really big bully to pull such a mess together. 

Is that why humanity is so well supplied with bullies?  Do we need them?  Is humanity's need for the bully-personality (cowardice and all) the reason God created so many bullies?  Or was that just evolution speaking?  All that is raw material from which to craft themes you can depict by using the culture you create for your characters.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Reviews 6: TV Series "Elementary" by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Reviews 6: TV Series "Elementary"
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

A writer does not "watch Television" -- or "see" what ordinary viewers "see" in a TV Show.

So this blog entry is not about whether I think ELEMENTARY is a "good" TV show, or what's wrong with it as a TV Show, or even about whether you should or should-not watch it.  This is more about "how" to be a writer watching TV rather than a viewer watching TV.

And I'm onto my hobby-horse about THEME again.  By Blogger's count, I've done 34 posts relevant to THEME in this writing series. 

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/11/story-springboards-part-3-art-of.html is just one, and it has some links to others about theme. 

Here's a link to an index of one of the various series on theme:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/05/index-to-theme-plot-integration.html

So today we're going to look at this episode of Elementary with a microscope focused on theme and what happens when the theme is not reticulated:

ELEMENTARY
Season 2: Episode 12 - Internal Audit
http://www.cbs.com/shows/elementary/episodes/212705
    Starring
    Jonny Lee Miller
    Lucy Liu
    Aidan Quinn
    Jon Michael Hill

When a hedge fund manager who was also running a Ponzi scheme is murdered, Holmes and Watson must determine which of his clients is guilty.

Study that "logline" -- you have to learn to write a logline for your own novel's pitch or query letter.  This one is an excellent example. 

We're looking at the cohesiveness of the script of this episode to discern the theme and the NETWORK (CBS) opinion of the audience the show is aimed toward. 

A Network gets their opinion of their audience for a given show by studying numbers, statistics, focus groups -- and applying the principles of "PR" (Public Relations and/or Advertising.)

As I pointed out many times, but closely in the series on Marketing Fiction ...

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/03/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world_18.html

... TV and Film (and News) delivered by Airwaves, Cable, or Internet is a business using the business model where the product the studios make is sold to advertisers totally on the number and demographic composition of the eyes glued to the screen. 

Commercial fiction and now (as pointed out in the Marketing series) non-fiction is all delivering you (the consumer) to the mercies of the advertisers. 
Understanding the attitudes, concerns and opinions of that audience is what PR is all about -- but today it's being used in reverse to create that opinion. 

As any Math Major will explain, "Statistics" can not be used backwards.  Statistics can accurately predict the behavior of large groups of people (thousands) but Statistics can tell you absolutely nothing about any individuals even if you know what Groups they belong to. 

PR is trying to become a science which can determine the behavior of an individual -- and one tool being experimented with is the use of fiction (and news) to shape public opinion. 

A writer who has studied my previous blogs on THEME will see this experimental process playing out in stark, high relief, when watching this specific episode of the CBS drama ELEMENTARY linked above titled Internal Audit.

Now, fix firmly in mind that I'm a Baker Street Irregular from the git-go.  I absolutely love the entire Sherlock Holmes mythos, in all its variations.

Elementary is a worthy entry into the canon, via the alternate universe approach (I mean, NEW YORK!!!  But, oh, well, good is good.)

This episode which clearly illustrates many of my points about THEME. 

You can't choose elements of your story at random, because they're neat, or good, or popular, or ripped from the headlines.  If you do, you may get it right, but more likely you will get it wrong and make a big mess.

"Internal Audit" is a neat, clear example of a big mess.

A couple episodes previously, the cop that Sherlock liked to work with got shot and hospitalized.  It appears now there's nerve damage to his dominant arm, and there is no way to say if it will heal or if he must be retired to a desk job.  He's a good Detective to have earned Sherlock's respect.

Sherlock feels guilty for having put this cop in that dangerous situation, but reviewing his choices, he finds no error that he committed.  It just happened.

NOTE: as most TV shows, this one never allows any of the characters to include spiritual elements of "right and wrong" in their decision making.  So the reasoning always seems to be two-dimensional and over-simplified.

The theme of this episode is GUILT/INNOCENCE.  It's all about how responsible an individual is for the consequences of their actions, and what that responsibility says about the choices a person must, should, or could make. 

In this theme element, the connection between Cause and Effect is highlighted.

But it's a TV show, so nothing so profound as cause/effect appears anywhere in this script. 

It is SHOW DON'T TELL -- a story in pictures.  And an excellent script, too. 

ELEMENTARY is one of the very best produced shows on TV.  Elegant! 

This episode, however, doesn't measure up to the usual standards. And that is what's so starkly revealing to make this episode worth study. 

Remember all we discussed in Story Springboards and Episodic Plot structure linked above.

The END of the Internal Audit episode gives you a "springboard" into the next "chapter" of the injured Cop's career.  If you are trying to master springboards or episodic structure, study that last bit of dialogue carefully. 

The cop's story-arc for this episode ends in a scene where the injured cop is offered a different job opportunity in a different law enforcement division.  That offer (unanswered at this point) is a "springboard."  It leaves you with a question that is not answered, and an array of possible developments to stimulate your curiosity.  How curious you are depends on how well you know and like this character.  (Theme-Character Integration is an essential ingredient in Springboards.)

The "mess" I'm talking about in this episode happened because, though one element appears to have been changed by perhaps Network Administrators who are not writers, this final scene was not changed to MATCH THEMATICALLY with the changed element.

I suspect that's because they want to direct this injured cop into the other department which is called "Demographics" but is a surveilance program looking for terrorists before they attack the city. 

The offer is to keep working to "keep this city safe."  We know this character is dedicated to that concept. 

The point of the entire episode is to redirect this one character's career -- presumably to later come back and involve Sherlock in Homeland Security and anti-terrorist activities.

Note that "point" is not indicated in the logline.  Never let your theme show in your logline.  Logline is about plot and genre -- about who will watch or buy the story.

The logline here is about the "mystery" (genre):

"When a hedge fund manager who was also running a Ponze scheme is murdered, Holmes and Watson must determine which of his clients is guilty. "

This is a TV Series with a "story arc" structure, but it is episodic.  So here we see the Springboards used in Episodic structure -- all the gear-wheels of a plot structure are visible and clear and cleanly delineated.  That's why it's so obvious what went wrong to create this mess.

That POINT of having this "episode" as part of the arc is what determines the THEME of the episode.

Each episode has to have a theme that is some sub-set of the master-theme of the Series, and that master-theme has to be a sub-set of the genre's master-theme.

For example: the master-theme of the Romance Genre is "Love Conquers All" -- so all the sub-genres, different settings, times, or alternate-universes, can't change that master-theme.  Each setting can generate a series of "episodes" -- or series of novels.  But always the main theme requires the plot to display a problem and show how love conquers it.  Everything else is decoration.

Thus in a Mystery/Detective series like ELEMENTARY, there has to be a CRIME as a problem, and Sherlock and Watson have to conquer it by sifting details into a pattern that reveals motive, method, and opportunity (all of which hinge on character). 

The master-theme of Mystery is "Crime Doesn't Pay." 

So back to this Elementary episode titled Internal Audit.

Up until that last scene where this job offer is made to the injured cop, I thought Internal Audit was a perfectly fine episode, nicely written, well acted, very engrossing mystery, and contained everything you could want from an ELEMENTARY episode. 

I thought Sherlock becoming a Sponsor was what the episode was about. 

Then BOOM - everything fell apart at that scene where the injured cop gets a job-offer.

Clearly redirecting this injured cop's career into anti-terrorist activity (referred to euphemistically as Demographics) was what the episode was about. 

Sherlock becoming a Sponsor for an AA member is not as portentous as a cop going into anti-terrorist squad duties.  Think about "springboard tension" -- which issue is more likely to uncoil and "spring" into higher drama?  Will Sherlock be drawn back into drug use -- probably, because the original character was a cocaine addict, so what's so dramatic about that?  But a homicide detective drawn into the world of international espionage, covert-warfare, and massive financial schemes -- border security -- wow, that's huge.

So springboard-wise, this episode is about redirecting a cop's  career.

One big messy problem is that nowhere in this episode prior to that final scene in the cop's story-arc is there any hint that he will be drawn into anti-terrorist task force work.

The writing on this series and even in this episode is so pristine, so perfect, that the lack of foreshadowing of this truly epic scene in the development of a minor character that will affect the life of the main character is horrifying.  No writer of this caliber would have done such a thing.

So I saw in my mind's eye the original script submitted (which may never have existed, I have no inside knowledge of production of this show), and the rewritten script that was produced.  And I saw the non-writer's "hand" behind the decision to replace one Perpetrator with another. 

The aired episode used the crime of Money Laundering to be the motive for 3 murders.

There was an Art Gallery involved as a "front" for the money laundering scheme run by the Ponzi scheme hedge fund manager.

Tracing back from the Art Gallery, Sherlock discovers a Holocaust Survivor charity (retrieving money from the  Nazis) is involved in the money laundering -- an international charity. 

That seemed perfectly reasonable to me -- they used veiled references to Bernie Madoff by using similar names etc.  It was well done.

At first the Holocaust Charity didn't seem intrusive -- didn't seem to not-fit.

Only when that final scene on the injured Cop's plot-thread came up did I realize the script was distorted.

I guessed they couldn't change that scene with the injured cop because there are plot-plans for subsequent episodes locked in.  As I said above, it's an obvious springboard. 

But someone decided they had to use a Holocaust Charity as the source of the guy who did the murdering. 

But the entire episode is about morality's dictums regarding personal responsibility.

It makes thematic sense that the source of this murderer would be a CHARITY, and money-laundering made perfect sense -- white collar crimes.

It had to be an International Charity because the job offer to the cop is to become a guardian of the city against invaders from abroad who want to kill people.

So thematically International is the only choice.

But what are the HEADLINES chattering about now? 

Not Bernie Madoff (who invested for charities, mostly domestic.  Currently a trust is paying a portion of the invested capital back to the investors). 

Right now the headlines (most buried deep behind our scandals de jour) chatter about US based Islamic Charities funneling money to terrorists who use that money to attack us here and abroad.

This is HORRIBLE NEWS -- most Islamic charities are as good as anyone else's, and they do the job very nicely, thank you!  But with humans, there's a rotten apple in everyone's barrel.

And of course rotten apples make headlines (that glue eyeballs to advertisers).  Stories about upstanding charities don't attract the exact eyeballs advertisers pay big bucks to access.

There are a number of really effective, efficient, completely honest Holocaust Survivor charities in the USA -- so I assume there must be a rotten apple in that barrel somewhere, humans being human.  I didn't see anything wrong on first viewing with the choice of a Holocaust charity.

Collect a lot of money or power in one location and like turning on a light bulb at sunset on your patio, you will attract flies, moths, and things that sting.

The lesson is don't turn that color light on -- don't collect money or power in one location under the control of say 6 or 12 individuals who only have to agree to keep quiet in order to make them all rich. 

Now take a close look at the underlying structure of that episode's script considering our discussion of episodic structure and springboards.

The point was a) Sherlock becomes a sponsor, b) injured cop gets involved in anti-terrorist activities.  c) Sherlock's protege, Watson, faced down a temptation to reveal one of her prior clients -- so the entire episode was about morality, responsibility, keeping your word of honor.  That's why the cop didn't answer right away -- as an honorable man, he had to be sure he chose correctly, and that he would give his Word and keep that promise (like Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's St. Germain vampire character.)

The Holocaust Survivor charity broke "word of honor." 

It was an international charity dedicated to doing something all viewers would like to see done, and it betrayed the Holocaust Survivors by retrieving their money but not passing it on to them or their heirs.

Does that fit the theme?

Almost.

There are some brilliant writers involved in this show.  Watch those names on the credits.  Grand careers are being launched here.

But what is the natural, obvious, and thematically perfect type of international charity to be the source of someone stealing money and WILLING TO MURDER?

Did Bernie Madoff shoot or stab people?  No.  That was pure "white collar" crime.  Did he deal with people who then turned around and killed him?  No.  Why?  White Collar Crime (like embezzlement ) doesn't go with murder. 

The kind of person who runs a Ponzi scheme is not the kind of person (study criminal psychology) who murders or associates with people who would. 

What sort of people run their lives on a morality that makes it OK to shoot, stab, burn, behead or otherwise murder people who disagree with them?

You have to find the sort of people who fit into the episode that ends with a cop considering a redirection of his career into detecting terrorists. 

In other words, the money laundering that goes with the cop's career redirect is international and run by people who believe murder is OK at least under some circumstances.

All of a sudden, when you see that last scene with the injured cop, you understand the thematic ERROR made here -- and because the intrusion is smooth, subtle, and almost correct, you have a quandry to resolve.  Is it the Holocaust Charity that is the intrusion or the Cop's career choice that is the intrusion in this script? 

Which piece of this script was wedged in by non-writers?

Then ask why non-writers would mess with a script.

The answer (all the way back to the 1960's and STAR TREK which I do know a lot about) is ADVERTISERS and their assessment of the audience they want to reach with their products.  Or more specifically, it's what the network execs think the advertisers think.  (consider the Duck Dynasty flap from December 2013 and audience plus advertiser responses to the flap.)

The decision to change a script element has nothing to do with the thematic integrity of the story.

That's the big problem you face if you want to work in TV (where the money is).

The decision is entirely a PR (math turning an art into a science and not quite making it) decision. 

Some non-writer exec decided they could not use the obvious Islamic Mosque supporting an Islamic charity funneling money to terrorists in other countries.

Given that final scene with the injured cop, it is vividly obvious the International Charity had to be Islamic in the original script.  If it wasn't -- then it would have had to be changed in rewrite because that's what has to go into the cop's plot-thread springboard. 

But Islamic Terrorism is a hot-button issue that would distract viewers from the commercials, and therefore forbidden.  Any non-writer can see that instantly.

So what sort of international charity could they use instead of a Muslim one?  Red Cross?  It would work thematically, but no, can't attack the Red Cross -- too many people approve of them.

So who?  What charity?

A Jewish Charity would be acceptable to the CBS audience as a source of an embezzler turned murderer.  Despite the fact that Madoff wasn't a violent criminal, despite everything mystery fans know about criminal psychology, despite all the facts everyone knows, it is plausible enough, so use it.

But the script already called for 3 murders to lead to the solution -- and that's air time. 

So these (really great) writers had to leave out the character development that would have let the audience understand the Perpetrator as a "rotten apple" -- a distinctive, unique, strange individual criminal with both White Collar and Violent Crime in his makeup. 

It must have pained them greatly to leave such a paper-thin character as the perpetrator.  They could have made the Holocaust Charity element work if they'd had maybe another 4 minutes of air time to develop that individuality. 

But even so, that would not have been the platform upon which to hinge the springboard of the injured cop's new career decision.  There aren't any Jewish terrorists planning attacks on New York or London. 

I've detected similar "messes" made of other TV shows, but none so clear and stark and easy to see as this one.

Given this problem with this script, what would you do to fix it? 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Believing In Happily Ever After Part 7 - The Writer's Lifestyle and Voice

Part 6 (which has a link to part 5 which links to previous parts of this series) is dated April 10, 2012:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/04/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-6.html

At the end of Part 6 we began talking about the trajectory of a writer's career and how it can be affected by decisions about what to write.

Look again at that quote from the screenwriting blog discussed in Part 6

http://gointothestory.blcklst.com/2012/02/screenwriting-101-jonathan-lemkin.html 

If you take "the wrong job" just because you've let your lifestyle drive you into needing a check, you will find the quality of your work deteriorating and it'll be harder to get another job (by this, the screenwriter is talking about WORK FOR HIRE -the exact business model that is freaking out L. J. Smith's fans.)

Here's something I know about Marion Zimmer Bradley.  She did take just anything that came along, writing, editing, odd jobs, anything!  She had kids to feed and bills to pay and she scrambled and scraped for years before the career triumph of having one of her novels made into a TV miniseries.

If you've read the Darkover novels in publishing order, you know that the quality of her work increased over the years.

But she did what that screenwriter is advising writers not to do.

What's the difference? 

Over her lifetime, Marion was a practitioner of many religions, an expert at considerable depth at many philosophies and worldviews.  She understood Tarot, Astrology, Magic, Christianity, Paganism, and much more.  She understood what they all have in common, the conclusion that behind it all there is a strong Hand that guides events. 

The theory of what that Hand is, where it comes from, how it manifests, how it treats this person differently from that person, etc etc -- all these mysteries of life, was always an open question for her, but one thing she always knew throughout all her adventures in life -- something is 'assigning' us our problems, and solving them makes us better, stronger and more able to solve the next one.

At least, that's what I saw (remember the commentary above here about memoir writing and facts) -- that's what I saw in her. 

That basic concept about the nature of reality is woven into all the Darkover novels she wrote, and it is something I think I was born with.  And so when I encountered the Darkover novels, I resonated to the stories in a way that was different from how I responded to other novels written at that time.

Marion, for the worldbuilding behind Darkover, invented a term for the psychic effects we experience as real but which somehow just can't be proved (or disproved actually). 

Science as we know it today is based on a "law" that Francis Bacon popularized, the system of empirical science based on the law of cause and effect.

Our whole Aristotelian worldview (I do hope you remember that from the Tarot posts) is based on cause and effect, establishing that when you do this, then subsequently because you did this, that happens.  This causes that.

Current politically correct philosophy insists that because cause/effect has worked so well to improve life on earth, that therefore there can and must be nothing else in reality except cause/effect.

Any phenomenon that is observed that can not be analyzed down to a cause/effect basis just isn't real.  Therefore it must be ignored.

Well, Happily Ever After is just exactly such a thing! 

Nobody has ever been able to nail the CAUSE for which the inevitable and repeatable, achievable by anyone EFFECT is Happiness, nevermind Ever After-ness!

Finding and marrying a Soul Mate is not a project one can embark upon by reading the textbook and performing the required actions.

So Marion came up with a catch-all term to lump together the entire non-scientific (not anti-scientific!!!) world of actions and events. 

She called the psychic and spiritual world "the non-causitive sciences."

As has been observed in Astrology for thousands of years before "science" was invented, very often the EFFECT can precede the CAUSE.

That is, what happens as a result of an action can happen before the action is taken. 

In modern science, this can be accounted for if you have been following developments at the edges of theoretical physics where the realm of magic is converging on the realm of science.  But we've still a long way to go.

So how does this apply to L. J. Smith?  I have no idea because I don't know L. J. Smith personally.  But the Vampire Diaries fans are resonating to her Voice which has to be inflected by her deepest philosophical notions, possibly notions she isn't even aware she has.  I keep finding such notions lurking inside myself, a constant revelation, so I assume others have them too.

So how is it that one writer can observe in himself and his compatriots in Hollywood that taking a job (writing a script) that is just for the paycheck can cause a deterioration in quality and marketability of the byline when another writer (in novels at the time) finds the exact opposite, that taking whatever COMES TO HAND increases skill quality and marketability?

I have a theory (well, 2 actually )about how that could be.  It might not be true, and might not apply to any of the writers mentioned here -- but it would surely make a grand foundation for a novel series.

There is a principle of Magic that says that if a Magician turns his/her Talent to lesser tasks than the Talent was gifted to him for, then the Talent will dissipate, not be renewed by the Higher Power that gifted him with it.

That could be what the screenwriter was observing. 

But there's another way to look at this process.

In Magic, there is a principle known as the Law of Abundance.

It's pretty well illustrated by the Biblical story of Mana -- how in the desert, when the Tribes camped, in the morning the ground would be covered in a dew-like substance that could be picked up and taken home to eat.  When eaten it would taste like whatever the person craved, and sustain them perfectly in energy and vitamins.

From that story is derived the concept that we work for this Higher Power, God Himself.  God pays our salaries, not the person who signs the check.

We are gifted with a Talent to make our way in the world, and a Lesson that we must learn and take out of the world with us when we die.  What work we are assigned is the work needed to learn that Lesson, and our Salary will come to us via another channel. 

In other words wealth itself is mana, or a Gift. 

In yet other words, your salary is not caused by your work.

Salary, sustenance, income, wealth are not part of the Scientific Universe. 

Work, tasks, difficulties, traumas, job, unemployment, success and failure, are not causes that directly result in wealth or poverty.

So, if you live in a world where there exists such a thing (right alongside Science and interacting with it smoothly and invisibly) as the non-causative sciences, then you accept whatever tasks, work, job, script contract that comes to you, and you do that work with all your might, all your strength, every last iota of Talent, ability, craft, and no-stone-unturned meticulous effort.

If you work with that attitude -- that the task is yours because God assigned it to you -- then you will, little by little, achieve the purpose of your life.

Meanwhile, sustenance will be provided, sometimes wealth, but inevitably happiness will accrue (even in poverty!). 

But wealth and happiness (two often incompatible things unless your Soul has achieved its lessons in this life) have to be understood not as a result of  what you do but of what you are, what you've made of yourself on a Soul level.  And it isn't a simple, scientifically understandable paradigm. 

The laws of cause and effect as they operate in material reality (Pentacles of the Tarot) do not apply at the level of Cups or Wands -- at least not exactly and without modification.

If you live in a science-only world, where no spiritual dimension exists or functions, then you have to believe that if you take on a shitty job writing some crap script for a very small paycheck, then you, yourself have caused your reputation to deteriorate so you can't get more work BECAUSE you made a wrong decision about what work to accept.

If you believe that your actions and your actions alone cause you to get work, then you must believe that your actions cause you to not-get work.

The belief that there is nothing but simple cause/effect operating in the world can become your religion, and anything that challenges that belief (such as an inevitable Happily Ever After) must be rejected with religious fervor.

If on the other hand you can understand your reality as managed by and even driven by a Higher Power, then you will look at your monetary problem in another way. 

You might conclude that you were given wealth beyond your spiritual level of development to handle (e.g. that you didn't give the 10% to Charity you should have) and so find yourself in poverty.  You will then pray, make ammends, pray real hard, and take whatever work comes along and do it with all your Talent and all your might.

This is what happens when people find themselves out of work and, despite pounding the pavement, can't find any opening.  So they go volunteer at a Hospital as a candy striper or at a Soup Kitchen or Homeless Shelter -- or teach Bible Study on Sundays, or whatever -- just DO something for others.

And then a break happens, out of nowhere for no reason anyone can see, and the person's life picks up, barreling hell bent for leather toward a Happily Ever After.

That's the stuff out of which stories are made because that's how real life really works.  (I know real people who've been through that process and I've followed the astrology of it all.)

So if you find yourself young, with writing Talent or storytelling Talent, you can regard that Talent as a "lethal weapon" with which to "wipe out the competition" and achieve Great Things (and maybe die of a drug overdose in some posh, or foreign, Hotel Room). 

After all, "you" are just a lump of meat, and it's a dog-eat-dog world.  You're never going to be Happy Ever After because there is no such thing -- there can't be because there's no such thing as a soul.  After all, brain research can account for every human trait and experience, including near-death and out-of-body so that proves there is no God.  What you, yourself do with your own hands is the only cause of events in your life.  So use your Talent to elbow your way to the top of the heap -- at least you can breathe a little up there.

OR -- you can look at the entire matter from different perspectives, not just that one narrow "Scientific" perspective.

Why did I put scientific in quotes?  Because real science keeps an open mind.  No matter how well proven any theory might be, it is always possible that NEW EVIDENCE can prove that theory wrong.  Science doesn't "believe" -- science only knows, and that knowledge is only tentative.

The Real Scientist admits of the possibility of the non-causal sciences -- even if she hasn't seen any evidence at all of such a thing.

It's possible to think it, so it might be true.  It might not be likely, and you might not want to bet your life on it -- but...

See?

So now read the following from my review column -- The False Hobson's Choice:

http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/columns/0212.html

That's part of a Series on Justice, and you'll find the index to the year 2012 reviews here:

http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2012/

That's my review column I've been writing for the paper magazine, The Monthly Aspectarian which is posted to their website lightworks.com then after the exclusive they paid me for has run out, it is archived on my site, http://simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/   

Science and Magic are not different things, not incompatible.  They are different coordinate systems, each useful for describing the same Universe.

A coordinate system is like a Point of View.  When writing a novel, you can shift the genre (remember the post on genre I linked here above) by shifting the point of view.

And that brings us back to the top of this topic.  A writer's LIFESTYLE "informs" the writer's "Voice" -- but Voice and Lifestyle are not connected by Cause/Effect -- they are interlaced via the non-causative sciences view of the universe. 

Some Voices irritate, send shudders through you.  Others soothe.  Others are as @MiriamSPia noted, boring. 

Boredom is, as most students of Magic know, the strongest of all Wards.

You want to keep something secret?  Make it boring. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com  
http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20

Believing In Happily Ever After Part 6 - The Writer's Lifestyle and Happily Ever After

Part 5 of this series is:
http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/02/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-5.html

On this blog, I talk a lot about the business model of being a professional writer, about writing craftsmanship, and I talk a lot about the Romance story requirement of the Happily Ever After ending.

I talk a lot on this blog about fiction, fictional worldbuilding, and crafting a good story.

But let's take a moment to look at how a writer crafts the story of their own life.

On Twitter in February 2012, I sat in on one of my favorite chats, #litchat, where the topic was about a lawsuit (that seems to have merit as it describes egregious wrongdoing, but that seems to me to hold hidden threats to writer's freedom to create and communicate).

Here's the URL to a brief description of the issue:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=146661802

So #litchat kicked around the issue of "truth in memoir writing" quite a bit, showing that many writers and readers have only begun to think about this topic, and consider it deeply.

In this particular case it seems a memoir writer fabricated actions and events that never occurred - on purpose - just to popularize the book and allegedly donate money to a charity -- which may never have occurred.

The facts of the case seemed to capture more attention than the legal principle I find alarming -- that a court can decide what is or is not factual in a memoir -- (not autobiography, not biography, but memoir). 

Since I'm in the midst of writing a memoir this intrusion of law into subjectivity gives me a different perspective.  Call a spade a spade, I was freaked out by this lawsuit article!

The next day I ran into a post -- I think it was on google+ -- on a blog by a teenager who wants to become a writer (and likes the kind of stuff I like) who was just as freaked out by a discovery on literary contract law that I've known about since I was younger than she is. 

The post was about L. J. Smith (author of Vampire Diaries) losing control of her product, and her byline, and all her titles, having the publisher hire writers to write more stories in her universe under her byline.

That sort of thing has been "business as usual" in publishing, especially YA, longer than I've been alive, so ho-hum-yawn for me but a major freaking-out-discovery for this young writer-to-be. 

When I learned about this standard practice in publishing, I already had decided I wanted to be a writer (not that I would, but that I wanted to) but was only mildly curious that some of my favorite novel series (Nancy Drew for example) were written by a lot of different writers under the same byline.  I just wondered how they managed that miracle and wanted to be part of it. 

Here's the post by this very talented teen writer:

http://parafantasy.blogspot.com/2012/02/this-is-utterly-ridiculousi-cant-even.html

Now, keep in mind the memoir writer who "sold out" for money, the idealistic teenager getting a taste of real life as a writer -- considering the biggest thing in writing news these years is Harry Potter, and the writer writing all her own story and benefiting from it all, she has a reason to believe writers keep what they earn -- and put this together with how L. J. Smith is being hammered for being successful.

Think about Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and her legal battle to keep hold of her St. Germain as a Vampire concept.  (she won, but just barely, and only after years of court battles during which she had to switch to writing about Olivia and other female vampires who were "made" by St. Germain.)

When I learned about multiple YA authors writing a series under a joint byline with the worldbuilding and byline being created by publishers, I also learned that Films and TV drama were written the same way, though authors would get byline credit. 

I later learned that byline credit could be extremely fictitious, too!  But since I wanted to 'be a writer' I was merely interested in how they managed all that and still got paid.  (I now know that sometimes they don't get paid!  Getting paid is a different issue!) 

I do hope you've been following the blog by one of my favorite Hollywood writers who "tells it like it is" in Hollywood from a writer's point of view:

Here's an example:
http://allan-cole.blogspot.com/2012/02/follow-bouncing-beach-ball-part-two-and.html 

Yes, this is "The" Allan Cole!!! 

Here's the masthead of his blog:
---------
Tales sometimes tall, but always true, of Allan Cole's years in Hollywood with his late partner, Chris Bunch. How a naked lady almost became our first agent. How we survived Galactica 1980, with only the loss of half our brain cells. How Bunch & Cole became the ultimate fix-it boys. How an alleged Mafia don was very, very good to us. The guy who cornered the market on movie rocks. Why they don't make million dollar movies. And many more.
-------------

Now, with all this background in mind, I run into the following post on a blog that usually has very interesting, salient, and informative entries:

http://gointothestory.blcklst.com/2012/02/screenwriting-101-jonathan-lemkin.html

Here's the blog entry that caught my attention this time, just a quote in isolation from the context (which I am familiar with but don't think much about):

-----------------
THE SCREENWRITING BLOG OF THE BLACK LIST
Screenwriting 101: Jonathan Lemkin
Posted on February 14, 2012 by Scott

“If you let your lifestyle expend your last check, you then say yes to a really bad project to keep the checks coming. The quality of your work goes down, your reputation goes down, and it’s harder to get the next job. I’ve definitely taken the wrong job a couple of times, and it’s very hard to do your best work if you’re feeling like, ‘Oh, this is the wrong job.’”

– Jonathan Lemkin (Lethal Weapon 4), excerpted from “Tales from the Script”
--------------------

OK, now back to the main subject I blog about here, how to raise the reputation of ROMANCE GENRE - but in particular science fiction Romance, Paranormal Romance being a real focus (since I write vampires in love).

One of my followers on twitter @MiriamSPia (a writer, surprise-surprise!) commented on a guest post I did for another beginning writer who had asked on yet another blog post about the challenges of cold-pitching a project at an agent or editor at a convention (being SF fans, they are planning on being at the Worldcon in Chicago 2012 -- worldcon.org for info).

The Guest post was for @Madison_Woods and it's in two parts.  Here's the first part which discusses the origin of Genre showing how a new writer can use a particular understanding of genre to create a pitch that will sell.

http://madisonwoods.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/genre-tuesday-guest-post-from-jaqueline-lichtenberg-part-1/

It went up on Valentine's Day, at the same moment as the following post which I did for Alien Romances:

http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/02/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-5.html 

which discusses the TV Series ONCE UPON A TIME.

Miriam commented on twitter:
I think its that "happily ever after" may seem boring and peaceful to outsiders.

As I've established in my posts here about Happily Ever After -- and the other posts linked in those posts mostly about how a writer uses THEME to do "worldbuilding,"  my best analysis is that the ability to suspend disbelief and enter a world ( remember "liminal" from the Genre Guest post) where there is a genuine threat that a situation will finally resolve with a Happily Ever After Ending (yes, threat! - to some people happiness is more threat than reward) depends entirely on the ability to include GOD in your model of the universe.

That doesn't mean you have to be "religious" or "spiritual" or anything like that.

It simply means you need to be able to STIPULATE that maybe there could be such an extra-reality entity orchestrating events, creating souls.  Some people can't stipulate that premise -- it's just way to scary.  So they can't cross that "liminal" threshold that the Guest Poster prior to my Guest Post talked about in such scholarly terms. 

Here's the guest post about "liminal" experience:
http://madisonwoods.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/genre-tuesday-with-dr-harrison-solow/ 

To accept the idea that there is HAPPINESS in finding a SOUL MATE -- you need to accept the idea of SOUL, which means humans aren't just meat.  There's something else to us.

What that is, where it came from and how it works can be open questions, but they have to be questions somewhere in the reader's psyche.

Now, for those who have followed my posts here on Tarot and Astrology, you know that I've used these esoteric tools to show you how to do the worldbuilding (hopefully invisible to the reader) that supports the foundations of story upon which you can build a plausible relationship that hurtles toward an "inevitable" Happily Ever After resolution of the main conflict.

Here are index posts to those posts in case you missed them:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_23.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html

The sense of "hurtling" and the sense of "inevitability" of the Happily Ever After ending do come from using tools in those index posts, yes, but they also come from the way the writer herself lives her personal life, and her professional life.  Or maybe it's vice-verso -- that you live a certain way because you understand such tools.

As I pointed out, these aren't the only philosophical tools around that produce this effect.  Choose your own tools, but master them to the point where they are fully integrated not just into your novels but into your life.

Examine what this teenager writer-to-be has said, (and what the comments on that post add up to) about how precious L. J. Smith's "touch" on this Vampire Diaries material is.

Think about the severe shift in the "feel" of the Darkover novels after Marion Zimmer Bradley was no longer writing them -- that transition is less jarring because the turnover to her successor was gradual as she became too ill to do the actual work.

What exactly is that quality that we treasure so much in the VIBRATION that a particular writer injects into material?  We often term that the writer's "voice" and it's terribly illusive for new writers to get a handle on.

The truth is you can't hear your own voice the way others hear it (not even in recordings, and not when reading words you have written).

One vital ingredient in a writer's "voice" is how they live their lives, professionally and personally.

Look again at that quote from the screenwriting blog. 

If you take "the wrong job" just because you've let your lifestyle drive you into needing a check, you will find the quality of your work deteriorating and it'll be harder to get another job (by this, the screenwriter is talking about WORK FOR HIRE -the exact business model that is freaking out L. J. Smith's fans.)

Here's something I know about Marion Zimmer Bradley.  She did take just anything that came along, writing, editing, odd jobs, anything!  She had kids to feed and bills to pay and she scrambled and scraped for years before the career triumph of having one of her novels made into a TV miniseries.

If you've read the Darkover novels in publishing order, you know that the quality of her work increased over the years.

But she did what that screenwriter is advising writers not to do.

What's the difference? 

We'll look carefully at that difference next week in Part 7 of Believing In Happily Ever After.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

You can find my January 2012 release THE FARRIS CHANNEL and 11 other books in that series (some by Jean Lorrah), plus my other novels, 3 with audiobook versions at
http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20

Star Trek / Loveboat Mashup And Soulmates Part I

This series of posts illustrates the thinking process inside the writer's mind. The exercise here is to target an audience and develop a jaw-dropping TV Series premise from a very vague concept.

-----Part I----------

So I've been thinking.  That's always a dangerous thing.

A couple months ago, on facebook, one of my writer friends asked which, among all the branches of science, is the most "fundamental."

This being a very popular writer, there were a lot of answers, and when it settled down, I think every branche of science I'd ever  heard of had been mentioned.  Of course I chimed in with Chemistry, then thought more and decided to go up the tree of history to the origin of science, and I said "Philosophy" which drew objections.

OK, this fellow who posed this magnificent question is a hard-science-fiction writer, and his fans are working scientists with an anti-religious bias.

I actually resonate well to that anti-religious bias (even though I'm definitely a mystic with a working religious philosophy). I don't see a conflict between the two views of reality, as I've explained in my 20 posts on Tarot which are designed to give writers a working acquaintance with the Kaballah.

The most popular among those posts are:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2007/09/six-of-swords-love-conquers-all-as.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2007/09/7-of-swords-conflict-avoidance.html

Yep, "love conquers all" and six of swords seem to be a popular google search. Psychological self-crippling mental tactics discussed in Seven Swords is likewise a topic of avid interest.

But the entire core concept behind Tarot is flatly rejected, scorned, scoffed off the map, by a group of hard-sf fans.  Why?  It makes no sense to me that sharp, deep-thinking people should be so blind on one side of their minds.

About the same time this facebook discussion raged, I was in a  #scifichat on twitter where we were discussing Starship Captains.

Somehow the whole "hunk" aspect of captains got glossed over so Linnea Sinclair didn't get mentioned.  Because of the hard-science, adventure-hero slant to the conversation, nobody squealed when one guy noted he'd be extremely averse to a Star Trek/ Loveboat mashup.

Oh-boy.

Well, that was a twitter chat.  140 characters just wouldn't do it.  So now part of it is this 7-part blog series.

These two groups of hard-science readers are in fact the exact audience who should be utterly captivated by the science fiction romance novel.  A lot of guys read romance novels or like romance in a story.  A lot of guys do Tarot.

Some guys are scientists and do Tarot. I know that's true because I've taught Tarot for decades and most of the students who turn up in my classes speak fluent science.  That makes it easy to learn Tarot and astrology too.

It's not the "guy" aspect of the person that's shunning the  science fiction romance.  There's something else going on.

Here we are with our prime readership for the romance novel shuddering away at the thought of a Star Trek / Loveboat mashup and rejecting "philosophy" as a science.

These are widely educated people who know full well that philosophy is the origin of science, historically.

So you and I have a lot to talk about here.

The central topic I've been pursuing with this blog is how to raise the regard for Romance, and particularly SF-Romance and Paranormal Romance in the eyes of the "general" public.  How do we get this publishing field to garner the respect you and I know that it deserves.

Clearly, there were two groups I was interacting with, people who should automatically hold our core subject matter in high regard, don't.  They won't.  They don't want their minds changed.

Does that mean there's something wrong with "them?"  Probably not.  Something wrong with "us?"  Well, apart from the usual, probably not.  So where's the problem?

If we can't ask the right question, we'll never solve this problem of audience receptivity.

Since we haven't solved it yet, obviously we haven't asked the right question, or phrased the question in a useful way.  This thing is the quintessential word-problem!  The very thing mathematicians (another branch of science mentioned immediately as fundamental) cut their teeth on.

How do you take a "real world" situation and reduce it to an algebraic equation that can be "solved?"

Once before in this blog I tackled a long involved topic and broke the post into parts.  A number of people liked that "short posts" approach, so I'll try it again this time and leave you in dire suspense until next week when we'll look at ways to turn this word problem into an equation of some sort.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com 

Targeting a Readership - PART ONE

Readers often watch TV or go to the movies. Today, movie-goers and TV/DVD watchers are less inclined to read books, unless they're spinnoffs.

Now, many TV shows have fan games and actor-blogs on their websites along with recent episodes to watch on your computer or handheld.

On the other hand, Amazon's Kindle seems to be attracting readers who shunned other e-book readers, even though the Kindle version can't do animation, full color, 3-D (which is growing big time now), and sound.

Still, a single title in text does not reach nearly as many as a TV show, and if you want to change the general attitude toward a genre such as Romance, you need to reach a very wide audience.

There is a new movie being advertised as a Romance, LOVE HAPPENS, which on imdb.com has (at this writing) garnered only 5.5 stars out of 10 -- half the audience doesn't like it. And the people who do, think it's mediocre, possibly because the trailers I've seen on TV sizzle with ROMANCE, but I'll bet the movie itself doesn't. But it is getting some big buck advertising.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0899106/

That's a theater release, and it will eventually be on DVD and TV, reaching even more people. But will it change their minds about Romance? Chances are good, the film is actually a "love story" more than it is a Romance.

Maybe Theater to broadcast TV is not the venue for a writer to aim at to get the largest possible audience?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090921/media_nm/us_emmys_demise_4

Is a report on the Emmy's broadcast drawing about 12.3 million viewers, and the presenters joking about the paltry numbers.

The population of the USA has gone up and up -- new census this year may turn up 330 million in the USA. I think it was about 9 or 8 years ago that the population hit 300 million, right after the last census.

For a broadcast TV show to draw a comparable audience to what TV shows of the 1960's drew, they would have to pull in about 100 million people to sit and watch the box for an hour.

Yeah, people used to sit through the commercials and not move for one whole hour. They wouldn't answer the phone, and that was before recorders and voice mail.

Can you imagine anyone doing that today? Not even answering their cell phone because the TV was on?

Today DVR's let you answer the phone, then roll back the show and catch what you missed even if you're not recording it, and fast-forward through commercials (though Congress wants to prevent the FF through commercials part).

People used to pay attention.

Imagine 100 million Americans (nevermind the rest of the world which might also see a show by satellite) all paying close attention to the same thing for one hour once a week. 100 million is about half all adults in the USA. It's not a lot of people, actually.

Then the next day they'd discuss it at work, in elevators, on twitter.

What if you hadn't seen it? Imagine the discussions you would be shut out of. Do you think you'd watch it next week?

Who cares what 12 million people are watching? That's 4% of the USA not 33% or 50% of adults.

The gist of the article on the Emmy's broadcast is that broadcast TV is losing to cable and the internet. The audience has become dispersed, so that today we have NOTHING to discuss in elevators.

Twitter and other social networks though are gathering the paltry few million with something in common to talk about, almost like fandom once was.  Today it's not called "fandom."  It's called a "niche." 

Jay Leno was pulling a whopping 7.7 million viewers in the 18-49 age group last week.

The Guiding Light has been canceled. That soap was on longer than I've been alive!

The 2009-10 season is expected to decline another 10%. (this is from Nielsen Ratings online at
http://tvbythenumbers.com/
It's a handy site for finding the numbers)

What are people doing? And why are they doing it? How can we capture their attention and hold it for an hour a week? If we could do that, would we have the ability to change an attitude?

OK, with DVR, DVD, and Web distribution too, it may not be the SAME hour that everyone pays attention to one thing.

Mystically, that simultaneity counts big time in creating change in what people think, or what they spend time thinking about.

Right now, however, we've lost simultaneity (which started to go away when they deployed kinescope to record shows broadcast in New York then rebroadcast them 3 hours later in California).
http://www.kinescope.tv/kinehistory.html gives a quick history and this picture of a kinescope recorder -- something I've never seen in person even though it revolutionized my life because I grew up in California!  Go to the website for a larger image where you can see the mechanism.  Wow.    

So we as writers have to go for subject matter.

The idea is to rivet your audience in place, hold them spellbound and deliver entertainment that fertilizes the subconscious, and makes people talk to each other (relationships is our business, remember) and think about what they've seen.

Have you watched any eps of DARK BLUE? It's about undercover cops, with lots of shooting and and ugly emotions, but it has a very high percentage of people-story woven into it. The undercover cops are emerging as real people with real angst and family ambitions -- and some of the perps they're trying to nail are deep enough as people to have recognizable life ambitions even if they are criminals and worse. It's an action series with complex heart.

Remember, we learned from Blake Snyder, May He Rest In Peace, that you put the real story you want to tell, your real theme, your heart, into the B story while the A story is the High Concept. DARK BLUE is a good example.

But any Romance in Dark Blue will turn up in the B story. We, however, are trying to figure out how to get the Romance into the A story, hitting a wide enough audience to convince the commercial interests that Romance is a respectable vehicle.

The only place (so far) that the writer can make that choice herself is text narrative. Webisodes, web-strips of still graphic novels, animations like machinima, are usually beyond the content creator such as a writer. And they cost too much, so far.

Google's project of putting POD machines into bookstores so you can print on demand some ancient public domain book you really want was discussed in Wired Magazine recently

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/09/google-books-publish-on-demand/

And the article has a NICE picture of a POD machine that costs about $100,000 (half the price of a house) and makes a 300 page book for about $3 in about 4 minutes, (the bookstore and google get paid on top of that expense so it costs you about $10.)

The article said:
---------------
Dane Neller, On Demand Books CEO, says the announcement flips book distribution on its head.

“We believe this is a revolution,” Neller said. “Content retrieval is now centralized and production is decentralized.”
--------------

And Dane Neller is correct that this absolutely inverts the fiction business model, just as Kinescope decentralized broadcast.  Change like this shifts whole civilizations, slowly but inexorably. 

Publishers, warehousers, distributors, all had to centralize to produce physical objects economically (huge printing presses doing print-run after print-run of books), organize them and put them before the eyes of potential (only potential) customers. Hit or miss, you never know if you'll sell what you make.

Writers all learn early the term "sell-through" and what that means for a career.

Now publishers only have to organize the information in a central place, and potential customers will browse through and find what they want, instead of going to see what's on the shelves and available.

Then the customer, no matter where she is, only has to wave her credit card and CLUNK a book falls out of the slot at her feet, or downloads onto her e-reader.

Just imagine all those old-old Romance novels that every author and publisher thought were read-and-toss, never to be reprinted trash will now be available in every bookstore. How will they find the writers to pay us? Will they even bother to try? The Google project issue is still in litigation and settlement status. Who knows what they'll do next.

"Home Entertainment" is undergoing the same kind of decentralizing revolution with "On Demand" programming that Google is bringing to publishing.

That revolution is basically the adoption of the internet model -- index it and let people pick what they want when they want.

As a society, we no longer march in lockstep, captive to the schedule devised by commercial interests. (that lockstep started with Radio and early moving-pictures)

Broadcast TV, Cable, Satellite, Internet, reality shows, "news" and "news commentary" shows, documentaries, travel, the food channel, scripted stuff like HEROS or HOUSE, M.D., drama or comedy, dramedy, and talk shows that let the audience have a podium, or talk shows with celebrities posturing, has fragmented "the audience."

Not even a third of the country watched the Presidential campaign, and that was home entertainment too. I think I remember the ratings indicated maybe 60 million or so at the peak, out of more than 200 million adults.

Home entertainment delivery is a huge industry becoming more diverse by the day. It includes video games you buy on disc, and access via the Web, play alone or against living opponents in real-time. Home entertainment includes anything people do for fun at home (with or without viagra).

Fiction, our kind of Alien Romance and oddball futuristic romance, or paranormal romance, is only a tiny fraction of a percent of that Home Entertainment industry.

But consider. "Novels" (not books; they may be gone for good already) may Novels, however, may not be HOME ENTERTAINMENT at all, because they're portable.

We already have a category of novel called a "Beach Read" -- and you all know what that is. It's not home entertainment. It's a mood for getting away from home. (of course, nobody will sue you for reading it in your backyard.)

A whole publisher's imprint called 'POCKET BOOKS' was founded in 1939 (and has passed through several owner's hands), with the concept of a book that would fit in your pocket. Bantam likewise aimed to make SMALL books to carry around with you.

Here's some history of publishing gathered neatly on the web.
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Pocket_Books#encyclopedia

Can anyone figure out why a site called absoluteastronomy.com would host a topic on publishing? I only found that through google.

To succeed at this strategy both Pocket and Bantam aimed for the MASS MARKET -- to publish nothing but best sellers. They wanted every book they published to be something everyone would want to read. The mid-list came later, but genres started as mass market (the Dime Novel western).

Nearly a hundred years ago there were still so few books being published that almost everyone could read almost every book, so people had something in common to discuss. In 1935 not everyone even had RADIO -- nevermind TV which was more a laboratory toy than a practical device.

The e-book was on the way to fitting in your pocket when suddenly Amazon and Sony and others made readers that not only don't fit in your pocket (or even in my purse), but they don't bend so you can force them in.

People carry DVD players around, too, to watch movies on the commuter train for example, and that's not even touching on ipods.

I think the entire field labeled by marketers as HOME ENTERTAINMENT needs to be re-labeld PERSONAL ENTERTAINMENT.

When you start thinking about it as PERSONAL entertainment, you can begin to solve the problem of where everyone went.

And the answer is simple. Everywhere. Everywhere but home.

Why don't these broadcast TV shows, cable shows, shows on the web etc, pull in at least a third of the adults (or a third of the kids, for that matter). Why are audiences so small?

Why do ebooks sell a few HUNDRED copies (unless they have huge advertising behind them) instead of at least 10's of thousands?

And given this fragmentation trend, how do you as a writer find an audience to target?

What do we all have in common?

If we don't have commonality, can we be a community? And if we're not a community, where does Romance fit into things?

Rowena Cherry has been talking about dominance games in galactic politics, the clashing of civilizations or at least societies on a giant scale, and how the resulting fragmentation is giving rise to individuals who are drawn to conquer in order to re-create order. We've seen that scenario playing out in the Balkans and now in what had once been Persia, was conquered by Constantine, and sub-divided with a ruler by Britain, leaving the resulting tribal feuds for you and me to sort out.

We've seen civilizations crumble in History, and on CNN. Rowena and a host of others are writing about interstellar civilizations crumbling. Is that because our own civilization is crumbling about us?

My theory is that love and romance are what hold civilizations together. How do we tell a story that will hold this civilization together?

There are some big questions to think about here, so do some thinking and eventually I'll take up this topic of audience cohesiveness and Readership identification again.

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

Beauty and the Beast: Constructing the HEA

To some people it may seem somewhat narrow minded that readers of Romance insist on the Happily Ever After ending.

After all, HEA is so unrealistic, a childish fantasy. Thus people who read Romance must have something wrong with them, which means Romance as a field is not to be taken seriously, which is a topic we've discussed at length in this blog.

I think those readers are missing something important about the novel as an artform. As writers, our job is to explain what they're missing in "show don't tell" technique.

Whatever type of novel you prefer reading, you read it for the satisfaction, the validation of your world view in the artform.

The Romance as an artform is not different, even (or especially) when you cast the Romance plot against an alien background or involve a non-human character in the main plot thread.

The worldview that the Romance HEA validates is something like "No Man Is An Island" or in modern psychological research, that happier, healthier longer lives are lived by those who have firm and dependable Relationships.

Here's a recent report in a long list of such reports on marriage and health:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-heart-women5-2009mar05,0,5692637.story?track=rss
--------------
Reuters
March 5, 2009
Chicago -- Women in strained marriages are more likely than other wives to have high blood pressure and other risk factors for heart disease, researchers said today.
... and: The researchers found that women in marriages with high levels of strife were more prone to depression and metabolic syndrome, a cluster of symptoms including thick waist, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and abnormal blood sugar that significantly raise the risk of heart disease.
---------------

Oh? HEA is unrealistic, eh?

If a relationship crystallizes solidly, settles into a supportive and low-strife paradigm, then (science is beginning to discover) AS A CONSEQUENCE the future course of the partners lives will be ENHANCED by good health and an assortment of miseries that are absent. That is they will live "happily ever after" because of the formation of this Relationship.

There have been other studies that showed how women are physically healthier than men because of the maintaining of relationships with other women, particularly that of the confidant. Relationships cause consequences -- and good Relationships cause HEA.

Of course, humans being human, while you're living an HEA arc of a life, you will find other reasons to make yourself miserable. You never think of all the diseases and disorders and dysfunctions you DON'T have in your life, so you can't see that you are happy.

People who have this kind of very real misery in their life might want to read horror or tragedy -- soap opera stories of unrelenting misery -- to stay aware of the troubles they don't have, troubles worse than theirs. It's a way of convincing yourself you are happy. And there's nothing wrong with that. It can motivate changes in relationships to raise the odds of an HEA in life. HEA endings can do that too - spark aspiration.

So how does a writer construct an HEA ending?

Well, it's an ENDING.

There are 3 points in The Novel that have to be nailed before you can outline the novel. Beginning. Middle. End. Determine any one of those, and the other two become determined.

If the END must be "happy" - an up-beat ending - then the MIDDLE must be the worst point in the main character's life (utter ruin; total hopelessness; conquered, captured, vanquished, left for dead, stood up at the altar).

With a low Middle and high End -- the Beginning has to be the ORIGIN of the problem that nearly kills the main character in the Middle and which he overcomes to triumph in the end.

Solve this one problem and all his life-troubles are over for good. There's HEA potential in every other genre, even or especially Horror.

Plot is driven by Conflict. To have a conflict, you have to have at least two elements that conflict. This vs. That. An urgent MUST vs an equally formidable CAN'T.

In the Romance, the urgent MUST is provided by the attraction to the other party. Science has revealed why we feel that MUST.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090211/ap_on_sc/sci_love_science

is an article on discoveries about brain chemistry and love. I think I've mentioned that here before, and on goodreads.com in SFRomance.

Add to that the subliminal awareness that our very lives depend on founding solid Relationships, and when a candidate for that Relationship appears it becomes an urgent emergency to "catch" that guy or gal.

Theory has it that it's the reproductive urge that drives us into Relationships. And that certainly seems reasonable -- BUT, if you don't live long enough to have and raise kids, reproduction becomes a moot point. I think we are aware in every cell of our bodies that our minute to minute existence depends on solid Relationships.

Mystically, the First Chakra (staying alive) always trumps the Second Chakra matters of reproduction. Our priorities are ordered for us on that basic a level. This premise lurks far in the background of my Sime~Gen novels.




The brain chemistry study shows us why we have the objective of establishing solid relationships. Relationships protect basic health so that we can reproduce.

Sothe URGENT MUST part of the conflict: "here is a POTENTIAL PARTNER; I must have this person or die!"

Your very life depends (literally) on reaching out to and securing that person in your life. That is not melodrama, it's science.

For all HEA Romances, that piece of the formula is established by the genre rules. The Urgent Must has to be an attraction to a partner and everything else is "complication" or background.

Now, the writer gets creative and the genre walls disappear into the distance. The writer can explore the universe finding things to prevent the attaining of this objective. What obstacles prevent people from forming partnerships?

The art of the romance novel lies in the variegated CAN'Ts writers have hurled at their characters.

What the CAN'T actually is does not matter as much as that it is just about equal to the MUST. To craft the HEA, there has to be a tangible chance that the Relationship won't gel.

But success has to be plausible, so the CAN'T has to have a "fatal flaw" that makes it believable that the two people do overcome this obstacle.

It is very possible that the low prestige of the Romance Novel (and particularly the Paranormal or SF Romance) comes from the choice of obstacle.

Some people may pick up Romances where the obstacle is fabricated, and in technical parlance, "contrived" so that it can be overcome. The "paper tiger" obstacle.

As a result, casual readers may judge all Romance to be "thin" -- a puppet show where the strings are visible.

Judging an entire genre by one or two novels is fairly common. Have you ever done that?

So, the Romance HEA is crafted from a scientificly verified array of MUSTS vs. artistically invented CAN'Ts. The HEA point is where the MUST overcomes the CAN'T -- i.e. the point where the conflict is resolved.

So tell me why all Romance isn't classed as Science Fiction Romance? If all Romance has the MUST part of the plot formula as a scientific premise, why isn't every Romance considered SFR?
The answer to this puzzle may be found by reading something outside the genre.

I have here a novel, a police procedural which raised the question of the HEA requirement again.




FLIPPING OUT by Marshall Karp. It's an April 2009 book I got from the amazon.com VINE program in ARC. It's copyright is held by a film company. I already posted my (4 star) review on amazon.

The intriguing premise is that a famous mystery writer is in a scheme to buy a run-down house, fix it up, write a murder mystery set in the house, then sell the house at auction on the day the book launches (complete with fictional murder victim's outline in tape on the bedroom floor).

It's set against the background of Hollywood. HUGE amount of money involved in the house flipping scheme -- very interesting background, like Columbo, a glimpse of the rich and famous.

It is a pretty good cut and dried, well turned and well written police procedural mystery with a nice clue-trail.

You can solve the mystery before the detectives do, but not TOO MUCH before, and the ending comes with a nice tricky TWIST shocker-scene, after which you get told what the detectives knew before you knew it. It's a good twist ending and provides a nice film moment for the climax. It's a good book.

Ah, BUT!!! There are many buts I didn't mention in my amazon review.

Reading this novel right in the midst of reading a sequence of fairly good fantasy novels, I found the contrast striking.

The mystery formula also requires an HEA ending. The mystery has to be SOLVED, and the reader has to feel satisfied that they could solve it as well or better than the detectives (but not a lot better because then it's too easy).

So while I'm thinking about the HEA reader requirement in Romance, I'm reading this mystery and second-guessing the detectives.

And I realized WHAT'S MISSING from FLIPPING OUT. It's a factor that I find very satisfying in say, Faye Kellerman's Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus series. And that is characterization. It's a reason I like Columbo and Murder She Wrote, too. The mystery and its solution hinge entirely on the psychology and relationships of the victims, suspects AND the detectives!!

FLIPPING OUT provides a huge, stark, high relief contrast to the psychological drama type mysteries that I love. The stringent absence of the psychology dimension makes for a dry, clean, stark, and austere reading experience (very much like old fashioned neck-up science fiction, I discussed last week) that is, no doubt, very satisfying to the reader looking for that simple puzzle without any psychological tangles.

FLIPPING OUT puts the emotional lives of the bereaved, terrified and frustrated characters in the background while the foreground focuses on the puzzle itself. That's what this genre is supposed to do.

So this book is perfect of its kind, but unsatisfying to me. Yet it has the perfect ending for a mystery. The detectives solve the case which is equivalent to the HEA where the gal gets her guy and vice-versa.

At the halfway point, the darkest hour, the detectives think they solved it -- everyone above them thinks it's solved. The perp was the last person in the world they'd suspect. They're crushed. Then they discover they're wrong, and the perp is actually someone even more last-person-in-the-world than they'd expect.

FLIPPING OUT is likely to be a best seller, very popular, might even make a movie. The author's other novels have garnered serious respect, the sort we'd love to see SFR get as a genre.
What does FLIPPING OUT have that Science Fiction Romance doesn't?

Could it lie in the CAN'T rather than in the MUST part of the conflict formula?

One really great Romance that did make it onto TV as a series is BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.



This series spawned a plethora of fanfic on paper on on the web, and some really great fan novels, too. It grabbed the imagination of the SFR type reader-fan. But why did it fail on TV?

The premise stalled the plot.

The premise was that the couple could NEVER get together. That's not bad in itself. The CAN'T has to be formidable.

But the characters accepted the CAN'T. They didn't fight it. They didn't try scheme after scheme (like I LOVE LUCY plots). They didn't attempt to go public. They didn't plan to run away. Neither was willing to sacrifice to go live in the other's world.

Neither of the main characters was HEROIC about overcoming the plot premise CAN'T. And in the end, the writers tried to salvage that, change and evolve the premise by revealing that one of the characters was actually of non-human (alien from outer space) blood -- but by then the audience was losing interest.

They hadn't sold the BEAUTY AND THE BEAST series as SFR so the audience deserted them when they tried to turn it into SFR, making the problem solvable.

Why did the audience lose interest? Because the MUST didn't show any progress toward overcoming the CAN'T. The conflict was not moving to a resolution without breaking the original premise.

There couldn't be an HEA unless you changed the premise - which is of course what the fanfic writers did.

So contrast and compare FLIPPING OUT with BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and think about it. Too little psychology and the actions and reactions don't seem plausible enough to make a story interesting even if the plot is fascinating. Too much psychology and the story stalls dead in its tracks because there isn't the gumption to pay the price for conflict resolution.

To create the HEA effect (in any genre), the trick is matching the MUST (and its motives, conscious and subconscious) with the CAN'T (and its motives, conscious and subconscious), in such a way as to challenge each of the characters to overcome some internal barrier, to CHANGE (or ARC in screenwriting parlance) in a way that opens the opportunity for the MUST to overcome the CAN'T.

In the Murder Mystery Police Procedural the Must, Can't and HEA in the foreground is the whole, logical why-done-it puzzle. It's who knows whom and follow the money for motivation. The angst, grieving widowers, and fear of discovery are all way in the background, told rather than shown.

In the Alien Science Fiction Romance, the affairs of state, plot puzzles, science and logic of brain biochemistry are in the background, told rather than shown, while the angst, grief, fears, hopes, dreams, and fantasies are in the foreground, shown rather than told.

What is in the foreground and what is in the background very often determines the audience that will most appreciate the work of art.

Or the fanfic writers will reverse foreground and background to tell each other new stories.

For more on those psychological and spiritual internal barriers and how to construct them for your characters out of the material inside your reader's mind see my blog post:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/paradigm-shift.html

For a writing exercise related to setting up foreground and background and "worldbuilding" the background see my blog entry writing assignment and read the exercise posted as comments on

http://editingcircle.blogspot.com/2009/03/worldbuilding-trunk-ated.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.slantedconcept.com