Caring About Things Is Cool

In 2005, country singer Jo Dee Messina musically proclaimed, "My Give-a-Damn's Busted." (I still wince at typing that phrase outside of fictional dialogue, even though it's been eighty years since Rhett Butler shocked audiences by speaking it in the final scene of GONE WITH THE WIND.) At a point when current events may tempt many of us to embrace that attitude, Kameron Hurley meditates in her latest LOCUS column on the value of caring about people and causes:

The Power of Giving a Damn

She once believed "it wasn’t cool to care too much about things. Caring about something too hard made you vulnerable. Weak." She attributes this feeling partly to "American cinema and storytelling, much of it geared toward portraying the rugged masculine ideal of the loner hero whose dedication is not to individual humans, but to himself. His world was littered with backstabbing femme fatales and best friends who betrayed him, and the worst parts of humanity were always on display. Don’t care too much about things, these loner-hero stories seemed to say; people will let you down, and humans are just a few steps away from destroying themselves."

This description of the American "loner hero" archetype doesn't sound quite plausible to me. Isn't the classic film image of the solitary, wandering hero more often that of a man who stands alone against injustice, eschewing personal ties to move on to the next town when his task in this place is done? That's the paradigm of the lone gunslinger upon which Stephen King models Roland in the Dark Tower saga (with more complex layers, of course). Or do I have a skewed idea of that figure because I haven't viewed more recent media incarnations of him? (Considering the two examples Hurley offers are FIGHT CLUB and AMERICAN PSYCHO—hardly icons of heroism to be emulated, from what I've read about them—she seems to veer away from her stated emphasis on the lone hero.) She recalls, "I was big on apocalypse movies as a kid, because they advanced this libertarian fantasy that each of us was fully equipped to live a long and productive loner life as long as we kept people away from us."

As an adult, she came to realize the "lie of self-sufficiency." Nobody survives, much less thrives, without depending on the social network, physical infrastructure, and material technology provided by the generations that came before us and the people who work to build and maintain those things. When Thoreau retreated to the woods to live by Walden Pond, he took manufactured tools with him. Even a hermit on a deserted island relies on the products of society; Robinson Crusoe couldn't have gotten far without items he salvaged from the shipwreck. (A gruesome short story by Stephen King imagines the probable fate of a man stuck on a barren island with nothing but his clothes and carry-on bag. The protagonist amputates his own limbs and eats them raw, killing the pain with illegal drugs he happens to be transporting.) In more realistic post-apocalyptic fiction than the type Hurley admired in her teens, the people who survive to rebuild society are those who band together for mutual support.

Discovering, "We are all connected," Hurley summarizes, "I’ve found that it’s not weak­ness to care about others, or to care about a cause. The true weakness is when we are too afraid to care about anything at all." As romance writers, we create worlds in which caring is of central importance and love conquers. That seems like a worthwhile message to promote anytime—especially in the grim times.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Theme-Worldbuilding Integration Part 5

SIDE NOTE: my Vampire Romance novel set on Earth's Moon, (which is nothing at all like the Anita Blake Series) is now, for the first time, available in e-book, almost all formats. 

Here's the new paperback edition:

The Kindle should be linked there. 

Last week in Part 4
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/09/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-4.html

...we discussed how differently a writer sees a popular news feature story than a reader does.  One lens the writer uses to view Events is the Archetype. 

We had ended Part 3
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/09/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-3.html

...wriggling in delight at how generously the world responded to the incident of Middle School children reviling a School Bus Monitor then posting her reactions on YouTube.  A fund was started that collected hundreds of thousands of dollars for this elderly woman.  And we ended off with a great big, BUT to consider.

In Part 4 we began to analyze that BUT into something a Romance writer, particularly a PNR writer can use.

-------------QUOTE--------------
I see two sides in this "BUT" --

A) US/THEM -- we reject those children
B) MY GOD/ YOUR GOD -- money solves all problems

...and later ....
Strip this bus incident back to the raw basics, and you see PROPITIATION OF A GOD.  That's the basic archetype revealed (there are a lot of them in the incident; this is the one Romance writers can use.)

The children's behavior resembles the behavior of the Ancient Greek gods torturing a human,  for fun, just because they can.  They knew they could get away with it because of the laws saying the bus monitor couldn't spank them, in any way, physical or metaphorical.

Just like the Ancient Greek gods, the children had more power than they had maturity to handle.  (read Gini Koch's Alien series!)  They have the godly power of YouTube. 

---------END QUOTE----------

We discussed how these children's ill-behavior  -- dare I call them spoiled brats?  Nobody uses that term anymore, but it is so appropriate here!  -- is typical of the behavior of children who have not been well parented. 

Of course, I don't know these children or their parents so I can't say that about these individuals, but as a writer looking for a story springboard, I can definitely say this is exactly the sort of behavior one would expect in children of households with failed parenting. 

I took issue with the media's characterizing this behavior as "bullying" -- that is now a politically correct term, but a misnomer of exactly the same formula that I pointed out in the first two posts in this series on Theme-Worldbuilding Integration. 

The correct descriptive, the accurate term, for this kind of behavior is "spoiled brat." 

The typical spoiled brat is a child who has power over the adults in their life, who knows they won't be punished for anything -- maybe anything short of a certain line.  The spoiled brat can have anything they want without effort.  The spoiled brat has merely to demand something they want and it is theirs by right, by entitlement, and nobody has the right to make them work for it.

The spoiled brat is the Prince who hates his whipping-boy and misbehaves just for the joy of seeing the whipping-boy hurt.

The spoiled brat becomes a monster in the house.  The parents fear the spoiled brat's temper tantrums ever more as the child becomes larger and harder to control.

The parents cringe before the demands of the spoiled brat.

Failed parenting produces monsters worthy of a horror movie.

We're writing Romance here -- Romance about a single parent finally finding a Soul Mate.  Consider the complications to a Romance when the child the single parent is raising is a spoiled brat.  Spoiled brats bully those weaker than they are, and terrorize those stronger than they are.  They attack everything in sight like piranhas after warm meat.

Now consider two single parents each trying to raise a spoiled brat.  The opposite of the Brady Bunch, no?  Fodder for a TV Series, yes? 

This examination of an old news story from June 2012 is not an exercise in futility.  There is a point to all this, big bucks to be made.

If spoiled-brattishness comes from failed parenting, and we have a second, maybe third generation of people whose parents failed to parent them well now raising children of their own then it's no surprise we have an epidemic of bullying and other violent behavior in Middle Schools.  Even childhood obesity may be linked to failed parenting -- a baby (infant even) who gets something stuck in their mouth every time they yell, who gets their every temper tantrum over a toy propitiated with a lollypop, is not going to grow up into the self-control and self-discipline that says "no" to sweets when they experience a twinge of emotional discomfort.

The link between desire and satisfaction is forged in infancy.

The fictioneer's job is to raise desire in their readers and then satisfy that desire. 

A writer who can not delay their own gratification of the need to say something, to show something, to get to the orgasm, is going to cram exposition into the story for self-gratification, not the gratification of their reader.

There is a cluster of cognitive skills that can be acquired only by being well parented.

Delayed gratification of desires is one.  Connected to that is the awareness that others exist, and that there is real, deep, multi-level gratification to be had in gratifying others.

The parent bird who drops a worm into the baby bird's mouth does it for the frisson of pleasure gratifying that baby bird brings, not from altruism but instinct.

The higher mammals have to learn parenting by being parented. (remember the experiment with monkeys we mentioned last week.  Research it if you're not familiar with these studies.)

What's parenting got to do with Romance?

Romance is entirely rooted in the AWARENESS of another person.

A human who hasn't been well parented, at least in some regard, though not necessarily by those who birthed him, CAN be incapable of the awareness of another.

Psychologists use the term validation.  One of the highest forms of personal completion is VALIDATION by another person -- another person who knows what you mean when you say what you feel.  That makes you REAL to yourself in a way nothing else can.

ALIEN ROMANCE -- is all about the oddity of experiencing that VALIDATION not from another human being but from a non-human.  Or vice-verso, of a non-human receiving that validation from a human.

VALIDATION - psychological visibility.  Look it up. 

It is a universal human experience.  The failure of BONDING at birth, the failure of continuity in care-giver in the first couple of years, can disrupt the development of that part of the brain that processes this kind of information. 

As an aside, I once read somewhere that it is the consistence appearance of the caregiver's face over the infant's crib in the first year that develops the part of the brain that recognizes faces. 

All of these features of "humanity" are innate in the human animal, simply in the primate body.

The spoiled brat behavior we witnessed in that school bus monitor video could easily be explained by a failure on this very simple level, the physical body level.  

But humans are ever so much more than that.  The essential feature of humanity is the Soul, and those 12 yr old spoiled brats had human souls that weren't functioning very well either.

The nurturing of the Soul is likewise a function of parenting. 

If a human child is treated only as an animal, given food, clothing, shelter and basic survival skills (in our culture that's reading, writing, using an iPad), the body develops but the Soul doesn't.

The Soul can be walled off from the body, rejected, suppressed, shunned.  The Soul will scream with pain and frustration -- maybe at night, in dreams -- but it can be suppressed and ignored up to a point especially if Parenting validates the process by approving of it, or ignoring the presence of the Soul.  It takes a lot of pure, raw courage to acknowledge and welcome one's own Soul into one's body.  But without that process being completed in adolescence, how can a Soul find a Soul-Mate and a Happily Ever After life? 

How can a person raised with a callous between body and soul ever experience Romance that isn't merely lust?  The body lusts - the Soul Loves.  When the two cooperate, the Universe lights up with delight. 

Children estranged from their Souls would behave like Ancient Greek gods, gratifying whims. 

These spoiled brat/bully/cowardly little tyrants will behave like animals.

Ever seen a flock of ducks pecking the wounded duck to death?  I have.

The "wounded duck" was that bus monitor, and that pack of children tried to peck her to death.  I don't know why because I don't know those people -- even if I did know them, I wouldn't really know why.  One human can't judge another human.

But, a writer can see patterns that others don't notice.

What I see, that may be a big opportunity for some writer, is the rising tide of purely animal-based behavior.  Given my personal philosophy, I parse that as being easily predictable if there has been an erosion of the Soul nurturing dimension of Parenting as a general trend in our society.

If that thesis is correct, then it's not surprising that a huge number of people gave so generously to the victimized school bus monitor. 

You can't generalize human behavior.  We are all unique individuals, though we sometimes move in large packs -- as with the donations to this woman.  Yet I can see that if the thesis of a failure of Soul Parenting being widespread in our society is true, then it may be that Parents who are aware they are failing in Soul Parenting were moved to make up for their failure by making amends to this stranger woman who was a victim of Soul-crippled children just like their own children.

The archetype here is propitiation of the gods.  It is a need to avert disaster (or get something dearly wanted) by putting offerings of food or flowers or whatever (virgin girls into the maw of the volcano) at the feet of the THREAT or the SOURCE.

Many people who haven't studied the mystical schools deeply enough think (possibly because they're taught this in college courses of the Bible as Literature) that the "sacrifices" called for in the Old Testament are exactly like this sort of PROPITIATION exercise.

I'll give you a clue.  They're not.  They're the exact opposite, and one of the things that makes a stark difference between the Ancient Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Persians, Romans, etc and the Jews.  It's an absolutely day/and/night difference, but that's only discernible on the Soul level.  That's why mystical studies are so valuable to the writer of Paranormal Romance.  Love is of the Soul; Lust is of the Body.  Meld them into a cooperative unit, and nothing material can successfully oppose them.

The secret of understanding that difference is in the mis-translation of the words.  "Sacrifice" is the opposite of what the Hebrew word actually means. 

So, now, back to the beginning of this series.  Theme-Worldbuilding Integration.

In the school bus incident, we see cause for euphoric HOPE because "people" rejected the behavior of those children with kindness to their victim.

BUT!!!  (which is where writers get all their crazy ideas -- but!)

Slicing and dicing the kindness offered, we begin to wonder if maybe that out-pouring of kindness and sympathy was actually rooted in the same illness that produced the children's bad behavior.

A lot of people gave money.  That's a huge potential audience for a novel.  Remember in "targeting an audience" -- we learned to study the real world around our target audience and discover what's bugging them, then reduce that to a theme, and use the theme to create a world and characters (in whatever order; doesn't matter.)

So what theme can we extract that would address that readership?

Quote from Part 4:

I see two sides in this "BUT" --

A) US/THEM -- we reject those children
B) MY GOD/ YOUR GOD -- money solves all problems

A) Us/them -- generation gap.  Our children have turned into monsters.  They don't share our values.

B) My God/ Your God (Oh, God! George Burns, 1977)

We live in the 'Age of Enlightenment' where science has become our god.  Whenever we have a problem, we shovel money at science, and it produces a solution. 

Disease: vaccine
Obesity: weight loss drugs, diet/exercise regimens - 6 foods that take inches off you waist

Back at the beginning of the 20th century, (you can look this up; it's true) farmers had an excess of hogs, so a study was commissioned which showed a bacon-and-eggs breakfast was healthy, gave you energy for the day (we still have that "eat a good breakfast" mantra around), and presto bacon sold like hotcakes.  Always check who pays for a scientific study. 

Science has been so successful at solving our everyday problems (as evidenced by lengthening life-span!) that it has become our god.

There is a concerted, well funded effort to prove that the biochemistry of the brain can account for ALL human experience -- to prove that there's no need to postulate a Soul as a real thing to explain human experience of life.  By Occam's Razor, the simplest solution is the right one -- so if you can explain all phenomena (even out of body experiences) without postulating a Soul, then there actually is no such thing as a Soul, which means God does not exist. 

It's all relentlessly logical, and "enlightened" people who've come out of the Dark Ages, and live in the Light of Science rely on logic for their sense of reality. 

There is a philosophy promulgated in the 1700's saying  that Reason works so well, it clearly indicates that God is a silly superstition only the unenlightened (dark minded; stupid or evil) would accept. 

The idea is that one must choose -- Enlightenment and Reason OR Darkness and Superstition. 

This is what I call a False Hobson's Choice.  Read the February 2012 Review Column at

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

In the Enlightenment view of the universe, (The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, a lapsed Mormon) Science itself has evolved from Paine's ideas into the god to be propitiated by shoveling money into its maw, just like virgins to the maw of the volcano or the Dragon. 

In that universe, the Soul is not real and thus children don't need their Soul nurtured, just the body.  The yearnings and promptings of the body are the guide to what is "right" and "human rights" actually means "bodily rights," exclusive of Soul Rights.

With each generation, the children become more of a Body and less of a Soul, progressively, a little at a time so nobody notices or complains.  Their god is science and their physical whims.  Fun is behaving like an animal, or herd of animals, and pecking strangers to death, shedding the elderly from the herd for the good of the herd.

In the opposite view of the universe, God is real, makes the Souls and the Reality that cradles them out of Love, and imbues the Soul with the capability to experience Joy, especially the joy of a Soul Mate.

The conflict is "Science As god vs. God is Real"

Themes can be intimate or hugely dramatic:

"Religious Conversion Changes a Person on the Soul Level."

"God is Pissed And She Is Coming!" (an old bumper sticker that says it all)

You can tell up close and personal stories of finding a Soul Mate and thus finding your Soul and seeing you've made monsters of your children.  Like a 12 step program, starting with admitting your complicity in monsterizing your children, you can ignite their Souls and rejoin them to their bodies, see them happily married. 

Or you can tell vast stories, Herman Wouk size stories, such as the story of Moses pulling a nation out of Egypt with 10 miracles, and a Voice speaking the Ten Commandments from a medium-sized mountain, making the hills dance.

The salient feature of the 10 Commandments story is very simple.  It's unique. 

There are a lot of religions in this world where a Prophet rises and says "God told me to tell you."  The gods of many nations only speak to their priests, or to one person at a time like the Greek gods who'd corner someone and torture them for fun. 

Many of the Native American spirits would speak to a favored person only when he was alone in the wilderness.  Even in Australia, the drill is to go AWAY from other people to find the spiritual pathway.  I couldn't generalize about Africa, which is multiplex.  Or India - whoo that's a complicated place. 

But of all the stories around the globe and through time, the only one I know of where the Identity reporting itself as Creator of the Universe actually spoke to more than a million people, a "mixed multitude" (i.e. Jews and Egyptians and other foreigners visiting Egypt who went with the Jews, impressed by the Plagues), spoke publicly to everyone all at the same time, is the 10 Commandments. 

Figure out what you think about this great philosophical debate (spoiled brats or bullies?).  Arrive at your thought by this process I've illustrated, bringing in everything you know about everything, distilling it all down to a single statement, so that thought will be your THEME.  The kernel of what really happened on that bus, and on YouTube, and why so much money was donated, will be your theme. 

Maybe it's, "Children will be children!" or "That woman deserved it; she's ugly."  or "YouTube is Evil for allowing that video to be posted." 

Or maybe it's something huge, like "That bus incident proves that government must control everything. We need a Federal Law against bullying."  Great story in a Political Romance!

Or something small and personal like, "My kids would do something like that.  I have to discipline them harder (or softer, or enroll them in sleep-away school, or whatever -- think Harry Potter for Adults.)

Find your theme, then find a character who believes it, and one who'll die to stamp it out.  Maybe the one who'll die to stamp it out is a kid bent on stamping out parental discipline. 

Pit them against each other in a conflict derived from their different takes on that thematic belief. 

Worldbuild their environment to showcase their issues. 

Toss in a couple more kids, shake don't stir, and write your novel.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Theme-Worldbuilding Integration Part 4

Part 1 in this series on Theme-Worldbuilding integration (doing both at once to reduce word-count and increase "pacing" without losing style and atmosphere) is:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/09/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-1.html

Part 2 in this series was posted September 11, 2012:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/09/theme-worldbuilding-integraton-part-2.html


Part 3 in this series was posted Sept. 18, 2012:
http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/09/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-3.html

Here is a post listing previous posts on Worldbuilding:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/06/worldbuilding-link-list.html

Here is a partial list of posts on this blog about the use of THEME in structuring a novel or screenplay:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/05/theme-element-giving-and-receiving.html

Again we're in midst of Holiday scheduling here, so I'm not writing this today, but long before "now."  But you may be reading this years later.  Isn't the web wonderful?   

"Last week" we looked at the Romance novels involving children -- young divorcee or widow with children falls in love.  Second time around jitters.  It's a dynamite plot angle.

Statistics show that the children of single parents don't do as well in school or in life as children raised by two parents.  I doubt they've diced up those statistics to discover how badly children of parents who are trapped  in a bad marriage do in school or in life.

Harmony between parents is, I believe, one of those essential ingredients in raising kids to be sensitive, caring, marriageable people -- people who can sustain a pair-bonding situation.

That kind of harmony between parents generally comes from Soul Mating, but not always.  Sometimes Soul Mates just know how to fight in a marriage, but fight "fair."  This can transmit to children the ability to express feelings, especially pain and dissatisfaction, learning to experience themselves without seeing others as the 'cause' of all their miseries (just some.)  Absent such an environment, children can absorb it by reading good Romances about family life. 

So another essential ingredient in raising kids to do well in life is DISCORD between the parents!

How can that be?  Because children don't do as you say, they do as you do.  As children, we absorbed both the image of joy between parents AND the image of how to handle discord, disagreements, compromising, displaced fury and rage bottled up on the job and brought home to be dumped on the spouse.

The stages and steps of emotional maturity that bring us to be able to take advantage of meeting a Soul Mate are rooted in how the parents behave to, at, and with each other.

Last week, we discussed the YouTube video that went viral in June about a group of Middle School kids reviling a school bus monitor. 

Here's a story about it -- I believe the video itself may have been pulled offline:

http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-06-20/news/32339643_1_school-bus-cell-phone-video-10-minute-video 

You don't want to watch that video anyway. 

In the news stories referring to the video, the incident was referred to as "bullying."

I don't think that's what it was.  I did see the video. 

To have a bullying incident, the bully-er has to be superior to the bully-ee.  Bullying is an abuse of power -- of being bigger, stronger, having more authority, or options to bring punishment down on someone's head, or blackmail, or get someone fired -- the bully has to have the ability to do harm to the bullyee.

Bullying can be just "crowding" -- a group of kids move in close, touching another kid, trying to provoke a violent response so the bully-ee gets in trouble with the school admin.

It can be passive aggressive, but it's always cowardly by definition. 

We live in a society where the trend is toward valuing safety over heroism, and as a result people who have not grown up modeling themselves on heroic behavior of parents toward dangers respond to threats to their safety by retreating, propitiating, and eventually cowering. 

It doesn't take real danger to draw forth that response, just the threat of danger.  Such a "threat of danger" is what bullying is and the goal is to evoke that cowardly response, the knuckling under, go-along-to-get-along response or the ineffectual lashing out at the irritant.  If there were no probability that a cowardly response could be evoked, there would be almost no bullying behavior because there would be no enticing goal to achieve by bullying. 

In the school bus case, the only element of "bullying" present that I could see was the power of numbers.  There were a lot of kids involved, verbally trashing one adult, attempting to provoke a violent response (such a violent response is the mark of the coward) -- which would have gotten her fired from a job she really needed.

She was the adult in the room, and didn't lash out at them.

Note that martial arts training focuses on controlling the power you gain from learning moves.  Watch The Karate Kid movie series carefully.  That is the training in heroism that erases cowardly traits.  The school bus monitor had mastered those principles, whether she had the physical "moves" or not.  It's a character trait. 


But she didn't handle the whole issue very well, either.  She wasn't able to assert authority of her own, or the authority of the school admin, or the authority of the parents of these children.

Now, that's all I saw.  For why any of this is important or relevant to Theme-Worldbuilding Integration in the Romance Novel, read the previous parts of this series, and the Theme series and the Worldbuilding Series.  This stuff is subtle -- it takes a Wizard!  But this bullying transaction illustrates the issues at the core of a true Romance -- because there is an interface between sexuality and power.  Those bullies on that school bus were adolescents.  Think about that. 

Recall, last week, I pointed out at the end of the piece that the fact this video provoked a project to collect  money for the school bus monitor, and that the amount collected became huge (and the bus monitor just recently acquired control of most of that amount), indicates where you can find a market for a novel based on a theme extracted from the news reports of this incident. 

This is all about targeting your reader, finding what's going on in their real world, reducing that real world to a THEME, then using that theme as a filter to generate a character with that problem. 

You should also use the theme also to filter out extraneous detail and build a world to cradle and present that character (just as a diamond merchant puts her diamonds on black velvet and subtly aims a light from the side, so they sparkle best.)

You want your diamonds, your characters to sparkle enough to catch the eye of the target reader, the people who did or would have donated money to the fund for that school bus monitor.  Those donors hearts went out to that monitor.  They wanted to make a statement repudiating the behavior of those children, and presumably of their parents for raising wild animals instead of people (failing to inculcate heroism in their children; heroes are never bullies).  They wanted to alleviate that woman's pain because they could feel it inside themselves.  THAT is an audience, and therefore a market for emotion-based fiction. 

Against the black velvet background of a schoolbus full of bullies, the monitor's character sparkled and attracted the eye and ignited hearts.  That's what you want your characters to do for your audience.

A question to consider is: "What has gone wrong in our society to produce such children?"

Or conversely, perhaps you don't think those children did anything so seriously horrible as to indicate something wrong with the entire underpinning of society?  Perhaps you can defend them.  That would be PERFECT for one of the Point of View characters in a novel.  Readers on all sides of the question would be steamed up.  Think about readers who are or were bullies -- how would they react to your main character falling in love with a bully? 

To make a novel rather than a short story, you need to argue all sides of this issue.

To do that, you have to reduce the issue to something very precise and clear. 

All of this has to do with analyzing that "BUT" we ended off with in Part 3 of this series.

There is an audience which believes the kids behaved poorly on that bus.  They collected a lot of money for the victim, an outpouring of sympathy and a statement, "We don't belong to a society where people ever WOULD behave the way those children behaved."

That collection of such a huge amount (hundreds of thousands of dollars) disowns those children. 

We do not stand with those children.  We do not condone their behavior.  Don't count us among them.

A bifurcation of society!!  Whoopee!  Fodder for DRAMA - high keyed, Pluto driven drama.

"It takes a village to raise children."  Absolutely, it does.  And there's a well-heeled village that just threw those children out to the wolves.

I see two sides in this "BUT" --

A) US/THEM -- we reject those children
B) MY GOD/ YOUR GOD -- money is my god and it solves all problems your god can't touch

The "guilt" of being the parent generation can be expiated by giving MONEY. Giving MONEY solves all problems, but most especially solves the problem of feeling GUILTY.  How many Romances have foundered on the issue of subconscious or repressed guilt? 

That monetary response might be inadequate.  The Romance Novel that reveals how and why it's inadequate may blow the whole Romance genre out of its ghetto.

Don't forget what we discussed about "misnomers" --

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Theme-Worldbuilding Integraton Part 2: The Use of Misnomers

--- where we discussed how "video-game" is used as a tag, a shorthand, a label for "violence."  It shouldn't be.  As of now, there are some video-games which incorporate reward for players who solve problems with adversaries and lose points for the use of violence.  There will be more video-games driven by Relationship stories. 

As with "Fast Food" there is nothing essentially wrong with "video" or "game" or "video-game." 

A video-game is a medium for delivering a story, entertainment.  It's the prevailing content that has gone bad.  As with "fast food" being a label for grease and sugar, "video-game" has become a label for "only savagery survives." 

There's an underlying cultural reason for this.  It's a long, involved, very philosophical and very boring, a multifaceted issue.

The writer's job is to reduce that tangled mess to something, quick, sweet, enjoyable, and memorable. 

Let me show you my thinking on this issue.

Remember, again, the purpose here is to show you HOW a writer thinks, not what you should or should not think.  Catch the drift of this process, then use it on your own material.  A writer doesn't see what everyone else sees when observing an incident such as the school bus bullying incident. 

Non-writers see that incident on the school bus, dismiss the complexity of the situation by slapping the label "bullying" on it, then to expiate a subconscious sense of guilt, to distance  behavior from that situation, to repudiate it, or for other reasons, they give MONEY.

A writer, chasing the roiling issues of "Poetic Justice" in the Soul-Mate rooted Romance, has to view it all through the question:  "What archetype is behind this behavior?"

Here are some of the posts on Poetic Justice:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/poetic-justice-in-paranormal-romance_22.html

Strip this bus incident back to the raw basics, and you see PROPITIATION OF A GOD.  That's the basic archetype revealed (there are a lot of them in the incident; this is one Romance writers can easily use.)

The children's behavior resembles the behavior of the Ancient Greek gods torturing a human,  for fun, just because they can.  They knew they could get away with it because of the laws saying the bus monitor couldn't spank them, in any way, physical or metaphorical.  They also grew up in a world where it was reasonable to expect retreat before the use of force or to expect more force to ellicit an ineffectual lashing out with force which would cause the victim more harm than it would cause the bullies. 

Just like the Ancient Greek gods, the children had more power than they had maturity to handle.  (read Gini Koch's Alien series!)  These bullies have the godly power of YouTube. 

I have often said here and in my review column that the Ancient Greek gods exhibited the behavior of children raised in a dysfunctional family.  And that's what I see in those children.  I don't see the children themselves,  but I see the parents.  I didn't see news stories about the parents failure as parents -- but I saw a lot decrying the mysterious epidemic of bullying among children.  Very mysterious.

There's plenty of discussion of the failure of schools to prevent the buillies from bullying -- not one word about inculcating heroism in "victims."  Have you ever seen a hero bullied?  Or a coward?  Contrast/compare and there is your novel (or video-game) theme and the world in which that theme produces diamond characters.  How many effective ways do you know for dealing with the attack of a bully?  Did you learn them from seeing your parents "model" them? 

Consider that if you leave the parents out of the mystery of where the bullying epidemic is coming from, you'll never solve it. 

But it would be politically incorrect to hold parents responsible for not-doing what the Law of the Land prohibits them from doing -- owning their children to the point of being held responsible for the damage their children do, even before they've done any damage.  Today children have "legal rights" that preempt the rights a parent needs in order to parent well.  State-raised children are the signature of the Communist regimes, yet we're now headed toward that in the USA, and those children once grown will become your market.  

The parents' hands are tied, just like the bus monitor's hands are tied. (or teachers' hands)  It's not just the threat of being accused of child abuse that ties parents' hands, though.  It is that they have no clue how to parent!  You can't learn it by reading books or taking classes.  You learn it by having been parented.

You've seen the experiments on monkeys.  A baby monkey taken from its mother and raised in a cage will abuse and kill its offspring, not parent the offspring. 

The propitiation element I see is harder to discern because it's removed several steps away from the actual bus incident.

How can you say that the huge amount of money that poured into the fund for the school bus monitor was propitiation paid to the misbehaving children on the bus?

There's deep psychology and sociology behind this long chain of connecting links. 

Think about it, and we'll discuss it next week, but first you must come to your own conclusions.  Remember the objective here is to master a thinking process peculiar to writers -- not to solve some specific real world problem.  Just as dialogue is not speech, but the illusion of speech, so also a fictional world, character or relationship is not a real world, character or relationship but the illusion of them.  We are doing an exercise here designed to train your subconscious to create illusions. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Worldbuilding with Fire And Ice Part 6: Values Twist

Here are the previous parts in this series:
The first 3 are from a very different "angle" than 4, 5, and now 6 involve.  We'll get back to this mix of Sex and Politics, weaving in Romance, Love and goshknows what else, a little at a time.  These posts are the foundation upon which to build facility with the use of THEME as discussed in previous years.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part-i.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/11/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part-ii.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/11/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/07/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part-4.html
http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/07/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part-5.html

Part 7 is scheduled for August 14th, 2012, and Part 8 for October 9, 2012.

We're dissecting and discussing a single World War II film made in 2005 titled THE GREAT RAID.  We started this discussion in WORLDBUILDING WITH FIRE AND ICE PART 4: STORMS OF DEATH  That post has links to previous worldbuilding posts. 

Death is an odd topic for a Romance blog, but a necessary one if you are a Romance writer.  This discussion will lead us deep into worldbuilding to show-don't-tell theme, so you never have to explain philosophy in words.  It is, however, the presence of conflicting philosophies shown by Values that makes Art live for generations. 



Now we'll look at some ways this 2005 film shows the pivot point in audience values, the twist between the 1940's and 2012. 

--------Values Twist -------------

By focusing on an accurate portrayal of the actual historical Events -- using some of the old footage, too -- THE GREAT RAID casts an air of authenticity.

Unlike many modern films and TV series, this film does not totally rewrite History into the opposite of what it was.  Even in the 1940's there were many women like the nurse/resistance-leader in this film.  There were many Japanese who didn't respect the Catholic church enough to stop when confronted by a Priest (but there were also many who would have stopped.)  The explosions might be a bit bigger than the usual WWII actual explosion, but that's Hollywood. 

The prisoners of war in this film might have looked a little handsomer than starved men would look - and there were no issues of lice, no swarms of mosquitos, no rats, and other jungle-island pests depicted in the film.

In a film made in the 1950's, you wouldn't find the icky realities portrayed graphically either. 

In this 2005 film, we watch as a Japanese garrison commander (portrayed as cruel and evil as any Nazi is ever portrayed by American films) orders 10 men executed because 1 man disobeyed a regulation of the prison camp. 

He lines up the men, swaggers a bit, and makes the others watch as their comrades (some of which the viewers now know) are shot in the back of the head.  Yes, it's a cliche scene, too, but it's well staged.

Here's the twist: in a 1950's war movie, you wouldn't see blood gouting from the ruined skulls at the headshots.  In this 2005 film, you don't see the blood gouting -- and the shooter, who stands way too close to the men he's shooting doesn't get spattered with obvious gore.

Note that this execution is not done by firing squad so that the person who murders another in cold blood will never be sure it was his bullet that murdered the prisoner.  In a firing squad, only one rifle is loaded with live ammunition, and the squad stands a good distance from the victim.  The victim's face is covered, and any onlookers don't see the expression -- nor does the victim see the squad.  This procedure is considered clean and merciful insofar as possible under those circumstances, preserving humanity.

In this 2005 film, one Japanese solder stands BEHIND the prisoners he, by himself, is executing, and shoots them drug cartel style.  We do see the line of victims fall one by one, but the camera is at a good distance -- there is no emphasis on the gore, the anguish.  It's distanced physically and thus emotionally, but it is raw and direct.  To half the audience it depicts the Japanese executioner as evil; the other half of the audience simply sees a scene that could have been more interesting if it were more realistic (realistic like a videogame, maybe).

In a 1950's film, the cliche scene would be a closeup on the commander of the prisoners listening to SHOTS FIRED outside the wall.  We wouldn't see the people lined up, nor see them fall. 

This is a cinematic TWIST at this pivot point in audience sensibilities. 

There are many examples of this kind of twist in this film, but let's get back to the Religion aspects because they are stark, and relevant to the worldbuilding issues writers face today. 

All human cultures we know of have SOMETHING in that niche Religion occupies.  Today, in the USA about half the people are on a campaign to expunge religion from public consciousness, even though at least 70% (according to an annual survey) believe there's something more to life the universe and everything than can be measured and quantified by science. 

Hence we have the popularity of shows like the syfy channel's ghost hunters and other shows about the Paranormal.  We also have a raft of TV series where paranormal creatures (Vampires, werewolves etc) are taken for granted, or a best kept secret of the town or show's main characters only.  We have comedy like PSYCH which parodies the psychic, and real psychics who help the police, too.  People are pushing hard to penetrate the veil between the reality science shows us and the "other" side whatever that may be, but at the same time denying the possibiity that God is real.

That is a brief sketch of the audience a new writer is inheriting now.  That ambivalence needs to be built into the fiction if it is to reach across those audience boundaries and unify an audience.

So let's look at some of the dialogue in THE GREAT RAID.  If you watched it as I recommended on July 3, 2012, find your notes on the dialogue.

"My future isn't in your hands." 

That is very profound, and very pre-2000 audience appeal.  But it's phrased ambiguously.  Some will hear that the person's future is in their own hands.  Some will hear it as declaring the future is in God's hands.

"You have to believe in something stronger than yourself."

A priest says that to a worried soldier. 

Our 2012 culture is trending away from such beliefs in God -- maybe toward the Supernatural or Paranormal but away from the concept that a single Creator still commands every little event in our lives, and most especially our Destiny.

If ONE mind is behind all reality, one would expect that when we look at Reality we'd see a coherent pattern.  In a way, we do.  We've deciphered genes and found how all life on earth is woven of certain patterns replicated in many dissimiliar creatures.  We are soooo one organism infesting this Earth.  Yet Death (the main subject we've  been addressing in Parts 4, 5 and here in Part 6, of this series) seems sporadic, unpredictable, unjust, and a destroyer of the Happily Ever After ending to any Romance.  No rational course of action can avoid Death -- therefore how can you say that life is commanded by a Creator?  Or at any rate by a Creator who cares?

"It isn't safe to bring them here."

This line turns up as they strategize how to complete the rescue mission.  If they extract the prisoners, they have to take them someplace, and it better be someplace that won't be destroyed by the incoming US invasion force clashing with the Japanese defenders.

Of course, the reason for the Raid is that the POW camp is not safe either.

These soldiers are not volunteers, as we have today.  They were drafted.  So it isn't right to say that because they're soldiers they know the risks, they signed up to do this risky job, and they willingly put their lives on the line for the defense of Freedom.  They didn't.  They were forced - most of them anyway.  We had very few career military in that fight.  We did, at the beginning of the war, have volunteers who rushed to sign up to defend the country after Pearl Harbor.  But by the end, it was drafted army.

So in the context of this 1940's situation, that line of dialogue can pass by you without making any impression.

Even in the context of 2005, prior to 9/11, you wouldn't notice that line of dialogue.

But it's the spike around which the entire value-system pivot is rotating.

Today, as I noted previously in this discussion of THE GREAT RAID, it has become immoral (and in many cases illegal) to put anyone at risk of anything for any reason.  All risk is being expunged from life.

The sole property that a Happily Ever After ending must have to be valid is that it must be absolutely risk-free. 

That's our real-life, real-world post-9/11 view.  Consider the TSA -- what is their reason for existing?  They submit anyone to any indignity on any statistic's whim simply to "keep us safe."  Nobody ever considers that the public would willingly risk another plane crash into a building in order to get rid of the pat-downs and other "unreasonable search and seizure" the TSA was created to impose.

Consider the scene in THE GREAT RAID where the prisoners are lined up outside, and because 1 had violated a regulation, 10 are shot.

That is a standard method of controlling hostile crowds.  It is used in every totalitarian state because it works (include the old Fantasy world standby of the Kingdom in totalitarian).  Think about the French Revolution. 

If you don't know much about the French Revolution, you can have a great time and learn too by reading Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's St. Germain novel set in 1792 at the time when Thomas Paine was writing two books that literally shaped the post 2008 culture of the USA.

Here's the Vampire novel of the French Revolution:


And here is some of Thomas Paine's writing.  He wrote in the 1790's and you can get everything he wrote on Amazon Kindle for 99cents (a bit more if you want it on paper!). 



Just imagine where we'd be if the Founding Fathers in the 1700's (or the farmboys who fought WWI and WWII in the 1900's) had been as obsessed with safety as we are today.

We flinch at everything.  Our food is dangerous, full of pesticides (it really is) and now we keep getting e. coli and other infections in salad, which is the only healthy food left to eat!  We sue our doctors if they give us the wrong medicine (many are very deadly).  We want to crack down on "illegal aliens" because the drug dealers shoot each other in the street (that's real! I live near it all.) 

We are becoming psychologically incapable of accepting RISK.  Our mental model of what life must be is "safe" -- i.e. sans all risk. 

The pioneers who trundled across the prairie in Conestoga wagons lived with risk and death every moment of their lives -- and voluntarily chose to take the risk to get land of their own upon which they could do as they chose.

They took that risk to get out of the control of Kings and other kinds of governments that wanted to keep them as "peasants."  That is, a class of poor farmers who could be controlled by such tactics as killing a bunch as punishment for what 1 person did as THE GREAT RAID shows a Japanese commander doing to control a prison camp. 

How many of you have been in a grammar school class where the teacher punished the whole class because a couple noisy kids were cutting up?

That's what teachers are now taught to do -- I think it's largely because we no longer have any teachers at all, we have Educators who don't know a subject they are teaching, but only how to teach. 

Your audience is familiar with the tactic of punishing the whole class, or an entire group, for the misbehavior of a couple.  That's why the TSA seems so logical.  People don't think it's wrong to impose a burden on everyone because of something a few people did -- or MIGHT DO. 

That attitude toward controlling groups is a huge Value Twist between the 1940's and the 2000's.  And 2005 is a pivot point, as this film depicts.

Today, nobody questions the premise that a group must be controlled by force, and if you have a group of opinionated indivduals as Americans tend to be, you absolutely must control them.

Nobody asks WHY control a group?  Why bother?  The assumption is in place that the individual can not and will not control himself.  The absolute proof of that is the way a handful of men from another country hijacked aircraft and crashed them to make explosions and kill people. 

Since we must be safe at all costs (literally all costs) and the threat lies with our individualism we must be hammered into a group, then the group hammered into a mold that behaves itself.  Thomas Paine made that clear, but what he didn't foresee was how fearfulness would invade our command structure.

That's one main Value Pivot you see in this 2005 film.  When a bully (such as the Japanese Commander we see in this film -- and I'm not implying there weren't such Commanders among the Japanese) gains power and is given the task of controlling individuals each with personal, individual self-esteem, the only tactic he can possibly envision is to KILL 10 for every 1 who misbehaves.  FEAR -- instilling fear -- is the main tactic of the bully.

A bully is a bully because he/she lacks self-esteem (and some other character strengths that can be acquired under kind teachers).  Lack of self-esteem leads to feeling powerless, which leads to fear, which leads to lashing out at someone weaker in order to feel a sense of power as a substitute for self-esteem.

Or it can work the other way.  The fear can lead to knuckling under to the Bully, backing away and backing down until backed into a corner -- when for fear of life itself, the fearful person lashes out blindly.  If the attack succeeds and vanquishes the bully, the Victim can oh-so-easily become another Bully. 

OK, that's very simplistic, but when you are creating a character, keep-it-simple is the rule.  Your audience understands bullies, even better maybe than the 2005 audience did.  But we also now understand the Victim better than we did.  The Victim also lacks self-esteem, or has it but has lost access to it from repeated abuse, and is therefore ripe to become the Bully they fear.

THE GREAT RAID depicts this subtle psychological connection between seeking safety, fear, power abuse, and the "glory" of rising to an occasion requiring valor, honor, teamwork that isn't forced on the individuals from above but rises from below as a leader is chosen and followed.  That one line of dialogue where the US soldier commanding these untried trainees discusses glory just says it all.  That is the kind of dialogue writing we strive for, and seldom reach.   

You can exploit the modern audience's familiarity with the safety/fear/crowd-control-by-punishing-all-for-transgression-of-one connection as a writer because Bullying has made headlines as it rises into High School.  It used to be shed by 8th grade, now you see it all the way into college, and students are being bullied to the point where they will commit suicide, or take up a gun and hose down a cafeteria full of people. 

This is the reality your reader lives in.  When you incorporate that into a worldbuilding exercise, you produce a world they can believe in.  Then you can do anything.  You have power.

The scrambling, screaming, overwhelming need for safety at all costs is the signature of lack of self-esteem at the core of the bully personality.  People with high self-esteem are Leaders.  They're not fearless.  They're not risk-averse.  They live risky lives and fail a lot, often enough to get used to it as the pioneers of the Old West got used to arrows springing up in the side of their horse-troughs. 

A Leader with high self-esteem does not become a Bully when handed the job of getting people to work together to common purpose.  He doesn't have to fire 10 others every time 1 person violages a rule.  He doesn't have to hide behind metal detectors and guards.  It isn't that he's ignorant of the threats that are coming at him.  It's that he can handle it.  That is the attitude of the Hero in a really hot Romance. 

Or you can flip all this upside down and write about the connection between punishing all for the transgression of one and its obverse, what the philosophers term Collective Salvation -- the bedrock principle behind the hammering repetition of the word, Fair, by so many in the media today. 

I'm not saying here one side is "better" than the other, just that this is a SOURCE for writers looking for a defined conflict that can "reach" a wide audience.  But to use such nebulous conflicts as Values, you must be conversant with both sides of the argument, really understand the positions from the inside, create characters who espouse those positions from comprehensible human necessity, and then you must argue the fine points of the positions just as this film does, "off the nose" -- in symbols, in brief throw-away dialogue, in a hesitation before acting, in a riveting glance before swallowing an objection and saying, "Yes, Sir!" 

"It isn't safe" is substituted for the more likely 1940's line, "It's not far enough away."  If you're writing a novel, one of your characters will say "It's not safe," and another will counter, heatedly, "Who cares!" and a third will put in, "Here, that's far enough away from ground zero."  In a film, you can have only 1 line of dialogue making that point about Values. 

Here's a wikipedia entry on Collective Salvation in case you've missed it.

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

It's harder to write about because there are not that many who understand it, but soon it may be a full half of the USA that accepts this philosophy as reasonable. 

That's another huge Values Pivot represented in THE GREAT RAID. 

Hitherto, WWII has always been about individual salvation.  Now history is being rewritten to make the entire 2-theater conflict about collective salvation.  It's subtle, at the moment, though, and you can still argue it in fiction. 

You may want to watch that movie again with all that in mind.  There are a number of terrific Romance novel concepts in this film.

Part 7 in this series is scheduled for August 14th, 2012, and Part 8 for October 9, 2012.  We're going to move way beyond this film and what you can learn from it. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com