Information Feed Tricks And Tips For Writers Part 4 - Keep The Press Out Of It by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Information Feed Tricks And Tips For Writers
Part 4
 Keep The Press Out Of It
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Previous parts in this series on Information Feed:

Part 1 was on the Definition of News:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/11/information-feed-tricks-and-tips-for.html

-----------QUOTE FROM PART 1 of Information Feed--------
When is it fun to acquire information?

When you have been harboring a burning question you need the answer to, AND when you have found that answer for yourself, by your own efforts, without anyone TELLING YOU.

Information someone tells you is boring.

Secrets you unravel for yourself are interesting.

That's what editors mean when they say they want to read a well written manuscript that "holds my interest."  That's code for "make me figure it out." 

Information that is kept from you is irresistibly interesting.

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

That quote relates to Story Springboards, Part 7, where we discuss in detail what it means to write an "interesting" story -- what constitutes INTERESTING and how do you identify it? 

Here is Story Springboards Part 7
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/01/story-springboards-part-7-knack-of.html
----------
Part 2 of Information Feed Tricks and Tips is also on Definition of News:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/11/information-feed-tricks-and-tips-for_23.html

Part 3 is about the publishing business model
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/12/information-feed-tricks-and-tips-for.html

Prior to the series on Information Feed we discussed some of the ingredients here:

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

So now we're going to look at the role of the media in fiction, and how to use the element of media intrusion life in a novel. 

As noted these last few months, to construct an "interesting" piece of fiction, one must consider the world in which the intended reader is living.  You must know more about that world than the reader of your novel would ever want to know. 

Information is boring.  What you are TOLD is boring.  What you figure out for yourself (as discussed in Story Springboards Part 7) is inherently interesting and memorable.  Even if it's the same thing!

So look at how today's public is tuning out the information in "Current Events."

That was the course where 6th grade children learned how to read a newspaper and understand what "The Press" does as the watchdog set to hound our elected officials and expose everything they do (or don't do). 

In the 1940's, people who voted got their news from Newspapers, while Radio News was a bit dubious and superficial.  Though TV had been officially invented, and even deployed commercially, the general public didn't have it, and there was no TV News. 

Visuals of what was going on in the world were distributed via theaters where a short (10 minute) "Newsreel" was shown between the films of the "Double Feature."

A "Double Feature" was two films, one with big name stars called the Feature or A-Picture, and a second with lesser known actors and usually a not-so-good script, cheesy effects, a cheaply made movie called the B-Picture.  You can now get most of them streaming on Amazon.

Between them came cartoons (Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck,) and sometimes a weekly Serial (Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon), and the Newsreel (when most went out to buy popcorn.)  This would be 3-5 hours of entertainment for 25 or 50 cents depending on your age (about the price of a 1lb loaf of bread or a gallon of gas.) Oh, and no commercials before, during or after these segments.  Theaters made all their money from concession stands and box-office.  And they did WELL indeed.

So a tidbit of NEWS was delivered amidst fictional entertainment, fantasy, and humor aimed at kids (but laced with racial and sexual innuendo only adults would notice.)

People didn't go to theaters in order to see the Newsreel about World War II or the Korean War or whatever.  They went to see FICTION, and that was because there was no TV in most homes.  Where there was TV, there was only one to three channels that broadcast maybe 3-4 hours per evening. 

Why the summary of ancient history?  Those people are not part of the modern Romance writer's audience.  Who cares?   

This blog entry is about the role of the MEDIA in Romance Genre and sub-genre, mixed genre. 

Why is this of interest to fiction writers?  Especially to Romance Writers?

Well, concurrently with this "tune-out" of the general public, we've also seen a complete revolution of the Romance field in general, and the gradual addition of MIXED GENRE sub-categories to Romance genre.

We saw the rise of the Victorian, the Historical, the Regency Romance, the Gothic Romance, the Western Romance, each taking a turn in the spotlight.

But it was still just a Romance story transplanted to another venue. 

Now we've seen a full pivot to the Kickass Romance Heroine, a completely different story and plot.  The shrinking violet and wall-flower are still around, and you can catch up on those via Kindle re-issues.  But today's Romance characters are heroic characters whose decisions are implemented. 

Reprints in general were essentially forbidden in Romance publishing for decades.  The stories were too much alike, and one writer (sometimes under several pen names) would write the same story over and over in different settings, with details and characters that differed slightly, and all of them would sell big time.

That era is almost gone.  Almost.  Now there's Paranormal Romance, Vampire Romance, Werewolf Romance, Interstellar Romance, Alien Romance, Military Romance (where the Heroine is a high ranking military fighter, pilot, strategist, troubleshooter, etc.), and women who are CEO's, COO's, etc -- some who are villains, thieves, blackmailers, spies, etc etc. Even hard-boiled Detective Romance has a place.

In other words, the feminist revolution opened up the roles women live in real life, and now that there's a new generation of teens entering the Romance readership which has internalized the idea that just because you're female doesn't mean you can't do THIS (whatever this is.)

It's not happening worldwide, (yet), but it is seeping into every country, even those under theocratic dictatorship.

In fact, the entire story-line (or Romance sub-genre) of a woman coming into her sense of person-hood under the thumb of an autocratic male regime is still hot-stuff.

In the 1960's writers played with the idea of women in the role of the oppressor (the role-reversal ploy). Even Gene Roddenberry tried that in a couple of failed Pilots.

The Millennials are beginning to drag the culture back to a "norm" of some sort.  If you study TV News, (just turn the sound off and watch), you will notice how men still wear shirts, ties, and jackets while women guests and anchors wear shrink-wrapped sheaths cut down to HERE, over spandex. 

Women TV News anchors wear 3 or 4 inch spike, platform shoes. 

And the hair style has reverted to the 1940's "look" of long, dangling hair with shreds tickling faces.

My mother noted, when she hit 50, that all the styles she had been forced to wear 30 years prior had suddenly come back.  She advised, "Never throw anything out.  It'll come back into style again." 

It's taken about 40 or 50 years, but here comes the 1950/60's sheath dress with spiked heels and lanky, artfully un-done hair.

Gene Roddenberry made a RULE for his TV shows (in the 1960's).  Women had to wear their hair UP or cut short.  If they didn't, it was a "signal" that they were sexually available.

To whom, and under what circumstances (home, work, playground with the kids, night out on the town, on school campus?) are we now sexually UNavailable?

The big difference between the 1950's and now is birth control.  These days a woman is expected to be sexually available with no fertility -- or carrying a morning after pill.  Sex is for fun only unless both parties deliberately choose to make it about procreation. 

That is a huge change in self-perception for women that isn't going away any time soon.

But that perception has not cut into the market for Romance novels.  It has, however spawned a multitude of new kinds of stories told in the search for Love, for a Soul Mate, and the thesis that a sensible woman test-drives the guy before getting deeply "involved." 

Now look at the rest of the picture, searching for where this alteration in female style came from and is going (OK, the answer is "around again" as my Mom noted.)

Where we are in this cycle of Sexual Politics -- reflected in dress, speech, work roles, ball-busting, kickass heroines to shrinking violets -- seems to be in a reversion to some kind of "norm."  

In Biblical Times, daughters who had no father were apportioned Land in his stead, by decree of God. 
In Roman times, a widow had property rights and other powers.  By the Middle Ages, all those rights were gone.  By Victorian times, the pendulum on women's rights was starting to move again, widows first. 

As writers, we search for a principle that works in any kind of fiction designed for marketing via any medium from paper print to webisodes. 

Why do we need that principle?

The Romance Genre professional of the 1950's didn't need any such principle.  In that era, a Romance novel was trash, fit for a single reading and tossing into the fire, or the trash (there was no recycle and no e-book.)

Publishers, as noted above, would never reprint a Romance Novel.

If you worked in Romance, you were a second class citizen (maybe third class) among writers.  The scorn was beyond the belief of today's Millennials.

And we still feel the sting of that scorn.  But it's a lot less now than then.  It just hurts more.

Why has the scorn abated at all? 

Romance novels are now considered re-printable -- if only as re-issues in e-book by their own authors. 

Today, there exists such a thing as the Romance Series.  That, too, is new (in both Science Fiction and Romance, as well as in the SFR or PNR mixed genre).

The existence of the mixed genres may be attributable to female contraception, which unleashed women to take over the world.

Or, as some say, Fanfiction (which is written mostly but not exclusively by women) to take over the world.

Here is an academic study to which I contributed an essay titled FIC, or why fan fiction is taking over the world.



What has fanfic to do with media intruding into a fictional world you have built?

Oh, just about everything. 

Birth control unleashed women to finish college, found careers, and relate to men in general as well as to a Soul Mate in particular, in a fashion that fulfilled the human potential inside that female.  This realization of potential found very early expression in fan fiction, where women raised in the 1940's and 1950's sought to create a model of a male/female Relationship between equals.

In the 1940's 1950's and well into the '60's, science fiction invented the fanzine and practiced (and perfected) individual, personalized magazine publishing. But at first fanzines carried nothing but non-fiction written by fans about writers or their professionally published science fiction novels, about the lives and ambitions of people who read those books and magazines, and about why they read them.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/101100368553209934322/albums/5971007155107206257/5971007161129801506

The professional magazine was a main communication channel in addition to Newspapers and Newsreels.  There were a lot, and there were a few "everyone" read (LIFE being one of those, TIME another.) 

Spirit duplication (that purple ink stuff) was used in business and in schools.  Fans used it to copy and distribute (by snailmail) "fanzines" (fan magazines written by and for fans) to fandom.

Fandom was a word that applied not to what you think of today, but to a well organized group of people all over the USA (mostly who hadn't met in person) who paid dues to one or another fan organization.  It had its own language and etiquette that differed markedly from that of the general public.  It spawned the World Science Fiction Convention in the early 1930's, suspended it during WWII, and resumed in the late 1940's.

As science fiction fandom grew, the number of copies of a fanzine grew -- and the larger circulation ones went to mimeograph (Gestetner is the name to research.)

If you look at the pictures of the World Science Fiction Conventions in those decades, you'll note it's mostly men (the writers were men), and you will see a number of women at formal dinner events (where the Hugo was awarded).  They were the SO's and wives,  often who worked hard and made the Event possible, but were not those listed for achievement.  There were exceptions, women who wrote under male bylines.

If you trace this kind of Event through the decades, you'll see that change in fandom in parallel to how it changed in the general population -- Science Fiction people didn't lead this "revolution."  Today science fiction fandom is about 50/50 male/female, as is Gaming, but the purveyors of these story-forms have not yet admitted that.

Science Fiction provided the first outlet for the children of those women you see in those early pictures, the decorative add-ons to what men did.

You may look down on those add-on women, but you might change your attitude if you just sit and imagine what it felt like to be them. 

Very possibly, you are in your thirties, maybe you have one or two children or plan to have them in your thirties.  That's a very different life, and different self-image than those add-on women had.

My grandparent's generation looked at life from that older perspective, and I know a few women who, today, are living that life.  If you know what it feels like to be pregnant, to have a baby that just doesn't sleep for months then barely naps, to get pregnant again before that kid is toilet trained, and so on for 9 to 12 pregnancies starting at age maybe 16-20 years, and turning 40 with two toddlers in tow -- just think about that weary drag on strength, spirit, and self-image.

Think about burying two of those hard-birthed children.

Think about having your body's strength drained away like that while having to do all their laundry by hand (and iron it all) and shop on a shoestring budget and scratch-cook almost everything they ate. 

It isn't a Regency Romance lifestyle.  There are no servants.  And you have to keep all that off your husband's shoulders because he has an even more draining challenge to keep a job and bring home a paycheck. 

Those women didn't monitor the News of the Day via some internet feed.  They knew almost nothing about what the men were up to in Washington D.C. and frankly, couldn't care less. 

Those women were (and still are all around the world) kickass heroines of the first class.

That lifestyle defines what it means to be a woman -- it means indomitable will, keen judgement, crafty budgeting, fiscal responsibility, and an iron fisted control of the husband and his paycheck. 

Remember, too, in those days women died in childbirth -- mostly, that was what any girl had to look forward to as her fate.

Don't feel sorry for them.  Respect your ancestors.

But now consider the women TV News anchors wearing shrink-wrap dresses cut down to HERE and spike heels that serve no purpose but to make it hard to walk around the set as a man does.

ASIDE: If you note the apparel in most videogames, it's shrink-wrap because animating flowing robes, skirts, even loose fitting pants, is one huge (expensive) technical challenge (even though Disney's been doing it for generations.)  So today's Millennials are used to the image of heroic people in shrink-wrap clothing.  Perhaps they are mimicking game-clothing in real life?  Or it just "looks right" to them?

I called that News Anchor apparel change from women in pants suits or at least long sleeved jackets, or dresses with long sleeves and high necks, a "reversion to the norm." 

But what is the "norm?" 

Is it the early 1900's -- the Old West? -- or Regency ballroom low-cut open bosom -- or the cult-modern version of the shirt-dress look?  What's "norm?" 

A writer doesn't need to know the correct answer to that -- but a writer must have an answer.  The answer the writer has (at the moment the Idea For A Story occurs) contains the Theme of this story.

You can make an answer up, especially when worldbuilding an alien culture that will spawn your Leading Man.  A differing "norm" can create conflict.

Take, for example, the "Lost Colony" scenario where you are writing the Old West set on another planet where explorers from Earth have crashed and are trying to eek out a living. 

You have to get inside the head of a young woman raised on that planet to see no escape from a life of rapid-succession child bearing as she meets an Orbital Lander from Earth and sees her Soul Mate step out proclaiming the Colony Found.

He's from Earth at a time when women don't "bear children" -- but have them incubated in a mechanical womb.  Or maybe there is such a thing as a womb "3-D printed" from the mother's DNA that incubates the fetus without strain on the mother's metabolism? 

What would that do to the psyche of all Earth's cultures?  What of the studies that show fetus responses to music and other environmental effects around the pregnant woman?  Would heartbeat and music be provided?  Everyone the same? Or unique for each fetus?

Maybe women have household robots, (Artificial Intelligence as good as what we now see depicted on the TV Show ALMOST HUMAN?) 



I can hardly wait until they do an episode of Almost Human where the AI has to babysit a family of kids while the mother is in the hospital.  I doubt it would be a challenge for him to deliver a baby -- medical procedures are probably in memory -- but you can't program child-care (yet.)  Kids are known for original thinking. 

Would being raised by an AI au paire change humans?  The answer to that could be a THEME. 

Look, here we have a website agenting in-home child-care.
http://www.aupaircare.com/

So you can see SFR writers have to be able to don the mindset of the woman from a world where there is no such thing as female contraception -- and if there were, it would be anathema because the very survival of the colony depends on a growing population. 

And you should have no trouble adopting the mindset of a young woman with a Talent (for art, music, acting, business management, sharp-shooting) being crushed into a life of continual pregnancy until she's too old and worn out to do anything she dreamed of as a child.

But having adopted your character's mindset, you now have the Information Feed problem mentioned in the title of this series. 

Somehow, you have to bring your reader into that always-pregnant mindset.

That process of bringing a reader into a new mindset is what I term "Information Feed."  You must feed your reader information in small bits deliciously wrapped in emotional significance. 

To provide your reader entre into the mindset of a woman who does, heroically, seek a life of child bearing and child rearing, you must appreciate the current culture's attitudes, and grasp this process of "reversion to the mean" that I've referenced above.

Such a "Lost Colony" novel really is a contrast/compare essay of two extreme positions highlighted against "the mean" -- the central, no strain, position human cultures tend to oscillate around.

Oscillate is the keyword. 

Currently, Millennial women demand contraception as part of their healthcare insurance policy.  I'm not coming down on one side or the other of the Obamacare argument over contraception.  I'm focused here on how the media figures into storytelling, Romance Novel writing and marketing. 

I'm showing you how to observe your world and think about it like a science fiction writer, not a denizen of that world. 

Stand outside of human history and look at the ideas, opinions, and standards of right and wrong as they oscillate around a mean over thousands of years.

To write a novel that will stay in print for 20 years (as my first novel, House of Zeor, did) then get reprinted and reprinted by different publishers for the next few decades (as my first novel, House of Zeor, did), and leap the gap into whatever new media delivery system becomes popular through those decades (House of Zeor went to e-book, and is now in audiobook, and its series is in development at a videogame company), nail that mean and know where your audience is now in that oscillation.

Just as in sharpshooting, you have to "lead your target."  You have to shoot at where your target audience will be, not where it is.

I don't see that changing any time soon.  Even with Indie production (or Amazon subsidized production) of web-distributed feature films, there is usually at least a 5 year lead time between "I've got an Idea" and "There It Is On My Screen!"  Very often, unless you're handed a work-for-hire contract and have 6 weeks to write the script, the lead time can be 10 years.

So assessing that oscillation around the mean can be a critical skill for any writer. 

Upon your assessment of the world you live in will depend your reprintability, your ability to craft a Series, and your ability to leap across tech-upgrades. 

In other words, your retirement fund depends on your ability to assess the harmonic motion underlying our ambient culture(s). 

Once you've arrived at an assessment and tested it out by watching TV News, Magazine and Web and Blog News, and comments on news stories on blogs, and listened to conversations at parties (that's an important element -- eavesdropping and keeping your mouth shut at parties to scarf up the ambient opinion), then you park your assessment in the back of your mind where your subconscious can find it.  Your subconscious will eventually craft an IDEA out of it.

Don't try to do this consciously.  A story deliberately crafted to showcase your own opinion about current culture will come off as "preachy" or as thin, awkward, with cardboard characters riddled with cliche.

Also, remember all the discussions on this blog about how necessary it is for a writer, particularly of Romance, to be able to argue all sides of any issue, including hot-button issues like contraception or abortion.  Remember, if there is nothing you could accept as evidence that you're wrong, you hold a non-falsifyable opinion.  That's not an opinion at all but rather it is a religious belief (even if God doesn't figure in it!).  You always have to image the counter-argument that would convince you to change your mind.

Romance writers of the 1940's were talking to a fairly homogenous readership, pregnant women raising kids and wondering if they had the right husband because their guys only wanted sex and more sex while women in that position need emotional support and admiration from their men, especially admiration for their heroism.

Also remember, in those days, divorce was a horrid stigma that followed the children and stunted their careers -- especially if the woman remarried.  Whisper campaigns killed. 

Put yourself in the position of such a wife/mother who really (truly, deep inside) wanted to be such a wife and mother, a stay-at-home Mom with no other way to make a living.

In the 1940's, Unions and all men solemnly believed that working men had to make more money than women who worked because a man worked to support a family, and women who were stay-at-home-moms actually EARNED half his paycheck by feeding, clothing, and tumbling him to keep him in top shape to do his job.

For a man to have children at all meant that a woman had to be pregnant most of her career-founding years (read sick as a dog, weak, coddled because of her "delicate condition" and rendered stupid and useless to the outside world by "mood swings.")

To have children meant someone had to stay home and take care of them (no such thing as day-care) -- no way could a Mom be employed without doing irreparable harm to the children.  A working Mom was abusing her children.  Think about that.  Get inside that mindscape. 

Remember the 1950's and 1960's post-WWII era saw the advent not just of the Living Room TV Set, but also the electric washing machine (and dryer), permanent press clothing, and a plethora of "labor saving devices" for the kitchen -- including refrigerators with freezers on top.  Less time scratch cooking (more packaged meals; the TV Dinner), and less time shopping and hauling food home every day by hand (women didn't have CARS -- families with two cars didn't become common until the 1960's and 70's).  Women cooked, cleaned and shopped by hand -- but they didn't have to drive carpool because schools were in walking distance of every home.

Any one item taken by itself wouldn't mean anything to the ambient mindset of the era.

Taken all together, they form a pattern of a huge weight taken off female shoulders allowing women to stand up straight, take a deep breath and re-assess their own self-image, independence, and power.  The 1970's whirlwind of change didn't happen because of ONE BOOK -- it happened because men commercialized convenience food and labor saving devices because they loved their wives.

That's a Point Of View -- it's a thematic element that has to be represented by a Character whose dialogue reflects that attitude in subtle ways.

Why would you need to learn that point of view if you're writing a Contemporary Romance aimed at the Millennials market?

The answer is simple.  To depict a character that is not "cardboard" and to reveal motivations without writing long, internal monologues, (motivations such as What Does She See In Him) you need another character, and that other character has to be someone OLDER. 

Parents and Grandparents are good prospects to flesh out your main character, uncles and old mentors, elderly neighbors, a dependable servant, a clever shop owner, the cop on the beat. 

Fictional characters also work to voice the dialogue that argues the other side of a matter -- characters in old novels or old movies that your Main Characters quote or reference.  "Those aren't the bots you're looking for." 

Oh, and speaking of The Force, don't forget the role that organized Religion has played, and still does in other parts of this world.  Religion is generally considered an oppressive force today, but one of your characters has to present the case for Religion as the actual Liberator of women.  This doesn't have to come from Clergy, but likely prospects for minor characters could be a female Rabbi, and other religions are giving women major roles, too.  Remember that this trend is also an oscillator. 

So we have these social and technological trends that oscillate while governing (independently) sexual behavior, reproductive behavior, marriage laws, gender-based self-esteem, career choices, wealth potential, power potential, gender based property ownership laws, sumptuary laws, and many other departments of life that anthropologists study.

Under "self-esteem" place all the categories of a person's access to communication with others, and sources of in-coming information (such as News, Weather, Sports, Gossip).

Would the good wife/mother hang out at the tavern to hear the latest Bard who wandered through?  Not likely.  They'd pump their men for the story.  The story would be edited by drunken inattention, illiteracy, bad memory, disinterest in the topic, and consideration of a woman's irrational emotional responses to men's business.

Such women didn't have blogs and online support Groups, or any of the worldwide associations we have today.  They weren't less intelligent than we are.  They just lived in an information-vacuum.

Which brings us back to what I sketched out at the top of this blog entry.

Today, the Millennials and their parents have "tuned out" -- they don't listen to "The News" the way people did during World War II.  They don't devote an hour a day to absorbing the import of doings and Events around the world, intent on their responsibility as voters to make the right assessment of the behavior of those they have elected.

Yes, that attitude is also oscillating. 

In the 1950's Radio, Newspaper, fledgling TV, Magazines, and Newsreels were commercial endeavors that served an audience keenly focused on understanding what was going on, and why. 

Here's the thing though.  When it came to voting, if a husband and wife disagreed on an issue on the ballot, they would both not-vote in that election because their votes would cancel each other out, so why bother.

But for the most part, because women were so focused inside the home, and so bedraggled/exhausted/spent, women believed what men told them and tended to vote the way their husbands said they should.  Nevermind secret ballot, the women voluntarily conformed to their husband's political opinions.  (fat chance of that today!)

The 1970's changed that, and women became News Consumers -- a bonanza for advertisers!  Women control spending in the USA -- pretty much always have. 

So women were "tuned out" in the early 1900's, "tuned in" by the 1970's, and now we're approaching the 2020's (just six years hence). 

Where have News Audiences been this last 20 years?  Tuned-in or Tuned-out?  And where will they go next?  (oscillation, remember - is the mean around which we oscillate creeping because of technology?)

Check the new Core Curriculum that has roiled up so much controversy as the Federal Government tries to control childhood education and make it uniform across the country.  See what your kids are being taught now.

Check particularly for Current Events -- what sources are children told to bring in to class to give speeches on?  The Web?  The New York Times or LA Times?  Local papers?  Video clips?  Huffington Post?  What are the authoritative sources most admired by school children today?

Most likely, all you know about the Core Curriculum standards has been learned from TV News or talk-show coverage.  (pundits and talk-shows are a relatively new phenomenon, too).

Unless you're an activist, you probably have not read the original source material that puts a gag order on local school personnel when talking to parents.  And there's very little coverage in mainstream news - TV Network News, Cable News, just don't focus on the revamping of the education system.

Several forces are at work there.  Fewer people are having children, and fewer of those who are growing a family have time to pay attention to News. 

Since our news sources are commercially driven (except NPR which gets public money and thus is politically grant-driven), they edit the news to be of interest (i.e. deliver eyeballs to commercials) to the life-situations of the viewers. Since fewer viewers have children in school, the news programs don't cover what's going on inside education -- must not bore viewers with information they don't want.

The rest of the country, retiring baby-boomers, 40-somethings who may have kids in school but both mother and father work full time, unemployed Millennials, and laid-off middle-aged people who are in the depressed/hopeless stage, may watch TV but even when watching News expect to be entertained not informed.  As a result, most of what's broadcast as news is really gossip and local news like accidents put up to fill National News time.  They show you video clips because it's more entertaining.

SHOW DON'T TELL is the watchword for good fiction because information is boring. 

That's why mystery and suspense has to be structured by the Socratic Method.

In January, 2014, we discussed how to use the Socratic Method to find and construct your story opening:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/01/story-springboards-part-7-knack-of.html

The Socratic Method gets the reader to ask questions, wonder, formulate answers, then test those answers.

That mental process is inherently entertaining, and the key skill in "writing an interesting story."  People are inherently interested in their own ideas, not yours.  After all, whose ideas are you most interested in?  What gets you racing to your tablet or computer to write something down or look something up?  The Ideas that energize you are your own, and it is your possession of them that makes them interesting -- not the content of the IDEA.

The questions to ask yourself as you craft your second draft is, "Why does this matter?"  "Why does 'the truth' matter to this character?" "Why does that character care?" Or the Romance version, "What does she see in him?"

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

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/09/theme-dialogue-integration-part-1-whats.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/09/theme-dialogue-integration-part-2-whats.html

It's the same with Science Fiction -- it's all about showing the reader into a puzzling situation that the reader gets to solve.

As in the Socratic Method, though, the way to hold your audience's attention is to withhold information.  There's an art to that, as well as a craft.

That's why I call this technique "information feed" not "information withholding." 

The core of the technique is to get your reader asking questions, postulating their own answers, and changing their minds about their assessment of the situation and the characters involved.  You can't tell the reader what you already know -- that's boring.  You have to get the reader to figure out for themselves what you already know. 

You do this by feeding information one kernel at a time.  The easiest way to structure that feed into a story is to have your main Point of View Character ignorant of everything you, the writer, knows at the beginning of the story. 

Then "feed" that information to your Character, causing the character to a)doubt what they know, b) seek more information, c) find partial or wrong data, d) reassess what they think, e) act on insufficient data, f) get into a huge mess because of acting on insufficient data, g) find out more, h) act again and succeed.

Now, look again at the title of this entry -- Keep The Press Out Of It.

That is advice from the screenwriting series, SAVE THE CAT GOES TO THE MOVIES! by Blake Snyder (of the 3 book series that I recommend.)



How do you apply it to novel writing?

In Romance, usually, you work with a tight focus on the lives of two people who are working out a Relationship.  So usually the media would not be in the story.

When you create a character or situation which would inevitably (in our real world) attract media attention into what is a private transaction, you destroy the bubble in which your story occurs.  The characters begin to respond to the external force of media attention more strongly than to each other, and the entire plot explodes and dissipates.  Various successive scenes refocus on the external scrutiny, and you lose your way through the story.

Look again at
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/01/story-springboards-part-7-knack-of.html

That's the Knack of Hooking Readers.  The abstract mental process of a writer creating a "hook" is explained via the analogy of a screwtop bottle.  When you let the media into your story, you strip the threads of that screwtop. 

When Blake Snyder was in the midst of writing that series, and propounded the maxim, "Keep The Press Out Of It" - he had a weekly blog.  I went on the blog and explained to him where I had used media reports to move a plot, and he agreed that technique was usable.

What was the example I gave him?

It was in my Vampire Romance THOSE OF MY BLOOD -



- which is set on the Earth's Moon.  The main character sees a news report showing his house, back on Earth, blowing up, and follows the story of who did that and why.  Knowing that information, learning it via the media, he acted in ways he would not have acted otherwise.  The fact that the team on the Moon was in the media spotlight was inescapable via the story's logic.  At the end, the media arrive in force, and that drives the characters to act yet again.

That novel was difficult to write, but the publisher who bought it for hardcover publicized it as my breakout novel.

Keeping that TIGHT FOCUS on the characters' developing and changing relationship, and using media for information feed for items the characters would not ordinarily learn about, not letting media become a major plot-driver, is difficult. 

There is one way to let the media be a character, and still not include reporters as characters.

Consider the high-profile character -- a corporate executive, multi-billionaires, Presidential Candidates, Oscar Winning celebrities, people who have the media lurking in bushes and chasing after them all the time.

Such people treasure PRIVACY -- and much of their energy is spent getting away from media, locking them out, walling them away. 

That's a CONFLICT.  Conflict resolution is what every story is about.

When you introduce media into your story, you introduce a major conflict inside and outside your characters, a conflict so major that it overshadows and pre-empts whatever conflict you introduced on page 1.

The theme shifts from what you wanted it to be to whatever the media represents to your readers.

The story then becomes all about the effect that your characters' actions have on the general public, how the public reacts, and what that reaction does to your characters.

That's HUGE.  Beginning writers generally can't handle that big a mess of themes, sub-themes, conflicts nested within conflicts. 

One example of how to do that well is


In Gini Koch's ALIEN series, one of the minor characters who provides many plot-moving elements as well as thematic statements is a reporter for a scandal rag.  He used to do UFO stories that were real, but present them as the usual crack-pot-nonsense.  Now, though, everyone knows there really are Aliens - some living on Earth defending Earth from others that are powerful and hostile. (If that sounds like THOSE OF MY BLOOD, it is like it.  THOSE OF MY BLOOD is about Earth's native vampires defending Earth from vampires from outer space.  ALIEN series is about Earth's native space aliens defending Earth from other space aliens.)

Yes, I love Earth.  Yes, I would defend it from all comers.  But yes, I do think it very likely most Aliens are good friend material if we handle First Contact well.

The first part of the ALIEN series is about a woman who thinks of herself as an ordinary human who gets caught up in the secret (out of the view of the media) war the resident aliens are waging against invading aliens. 

Little by little, information is fed to the reader as the Earth woman learns "what is going on." 

Gini Koch has gotten both the information feed and the use of the media just right in this series.

But take a good look at these books.  They are HUGE -- very long, very expensive to publish and very expensive to buy because of the size of each volume.  That's what happens when you include the media, or a media-attention worthy Event or plot-line or character.

That kind of material is hard to control, hard to discipline, and it takes strength built through practice to achieve this. 

Note that in the early ALIEN novels, Koch has "kept the media out of it" -- and only gradually introduced this reporter character.  Study how that is done.  It is done exceptionally well. 

All rules are red flags in front of the bulls who are writers -- all rules will be attacked, and sometimes broken.  Most of the time, breaking a rule of this kind will result in unusable material.  But when you do it successfully, you hit best seller ranks. 

The secret is to practice in secret.  Remember, publishing is itself "media" and doesn't always mix well with real life.  Some of what you do does not go into books or onto the web. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Guest Post by Deborah Macgillivray - Wolf In Wolf's Clothing

Here below is a Guest Post by a writer whose book I reviewed here a while ago, and still remember.  It's not just memorable, it's vivid and wonderful!  Here's the post where I discuss that novel:

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

And this is about the Dorchester publishing bankruptcy and how it affects writers.  And what writers are doing about it.  See official notice from SFWA posted at end of this blog post. 

You really must read Macgillivray.  It's not just good entertainment.  It's informative, instructive, illustrative of good writing, and inspiring too. 

I'm thrilled to bring you this story in her own words, and I want you to pay close attention, most especially if you are intending to embark on a career in ficton writing. 

Here's where to find a list of Deborah's books that are currently available in Kindle:

Deborah Macgillivray

-----------Guest Post from Deborah Macgillivray -----------

Life does imitate art―

© By Deborah Macgillivray

Oscar Wilde said in his 1889 essay, The Decay of Lying, that "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life".  You might say I am living proof of that.  At the very end of 2009, just days before Christmas, I thought the most urgent and important thing in my life was meeting the deadlines for my next two books.  At eight in the evening, I had typed “the end” to my next historical novel, fourth in the Dragons of Challon™ series― Redemption ― and was going over notes to finish the fourth in the Sisters of Colford Hall ™ series― To Bell The Vampire. 

I had been pulling all-nighters, overdosing on 5 Hour Energy for days to get the book finished.  I felt happy with the novel, so I treated myself to what I hadn’t indulged in too much that week―sleep.  I slept so well!  I cannot ever recall resting as peacefully as I did for those few hours from 8:30 pm until 1:21 am.  Sometimes, people jokingly remark that is sleeping the sleep of the dead.  I came very close to that being reality.

I jerked from that velvet sleep at the wee hour of the morn, knowing something was wrong.  The lights were out.  I had fallen asleep with the television going, so there should have been that soft illumination filling the room.  But there was nothing.  I never awaken easily, so I nearly tumbled out of bed trying to feel my way to the light on the nightstand.  When I did, I saw something very strange.  The room was black, like a thick woolen curtain, yet a bright orange glow showed toward the bottom six inches.  That was the first inkling that I was in dire trouble. 

Drawing a breath I sucked in oily black smoke.  I had not been aware of that fact before, because I by chance had been sleeping with a pillow on my head.  I had been suffering an ear ache, and sleeping with the pillow over my head made it hurt less.  Through the heavy befuddlement of my still sleepy brain, I recalled a fire safety tip, which said to get to the floor level because there was still good air down low.  Good tip, but one that was unworkable for me.  I knew if I went down on my knees I might not come out of this alive.  I had knee surgery in May and it hadn’t healed right.  Dropping to my knees and crawling would have been sealing my death.

I fumbled around for the phone in the bedroom.  It was dead.  So holding my breath, I staggered toward the other end of the house.  It was then I first saw the fire―a massive orange monster that had already engulfed one whole wall of the house and was going up through the roof.  It’s hard to think when you are faced by a horror like that.  Damn dangerous not to!!!  I had to go past the flames to get to the kitchen where the wall phone was.  Skirting the spreading fire, I reached the darkened room.  Stupidly, I wasted precious seconds thinking I could throw some water on the flames to slow it down, with the hopes of holding things at bay until the fire department came.  Only, there was no water coming out.  I burned one hand on the faucet when I tried to turn it on.  The bloody faucet was like touching a brand.  It just gurgled and hissed steam!  I reeled to the phone to call for help, but that phone was dead as well.  What I didn’t know―the phone lines had already burnt through on the outer wall.

 I saw I had made a bad mistake in wasting the time coming to this end of the house.  The fire was running along the center of the ceiling in the porch room.  As it shot across the roof and ceiling, liquid fire was raining down on the carpet and the woolen carpeting was going up like tissue paper!  Our front door was on the To Do List for repair.  Recently, it had become swollen from so much rain and needed planing because it kept sticking, seeing it impossible to get open.  There was no way I could go out through that entrance.  The only avenue left would see me walk through the fire, back the way I had come, to reach the rear door.  The sliding glass doors on the side were already engulfed in the writhing flames.  I stared in horror as I saw the glass beginning to melt and buckle, heard the pinging of the metal frame starting to warp.  Within seconds I would have been trapped. 

It was a very bizarre moment.  I was still fuzzy-headed from just waking up and the sheer enormity of all this happening about me was simply too much for my mind to take in.  Worse, I thought for a few heartbeats that surely I was sleeping still, dreaming about my last book A Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing, and I would awaken and laugh at the silly nightmare of getting trapped inside one’s own book.  The final scene in my novel had dealt with a thatched house going up in flames and with the heroine trapped inside, what she did to survive.  How utterly bizarre, that a book just released in October should be a reflection of my life in December!  So much of what I had written for that book echoed what I was now living through.  Talk about eerie, almost prophetic!

I watched as the fire on the carpet rose to chest level.  I have very long hair, and I was concerned the flames raining down would set it afire.  But at that point, I had no alternative, no hope of surviving this unless I moved.  My lungs were already crying out, desperate for air, but I couldn’t suck in that foul black smoke.  I never knew smoke could be so black, or the heat from the flames could almost shrivel your skin like drying leather.  The scents, the sights, the feel will never leave me.  To this day, I have problems being in a totally black room, or to smell the scent of someone burning a fire in a fireplace.

Finally, I went forward into the crucible, taking the twenty foot long room in jumps, just praying I would be going too fast for the flames to catch me, praying that bad knee didn’t buckle and send me crashing down into the room of fire.   I was lucky.  I did reach the outside, and the injuries were small compared to what could have happened.  Some smoke in my lungs, a burned hand.  Only, my two cats were still inside.  I couldn’t reach them from that side of the house, so I went around to the front, trying to see if I could get in through a window to find them.   All windows now had flames coming from them.  The only hope was to try and dig a hole through the wall.  I took a long piece of metal and broke off the wooden siding, trying to dig through the insulation, beaver board and a brick wall on the inside. 

A couple, who had just gotten married and was coming back from celebrating, were passing by and saw the flames.  They called the fire department.  The firemen came with engine lights flashing and, sirens wailing, but it was too late.  In those few minutes, from the time I had awoken until the newlyweds passing pulled me from the hole in the wall, where I was trying to reach my kitties, my whole life went up in a conflagration.  There was absolutely nothing left.

My identification was gone.  Fortunately, my husband had been away and was coming home that night or his license, credit cards and checks would have been lost, too, complicating what I had to face in the coming days.  I was in shock, naturally.  Everything was gone!  My manuscripts, my computers, my clothing.  I had run into the cold night with the clothes on my back and barefooted.  I laughed it was lucky I had fallen asleep in my jeans and a sweater that night, or I would have been running around in a nightgown!

Currently, I am still working to rebuild my life, to heal from this devastation.  It has taken time to settle the past and embrace the future.  A new home, new computers…a new life.  With all that going on, my writing has had to take second place.  The two novels were lost.  Oh, I had copies on external hard drives―which melted along with the laptops.  I have since learned to use Carbonite, so all my writing is now backed up online. 

During all this, you learn new priorities and your perspectives change.  Things that were so important suddenly took a backseat to the healing, adjusting and rebuilding my life.  As soon as my days would return to something that resembled normal, another tragedy hit me in my husband nearly died in the following year. 

He began experiencing grave seizures that saw him in ICU for weeks, not expected to live.   Fortunately, and with good care, he did.  Then, we faced a long hospitalization and rehab for him to learn to walk again.  Once more, things came around and I thought the troubles were behind me.  Yet again, I faced one of those situations that test your strength when my husband faced losing vision in his right eye.  After five months of laser treatments we are hopeful in time his vision will be all right.

I suppose that is why when news of Dorchester Publishing going bankrupt was announced it hardly seemed more than a bump in the road to me.  Before the fire I would have been devastated that one of my publishers was going out-of-business.  Dorchester left hundreds of authors “orphaned”― worse, left those writers without paying them for years.  The news hit many authors with a devastating impact.  I truly enjoyed writing the Sisters of Colford Hall series, and knew my editor, Chris Keeslar, “got” my quirky stories of the women who found love better the second time around.  I would miss working with him.  I had a total of eight books in the series planned and in production.  Three were out.  What would happen now?

Well, once more, things are coming around.  My husband’s health is stable.  I have healed―mostly.  There are times when I see a fire portrayed in a movie or television that I have to walk away or close my eyes against the images, fighting not to be sucked back into the moment that nearly claimed my life.  As I said, I cannot take being in a darkened room, and no longer enjoy the scent of a wood fire. 

And, my writing is coming around.  There is a new future for the Sisters series.  Amazon Publishing/Montlake has given me an offer to see the first three books put into Kindle, Tradesize and Hardback.  So, if I accept their contract, they will fix some of the wrongs done by Dorchester and give my Montgomerie sisters a new home.

I still look at the words I wrote in A Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing.  The scenes bring a chill to my spine, just how closely they mirrored what happened to me.  I don’t know what prompted Mr. Wilde to pen that phrase about life imitating art, but I know he was quite right―it does.

-----------END GUEST POST --------------

Now that is a snatch of real life in the business of Publishing. 

OK, not everyone has a house fire hit along with dire illness and a publisher's bankruptcy all at once, but "life" gets in the way of "writing" one way or another. 

I haven't done Deborah's natal chart, so I don't know the facts in her case or her husband's -- BUT -- this triple-disaster syndrome is typical of Pluto transits to sensitized natal points, and those kinds of disasters -- dire and terrible BLOWS to life's stability coming in a series stretched over several years, creating a "new normal" if you survive -- are typical Pluto effects at the pinnacle of success.  It's the same energy that manifests as success and DIRE BLOWS.  Knowing that fact in a very instinctive way makes a writer truly great, but only if you survive the blows.  That is why I've discussed Pluto in such depth in previous posts on this blog. 

If you do survive it, the knowledge informs your next novel.  Disasters would have happened, even if you were doing something else for a living, but you wouldn't have developed the skills to use that experience in a novel, to share it, to help others survive their blows. 

The thing is, the publishing business is a business, and does not care or compensate for the Events of a writer's life. 

The writer has to keep going through all that, pick up on the other side and go on producing words. 

My point here is that one does not "become" a writer.  One is, or is not, "a writer."  Writing is what you can't help doing no matter what's going on.  Selling what you write, that's a totally different matter.

There will be more twists and turns to the Dorchester saga and the fates of the writers with contracts with Dorchester.  A PART 2 for Deborah's saga as events develop with this new venue should be forthcoming in a few months. 

But I'm telling you straight, if you are planning "to become a writer," think again -- and again.

You just don't "become" a writer -- you discover that you "are" a writer, and can't help it. 

--------------October 14, 2012 QUOTE ----------------
THIS VIA AN OFFICIAL SFWA MAILING TO WRITERS:

Because of severe problems with rights and payments, Dorchester Books was placed on probation in December 2010.  By January 2012, it was clear that the company was on the verge of going out of business, and they soon fired most of their staff.  The company managed to avoid bankruptcy, however, and remained in control of it's contracts with writers.
 Earlier this year, Amazon Publishing purchased the contracts for well over 1,000 Dorchester books.  Dorchester authors were offered the chance to join Amazon Publishing and receive full back royalties or have their rights reverted.  Amazon reported that a potential 1,900 titles were involved, and that 225 authors had turned down the offers and asked for their rights back.
 Amazon/Dorchester reports on their Web site:

 "At this time, we are completing the reversion process, transferring all titles back to their respective authors. Though we have made great strides, our research has uncovered a number of authors for whom we have no contact information. In addition, there are a number of titles without corresponding authors. To complete this reversion process, we will need your help."
 There is a form on the site for authors to use to reclaim rights: http://www.dorchesterpub.com

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

So, after you've begun selling Science Fiction or Fantasy to markets that pay advances, you should seriously consider joining various writer organizations such as sfwa.org and/or http://www.epicorg.com/index.php 



Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

What Exactly Is Editing - Part III

See Part I of this series,  
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-i.html

and part II
 http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html

We left off in Part II with a Science Fiction Romance Editor, a character you yourself created, sweating over a stack of submissions trying to save her job.

The question is, "What Will She Do?" Which manuscript will she choose?

Now we up the ante.

On her desk are a stack of 1 page novel descriptions from her slush pile readers and a few pitches from Agents who have always done business crisply with her.

But the books from the Agents just haven't sold well enough to keep her job off the chopping block.

The clients of these top Agents are all seasoned professionals who rewrite to order, on deadline, never miss a deadline, and don't waste the Editor's time with gossipy phone calls or emotional hand-holding sessions. These are writers who won't "feel honored" to be chosen. They're craftsman proud of their work who will respect the editor who can see the quality in their product. They're ready to do business as equals, not toady to a power-figure.

She doesn't have to maintain a personal relationship with the clients of these top Agents. They are professional writers who know what they're doing and just do it - on time.

Experience has taught our editor (the hard way) that if she picks something out of the slush pile, the writer (who couldn't land an Agent) will then spend whole, long days of the editor's time on the phone basically asking for writing lessons.

Some editors are writers, too, but that's less and less common in the new publishing world. We'll discuss the difference between writer and editor later in this series.

Our editor can't afford to give writing lessons (though some editors do that even when they can't afford the time because they see $$$ if the produce can be perfected).

Our pressured editor, however, actually doesn't know how writers write or how to teach how to write, even if she is a good professional writer herself. She's trained and paid to recognize at the gut level the perfected result of good writing, not to examine the internal, subconscious mechanism by which this product is created.

She has no time, and her job is on the line.

And she's a corporate professional. She knows that she must not let either the Agents or their writers know that her job is on the line.

She needs a best-seller, and she needs it now. The authors of her former best-sellers haven't been selling so well lately. She doesn't know why. Where to turn?

What is she going to do?

Now, as a writer, you have walked a mile in your customer's high-heels. You can feel the starch in her shirt. You know how tight her pantyhose are and how expensive her haircut was.

Do some method-acting. Feel the roiling emotions, the sweating tension, the desperation that must not show.

You know now who you are dealing with.

Whether you connect with this editor via an Agent or through the slush pile, or at a convention tossing her an elevator pitch - you know what your customer needs from you because you can feel it.

Your customer needs to know that you understand the pickle she's in, won't ever - EVER - let anyone know that you know that things are tough - (never let them see you sweat) - and your customer needs to know that you have the solution to her problem.

Now get this straight.

Your customer needs to know that you have the solution to her problem, not that you JUST THINK you have but really do have it.

What is it that professional Editors do?

They keep their jobs so that they can license your next novel.

They keep their jobs by staying calm and producing concrete results that the bean-counters upstairs can use to keep their jobs!

So your job as "a professional writer" - is not just to produce solid prose the publisher can use to make a profit for the publisher, but your job is to keep your editor calm, collected, confident and successful.

How can you do that?

By assuring her that you are a professional writer with the following traits:

1) That you have totally divorced your emotional life from the string of words you have to offer her.

2) That these words are your personal self-expression, and that your Self is very close to the target audience that her salesman want to hit big with, and will hit that audience in the emotions because of it.

3) That even though these words started out very personal to you, you have attained a clinical distance from them (how you did that is none of her business)

4) That if anything in this work doesn't look to her as if it will fit through the marketing channel smoothly, you will change it to fit perfectly with only the vaguest wave from her to indicate where nips-n-tucks are needed and without further detailed direction from her. 

5) That you understand the exacting (and ever changing) shape of the marketing channel she's got to feed and your goal is to produce a product that will fit neatly into that marketing channel and boost her career.

6) That you know she is a professional editor and therefore is not out to express her personal artistic message via your words

7) That she is your customer, is always right, and not in need of your instruction in how to do her job.

8) That you know exactly what you're doing and will produce results on deadline no matter what may be going haywire in your personal life. You are a professional writer, and keep your homelife out of the office (but you have a rich homelife and are stable and dependable in that context.)

Read that list of assurances again and mind the repetitions; they are important. Note that the face you turn to your editor is totally antithetical to the inner heart and soul of "a writer." It is the professional writer's face.

Read the list a third time. Think about this. An awful lot of the really big best sellers, writers with books that become movies and movies that become best selling books, were journalists first, or for years. What do journalists have that most aspiring novelists don't? Years and years and YEARS of working to a totally inflexible, absolute, do-it-or-die deadline.

A working journalist presenting a novel to an editor has an edge because the journalist will be assumed to make the production deadlines or die trying.

This is an increasingly rare trait in the modern world, and has thus become a saleable commodity in the prose marketplace. Get a professional credential that bespeaks a habit of living within deadlines and never missing them - and you have an edge against all the competition for an editor's (or producer's) attention.

Read that list a fourth time. Note what's missing: art, artistic value, intrinsic merit of the work, discussion of theme or content. Nothing in that list addresses your art. Nothing in that list captures your interest. 

Everything important to you as a writer is in your art. You live for your writing, and all the rest is waiting. That's why you'll argue with editors about whether this character would or wouldn't do that thing - and whether this scene should be deleted or another scene added.  That content is important to you. 

No other functionary in the fiction delivery system cares about anything that's important to you. Knowing that in your bones makes you a professional writer.

You know that your readers (your fans and potential fans) want your heart, not the commercial formula packaging with which you have surrounded your heart. 

But the packaging is necessary insulation to shape your story to the delivery system's tubes leading from you to your reader.

Your readers and fans will never see your heart beating gloriously unless you can package it to survive the 900 pound gorilla that lives in the back of the UPS truck and loads suitcases onto planes. That packaging that protects your heart is the commercial fiction structure, the formula, the trope that academics talk about. It's Blake Snyder's beat sheet and genres.

Read that list of traits a fifth time. It's all about your ability to package a story, not about the story itself.

What makes your product different from the product of other writers (the only real reason you ever write anything) is never mentioned. Nobody in the fiction delivery system is interested in what makes you different from other writers. The only thing of interest here is what makes you the same as all the others. That's what this desperate editor you've invented in your mind is looking for. Someone trust-worthy.

The fiction delivery system workers are all convinced that it's the packaging that sells product and makes a profit.  The content is worthless, irrelevant, and perhaps even annoying or repellent.  Packaging makes a best seller - but the packaging must fit the content like a glove so the whole thing slides right down the tubes of the distribution system frictionlessly.  (friction costs money)

For more on the worthlessness of "content" or Intellectual Property see:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/fix-for-publishing-business-model.html
You and your editor discuss packaging - your heart stays out of the discussion.

It's up to you to create your story or novel such that your heart is deep, deep inside and no possible change an editor needs can touch it.

You, your Agent, and your Editor are dealing only in the packaging, not in the heart itself.

And that's how you can manage the clinical distance necessary to get through editing without wasting days pacing and crying your head off, or disputing the changes the editor has suggested.  

No change an Editor might require would touch the part of the story that matters to you - you know that because you are a professional and you constructed the work so that the payload (your heart) is carried in a very sound commercial "vehicle" - a mechanism known to sell to the audience that you secretly know wants your payload.

Now your job (especially if your work has been discovered in the slush pile or captivated the interest of an editor in an elevator) is to convince the editor that you understand the difference between payload and vehicle, and that you are a total master of vehicle repair and maintenance.

That's where most new writers trying to pitch to an editor at a convention will fail.   The new writer will tell the editor the story, focus on all the tangled character motivations and rich tapestry of backstory propelling these characters into adventure.  But what the editor is listening for is, "I am a proficient vehicle mechanic and I build vehicles your readership has proven it loves."  And all that editor is hearing is, "I'm different from all other writers because of my vastly detailed art and I wouldn't ever build a vehicle if my life depended on it."

Payload, heart, the actual story, is very important, but finding useful payload is easy.  Good vehicle mechanics are rare. 

The Editor will choose a payload that suits the target readership for the line being edited. That's a given. Picking out satisfying payload is the editor's talent and stock in trade, and the process is none of your business. That's why editors you interview always say "Just write a good story." or "I want interesting characters." or asked what makes a good story, they are reduced to something that says in effect "If I like it, it's good."

The payload (the emotional kick) of the story is not under discussion in the Writer-Editor transaction. That hurdle has already been crossed, and it's the reason you have an offer or a contract. This editor knows where to sell your payload and has the means to do so.

The vehicle, the mechanism that has to deliver that payload to the heart of the reader, is entirely mutable during the editing process.

What's the editor's job?

To produce 3 or 5 books every month that all travel in the same model vehicle.  

The editor is running an assembly line that produces green Corollas. She might take your red Corolla, but will require a new paint job, and maybe matching interior at your expense.

The editor is running a circus that needs a High Wire Walker, and you got the job auditioning in spangled tights -- but this year's show has a Western theme and she hands you a hoop-skirt costume. It's still wire-walking. You're trained to that. You can do it even though you've never done it in a hoop-skirt before.

Writing is a performing art.

You are a performing artist.

The Editor is mounting a show. She needs singers, dancers, acrobats, a lead actor and actress, some supporting players, and a chorus.

You audition as a singer with one song you know well (your novel), but she hires you and asks for a more upbeat arrangement. You represented yourself as a singer. So re-arrange your song, sing the song her show requires and prove your professionalism.

The show must go on.

Next time we'll look at some of the obstacles to getting the show on the road and the nitty-gritty of what an author under the editing hammer faces in order to accomplish this task.

Readers who aren't writers will begin to suspect they ought to pay more for books than they do, given what writers go through to put those books into the reader's hands.

Part IV of this series posted on Aug. 24, 2010

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

A Fix For Publishing Business Model

I've hit on a new twist for fixing the Fiction Delivery System, and I don't think anyone has yet proposed this.

With imagination and dedication this idea could fix the broken business model of the freelance writer, artist, musician etc.

I also think that the USA would be the very last place it would be applied.

But I think this is the right concept to kick off a brainstorming session.

It would require inventing a totally new business and maybe inventing some professions and possibly some math, too. But the tools to do it all are "on the shelf" being ignored.

Business Model Problem

Let's start with an analysis of the problem as I see it (probably nobody else sees it this way, though).

I call the pipeline that brings us novels on bookstore shelves (or web pages), on paper or by download, on Kindle, Nook, or iPad, and films, TV shows, comics, animation, webisodes, and even fan fiction, the Fiction Delivery System.

Any method of delivering the storyteller's story to the mind of the fiction consumer is part of The Fiction Delivery System.

I have discussed on this blog various tech based developments and social evolutions that are bending, warping and re-inventing the Fiction Delivery System.

Web 2.0
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/worldbuilding-by-committee.html

And other topics a writer must pay attention to, such as the advent of Print on Demand, or Zero-Inventory, or Just In Time inventory, tax laws about inventory, ebook publishing, self-publishing, and all the rest you are familiar with because you read blogs.

If you've been following my analysis of changes in publishing, you are probably bored with it already. And everywhere you turn on the web, someone is bemoaning or embracing the changes which many young people just entering the field don't even see.

Publishers are going bankrupt (still). Distributors are going bankrupt. WRITERS are going bankrupt from "piracy" (iTunes, music torrents etc).

Recently, an article revealed that CD's are for sale on eBay containing ADVANCE REVIEW COPIES of books only in the submission or editing stage at major publishers. Pirated ARCs!

Amazon is fighting for control of ebook pricing, and just publically conceded to MacMillan -- yet, who knows where that will lead?

Meanwhile, at conventions around the country, I've been on many panels about the entire philosophical issue of Intellectual Property Rights.

This is a serious generation-gap abstract philosophical (maybe even Religious) issue that has financial repercussions, and worse reaches into the very foundation of the concept "business model."

Bewilderment and panic set in at the top of the Music Industry when pirated downloads via peer-to-peer networks first appeared.

The film industry soon followed as videos of pre-release or award-nominated films appeared everywhere. People recorded films off movie theater screens and hawked them on street corners. The Chinese and other countries grabbed feeds and distributed not just music and films, but software, complete with fancy imitation labels!

Some other countries do not share the USA's worship of Intellectual Property Rights (copyright, trademark, patent).

The older generations in the USA see "piracy" of books, DVD's, hardware, software as a crime.

Younger people and people in start-up countries with different philosophies see it as their Inalienable Right.

It's not "piracy" to them. It's "just business" and they are bewildered how anyone could object to what they do.

Worse yet, they are offended, horrified, repulsed, by the very impulse that makes us object to their behavior. How dare anyone restrict access to the product of anyone's imagination?

Really, philosophy does work like that. Emotionally, non-verbally. It really does.

A "philosophy" is not something you just espouse or learn. A philosophy is the very root of your personal Identity. It operates your emotions, motivates your actions, and provides the satisfaction when you achieve a concrete result.

Philosophy is what life is all about. But it only works when it's unconscious. Hence it is magically warded by a wall of boredom. You literally can not pay attention to a discussion of a philosophy that actually resides in your unconscious and does operate you.

Most Religions are Philosophies. What they teach you overtly is not necessarily what the religion is actually powered by. The real power (as in film scripts and books) is the subtext.

When the subtext is made into surface text, it becomes boring or ridiculous. Few people can focus the spotlight of consciousness on their personal philosophy and still espouse it consciously and subconsciously. Those few are generally regarded as "Philosophers."

After all the muttering and chattering I've done on this blog about the mechanisms within the Fiction Delivery System and about what the impact of technology and the social-networking phenomenon are changing, you can see that I like philosophy, I use it, and I inject it into fiction both on purpose and subconsciously.

If boredom didn't drive you away from all my posts on the Writer's Business Model, you should be able to see where I'm headed with this post. I didn't see it though until just last night.

We have the elements in place, we have the tools on the shelf, and we have the answer to what's wrong with the Fiction Delivery System and the writer's business model.

Pieces of this solution have been discussed all over the web on blogs, especially by Agents and publishers and writers. But pieces are now turning up in the major media (like Business Week, Forbes, The New York Times, and on and on).

Here is one article you should force your way through if you possibly can. The boredom wards are immense on this one, and I barely made it myself. Everything in me screams NO NO NO!!! But actually, this is a priceless opportunity to solve the real problem with the writer's business model.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution

That's the top of a long feature article in Wired Magazine.

Skim fast through to page 5 of this article,

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution/5/

then dig in and think hard as you read the part that starts thusly:

---Quote from Wired---------
In the mid-1930s, Ronald Coase, then a recent London School of Economics graduate, was musing over what to many people might have seemed a silly question: Why do companies exist? Why do we pledge our allegiance to an institution and gather in the same building to get things done? His answer: to minimize “transaction costs.” When people share a purpose and have established roles, responsibilities, and modes of communication, it’s easy to make things happen. You simply turn to the person in the next cubicle and ask them to do their job.

But several years ago, Bill Joy, one of the cofounders of Sun Microsystems, revealed the flaw in Coase’s model. “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,” he rightly observed. Of course, that had always been true, but before, it hardly mattered if you were in Detroit and someone better was in Dakar; you were here and they were there, and that was the end of it. But Joy’s point was that this was changing. With the Internet, you didn’t have to settle for the next cubicle. You could tap the best person out there, even if they were in Dakar.

---End Quote From Wired--------

This is the SOLUTION to the writer's business model problem, and to the publisher's problem, and to the Cable TV Operator's problem, and to Film Studio's problem, and even the Music Publisher's problem. This is the solution to structuring the advertising supported business model to apply to FICTION, but it doesn't look like it on the surface.

If you've read all my previous columns, you may be able to get ahead of me here and see the solution instantly.

Read carefully down to where it says:

---Quote from Wired--------

Let me tell you my own story. Three years ago, out on a run, I started thinking about how cheap gyroscope sensors were getting. What could you do with them? For starters, I realized, you could turn a radio-controlled model airplane into an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone. It turned out that there were plenty of commercial autopilot units you could buy, all based on this principle, but the more I looked into them, the worse they appeared. They were expensive ($800 to $5,000), hard to use, and proprietary. It was clear that this was a market desperate for competition and democratization — Moore’s law was at work, making all the components dirt cheap. The hardware for a good autopilot shouldn’t cost more than $300, even including a healthy profit. Everything else was intellectual property, and it seemed the time had come to open that up, trading high margins for open innovation.

----End Quote from Wired-----

Now you have to read very very carefully all the way to the end of the article, then scan the comments (look at how many and how vehement those comments are. The emotion expressed betrays the existence of a philosophical sore point).

The Philosophical Argument in our society is OVER.

Any futurologist worth her salt will see that instantly, and the best futurologists today work in Paranormal Romance, (believe it or not).

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

All fiction is nothing but intellectual property. It has no substance. There is nobody in the next cubicle. Physical location does not matter. Couple that to the idea that intellectual property is of no value in the marketplace, and you have your solution to the business model problem posed by loss of control of copying.

A long time ago, Fred Pohl and John Campbell, two Science Fiction magazine editors of gigantic intellect and far-ranging abilities, taught us a problem solving technique to use in plotting stories. Take two insoluble problems. Put them in the same story. Let them solve each other.

The principle comes from Engineering, not fiction, and is one of those patterns you see reflected between reality and fiction that makes fiction believable.

Engineering creates concrete objects, things you can sell. Fiction does not, and therein lies the problem with the writer's business model.

Fiction is ideas. Emotions. Philosophy. Fiction is reality fabricated, warp and woof, into a rich, deep but imaginary construct that can have the power of philosophy (or even Religion) to bend and shape people's real lives.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/01/worldbuilding-for-science-fiction.html
is the post where I describe theme, philosophy, and the warp and woof fabric of fiction.

Worse yet, what the writer imagines and crafts into that fabric, can't even be proprietary because it's constructed "off the shelf" -- out of archetypes that can be unshelved and used by anyone, out of philosophies, pantheons, and cosmologies rooted in the ancient histories of all peoples around the world.

That's why film producers will not and can not read unsolicited manuscripts.
Ideas can't be copyrighted. Even the details can't be owned, the whole construct can't be owned. Any well trained writer could have created exactly the novel you created. And if you admit to the mystical view of the universe, it's even likely you lifted your construct out of someone else's imagination on the astral plane.

I've explained how that works in previous columns. It does work. It's happened to me. It's real. The stuff we feel so proprietary about actually drifts around in some non-material dimension, a shelf, where anyone can access it.

In fact, the most lucrative fictional fabrics are the ones MORE people have already accessed, and have possession of in their dreams and imagination. Popularity happens because more people recognize their own dreams within the fiction being offered.

I've explained that Marion Zimmer Bradley taught me that the book the reader reads is not the book the writer wrote (which she learned from her forebears). Everyone who reads just uses the story as a template to enjoy themselves in their own dreamscape.

Not only is fiction nothing but "intellectual property" (which this article in Wired has declared worthless in monetary terms), it is not now and never has been proprietary.

Seen that way, from a mystical dimension of archetypes and human spiriit, the entire idea that your dreams already belong to me and therefore I don't have to pay you for them makes perfect sense.

So how can we, as writers, publishers, artists, musicians, film producers, duplicate what this man has done with his drone-piloting circuit board business?

For a couple of decades (long enough for a whole generation of entreprenuers to grow up and start businesses) we have seen "open source" software leading the way. You give away free the intellectual property component.

How can we do that if the intellectual property isn't a component but the entire creation?

Newspapers led the way giving away intellectual property, radio blazed the trail, TV followed, today Newspapers are trailing the pack getting onto the web with "editions."

It's the advertising model.

But remember BBC? It was tax revenue supported, not advertising supported for decades. The ultra-conservative British are only now edging into advertising.

The world doesn't move in lockstep, but though the USA led in the advertising-supported business model, it very well may trail in the Open Source business model.

Unless, that is, the right person or persons read this blog and grab my idea of how it can be done. (I freely give it to anyone who wants to make the world safe for fiction creators!)

Now that you've read that entire article in Wired, stop and think of all the other things about "e-book piracy" you've read lately (there's been a lot of discussion on the EPIC Lists recently, too).

We're fighting to stop piracy. Theft offends our philosophy-bone.

Look again what this fellow in Wired, Chris Anderson, accomplished.

You give away the intellectual property, but you SELL the "thing itself" - a physical object.

That's how you make money in the new world. Selling physical objects cleverly assembled from off the shelf bits and open source intellectual property.

Physical objects add value to the Annual Gross Human Product.

Intellectual inventions and ideas are no longer valuable in trade, no longer add to the quality of human life and therefore have no intrinsic value.

How can a writer apply that concept?

We don't make things; we make ideas. We just arrange "off-the-shelf" components known as words using public domain templates known as archetypes.

The Advertising Model

That's it. That's the solution. But the current method is backwards.

Currently, someone has a physical object to sell. They use fiction to attract eyes to their product pitch known as a commercial or web-advertisement.

"I Love Lucy" sells toothpaste, not laughs.

Like all TV shows, it was invented to glue eyeballs to the screen during commercials, to deliver an audience to toothpaste advertisers. That's what radio and TV fiction is for, and the tradition goes back to Charles Dickens with novels serialized in newspapers to glue subscribers to a newsfeed sold at a profit.

Now look at ad supported TV fiction and think "reverse video" (like what happens when you use your mouse to highlight some text and the background and text color switch places).

It becomes fiction-supported TV ads.

Now we're getting close to applying the thinking behind that Wired Magazine article.

At present, the bits of story are almost smaller than the commercial breaks.

It's getting so hard to follow a TV episode, what with all the long breaks, that people are willing to wait and buy the DVD of the whole season, sans commercials.

People willingly pay for premium channels - but those channels are in financial difficulty as are the cable operators.

People want whole movies, not sliced and diced to fit in commercials.

Already you can buy TV's and Blu-ray boxes that are internet ready and configured to deliver a specific brand of streaming movie service (Netflix, Blockbuster -- proprietary lock on the hardware just like phone companies and cell phones!) Read about it in Consumer Reports:

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/electronics-computers/tvs-services/tvs/index.htm

The October 2010 issue of Consumer Reports features BEST TVS, and has instructions how to connect your TV to the Internet.

This proprietary-lock business model is at odds with the Open Source business model, and a major armageddon is in progress right over our heads. Just let the problems solve each other, and don't forget "Love Conquers All" is always the solution to fear.

Just look at the magnitude of the storm of change and resistance to change sweeping through the fabric of our world when it comes to advertising.

A recent Federal Supreme Court ruling struck down a law preventing corporations from spending unlimited amounts of money in support of a political candidate or policy. That'll be fixed by a new law, but look at the TERROR that ruling evoked and remember philosophy drives our emotions.
You've never seen the like of this much terror at a Horror film's first showing!

Why? Because politicians know that the target of advertising is under 40, that we have a demographic bulge of voting age young people, and that those people will do whatever the most ads say they should. (they WILL).

The obvious solution escapes the politicians because it would prevent them from selling their own messages to those voters by being the most prevalent voice.

So nobody is even talking about training kids in how to make commercials, thereby immunizing them to flimflammery.

I know this works because I trained my children that way. Kids can be trained to be commercial-immune by age 7 or 8.

But that panic among politicians is very real. They'll make a law to fix the ridiculous imbalance again, don't worry about that. Our interest here is the whole advertising process, and especially the business model of fiction supported advertising. (not advertising supported fiction, you see?)

Look at the degree of panic among those politicians and you can see the whole philosophy-driven panic means more than is apparent on the surface.

Something is at the breaking point in advertising business model.

Politicians can see we've got an emergency on our hands and you should never waste a good emergency.

Already, it's been proven by scientific research and admitted by major advertisers and advertising creation firms that people over 40 don't change their behavior as a result of seeing an ad (no matter how many repetitions).

You can't "sell" to older people, but they're the ones with money (and credit). This even holds true online. I've filled out surveys time and again only to get to the last web page and be told they have nothing to advertise to me. Hard scientific research shows its a waste of money to advertise to a certain cut of the demographic (basically readers).

Suppose advertising could sell your product to over and under 40 demographic?

If we turn the advertising model to "reverse video" - or "negative" - we might see the solution, provided we understand the problem.

Think fiction supported advertising.

Reverse the business model. Get out of the way and let the problems solve each other. Love Conquers All.

That reversal makes our intellectual property of monetary value again.

But you'll understand this only if you understand "what" fiction is and what a person does when imbibing fiction.

Fiction is usually regarded as a luxury. It's not.

Fiction is a necessity of life.

Why is fiction a necessity?

Because fiction is the food that philosophy feeds upon. And as mentioned above and in other blog posts here, philosophy is the life's blood of fiction as it forms and shapes the theme of any story.

People need fiction to keep them in touch with their own philosophy and to keep their philosophy in touch with reality.

Fiction keeps you sane.

Fiction is never "escapist" as it is so often dismissed as. Many readers feel they are reading to "escape" but once you understand what you are escaping to, the exercise of reading a novel takes on a whole new meaning.

Life without fiction is like sleep without dreaming.

Dreaming is not an "escape" from sleeping.

Fiction is not an "escape" from life.

Dreaming completes the exercise of sleep just as fiction completes the exercise of living.

Fiction leads you to an operational and usable model of reality you can live by (or die by). Fiction does that by taking you far, far outside your own reality so you can look back on it and see it as a whole. Fiction can never let you "escape" your reality. It rubs your nose in your reality by revealing a truth you could never see while walking in your own moccasins.

However, the "advertising supported fiction" business model has distorted that process of fiction imbibing.

The very point of imbibing fiction has been blunted by the INTERRUPTIONS for ad pitches, and those ad pitches can only be worth the money it costs to deliver them if the audience is young, so TV fiction is watered down.

Films get watered down, too, because eventually they must be shown on TV with commercial interruptions.

Interruptions and distractions cause people to make mistakes.

Texting while driving can be fatal, remember, and recent studies show that making laws against it don't prevent accidents.

Studies have shown that multi-tasking workers are less efficient than those who do one thing at a time, concentrating. (I've lost the link to the most recent study but I recall that I did place it in one of my previous blog posts here.)

Distracted drivers kill themselves and others via mistakes.

Consider the psychological condition of people who are awakened from sleep each time they enter a REM sleep cycle. (Sleep apnea can do that to you.)

As you must not be distracted from your work or your dreams, likewise you must not be distracted from your fiction.

With distractions, you miss the nutrient value of the philosophy. And you miss the pleasure of imbibing your fiction.

What if you could come up with an advertising model that does not distract viewers or readers from the fiction?

What if you give up the idea of using fiction as bait for eyeballs?

What would you replace the advertising supported model with in order to prevent distractions?

What if you could train young people to be immune to commercials (so we don't need laws restricting the amounts anyone can spend on political ads -- more money circulating is good for the economy, more points argued is good for democracy) and still move product to consumers efficiently?

What if you abolished commercials totally?

How could people who create material products induce people to buy their products without commercials? Without web-ads? Without animations on YouTube? Without distracting drivers with billboards. Without intruding on one activity to induce people to engage in another activity?

Note that film producers who are swimming in pitches thrown at them from every direction become so pitch-deaf they hire interns out of school to read pitches and the interns soon become too jaded to see a great script among the dross.

Commercials are pitches. They are desperate, frantic attempts to make you do something you aren't of a mind to do, at the moment anyway.

What if pitching was to become obsolete?

The film industry is moving in that direction with online websites that vet film scripts and provide a marketplace for producers to go find the exact script they want to produce without being bombarded with irrelevant pitches.

What could possibly replace pitching toothpaste? How could the world of commerce function without commercials?

Turn that question around. Why are industries still clinging hysterically to the commercials model of advertising, even though the world has changed and advertising is less and less effective simply because people get used to it and tune it out? When was the last time you were reading a news story and clicked on a banner ad for makeup?

That frantic battering consumers are taking is why congress was considering a law to prevent cable stations and TV stations from raising the volume on the sound when commercials come on. It annoys and distracts -- but they need to raise the volume to retain your attention as everyone in the room moves and talks during the distraction of a commercial break. People just totally dismiss the commercials. But those commercial breaks are still distractions, interruptions to be endured with an ever-increasing pricetag on our health and well being.

Why are these companies with good things to sell, things we need and want, so insistent on alienating their customers?

And Here It Is -- A New Business Model

If manufacturers of goods to sell can understand that fiction is also a product, a commodity, of value to a customer only when properly assembled (as a car is of more value when all assembled than it is as a stack of boxes of parts), then they will adopt this model.

Fiction imbibing is all about emotion. Writers work hard to get the rhythm of variance of emotional pitch paced just right. Suppose you had to endure six commercial breaks during the hour you reserve for sex with your partner? There's a reason the highest praise for a book is "I couldn't put it down" or "It kept me up past bedtime."

Continuity is absolutely essential to a good fictional experience.

It's all about building an emotional reaction with depth and texture, and you can't achieve that with interruption.

Think what it's like to be adding a long column of numbers in your head, only to be interrupted by a phone call, and have to start over, to be interrupted by the doorbell, and start over, to be interrupted by having to go to the bathroom. Maybe you'll get that column of numbers added, true, but how much less time and effort would it take if there were no interruptions?

Commercial breaks cost our society more than they are worth.

Think about how "the arts" functioned before commercialization. Artists (painters, musicians, actors) had Patrons who supported them with room and board etc., then presented their Artistic Product to their closest friends, as a prestige point.

Use that old idea, together with new technology, and think about what the Wired article said that I quoted above. Here it is again:
----------Wired Quote--------
But several years ago, Bill Joy, one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems, revealed the flaw in Coase’s model. “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,” he rightly observed. Of course, that had always been true, but before, it hardly mattered if you were in Detroit and someone better was in Dakar; you were here and they were there, and that was the end of it. But Joy’s point was that this was changing. With the Internet, you didn’t have to settle for the next cubicle. You could tap the best person out there, even if they were in Dakar.
--------END QUOTE-------------

Proximity no longer is an issue.

That is such a startling idea. Think about it.

In Radio, and at the beginning of TV broadcast, one company would sponsor an entire show and become identified with that show.

Today "product placement" is starting to retread that concept. A Hero would drive a certain type of car, use a brand of telephone, eat a certain breakfast food.

Proximity doesn't count any more. You don't have to have your commercial inserted between scenes of a TV show. You don't even have to have your product be seen onscreen with The Hero.

Look at how people actually shop for things they need and want.

People focus on getting the shopping done NOW, and reading a book LATER.

When you're ready to buy something, you go to the store or website, use a search engine to find the best price or read the comments to find the best brands. You survey all the alternatives on the supermarket shelf, and pick a package that is either familiar (a replacement for what you used up) or pick something that looks interesting (an alternative to what you used up).

Or you have a problem in your house, and go to Home Depot to search for a solution, not even knowing if one exists. At that moment, your mind is open to suggestions, and that's when you want to see pitches for products, but only for products that address your problem.

When you want to buy something, you want to buy it. Either enjoying a leisurly shopping spree or dash in and out to get the boring chore of buying over with.

When you want to "buy" fiction, you sit down in your favorite chair and flip on the TV, DVD, DVR, or pick up a book, or flip on your Kindle and download the latest in a series you're following - whatever source, doesn't matter. Your mindset is the same. "I need a good story."

SHOPPING: "let's see what they've got" --- or "get me out of here fast."

FICTION TIME: "Now, what's been going on with my favorite character" or "Now I get to read this new vampire novel all the TWILIGHT fans are raving about."

When you're shopping, you're shopping.

When you're imbibing, you're imbibing.

Distracting you from your purpose will not win your approval, loyalty, or public support.

When you are young, and just being socialized, the first thing your parents teach you after you learn to talk is "don't interrupt your elders" -- which eventually becomes the teenager's skill of joining a knot of kids standing around the recess yard and just talking. You have to learn to join that conversation without interrupting, without diverting attention to yourself, without distracting them from the subject, without changing the subject.

What advertisers on TV do today is CHANGE THE SUBJECT.

That shows a lack of basic socialization.

Here's a blog entry I did on what business people do wrong when they try to adopt a social networking strategy, and why they do it wrong.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/marketing-via-social-networking.html

Even netizens learn, first and foremost, when you join a List, you lurk for a while and find out who's who and what they're talking about. You don't post off-topic without profuse apology and explanation of why this item is important to these people.

Good grief, Romance Writers have been exemplifying this technique of how to open an acquaintance with a stranger you've fallen in love with at first sight for generations! You'd think advertisers would have learned that by now.

Don't interrupt. Don't distract. Don't change the subject.

There are some fancy multi-syllabic names for the kinds of mental abberations that cause people to be unable to learn those simple rules of behavior.

But to date, advertisers have steadfastly ignored those rules because it seems to make them a profit. Suppose they could make a bigger profit by obeying those basic social rules?

How could they possibly do it, though?

You can't answer that question. You can't solve that puzzle. There is no answer. Now. Yet.

There's no way to solve that problem now because we are missing an entire profession, an entire industry actually.

The reason we're missing this industry (that would connect fiction imbibers with companies who have concrete products to sell) is a basic American attitude -- the one the Supreme Court highlighted with the decision to allow unlimited advertising dollars to flow from corporate coffers in political campaigns.

Free Speech.

Why is Free Speech such a core value it had to be in the Bill of Rights?

Free Speech is one of the results of the dual-valued philosophy behind the Constitution -- The Majority Rules, but The Individual Has Rights that the majority can not take away.

You can say anything you want. But you can't exercise that right in my house, my private domain, without my permission.

PRIVACY is a right which manifests in the prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure of property, and the protection of intellectual property under the exact same terms as that of personal property (house, land, possessions).

That attitude toward individual privacy (no wiretapping etc), make the solution to the Fiction Writer's Business Model Problem totally impossible to think, nevermind actually do.

The solution requires invasion of privacy and something akin to wiretapping your phone.

But it's already happening in the inexorable push to make a profit in an internet based, Open Source world.

Everyone you deal with has electronic records on you, and the prospects for "Big Brother Is Watching You" are not looming ahead of us any more -- they are far behind in what seems Ancient History to today's 20 year olds.

Traffic cameras, security cameras, Airport Security screening, Google, medical records, court records, media outlet file tape, ATM transaction records, bank records, cell phone records, gps on cell phones, -- you are always under surveillance and it's getting tighter and more public.

Anonymity in public and personal privacy have not existed for decades already, and a whole generation has grown up with this technology. Younger people don't see it as a problem, so it's inevitable that this solution will be implemented at some point fairly soon, when enough old folks have died off.

And here it is.

Connect the grocery checkout counter record of what you bought, of your buying patterns assembled every time you use the store discount card tab on your key chain, or make a website purchase, to your TV set or Cable Box or Sat box, or e-reading device (Kindle, Smartphone, Nook, whatever).

That's it, the whole problem is solved.

One more link in our chain of electronic records, and BOOM - no more distractions, no more interruptions.

How does it work to sell product?

Simple.

When you're ready to buy something, you are "in a place" mentally and physically where you are receptive to suggestions and ads would not be interruptions or distractions.

You walk into a brick and mortar store or click into a website. There you search for products and actively pay attention to what's pitched at you. The data gathered on you in the past allows the ads pitched at you to be chosen by characteristics you've evidenced in the past.

Already Google and especially BING customize ads and re-arrange what choices are offered to you in answer to a query according to other websites you've visited (Google is now using what sites you click on via twitter to customize responses to you).

It's getting harder, but you can still break out of your mold and explore other options. We may need laws to prevent shutting you into too small a box.

Using this fiction supported advertising model, when you are receptive to finding products that solve your problem, you are presented with options that would actually be useful to you. No distractions. No pitches. Just solid, reliable, true information about the products that solve your problem "what's for dinner?" "what sort of shoes can I afford to wear with this dress?"

As you troll through the supermarket, local mall, or websites, you choose products that suit you at prices you agree to, and you know all the alternatives.

A record is kept of what you buy, from whom, when, at what intervals.

With each product you purchase, you earn "points." (like frequent flyer miles, or credit card points -- an account is kept of what you've earned).

These points are TV SHOW POINTS (or streaming, dvd, dvr, ebook, Kindle, or even hardcopy book points).

They are worth such-and-so-many hours of commercial free viewing or reading.

Your life is totally changed from it is today -- when you're shopping, you're shopping. When you're viewing, you're viewing.

Watching the Shopping Network on TV or internet would probably count as shopping - and what you buy adds points to your Fiction Points account.

I can see two ways for this to work.

Either large companies like Proctor and Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, Heinz, etc would award points for buying their products that you can use to see only certain TV shows that they sponsor by paying for production (or buy certain novels from certain publishers that they sponsor by paying for production).

Or a new kind of business would be founded to award points no matter what you buy -- but maybe apportion more points today for Tide than for Arm&Hammer depending on deals with sponsors?

The new business would be a clearing house. It would contract with Proctor and Gamble (etc) to get money, apportion money to fiction-creators, and contract with consumers who establish an account, like a credit-card account, and keep track of what you buy so it can award you access to fiction via points you earn by buying certain brands.

Both these concepts would probably fight it out in the marketplace, likely with other more "proprietary" based concepts.

The stand-alone (off the shelf) technologies to do this already exist. They just have to be linked up (as the fellow made new circuit boards to create his drone controllers).

a) Data about your buying habits from credit card, online sites, supermarket, mall, etc purchases, is all electronicized now.

b)Data about your viewing habits is available to your cable, sat, etc data supplier. Smartphone surfing, computer surfing, etc -- your IP address ID's you, as on social networks. You are tracked.

c) Companies that produce advertising (political organizations too) know how masses of people move -- they get that from a lot of data about individuals.

Connect the purchase-point activity to the DVR attached to your TV (or whatever new architecture we adopt).

Turn on your TV to watch, say SANCTUARY (as discussed last week

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/01/religion-in-science-fiction-romance.html )

..and you see it without commercials if you bought Tide, shopped a Toyota showroom, had your BMW serviced, or bought a Big Mac.

If you didn't buy the right product or brand of product, I'd guess you'd be interrupted with even more pitching commercials than now.

After enough of that punishment, you would start to pay attention to what brands provided you with commercial free versions of your favorite shows.

Since most of us time-shift using a recorder of some sort, the shows would be delivered to your automated recording device (or online library of shows) commercial free.

If you're reading ebooks (or even hardcover books) you would not pay money for them. You'd pay with points earned by buying whatever brands are connected to the fiction you want. The writers and publishers would be paid by the brand that sponsors the fiction.

It's not so different from the way film and TV gets produced. Production companies contract with networks and get money to create the show which the networks broadcast and sell commercial time during. Except, this way, there are no commercial breaks and no waste of money by advertisers.

Now how would you know, standing in the breakfast cereal aisle, which brand of cereal to buy to get the show you want commercial free?

Each package would carry a symbol showing what points you get for buying it.

That's why I think a new business is needed.

This would be an IT business that awards and redeems your purchase-points so seamlessly and automatically you don't know it's there.

You wouldn't have to know which show you want when choosing laundry detergent. You get points no matter what you buy, then you spend them to see whatever you want to see.

There might be several such competing IT businesses, each for a type of show (non-fiction, news, Science shows, Education shows you get college credit for, whatever categories shows fall into).

There might be several icons on a package indicating what credit you get for purchasing the product.

Commercials and pitches for products would be presented to you only while you're in the store, and could contain info on what shows you get for buying the product.

But they would be pitching at you while you're paying attention and deliberating over what to buy. They don't waste their money; you don't waste your time, and Congress doesn't need a law to prevent raising the sound volume during commercials.

TV channels, Cable providers, Sat providers, airwaves providers, even maybe production companies like Disney, would contract with these IT services to get money to make shows and deliver them to you. The IT service would get money from product makers that the product makers now waste on advertising to rooms full of people who went to the bathroom or hit fast-forward.

You buy your fiction (uninterrupted delivery) by buying a product.

Now there are two big holes in this idea.
1) Disparity of income creates disparity in buying habits
2) Niche fiction, things that aren't aimed at a mass market, might not get sponsored well enough to be cheap enough. Popularity would still govern availability of fiction.

The higher your income, the more you buy.

The people lower on the economic scale don't spend as much money. So they'd have less access to the very thing they need most to get higher on the economic scale -- fiction that inspires, non-fiction that instructs etc.

Those who spend a lot would have more viewing-credits than they need.

Those who spend little would have too few.

Free market forces would create a trading marketplace for these viewing-credits.

I would suggest the Free Public Library system should be the place to handle the trading since they already deal in fiction.

Most libraries are set up online already -- you can order or renew a book online at my library and the whole library system catalog is online so you can reserve a book your branch doesn't have. And most libraries now have computers set up for internet access via your library card (those that don't will soon have).

So a virtual or real visit to your local library could let you buy the viewing credits you didn't earn by purchasing advertised products.

So if you have no money, what would you buy viewing credits with?

What would people who have a lot of money, profligate spending habits, and a surplus of viewing credits want from you?

For that matter, what would advertisers want from you if you don't buy much?

Maybe some profligate spenders would donate their points to the library, as they now donate once-read books that are nearly new. The library would charge a few cents, as they now sell donated $30 books for $1.50 to sell them to you.

Or maybe the Library would use the points to provide you with access to the fiction of your choice (on-demand style).

Or other things might be bartered -- like filling out a survey, participating in a product trial, etc. I'm sure imagination will supply bartering tokens we could not possibly think of today. (maybe you could pay college tuition with viewing credits one day).

Uninterrupted viewing of the Superbowl could be worth something (though I know lots of people watch for the commercials).

This is a half-baked idea. But it could be applied to solve the publisher's problem, the warehouser's problem, the distributor's problem, the retail-bookstore's problem, the self-publisher's problem.

Writers, publishers, bookstores, etc are selling uninterrupted fictional experiences more than they are "intellectual property licenses".

Piracy is a problem only if your business model is to create and sell intellectual property.

If you get rid of the idea that intellectual property is personal property or proprietary property which you have a right to license (or not) as you choose, the whole picture shifts markedly.

If books, novels, e-books, stories of all sorts in all media could adapt to a "story-supported-advertising" business model, we might survive as writers.

A self-publisher could contract with one of these IT organizations so that people who buy manufactured products could use their fiction points to buy e-books, Print on Demand hardcopy, or other formats just as they would to view a TV show uninterrupted.

Writers wouldn't be selling their "intellectual property" at all. They'd give away their stories, and get paid for giving them away by manufacturers who see their products being bought in order to get access to the story.

The IT business wouldn't have to denominate the points in US$. The points would be like frequent flyer points, just points until you redeem them for Southwest flights or American Airlines flights. Thus they would become a de-facto international currency, and e-books in any language could be obtained using points earned buying groceries in any country.

Like the Wired article said, location doesn't matter any more.

The key points to this concept:

1) Intellectual Property is not personal or proprietary and is worthless

2) People want to do what they want to do when they want to do it and no distractions (sort of like courtship or even like sex). In other words, the driving is the distraction to the texting, so we need cars that drive themselves, which we almost have.

3) Fiction is a necessary nutrient, as vital as food, clothing, shelter, water, air, R.E.M. sleep, to sustaining life and sanity. Satisfaction requires no-distraction time-blocks.

4) Fiction is nothing but intellectual property and is therefore worthless

5) Uninterrupted TIME BLOCKS are of actual monetary value.

6) Given today's Information Technology based civilization, a lifestyle composed of uninterrupted time blocks is a commodity that can be monetized.

7) Connect point of sale information with point of fiction imbibing information and create a business model like the kind of "circuit boards" the fellow in the Wired article created -- don't charge for the intellectual property of fiction, but for the lack of distraction while imbibing it (i.e. charge for the circuit board not what it contains).

8) A new generation won't mind the violation of the basic notion upon which the USA was founded -- personal privacy and individual freedom. The new 40-year-olds in twenty years will be as vulnerable to this marketing technique as the 18 year olds are vulnerable to today's commercial-driven airwaves. But you won't need laws restricting how much money can be spent advocating a political position -- political ads belong in stores, not in stories.

I think that would fix the fiction delivery system and everything I see as wrong with it thusly:

a) it would provide a monetary base to produce and purvey fiction

b) it would provide direct feedback between fiction-imbiber and investor (manufacturer with something to sell).

c) it would stop the fragmentation of fiction into tiny chunks, forcing themes to be simpler and less satisfying than they could be. Thus fiction could become more effective as a lift to the spirits.

d) it would foster long-attention-span instead of the short-attention-span fostered in children who grew up on Sesame Street which has segments structured like commercials (or the TV Show HEROES).

but it would of course create new problems.

a) how do writers get readers to choose to read their books, spending points on them?

b) how do writers with a tiny audience survive the forces of mass marketing?

c) how do niche products attract sponsoring and keep their prices down since they can only reach a small market? How do you create these small markets? (social networking is the current best answer).

A host of other problems are inherent in this concept, but the current method is likewise fraught with flaws.

As Wired points out, this new economy is already revving up to full speed right alongside the old fogies clinging to the old economy.

My question is, "Has the old anything ever won out over the new anything?"

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com