Theme-Worldbuilding Integration Part 17 - Creating A Prophecy

Theme-Worldbuilding Integration

Part 17

Creating A Prophecy

by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

The index to Theme-Worldbuilding Posts is here:
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/04/index-to-theme-worldbuilding.html

Last week we looked at Depicting Prophecy
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/11/depiction-part-34-depicting-prophecy.html

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

Next week, we'll look at Creating A Prophet Character.

Now let's consider how to craft a fictional Prophecy.

Before you decide your story needs a Prophecy, you need to look at the Characters and Plot to determine if you need a Prophecy that the Characters will (or will not) believe, and that the target audience will (or will not) believe or accept.

Are your Characters going to believe the Prophecy, and then find out it is a sham, a scam, grifter's trick, or a "false religion?"

Why do you need a Prophecy to tell this particular story?

If your story absolutely requires a Prophecy to "work," then you have to create one, or lift one from Earth's rich history.

Do you want to borrow a real Prophecy (one that has, or has not, already been considered to have materialized?) or do you need a completely fresh and original Prophecy?

As noted last week, depicting a Prophecy in a Science Fiction Romance or any fictional work, requires two main things:

1. If you include a Prophecy - the story and plot become about Prophecy, and the non-material (mystical) dimensions behind your built world.

2. Once included, everything else in your built world, every detail, must be consistent with the mechanism by which Prophecy works in your World.  

If you use Prophecy, (or foretelling, or divination, or ESP or any form of foreknowing) you don't have to let the Characters or the Reader know how it works, but you must know how it works.

This is a general rule in writing Fantasy of any sub-genre -- you have to know  more than your reader, and you should let the reader know everything you know.  Just tell your Character's story -- the Characters do this, and that happens, and then the Characters do that.  Just telll the story.

But to get to where you can tell the story without thinking about the details, you must know how the world works so you will invent or pick details that depict the same "world."

If you skip across World Boundaries (as Simon R. Green and Jean Johnson do), the rules by which things work may change.  Sometimes cross-dimension contact changing the physics underlying a World, so how and why things happen can change.
 can get very complicated -- but if you pull it off, as Gini Koch
has done with her Alien series -- you can build a huge readership that feels they live in your world.

Consistency is the key to all this love of your Universe.  

Our real world is stable and consistent while our understanding of our world changes (often as abruptly and radically as taking the Red Pill ).  In our reality, only the Creator of the Universe really knows how things work -- and for all we know He might be changing the rules behind the scenes.  But we see the world as stable, reliable (drop stuff on Earth, it falls - drop stuff in orbit, it floats).

Part of the enchantment of Romance is the "adventure" -- as discussed in the last few weeks -- which is what makes Romance so easily blended with Science Fiction.

Romance is all about The Unknown Tall Dark Stranger, and what's going on inside that dark head -- Science Fiction is all about The Uknown laws of physics, math, chemistry, dimensional geometry, or Alien Species out in the Galaxy.

Meeting a new person (or kind of person) and meeting a new Law of Reality or kind of Reality is Adventure.

Adventure is the action (plot) of going OUT of your comfort zone, or having your comfort zone invaded by something unknowable.

In our modern science (which is changing daily on the topic of "what is Time?" ) it is not possible to predict The Future, but it is possible to extrapolate from data known about the past and present.

Take hurricane forecasting, for example.  Given modern data collection methodology, wedded to modern computational power, and massive advances in mathematics, we have a large handful of "models" for where a hurricane will go and how strong it will become (and when and where it will end).

A hundred years ago, that kind of predication would have been Prophecy -- or Divination.

So what tools are available in your built world?  What can they know?  What can't they know?  And a totally different question:  What do they actually know, believe, accept, act on?

Will your Character act (plot) on the information provided that (as far as he knows) can't be known?

If predictions from one specific source keep proving out, when will your Character begin to accept the next prediction and act on it?

Then you must answer the core question, "Is correct prediction due to random chance, a trick, a scam, a Talent, a Message From God, or simply an illusion -- or perhaps the old, "self-fulfilling Prophecy."

Which mechanism you choose to be "real" to you, the writer, does not have to be known to the Character or the Reader.  Over a series of novels, the Reader should be able to figure it out, and in a good Mystery-Adventure, the Character should figure it out after the Reader has a prime suspicion.

After the Character figures out how the Prophecy happens, then the Character must TEST (as in Science) if that hypothesis is true.  The Character devises some sort of test and executes it (plot) (that can take a whole novel), gets results and comes to rely upon the new Theory of Reality.

In a long series of Science Fiction Romance novels, the main Character(s) may concoct and disprove a long list of theories about this onerous and obscure Prophecy that seems to be determining or directing their lives.

Since the reader knows that on Earth, among humans, prophecies of doom are promulgated by cults, usually gathered around someone who is a bit unbalanced, and so far doom hasn't happened as predicted, the Reader is not going to believe the plot-Prophecy you introduce is really Prophecy.

You have to argue and convince the Reader that, in this World you have Built, Prophecy is "real" and this prophecy is actually true (or not-true).  Characters you have led the Reader to respect have to lean toward whichever answer your plot requires.  Characters you do not want the Reader to respect should be leaning away from the answer.

To craft those Characters and make them plausible, you have to know the answer.

If you change your mind as you write -- and that often happens! -- then you will have to rewrite, and the novel or series will become boring to you after many detail adjustments.  In fact, this error (deciding things about your World in an unproductive order) often leads to dropped manuscripts, discarded Ideas after years of investment in them, and even Writer's Block.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/04/when-should-you-give-up-on-manuscript.html

If you, the writer, know too much about your world, your characters, your theme and plot, before you start writing, you will get bored or hit a wall where you can't write any more.

If you don't know enough, what you write will develop inconsistency -- Characters will behave "out of Character" and choices and plot events will seem "implausible" -- when you, the writer, lose the thread of the narrative (the because-line), then your Reader wanders off the line, gets bored, and tosses the book aside.  Your byline gets tagged in their minds as "not worth the price."

But how much is "enough?"

That amount varies from writer to writer, and from project to project.

The old, general advice is to become a professional writer, you must do a million words for the garbage can.  In other words, practice gets you to Carnegie Hall.  Practice is professional work, too.

With practice, if you do it the way a musician learns an instrument or a particular piece, with a goal of mastery in mind, you will be able to know before you start writing, how long this story will be.  And you will know just when you know enough about the story to tell it.

Playing a musicial piece on stage is the same skill as writing a story.

Writing is a Performing Art.

In music, you have Waltzes, Symphonies, Jigs, etc -- each type of musical piece has a structure which defines it.

When you write an Alien Romance, you write within the structure of Alien Romances -- yes, the genre has matured to a point where it does have a structure.  These structures are invented via a collaboration between writer and reader, and publishers eventually choose to publish those novels which conform to the structure that sells best.  Structures sell.

If you want to dance a Waltz with your partner, and the band plays a Jig, it just isn't going to be much fun to watch or to do.

The moves (the plot of the novel) have to match the structure and rhythm of the genre, so everyone has a good time.

So when you are about to start writing your story, you know when you know "enough" to start writing because you've practiced this "piece" on this "instrument" until you are master of telling the Alien Romance story.

A musician on the stage is not thinking about what note comes next, but rather about the grand effect the sound has on the audience.

Likewise, when you are starting to write, you start the music with an introduction, a crash of symbols, or a tinkling sparkle of sound -- you choose the tenor of the opening sentence knowing what "key" you are writing in.

You "play" the piece for your Readers.

Only with practice do you learn how to tell when you (specifically, you the writer, the individual who is different from all other writers) know enough, but not too much, about the world you are building.

How much do you need to know before you "reveal" this world to people who have never heard it before.

So, one of the things you need to know about your World before you start to write (or face the daunting task of a major rewrite) is whether the Laws of Reality in your world allow for the existence of Prophecy, disallow it, or make it the object of scam artists.

Since we are discussing Science Fiction Romance, romance between human and Alien, we can consider how on Earth (so far) Prophecy has been traditionally vague, misleading, and open to interpretation whether it has come true, or not.

Suppose you write on our Contemporary Earth, but inject newly arrived Aliens.  Your reader knows all about Earth -- discovering all about the Aliens is the adventure.

Suppose the Aliens have actual, for real, always comes true in a literal and obvious way, Prophecy.

Where are they getting Foreknowledge?

Are they time-traveling?  Being informed by God?  Scamming Earth by cheating somehow?

Suppose the Aliens are sent by the Creator of the Universe to scold and correct human behavior, and they deliver Biblical Style Prophecy -- "if you don't change your ways, this awful disaster will befall you."

Your Aliens (one of whom falls head over heels for your Human Character) have a direct pipeline to God (or some force or entity that may as well be God.
God has rejected humans for all our scurious behaviors.  God favors these Aliens.  Are they Angels?  Are they flawed?  Did they used to be as misbehaved as humans?

Your human Lover has to search for (and find) an answer to that question that satisfies your reader -- but not necessarily in Book I.

Prophecy Is Real = A Theme.

Prophecy Is Not Real = A Theme.

Choose the theme, build the world around it.

Soul Mates as a concept depends on the existence of a Soul.  Do Souls have a destiny they can not avoid?  Or is Destiny Negotiable?

Is a Prophecy proven valid if actions avoid the prophesied consequence?

What price would your Soul Mates Across Species Lines be willing to pay to save humanity from some prophecied fate?

What if the Alien's Mission On Earth is ostensibly to save Earth by changing Human Nature -- but actually, what is really going on (known only to you, the writer, for several novels into the series) is to save the Alien Species from extinction by cross-breeding?

What sort of Aliens would be assigned by the Creator of Fates to save Humanity?  Are they willing or unwilling participants in this Mission?

Was seducing a human Lover part of the job, or a violation of the work contract rules?

What do these Lovers start out believing about this Prophecy?  What do they discover and learn along the way?  Where do they end up (parting ways, or married, or married-and-parting-ways?)

Is there offspring from this Union?  What role does such an offspring have in the Fate of Humanity?

Does your world have other Dimensions, and are these Aliens from Across the Dimension Divide?  On the other side, God is Real -- but on this side, not-so-much?  Can you create a truly God-Foresaken Reality adjacent to our own?

The story you can tell depends on the Universe Parameters you establish on Page 1.

Ordinarily, when you present an element like Prophecy -- saying "here is the cardinal rule of reality in this story" -- the reader expects that rule to be violated, disproven and replaced during the story.

That artistically huge element you wave in the reader's face before they get to know the Characters is placed first to signal the reader that THIS is the obstacle or adversary.  THIS is what the Characters fight against, and the conflict This vs. Characters is what the reader expects to see resolved.

So where and when you introduce the Worldbuilding Element of Prophecy or Foreknowledge of any kind tells the Reader if it is Obstacle or Tool.

And in a long series of novels, you can turn many Obstacles into Tools the Hero can use to solve the real, underlying, problem the reader learns is there during the course of the story.

To qualify as Science Fiction Romance, you must bring your Lovers to a Happily Ever After state.

But since it is Science Fiction, you can redefine Happiness, and even redefine the parameter "Time" so that "ever after" takes on a meaning unique to your World.

Is Prophecy = Reality a happy thing?  Or a disaster?

Is Prophecy = Scam a happy thing?  Or a disaster?

If you don't decide which Theme to use as the Master Theme before you start to tell the story, you will very likely end up in multiple rewrites, striving to bring everything into logical agreement with one or the other.

For a very long series of novels, you can postulate that THIS Prophecy turns out to be a Scam, but Prophecy can be Real.  Or vice-versa -- that THIS Prophecy is actually real, but in general all known Prophecies were scams.

That is complex and very hard to do.  It can be done, though, if you are meticulously consistent about building your world around the major Theme that will infuse every Character's story.

Here are a few posts discussing Theme and how to use it.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-learn-to-use-theme-as-art.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-you-can-do-in-novel-that-you-cant.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

When Should You Give Up On A Manuscript?: Part 1 Hitting a Brick Wall

When Should You Give Up On A Manuscript?:
Part 1 Hitting a Brick Wall
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

So there you are staring at half a page of text and it's page 130 of your novel, but not one single WORD will appear in your mind or flow from your finger tips.

This is an occasion for sweating bullets if you have a DEADLINE looming, a check you cashed and spent, and a dire need for the on-delivery check.

Not only that, but your credibility as a writer depends on making this deadline -- you'll never get another contract if you don't deliver, and it had better be publishable material. 

But every single suggestion that swirls through the edges of your mind is just crappy, cliche, artificial, hollow.  The characters won't talk to you and the plot just won't MOVE.

If you write anything, it'll be a chronicle of a character going from one setting to another, arduously describing every stain on the public bus seats, every taxi that splashed by and left him standing, every red light, every drunk sleeping in a doorway.  Nothing.  Nada.  Zilch. 

The character is bored and the plot is stuck.

The difference between an amateur and a professional is knowing what to do when this happens -- when, not if.

Here are some previous posts where such problems are mentioned in passing, though this collection is not specifically part of a series:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/sexy-information-feed.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/12/villain-defined.html

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

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/writing-tips-tweets.html

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

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/six-kinds-of-power-in-relationship.html

You may have mastered all the techniques, elements, craft skills, and tricks of the trade discussed in previous posts on this Tuesday blog series -- and that can make you into a writer (maybe a great writer).  Your stories will be solidly crafted, and entertaining to your readers -- you might even be drawing hoards to your blog or selling a lot of copies on self-publishing platforms. 

But that's not what it means to be a professional writer. 

Being professional is not just a matter of getting money for what you do, but rather of doing what you do for the sake of getting money (not JUST money, but without getting money you won't do it at all.)  That's the difference between a hobby and a profession.  A hobby is what you do when you're not doing your profession.  (for the astrologers, that's 10th House vs. 6th House -- getting the rulers of those two Houses into harmonious cooperation is a major trick in living an HEA ending.) 

"Professional" anything means that's what you do for a living.  It means if you don't do that, you'll die (literally.) 

A profession isn't what you do when you feel like it or when you're inspired, and it may not be what you do best, but it is what you do, day in day out, slogging through the snow, faithfully delivering to your customers as promised, do-or-die and at high quality.

You do it not because it's what you want to do.  You do it because if you don't, you can't buy food.

Desperation is what has produced the greatest novels of all time.

Go read some classics, then read the biographies of those writers.  From bards slogging from village to village hoping for a free meal at the tavern to starving musicians and acting troups and writers looking for a Patron in the middle ages, to the "commercial artist" of today, what has sparked the production of Literature that lives through the generations is desperation for a meal. 

In the last century, the entire business model of the writer has changed drastically. 

Since "mass production" appeared, and the printing press was exploited (the Dime Novel -- look it up) to mass produce fiction, a new profession has evolved.  Commercial Art.

"Commercial Art" is a contradiction in terms -- Art is personal, Commercial is impersonal. 

Art is all about what makes you unique.  Commercial is all about what makes you the same as others.

Putting these two together and trying to blend them is an ongoing experiment that may be about to fail or morph into something new.

Why is that?  Because the Internet and electronic self-publishing allows for smaller readerships to make a project bring in a living wage.

We are very far from that point at this time, but it is definitely the direction things are going in.

Personalization, customization, -- watch the video game RPG market (yes, I'm in it).  You have stories in which the "reader/viewer/player" creates their own character by assembling attributes from a set list -- and eventually technology will let players contribute attributes for others to use.  That is already happening in some venues, and that is where the  business model is churning.

So that point of utter desperation will rarely be reached by those specializing in the e-book and/or self-publishing market, and it will become even more rare as the writer's business model continues to evolve beyond "Commercial Art."

However, the trouble shooting process called for by either business model is the same, is easy to learn (if you've been reading this blog and doing the suggested exercises), and yields definitive results with very little effort.

When you hit that brick wall at the 1/4 or 2/3 point in a manuscript (or the half or 3/4 point, which is only a bit different), you have a series of decisions to make.

Regardless of your business model, that series is the same, and ought to be done in the same order.  If you get the decisions right, you'll finish the manuscript and it will be a solid piece of fiction designed for your market. 

Keep in mind that, no matter how depressed you are or how shattered you are by hitting that brick wall in a story you were so fired up about, the solution is routine, well known, and easy to do.

DECISIONS

1) Was this story worth starting?  Does it have a market?  Was it worth all the work done so far? 

2) Should I work on something else, and shelve this project indefinitely - or until inspiration strikes? 

3) What would it take to fix this story?  How much time do I have to fix it, and can the specific fix needed be done within that time limit?

4) Should I junk this into the shredder, delete all files, and just start from scratch to fulfill the contract?  (is that even possible, given the time limit?)

5) Is what I'm being paid for this worth the time/effort/angst necessary to turn out a finished product?

6) If I just scrap my original vision and craft this manuscript into something publishable that will fulfill the contract, will the result be "good enough" to put my primary byline on it?  Will the editor who paid my advance accept this with a different byline?  (contracts usually specify byline, and if a byline has a track record, they won't allow a change.)

7) If I scrap my original vision and just fill the contract competently, can I then use the scraps to create something that would showcase that original vision? 

Note that these questions are somewhat like a game of chess (or a war campaign) -- they focus more on the future, on the next 4 moves, than on the present problem. 

The Beginner's Defeat usually starts with an inability to foresee a future for the project in question.

The focus has to become (and this is an emotional turnabout when you're stunned by hitting a brick wall at full speed) -- "So Now What Do I Do?"

So let's start with the assumption that 1) has been answered with "Oh, just wait until they all read this!  It'll be so good!"  -- so yes, the project is worthwhile, but it's just that you can't do it right now.

So then what?

#2 indicates that the choice is to leave this project aside and work on something else, OR to just sit there staring at a blank page. 

That's not the choice, but it's always what the subconscious produces when it's stunned by that impact into the classic brick wall.

Framing a question incorrectly invariably leads to ineffectual swipes at non-existent solutions.

So let's examine what's wrong with 2) -- Should I work on something else and wait for inspiration on this? 

Well, the first error in that question is that it's way premature in the process to resort to such drastic measures.

It skips steps.

Beginners often do that, no matter what craft or skill they are beginning to learn.

The #2 question should be something more along the lines of, "What will I be teaching my subconscious if I shelve this project at this point simply because I hit a brick wall?"

And the obvious answer is that you will be teaching your subconscious to formulate and present you with IDEAS that have an inherent design flaw such that you will keep running into brick walls, no matter how marketable the basic concept might be.

As I've pointed out any number of times in these Tuesday blogs, writing is a performing art -- like dancing or playing the piano or driving a car.  You don't LEARN IT -- you TRAIN TO DO IT.

If you quit on a project just because you ran into a brick wall (or over a cliff, which is a different sort of problem), you are training your subconscious to take the easy way out and ignore everything you've been training it to do.

In a gym, we know "No Pain: No Gain."  The same is true for writing -- it's training, muscles, sinews, flexibility, speed, endurance, all the athletic parameters have an equivalent in writing.

So when your characters punch you in the nose and take off for the hills, what do you do?

You train harder.

You take the pain and make the gain. 

What pain is it that you are avoiding by wanting to shelve the project?

It's (not always, but often) the pain of facing facts. 

The part of you that refuses the pain of facing reality is your subconscious -- which is the part that does all the heavy lifting in fiction-writing.

So the objective of this exercise (picking yourself up and surmounting the brick wall) is to train your subconscious not to produce structures with brick walls in the middle.

You teach it, "You don't like brick walls?  OK, don't make any."

How do you do that?

Well, remember when you were learning spelling?  To learn to spell a word, you write it -- over and over and over.  If you make a mistake, you write it a hundred times, preferably on a board in front of the class, and believe me you will never make that mistake again! 

That same process is how you train --- not learn -- to do anything.  Repetition, and some kind of incentive like public embarrassment.  Whatever works for you - no two people are exactly alike.

But whatever process you use, to be successful, it will have the same attributes that all successful training has. 

1) STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING -- a dance instructor calls STOP.

2) CHANGE POSITION -- a dance instructor takes her cane and pushes your leg higher, scolds when you fall over.

3) DO IT AGAIN -- and do it right this time

4) DO IT -- DO IT -- DO IT -- over and over with the correction integrated, until you do it smoothly.

So applying this to the writing process, what do you do when you hit a brick wall?

1) STOP WRITING -- just freeze in place.  Leave your desk, and go stalk about the house screaming your head off (then pet the dog you upset).

Some writers just slam out of the house, jump in the car and go shopping.

Some go to a movie, then have chocolate ice cream.

Some go trap shooting.  Or to the gym.  Or sailing on a quiet lake.  Or to a concert in the park.  Or jacuzzi. 

Whatever you choose, it's YOUR blow-off-steam activity. 

2) In an hour or two, back at the desk, you CHANGE POSITION.

You slammed into the brick wall on page 133, so you go to another page.

#3 in this process is DO IT AGAIN -- so what the writer does is REWRITE. 

But rewrite what into what and how and why?

After you figure that out, you go on to #4, and do it and do it and do it until you can do the moves smoothly.  Practice is how you get to Carnegie Hall.

Note though that I used the dance instructor analogy.

You don't have a "writing instructor."  A beta reader is not a writing instructor.  An editor is not a writing instructor.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vii-how-do.html

There are no writing instructors because no two writers are alike enough for the processes of one to work for another.  No two people do this the same WAY.

But the end-product of professional writers is all uniform enough to fit into the delivery channels their marketers have designed. 

So keep your eye on the end product you are aiming to produce, and let that end product be your "teacher." 

The best way I know of to envision such a "teacher" or end product goal to shoot for is Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! trilogy of books on screenwriting.  He has created a list of examples of big selling story forms -- not formula, but a creative understanding of what makes a certain kind of story "work" for large numbers of people.

So when you hit a brick wall, you STOP, (blow off steam), and come back to your TEACHER.

One useful way to do that is to find the story-type you are working on in Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT GOES TO THE MOVIES, go to the bottom of the page and read the list of movies that are prime examples of your type of novel -- then dig one up on Netflix or Amazon Prime or wherever, and watch it.  Sometimes two or three times over -- taking notes.

Now go back to your desk and CHANGE POSITION -- as if your dance instructor had jabbed her cane into your knee to move it just so! 

Go to PAGE 1 of your manuscript. 

Check that page against all the elemental lists I've given you in these blogs and against the "beats" Snyder lists, and against your notes on the film you saw.

This works equally well with novels.  If you hit that brick wall in your novel, go reread another one that is like yours, or from the same publisher and editor, or by a writer you want to emulate.

You may want to write a contrast/compare essay between your first page, and your model novel's first page -- or the first 5 pages of a screenplay. 

The question -- the PAINFUL STRETCH of a question that your subconscious drove you into a brick wall instead of asking (because it's way too painful to ask it) is:

WHAT DID I DO WRONG?

If you shelve this project and go work on something else instead before you ask that question, you are training your subconscious to spur you into starting projects that can not be finished.  You are training your subconscious to force you to fail at your profession. 

If you shelve a project after you have asked this question, answered it several different ways, evaluated all those ways and chosen the best answer, then looked up HOW TO FIX WHAT YOU DID WRONG, and attempted to employ that fix (duck tape works sometimes), and found that the fix is beyond your abilities -- then you will not be training your subconscious to produce unfix-able projects strewn with brick walls.

It's that numbered process that does the trick here:

1) STOP
2) CHANGE POSITION (to correct one; it does no good to practice mistakes)
3) DO IT OVER (correctly)
4) DO IT AGAIN AND AGAIN (practice until it's a smooth performance).

So if you shelve a project that is irretrievably flawed, but instead of just going off to write something else on another whim, you rub your subconscious's nose in the mess it made and discipline it to FIX THE MESS one tiny, painful-boring, repetitive step at a time, you will be becoming a professional writer -- a writer who can write anything for any market at the wave of an advance payment.

In future installments in this WHEN SHOULD YOU GIVE UP ON A MANUSCRIPT series, we'll look at the individual trouble shooting steps for finding out what you did wrong, and either correcting it in this manuscript or creating another manuscript project specifically designed to acquire, polish or practice the precise skill set that caused the mistake.

Brick walls are caused by skills-failure. 

Writing professionally is a skill that does not depend on inspiration, is not random, and does not leave the writer as a victim of subconscious vagaries. 

It's harsh.  Nobody wants to hear it.  But it is true.  I didn't make this up.  I didn't discover it all by myself.  I got it from the best in the field.  They got it from their previous generations of writers. 

If your skills fail you, you will not eat.  Build strong skills that don't fail when your spirits flag, when "life" hits and knocks you over, when disaster threatens, and when the baby cries. 

You can't learn this stuff.  But you can train and train and train until your core skills are strong enough to keep you going no matter what.  Best of all, you can train your subconscious (by making it do-over all the failures) not to produce brick walls. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Six Kinds of Power in Relationship

Blake Snyder in his two SAVE THE CAT! books on screenwriting





points out that to keep a story moving, to keep the character arcs changing throughout the 110 page screenplay (or for that matter, a 400 page novel) you need to start the main character off at the point in his/her life when he/she is forcibly confronted by 6 things that need fixing.

Starting at that point keeps the plot from dying or unraveling in your fingers, which some new writers misinterpret as writer's block. It's really not writer's block, but writer's skill deficit.

For truly sterling examples of this complex writing technique producing a truly simple but not simplified plot, see Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files novels.

OK, The Dresden Files novels are not strictly speaking "Romance" because there isn't a Couple whose relationship dynamics create the plot -- but to me, Dresden the written character is some kind of grandiose hunk! The TV Dresden was starting to grow on me, but it got cancelled. And on TV the troubles that beset Dresden had to be reduced to episode size and watered down for the TV viewer who doesn't know magick.

THE DRESDEN FILES - here's the first 3 in a boxed set:



There are so far I think 12 Dresden novels and more coming. Like C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner universe novels, this is a series to savour, but Foreigner is more Alien Romance than Dresden is (so far -- you never know about trends that will re-shape a long series).

But both Foreigner and Dresden sustain a focus very tightly on the main character and that character started out with at least 6 things that need fixing.

Here's another long series that grew out of things to fix piling up on the main characters -- and this one is HOT Romance with magic as a societal force to be reconned with (Vampires hot for Werewolves though it's forbidden!) This is the first 3 in the series -- and the next one to come out is dedicated to me and is set in an interstellar society, real Alien Romance growing out of an urban fantasy series! The working title is DEMON IN THE DARK.

This is Susan Sizemore's urban fantasy Prime series, and you really don't want to miss any of them.



And here's the latest in the series


And I'm reading an ARC of the next one already.

What these 3 disparate (long running) series have in common is the choice of the initial moment in the main characters' lives when their story STARTS.

Choosing the wrong place to start is one of the most widespread classic errors that beginning writers make. I see it in writing workshops all the time. 9 out of 10 submissions will give me no choice but to explain that this manuscript has NO CONFLICT and it has no conflict BECAUSE it starts in the wrong place in the character's life, a place where "the story" of that character has not yet begun.

So a character floats into your mind and starts demanding you tell his/her story. You gotta do it, but where do you start?

Generally speaking in real life, troubles come in strings, disasters come in sets of 3's strung out over 12-18 months. (everyone knows this pattern even if they are certain astrology is silly)

Ever heard of literary license? When telling a character's story, while the character is telling you how things happened one thing at a time over years, you must take "literary license" and COMPRESS the troubles into thematically inter-related bunches to create a series of long novels -- or even one, great, fat novel.

And Blake Snyder got it right. The magic number is 6. That's two different transits each happening 3 times.

That's why troubles come in 3's. The outer planets go over a point in a natal chart, go retrograde back over that point as the Earth rounds its orbit, then (retrograde is an optical illusion, you know) the transiting planet goes "direct" and crosses that natal point again. If all the energy doesn't blow through on first contact, it may trickle through in 3 parts, or 2 parts. That's why the pattern is hard to see. Sometimes one or two pieces are missing.

Since the most powerful and memorable and re-readable novels and screenplays are about plots driven by Relationships not just mere Characterization, we should look into the details of Relationships for plot-drivers.

One kind of transit that always generates serious trouble in people's lives is the exquisitely slow transits of Pluto. Pluto is about power (yes, I know they demoted it from planet status - but that doesn't matter. "Nevertheless, it moves!")

And as discussed at some length previously here, Neptune is the plot-driver for the Romance experience.

Also, in Kabbalah, 6 is all about Love. I talk about that in detail in my books on Tarot that have never been published yet, The Not So Minor Arcana: Wands and The Not So Minor Arcana: Cups.

So if we look into the structure of power in relationships to find the 6 things to fix, we should find some plot-drivers that really have legs! And they will automatically be thematically related because they all manifest Pluto. Pluto "rules" or is associated with Scorpio, the natural 8th House, and thus is very much all about the more primal side of sexuality.

Keeping your 6 things to fix thematically related is yet another trick for avoiding writer's block. You will always know what comes next and why it's interesting because it's all about power.

Choosing those 6 things to fix in a thematic bundle is the secret to keeping the surprise twists coming and coming, and holding the interest of an audience, sometimes not just through one novel but way past a dozen novels in a series.

That secret of choosing plot-driver sets meshes perfectly with the way I explained using Scene Structure for pacing last week.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure.html

Plotting is an artform, not just a set of technical, mechanical tricks. The tricks are the brushes, pigments and canvass you use to bring your characters to life.

Art is a SELECTIVE recreation of reality. Verisimilitude is not the same thing as reality itself, but verisimilitude awakens a sense of being within a different reality. I covered that in the following post:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/verisimilitude-vs-reality.html

Linnea Sinclair has developed a knack for explaining how to develop characters and I highly recommend you read her blog entries on that subject. I'm sure they are as scattered as my own have been, so maybe she'll drop a list of them as a comment on this blog entry.

Linnea Sinclair showed you a lot about Worldbuilding in her post

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/world-building-for-writers-or-why.html

I'm hoping the others on the blog who've discussed worldbuilding will drop the URLs of their posts into the comments on this post.

So this examination on Power as a plotting tool isn't so much about characters and their internal conflicts, but more about Relationships between or among characters and how internal conflicts buried deep in a character manifest (unexpectedly) in external Relationships, creating Blake's "6 Things That Need To Be Fixed" formula for the opening of a story.

In previous posts here, I've explored the ways that professional fiction writers can use Astrology and Tarot (not believe in it; use it) to enhance their artificial worldbuilding so that the result is believable even when not plausible.

My posts on Tarot based on Kabbalah, Astrology and Worldbuilding as well as other writing craft techniques will soon be edited, expanded and collected into volumes and made available as e-books and POD versions on paper.

The first set will be 5 volumes on Tarot with the envelope title The Not So Minor Arcana.

The Astrology and Worldbuilding sets will come later.

(see my Friendfeed box on the right column of this blog to find how to subscribe to me and be notified how to get these compilations, or just subscribe to this blog). But you can read much of it now by digging it out of this blog. Search on Tuesday - the day I post. Or you might start with these:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/07/astrology-just-for-writers.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/07/astrology-just-for-writers-part-2.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/10/astrology-just-for-writers-part-3-genre.html

There are 5 parts of Astrology for Writers so far, plus numerous references to Astrology as it can be used to create verisimilitude where there actually is none (i.e. a fantasy world you just built).

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2007/12/10-pentacles-cake-comes-out-of-oven.html (follow the links in this post back. Swords and Pentacles have been covered in 20 posts).

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/source-of-expository-lump.html is a key post in my Worldbuilding and writing craft series.

So you see, we've been building up to this more difficult subject of Relationship as a plot driving mechanism, one component craft technique at a time. The underlying purpose of all this analysis is to find a way to boost Alien Romance's respectability in the general media.

Keep your eye on the objective and the boring work will just get done. It's like watching TV while knitting. Do you really need to look at your hands?

So now let's knit together 6 kinds of Power that can make for problems (or solutions) in a Relationship while keeping the plot twisting, but keep our minds on AR on TV.

----------------------

1) Control of the Agenda
2) Veto Power
3) Who holds the "gun" (real or figurative)
4) The Magic Address Book; The Golden Rolodex
5) Potentially embarrassing (fatal?) secrets
6) Purse Strings

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1) Control of the Agenda

This may be the most famous kind of power there is in a relationship between one character and a larger group of characters. But it operates within couples, too.

It can be very subtle. And the more subtle the power over the agenda is, the more devastating a chokehold it can be.

Many people aren't even aware there is an agenda in every encounter, nevermind that it can be controlled without their knowledge.

Take an example ripped from the headlines today.

Congress is getting ready to thrust upon us a "Healthcare Reform" bill -- a huge bill, but none of them voting for it or against it will have read it because they couldn't understand it anyway.

The inner workings of Congress and the Senate are all about Agenda Control and everyone who browses the news understands how that works. It's seniority and majority party, getting Committee appointments, plus a lot of 18th Century customs that have lasted.

They never bring a bill to the floor unless they know how the vote will go. That means bills don't even get voted on unless the agenda is fully under control of the majority party.

That's pretty much how corporate executive committees work, too.

OK, we all understand that and can use it in stories.

But politicians love power and don't seem to know there is any other way to think. Some men seem to believe it's unmanly to think any other way, even in a Relationship.

When people say they don't want the government dictating their health insurance terms, or they don't want a government run single-payer system, Congress responds, "Oh. Yeah, I see your point. Well, don't worry. We'll GIVE YOU LOTS OF CHOICES so your health insurance will be your own choice."

As far as politicians are concerned that totally fixes the problem because it defuses your objection but they retain control of the agenda. Husbands on the road to divorce do this to their wives.

Congress did that with the Medicare Prescription insurance bill, and created a system where dozens of private companies "provide" prescription insurance as a proxy for the government, and "give you choices" none of which are adequate to anyone but the average person, and of course profitable to the offering company. But you must choose from the list presented to you, which is further limited by state laws. No matter which way you choose, the company wins. The agenda was set, but not by you.

Think about that power-play maneuver of retaining control of the agenda by limiting choices but forcing the other to choose from that menu and claiming that means freedom of choice.

Choosing among choices created by someone else is not the same thing as creating your own.

Think how that control of the menu of choices works in terms of a Romance relationship. Think how it might seem to non-humans.

What are the politicians doing? They know no other way to relate to voters except by exerting power over voters (so they can get elected).

How do they flimflam voters into thinking that the government is giving them FREEDOM OF CHOICE by giving them LOTS OF CHOICES?

It's like the dropdown menus in a program. THESE are the choices you get to choose from because that's all the choices the programmers could think to offer (or know how to offer or find profitable to offer).

GIVING the choices is "setting the agenda." This is what you have to choose from and if you want something else, or a little of this and a little of that, you can't have it.

The character who sets the choices before you is setting the agenda.

The character who chooses from that array of choices is the one without POWER in the transaction, no matter how large or varied the menu of choices.

The person who sets the agenda retains the power to LIMIT what you may choose from, and to force you to make a choice from that pre-set list where every item on it benefits them not you.

If you think about it, that's how the news media works (always has worked that way). "All the news that's fit to print" is still an agenda-enforcing chokehold because they choose what's fit and what's not. The internet is changing that business model faster than the media can adjust. The power centers in our cultures are shifting HARD.

So our taste in fiction has to shift, just as hard.

Think what non-human civilizations that had that power-center shift happen generations ago might be like. Then think of them arriving on earth to watch our comedy of errors.

Centralized Agenda Control is how business meetings are run at the corporate level - the one in charge sets the agenda, and anyone speaking outside that list of topics is out of order. Do that too often and presto - you're fired.

Local Town Council meetings are supposed to work that way but often frizzle out into shapeless shouting. Not good drama.

From a child's point of view, families are run from a centralized agenda (which is why we tend to run our families that way once we grow up -- don't know any other way).

"What's for dinner, Mom?" "Rice and Beans; or Beans and Rice, take your pick."

"Where are we going this year on vacation, Dad?" "The Jersey shore. Or there's that beach in Maryland you liked last year." "I don't want to go to a beach. I want to go to a Dude Ranch." "Not this year. Too expensive. And dangerous. There's a nice beach in Connecticut."

See? You can choose. You have freedom of choice, and you're BEING GIVEN A VOTE (given is the operative word). But you can't choose to stay home because you're a kid and can't stay alone. You can't have what you want because it's not on the menu. Choose a beach - any cheap beach. We're listening to you, but we're setting the agenda.

That's how people in our society use power and the process can generate a problem your main character must solve.

OK, so suppose we're writing Romeo and Juliet.

Juliet votes for the Connecticut beach and meets Romeo there. The entire plot and conflict of Romeo and Juliet stemmed from the fact that the parents set the agenda (but of course the parents didn't see it that way; they had their agenda set for them by society and the legitimacy of feuding as a way of life). For Romeo and Juliet, the resolution was that the kids didn't allow the parents to set their agenda.

So the position of Agenda Setter is the single most powerful position in any relationship, and that power is the most far-reaching and difficult to counter when it is exercised with subtlety. "Give the less powerful many, many MANY choices" and they'll never notice they have no freedom to choose.

So problem #1 for your main character can be either what choices to offer others, or whether to let someone else populate the menu of choices. How does your main character break out of that power-grip and assert his/her own agenda? Is your main character even aware he/she has been manipulated into a position of powerlessness? Or is holding only part of the power enough? What changes in your character's world to make it not-enough?

2) Veto Power

This is obvious. It's the power to say "NO" and make it stick.

But again, in our culture, it's socially and politically incorrect for certain people to use this power in certain ways. Thus the person with power can end up in a complex spiderweb trap with no way to exercise their power.

For an example, just read up on the lastest UN Security Council resolutions. That "Veto Power" was given to the 5 permanent members as a way of keeping them from exercising it. Say no to what others consider reasonable and you're dirt.

So one of the 6 problems your main character might have is a Veto Power they can't use. Or if they do use it anyway, the trouble generates the plot.

Take Romeo and Juliet again -- their veto power was suicide.

That's kind of like the DOOMSDAY MACHINE in Star Trek (actually, it's an old military concept). A weapon so powerful it could destroy both sides. You can't use it, and threats with it seem vapid. Well, Romeo and Juliet is a play Aliens might consider when threatening humans with a pre-set agenda of choices.

3) Who holds the "gun"

"The Gun" is a weapon somewhat short of Veto Power or a Doomsday Device, but hardly a precision tool in most hands. (Lone Ranger and Have Gun Will Travel fangirl here!)

The gun is a tool for doing damage of some sort. But it isn't enough to simply have a gun -- WHO holds that gun is the most important part of the threat to the power structure of a dynamic Relationship. The character of the gun-holder is the focus in this problem to be solved.

Take for example, an unarmed man in a sports suit and an armed man in an Armani suit. They are fleeing through a forest chased by a S.W.A.T team (maybe aliens who caught them spying on their beached UFO?).

The Armani Suit tries to use veto power on the Sports Suit who is busy setting the agenda for tricking the aliens into making a choice from a menu of one item.

Armani waves the gun with authority saying, "The man who holds the gun gets his way." Sports Suit snatches the gun right out of Armani's hands levels it at Armani and notes that, "The man who holds the gun gets his way, right?"

It isn't who has the weapon that matters to the plot. It's who controls it. Who knows how to use it.

People who are masters with weaponry don't have to carry weapons. Anyone who wishes to contend for control of the agenda will bring plenty of weapons for everyone. Let them sweat under the weight. They'll get tired and it'll be easier to vanquish them.

So Problem 3 might be that the character who understands a particular weapon (doesn't have to be a gun -- could be a whole space ship with no overt weapons, or a sword, or a length of electrical cord, or a magical chant) does not currently possess that weapon.

Or the complication might be that the person who does possess the weapon doesn't understand the weapon. A character with no shooting-range experience is more deadly when waving a gun than a trained Marine. The Marine will hit what she aims at, and that fact can be very comforting when things get dicey.

4) The Golden Rolodex

Well, Rolodex makes software these days, but the cliche reference is to the cardfile or listing of the ones who will respond to a message as expected and wanted. "I need a speedboat by this afternoon." "Ah, well, I know a man ..."

The person who always "knows a man who" is the one with great power in every relationship. The go-to guy/gal.

I had a cousin with the family golden rolodex. When she sent invitations to a party, the whole family turned out from 3 states around. When somebody else threw a party, hardly anyone came. When I needed to throw a graduation party for one of my kids in New York, I called her in New Jersey. The whole family turned out from 3 states around - and California too.

It's a cliche, but it works. If you need some outlandishly unique operation to go down just the way you want it, you need to know someone who knows everyone and can select who to ask.

Thanksgiving Dinner makes a great plot-event for solving one of the 6 problems.

The character in a Relationship who knows all the email addresses, phone numbers, and URLs is the most powerful person in the relationship, even more powerful than the agenda setter in certain circumstances.

Take for example, the classic situation of the suddenly widowed woman who doesn't even know how to notify her husband's relatives that he has died. The husband paid all the bills. She doesn't know the phone company's phone number, or how to pay the water bill, or where that information is filed, or how much they owe on the house.

The person who knows which people know each other, who knows all their skill sets and their family situations, their political leanings, and personal hobby horses - that person has POWER in every relationship.

Corporations discovered this by scientific research and changed the Personnel Department into the Human Resources department.

I recall when they first started sending questionnairs to employees demanding the employees confess all their hobbies and incidental interests and skills because the employees' skills were the wealth of the corporation. No shit, they really did that and it upset people. Today people comply without thinking about the invasion of privacy -- the power they are giving up for no money. (Well, maybe it'll pay off if the company out of the goodness of their hearts decides to offer a RIF'd worker another position in a different profession.)

So the general reader knows that not being on the good side of "the man who" could be a major one of the 6 problems your main character must solve, especially if he's slipped outside the set Agenda and gotten himself fired.

5) Potentially embarrassing (fatal? Awkward?) secrets

This can be leverage. See the TV show Leverage which is a sort of remake of Mission: Impossible. Knowledge is power. The TV show (USA NETWORK - CHARACTERS WELCOME)
also uses psychology and knowledge as power.

As with Romeo and Juliet, the solution to being blackmailed is to refuse to let another character set the agenda. Just out the info yourself.

Ah, but the price!

One of the 6 problems that have to be solved might have to do with who knows what about which.

Trust issues come in here. Can this character who caught you sleeping with your boss's wife be trusted to keep her mouth shut?

Perhaps in Romance, the Sexual Blackmail potential of secrets is the hottest way to focus attention on the interface between Power and Sex, and distinguish both from actual Romance.

Laughter, embarrassment, and physical danger all have something in common, which is why sex or a giggling-fit often come right after a big physical fight.

PAIN is the element in common. Laughter happens right at the edge of subtle emotional pain. Embarrassment is likewise right at the edge of a kind of potentially fatal emotional pain (something that can change your life and your basic character if rammed through to the logical finish). Embarrassment taken to dramatic conclusion is social-rejection, shunning, and that can be fatal. Ostracism is worse than jail because you can starve or freeze and nobody cares.

For a character who has a hot secret, in their past the potential consequences IF IT WERE KNOWN can make a really good Problem #5 to be fixed.

What is the resolution of, say, the problem where someone falls in love and does not confess before the wedding day that he's in the witness protection program and every characteristic that made his Bride fall in love with him (taste in art, love of music, clothing, even profession) was made up for him. His real self just isn't like that at all.

Does your character say "I Do" before or after confessing? Does someone swoop in with the information? Does the Bride shrug it off saying, "I knew that from the first day we met," because she's a telepath from outer space spying on Earth?

In fact, THE SECRET as a problem works best of all when two characters in a telepathic bonding discover secrets about the other. Each one figured they must know everything about the other because of the telepathic bonding. What a shock.

6) Purse Strings

Well, the financial control in a couple relationship has been used to enslave women since forever. Ho-hum. Cliche.

Oh? But what about the woman who has financial control. Today, in the USA, according to a number of polls I've seen, it's usually the woman who handles the finances. That's one reason so many ads are aimed at women. Women make the purchasing decisions.

And then there's the widow(er) who doesn't even know where all the spouse's bank accounts are but thought she did. Think about variations on Madoff's wife's position. Not the reality. The potential drama in the position depending on how the cash flowed through that family.

If you really need to understand a situation, "follow the money" is the most productive way to spend your investigative dollar.

Any number of Columbo episodes, and even Murder She Wrote, were based on following the money, finding the purse strings, and thus finding the seat of power in the dynamic relationships being exposed because of a murder.

One great example of a murder mystery series that's a sizzling romance is Faye Kellerman's Decker and Lazarus series:



Oh, yeah, don't forget there's plenty of variations on this purse-strings problem to explore with the same-sex couple with scattered assets and limited legal rights in certain states. Your main character could have the problem of getting actual hands on his/her rightful inheritance from a deceased spouse and become a suspect because of those efforts.

Then there's the college kid waiting for his parents to send money. Suppose they're fighting over how much support he should get. Suppose the parents get a divorce, and don't inform him until after the decree?

Or take international politics. There's the Fantasy TV show KINGS, for example, where the war between neighboring countries is promulgated by the guy funding the King, and when the King wants to make peace, the funds go into war-mongering and palace intrigue and skulldugery where the profits are. You think the King was fooled? Watch that show. Love, Romance, Infidelity, Intrigue, the stuff of human relationships.

I think some of these short summer-replacement series are actually concocted with the idea of making the profit from selling the DVD's. Follow the money.

The power of control of the wealth works wonderfully well on the interstellar scene because it's something we all have intimate knowledge of and can believe as a motive even for aliens. It's primal enough that we can infer that even aliens would have "resource control" as a goal.

Purse Strings don't just control coined money. The "Purse Strings" power-mongering is about any sort of concrete resource control. Oil interests don't seem too enthusiastic about solar panel deployment for power generation, do they? Remember the TV show Dallas? Suppose you wrote an episode of that today, in the "alternative energy" revolution?

Consider the Wild West stories of the cattlemen vs. the sheep runners.

Water rights are still a huge bone of contention in the West USA (Colorado lakes are down to I think it's about a third of where they should be at this time of year; Colorado feeds Arizona and California water, and hasn't enough left for itself.)

A recent FORBES article pinpoints some of the calculation fallacies behind the concept of the locavore (eating local produce). This is an article fraught with story ideas because of all the things there are to "fix" that you can choose from, and the equivocal facts. The article contends that it's more "green" for England to import lamb from New Zealand than to raise sheep locally.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0803/opinions-energy-locavores-on-my-mind.html

Business Week online is also a fertile source of Six Things To Fix for your main character.

http://www.businessweek.com/

And those are two of the most obvious places for writers to watch for plot driving things to fix involving purse strings and power.

These magazines are all about power and the power-structure that we are so embedded in that we are as oblivious to it as we are to the air (unless there's a storm wind or a bad smell).

The reader/viewer's obliviousness is the writer's most powerful tool for inserting the surprising twist that is nevertheless obvious in retrospect.
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So there are 6 areas of Power in Relationship fraught with dramatic potential. And that's derived from only half of Pluto's possible effects and we barely touched on what Neptune can do to perceptions.

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

Writer's Eye Finds Symmetry

We had an interesting discussion on Spoilers recently in which I held that any story worth reading or viewing couldn't be "spoiled" by knowing the ending, or any particular scene, plot development or bit of dialogue.

In other words, I held that there is no such thing as a "spoiler."
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/03/prologues-and-spoilers.html

If knowing what happens "spoils" it for you, then it wasn't well written enough to be worth your time and money anyway.

But in fact, there is such a thing as a spoiler!!!

What "spoils" fiction for readers and viewers is not knowing what happens, but knowing the trick behind the fictional facade.

The trick that's jerking your emotions around, that takes an event or line of dialogue and carries it straight through your conscious defenses into your subconscious and hits your deepest, most buried buttons, works just as well whether you've heard the plot in advance or not.

But once you know the trick being used against you, you don't react to it any more.

As stage magicians loathe letting anyone know their "secrets" (even other magicians), so also writers (who are prestidigitators of the emotions) should guard their proprietary secrets. Some writers go so far as to not-teach new writers because newbies are 'the competition.'

There is a process which trainee writers undergo as they pass from audience to stage-magician that is extremely wrenching. As you learn the secrets that writers have been using to jerk your emotions around, to make you laugh or cry over a scene, to deliver a GASP!, or a whoop of triumph, you find that your favorite fiction is "spoiled" -- you just don't enjoy it anymore, the way you used to as a mere reader.

You've found the keywords that trigger your emotional responses, even when used 200 pages before the impact hits you. You've found how you fall for the hero's kryptonite weakness, or root for heroes who have no such weakness. You've read a lot of these articles on how to write, and you've attended panels at conventions where writers reveal their secrets. Perhaps you've even done some writing yourself, and realize that these stories that always seemed so real, so important, so filled with higher truth, spiritual insights, or personal affirmation of your view of the world -- all this stuff you always adored suddenly seems as flimsy and false as the Western town main street consisting of plywood fronts for stores with catwalks on the back for cameras.

And it's all bland and pointless, except there's money to be made writing! So you set out to write, and that just makes the apathy for reading or viewing any fiction worse.

This state of apathy for fiction can persist for years once fiction has been "spoiled" for you by glimpsing behind the scenes. Or it might persist only for a few months, depending on how fast the stage of mastering the craft lasts. And the length of that interval depends on how hard you work at mastering the tricks yourself, and how much of yourself you put into it, and on how good you are at learning abstract things then applying them in the practical world.

Some people actually reach a version of this stage of apathy just while watching television, never thinking to become writers. They grasp the underlying formula for a TV series, find it predictable, and then find it boring because it's predictable.

Some will then segue into an "I can write better than that!" attitude and proceed to do so (with varied results), but still not find their enjoyment of commercial fiction returning.

So let's talk a little about how writing students bootstrap themselves up to the level of professional writers, and begin enjoying fiction for totally different reasons than they had ever been able to imagine before. This sheds light on why the same novel rarely wins both the Hugo (voted by fans) and the Nebula (voted only by professional writers.)

What does the writer's eye see that the reader's eye misses?

What do writers see in each others' work to send them into paroxysms of joy, of admiration, or even (*gasp*) into becoming a FAN of another writer's work?

It's all in the writer's TRAINED EYE. The writer's inner eye "sees" patterns that escape the casual reader. Having attempted to capture such a pattern and display it in a fictional universe, a world they have built themselves, the writer is aware of how difficult it is to put such an abstract vision into a piece of fiction and have the fiction still work as a story comprehensible to other people.

Only the writer who has studied the craft, then attempted (and perhaps even sold) stories has full appreciation of what an achievement capturing a real-world pattern in a bit of fiction can be.

If the pattern is put into the foreground of the fiction, the fiction fails to reach the reader/viewer's subconscious. If it's in the background or too buried in symbology or assumptions, the fiction doesn't communicate the pattern to a commercial size audience. If it's too hidden in the THEME, the fiction fails. Too blatant or too hidden -- either one is easy to write. But getting the pattern to be visible, clear and well stated, but still open to personal interpretation, and thus able to engage the audience's subconscious, now that's hard.

A writer can have a blazing epiphany, become filled to the brim with the urgency of showing the world an important bit of wisdom, and write their heart into a story -- only to have it sneered at or rejected.

After such a failure, a writer is set up to break through the apathy barrier, to become a FAN of other writers, to appreciate writing as craft and art welded into a thing of beauty.

What does a writer learn in that moment of breaking through the apathy barrier? What breaks that barrier and restores enjoyment to fiction? Finding a pattern you recognize properly used in a bit of fiction, understanding the craft elements that construct and convey the pattern, and knowing "This is what I was trying to do!" Recognizing another writer's success at something difficult restores a writer's zest for reading/viewing other writer's fiction.

All that is very abstract. Here's a concrete example.

Let's take the film MR. AND MRS. SMITH, the 2005 movie version where a husband and wife are in marriage counselling, and discover that each one has been keeping a secret from the other.

They are both assassins working for secret agencies. And they've been assigned to kill each other, and in fact the situation which pits them against each other was rigged by their superiors simply because they were living together. (um, yeah, it's a romance, and has all the elements of an alien romance, since each is "the unknown" to the other)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0356910/



I've seen this film several times, and once again just recently.

But this last time was the ONLY time I saw what it was that speaks to me in this film.

Previously, it had been years since I'd written a screenplay. Recently I've done three (none yet to my own satisfaction!). Now I'm seeing movies differently, and really enjoying things I did not enjoy before. Apparently I stopped writing screenplays before I broke this barrier.

So in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, I found the PATTERN that (when I couldn't see it) was jerking me around. Now it is very likely you saw this pattern the first time you saw the movie, and you won't understand why I didn't see it.

And I like this movie even better now that I've seen clearly what was only hazy before.

I hope you've re-read my post
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/03/prologues-and-spoilers.html
because in that post I did mention that if you have a prologue, you also need an epilogue. That's a technique of structure often called "bookends." Mr. & Mrs. Smith has "bookends" in the structure, and I never missed that point.

The film starts with the husband and wife sitting in office visitor chairs before a desk you don't see. It's a marriage counselling session. They haven't had sex in a while (with each other, that is) and can't agree on how long that's been, nor on how long it's been since they met. We see how they met, pretending to be a couple even though they didn't know each other, evading a police search for an assassin who was an American traveling alone. Total strangers, they provided cover for each other.

We see each of them in their ordinary workday persona, in wild "James Bond" action, battling, killing, almost being killed, arriving home in very "James Bond" unruffled fashion, being the perfect suburban couple. They argue or go stone-silent over trivial household matters. Clearly something abnormal there.

Then they're pitted against each other (we don't know why at first) and each wrestles with whether to kill the other (almost does it), and finally they begin actually TALKING about the issues between them ("What did you think the first time you saw me?" asking frank and embarrassing questions and answering honestly.) As they clear the air, they decide they won't kill each other, and they team up as allies against the conspiracy of their superiors to make them kill each other because they're living together (and therefore the "other" is a spy.)

The battle scenes get wilder and wilder until they shoot up a store, blow things up, (even their own house gets turned into a pile of kindling) then there's a stunt-doubled car chase to make Indiana Jones pale.

And after one wild-WILD action fight sequence, they blow off the rest of their aggressions in sex, wild passionate sex like they haven't had in years.

They settle the problem with their superiors, and they're back at the marriage counsellor. Mr. Smith prompts the marriage counsellor to ask the sex question again. They admit they redecorated the house (one of the issues they were spatting over was the color of the curtains).

Of course, the way I've outlined the story here, the pattern is obvious because I see it now.

The VIOLENT ACTS we see as they do their day-job, the violence in joining in combat at a job (that was a setup) where one tries to steal the "package" from the other, all the way through forming an alliance and shooting up and destroying a SUBURBAN HOUSEWARES STORE (with all kinds of nasty hunting weapons) (and they turn out to be wearing kevlar vests! I tell you the SYMBOLISM is perfect for penetrating subconsciouses), even the explosion that destroys their house -- all that violence and destruction is the SHOW DON'T TELL illustration, an exact replica or reflection, of the usual ho-hum marital-spat screaming fights most couples have. When a marriage is in real trouble, those spats become symbolic of the real problems in exactly the way the violence and truth-in-marriage issues do in this film.

The violence in this film acts as a SYMBOL for the marital issues that are screamed over and around but never actually stated in ordinary marriages (such as viewers of the movie might be living through). As the violence escalates, their COMMUNICATION over the real issues escalates (as rarely happens in real life -- I said this is a romance.)

The marriage counsel session dialogue is easily recognizable as marital issues. Just read some self-help books and you can't miss it. Textbook stuff. The marriage counsellor doesn't know they're both assassins by trade. Would that trade make a difference?

The VIOLENCE appears to be just rollicking good fun needed to sell a movie. Neither is rattled by explosions, wounds, etc. The violence isn't about the violence. It's about conversation, about communicating.

This is a film in which VIOLENCE is CONVERSATION. DESTRUCTION is SEXUALITY.

The film doesn't go into great detail about the sex scenes, but the violence is detailed move for move and prolonged for fun, right down to gradually stripping off clothing as it gets ruined by the violence.

We've all discussed the psychological equivalence of sex and violence.

From the writer's point of view, the trick is to define a HIGH CONCEPT, and write that story, delivering on the fun in the concept.

The CONCEPT that husband and wife are (secretly from each other) professional assassins casts the marital "battle of the sexes" into HIGH CONCEPT, and provides the "violence" that producers require to pull in audiences.

But the violence in Mr. And Mrs. Smith (2005 version) is not gratuitous. It's not there to draw audiences. It's not there to display the grandiose physiques of the stars or the director's genius. It's there to FULFILL A PATTERN, to reticulate a pattern, and to discuss the nature of marriage.

Whee! This writer SQUEALS FOR JOY at seeing every bit of this script so clearly etched that every line traces right back to where the concept came from.

Now seeing into the wheels-and-gears behind the illusion does not spoil it for me. It is in fact the reason I imbibe fiction in all media. I take vast joy in well oiled wheels-and-gears.

Seeing into the mechanism is one part of the exercise of creating such a mechanism of your own. Seeing this particular mechanism fitting a typical alien-romance plot into commercial box office parameters makes me ever more hopeful that we can indeed create that blockbuster, runs-for-twenty-years PNR TV series.

Does anybody reading this remember TOPPER? It's not even currently available on DVD, and what's available used is only "highlights" -- it's time to rethink all this PNR stuff.



AMAZON SAYS: "A madcap comedy escapade, The Adventures of Topper is a collection of the funniest episodes from the ""Topper"" television series. The show, based on a novel by Thorne Smith and the book's subsequent spin-off motion pictures, features genteel banker Cosmo Topper who moves into a new house that comes complete with ghosts and all!"

Remember "The Ghost And Mrs. Muir" ???



Each of those two "Concepts" spoke to a particular generation in terms of what was bugging that generation most. Mr. & Mrs. Smith speaks to the issue of truth in marriage. Note how on SMALLVILLE, and even in BUFFY, the truth issue is make-or-break in the Relationships. (Clue: truth in marriage wasn't always iconic in USA society, [rememer I LOVE LUCY?] nor in Victorian or Renaissance English Romances. It's really a very new yardstick for measuring relationships.)

Book, film, TV Show -- there's a link, a trail to follow that connects these forms of entertainment with each other and with the social matrix they address. And today we have to add web-originals, and other graphic novel, TV, and other new distribution channels.

Now think CONCEPT and think SYMMETRY as only the writer's eye can see it.

Think about Mr. And Mrs. Smith and how the violence level of the script mirrored the exact textbook progress of a marriage encounter-group session. See the pattern whole and completely reticulated, in the subconscious and in the conscious. The pattern is not in the foreground, not in the background and not even in the THEME. It's in the ties between the violence and the psychology that exist ONLY IN THE VIEWER'S MIND, and never on screen.

Don't just admire the modern Mr. And Mrs. Smith -- follow the pattern lines back to the originating concept, reverse engineer the script, deconstruct that concept into its components, and delve into how that concept was created.

It's not just a flash of inspiration that creates concepts. It's long, hard days of perspiration -- sometimes watching or reading things you wouldn't ordinarily want to. When that flash of inspiration occurs, it's your subconscious reporting on its month's work.

Writers do most all their work while sleeping, but the IRS doesn't let you deduct the bedroom of your house. Talk about unfair tax practices.

So replicate what they did to create and recognize the High Concept, "A married couple where each is secretly an assassin."

You can't use their concept, but you can use their method of finding that concept.

What other conflicts besides the "battle of the sexes in marriage" do you know of that go on in millions of people's lives every day? That's the question to answer in order to get the effect Hollywood wants: THE SAME.

What kind of well known, familiar conflict is so pervasive people don't even notice it's there, nor consider it worth commenting on? And what are the best self-help books that address subsets of that vast conflict area?

Nail that SAME part, then search for the BUT DIFFERENT part of the formula.

With Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the "different" part is that they're BOTH professional assassins.

Then the grind-the-crank part of the plot leads directly to "assigned to kill each other" - you just have to figure out a reason. The elegant solution is "because they're living together which means each is a spy assigned to waggle our secrets out of our hired assassin."
The twist with Mr. and Mrs. Smith is that the box-office requirement of VIOLENCE is supplied by their day jobs, not by the domestic dispute over keeping secrets.

I'd bet all of you already know all this.

So what are you thinking. Two alien from outer space spies meet on Earth and marry to maintain their cover? But they've each been sent here to search for the other and a) kill him, or b) protect Earth from his faction Out There?

Here are some widespread "conflicts" to explore other than Battle of the Sexes:

1) People Vs. Medical System
2) People Vs. Insidious Advertising Practices (think 0% nothing down mortgages)
3) People Vs. The Boss From Hell
4) People Vs. College grading system
5) People Vs. Traffic congestion
6) People Vs. Post Office Screw Ups
7) Tech Support Slave Vs. Enraged Customers
8) Mom Vs. School System over allowing Bullying

What other pervasive, everybody knows what it is about, conflicts can you think of?

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

Writing Tips Tweets

Personally, I feel twitter is a fad -- somewhat like CB Radio was/is. Its popularity may be peaking now. It may disappear, replaced by something else, or it may be left only to those who've found a real use for it.

But at this time, I think most people who spend any time phone texting or online will find twitter useful, provided they are selective about the people they link to.

Me, I'm all about writing, reading and screenwriting -- the place of the entertainment media in nourishing the soul (can you think of any better soul-nourishment than a good Romance?)

So projects like this new one below catch my interest.

Jean Lorrah, my sometime collaborator and co-owner of Sime~Gen Inc., ( www.jeanlorrah.com ) has started a twitter.com account to post short tips on writing for writers.

http://twitter.com/tipsonwriting is the page that will show you the list of tips.

You can get these sent to your phone as text messages if you join twitter, or have them sent to your own twitter account by "following" tipsonwriting . Or log into the http://twitter.com/tipsonwriting/ page to see them. And Jean has the feed from the tips account posted on various websites. It's currently on the top page of simegen.com too.

Subscribing to Jean's Writing Tips Tweets could be the quickest way to break writer's block. Just try each day to do what the Tip suggests, in the simplest way you can, not for publication but just a practice swatch for yourself.

You might want to post the results on
http://editingcircle.blogspot.com/2009/05/post-tips-on-writing-exercises-here.html
as a comment and get feedback on your exercise. But that might be intimidating so it could be better to just keep it in your own file to be mined for publishable ideas later.

But if you're practicing, just do a practice swatch of words for yourself and presto you'll be writing and then the words will come roaring out.

Jean might take contributions or retweet other writers' tips later. DM her on twitter.

Twitter isn't ONLY for those who have unlimited text messaging on their phones. There are a number of websites around that help you use twitter or publicize your activity on twitter. And there's a browser toolbar you can install on your browser to help you follow your incoming tweets, or send tweets. More brands of browsers will no doubt be getting this toolbar enabled for all kinds of social networking sites.

friendbar is an add-on for the firefox browser. Browse some add-ons here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3794

People are blogging like mad about the tools that make twitter easier to live with.

Here's an article:
http://www.randygage.com/blog/tweet-this-a-twitter-manifesto

Jean Lorrah found http://www.tweetlater.com which helps you manage multiple twitter accounts. Imagine that - MULTIPLE twitter accounts!

These Web 2.0 tools are being invented faster than I can keep track, but their purpose is to relieve the frantic and overwhelmed feeling we all get from multitasking beyond our capacity and to dodge spam floods such as the current worm infection is causing.

A lot of these tools will fail quickly. Much of it is advertising supported with a "free" level and a professional or paid subscription level.

As I said, Twitter is designed to help you avoid dealing with tons of spam in your email box. Dodging spam is a trend among younger people today both because parents want to insulate them from the trash in spam, and because life is too short to scan spam for hours a day. So they connect to a limited number of people they really know, and communicate in depth with that small number. That makes texting and tweeting a very efficient and cost-effective method of establishing and maintaining deep relationships.

But the social networks can waste a lot of time, too.

Twitter has a higher velocity message flow because each message is so short, so it feels like it's less of a burden. The shortness of the messages are like the half-sentence utterances in a real life conversation.

I can hardly wait for a teen romance novel that consists of nothing but tweets, like the Historical novels that consisted of nothing but letters (or like Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's St. Germain novels, though the letters are less plot-movers than they were in her earlier books.) I loved that format and can see a huge potential for it in twitter.

Can you imagine, for example, a time-travel romance with the two lovers separated by centuries but communicating through a portal that would allow only tweet-sized text messages?

Perhaps I'm intrigued by "short" because it's something I can't do. I don't suppose readers of this blog have noticed that trait of mine ...

The problem with twitter is that it is indeed "faster moving" -- which makes you pant to keep up if you follow more than four or five very taciturn people. Hence these other online tools for "managing" your twitter account(s!)

It's a trend, though, to use one more technological application to cure a problem caused by another technological add-on to an otherwise frantic life, and it's happening in all walks of life. Maybe we should term it Tech-Defense, or Tai Kwon Tech?

For example, some techie noticed how the older generation resists techie gadgets (like digital picture frames) and came up with a digital picture frame application that simplifies shouting over the chasm between generations.

They put a digital picture frame on the household wireless network.

There are quite a few manufacturers of those wireless frames, and already a factory-installed mall ware virus was distributed by Best Buy last year via one of the USB plug picture frames. But the viruses haven't yet invaded your computer over the wireless connection. Maybe next year.

But the deal is this.

Young people can take phone or digital pix and EMAIL THEM directly to grandma's picture frame. The frame logs onto grandma's house wireless (you may have to go install a router), and downloads 40 or 50 pictures at say 3AM. It download the pix you uploaded via email attachment (or other means) to the hosting website.

The next day, a whole new slide-show turns up for Grandma to see and she did nothing to make it happen. She doesn't even have to understand how it works! She'll just grin delightedly at her grandchildren.

I love this concept. It is a subscription product though, and the kids have to take the pictures, upload them to the site which the frame logs onto, and pay for renting the bandwidth on the picture hosting site. Here's an example: http://www.ceiva.com/ is a hosting website that sells its own picture frame. You can also find it by searching ceiva on amazon. They gotta be making a fortune on this! I can handle tech, and I want it!

The Digital picture frame has become one of the hottest products on the market, and there are a number of sites that are set up to share pictures with a frame.

I think it'll be the biggest seller this coming gift season -- because I WANT ONE VERY BADLY! The wireless feature really has me hooked.

But consider both Jean's twitter writing tips and this picture frame all in one breath.

We're looking at a TREND here - tech that cures tech problems. Writers of futuristic or paranormal romance can exploit this concept. Find a problem, any problem that keeps lovers apart, and cure the problem with an application of the very thing that caused the problem to begin with. "Hair of the dog."

Think of this scene. A guy wants a girl to pay attention to him. He swaps the picture frame on her work desk for a wireless frame of his own. Then sends her pictures to sell himself to her? Or maybe he hacks into her frame's download site and intersperses his own pix with those of her cousin's new baby?

Practical joke: swap your frame for someone else's and send them baby pictures of someone you want to embarrass.

Paranormal: Suppose a techie ghost finds a way to impose pix on a wireless frame?

Oh, the story potential is totally endless! Welcome to the 21st Century.

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

PS: if you get anything published based on anything like twitter or digital frames, do please be sure I get a review copy and a note referencing this blog! Whee!!! The story potential of those wireless frames is totally endless!!!