Story Springboards Part 1: Art Heists by Patricia McLinn

Today we have a wonderful article by Patricia McLinn on the romantic aspects of the Art Theif.  We're all fans of Remington Steele, and It Takes A Thief, and now White Collar, but what is it about these television shows that are so fascinating to Romance readers?

Oh, and if you haven't read any Patricia McLinn titles, oh please do look up her novels!  See end of her post for how to find her publications. 

-----------GUEST POST BY PATRICA McLINN ------------

            Fiction, as it turns out, is way better than fact when it comes to art heists.

            But that’s starting at the end of this blog, and I should take you back to the start, which was my offhand Tweet wondering why art heists stir the imagination. That sparked a Twitter/e-mail exchange on the topic with my esteemed blog hostess.

            From what seemed to be off the top of her head, Jacqueline listed nearly a dozen angles a fiction writer could pursue while playing in the art heist sandbox

--There's the historical importance - holding a piece of 
history 

--There's profit - the black market fence has a client 
if you can get the painting or statue 

--There's stealing it to keep it just for yourself, 
very personal, very intimate. 

--There's maybe the thief is a reincarnation of the 
painter or the subject and just wants the thing and 
doesn't know why? 

--There's the simple thing like climbing a mountain
 -- break through their security because it's there 
(like hackers). 

--There's just hurting the owner because you don't 
like him/her/it. 

--There's striking back at the nose-in-the-air 
art-patron public because you don't like them. 

--There's "liberating" the art from the 
dog-in-the-manger owner so that posterity can 
have it (stealing from the Nazis). 

--There's keeping it from destruction in a 
shooting war (think recent events in Egypt). 

--There are all the things about Art that make 
it interesting -- and then there's the whole 
D&D board game fascination with STEALING (the 
Thief character with all sorts of sub-traits). 

--There's the whole "magical" dimension of how 
great art depicts or connects to the human 
Group Mind -- and all the voodoo that 
can be done that way.

            As a novelist, that list has me salivating.  However, I also have a background in journalism, including being an editor at the Washington Post for mumble-mumble years. As Lawrence Block said in the title of one of his wonderful books on writing, I love TELLING LIES FOR FUN AND PROFIT – but I want to know when I’m telling lies. Mark Twain gave great advice: “Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”

            So, I started checking into why the public finds art heists romantic and alluring, and the psychology behind art heists.

            Sorry, folks, the experts agree that to the extent that the public finds art heists romantic and alluring, it’s because we don’t know the truth behind them. (Note to anyone writing an article about art theft: Cary Grant went after jewels, not art in TO CATCH A THIEF. Saw that wrong several places.)

            Former Scotland Yard detective Charles Hill is reported to have said that stealing great works is less a daring act than a sign of an unimaginative thief [[http://www.simoleonsense.com/the-psychology-of-art-thieves]], because the thief is doomed to obtaining nothing near the true value of the art.

            Yet thieves do steal art – reportedly as many as 20,000 pieces a year in Italy. [[http://www.artcrime.info/facts.htm]]  Why?

            Motivation One: USA Today [[http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-05-23-Parisartheist-motivation_N.htm]] quoted Joel Silberberg, Director of the Division of Forensic Psychiatry at Northwestern University, as saying, “If you look back historically at other pieces of stolen art, the motivation is idiosyncratic. Look at the Mona Lisa's theft — taken from The Louvre in Paris in 1911 by an Italian patriot. He resented that one of Italy's greatest pieces of art was being displayed in France. So you get individual motivation there, or a political motivation.”

            (For more on the 100th anniversary of the Mona Lisa theft earlier this year, click here. [[http://blogs.artinfo.com/secrethistoryofart/tag/kempton-bunton]].)

            Motivation Two: Said Hill: “Then there’s the trophy-hunting art thieves. They don’t make much money at all and cause themselves endless aggravation. But they enjoy doing it. It gives them a buzz.”

            Let’s call those Crackpot 1 and Crackpot 2.

            Motivation Three:  Money.  A few of the money-motivated art thieves might be stealing to fulfill an order from an unscrupulous art collector, but not many.

            Instead, according to the experts, most of the money garnered from art thefts goes to –

            And here’s where facts will forever change my view of the fiction.

             -- organized crime and terrorism.

            Yikes. Makes the crackpots look appealing by contrast. But the crackpots are in the minority when it comes to art thieves.

            According to the website of the Association for Researching into Crimes against Art (known as ARCA[[http://www.artcrime.info/facts.htm]]): “Most art crime since the 1960s is perpetrated either by, or on behalf of, international organized crime syndicates.”

            ARCA, citing information it “compiled from sources including Interpol, the FBI, Scotland Yard, Carabinieri, independent research and ARCA projects,” also says, “Art crime represents the third highest grossing criminal enterprise worldwide, behind only drugs and arms trafficking. It brings in $2-6 billion per year, most of which goes to fund international organized crime syndicates.”

            That just ground my image of the dashing art thief into dust.

            Two other areas of art theft (though not heists) that greatly concern the experts are fraud/forgeries (so the Audrey Hepburn-Peter O’Toole movie HOW TO STEAL A MILLION is practically a documentary, right?) and theft by destruction, most often perpetrated by repressive groups (think of the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamyan statues.)

            So, have the facts taken all the fun out of the fiction?

            Not, necessarily.  First, of course, there’s that whole fiction thing -- as in we make stuff up.  As fiction writers, we don’t have to adhere to the most statistically likely thing to happen.

            Also, there are some intriguing elements among the facts.

            Take ARCA.

            Among other things, it offers a blog with current art-theft news [[http://art-crime.blogspot.com/]]. (Forgive them the incorrect “it’s”.)

            There’s also the history of Noah Charney, founding director of ARCA. He says he developed an interest in art crime while researching a novel, THE ART THIEF.

            “I am most interested in the field from a practical standpoint—how the academic study can help to inform contemporary law enforcement and art protection,” he says on his website[[http://www.noahcharney.com/bio.htm]]. In June 2006 he held a conference “in Cambridge entitled ‘Art Theft: History, Prevention, Detection, Solution.’  It was attended by the heads of the FBI, Scotland Yard, and Carabinieri Art squads (Vernon Rapley, and Col. Giovanni Pastore) as well as academics and art professionals with interest, if not previous experience, in the study of art crime”  and since then, he says, he has forged alliances with the law enforcement experts.

            How about pitting a Charney-esque character against a terrorist mastermind in a clock-ticking effort to protect, oh, say, a Vermeer exhibit?

            If that doesn’t get your fiction-writing juices going, how about this:

            The should-be-world-renowned Museum of Bad Art (MOBA), in Somerville, Mass., has been the victim of two art heists. 

            First, the painting Eileen was taken in 1966. According to the museum’s Wikipedia entry [[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Bad_Art]], “The museum offered a reward of $6.50 for the return of Eileen,” and donors later increasing the reward to $36.73. To no avail. A decade later, someone claiming to be the thief demanded a $5,000 ransom. MOBA refused. The painting was returned.

            Despite a sign proclaiming "Warning. This gallery is protected by fake video cameras", another criminal struck in 2004, leaving a note demanding $10 for Rebecca Harris' Self Portrait as a Drainpipe.  This time, the art was returned soon after the theft … with a $10 donation.

            If these heinous crimes don’t stir your imagination, you are far too stolid a soul to be writing fiction.

~ ~ ~  

Patricia McLinn [[http://www.PatriciaMclinn.com]] is the author of 26 novels, focusing (as much as she focuses on anything) on relationships.  Many are now available as e-books at the major outlets. She encourages you to purchase those she’s indie published (without overtly urging you not to buy those from a publisher.) Her first non-fiction book – WORD WATCH: A Writer’s Guide to the Slippery, Sneaky, and Otherwise Tricky -- draws on her mumble-mumble years as an editor at the Washington Post and a lifetime of cranky reading. Her first mystery will be released in June 2012, and at that time she will encourage you to buy from that publisher.

You can follow Patricia at Twitter [[http://twitter.com/PatriciaMcLinn]] and Facebook [[https://www.facebook.com/PatriciaMcLinn]]. WORD WATCH Tweets [[http://twitter.com/WordWatchBook]] and Facebooks [[https://www.facebook.com/WordWatchTheBook]] for itself.

 ---------- END GUEST POST BY PATRICIA MCLINN -----------

POSTED BY JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG

http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com



Part 2 of this series is at
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/04/story-springboards-part-2-tv-shows.html

Parts 3 and 4 will be:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/11/story-springboards-part-3-art-of.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/11/story-springboards-part-4-art-of.html

Sizing Up The Competition Part 2 Winning A Mate

Last week

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/sizing-up-competition-part-1-tigress.html

we ended off with this observation:

It can be argued that the whole animal kingdom is at war, and it's all based on sexuality.  OK, it's a stretch to blame microbe-wars on sexuality since they don't have any, but still they eat each other.

The thesis is that violence is inherent in primate nature.  Violence is necessary to ensure that the strongest among us mate and proliferate the most. 

This is exactly the sort of science-philosophy that science fiction (and by extension science fiction romance) exists to challenge, dissect, discuss, and speculate about. 

But as we noted last week, we must practice the stagecraft adage Don't speak for the moment, let the moment speak for itself.

If you have characters expounding philosophy or beating their political drums at each other, baring their metaphorical fangs (or real ones), the reader will not be entertained. 

The writer of science fiction or Paranormal Romance is the one who has to challenge, dissect, discuss, and speculate.  The reader should not be aware that this happened offstage.  The writer sets up a "moment" and then just stands silently and lets that "moment" speak to the reader who never knows all the work that went into defining and constructing that moment. 

It is up to the writers of Romance novels to ask these difficult and unsavory questions -- not to find answers, but to engage readers in thinking and feeling, aspiring and finding peace, creating the Happily Ever After ending, the HEA. 

So here's a question:

If this "violence-is-inherent" thesis about human nature and human reproduction is true for humans, does that mean it necessarily must be true for any non-humans we might come across in this galaxy -- or another galaxy? 

Would this thesis hold true across time-lines or across "universes?"   Would human ghosts exhibit the same tendency toward competition, violence, winning?  Think paranormal romance. 

What would humans who do not function along the lines of competition/winning/violence create in the way of civilization? 

What would happen if one of "us" met one of "them?" 

Perhaps "we" arose from such a cross-fertilization?  Way back? 

If we humans contain all the animal attributes of the creatures behind us on the evolutionary ladder, then we contain the canary as well as the tiger, don't we?  How do they get along together? 

It's hard to imagine Darwin's thesis holding validity without the concept of competing for mates, with the best and the strongest winning. 

The drive to grow up strong, and the need to win at everything, really does seem to function as a mating game dynamic.  But how much of that is cultural and how much inherent? 

Is "winning a mate" actually related in any way to Romance?  Or is "winning" antithetical to "romance?"

Is "winning a mate" about the tiger while Romance is about the canary?

Could that be the source of the Battle of the Sexes? 

I recently read some reviews on amazon of modern Fantasy novels published by the Big 6 publishers mentioned in the blog article I sited in Part 1 last week:

http://kianadavenportdialogues.blogspot.com/2011/08/sleeping-with-enemy-cautionary-tale.html

These recent novels I've read have become heavily laced with violence (the kickass heroine falls in love).  But they are marketed to romance readers. 

Some veteran romance readers balk at the hatred and violence portrayed as a vision of the world through the first-person heroine's eyes. 

I'm not talking about just one book here; there's a trend afoot though you may not have noticed it yet.  I'm the canary in the coal mine when it comes to trends in fiction!

Some modern romance readers are disappointed at the lack of, or at the low-quality of, the sex scenes.

The consensus seemed to me to lean in the direction of "violence/hatred and Romance don't mix." 

Hatred and the resultant savage violence somehow spoil the Romance mood (which is not news to me!)

But apparently there are some editors at the big publishing houses for whom the violence fulfills the Romance in some way, or their sales numbers are telling them that a growing segment of their customers look for the dark, ugly portrayals amidst the Romance.

We can all relate to the idea that the tiger-in-human-form is sexy.  But is he sexy covered in the blood of the canary?

I have long had a screeching complaint against film makers, TV shows, and publishers for the way they present only what I term "upside down" or "inside out" fictional structures.

You can see this very clearly today in TV shows.  The one that hit me between the eyes recently is a lovely show titled THE GLADES, about a detective relocated to Florida, who is ridiculously good at solving murders. 

The reason I watch THE GLADES is the mixed-up love-story/romance between the detective and a nurse who wants to be a doctor.  Her husband was in prison, and she was raising her kid alone working as a nurse, taking courses to become a doctor.  The detective mentors the kid, really likes the boy just for his personality, falls in love (resisting all the way) with the mother, and the father gets out of prison.  Trouble ensues, and now the story is progressing (well, I hope it'll return).

But this is also the reason I watch several other shows of that sort.  I endure the murders and ugly side of human nature dealt with in order to follow the Romance. 

But the Romance is always frustratingly secondary.  The relationships or love story are just complications, while much more air time is spent on chase scenes, fight scenes, night club scenes, bleeding people, dead people, filthy alleys. Those are the "moments" left to "speak" to us. 

Now, it's good to have some of that "reality" jazz for artistic contrast, for thematic high relief, and I always have that dimension in the stuff I write.  But for me, as writer or reader, all that stuff is background.

The important thing is Love Conquers All, and the arduous path to the Happily Ever After (and yes, I do sometimes show how many novels worth of drama and how many lifetimes a soul must live to achieve that Happily Ever After, but it's the main point of the whole thing.)

In the modern TV show formula, (as in times past), the main point is the ugly death, the more violence the better, and love is just a complication.

You can find no better lesson in the difference between foreground and background than in studying the  TV series (say ALPHAS for example) vs. a really nice Romance. 

One of the reasons I like the TV Series WHITE COLLAR so much is that it is depicting the converging pathways of the life of crime vs. the life of a solid marriage.  WHITE COLLAR is showing us the transformation of a fine upstanding criminal into a champion of law and order.  Or maybe that's not the gameplan that the producers will eventually pursue.  It depends on the ratings.

Fascinatingly, this transformation of character (called in screenwriting "arc") is from criminal to cop, while in Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series we're watching the transformation of a cop into a criminal.  Anita's story involves a whole lot more sex of incredible variety, a considerable amount of loyalty, lust and even affection, but not a great deal of actual Love.  Without Love I can't see an HEA in her future.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Believing in Happily Ever After Part 4: Nesting Huge Themes Inside Each Other

Last week we looked at two conflict sets that form the basis for huge thematic statements that can be simplified down to something as stark and elegant as the underpinnings of the TV show Leverage. Now we'll see if we can combine these 4 thematic elements into a set of themes that generate conflicts and thus plots for large, multi-point of view novels as we began discussing in

Verisimilitude vs. Reality Part 2 September 13,2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-2-master.htmlVerisimilitude vs. Reality Part 3, September 20, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-3-game.html
The previous posts in this series were posted on:

October 4, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-1.htmlOctober 11, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-2.htmlOctober 18, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-3.html
Secret vs. Private + Standardized vs. Customized

You can "nest" those two sets of conflicts to produce a huge novel with a dizzying array of Point of View Characters.

You can nest them because they are philosophically related. If you can explicate that philosophical relationship all in Show and without any Tell (i.e. tell the story in pictures, in icons and images) you will have a masterpiece of commentary on the current human condition.

To start, note that in a Standardized culture anything about you that you don't hang right out in public is going to be regarded as grounds for suspicion about you.

Why is that?

Think about it.

In a Standardized culture, we're all alike. So if there's something about you that you aren't forthcoming about, then it must be something that identifies you as "Different" -- as unacceptable. It has to be something you're ashamed of, because after all we're all the same, so why would you keep it secret?

Once you've seen a naked woman, you've seen a naked woman.

Why would any woman "hide" their nakedness (or any part of their body) from you when all women are the same? Men, too, for that matter. What's to hide?

If you're not displaying your nakedness for all to see, you are keeping something secret. It's only logical.

There's physical nakedness, and there's psychological nakedness. In a Standardized culture, if you're not as naked as everyone else, you're not politically correct. You're keeping something secret.

In a Standardized culture (science fiction extrapolation to vast extreme for the sake of illustration), there can be no such thing as "private." There is only "secret." And in a Standardized culture, secret is evil.

Why is secret evil? Because something different might undermine the standardization of everyone.

In a Customized culture, on the other hand, there can be secrets and some of them may be about Evil, but most of what you don't know about another person is just private, and you're really not curious at all about other people's private business. You have your own private business to fill up the empty spaces inside you.

That's right, in a Customized (carry to extremes, remember? It's a principle of screenwriting) culture, a seriously totally customized culture, people would still be intensely curious about all kinds of things, but never about someone else's private business.

In a Customized culture, people don't dress or talk all alike. In a Standardized culture, they do.

In the 1950's, each year brought a specific fashion-necessary hemline length. If you couldn't afford a new dress (women didn't wear pants much), then you took up or let down the hemlines to within a half-inch of the specified proper fashion, usually sewing by hand. Standardization reigned in car-manufacturing, and in fashion. Uniform spelling was not just admired but an absolute requirement. Radio announcers had even become standardized for accent. (today you hear regional accents on TV announcers -- in the 1950's you didn't., though regional accents were more redolent.)

In the 2010's, walk along any street and see some women in pants suits, others in jeans, ankle length skirts, mini-skirts, all going the same place.

The other day I saw a video clip of a bunch of people walking out of the White House after a high level conference they were reporting on. I watched the women. They ALL wore skirt-suits (not a one of dozens wore a pants suit), and the skirts were above the knee in every case. Their dress for business wear had become standardized to a new standard. Even just 5 years ago, there were lots of pants suits in such shots. Remember Hilary Clinton wore and still wears pants suits more than anything else.

In between, there was a trend where women on TV non-fiction shows (there was a time when no TV anchor on a news show was female) all wore suits, sometimes with tailored shirts and ties, sometimes pants suits, but sometimes skirt-suits and they weren't mini-skirt suits.

I've taken a recent poll cruising news shows. All the newswomen are showing a lot of skin, cleavage, and often wear skin-tight dresses with cleavage and no sleeves, showing more of themselves than they would in a bathing suit. Just a few years ago, those same women wore suits with jackets when seen among men wearing suits with jackets. Today, female reporters stand on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (which is being bought by the Germans) among men in suits, but the women are showing cleavage and lots of skin, or if it's cold outside, they wear very tight sweaters.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/15/dboerse-nyse-idUSN1E76E16C20110715

And the Germans have a very different culture than the U.S.A. does. As much as German culture (via immigrants) has influenced us, we are still very different.

I'm not passing value judgements here. I'm surveying details that sketch the context of your reader's real-world, against which they judge the plausibility of your fictional world. I'm selecting details here that infer other types of details. Think about the reasons for these fashion shifts. This is how you "build" a world for your characters from the substance of your theme. When you build your fictional world from the elements of your reader's real world, the readers will believe your entire story - it will seem plausible. Your reader reads about how people dress, and your reader infers the value system of the culture in which those characters walk abroad.

Women wore suits to be like men, or to seek respect for not presenting themselves as a sex object.

There was a cultural conflict there generating that fashion choice -- the striving to be taken seriously. In prior times, women news reporters were never allowed to report on business stories or crimes (or from the locker room at a sporting event). Women reporters covered women's stories only. Nothing a woman said was ever taken seriously.

Today that cultural conflict is gone, and women are behaving as if they can be taken seriously and display as much skin as they (or the news producers) want. Yes, it seems the real reason for the cleavage display is that sex sells. Nothing rivets a man's attention like cleavage and the producers (even the women producers) of news shows see that in their ratings demographics. But the men don't wear wet T-shirts to display a six-pack.

I've seen prime time hard-news TV shows with a female anchor and a couple of female reporters, all showing a lot of skin, and reporting on serious news. Big change, and I haven't seen anyone note it even in passing.

The writer's eye must observe these things and translate the visuals into thematic substance.

Compare that cultural shift to the one described in the article I sited earlier in this Believing In Happily Ever After series about the increasing internet speeds and what enterprise has been able to do with that technological advance.

Here's the link again:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/07/speed-matters/

Microsoft and Google, the two publicly traded titans who, along with amazon.com, reign supreme in the Customized culture, actually operate on the old Standardized Worker-bee model. Though their products are created by wildly dressed individuals, they are developed and marketed by standardized workers, in standard business suits.

Consider that Facebook became a publicly traded company in 2011. Now Google has launched Google+ a serious competitor to Facebook. Google+ is another example of a user customizable service that's standardized on the back end.

I was talking with an employee of GoDaddy the other day about this very thing, and we agreed that GoDaddy is the Home Depot of the digital world (GoDaddy is a do-it-yourself website hosting service with customer service phone answerers who really know what they're talking about just as Home Depot clerks know what the products on their shelves actually do).

While GoDaddy is enabling individuals to create totally Customized (or templated Standardized; your choice) websites, they treat their employees like identical worker-bees, and pay really low wages, rewarding the best sales people with bonuses. (Sears does the same, as do many department stores).

At GoDaddy the art staff gets paid less than the customer service reps, according to my informant.

Well, that's how it used to be.  Things may be changing there, too.  See this?

http://mashable.com/2011/07/02/godaddy-sold/

GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain registrar, has been sold to three private equity firms in a deal valued at $2.25 billion, the company announced in early July 2011.


So these successful businesses (creating those rich folks who take what they want) are now hybrids of the Standardized and Customized cultures.

They sell customizable products (all the same out of the box; you make them different), but manufacture them in a Standardized Henry Ford style way. Do you smell a conflict generating a plot yet?

Now, you all know of the "privacy" issues on the internet, and the hacking incursions into bank records, even personal cell phones of celebrities.

Take that "real" world your reader lives in, slice and dice it just as you sliced and diced the TV Show Leverage which we discussed in Part 2 of this series.

Build an alien culture from one of these sets of themes, and a futuristic (extrapolated to extreme) human culture from the other set, put them in CONFLICT over a problem, resolve the problem, and you have a major novel that seethes with Romance one way or another, because the only thing that can Conquer this stuff is Love.

In the Standardized culture in which every instinct to Privacy is regarded as keeping illicit Secrets, the unique individual strives to 'break free' of a stultifying oppression. The Standardization is the problem.

In The Customized culture in which Privacy is treasured (what happens in the family, stays in the family), the Businessman who seeks to maximize profits via standardizing both workers and products, strives to hammer slippery individuals into shape and make everyone want the same thing. The Individualization, the sacredness of privacy, is the problem.

In a previous post we discussed the origins of the science of Public Relations. You should read the wikipedia article on PR and advertising.

Here are 3 posts on PR and altering the perception of reality in the way described above with fashion.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/glenn-beck-didnt-invent-overton-window.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/01/failure-of-imagination-part-4-teasing.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-to-change-perception-of-romance.html

Remember the principle, create a frustration then sell the solution and alter the general perception of reality.

To get the greater readership to accept the reality of the Happily Ever After ending, that ending has to become the solution to their greatest frustration -- like increasing internet speed and selling data connections by the megabyte.

The greatest frustration out there right now is the conflict between the innate (and I believe intrinsic in human nature) desire for individual uniqueness to be recognized (i.e. unconditional love) and the survival-instinct need to hunker down as one of the herd, to be a worker-bee and get a paycheck, to use the most popular brand of shampoo.

God Forbid anyone should think you're Different - because you know you are. That's CONFLICT the very essence of STORY. But more than that, it's the essence of Romance, because Romance starts with the impact of the vision of a future where you are not alone in your privacy.

The desire to be unique, and yet the same, and also recognized and appreciated for your individual uniqueness is the "problem" in the us vs. a problem conflict formula.

Right now, our genera population can't see Love Conquers All as the solution to that uniting problem in our culture.

Use Art to demonstrate that solution, and sell big time.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Believing in Happily Ever After Part 3: Standardization vs. Customization

Part 1 of this "Believing in Happily Ever After" series is:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-1.html
Part 2 is:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-2.html
Last week, we left off in the midst of examining the TV Show Leverage noting that Leverage has a "Tell Don't Show" opening that sets out the premise starkly, and explicitly states the theme.

The opening voice-over is:
"The Rich And Powerful take what they want.  We steal it back for you."

Now we're putting that TV show's premise and theme into the context of the world of the viewers it's aimed at, (you and me, actually, though Leverage is not a Romance.) 

Consider, this is a world in which huge social forces (not the least of which is the Internet and dot-com companies that  are going "public" on the stock exchange and wielding more power than any other kind of company before) are striving in two directions, creating conflict and a philosophical argument so big it's nearly impossible to see or define.

I parse it this way.  (do your own parsing).

I see, via Leverage's window on the philosophical/fiction-theme world, the conflict as Customization Vs. Standardization. 

Remember all the times I've sent you to read Alvin Toffler's non-fiction book, Future Shock.  He gave me the insight to be able to see things in this light now. 

Remember that the Essence of Story is Conflict. 

Plot is a sequence of events on a because-line -- because this happened we have a problem, which causes us to do this, which results in that, which causes us to do something else, and so on because-because- in unbroken chain all the way to problem-is-resolved. 

The conflict is Us vs. Problem. 

The conflict is resolved by a sequence of actions which resolve the conflict -- after the problem is solved, there is no further conflict.  (Happily Ever After) 

Out there in our everyday reality, the reality your reader lives in and uses to judge the 'plausibility' of your fictional worldbuilding, there are nested conflicts. 

We discussed nesting plots in Verisimilitude Vs. Reality parts 2 and 3, September 13 and 20, 2011.  

To create nested plots, you need nested conflicts, which means you divide one huge abstract theme into sub-themes, factoring a philosophical conundrum into smaller pieces and arranging them one inside the other, like Russian dolls.

So I'm looking through the window of a TV show (in this case Leverage, but this process works with any show, movie or novel) - and imagining the audience, the reality they live in, what they know about it and what they don't know about it.  I'm imagining the audience that Leverage is speaking to.

People love this show for a reason -- well, each person for a different reason -- but they see the show as trivial, as light entertainment, and of course it's not real.  But it's plausible for a reason.  We as writers need to know that reason.  Or reasons. 

The audience's emotional reactions come from their own unconscious assumptions and mostly from what they don't know about themselves.

Playing on that unconscious part of a reader's mind is called "art." 

Remember in the Big Love Sci-Fi series we discussed the social boundaries between Private and Secret shifting, melting and reforming.

That's one of the huge philosophical issues younger readers are unaware of but affected by emotionally.

So private vs. secret can be a thematic conflict line that generates a plot (thousands of plots).

Another conflict line even bigger than private vs. secret can be Standardization vs. Customization

So let's make a little list:

CONFLICTS:
 a) Secret vs. Private
 b) Customization vs. Standardization
 c) Statistics vs. Prejudice

Each of these 6 components of conflict represents a huge, complex, abstract, and powerful thematic concept.

Let's think about Customization vs. Standardization in our world and how we can use that nascent argument to create plot generating themes and conflicts.

In the 1800's the Industrial Revolution took off steaming into the 1900s where Henry Ford popularized The Assembly Line method of producing thousands of identical copies of a complicated thing.

The more complex machinery became, the less economically viable hand-building such machines became.  With Ford's advent, the frustration of business men and industrialists with "craftsmen" who worked slowly and methodically to produce a non-uniform (custom made) product was resolved.

Read Toffler's Future Shock and the description of how our public schools adopted the "covert curriculum" of hammering kids into identical "workers" for assembly lines, because that's what Big Business needed schools to do (and of course Big Business was and is the source of political campaign funds that can not be ignored).

So until the World Wide Web, Microsoft, AOL, Google, Blogs, email, ebooks, etc, Standardization was the Holy Grail of Business.

Products had to be made uniform -- all alike -- or it wasn't cost effective.

But people weren't all alike.  So business set out to create consumers who all wanted the same thing.

Radio advertising and then TV advertising worked to satisfy that requirement -- that uniform products required uniform consumers to want them, and uniformity was the solution to consumer's frustration with things that don't work.

Different Is Dead became the rallying cry of the 1940's and 1950's. 

The 1960's brought the Internet and Star Trek and Spock who was DIFFERENT!!! 

Star Trek portrayed on the ultra-uniform medium of series TV a UNIQUE INDIVIDUAL character.  He stuck out like a sore thumb, and was admired, respected, obeyed and even loved by his crew-mates for his differences. 

Vulcan was a culture that lauded the philosophy of I.D.I.C.  -- Infinite Diversity In Infinite Combinations.

The 1970's ushered in an era of (Alvin Toffler's Future Shock was published in the 1970's and is in new editions today) an era of CUSTOMIZATION.

Toffler predicted the cottage industry of telecommuting and even named it.  Today a lot of your customer service online is done via chat by workers working from home on customized schedules and individually varying computers.

Women's Lib and Martin Luther King all belong to this, but branch off into the conflict of Statistics vs. Prejudice.

Let's focus on this Customization vs. Standardization for a bit more.

This is a huge, multigeneration trend that most of your 20-something readers won't be aware of because this long perspective on history isn't taught in schools, nor is the philosophy behind it addressed below graduate level in college. 

We are now in the crunch-zone of this conflict.  Schools world wide hammer young kids into identical bricks. 

The counter trend is only found in private schools for the gifted or rejected, schools that let young kids wander around a rich classroom and pick up things to learn about as they become interested. 

Mass market education is still aimed at turning out identical product - workers for factories that no longer really exist. 

Note how the Federal Department of Education (I'm in the USA and use that perspective), could be viewed as a huge and bloated agency created by combining agencies and then not purging out redundancies but rather fighting turf wars for good paying federal jobs.  As a result of that, and various administrations (this is not party-specific) efforts to appease campaign finance sources and do the right thing by our kids anyway, we now have a Federal series of tests that all students have to pass.

That's standardizing people to function in a standardized world.

But as Toffler pointed out, we're not in a standardized world any more.

Small wonder we can't produce enough employable people.  Small wonder there are whole segments of TV viewerships who see their lives as mashed down and unjustly ruined by these huge forces -- "the rich" or "the government" or whatever huge thing their squeaky voices can't reach.

That plight produces emotions that are likewise widespread.  As a result, fiction that would not otherwise be popular, is popular. 

Think like a Romance Writer for a moment.  Can Romance be standardized?

Or is Romance the enemy of standardization?

Here's an article, I hope is still online, about facial recognition software, facebook, google, and online dating sites -- and the whole issue of using your "real" identity online.

http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/08/04/7254996-your-face-and-the-web-can-tell-everything-about-you

Remember the popularity of the Western Romance. 

What are Western Romances about?  Rugged individualists (not unlike the A-Team or the Leverage team).

Victorian Romance, Steampunk, you name it -- Romance is always about the misfit's unique qualification to succeed because of their differences not in spite of them.  (so is Science Fiction, for that matter)  And the TV show Leverage, the show Psych, the USA shows White Collar, Burn Notice, Royal Pains -- all of them feature unique individuals. 

This country was founded by folks who didn't fit the mold back home and went pioneering into the wilderness.  Those who survived to forge this country into a Nation were individualists who visualized a customized world, where each individual was valued for their unique qualities.

They lived in a "handmade world" where no two quilts were alike, no two butter churns were alike.  People wrote with quills - bird feathers - and no two of them are alike.  In fact, if you read original manuscripts from the 1700's even the most educated and erudite did not spell words in any uniform way, not even in the same document..  And precious few could read, though in the 1700's in America, that was changing.

Has anyone noted that there is a re-casting of the newspaper articles from the 1700's where folks were arguing about what kind of Nation we would become?  It's in modern English now because the originals are almost incomprehensible, (wild spelling, archaic words, involuted sentences like I write) and it became an overnight New York Times best seller.  The Federalist Papers.  It's on amazon.com. 

Standardization wasn't even a concept back then.  There was no conflict, not a lot of stories to write, about the vast sea of identical people and the one individual who stands out from "the masses."  "The Masses" as a concept didn't exist, though philosophical theorists were busily inventing the whole movement we label as "Liberal" or "Progressive" today. 

One novel series I do love from that era though is Cooper's The Leather Stocking Tales.  The story of two unique individuals reaching across a cultural gulf (European to Native American), against the backdrop of imported European armies fighting a war for territory.  By that era, Armies were rows of standardized troops moving in unison.  It may be that armies became the first standardization of people -- dating from Roman times, for sure. 

The power of Rome lay in that standardizing of troops, maneuvers, uniforms.  When Rome fell, England and Europe were left with Knights -- individuals in tin-can armor fighting for Honor.

Standardization , the assembly line, screws all the same size, brought vast wealth to this Nation, and a revolution to the world. 

It also brought the idea of Unions, of the rights of the peasants, the poor, the downtrodden, the "masses" of identical, expendable canon fodder peasants, into a political world. 

But we haven't won that battle yet.  The USA is still the only country with our style of government -- every other country that elects governments that actually govern uses the Parliamentary System of the country the USA broke away from, England.  The USA is still unique.

But there has arisen an entire society within the society of the USA - that might be a majority now - that values "fitting in" above "unique."  Some are so desperate to make sure everyone fits in and is thus happy that they're willing to use force to make others fit in, and that makes for great conflict to generate stories. 

That's the conflict most teen-romance features -- think Twilight.  Harry Potter.  The argument for the unique individual is presented in both those formidable series by the depiction of the environment and the people around the main characters, who stand out or are rejected by the masses of people who value being identical to others. 

Next week, in Believing in Happily Ever After Part 4, we'll look at how to link two of these "super-themes" -- themes so huge you can't pitch them in a voice over in front of a TV series and call it a premise.

Secret vs. Private + Standardized vs. Customized

See if you can find how these two huge conflicts blend into a nested theme structure. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Believing in Happily Ever After Part 2: The Power of Theme-Plot Integration

Now we launch into some very advanced writing lessons aimed specifically at Science Fiction Romance writers and Paranormal Romance writers.  But anyone who ventures into worldbuilding, such as historical writers and mystery writers, will find some valuable inspiration in this series about the Ending called "Happily Ever After."

Here's one of my early posts here on the Happily Ever After ending.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2007/02/happily-ever-after.html

Now this is an advanced writer's exercise.  We're going to employ the skills discussed in depth and detail in previous posts -- search for the tag Tuesday to pull up all my series on writing.

Here are some recent posts leading into this current discussion which also list posts from a while ago that laid down the foundation skills we're using here. 

The Big Love Sci-Fi series ran 8 parts from 6/21/2011 to 8/9/2011 and danced around the edges of this topic.

We discussed such dicey topics as Sex Without Borders, How Big Can Love Be in Science Fiction, the Mystery-Detective Romance, Modesty the Scrimmage Line of big Love, and then 3 parts on Unconditional Love and Science Fiction.

Here's the link to Part VI which has links to the previous parts of that series:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/07/big-love-sci-fi-part-vi-unconditional.html

In Part VI on Unconditional Love and Science Fiction I wrote:
---------quote---------
So SF has "proved itself" by having moved the boundaries of reality for many people now living. So they accept this new reality of iPhones and thus most SF no longer seems ridiculous or crazy.
---------end quote------

Here is a news item that reprises the changes in our world due to the internet and computers:

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/07/speed-matters/

It traces what we who lived through it barely remember except as a relief from frustration - the increasing speed of computers, the internet connections, and web-page loading.  The people who created those innovations thought the unthinkable because people were frustrated and would pay money to be relieved of frustration.

With the demise of Steve Jobs, the internet is now full of historical summaries of the changes wrought by his innovations. (*celestial round of applause to this master, serial-innovator*)  If you never owned a Trash80, go read about Steve Jobs and how he moved us beyond that much lauded machine.  

To change people's everyday reality, first make them fed up with the reality they've got, then offer to sell them a solution to their problems if only they'll change their IDEA of the boundaries of their reality. (buy a new computer; switch phone services).  That is a plot outline, or a war strategy.  There's no way to tell the difference.

My more recent posts that list prior posts to read to catch up on the topic of theme and story-structure are:

8/23/11 Source of the Expository Lump Part 2
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/source-of-expository-lump-part-2.html 

8/30/2011 Astrology Just For Writers, Part 10, Pluto The School of Hard Knocks
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/astrology-just-for-writers-part-10.html
9/13/11 Verisimilitude Vs. Reality Part 2 Master Theme Structure (on point of view shifting)
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-2-master.html

9/20/11 Verisimilitude Vs. Reality Part 3  The Game, The Stakes, The Template
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-3-game.html
10/4/11 Believing In Happily Ever After: Part 1 Stephen King on Potter Vs. Twilight

We've been working on the puzzle of  why the Happily Ever After Romance ending is too implausible for suspension-of-disbelief even by veteran science fiction/fantasy readers, and why Love Conquers All seems idiotic to the general public even though they verbally espouse that solemn belief. 

The essence of the problem seems to be that the Romance Genre simply assumes, without discussion, without challenge, without characters who espouse various sides of a heated debate on these topics, that all readers likewise assume these elements of fiction are actually built-in aspects of our everyday reality.

It's not that the HEA building block elements aren't true, or that they are rejected automatically by the scorning public, but that the writer does not argue the point, does not even know there's a point to be argued with the reader.

Arguing those unconscious assumptions in dramatic form was Marion Zimmer Bradley's greatest talent -- and it was a talent.  She didn't do it with conscious, deliberate intention.  It was simply how she presented her stories.

I studied under her tutelage for years, dissected her writing techniques since I was a teen, and I am just not as good at it as she is.  I have to do it consciously, so maybe I can demonstrate how you can teach yourself to do this.

Marion Zimmer Bradley never argued these two assumptions, The HEA and Love Conquers All, that I know of.  Scholars may dig something up that would demonstrate that's not true, but at the moment I can't point you to an example of exactly how to construct this argument.  I've never seen it done successfully - but I'm hoping some reader of this blog will comment with a link to a novel where this argument is laid out with stark clarity and convincing impact.

So let's delve into how to use theme to generate a plot that is part and parcel of this seminal argument.

Here's a perfect example to study because it's a TV show, ultimately very shallow, and very easy to dissect.

The TV show, LEVERAGE, TNT Sundays 8PM these days. 

You can find it on iTunes or Amazon. 
Leverage - all seasons




I've discussed Leverage previously.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/tv-shows-leverage-and-psych.html

I've watched a lot of Leverage episodes.  It's a typical TV Series, but has a story-arc with the lives and inner conflicts of the ongoing characters and their soap-opera style relationships.  It's not Romance, or even Intimate Adventure.  It's way too "dark" for that - the leader of the team is an unrepentant drunk, the team has a thief, a hacker, Muscle who solves problems with punches, and a grifter who plays the femme fatale with aplomb.

But the show is easy to dissect and understand for theme.  Not all good TV shows are this easy to dissect.  

As I've said in the series of posts noted above, theme is the part of the story where you say what you want to say.

It's the part where you put your opinion.  It's the part which carries the reason you want to write the story which ought to be the same as the reason the reader wants to read the story.  It's the part where, if you encode the theme-statement soon enough (1st page; 1st line in a novel) you can prevent people who will hate your novel from reading it. 

But to be truly effective, to evince an emotional response from your chosen readership, to sucker-punch the reader in a part of the mind/emotion complex that blocks you from "moving the boundaries of the reader's reality" so they can grasp the foundation principle Love Conquers All, your theme must be hidden from the reader's awareness.  Your theme must be "coded" -- usually in symbolism, which is one of the techniques we've discussed in previous posts.

See this post on icons and symbols:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/turning-action-into-romance.html 

The best place to hide anything is in plain sight.

That's what Leverage does to make it worth studying.  It hides its theme in plain sight, yet very much "off the nose" - a screenwriting term we'll return to in future posts. 

As a TV show Leverage is very similar to A-Team or It Takes A Thief, or today's White Collar that I rave about so much, or even Burn Notice.

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

That blog entry is about how to craft a "show don't tell" opening.

Leverage has a "Tell Don't Show" opening that sets out the premise starkly, and explicity states the theme in such a way that the real message is "off the nose" (i.e. in subtext).

The opening voice-over is:
"The Rich And Powerful take what they want.  We steal it back for you."

And then Leverage proceeds to explicate that theme (Class Warfare is Innate, or The End Justifies The Means,  Might Makes Right, or maybe Robin Hood Was Right) with relentless precision, scene after scene, show after show with never a foot placed wrong.  The TV Series Leverage is a beautiful thing to behold! 

Note the opening does not say "some rich people take what they want" or "we'll steal only if we have to and then make it right with the Law" -- it says all rich people take anything they want (listen to the tone of voice in that voice-over) regardless of how it harms not-rich people, and you are not-rich so you need us powerful/ruthless folks as Leverage to take back what is rightfully yours regardless of the ethics or morals of stealing.

The subtext is that if you're not-rich, it's someone else's fault, usually a rich person's fault.  Listen to the tone of voice, and read into it what you choose - but I hear that there is no way to solve the problem of being an impecunious victim of wealthy power abusers that is within the law, no way to get that wealthy except by breaking the law.  The law keeps you trapped in the ranks of the downtrodden.  If you're not rich, the law is not your friend.  (very hard to dispute, I will admit). 

It says we, the Leverage Team, violate the law, and any rules of morality that get in the way, to defend the helpless from the mighty. 

It says Might (riches) makes Evil and anything you do to battle Evil is Right. (again, very hard to dispute; but this blog piece is about using writing techniques to say what you want to say, not to evaluate what others have said, only how well they've said it.  Respond to the Leverage theme in a piece of fiction!  That's being part of the conversation among fiction writers.) 

The TV Series Leverage says Law must not prevail because it's always against the helpless.  A government of Laws is bad. (Law is made by the rich who buy politicians.)

A show broadcast in July had a rich man who was hated by his associates throw a party with a staged murder that the guests were to solve.  But someone murdered the host instead (for real), and left the head of The Leverage Team as the only witness and therefore the only suspect.  A policeman, hired to monitor events at the party, who was involved with the rich man's daughter, turned out to be the murderer at the instigation of the daughter.  THEME: Police are bad guys; Crooks are good guys.  People with power or money or both are always bad-guys.  Always. 

The absolutes in that summary of what this episode says come from a lack of a Good Guy/Gal who is rich, or a Bad Guy who is poor and downtrodden.  There are no counter-examples among the characters to muddy the thematic picture (make it "deeper" or more "realistic") which is another reason this is a great show to study. 

One thing I do like about the Leverage Series is the Conflict illustrated by the emotional responses of the characters who are essentially criminals at heart.  The leader of The Team was seriously disturbed when his team seemed to think that maybe he had in fact murdered the rich guy at the party.  That characterization provides you with the "argument" I'm talking about here.

Right inside the plot (rich guy murdered before eyes of Team Leader is a PLOT ELEMENT, and technically forms the part of the plot called a "complication") is the argument statement "well, since the crooks want their friends to believe in them, the crooks must be good guys."   The good guys are doing bad things, but it's okay because they're good guys.   

White Collar and Burn Notice state their premise up front in the opening.  Burn Notice says:  "When you're burned, you've got nothing" etc.  But the way each of these shows state the premise does not ram the theme down your throat the way Leverage does.

EXERCISE: State the premise of your most recent Work In Progress just that briefly.  

Leverage is "dark" and though the explicit violence shown on screen isn't any more emphatic than White Collar or Burn Notice, the way Leverage slams the theme into your face in the opening, then hammers it into your brain scene after scene, is a kind of subversive violence worth studying.  Few shows are quite as easy to dissect and understand, just because of how elegantly they employ this technique.

Caution: I'm not advocating that Romance Writers should use this "Leverage" technique to ram the Romance themes down the public's throat.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  But there's a lot to be learned very easily by studying the theme-plot integration of this simplistic TV show, Leverage.  The study will reveal how to construct a more subtle and complex piece of fiction.

But even a subtle and complex Romance work must have such a thematic statement of the premise to become marketable as "Mass Market."

Now, you will notice that Leverage is on TNT while White Collar and Burn Notice (and a raft of other shows I love) are on USA (character's welcome). 

Yet Leverage has "characters" who are deep, complex, gradually revealed season after season, and who are, perhaps against their wills, maintaining relationships. 

The relationships they maintain are basically within the Team, outside interests fleeting. 

I see Leverage as "dark" because the Team members are portrayed as not having a shot at Happily Ever After, or if they ever did, they blew it.

White Collar and Burn Notice show heroic (if shady) characters striving toward an HEA.  They have long range goals they believe will vanquish their frustrations and stabilize their lives into an HEA.

Leverage depicts a Team that sticks together because it's their only hope at a Happily For Now situation.

If you've been watching Leverage, you probably don't see it as "serious" as I do.  It's offered as, and taken as, "light entertainment" and "just for fun."  It's a "what if" story.  But for some people in the audience, people who see themselves as being mowed down by the powerful who take what they want (in today's economic climate, that's a huge number of people), Leverage (like A-Team before it) is an "if only." 

Superman in the 1940's was an "if only" for a lot of people with unsolvable problems.  The theme song of Smallville features the phrase spoken loudly and intelligibly over the music, "Rescue me." (a prime Romance theme).

In difficult times, people can have the stuffings knocked out of them by forces of government, law, wealth, big business, anything that their individual strength can't affect.  So fiction of this type thrives.  Leverage says hire thugs to do your dirty work, and it's okay if you're actually righteous yourself. 

The people the Leverage team works for are always in "the right" from the audience's point of view, the generally accepted morality of today.  The people the Leverage team goes up against are equally starkly and absolutely in the "wrong" according to the morality of today.  The Leverage team itself is shades of gray, very dark gray. 

This is nothing like the TV show Forever Knight where the Evil (vampire detective) was trying to "atone for sins." 

Superman was the benevolent Power, the image of what a human being could and should be, honorable, unimpeachable, un-bribable.  The Leverage team has their own sense of Honor. 


In Part 3 next week, we'll get a little deeper into the thematic structure of Leverage and how it "leverages" its audience's world into a story.

Do search your own Work In Progress to reshape it around a premise statement that encodes or symbolizes your own theme, and make it as clear and concise as these TV show examples.  This statement is the opening sentence of your query letter to agent or editor.  It defines your target audience and what payload you deliver to that audience.  The definition of the audience will determine whether the rest of your query letter will be read -- or not -- and what publishers might consider publishing the work, for which imprints that publisher handles.  

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Star Trek: Voyager and Captain Janeway

On facebook, friend me at http://facebook.com/jacqueline.lichtenberg/

I am in a Group titled Bring Back Kathryn Janeway, and some other Star Trek groups.

The Janeway group has a twitter account and on facebook has over 500 members.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=366418642046

I happened to think of the Janeway Group recently because a fellow found me on facebook who had interviewed me years ago about Spock's popularity.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=100000108289003

His article is now posted here:

http://mystartrekscrapbook.blogspot.com/2010/04/1976-article-spock-part-2-analysis.html

Click on the image and you can get it up to readable size print.

So as happens constantly, Star Trek is back in front of my nose, and I found myself thinking about Janeway.

If you poll an audience at a con panel about Star Trek: Voyager you get about half hating it and about half liking it or feeling it's "ok" but not the best of the bunch.

If you poll on Janeway as a character, the men reject her and the women like (if not adore) her.

What's going on there?

Star Trek: Voyager had an innate fatal flaw built into the very premise.

The flaw is the same flaw you often find in "SFR" (Science Fiction Romance) or PNR or Fantasy-Romance.

There is a GIANT PREMISE which is absolutely fascinating, energizing, and makes you anticipate watching.

The story starts, and something diverts attention from the premise onto a looming, maybe life-threatening problem, and then onto another problem, and another problem takes priority, and another problem explodes to top priority.

Meanwhile, everyone is waiting and waiting for the PAYOFF - the original primise to be advanced, woven in, and eventually evolve into a conflict that can be resolved.

It's a pattern you see in Time Travel Romance, for example. The author worldbuilds us a nifty time-travel device, accident, premise. One lover-to-be falls or leaps through into another time or universe ---- and never looks back.

We don't find out how the time-travel device works, why it works, how to make it work on purpose and take us where we want to be, or anything interesting. I mean lovers can meet and bond anywhere, anywhen, but there's only ONE Time-Travel-Device that defies physics as I know it. If the device is introduced first, I need to know all about the device, not about the lovers.

If the lovers are introduced first, and the device is a support to that.

For example: one lover is stuck in our time and invents the device on purpose to get to the other lover stuck in some other time - maybe with a plan of fleeing to a 3rd Time - then the way the device works doesn't matter to the story.

But if a device exists, (first before we meet any people), and a person falls through it by accident, then if that person is worth my attention, that person will not rest a moment or think of anything else or feel anything else until they've figured out how the device works and how to command it to take them "home" -- no matter the lure of the current time.

Likewise, with Voyager and Janeway. Here is this SPACE SHIP (wow, a Starfleet ship that isn't THE Enterprise! Bring it on!), and here is this Captain -- (wow, a woman Starship Captain - bring it on!)

Then all of a sudden, they are swept to the back side of nowhere.

They turn around and start trying to figure out how to get home.  And they don't. 

Then this happens, that happens, nothing happens, around and around, and they're on a 70 year trek to home with incidents (incidents mind you, not plot developments) along the way.

They forget about striving to get home through most of the episodes -- where they may be fighting for their lives or for Starfleet principles -- but essentially it's episodic so the Situation is returned to the status quo at the end of each episode. Net-net -- nothing happened.

Well, "nothing happened" is still interesting but only if SOMEONE CARES that nothing happened. Someone has to be frustrated, striving against the barriers preventing something from happening, trying schemes and plots and theories - maybe failing but continually trying. Never for an instant forgetting the goal. 

But that isn't how it goes through most of Star Trek: Voyager.

You have the same plot problem that creates boredom in STAR GATE: UNIVERSE.

In Universe the Ancient relic of a ship is stuck out there and they can't even control it -- OK, they can communicate with home, but still they go from harrowing situation to disaster to this and that and the other thing - and NOTHING HAPPENS with the original premise which was interesting.

In Star Gate: Universe - the premise was there's this Earth outpost that gets attacked and the humans there evacuate onto this relic ship via stargate. Then -- so what? They're stuck as passengers just facing harrowing situations to survive -- not to MAKE PROGRESS mind you, but just to survive.

It's not a story. It's not a plot.

Now they've brought in some vicious aliens who want the relic starship, and they're playing cat and mouse with aliens on their tale, unable to control the ship. Nothing happens.

So you see the recipe for how to kill a series the higher ups in the network hate.

Take a premise guaranteed to sucker in the very audience you want to destroy, ignore that premise because of one emergency after another, and the audience will just wander off to watch White Collar.

If you present a premise first - then work that premise TO THE BEATS - don't bore the audience.

Now, back to Janeway herself.

Frankly, I think what "they" did to this character was the same kind of thing that was done to the show by tossing the premise aside.  They had a dynamite premise -- Kathryn Janeway, woman Starship Captain, Kirk watch out!  And they flipped it off and tossed it aside. 

JANEWAY as a character is exciting because of the potential she has for changing the Trek Universe, the politics and sociology of Star Fleet and interplanetary relationships.

The show's guardian angels recognized that potential, and cobbled onto the mess an ending that might have worked. They brought her back to Starfleet using new technology, time-travel, alternate-universe gimmicks, and she brought back data that changed things.

OK, that's good. So what's wrong with Star Trek: Voyager?

That ending was not INHERENT IN THE OPENING 5 EPISODES.

We were not sitting there anticipating that ending, knowing things the characters did not know, watching them figure it out, seeing their bravery, boldness, audaciousness, and heroism win the day. We didn't see them grow beyond all those heroic traits to bonding with each other despite the barriers to that.  We didn't see Love Conquering All.  We had no idea of what the "All" was that needed "Conquering." 

We couldn't see the overall shape of the VOYAGER story-line from the beginning because the writers didn't know it. The ending was not implicit in the beginning. That doesn't make for a surprise ending or a twist. It makes for a dull show with a deus ex machina ending.

The main character of this story is Janeway.

And that character only contributed to the "confusion" that drove half the audience away.

Yet look at all the Janeway-Chakotay fanfic -- (and other slashes and mashes!).

There's Trek magic in those characters, no doubt about it.

So why does half the audience shrug Janeway off as a non-entity? They don't "hate" her - that would be exciting! They don't even despise her. They think she's a bad Captain and a total wash out as a person.

Why do they think that?

Maybe a better way to phrase it is, "Why don't I think that?"

The answer is Kate Mulgrew.

Mulgrew was handed the short and very dirty end of the stick here.

Janeway was written to be one person in the first episode, another totally different person in #2, and opposite in #3, and skewed in #4, and different again in #5 and so on.

She was never the same person in two successive scripts.

Then as a weekly series must, the producers used different directors on different episodes.

So Janeway was directed to "be" different people - trying to "correct" the writing by directing and acting.

Little by little, Mulgrew created a character --

And that's why I love VOYAGER!

Mulgrew showed us what a real actor can do with an impossible situation.

Keep in mind STAR TREK: VOYAGER is "supposed to be science fiction" -- but as with all the other Treks, the fanfic shows us that it's not. It's really ROMANCE seen from another point of view.

Actually, that's the real difference between or among genres. Any story can be made into any genre by just changing the point of view character and sometimes the "narrative voice" (first person to third person narrative).

Mulgrew took the confused, conflicting, mutually exclusive Janeways she was handed and created a unified, whole, complete HUMAN BEING from the mishmosh.

She created a CHARACTER with depth, facets, inconsistencies that flesh out and illuminate the inner subconscious depths of character the way the very best classics show us character.

The one crippling lack in the material handed to Mulgrew was the lack of RELATIONSHIP. Kirk on-screen displayed relationships, but Janeway wasn't allowed to.

But the fans fixed that. The Fanfic shows us Janeway deep into complex relationships worthy of the complexity of character, the realistic complexity Mulgrew created from the contradictions.

However, Janeway was still a character in a TV show -- an anthology TV show not a really good ARC TV show like Babylon 5.

TV show characters are not allowed to be "classic" - rich, deep, multi-faceted.

Worse, Janeway was still a character in a science fiction TV show, and we all know science fiction is only for teenage boys who are squeamish around girls and basically nerds who will never be able to hold a relationship, right?

So despite the incredible job Mulgrew did, the accomplishment is unsung.

Now, just imagine if STAR TREK: VOYAGER were an actual SFR complete with rich, deep, conflict-ridden RELATIONSHIPS!

Imagine if the writers had actually had a plot for the series, as Babylon 5 had.

In that case, you might be able to see Janeway.

As it is, this gem of a character is encrusted and hidden beneath the rubble of failures of other creative people. All of those who worked on this show are, individually, not only talented but highly skilled and know better than to do this. But for some reason, upper management or whatever, they were not allowed to do what they know how to do -- or not inspired or properly rewarded.

So I say Bring Back Janeway - in another universe than the one we met her in, and let's see what happens with good writing, great directing, and an actual plot, some really Up In Space Romance (as opposed to Down To Earth Romance) and plentiful story-arcs like Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

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

Toystory 3 Analyzed for "Beats"

Read this: 
http://www.blakesnyder.com/2010/06/25/toy-story-3-beat-sheet/ 

CAUTION: that analysis contains "spoilers"

I don't accept that any good story can be "spoiled" by knowing what will happen before you read/see it and I've discussed why in these posts:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/03/prologues-and-spoilers.html

And

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/06/writers-eye-finds-symmetry.html

The analysis of Toy Story 3 is where you'll find how the film fits neatly onto the Beat Sheet developed by the late, great, Blake Snyder.

http://www.blakesnyder.com/tools/ is where you can download the beat sheet to use.

It's explained in detail in Snyder's
Save The Cat! screenwriting series

Now what has this screenwriting trick to do with solving the problem of why Romance is not the most respected genre in publishing?

Where is the Nobel Prize for Best Romance Novel?

Blake Snyder's Beat Sheet - that's where.

What is that "beat sheet" and where did it come from?

Snyder tells in his books how he watched hundreds of films, over and over, and extracted the "beats" (at what elapsed time each story-development plot-point is reached).

He found that all the widely heralded, highly regarded, raved about, high box office grossing films all had the exact SAME STRUCTURE.

It isn't a "rule" some gate-keeper in Hollywood made up and imposed.

It's a habit evolved by producers from audience feedback.

They learn how to do it by doing it.

On Twitter, I recently exchanged notes with a producer who had posted a tweet of advice saying learn to please an audience. So I tweeted back, prodding with "how do you learn to please an audience?" and he retorted - by getting up on stage of course.

I didn't fling back my writerly response, "I'm a writer, not an actor!"

It wouldn't have done me any more good than it ever did Dr. McCoy.

But I thought about it until this morning I found the link to this Toy Story 3 blog post in my mailbox.

Also yesterday, my fanfic writing friend whom I used for this writing lesson on converting exposition to action -
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/05/tv-show-white-collar-fanfic-and-show.html

- mentioned that she has found her speed and facility with plotting increasing as she bats out tiny vignettes based on the TV show White Collar and gets reader feedback.

She can really TELL when she has done it correctly. The response to a well plotted piece is orders of magnitude greater than the response to an ordinary piece.

And that's exactly why I recommend fanfic writing as a way to learn this trade. It's how writers do what actors do in Little Theater. Learn to please an audience. What those producers whose blockbusters Blake Snyder studied have that we don't have - is just that, HOW TO PLEASE AN AUDIENCE.  And Snyder found and codified the secret.  The Beat Sheet, and his analysis of genres. 

As I've said before, writing is a performing art, an insight given me by the first professional writer to take me under her wing and pound some sense into me -- Alma Hill. I've discussed that here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/wrting-as-artform-performing-art.html

So what does it mean to "perform" a plot "well?"

Beats.

Rhythm, just like dancing, playing an instrument, acting onstage. 

The Beat is what gives a piece the exact pacing that reader/viewers expect.

You know how it throws you off if your dance partner, Yoga or Martial Arts partner, or sex partner, misses a "beat." Fun turns into not-fun, and it's all in expectations of the actions of another.

In storytelling, the writer is the dance-partner of the reader/viewer.  That's why writers who just want to do their Art their own way fail in the marketplace - because they're dancing solo with a partner who wants carnal contact. 

Why is Romance Genre so emphatically disqualified from the super-huge audiences commanded by blockbuster films like Toy Story 3?

Beats.

Pacing is the very important element that puts off the wider audiences and they don't even know it.

We've examined how "outsiders" explain their aversion to Romance Genre here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/why-do-they-despise-romance.html

and here

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/is-there-taboo-against-romance-in.html

That's what trained professional writers see (and what widely read readers feel) is "wrong" with Romance.

But I submit that the real problem is the PACING - the exact points at which the plot moves forward a notch and the exact direction in which it must move to satisfy reader/viewers used to productions aimed at the very wide audience.

In graphic Art, trainees spend years and years studying and perfecting the ability to perceive and execute what is called "Line" - an element of composition that is the connecting point between the interior artistic content the artist wants to convey and the viewer of the work who may know nothing of art.  "Line" guides the eye and commands the attention.  "Line" says it all.  (watch Olympic Figure Skating). 

"Line" is what causes you to gasp when you first see an object, pierced by it's beauty.

"Line" is what makes you remember a company logo, and it's why companies pay millions to artists to create such memorable logos.

"Line" is what blockbuster movie fans look for and respond to when they think they're actually focused on something else.

The Romance Genre, packed into a side-channel of paper publishing for so long, has developed its own "Line" and its own "Beat Sheet."

And those elements, as original and enjoyable as they are, clash horribly with what the general audiences expect.

Not, mind you, with what general audiences WANT -- but with what they EXPECT.

Having expectations dashed is painful, not entertaining.

If Romance Genre can take its distilled essence (Love Conquers All; Falling In Love clarifies reality rather than obscuring it) and re-cast that essence into the Beat Sheet and Line that larger audiences expect, it will not only be accepted, it will be more popular than anything else ever has been.

Now that seems to have nothing to do with Toy Story 3.

Well, folks, "Romance Genre" is our "Toys."

People are expected to "grow out of" reading Romance.

Read the analysis on blakesnyder.com (and maybe some of the comments, too) and you'll see the analogy holds better than you would expect.
http://www.blakesnyder.com/2010/06/25/toy-story-3-beat-sheet/

Just like the Toys, the Romance Genre clings to us, reaches for other readers, fights being discarded.

The "Debate" section describes where we are now in this Romance Story.

New "adult" motifs are injected to hold older attention. But just as with SF/F, the Romance readership cycles generation to generation -- just as with Toys. A new generation is reading Romance, a generation raised on visual media.

Also note how the blogger at blakesnyder.com keeps harping on how THEME carries Toy Story 3 to the wider audience. It's about toys - so it's for kids, right? But THEME is the most fun an adult can have with a story. So it hits both audiences.

Romance, like SF/F and all genres these days, has to change "Line" and "Beat" to sustain a "reach" into a readership broad enough to keep publishing profitable.

The world is changing. Novels have to become visual, structured like movies. Don't forget the as yet unrealized field of novels with text and video co-mingled. Only technology keeps that from Kindle distribution.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Orson Scott Card a Mormon, Jack Campbell the Writer, and the Chief Rabbi of England all Agree

--------
I can't split this post in half - I tried, but the second half makes no sense without the first.
--------

A Chief Rabbi, Orson Scott Card a Mormon, and Jack Campbell SF-Romance Writer All Agree? ??? !!!

Yes, they agree, but I doubt they all know it or would want to know.

Way back when I was about 3 or 4 years old, I was incensed when networks pre-empted my favorite programs and replaced them with news flashes usually regarding politics and war.

I thought about that very hard. It is hard to think when you're that young and don't have any experience to think with, but I came to a conclusion that I stand by to this day, "Fiction - i.e. story - is more important than war or politics."

What does that mean? It means simply that what makes a difference to you in how you live your life, what you decide to do, to be and to become is tied more closely to fiction than it is to current or historical events.

What is important in life (i.e. Romance, Love, Bonding, Compassion, Sharing, Healing, Faith, children, grandchildren, peace, etc.) is inherent in fiction (even fiction about war) but is not present in news stories about current conflicts in war and politics.

You learn to be who you truly are in your fiction, your inner story, your "his"tory, which sums up to a big component of your Identity.

From the vast outpouring of fiction about TV shows on outlets like fanfiction.net we see clearly that fiction cuts to the quick, to the roots of the Soul.

See my blog post on a writing lesson derived from a bit of fan fiction about the TV show White Collar, illustrating how to transform a "tell" passage into a "show" passage in fiction, so the fiction doesn't remain totally internal to yourself, but can "speak" to others.

That White Collar post is http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com posted May 4th, 2010.

The energy you see pouring out of fanfiction.net is an exchange of ideas, of theories, of passions.

The passions of one writer ignite the passions of another. Yes, people write fan fiction that makes fans of the TV show out of folks who have never watched that TV show (so they watch it streaming or buy the DVD to catch up).

Now go to a political site with news stories and read the comments on the stories. You see a totally different sort of dialogue. Each poster seems to be yelling and screaming (or being very formal and officious) while expressing their own opinion. Those who agree with each other inflame each other's passions on the topic. Those who disagree just loudly and emphatically disagree, inflaming their opposition's passions. But the passion tapped into is rage, hate, rejection, self-righteousness, or the acceptance of being a member of a powerful gang that can beat down all opposition.

I've seen some exchanges on news posting comments where a person drops a URL and another person reads it and says "thank you, that changed my mind on this topic" to the one who dropped the URL.

I've seen that, but it's very rare.

For the most part, people just express their opinions and call those who disagree names. They aren't engaging in a dialogue, sharing a passion and changing minds by providing insights the way fanfic community does.

Such news posts draw comments that are all "tell" and no "show" -- and because the comments are "tell" they don't change anyone's mind. They don't change minds because they're not part of the story. Story is always SHOW DON'T TELL.

"Show" does change minds.

Stories change minds, and even hearts. Stories form opinions, not just express them.

Remember, one of the objectives in my posts on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com
is to discover how to change the public mind on the subject of Romance in general and SF-Romance in particular.

Changing minds is a very dangerous thing to set out to do. You really don't want to implant your ideas, values or attitudes into someone else's mind where they are not native. That would not help them.

You don't want to use any power of yours to override or overshadow the free will choices of another person. Ever. No matter how much your own interests are at stake, no matter how much you stand to lose by their misbehaviors, you never, ever, use expertise, authority, knowledge, or any other power to control or even limit another person's available options. Even if it's for the other person's own good, it's still power abuse.

You only want to offer people more choices from which their free will can select what they wish -- NOT what you wish.

You want to open doors, provide glimpses of new vistas.

OK, "criminals" - that's another matter. The insane - another matter. Each is a problem in its own right. Our current culture is not handling those matters very well yet, but we're a work in progress.

Being forced into jail, hospitals, rehab, is painful, but ultimately the best way we have of opening new opportunities for such people. That's not the sort of person, though, that I'm talking about here. They don't form, shape and energize the main culture's over-arching story.

But in that mainstream of our culture(s), in the center of our river of culture, we are developing so many choices, ever more choices to make every day, that we are overloading the basic human nervous system's ability to make choices.

If a person becomes surrounded by more open doors than they are prepared to deal with, they may become confused and that could be worse than simply being wrong about something. So more choices is not always a benefit - and it's not your place to judge how many choices another should or shouldn't have.

The only way I know of to provide others with a plethora of choices but leave it up to them to decide how many choices to become aware of is to "show" don't "tell."

Really, two people reading the same book will take away two totally different descriptions of that book because each chooses to see different open doors and ignore other open doors as if they aren't even there.

When you "tell" - you hammer your idea into another's mind whether they're ready for it or not.

When you "show" - you invite only those who are ready, to come play in your back yard with your toys, your ideas, your concepts, your passions.

A really good novel (or novel series) invites reader participation in exploring beyond those open doors.

One such series out there stumping for SF-Romance while garbing itself in the guise of plain old Space Opera War Stories is Jack Campbell's THE LOST FLEET series. He's up to #7, THE LOST FLEET: VICTORIOUS

"Victorious" is the name of a ship in the Fleet of one of the interstellar combines engaged in this huge galactic war.

Two Human interstellar governments (each controlling dozens of star systems) are the unknowing victims of an alien species playing "let's you and him fight."

So the war which has been going on for 100 years is based on a trick.

John Geary, our Hero, was in a space battle at the beginning of the war, got stuck in an escape pod in cold sleep for a century, was rescued in book I of this series and catapulted into command of the Fleet when the old commander was ambushed and killed. Now, 7 books later, he has returned The Lost Fleet to it's home base (so it's not technically lost anymore), and set out again to end the war, penetrating deep into "enemy" territory to end the war.

Meanwhile, he's fallen in love with the Captain of his flagship -- they both know they're both in love, but flat refuse to acknowledge it because of chain of command complications -- and Geary is also in lust with a married woman who is a Politician, Co-President of his Alliance.

The story of the politician's husband and Geary's brother, both captives of "the enemy," is a complication worthy of any Romance genre time travel novel.

Jack Campbell, by showing not telling the place of Relationship and Love in the affairs of humankind, in the affairs of war and politics, is making huge inroads into the broader market for a Romance, and the issues of Romance most dear to our hearts.

The Lost Fleet is set in space, in a complex galactic war, but, just like Star Trek, it is about here and now, and life in our crazy world.

This series addresses the issues at the core of the Romance Genre, and the problems created by the modern "Sexual Harassment" laws. It's about Relationship between Equals, and that theme plays out on the personal level and on the interstellar political level.

On the other hand, as Linnea Sinclair pointed out, an action SF-Romance story has a serious problem with the balance between the progress of the relationship (which is the Romance plot) and the progress of the action-conflict which is, in this case, the War plot.

In The Lost Fleet series, the actual science takes place "off-stage" - experts in various parts of the fleet, geeks in closet-sized labs, discover and master new vistas of science that is the foundation of new technologies, and all that advancement affects the politics and the available offensive and defensive armament, thus the tactics and even strategies.

It's masterful worldbuilding, and tight writing that leaps over many of the scenes that would occupy entire novels in other genres.

For example, Geary is given a promotion at a debriefing directly to the highest ranking elected officials (not the equivalent of the Pentagon chiefs, but the equivalent of Congress, not the White House).

At this briefing, it is decided to promote him from Captain to Admiral of the Fleet (not just Admiral, skipping a lot of ranks, but Admiral of Admirals - Fleet Admiral). This rank has never in history been conferred (like Five Star General in WWII). But just by convenient happenstance, the leader of the politicians happens to have the new insignia in his pocket!

All 7 novels so far are riddled with major skips like this. Although the space battles happen with enough back-and-forth between opposing space fleets, and Geary has enough setbacks to show his victories aren't easy, he always wins. That makes it all seem just too hokey, too easy, to corny for a 7 book novel series.

But that's Jack Campbell's solution to the problem of that balance between the relationship-politics-people story and the action-plot. Just SKIP some stuff, and there's enough room for both. So these aren't "perfect" books - but they are a refreshingly different read, and as such raise some interesting issues to think about.

The Lost Fleet series is Art. And it is about the messy turbulence in our world created by a massive change in our culture's "Story."

What do I mean by "our Story?"

Orson Scott Card explains the narrative, the story, of a prevailing culture and pinpoints where we entered the whirling change in this culture that's resulting in a change in our narrative we haven't actually taken notice of.

Here is an excerpt from a speech Orson Scott Card gave before a Mormon group -- it's thus slanted, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater as you read. There are ideas here and a challenge.

http://www.meridianmagazine.com/ideas/100426dismantling.html

Storytelling is the essence of a culture's lifeblood.

Orson Scott Card says the inflection point of change in our world's culture began in the 1960's and hit hard in the 1970's. That seems valid to me, but keep in mind I'm not talking about our "reality" here - I'm talking about a principle behind that reality, the culture's narrative and what that implies about the role of fiction in life.

As Orson Scott Card points out, what has not happened (yet) is a public evaluation of the results of that change that started in the 1960's (flowerchildren) and 1970's (women's lib).

We bemoan a lot of what seems to me to be the direct results of the changes -- disintegrating family, shift in the way employees are treated as temporary, replaceable or self-employed, and a difference in what education is (vocational training only, as opposed to "a Classical Education" teaching how to think not what to think)

And more apparent to me every day is the fragmentation of fiction-audiences (TV, film, books (more titles, fewer readers per title), games (was only D&D, now thousands).

An obvious result of the audience fragmentation is that we haven't got any fictional language in common in which to communicate about intangibles like values.

Many people who see these trends don't see them as consequences of a shift in our national narrative, our STORY, the way Orson Scott Card does.

But if you look closely, and evaluate what we've shucked off against what we've gained, you might begin to see the opening where Romance and especially SF-Romance, seems to fit like the right key in a lock.

Maybe the name of what we've lost is RELATIONSHIP, bonding. Maybe the solution is narrative about how to form bonds strong enough to last a lifetime.

Consider that the fragmentation I've described here might ignite xenophobia among many groups who would then, in fear, strike for domination over other groups.

Or maybe that's not what's actually happening? Orson Scott Card looks at the sweep of history to find how what was good disintegrated into something not so good. But maybe it's really an improvement?

I've written in this blog about the impact of Web 2.0 on fiction and politics as well as the business model of writers. In general, I'm wildly in favor of our new world of connectivity.

Despite where I personally stand at this moment in time, it's an open question for me. Is the change happening now going in a "good" direction -- or a "bad" direction? Is it change itself that makes me uncomfortable? Or is it the valuable elements we've lost (spelling for one thing). Or is the apparent destination of this change disquieting?

How do you make that value judgment?

Card suggests testing the direction of change against the ultimate goal for any culture - self-perpetuation. Can you transmit living values to the children? And they to theirs? Does this culture "time-bind" up and down as well as sideways across probability lines (or into alternate universes).

Is that test of the direction of change valid?

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of England, offers another way to test the product of the changes made in the 1960's and 1970's.

Before he was a Rabbi, he got a Ph.D.in Philosophy and was headed for a teaching career in that arcane field. So when he speaks of Hellenistic philosophy, he knows what he's talking about.

His Lecture is a huge long article, longer than my blog posts even!

Rabbi Sacks has done this 6 part Lecture Series on "Faith" - and the item I'm focusing on is Lecture #2 in the series.

Lecture #1 is
http://www.chiefrabbi.org/ReadArtical.aspx?id=451

He calls this lecture series a journey of Ideas. SF is the Literature of Ideas.

Here is Lecture #2 in this series:

http://www.chiefrabbi.org/ReadArtical.aspx?id=1607

#2 is titled:
Faith Lectures: Judaism, Justice and Tragedy - Confronting the problem of evil

At this writing, I find that the Lecture #2 is truncated about in the middle. Perhaps they will fix that by the time you read this. I have the whole text in print.

Here's a quote from #2 as Rabbi Sacks recaps Lecture #1 in the series:

--------QUOTE---------
Friends, I was trying to explain in my first lecture that Judaism, as you will understand from that story, is a religion of multiple perspectives, of many ways of looking at the truth. Some of you who followed that lecture - did any of you follow that lecture? [Laughter]. It was a bit tough going but some of you followed that lecture and understood absolutely correctly that it was nothing whatsoever with the title of that lecture which was "Faith". Listen, I'm sorry. What can I do? The truth is: I will come to faith, I promise you, probably in the third lecture, possibly in the last. One way or another, we'll get there. But first of all I really have to take you with me on a journey to see Judaism as different, as less familiar, as more radical than we ever imagined. If we can do that, we will be able to take things we have known about for ages and see in them something new. We will undergo what I call a 'paradigm shift'.

My thesis in the first lecture, the story so far for those of you who missed it, as far as I can summarise it, is this: that Judaism as I portrayed it was and is a radical alternative not only to the ancient world of myth but to the central paradigm of western civilisation, namely to Greek thought whose characteristic mode is philosophy, at least Platonic, and Cartesian philosophy, and whose master discipline is logic. As I said, the unspoken assumptions of western thought - and of course I am being crude here but you don't want a lecture with footnotes as well - are the following:

That knowledge is cognitive.

The metaphor of cognition is sight. It's a visual matter; truth is something we see. ...
--------END QUOTE-------

What have I been TELLING you in all my posts on screenwriting? Story in pictures. Show don't tell. The metaphor of cognition is sight. hmmm.

After I read that quotation above, I had to read the whole Lecture because, as you know if you've read my published book on Tarot (NEVER CROSS A PALM WITH SILVER), the trick to understanding Tarot is understanding how it's basis (Kabbalah) is so absolutely different from our ambient USA culture which is so thoroughly Hellenistic in all unconscious assumptions.

Took me about three hours to read just Lecture #2, every word, slowly and carefully. I had to set aside reading THE LOST FLEET: VICTORIOUS to get that read in. Then I just had to find it online so you could read it too!

The title of the Lecture doesn't make it sound like it has anything to do with Romance. But it does have to do with the story, the narrative, we share as a culture - not just Jewish culture, but the whole of the world that was involved in World War II. And some of the best Romance I've ever seen has been WWII films!

A good Romance is always fraught with tragedy. Justice in Romance means that the destined couple end up together - after it all. It's Happily Ever After, not Happily In The Beginning. Romance is about overcoming the obstacles to happiness. (News stories are not about happiness, nor about Events that are merely obstacles to happiness.)

Tragedy is rampant in our world today, separating lovers and interfering with family life. That's part of our narrative.

Is Justice just as rampant? And if so, is that a good thing? Is there such a thing as Justice run wild? Can "Justice" turn to evil in the wrong hands?

The 7 novels in The Lost Fleet series do address this problem via the character of the fleet commander, Gear, and his two loves.

Another long series of novels that discusses how Values shape and armor Character is the Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher, which I rave about periodically here.

Most of the Urban Fantasy you see these days is based on some elaborate worldbuilding to create a backdrop for a battle between Good and Evil, with the result being a draw, or leaving Evil a bit ahead.

The biggest box office films are Good vs. Evil, clear cut and stark.

So reading up on the philosophy behind our culture's angst over "Good" vs. "Evil" is part of the 7 Endeavors I discussed as training for a writer in these posts:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/7-pursuits-to-teach-yourself-writing.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/7-pursuits-to-teach-yourself-writing_27.html

Fiction, I contest, is more important than reality because fiction conveys our cultural narrative, our story. I figured that out when I was four years old, so don't take it as defense of taking up the trade of writing. I had no idea I could or would be a professional writer back then. I didn't know there was such a thing as a "profession."

What so much of our fiction is conveying now is very different from what our fiction written before WWII conveyed.

World War II made "Evil" a newspaper headline. A generation grew up in a world traumatized by a battle against "Evil." (BTW all 3 sides saw the other 2 sides as Evil, just as Terrorists are fighting the insidious Evil of modern culture.)

Now the children of WWII veterans seem to be stuck in a fascination with that battle, replaying it in every fantasy universe in every medium that can carry fiction.

That's what's so interesting about THE LOST FLEET series. The battles there are not against "Evil" at all, just against greed, revenge, invaders, fear, misplaced courage, and an assortment of human motives, and maybe eventually non-human ideas of proprietary rights. There's nothing clear cut about the motives or the stakes in this galactic war.

And The Lost Fleet is a New York Times best seller. There may be something going on here that we need to pay attention to.

Rabbi Sacks talks about the problem of "Evil" - that if G-d is Good, and if G-d exists then how can Evil exist?

Here's another quote from Lecture #2
-------QUOTE--------
...see if we can understand in a new way that most difficult of all problems in religious thought, perhaps in human thought as a totality, namely the problem of evil or the problem of injustice, the thing which we describe when we talk about 'when bad things happen to good people' or what the rabbis said in terms of tzadik vera lo, which is the rabbinic equivalent.

That problem is so deep that it has given rise to a whole theological discipline, primarily a Christian one, a very distinguished discipline. And I please pray of you, all of you, that whenever I contrast Judaism and something else, I am never trying to denigrate that something else. I really mean that. To be a Jew is to make space for 'otherness'. If I were to sum up the whole of these six lectures, it would be in that phrase: "To be a Jew is to make space for otherness". But that means we do our thing and we respect those who do other things. Therefore, Christianity developed a whole theological discipline which so too did the Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages which is called theodicy. It is the whole attempt to understand how if God exists evil exists.

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See? To understand what Orson Scott Card talked about as a change in our culture in the 1960's and 1970's, you need to go all the way back to the Middle Ages, before the Mormon's existed as such.

You may also want to use Astrology to trace the effects of Pluto through the 1960's and '70's so read this:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-6.html

"Theodicy" then is what all of modern Urban Fantasy seems to be about. That encompasses a lot of TV shows, and many movies. Action movies and action-romance too, likes to grab that one thing, Good vs. Evil.

This endless outpouring of novels about Good vs. Evil, and about how you survive in a world where both operate, may be due to the concept that the question can not be resolved, but it must be!

Here's another quote from Lecture #2

--------QUOTE---------
Now if that is so, if my interpretation is right, then Judaism begins not in the conventional place where faith is thought to begin, namely in wonder that the world is. Judaism begins in the opposite, in the protest against a world that is not as it ought to be. At the very heart of reality, by which I mean reality as we see it, from our point of view, there is a contradiction between order and chaos: the order of creation and the chaos we make.

Now the question is: how do we resolve that contradiction? And the answer is that that contradiction ..., between the world that is and the world that ought to be, cannot be resolved at the level of thought. It doesn't exist! You cannot resolve it! Logically, philosophically, in terms of theology or theodicy, you cannot do it! The only way you can resolve that tension is by action; by making the world better than it is.

.... When things are as they ought to be, ....- then we have resolved the tension. Then we have reached our destination. But that is not yet. It was not yet for Abraham and it is not yet for us. And from this initial contradiction, from this cognitive dissonance, are born the following four fundamental features of Judaism.
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WHEW! Is that, or is it not, an accurate description of the entire Romance genre with the emphasis on the HEA ending? What an unexpected place to find such a statement of the objective of the Romance genre, and the nature of the spiritual exercise of reading Romance!

Soul mates finding and bonding to each other changes the world, relieves that tension between Good and Evil by action, by changing the world, the whole world and all it's potential future paths.

The entire Lecture #2 really is needed to put this all into context. But the full text I have in a printed book is not on this website. Maybe it will be by the time you read this.

Making your own world "as it ought to be" is the essence of Romance.

Falling in love is the glimpse of that world of "ought" - when the Honeymoon is over, the struggle to recreate what "ought" to be in the cold light of reality begins. Some couples win that struggle. Others don't make it. Both kinds of couples change the world.

There is one philosophy that assumes it is a given that we will succeed in tinkering the world up to what it "ought" to be.

There are others that assume we will fail.

Is the pivot point of WWII and the subsequent 60's and 70's generational change we have seen a pivot from a vision of "we will succeed" to "it isn't possible to overcome Evil"?

That's the Horror genre premise - that Evil must exist so that Good can exist, and the most the Hero can achieve is to stuff Evil into a sarcophagus and bury it a mile deep behind sigils and signs.

The most Good can achieve against Evil is a draw.

Orson Scott Card is asking if our narrative has shifted from "we will prevail" (which won WWII), to one of "give up; it's a draw" or maybe to one of "give up; it's impossible."

Jack Campbell is answering, "Hell no! We're gonna win this sucker, and then we'll settle your hash, you meddling aliens."

What is the narrative we are passing on to our children? To what great heights will they aspire because of our story?

Rabbi Sacks has an answer to that in a unique analysis of the Passover story - not as about Passover itself, but about NARRATIVE, about story as a necessity for transmitting a culture.

http://www.chiefrabbi.org/ReadArtical.aspx?id=1623

The title of the piece says it all:

Never underestimate the power of a story to enlarge the moral imagination of a child.

It talks about Africa, Haiti's earthquake, and Rwanda.

Read that very short piece and ask yourself what does our modern cultural narrative spur our children to do?

What do you have to say, to contribute, to our modern cultural narrative? Show don't tell.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com