SIDE NOTE: my Vampire Romance novel set on Earth's Moon, (which is nothing at all like the Anita Blake Series) is now, for the first time, available in e-book, almost all formats.
Here's the new paperback edition:
The Kindle should be linked there.
Last week in Part 4
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/09/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-4.html
...we discussed how differently a writer sees a popular news feature story than a reader does. One lens the writer uses to view Events is the Archetype.
We had ended Part 3
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/09/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-3.html
...wriggling in delight at how generously the world responded to the incident of Middle School children reviling a School Bus Monitor then posting her reactions on YouTube. A fund was started that collected hundreds of thousands of dollars for this elderly woman. And we ended off with a great big, BUT to consider.
In Part 4 we began to analyze that BUT into something a Romance writer, particularly a PNR writer can use.
-------------QUOTE--------------
I see two sides in this "BUT" --
A) US/THEM -- we reject those children
B) MY GOD/ YOUR GOD -- money solves all problems
...and later ....
Strip this bus incident back to the raw basics, and you see PROPITIATION OF A GOD. That's the basic archetype revealed (there are a lot of them in the incident; this is the one Romance writers can use.)
The children's behavior resembles the behavior of the Ancient Greek gods torturing a human, for fun, just because they can. They knew they could get away with it because of the laws saying the bus monitor couldn't spank them, in any way, physical or metaphorical.
Just like the Ancient Greek gods, the children had more power than they had maturity to handle. (read Gini Koch's Alien series!) They have the godly power of YouTube.
---------END QUOTE----------
We discussed how these children's ill-behavior -- dare I call them spoiled brats? Nobody uses that term anymore, but it is so appropriate here! -- is typical of the behavior of children who have not been well parented.
Of course, I don't know these children or their parents so I can't say that about these individuals, but as a writer looking for a story springboard, I can definitely say this is exactly the sort of behavior one would expect in children of households with failed parenting.
I took issue with the media's characterizing this behavior as "bullying" -- that is now a politically correct term, but a misnomer of exactly the same formula that I pointed out in the first two posts in this series on Theme-Worldbuilding Integration.
The correct descriptive, the accurate term, for this kind of behavior is "spoiled brat."
The typical spoiled brat is a child who has power over the adults in their life, who knows they won't be punished for anything -- maybe anything short of a certain line. The spoiled brat can have anything they want without effort. The spoiled brat has merely to demand something they want and it is theirs by right, by entitlement, and nobody has the right to make them work for it.
The spoiled brat is the Prince who hates his whipping-boy and misbehaves just for the joy of seeing the whipping-boy hurt.
The spoiled brat becomes a monster in the house. The parents fear the spoiled brat's temper tantrums ever more as the child becomes larger and harder to control.
The parents cringe before the demands of the spoiled brat.
Failed parenting produces monsters worthy of a horror movie.
We're writing Romance here -- Romance about a single parent finally finding a Soul Mate. Consider the complications to a Romance when the child the single parent is raising is a spoiled brat. Spoiled brats bully those weaker than they are, and terrorize those stronger than they are. They attack everything in sight like piranhas after warm meat.
Now consider two single parents each trying to raise a spoiled brat. The opposite of the Brady Bunch, no? Fodder for a TV Series, yes?
This examination of an old news story from June 2012 is not an exercise in futility. There is a point to all this, big bucks to be made.
If spoiled-brattishness comes from failed parenting, and we have a second, maybe third generation of people whose parents failed to parent them well now raising children of their own then it's no surprise we have an epidemic of bullying and other violent behavior in Middle Schools. Even childhood obesity may be linked to failed parenting -- a baby (infant even) who gets something stuck in their mouth every time they yell, who gets their every temper tantrum over a toy propitiated with a lollypop, is not going to grow up into the self-control and self-discipline that says "no" to sweets when they experience a twinge of emotional discomfort.
The link between desire and satisfaction is forged in infancy.
The fictioneer's job is to raise desire in their readers and then satisfy that desire.
A writer who can not delay their own gratification of the need to say something, to show something, to get to the orgasm, is going to cram exposition into the story for self-gratification, not the gratification of their reader.
There is a cluster of cognitive skills that can be acquired only by being well parented.
Delayed gratification of desires is one. Connected to that is the awareness that others exist, and that there is real, deep, multi-level gratification to be had in gratifying others.
The parent bird who drops a worm into the baby bird's mouth does it for the frisson of pleasure gratifying that baby bird brings, not from altruism but instinct.
The higher mammals have to learn parenting by being parented. (remember the experiment with monkeys we mentioned last week. Research it if you're not familiar with these studies.)
What's parenting got to do with Romance?
Romance is entirely rooted in the AWARENESS of another person.
A human who hasn't been well parented, at least in some regard, though not necessarily by those who birthed him, CAN be incapable of the awareness of another.
Psychologists use the term validation. One of the highest forms of personal completion is VALIDATION by another person -- another person who knows what you mean when you say what you feel. That makes you REAL to yourself in a way nothing else can.
ALIEN ROMANCE -- is all about the oddity of experiencing that VALIDATION not from another human being but from a non-human. Or vice-verso, of a non-human receiving that validation from a human.
VALIDATION - psychological visibility. Look it up.
It is a universal human experience. The failure of BONDING at birth, the failure of continuity in care-giver in the first couple of years, can disrupt the development of that part of the brain that processes this kind of information.
As an aside, I once read somewhere that it is the consistence appearance of the caregiver's face over the infant's crib in the first year that develops the part of the brain that recognizes faces.
All of these features of "humanity" are innate in the human animal, simply in the primate body.
The spoiled brat behavior we witnessed in that school bus monitor video could easily be explained by a failure on this very simple level, the physical body level.
But humans are ever so much more than that. The essential feature of humanity is the Soul, and those 12 yr old spoiled brats had human souls that weren't functioning very well either.
The nurturing of the Soul is likewise a function of parenting.
If a human child is treated only as an animal, given food, clothing, shelter and basic survival skills (in our culture that's reading, writing, using an iPad), the body develops but the Soul doesn't.
The Soul can be walled off from the body, rejected, suppressed, shunned. The Soul will scream with pain and frustration -- maybe at night, in dreams -- but it can be suppressed and ignored up to a point especially if Parenting validates the process by approving of it, or ignoring the presence of the Soul. It takes a lot of pure, raw courage to acknowledge and welcome one's own Soul into one's body. But without that process being completed in adolescence, how can a Soul find a Soul-Mate and a Happily Ever After life?
How can a person raised with a callous between body and soul ever experience Romance that isn't merely lust? The body lusts - the Soul Loves. When the two cooperate, the Universe lights up with delight.
Children estranged from their Souls would behave like Ancient Greek gods, gratifying whims.
These spoiled brat/bully/cowardly little tyrants will behave like animals.
Ever seen a flock of ducks pecking the wounded duck to death? I have.
The "wounded duck" was that bus monitor, and that pack of children tried to peck her to death. I don't know why because I don't know those people -- even if I did know them, I wouldn't really know why. One human can't judge another human.
But, a writer can see patterns that others don't notice.
What I see, that may be a big opportunity for some writer, is the rising tide of purely animal-based behavior. Given my personal philosophy, I parse that as being easily predictable if there has been an erosion of the Soul nurturing dimension of Parenting as a general trend in our society.
If that thesis is correct, then it's not surprising that a huge number of people gave so generously to the victimized school bus monitor.
You can't generalize human behavior. We are all unique individuals, though we sometimes move in large packs -- as with the donations to this woman. Yet I can see that if the thesis of a failure of Soul Parenting being widespread in our society is true, then it may be that Parents who are aware they are failing in Soul Parenting were moved to make up for their failure by making amends to this stranger woman who was a victim of Soul-crippled children just like their own children.
The archetype here is propitiation of the gods. It is a need to avert disaster (or get something dearly wanted) by putting offerings of food or flowers or whatever (virgin girls into the maw of the volcano) at the feet of the THREAT or the SOURCE.
Many people who haven't studied the mystical schools deeply enough think (possibly because they're taught this in college courses of the Bible as Literature) that the "sacrifices" called for in the Old Testament are exactly like this sort of PROPITIATION exercise.
I'll give you a clue. They're not. They're the exact opposite, and one of the things that makes a stark difference between the Ancient Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Persians, Romans, etc and the Jews. It's an absolutely day/and/night difference, but that's only discernible on the Soul level. That's why mystical studies are so valuable to the writer of Paranormal Romance. Love is of the Soul; Lust is of the Body. Meld them into a cooperative unit, and nothing material can successfully oppose them.
The secret of understanding that difference is in the mis-translation of the words. "Sacrifice" is the opposite of what the Hebrew word actually means.
So, now, back to the beginning of this series. Theme-Worldbuilding Integration.
In the school bus incident, we see cause for euphoric HOPE because "people" rejected the behavior of those children with kindness to their victim.
BUT!!! (which is where writers get all their crazy ideas -- but!)
Slicing and dicing the kindness offered, we begin to wonder if maybe that out-pouring of kindness and sympathy was actually rooted in the same illness that produced the children's bad behavior.
A lot of people gave money. That's a huge potential audience for a novel. Remember in "targeting an audience" -- we learned to study the real world around our target audience and discover what's bugging them, then reduce that to a theme, and use the theme to create a world and characters (in whatever order; doesn't matter.)
So what theme can we extract that would address that readership?
Quote from Part 4:
I see two sides in this "BUT" --
A) US/THEM -- we reject those children
B) MY GOD/ YOUR GOD -- money solves all problems
A) Us/them -- generation gap. Our children have turned into monsters. They don't share our values.
B) My God/ Your God (Oh, God! George Burns, 1977)
We live in the 'Age of Enlightenment' where science has become our god. Whenever we have a problem, we shovel money at science, and it produces a solution.
Disease: vaccine
Obesity: weight loss drugs, diet/exercise regimens - 6 foods that take inches off you waist
Back at the beginning of the 20th century, (you can look this up; it's true) farmers had an excess of hogs, so a study was commissioned which showed a bacon-and-eggs breakfast was healthy, gave you energy for the day (we still have that "eat a good breakfast" mantra around), and presto bacon sold like hotcakes. Always check who pays for a scientific study.
Science has been so successful at solving our everyday problems (as evidenced by lengthening life-span!) that it has become our god.
There is a concerted, well funded effort to prove that the biochemistry of the brain can account for ALL human experience -- to prove that there's no need to postulate a Soul as a real thing to explain human experience of life. By Occam's Razor, the simplest solution is the right one -- so if you can explain all phenomena (even out of body experiences) without postulating a Soul, then there actually is no such thing as a Soul, which means God does not exist.
It's all relentlessly logical, and "enlightened" people who've come out of the Dark Ages, and live in the Light of Science rely on logic for their sense of reality.
There is a philosophy promulgated in the 1700's saying that Reason works so well, it clearly indicates that God is a silly superstition only the unenlightened (dark minded; stupid or evil) would accept.
The idea is that one must choose -- Enlightenment and Reason OR Darkness and Superstition.
This is what I call a False Hobson's Choice. Read the February 2012 Review Column at
http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2012/
In the Enlightenment view of the universe, (The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, a lapsed Mormon) Science itself has evolved from Paine's ideas into the god to be propitiated by shoveling money into its maw, just like virgins to the maw of the volcano or the Dragon.
In that universe, the Soul is not real and thus children don't need their Soul nurtured, just the body. The yearnings and promptings of the body are the guide to what is "right" and "human rights" actually means "bodily rights," exclusive of Soul Rights.
With each generation, the children become more of a Body and less of a Soul, progressively, a little at a time so nobody notices or complains. Their god is science and their physical whims. Fun is behaving like an animal, or herd of animals, and pecking strangers to death, shedding the elderly from the herd for the good of the herd.
In the opposite view of the universe, God is real, makes the Souls and the Reality that cradles them out of Love, and imbues the Soul with the capability to experience Joy, especially the joy of a Soul Mate.
The conflict is "Science As god vs. God is Real"
Themes can be intimate or hugely dramatic:
"Religious Conversion Changes a Person on the Soul Level."
"God is Pissed And She Is Coming!" (an old bumper sticker that says it all)
You can tell up close and personal stories of finding a Soul Mate and thus finding your Soul and seeing you've made monsters of your children. Like a 12 step program, starting with admitting your complicity in monsterizing your children, you can ignite their Souls and rejoin them to their bodies, see them happily married.
Or you can tell vast stories, Herman Wouk size stories, such as the story of Moses pulling a nation out of Egypt with 10 miracles, and a Voice speaking the Ten Commandments from a medium-sized mountain, making the hills dance.
The salient feature of the 10 Commandments story is very simple. It's unique.
There are a lot of religions in this world where a Prophet rises and says "God told me to tell you." The gods of many nations only speak to their priests, or to one person at a time like the Greek gods who'd corner someone and torture them for fun.
Many of the Native American spirits would speak to a favored person only when he was alone in the wilderness. Even in Australia, the drill is to go AWAY from other people to find the spiritual pathway. I couldn't generalize about Africa, which is multiplex. Or India - whoo that's a complicated place.
But of all the stories around the globe and through time, the only one I know of where the Identity reporting itself as Creator of the Universe actually spoke to more than a million people, a "mixed multitude" (i.e. Jews and Egyptians and other foreigners visiting Egypt who went with the Jews, impressed by the Plagues), spoke publicly to everyone all at the same time, is the 10 Commandments.
Figure out what you think about this great philosophical debate (spoiled brats or bullies?). Arrive at your thought by this process I've illustrated, bringing in everything you know about everything, distilling it all down to a single statement, so that thought will be your THEME. The kernel of what really happened on that bus, and on YouTube, and why so much money was donated, will be your theme.
Maybe it's, "Children will be children!" or "That woman deserved it; she's ugly." or "YouTube is Evil for allowing that video to be posted."
Or maybe it's something huge, like "That bus incident proves that government must control everything. We need a Federal Law against bullying." Great story in a Political Romance!
Or something small and personal like, "My kids would do something like that. I have to discipline them harder (or softer, or enroll them in sleep-away school, or whatever -- think Harry Potter for Adults.)
Find your theme, then find a character who believes it, and one who'll die to stamp it out. Maybe the one who'll die to stamp it out is a kid bent on stamping out parental discipline.
Pit them against each other in a conflict derived from their different takes on that thematic belief.
Worldbuild their environment to showcase their issues.
Toss in a couple more kids, shake don't stir, and write your novel.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Showing posts with label romance stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label romance stories. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 02, 2012
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Theme-Worldbuilding Integration Part 4
Part 1 in this series on Theme-Worldbuilding integration (doing both at once to reduce word-count and increase "pacing" without losing style and atmosphere) is:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/09/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-1.html
Part 2 in this series was posted September 11, 2012:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/09/theme-worldbuilding-integraton-part-2.html
Part 3 in this series was posted Sept. 18, 2012:
http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/09/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-3.html
Here is a post listing previous posts on Worldbuilding:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/06/worldbuilding-link-list.html
Here is a partial list of posts on this blog about the use of THEME in structuring a novel or screenplay:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/05/theme-element-giving-and-receiving.html
Again we're in midst of Holiday scheduling here, so I'm not writing this today, but long before "now." But you may be reading this years later. Isn't the web wonderful?
"Last week" we looked at the Romance novels involving children -- young divorcee or widow with children falls in love. Second time around jitters. It's a dynamite plot angle.
Statistics show that the children of single parents don't do as well in school or in life as children raised by two parents. I doubt they've diced up those statistics to discover how badly children of parents who are trapped in a bad marriage do in school or in life.
Harmony between parents is, I believe, one of those essential ingredients in raising kids to be sensitive, caring, marriageable people -- people who can sustain a pair-bonding situation.
That kind of harmony between parents generally comes from Soul Mating, but not always. Sometimes Soul Mates just know how to fight in a marriage, but fight "fair." This can transmit to children the ability to express feelings, especially pain and dissatisfaction, learning to experience themselves without seeing others as the 'cause' of all their miseries (just some.) Absent such an environment, children can absorb it by reading good Romances about family life.
So another essential ingredient in raising kids to do well in life is DISCORD between the parents!
How can that be? Because children don't do as you say, they do as you do. As children, we absorbed both the image of joy between parents AND the image of how to handle discord, disagreements, compromising, displaced fury and rage bottled up on the job and brought home to be dumped on the spouse.
The stages and steps of emotional maturity that bring us to be able to take advantage of meeting a Soul Mate are rooted in how the parents behave to, at, and with each other.
Last week, we discussed the YouTube video that went viral in June about a group of Middle School kids reviling a school bus monitor.
Here's a story about it -- I believe the video itself may have been pulled offline:
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-06-20/news/32339643_1_school-bus-cell-phone-video-10-minute-video
You don't want to watch that video anyway.
In the news stories referring to the video, the incident was referred to as "bullying."
I don't think that's what it was. I did see the video.
To have a bullying incident, the bully-er has to be superior to the bully-ee. Bullying is an abuse of power -- of being bigger, stronger, having more authority, or options to bring punishment down on someone's head, or blackmail, or get someone fired -- the bully has to have the ability to do harm to the bullyee.
Bullying can be just "crowding" -- a group of kids move in close, touching another kid, trying to provoke a violent response so the bully-ee gets in trouble with the school admin.
It can be passive aggressive, but it's always cowardly by definition.
We live in a society where the trend is toward valuing safety over heroism, and as a result people who have not grown up modeling themselves on heroic behavior of parents toward dangers respond to threats to their safety by retreating, propitiating, and eventually cowering.
It doesn't take real danger to draw forth that response, just the threat of danger. Such a "threat of danger" is what bullying is and the goal is to evoke that cowardly response, the knuckling under, go-along-to-get-along response or the ineffectual lashing out at the irritant. If there were no probability that a cowardly response could be evoked, there would be almost no bullying behavior because there would be no enticing goal to achieve by bullying.
In the school bus case, the only element of "bullying" present that I could see was the power of numbers. There were a lot of kids involved, verbally trashing one adult, attempting to provoke a violent response (such a violent response is the mark of the coward) -- which would have gotten her fired from a job she really needed.
She was the adult in the room, and didn't lash out at them.
Note that martial arts training focuses on controlling the power you gain from learning moves. Watch The Karate Kid movie series carefully. That is the training in heroism that erases cowardly traits. The school bus monitor had mastered those principles, whether she had the physical "moves" or not. It's a character trait.
But she didn't handle the whole issue very well, either. She wasn't able to assert authority of her own, or the authority of the school admin, or the authority of the parents of these children.
Now, that's all I saw. For why any of this is important or relevant to Theme-Worldbuilding Integration in the Romance Novel, read the previous parts of this series, and the Theme series and the Worldbuilding Series. This stuff is subtle -- it takes a Wizard! But this bullying transaction illustrates the issues at the core of a true Romance -- because there is an interface between sexuality and power. Those bullies on that school bus were adolescents. Think about that.
Recall, last week, I pointed out at the end of the piece that the fact this video provoked a project to collect money for the school bus monitor, and that the amount collected became huge (and the bus monitor just recently acquired control of most of that amount), indicates where you can find a market for a novel based on a theme extracted from the news reports of this incident.
This is all about targeting your reader, finding what's going on in their real world, reducing that real world to a THEME, then using that theme as a filter to generate a character with that problem.
You should also use the theme also to filter out extraneous detail and build a world to cradle and present that character (just as a diamond merchant puts her diamonds on black velvet and subtly aims a light from the side, so they sparkle best.)
You want your diamonds, your characters to sparkle enough to catch the eye of the target reader, the people who did or would have donated money to the fund for that school bus monitor. Those donors hearts went out to that monitor. They wanted to make a statement repudiating the behavior of those children, and presumably of their parents for raising wild animals instead of people (failing to inculcate heroism in their children; heroes are never bullies). They wanted to alleviate that woman's pain because they could feel it inside themselves. THAT is an audience, and therefore a market for emotion-based fiction.
Against the black velvet background of a schoolbus full of bullies, the monitor's character sparkled and attracted the eye and ignited hearts. That's what you want your characters to do for your audience.
A question to consider is: "What has gone wrong in our society to produce such children?"
Or conversely, perhaps you don't think those children did anything so seriously horrible as to indicate something wrong with the entire underpinning of society? Perhaps you can defend them. That would be PERFECT for one of the Point of View characters in a novel. Readers on all sides of the question would be steamed up. Think about readers who are or were bullies -- how would they react to your main character falling in love with a bully?
To make a novel rather than a short story, you need to argue all sides of this issue.
To do that, you have to reduce the issue to something very precise and clear.
All of this has to do with analyzing that "BUT" we ended off with in Part 3 of this series.
There is an audience which believes the kids behaved poorly on that bus. They collected a lot of money for the victim, an outpouring of sympathy and a statement, "We don't belong to a society where people ever WOULD behave the way those children behaved."
That collection of such a huge amount (hundreds of thousands of dollars) disowns those children.
We do not stand with those children. We do not condone their behavior. Don't count us among them.
A bifurcation of society!! Whoopee! Fodder for DRAMA - high keyed, Pluto driven drama.
"It takes a village to raise children." Absolutely, it does. And there's a well-heeled village that just threw those children out to the wolves.
I see two sides in this "BUT" --
A) US/THEM -- we reject those children
B) MY GOD/ YOUR GOD -- money is my god and it solves all problems your god can't touch
The "guilt" of being the parent generation can be expiated by giving MONEY. Giving MONEY solves all problems, but most especially solves the problem of feeling GUILTY. How many Romances have foundered on the issue of subconscious or repressed guilt?
That monetary response might be inadequate. The Romance Novel that reveals how and why it's inadequate may blow the whole Romance genre out of its ghetto.
Don't forget what we discussed about "misnomers" --
As with "Fast Food" there is nothing essentially wrong with "video" or "game" or "video-game."
A video-game is a medium for delivering a story, entertainment. It's the prevailing content that has gone bad. As with "fast food" being a label for grease and sugar, "video-game" has become a label for "only savagery survives."
There's an underlying cultural reason for this. It's a long, involved, very philosophical and very boring, a multifaceted issue.
The writer's job is to reduce that tangled mess to something, quick, sweet, enjoyable, and memorable.
Let me show you my thinking on this issue.
Remember, again, the purpose here is to show you HOW a writer thinks, not what you should or should not think. Catch the drift of this process, then use it on your own material. A writer doesn't see what everyone else sees when observing an incident such as the school bus bullying incident.
Non-writers see that incident on the school bus, dismiss the complexity of the situation by slapping the label "bullying" on it, then to expiate a subconscious sense of guilt, to distance behavior from that situation, to repudiate it, or for other reasons, they give MONEY.
A writer, chasing the roiling issues of "Poetic Justice" in the Soul-Mate rooted Romance, has to view it all through the question: "What archetype is behind this behavior?"
Here are some of the posts on Poetic Justice:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/poetic-justice-in-paranormal-romance_22.html
Strip this bus incident back to the raw basics, and you see PROPITIATION OF A GOD. That's the basic archetype revealed (there are a lot of them in the incident; this is one Romance writers can easily use.)
The children's behavior resembles the behavior of the Ancient Greek gods torturing a human, for fun, just because they can. They knew they could get away with it because of the laws saying the bus monitor couldn't spank them, in any way, physical or metaphorical. They also grew up in a world where it was reasonable to expect retreat before the use of force or to expect more force to ellicit an ineffectual lashing out with force which would cause the victim more harm than it would cause the bullies.
Just like the Ancient Greek gods, the children had more power than they had maturity to handle. (read Gini Koch's Alien series!) These bullies have the godly power of YouTube.
I have often said here and in my review column that the Ancient Greek gods exhibited the behavior of children raised in a dysfunctional family. And that's what I see in those children. I don't see the children themselves, but I see the parents. I didn't see news stories about the parents failure as parents -- but I saw a lot decrying the mysterious epidemic of bullying among children. Very mysterious.
There's plenty of discussion of the failure of schools to prevent the buillies from bullying -- not one word about inculcating heroism in "victims." Have you ever seen a hero bullied? Or a coward? Contrast/compare and there is your novel (or video-game) theme and the world in which that theme produces diamond characters. How many effective ways do you know for dealing with the attack of a bully? Did you learn them from seeing your parents "model" them?
Consider that if you leave the parents out of the mystery of where the bullying epidemic is coming from, you'll never solve it.
But it would be politically incorrect to hold parents responsible for not-doing what the Law of the Land prohibits them from doing -- owning their children to the point of being held responsible for the damage their children do, even before they've done any damage. Today children have "legal rights" that preempt the rights a parent needs in order to parent well. State-raised children are the signature of the Communist regimes, yet we're now headed toward that in the USA, and those children once grown will become your market.
The parents' hands are tied, just like the bus monitor's hands are tied. (or teachers' hands) It's not just the threat of being accused of child abuse that ties parents' hands, though. It is that they have no clue how to parent! You can't learn it by reading books or taking classes. You learn it by having been parented.
You've seen the experiments on monkeys. A baby monkey taken from its mother and raised in a cage will abuse and kill its offspring, not parent the offspring.
The propitiation element I see is harder to discern because it's removed several steps away from the actual bus incident.
How can you say that the huge amount of money that poured into the fund for the school bus monitor was propitiation paid to the misbehaving children on the bus?
There's deep psychology and sociology behind this long chain of connecting links.
Think about it, and we'll discuss it next week, but first you must come to your own conclusions. Remember the objective here is to master a thinking process peculiar to writers -- not to solve some specific real world problem. Just as dialogue is not speech, but the illusion of speech, so also a fictional world, character or relationship is not a real world, character or relationship but the illusion of them. We are doing an exercise here designed to train your subconscious to create illusions.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/09/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-1.html
Part 2 in this series was posted September 11, 2012:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/09/theme-worldbuilding-integraton-part-2.html
Part 3 in this series was posted Sept. 18, 2012:
http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/09/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-3.html
Here is a post listing previous posts on Worldbuilding:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/06/worldbuilding-link-list.html
Here is a partial list of posts on this blog about the use of THEME in structuring a novel or screenplay:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/05/theme-element-giving-and-receiving.html
Again we're in midst of Holiday scheduling here, so I'm not writing this today, but long before "now." But you may be reading this years later. Isn't the web wonderful?
"Last week" we looked at the Romance novels involving children -- young divorcee or widow with children falls in love. Second time around jitters. It's a dynamite plot angle.
Statistics show that the children of single parents don't do as well in school or in life as children raised by two parents. I doubt they've diced up those statistics to discover how badly children of parents who are trapped in a bad marriage do in school or in life.
Harmony between parents is, I believe, one of those essential ingredients in raising kids to be sensitive, caring, marriageable people -- people who can sustain a pair-bonding situation.
That kind of harmony between parents generally comes from Soul Mating, but not always. Sometimes Soul Mates just know how to fight in a marriage, but fight "fair." This can transmit to children the ability to express feelings, especially pain and dissatisfaction, learning to experience themselves without seeing others as the 'cause' of all their miseries (just some.) Absent such an environment, children can absorb it by reading good Romances about family life.
So another essential ingredient in raising kids to do well in life is DISCORD between the parents!
How can that be? Because children don't do as you say, they do as you do. As children, we absorbed both the image of joy between parents AND the image of how to handle discord, disagreements, compromising, displaced fury and rage bottled up on the job and brought home to be dumped on the spouse.
The stages and steps of emotional maturity that bring us to be able to take advantage of meeting a Soul Mate are rooted in how the parents behave to, at, and with each other.
Last week, we discussed the YouTube video that went viral in June about a group of Middle School kids reviling a school bus monitor.
Here's a story about it -- I believe the video itself may have been pulled offline:
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-06-20/news/32339643_1_school-bus-cell-phone-video-10-minute-video
You don't want to watch that video anyway.
In the news stories referring to the video, the incident was referred to as "bullying."
I don't think that's what it was. I did see the video.
To have a bullying incident, the bully-er has to be superior to the bully-ee. Bullying is an abuse of power -- of being bigger, stronger, having more authority, or options to bring punishment down on someone's head, or blackmail, or get someone fired -- the bully has to have the ability to do harm to the bullyee.
Bullying can be just "crowding" -- a group of kids move in close, touching another kid, trying to provoke a violent response so the bully-ee gets in trouble with the school admin.
It can be passive aggressive, but it's always cowardly by definition.
We live in a society where the trend is toward valuing safety over heroism, and as a result people who have not grown up modeling themselves on heroic behavior of parents toward dangers respond to threats to their safety by retreating, propitiating, and eventually cowering.
It doesn't take real danger to draw forth that response, just the threat of danger. Such a "threat of danger" is what bullying is and the goal is to evoke that cowardly response, the knuckling under, go-along-to-get-along response or the ineffectual lashing out at the irritant. If there were no probability that a cowardly response could be evoked, there would be almost no bullying behavior because there would be no enticing goal to achieve by bullying.
In the school bus case, the only element of "bullying" present that I could see was the power of numbers. There were a lot of kids involved, verbally trashing one adult, attempting to provoke a violent response (such a violent response is the mark of the coward) -- which would have gotten her fired from a job she really needed.
She was the adult in the room, and didn't lash out at them.
Note that martial arts training focuses on controlling the power you gain from learning moves. Watch The Karate Kid movie series carefully. That is the training in heroism that erases cowardly traits. The school bus monitor had mastered those principles, whether she had the physical "moves" or not. It's a character trait.
But she didn't handle the whole issue very well, either. She wasn't able to assert authority of her own, or the authority of the school admin, or the authority of the parents of these children.
Now, that's all I saw. For why any of this is important or relevant to Theme-Worldbuilding Integration in the Romance Novel, read the previous parts of this series, and the Theme series and the Worldbuilding Series. This stuff is subtle -- it takes a Wizard! But this bullying transaction illustrates the issues at the core of a true Romance -- because there is an interface between sexuality and power. Those bullies on that school bus were adolescents. Think about that.
Recall, last week, I pointed out at the end of the piece that the fact this video provoked a project to collect money for the school bus monitor, and that the amount collected became huge (and the bus monitor just recently acquired control of most of that amount), indicates where you can find a market for a novel based on a theme extracted from the news reports of this incident.
This is all about targeting your reader, finding what's going on in their real world, reducing that real world to a THEME, then using that theme as a filter to generate a character with that problem.
You should also use the theme also to filter out extraneous detail and build a world to cradle and present that character (just as a diamond merchant puts her diamonds on black velvet and subtly aims a light from the side, so they sparkle best.)
You want your diamonds, your characters to sparkle enough to catch the eye of the target reader, the people who did or would have donated money to the fund for that school bus monitor. Those donors hearts went out to that monitor. They wanted to make a statement repudiating the behavior of those children, and presumably of their parents for raising wild animals instead of people (failing to inculcate heroism in their children; heroes are never bullies). They wanted to alleviate that woman's pain because they could feel it inside themselves. THAT is an audience, and therefore a market for emotion-based fiction.
Against the black velvet background of a schoolbus full of bullies, the monitor's character sparkled and attracted the eye and ignited hearts. That's what you want your characters to do for your audience.
A question to consider is: "What has gone wrong in our society to produce such children?"
Or conversely, perhaps you don't think those children did anything so seriously horrible as to indicate something wrong with the entire underpinning of society? Perhaps you can defend them. That would be PERFECT for one of the Point of View characters in a novel. Readers on all sides of the question would be steamed up. Think about readers who are or were bullies -- how would they react to your main character falling in love with a bully?
To make a novel rather than a short story, you need to argue all sides of this issue.
To do that, you have to reduce the issue to something very precise and clear.
All of this has to do with analyzing that "BUT" we ended off with in Part 3 of this series.
There is an audience which believes the kids behaved poorly on that bus. They collected a lot of money for the victim, an outpouring of sympathy and a statement, "We don't belong to a society where people ever WOULD behave the way those children behaved."
That collection of such a huge amount (hundreds of thousands of dollars) disowns those children.
We do not stand with those children. We do not condone their behavior. Don't count us among them.
A bifurcation of society!! Whoopee! Fodder for DRAMA - high keyed, Pluto driven drama.
"It takes a village to raise children." Absolutely, it does. And there's a well-heeled village that just threw those children out to the wolves.
I see two sides in this "BUT" --
A) US/THEM -- we reject those children
B) MY GOD/ YOUR GOD -- money is my god and it solves all problems your god can't touch
The "guilt" of being the parent generation can be expiated by giving MONEY. Giving MONEY solves all problems, but most especially solves the problem of feeling GUILTY. How many Romances have foundered on the issue of subconscious or repressed guilt?
That monetary response might be inadequate. The Romance Novel that reveals how and why it's inadequate may blow the whole Romance genre out of its ghetto.
Don't forget what we discussed about "misnomers" --
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Theme-Worldbuilding Integraton Part 2: The Use of Misnomers
--- where we discussed how "video-game" is used as a tag, a shorthand, a label for "violence." It shouldn't be. As of now, there are some video-games which incorporate reward for players who solve problems with adversaries and lose points for the use of violence. There will be more video-games driven by Relationship stories.As with "Fast Food" there is nothing essentially wrong with "video" or "game" or "video-game."
A video-game is a medium for delivering a story, entertainment. It's the prevailing content that has gone bad. As with "fast food" being a label for grease and sugar, "video-game" has become a label for "only savagery survives."
There's an underlying cultural reason for this. It's a long, involved, very philosophical and very boring, a multifaceted issue.
The writer's job is to reduce that tangled mess to something, quick, sweet, enjoyable, and memorable.
Let me show you my thinking on this issue.
Remember, again, the purpose here is to show you HOW a writer thinks, not what you should or should not think. Catch the drift of this process, then use it on your own material. A writer doesn't see what everyone else sees when observing an incident such as the school bus bullying incident.
Non-writers see that incident on the school bus, dismiss the complexity of the situation by slapping the label "bullying" on it, then to expiate a subconscious sense of guilt, to distance behavior from that situation, to repudiate it, or for other reasons, they give MONEY.
A writer, chasing the roiling issues of "Poetic Justice" in the Soul-Mate rooted Romance, has to view it all through the question: "What archetype is behind this behavior?"
Here are some of the posts on Poetic Justice:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/poetic-justice-in-paranormal-romance_22.html
Strip this bus incident back to the raw basics, and you see PROPITIATION OF A GOD. That's the basic archetype revealed (there are a lot of them in the incident; this is one Romance writers can easily use.)
The children's behavior resembles the behavior of the Ancient Greek gods torturing a human, for fun, just because they can. They knew they could get away with it because of the laws saying the bus monitor couldn't spank them, in any way, physical or metaphorical. They also grew up in a world where it was reasonable to expect retreat before the use of force or to expect more force to ellicit an ineffectual lashing out with force which would cause the victim more harm than it would cause the bullies.
Just like the Ancient Greek gods, the children had more power than they had maturity to handle. (read Gini Koch's Alien series!) These bullies have the godly power of YouTube.
I have often said here and in my review column that the Ancient Greek gods exhibited the behavior of children raised in a dysfunctional family. And that's what I see in those children. I don't see the children themselves, but I see the parents. I didn't see news stories about the parents failure as parents -- but I saw a lot decrying the mysterious epidemic of bullying among children. Very mysterious.
There's plenty of discussion of the failure of schools to prevent the buillies from bullying -- not one word about inculcating heroism in "victims." Have you ever seen a hero bullied? Or a coward? Contrast/compare and there is your novel (or video-game) theme and the world in which that theme produces diamond characters. How many effective ways do you know for dealing with the attack of a bully? Did you learn them from seeing your parents "model" them?
Consider that if you leave the parents out of the mystery of where the bullying epidemic is coming from, you'll never solve it.
But it would be politically incorrect to hold parents responsible for not-doing what the Law of the Land prohibits them from doing -- owning their children to the point of being held responsible for the damage their children do, even before they've done any damage. Today children have "legal rights" that preempt the rights a parent needs in order to parent well. State-raised children are the signature of the Communist regimes, yet we're now headed toward that in the USA, and those children once grown will become your market.
The parents' hands are tied, just like the bus monitor's hands are tied. (or teachers' hands) It's not just the threat of being accused of child abuse that ties parents' hands, though. It is that they have no clue how to parent! You can't learn it by reading books or taking classes. You learn it by having been parented.
You've seen the experiments on monkeys. A baby monkey taken from its mother and raised in a cage will abuse and kill its offspring, not parent the offspring.
The propitiation element I see is harder to discern because it's removed several steps away from the actual bus incident.
How can you say that the huge amount of money that poured into the fund for the school bus monitor was propitiation paid to the misbehaving children on the bus?
There's deep psychology and sociology behind this long chain of connecting links.
Think about it, and we'll discuss it next week, but first you must come to your own conclusions. Remember the objective here is to master a thinking process peculiar to writers -- not to solve some specific real world problem. Just as dialogue is not speech, but the illusion of speech, so also a fictional world, character or relationship is not a real world, character or relationship but the illusion of them. We are doing an exercise here designed to train your subconscious to create illusions.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Theme-Worldbuilding Integration Part 3: Children in Romance Novels
Part 1 in this series is:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/09/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-1.html
Part 2 in this series was posted September 11, 2012:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/09/theme-worldbuilding-integraton-part-2.html
Here is a post listing previous posts on Worldbuilding:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/06/worldbuilding-link-list.html
Here is a partial list of posts on this blog about the use of THEME in structuring a novel or screenplay:
Note that I'm not writing this piece today as it is a Holiday, so I'm offline. But I've noticed most of the readers of these blogs come along days and weeks later, so let's just plow ahead with this very difficult coordinating of two huge writing techniques, Theme and Worldbuilding.
This is especially focused on Romance, most especially PNR or Science Fiction Romance, even contemporary Urban Fantasy novels.
I've been reading a number of Romance novels lately that involve the "second time around" process, a divorced woman with children falling in love -- once burned: twice wary, a story the Romance genre didn't want to touch for decades is now popular. And there's always the widow story which is very traditional, especially the Young Widow in Victorian times. You can Steam Punk that story very easily.
But if you open up the time-line, you can tackle whole new vistas in Romance. Well, not so new, as Robert A. Heinlein wrote about families in space ships, asteroid mining families in junk-ships, generation ships going for the stars and raising kids who didn't value what the parents did, kids raised on Martian colonies, on the Moon. He had a lot of kids in his novels.
So kids aren't a new encumbrance to the adventure-hero story.
They are relatively new in the Romance genre, and there's still a lot of territory to be explored in the Fantasy Romance area - particularly PNR.
Don't miss Gini Koch's "Alien" series that I pointed you to in a previous post:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/turning-action-into-romance.html
She has a new one out in 2012 -- read them in order. She's taken a fairly ordinary office worker woman into an Urban Fantasy world where she falls in love with an Alien and now has a kid by the Alien.
She's got to teach that kid (who has "powers") to be a good person.
How do you do that? What kind of Romance theme goes with worldbuilding raising Superman?
In real life, we all have our successes and failures with transmitting values to kids. If you include your neighbors and maybe your twitter friends too, you know many moments of soaring joy when a kid does something showing they "get it" -- that suddenly this selfish little bundle of demands finally understands there are other people with wants and needs in his/her world. If you're lucky, that may happen at about 3 or 4 years of age.
But you also have seen many real world examples of utter failure. For example, that recent YouTube video of a school bus monitor being deliberately maltreated by 12 yr olds just to make a YouTube Video of her reactions -- the utter cruelty of telling her that she's so ugly and nasty that she couldn't possibly have any family because anyone related to her would commit suicide! While in her reality, she did have a relative who had committed suicide. The devastation of that moment in her emotional life is incalculable. The kids thought it was funny.
I keep saying "Love Conquers All" is not just a silly fantasy - it's real in real life, and it's the way to go. Love and Joy are the fuel for our deeds that gives them magical wings, that amplifies the effect of what we do. That's from a concrete observation of real world events. It's actual, not a fantasy. But there can be a lot of different explanations for this observed fact, explanations that "work" well for a lot of people.
Personally, I prefer the explanation rooted in the postulate that God is real, actually exists, actually stirs up human affairs and takes a very personal interest in each individual, that the Universe is created every moment from God's Love, and because of that, when we Love our actions are super-effective in interacting with that created Reality.
The Universe is solidified Love. When we perceive that fact, and ignite our Joy with that fact, everything we do has astonishingly powerful effects far beyond the reach of an individual person. Our thoughts, words and deeds echo from the walls at the ends of time when they are powered by Joy ignited by Love -- which is why Happily Ever After is the only possible outcome of Life. It's just that getting the hang of how to do that is very hard. It can take quite a few incarnations to get it right! But we'll be at this and at this until we get it right. That's one theme thread woven through everything I write.
That's my philosophy, but it's only one of many worth exploring. If my take on Life is true, it doesn't invalidate any of the other explanations for the observed fact that Love works while Hate does not work.
Hate ignited in those young people, rewarded by the society they live in (videogames, YouTube, and a toxic school environment), led them to an egregious act of hatred by simple, logical steps -- "oh, it's harmless; just kids cutting up."
"Video-game" is one of those misnomers we investigated in a prior posts in this series.
I'm sure those children couldn't imagine that anyone would object to what they were doing to that school bus monitor -- at least nobody under 20 years old would object! After all, it was harmless, right? Just joking. Just for fun. Fat, ugly, old people should be put in their proper place in the scheme of things, especially fat-ugly-old people who are there to discipline you into sitting still and being quiet so the school bus driver doesn't crash the bus. Like toilet-papering teacher's houses, egregious vandalism of property or person is FUN, and well-sanctioned by our society, at least by the young, slender, pretty people?
Keep your eye on the ball here. We're talking Theme-Worldbuilding INTEGRATION, not "ain't it awful" gossip.
What if these kids were as powerful as the kid Gini Koch's heroine is raising?
Apparently our whole society is not as depraved as the kids we're raising.
Someone started a fund and suddenly they had collected hundreds of thousands of dollars for the benefit of this woman. People voted on those kids' actions by tossing a few coins in a hat. The response made TV news headlines, and that's an encouraging thing in this world. The adults of this world do not approve of the behavior of the children we are raising.
That stark RIFT between the generations has never (in my memory, or the memories I heard about from my forebears ) been more dramatic. Oh, boy is this an opportunity to found a new Best Seller Genre!
See some of my blog entries on Pluto and drama:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/12/astrology-just-for-writers-part-5-high.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/six-kinds-of-power-in-relationship.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/astrology-just-for-writers-part-10.html
Studying this incident can give you a target to pin on your reader's heart, something to aim at when you winnow out the themes rattling around in your head.
There's at least one major, and far-reaching theme buried in this incident. By the time any Romance novel based on it can appear in print, the video and incident will be long forgotten, and the thematic substance will seem fresh and original. So this is the kind of incident worth studying for thematic opportunities.
Considering the amount of money that was raised, and how fast it came in from thousands of donors online, you have a readership that's wide enough, that's got money, and that wants to hear your story, to experience the SOLUTION to this problem with our kids.
That solution, in my estimation, is LOVE -- but the problem is how to apply it.
There is of course one sad thing about that response to this school bus monitor's angst -- we'll just collect some money so she can have a vacation from all that. The people who started the collection had no idea it would be a retirement fund magnitude of cash collected. And I've no idea of the tax status of such donations, but I'm sure the harassed woman won't get it all.
The sad thing here is the popular response is "give money and forget it -- giving money fixes it." And we do that often -- most of our big social problems get that response.
It's a good one, and definitely transmits LOVE as it should, is very powerful and to me very heartening -- but!!!
And the but will be left for next week. See if you can work out for yourself where the dramatic opportunity is inside that BUT.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/09/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-1.html
Part 2 in this series was posted September 11, 2012:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/09/theme-worldbuilding-integraton-part-2.html
Here is a post listing previous posts on Worldbuilding:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/06/worldbuilding-link-list.html
Here is a partial list of posts on this blog about the use of THEME in structuring a novel or screenplay:
Note that I'm not writing this piece today as it is a Holiday, so I'm offline. But I've noticed most of the readers of these blogs come along days and weeks later, so let's just plow ahead with this very difficult coordinating of two huge writing techniques, Theme and Worldbuilding.
This is especially focused on Romance, most especially PNR or Science Fiction Romance, even contemporary Urban Fantasy novels.
I've been reading a number of Romance novels lately that involve the "second time around" process, a divorced woman with children falling in love -- once burned: twice wary, a story the Romance genre didn't want to touch for decades is now popular. And there's always the widow story which is very traditional, especially the Young Widow in Victorian times. You can Steam Punk that story very easily.
But if you open up the time-line, you can tackle whole new vistas in Romance. Well, not so new, as Robert A. Heinlein wrote about families in space ships, asteroid mining families in junk-ships, generation ships going for the stars and raising kids who didn't value what the parents did, kids raised on Martian colonies, on the Moon. He had a lot of kids in his novels.
So kids aren't a new encumbrance to the adventure-hero story.
They are relatively new in the Romance genre, and there's still a lot of territory to be explored in the Fantasy Romance area - particularly PNR.
Don't miss Gini Koch's "Alien" series that I pointed you to in a previous post:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/turning-action-into-romance.html
She has a new one out in 2012 -- read them in order. She's taken a fairly ordinary office worker woman into an Urban Fantasy world where she falls in love with an Alien and now has a kid by the Alien.
She's got to teach that kid (who has "powers") to be a good person.
How do you do that? What kind of Romance theme goes with worldbuilding raising Superman?
In real life, we all have our successes and failures with transmitting values to kids. If you include your neighbors and maybe your twitter friends too, you know many moments of soaring joy when a kid does something showing they "get it" -- that suddenly this selfish little bundle of demands finally understands there are other people with wants and needs in his/her world. If you're lucky, that may happen at about 3 or 4 years of age.
But you also have seen many real world examples of utter failure. For example, that recent YouTube video of a school bus monitor being deliberately maltreated by 12 yr olds just to make a YouTube Video of her reactions -- the utter cruelty of telling her that she's so ugly and nasty that she couldn't possibly have any family because anyone related to her would commit suicide! While in her reality, she did have a relative who had committed suicide. The devastation of that moment in her emotional life is incalculable. The kids thought it was funny.
I keep saying "Love Conquers All" is not just a silly fantasy - it's real in real life, and it's the way to go. Love and Joy are the fuel for our deeds that gives them magical wings, that amplifies the effect of what we do. That's from a concrete observation of real world events. It's actual, not a fantasy. But there can be a lot of different explanations for this observed fact, explanations that "work" well for a lot of people.
Personally, I prefer the explanation rooted in the postulate that God is real, actually exists, actually stirs up human affairs and takes a very personal interest in each individual, that the Universe is created every moment from God's Love, and because of that, when we Love our actions are super-effective in interacting with that created Reality.
The Universe is solidified Love. When we perceive that fact, and ignite our Joy with that fact, everything we do has astonishingly powerful effects far beyond the reach of an individual person. Our thoughts, words and deeds echo from the walls at the ends of time when they are powered by Joy ignited by Love -- which is why Happily Ever After is the only possible outcome of Life. It's just that getting the hang of how to do that is very hard. It can take quite a few incarnations to get it right! But we'll be at this and at this until we get it right. That's one theme thread woven through everything I write.
That's my philosophy, but it's only one of many worth exploring. If my take on Life is true, it doesn't invalidate any of the other explanations for the observed fact that Love works while Hate does not work.
Hate ignited in those young people, rewarded by the society they live in (videogames, YouTube, and a toxic school environment), led them to an egregious act of hatred by simple, logical steps -- "oh, it's harmless; just kids cutting up."
"Video-game" is one of those misnomers we investigated in a prior posts in this series.
I'm sure those children couldn't imagine that anyone would object to what they were doing to that school bus monitor -- at least nobody under 20 years old would object! After all, it was harmless, right? Just joking. Just for fun. Fat, ugly, old people should be put in their proper place in the scheme of things, especially fat-ugly-old people who are there to discipline you into sitting still and being quiet so the school bus driver doesn't crash the bus. Like toilet-papering teacher's houses, egregious vandalism of property or person is FUN, and well-sanctioned by our society, at least by the young, slender, pretty people?
Keep your eye on the ball here. We're talking Theme-Worldbuilding INTEGRATION, not "ain't it awful" gossip.
What if these kids were as powerful as the kid Gini Koch's heroine is raising?
Apparently our whole society is not as depraved as the kids we're raising.
Someone started a fund and suddenly they had collected hundreds of thousands of dollars for the benefit of this woman. People voted on those kids' actions by tossing a few coins in a hat. The response made TV news headlines, and that's an encouraging thing in this world. The adults of this world do not approve of the behavior of the children we are raising.
That stark RIFT between the generations has never (in my memory, or the memories I heard about from my forebears ) been more dramatic. Oh, boy is this an opportunity to found a new Best Seller Genre!
See some of my blog entries on Pluto and drama:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/12/astrology-just-for-writers-part-5-high.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/six-kinds-of-power-in-relationship.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/astrology-just-for-writers-part-10.html
Studying this incident can give you a target to pin on your reader's heart, something to aim at when you winnow out the themes rattling around in your head.
There's at least one major, and far-reaching theme buried in this incident. By the time any Romance novel based on it can appear in print, the video and incident will be long forgotten, and the thematic substance will seem fresh and original. So this is the kind of incident worth studying for thematic opportunities.
Considering the amount of money that was raised, and how fast it came in from thousands of donors online, you have a readership that's wide enough, that's got money, and that wants to hear your story, to experience the SOLUTION to this problem with our kids.
That solution, in my estimation, is LOVE -- but the problem is how to apply it.
There is of course one sad thing about that response to this school bus monitor's angst -- we'll just collect some money so she can have a vacation from all that. The people who started the collection had no idea it would be a retirement fund magnitude of cash collected. And I've no idea of the tax status of such donations, but I'm sure the harassed woman won't get it all.
The sad thing here is the popular response is "give money and forget it -- giving money fixes it." And we do that often -- most of our big social problems get that response.
It's a good one, and definitely transmits LOVE as it should, is very powerful and to me very heartening -- but!!!
And the but will be left for next week. See if you can work out for yourself where the dramatic opportunity is inside that BUT.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
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