alien romances

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Believing in Happily Ever After Part 5 TV Series Once Upon A Time on ABC

Part 4 of this Believing in Happily Ever After sequence of blog posts is
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-4.html

It has links to the previous 3 parts and the Verisimilitude vs. Reality series.

In Verisimiltude vs. Reality and other posts linked in that series, we delved into the real world the reader lives in and looked at how that real-world environment shapes the enjoyment of a fictional environment. Eventually, we'll look even deeper into various methods a writer uses to handle theme and how the chosen method affects the size and shape of the audience the writer might reach.

The purpose of this study is to deliver a Happily Ever After ending experience to readers/viewers who flatly disbelieve in the possibility.

Part of the real-world environment a reader lives in is the fiction (video, text, big screen, radio) the reader is immersed in.

The TV Series Once Upon A Time on ABC is part of that environment.

I was reminded forcefully of this in November 2011 by the announcement of the death of Anne McCaffrey, creator of the Dragonriders of Pern. Her biography page says she was born April 1st, 1926, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at 1:30 p.m. and her first novel was published by Ballantine Books in 1967.

My first story was published by Fred Pohl in World of If Magazine of Science Fiction in January 1969.

In April of 2011 Copperheart announced that filming of the first Pern novel, Dragonflight, would begin in 2012.

http://collider.com/david-hayter-dragonflight-dragonriders-of-pern/85654/

The Friday after the announcement of her passing was a #scifichat devoted to Santa, and what SF presents SF readers would give to other SF readers. But the second hour of the chat became a remembrance of Anne McCaffrey, not just Pern but all her other wonderful novels. The discussion branched out into writers she had influenced and what her success with Pern introduced to the entire field.

McCaffrey broke through with not just the overt sexuality of the Dragon/Rider relationship in the Pern novels, but the emotional bonding of a true, committed, to-the-death relationship. That angle resonated with the audience of the 1970's.

I don't know what they're planning to do with the film, but there are Pern fans involved in creating it. From the discussion on twitter, though, I gather different readers remember different components of those novels.

Some people had avoided the Pern novels because they thought the novels were fantasy. They aren't. They're science fiction that looks like fantasy.

Fast-forward to 2012 and take a close look at the TV Series Once Upon A Time.

Is it fantasy or science fiction? Is it Paranormal Romance? Is it kid-lit? What is this series? Is it even important?

Note how it does 2 things that have become standard fare on Television.

a) It rewrites "history" as "steam punk" does -- but focuses on the fairy tale universe of Snow White and Prince Charming with the Wicked Witch (complete with mirror and poison apples), not the Victorian era.

b) It juxtaposes this "fantasy" world of the rewritten storybook with our everyday reality, (like Urban Fantasy often uses 2 universes with a door between). You may remember how Forever Knight handled flashbacks to hundreds of years ago.

Yep, I said "between" -- which isn't quite like "Between" of the Pern novels through which Dragons teleport their Riders to fight Thread.

But the principle is the same as Star Trek's transporter, Warp Drive, or any number of "devices" that let characters travel from one spot to another fast enough not to slow the plot down.

Once an audience has been introduced to these techniques -- as in Time Tunnel, Quantum Leap, or Sliders -- producers doing another show can use that technique as a given and get on with their own stories.

So, despite McCaffrey introducing readers to Between in the 1970's, and Star Trek's transporter and warp drive coming online in the 1960's, the Pern movie will be regarded as borrowing or stealing the "device" of Between.

The Pern novels start at the beginning of a period of warfare against "Thread" (a crop-destroying rain of organisms from space), in which misery, starvation, poverty, and perhaps the extinction of humanity on the planet Pern, are the apparent direction of life. An apparently stable society is brought down around the heads of its ordinary people, and it's power brokers, while the disregarded powerless are elevated to hero status.

It's very much what this reality faces today -- the impending or actually in progress meltdown of the global financial system. Or the meltdown may be over by now and we just don't realize we've hit bottom and are going to climb again.

We also have impending war, and war in progress in a lot of places, war that brings the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

That's the reality the audience lives in, and would very much like to escape.

What's better than escaping Reality, though, is coming to understand it in a way that lets you carve out a life leading to your own Happily Ever After. Fiction can provide that kind of "grip" on reality that steadies you down for the long haul up to a better life.

The Pern novels depict a world locked in a frozen feudal system, suddenly attacked by Thread, and saved by the superstitious, traditional, disregarded, way too expensive fossilized organization known as the Dragonriders. Suddenly, the feudal lords can't protect their people, but the poverty-stricken, useless, and widely regarded as nut-fringe folks are the only ones who can protect people.

I think Pern can fly as a TV Series once it's been a successful movie.

Pern does not paint a rosey Happily Ever After picture. It doesn't even give you a "Happily For Now" (HFN) ending. The novels end on the upbeat of a challenge conquered, but with the vista of a new, bigger challenge yet to come.

The Hope in these endings is that during the "action" section of the novels, Relationships form that are solid, perhaps unbreakable, and enable the teams to face bigger challenges with the expectation of surviving. Thus the Pern novels are perfect examples of Intimate Adventure.

The secret of the Pern novels though is in the story the theme its founded on, and how that theme is shown not told.

The Relationships formed have the seeds of real Happiness in them, and the overwhelming force of what might be described as karma.

The characters, dragons and humans, all go through a stepwise process of bonding with a soul mate, and the result always seems - after the fact - to have been inevitable, right, and just.

Yes, Poetic Justice again:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/poetic-justice-in-paranormal-romance_22.html

The Pern novels are a perfect example of a) Paranormal Romance (the telepathic bonding with Dragons) and karmic marriages, and b) that there really is Justice in the world, and it always SINGS (music is a huge component of the Pern world).

Now, contrast/compare the TV Series Once Upon A Time with the Pern novels of Anne McCaffrey.

Eventually, the Pern series does get to including time travel, so there is another comparison.

Once Upon A Time updates the fairy tale world of Snow White etc. using modern characters and relationships. The story is thus more accessible or believable to the adult audience.

The thing is, when these fairy tales were originally circulating as folk-tales, they depicted the "real" or modern world the intended audience lived in. Today, there aren't many "folk" tales, made up by non-professional story-tellers and passed around to be improved on by others. Most of our fiction, even for children, is professionally created and designed for the broadest possible audience. (YouTube is changing that; urban folk-legends and folk music is reviving!)

So it would seem appropriate to "update" the oldest tales again, and embue them with the moral lessons of today's world, rather than the original lessons inserted by the Brothers Grimm from extant folktales that probably date back before the 1500's. It's done in every generation.

Google "Snow White" and you'll find everything from a new forthcoming movie to scholarship by serious professors. Folk tales are very revealing of the underlying culture.

So consider what this Once Upon A Time TV Series reveals about Hollywood's idea of our culture, of what we are, what we should be, and what we want to be.

There's a lot of philosophical material in this subject, some of it as yet untouched by writers looking for themes.

I want to point you to just one aspect of this series that you can ponder and maybe plunder for story material.

The premise of Once Upon A Time is that the Evil Witch curses the community of Snow White and Prince Charming to be transported to a place where THERE ARE NO HAPPILY EVER AFTER ENDINGS - not for anyone except the Evil Witch herself!

And that place where it is a fact that the HEA does not exist and can never exist is HERE - in our everyday reality.

The Evil Witch is now the Mayor of a small town in the USA where people can't leave - they can't escape. If they try, horrid things happen, driving them back. The Mayor's word is law. She's happy.

The curse can be broken, but only by one woman who was born when the curse was hurled. She was rescued and flung aside into our world before the curse trapped her, too.

Only one small boy knows what's going on because he found the fairy tale book. He lures the woman who can break the curse to the town, they wake Prince Charming from a coma, and then things get interesting.

The premise that sells this TV show to a major network may be taken to be "this world's natural condition is that Happily Ever After can not happen." That's why this world was the Evil Witch's chosen destination. Or maybe the curse only applies to the one small town the Witch dominates? It's fascinating how they dance around this topic, probably waiting for ratings responses to see which direction to take the show.

They appear to be waiting to see if the majority subconsciously believe that Happily Ever After can't happen in this world. And then they'll decide what to do about changing that situation.

By using this premise as the main conflict, the series creators induce a hostile audience to watch (and become addicted to) a fairy tale about restoring the world's ability to produce a Happily Ever After ending to Romances.

They can wait to see the audience response to decide how "dark" to make this world, just as the TV Series Beauty and the Beast danced around the Romance -- the premise being that the couple could never be together (because he was a Beast who had to hide "below" in darkness).

The Once Upon A Time TV series may be the breakthrough Event (the Overton Window Event) we've been looking for. It may be another try at the Beauty and the Beast audience, and it might succeed in reaching beyond that audience. Another show in this line of development is Lois And Clark. The dramatic problem with all these show-premises is that once the inherent conflict is solved, the show is over. If you don't solve it, the audience loses interest. If you do solve it, your job as writer/producer is over and you don't get paid anymore. The only way to avoid solving the problem is to turn the plot in a "dark" direction, away from the Happily Ever After.

The beginning of Once Upon A Time takes our theme, our main problem, and puts it "on the nose" the exact way the TV Series Leverage treats its theme ("The rich and powerful take what they want: we steal it back for you.")

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/tv-shows-leverage-and-psych.html

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

But the TV Series Leverage is structured for an endless sequence of adventures while the main characters barely hang onto life and sanity.

The TV Series Once Upon A Time may herald a change in what's acceptable to particular audiences as Star Trek and Pern did in the 1970's. The producers may tackle the conflict head-on and change our world into a world where Happily Ever After is an available option for most people, including fairy tale characters trapped in a town dominated by an Evil Witch.

Oh, do remember, Star Trek was not popular in the late 1960's when it first aired for barely 3 years. The explosion only came when it went into reruns and sifted into the consciousness of TV viewers during the 1970's. Those were not the same people who were reading Pern, though there were overlaps.

Most people who read Pern (and Sime~Gen) watched Star Trek -- but most people who watched Star Trek did not read Pern or any other science fiction. In fact, even when the Star Trek novels took off as New York Times Bestsellers (an unprecedented event I participated in by being the Agent who sold A. C. Crispin's Star Trek original novel Yesterday's Son), those who bought and devoured those tie-in novels did not follow the established Science Fiction authors who wrote them back into the authors' own worlds.

It took decades (a generation) to bring Star Trek tie-in readers into science fiction.

The main force that I think did it was Star Trek fan fiction (which is what my non-fiction book Star Trek Lives! is about).

Writers of Star Trek fan fiction grew up to be Science Fiction and/or Fantasy professionals, an unthinkable result of indulging in writing fan fiction. The explosion of the adult Fantasy novels mostly by women writers, many of whom had been fanfic writers or readers, opened the door for the modern treatment of sexuality and soul-mate bonding in Paranormal Fantasy.

I don't think it's a cause-effect chain of events. But there is a relationship that we can explore in later entries in this blog series.

In the mean time, watch Once Upon A Time, read the Dragonriders of Pern novels by Anne McCaffrey, and compare them. And see what is done with Pern on film!

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Thursday, February 09, 2012

Bra-a-a-ins!

Another interesting bit of information from Temple Grandin’s ANIMALS IN TRANSLATION: Some scientists theorize that brains evolved because animals became mobile. A creature that doesn’t move around has no need for a brain in coping with its environment. As an example, Grandin describes a marine animal that is free-swimming in its juvenile period, similar to a tadpole. When it matures, it becomes anchored to one spot on the sea floor. In the process, it re-absorbs parts of its juvenile form, including the brain—it almost literally eats its own brain, which it doesn’t need anymore.

I once read a story about an alien species that looked humanoid while immature and metamorphosed into plant-like creatures as adults. In this sessile phase they apparently became plant-like in intelligence (or absence thereof) too. The twist in the story was that they’d become stuck in permanent neoteny, and their species had even lost the memory of having originally had a two-stage life cycle (until the truth was rediscovered by accident).

Does this theory mean we could never meet intelligent trees?

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Tuesday, February 07, 2012

Research-Plot Integration in Historical Romance Part 5

Part 1 of this series is:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/01/research-plot-integration-in-historical.html

Part 2 of this series is:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/01/research-plot-integration-in-historical_17.html

Part 3 of this series is:
http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/01/research-plot-integration-in-historical_24.html
Part 4 of this series is:
http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/01/research-plot-integration-in-historical_31.html

We're examining the potential of Maggie Anton's trilogy, Rashi's Daughters:

We ended off last week talking about how a writer uses philosophy to paint a picture for the reader of "life, the universe, and everything" that's different from the picture the reader usually sees.

Anton nails several bits of philosophy with exquisite precision. She shows how Rashi's family owned and operated a vineyard and produced exemplary wine. She researched the details of wine production in that era and inserted a lot of detail about it, using most of that detail in the production of her fascinating incidents. For example, at one point a character dies by being overcome by fumes from the grape juice as it's being extracted from the grapes.

Anton discovered that the town where Rashi lived was a trading center through which a wide variety of goods flowed. She details how the taxes from transactions on the trade fares interacted with the prosperity of the Jewish community and its relationships with the surrounding Christian communities.

Most readers who know anything about Medieval Europe remember the later centuries when Jews were prohibited from various activities, rather than these early years of the collapse of the Roman empire. Readers of today still have their impressions of the 20th century colored by vilification of the Jews for financial dealings. We all know stories of financiers who lie, cheat, steal, and trick their way to wealth. Anton is no doubt well aware of this attitude toward financial dealings and business in general.

She no doubt knows that, for her readers, the attitude toward business as a profession is as incendiary as the attitude toward uppity women. Yet all three novels, though they depict Rashi's daughters as ambitiously engaged in business, walk right by all the Talmudic material on business -- mentioning it offhandedly, off-stage, involving other characters, and focus Rashi's daughters' attention entirely on their feminist issues.

Anton does note Rashi's famous training of his Talmud students in the art of the vintner because scholars must have a profession. She gives us a lot on that art, and a lot on the physician's art, but not the driving emotional reality behind choice of profession.

That focus on feminism is a philosophical choice. So for a moment, let's look at another philosophical point she might have lit up instead of darkening out.

-------------EXAMPLE OF A PHILOSOPHY--------

Let's consider a philosophical "pixel" from Tzvi Freeman.

Here's a long item with much to think about:
http://www.chabad.org/blogs/blog_cdo/aid/1675738/print/true/jewish/Take-Wall-Street-Please.htm

--------Quote from Tzvi Freeman article -- Numbers refer to his footnotes--------------

There are those professions that society considers noble callings, such as doctors, judges and professors. Society respects them for what they do. Then there are business people. Society respects them, too—but are they respected for what they do, or for what they get? Do we respect their occupation, or do we see them as doing a worthless job—making money out of money?

Where is business respected? Take a look in the Talmud.

In the Talmud you’ll find spiritual and earthly duties lumped together in ways that sends the modern mind spinning:

    Rava said, “When a soul stands before the heavenly court, it is asked, ‘Did you buy and sell fairly? Did you fix times for Torah study? Did you attempt to be fruitful and multiply? Did you look forward to the messianic redemption? Did you debate matters of wisdom? Did you understand one thing from another?’”2

Do you see that? Marrying, procreating and making an honest living are good and wonderful occupations—in the same breath as Torah study, gaining wisdom and keeping the faith.

Why? Because they benefit the world. As in the common talmudic term for making a living, that dignified and ennobled phrase, “settling of the world”3 —for, as the prophet states, “G-d did not create emptiness; He formed a world to be settled upon.”4

Maimonides sums up the Jewish position with strong words:

    Anyone who comes to the conclusion that he should involve himself in Torah study without doing work and derive his livelihood from charity, desecrates G-d's name, dishonors the Torah, extinguishes the light of faith, brings evil upon himself, and forfeits the life of the world to come, for it is forbidden to derive benefit from the words of Torah in this world.

    Our Sages declared: "Whoever benefits from the words of Torah forfeits his life in the world." Also, they commanded and declared: "Do not make them a crown to magnify oneself, nor an axe to chop with." Also, they commanded and declared: "Love work and despise Rabbinic positions." All Torah that is not accompanied by work will eventually be negated and lead to sin. Ultimately, such a person will steal from others.5

And so, the laws concerning earning an honest living and thereby making the world a more settled and civil place also belong in the holy books.

The medieval Augustinian view, on the other hand, saw all these as curses of the snake, the product of original sin—since they were directed by man’s evil impulse.6 Such, as well, was the view of the ancient Romans and Greeks, who looked askance at craftsmen, merchants and others who lived by toil.

And so, whereas the Jew saw work as good for the soul and moneymaking as of benefit to everyone involved, the society which enveloped them saw it as a tolerable sin. Not lending money alone, but almost every form of business was labelled “usury”—using someone else for one’s own benefit.7

Life began to change radically when European society adopted the Jewish attitude—that which Weber prudently coined “the Protestant ethic.” The Jews, wrote Montesquieu, “set the stage for the rebirth of European commerce, and with it the beginning of the decline of prejudice and the rise of a more gentle, less ferocious way of life.”8

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

Remember, Maggie Anton authentically put the daughters of Rashi into "business" -- married to traders, the daughters of a Vintner -- and that one became a money might be true or not.

The women's business endeavors, while quiet and out of the spotlight for the most part, were not a source of conflict but just mere background, an excuse for them to run around and have technical conversations about things they already knew about.

Business and earning a living in a Torah Yeshiva was not what Anton's story was about.

A story's conflict focuses a story, and exemplifies the theme by how the conflict resolves. The essence of story is conflict, but that's not enough if the conflict doesn't start, progress, morph, and resolve.

Now reread or just remember my older posts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/greed-is-good.html

And you might want to ponder:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/05/orson-scott-card-mormon-jack-campbell.html

And:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/12/tree-in-forest.html

As I've said in previous parts of Research-Plot Integration, Anton chose the annecdotal structure rather than an actual plot structure for her trilogy. So she doesn't have a conflict that starts at the first chapter of Book One and climaxes at the last page of Book III, leaving the reader gasping and crying, yet understanding their own life in this real world much better.

Anton mentions the stark distinction between the Christian views of the surrounding community and the close and isolated views of the Jewish community. But she shrugs all that off by saying during this interval there was relative peace between the two communities.

Yet, Rashi lived at the threshold of the Crusades, the paroxysm of Europe draining the strength of the young male population into a killing-field of the Middle East.

Could any setting be more ripe for an in-depth discussion of the philosohical issues between the Middle East and Judaism and Christianity?

Anton gives us the impression that the (historical fact of) learned daughters of a towering figure of Europe knew nothing but the scrapts of war news that get tossed into this story with little consequence. Yes, Anton tells us how Spain was more hospitable on the one hand, and more corrosive of Jewish learning on the other -- but to do that, she breaks viewpoint and follows one of the sons-in-law who gets caught up in the study of Astronomy in Spain. Fine. Very interesting. Another annecdote whose only consequence is the angst and misery of the wife left behind who invents a whole new business model to get her husband to stay home -- only to find out that he'd rather study Astronomy than Talmud.

Each annecdote is very strong, composed of very strong material -- but ultimately leaves the reader floating weightlessly without direction.

So what could Anton have done instead?

What would an envelope plot, beginning on page 1 of Book 1 and climaxing on the last page of Book 3 -- with each Book having a plot that begins on page 1 and climaxes at the end just before the plot-advance of the envelope plot -- have added to this trilogy?

Remember my post on nested plots

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-4.html
Anton's problem -- "write about the little known daughters of Rashi" -- is just the sort of writing problem the nested-plot structure, built on the nested-theme structure, solves.

But to create a trilogy using that nested-plot structure, you need 1 single theme from which you derive 3 separate themes that "harmonize" with it, poetically, (as in Poetic Justice In Paranormal Romance). Given the Medieval attitudes toward demons and angels, the setting is perfect for a Paranormal Romance complete with magical practices that work.

Each of Anton's "anecdotes" has a different theme, and few of them are related. So the only thematic statement that comes through to a reader who has no suspended disbelief is "women should not be distinguished from men."

This is exemplified in the emphasis on how Rashi's daughters (reputedly) wore Tefilin (a Commandment binding on men) and did other things women aren't forbidden to do, but are exempt from doing.

More on Tefilin, what's inside the leather cases, the blessings for donning them, etc:
http://www.chabad.org/generic_cdo/aid/102436/jewish/Tefillin.htm

But mystical Judaism holds that the female soul is permanently and emphatically distinct from the masculine soul. Mystical Judaism (which Rashi didn't pay attention to) holds that the feminine soul is a little closer to holiness.

Instead of these practices being incidental color on the lives of three exceptional women, it is left to be the only point of the story without any real "show don't tell" exploration of mystical Judaism. Rashi did not encourage mysticism in his household (that's fact), but the surrounding Jewish culture was peripherally affected -- mostly in a superstitious way rather than a Kabbalah studies way.

Although they enjoy praying with Tefilin, (achieving that practice is an incident referred to repeatedly later), Anton's characters don't seem to find a deepened spiritual existence, a greater insight, a prophetess's wisdom, from the practice.

Anton depicts the practice of draping Tefilin on the headboards of beds where women are being delivered, and indicates this saves women's lives. We see many births, some disasters, but can't make the connection.

Anton also has the daughters resorting to specially written Mezuzah scrolls that purportedly embodied the mystical dimension.

More on the Mezuzah:
http://www.chabad.org/generic_cdo/aid/278476/jewish/Mezuzah.htm
All the information Anton unearthed in research is there in these books - with incidents contrived to make it seem logical to include that information -- contrived being the operative world.

How do you cure the problem of the "contrived" effect?

What cures the contrived, and gets rid of expository lumps full of deliciously interesting information you just have to include because you worked so hard on it, is internal conflict.

If you rely on the incident structure, you don't have any real conflict that can be resolved -- it's just "this happened" then "that happened."

If you don't have a conflict, you don't have a plot.

If you don't have a plot, you don't have a story -- because either the story generates the plot or the plot generates the story, but they go together like two sides of a coin. That's why most writers (and readers) can't distinguish story from plot.

The story is generated by the internal conflict.

The internal conflict is the character motivation -- and it works best when the character does not know they have an internal conflict at all.

Real people don't usually know they have an internal conflict until it's resolved -- or just at the point where they can name it, then they can resolve it.

So characters who don't know what's driving them, what's compelling or impelling them, seem "realistic" -- and cause the reader to suspend disbelief and fearlessly explore the made-up world the character lives in.

The internal conflict drives the character to act. The action (or decision) of the main POV character is what initiates the plot.

The main character acts. The antagonist re-acts. (that's how you can tell the hero from the villain -- that's how you can tell who to root for -- always the hero acts first because it's the hero's story. When the villain acts first, the villain becomes the hero and is rooted for.)

The main character, the main POV character, is "playing white" to use a chess analogy, and moves first.

Or put another way, the writer joins the action at the point in the character's life where she ACTS, and thereby causes her world and the people around her to react. At other times in her life, she's not the hero of her story but a pawn in someone else's story.

Anton started her story at a very good point, where Rashi's mother had become incapable of running the vineyard, and his wife called him home to "take care of the business."

So the whole Talmudic teaching on the relationship between learning and business, earth and heaven, could have made a terrific envelope theme over the 3 books.

So Rashi comes home, meets his nearly grown daughters, and begins teaching them -- which leads to the Tefilin incident.

Note that - Rashi meets his daughters (he was away learning Talmud as they grew and came home for holidays).

See? Rashi meets. It's not the girl's story, it's Rashi's.

OK, the girl meets her father -- a fine beginning, but what does she do? She does not act. She is acted upon at that point -- Rashi begins to teach.

Anton contrived the narrative so that the eldest girl becomes intrigued and wants to learn what Rashi is teaching, so she takes her spinning work and sits and listens -- passively.

That's why there's no plot, only incidents. There's no plot because none of the 3 Daughters has a point in their lives when their story starts.

Now suppose Anton had solved the problem differently. Suppose she'd set out to use the nested themes, what could she use as the overall trilogy conflict?

Rashi vs. Mystical Judaism

In the trilogy, Rashi starts out a fairly young man - at that time, one didn't start studying mysticism until the age of 40, maybe much older.

The trilogy ends just about the point where Rashi dies.

History records that he never quite finished his Talmud commentary -- his sons-in-law and grandsons took over.

DEPART FROM HISTORY - with a fantasy "what-if?" --

What if Rashi did indeed study the mystical aspects, knew them cold, and maybe that's why his commentaries weren't completed? What if Rashi learned the mystical teachings, and flat out rejected them?

What if his DAUGHTERS embraced the mystical with a fervor and a passion they, themselves, never understood?

Father-Daughter conflicts over huge philosophical issues.

That would give you their internal conflicts, each individual yet derived from a main unified conflict, thus lending itself to trilogy treatment.

The internal conflicts would prompt non-rational or supra-rational actions which the daughters wouldn't understand themselves, which would cause the world to react in ways that might be interpreted as mystical - or not - depending on the reader's bent.

You would have an internal conflict generating an external conflict that could resolve neatly at the end of the third book.

What Anton left out of this trilogy is the "story" and internal conflicts generating actions which produce meaningful emotional maturation. If there were a story, there would be a plot. The girls are older at the end of the trilogy, but not different than they were at the beginning. They don't have epiphanies, about-faces, massive disillusionments with philosophical certainties, even when faced with marital infidelity.

Anton's characters don't "arc" in the way Hollywood characters must. If sold to film these books would be massacred in the attempt to create character-arcs.

The trilogy is a chronicle, yes, but not a story. It reads like a diary or a record of events that occurred -- but does not give you that clear picture of a world that's the same world you live in, but different.

Father vs. Daughters over a conflict that is rampant in today's world would produce that character-arc without the "contrived" effect.

Just look at all the Paranormal Romance on the shelves, the fantasy on your TV screen. Magic vs Mundanity is the core of Harry Potter, etc. It's a hotter commercial topic than feminism, but actually does have its roots in feminism and many related societal concerns.

What if, at his death, the Daughters, steeped in the paranormal, finally understood Rashi's response to the mystical and changed their minds completely about incorporating the mystical into life?

Of course, to achieve that as a reader-awakening the writer would have to understand Rashi's objections, all the counter-arguments that convince the girls, and finally the one argument Rashi might have left in an unpublished text that would change the girls' minds. To do that, the writer would have to be able to think like Rashi. May as well try to think like Yoda or Gandalf.

What if, after Rashi's death, the daughters then expunged all trace of any mystical activities they had participated in during his life and taught their children to turn from mysticism?

What if that's why the Kabbalistic writings don't appear for a few more centuries?

It would be a rewrite of history, complete with cover-up, that would allow for:

a) Character Arcs
b) story
c) plot
d) a reader's journey through what it means to be Jewish and female
e) suspension of disbelief
f) Poetic Justice via karmic, paranormal, highly improbable event sequences

The list of points could go on and on.

The author could not have achieved all that by "rewriting" these volumes. It's a "toss it all away and start from scratch" situation.

An editor could not guide a writer through this kind of restructuring. I don't know any editor who could even begin to explain explosive marketing potential in this concept to a writer who's stuck re-running the outworn feminist fight. The books I want to read are not the books she wants to write. She achieved her own objective and you can see the result in the comments on amazon.

The difference I'm describing has to be generated on the conceptual level, the level of Idea that happens before the writer is conscious of the need to write that story.

So studying these novels can be of benefit to the student writer a few years before that writer is struck with the highly commercial Concept that will make or break their career.

Just in case you might be such a writer, read at least some of Anton's trilogy or something comparable.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
For more on Gemara, check this out:
http://www.beverlyhillschabad.com/gemara.htm

Thursday, February 02, 2012

Happy Candlemas

I almost forgot today is Candlemas, aka Groundhog Day. The liturgical churches traditionally celebrate February 2 as the festival of the presentation of the infant Jesus in the Temple. It's called Candlemas because in some regions the priest blessed the candles for the year on that day. In England there was a belief that Christmas greenery had to be taken down by February 2 or risk bad luck. So I am really early by waiting only until after Epiphany (January 6) to dismantle the tree! The same date was a major pagan Celtic festival. Many European cultures have legends about various animals emerging from their dens to check the weather on Candlemas. The American folklore of Groundhog Day comes from the Pennsylvania Dutch.

I still don't grok, though, why BAD weather on February 2 foretells GOOD weather with an early spring.

Margaret

Emotion and Decision

I’ve been reading some of the works of celebrated animal behavior expert Temple Grandin, who, as you probably know, is autistic and believes her condition allows her a unique insight into the minds of nonhuman creatures. In ANIMALS IN TRANSLATION she mentions a psychological discovery that came as quite a revelation to me: It has been found that people who lack all capacity for emotion, for instance because of brain injury, can’t make decisions. Logical, rational weighing of alternatives isn’t enough. Emotionless people have no impetus to choose one course of action over another. I’m somewhat shocked because I’ve always assumed choice and will are independent of feelings. As one slogan of the Marriage Encounter program says, “Love is a decision.” Even at the occasional moments when you feel like wringing your significant other’s neck, you can choose to behave in a loving way.

So does this theory apply to aliens? Does it mean a completely emotionless character, such as Spock claims to be, couldn’t function? Of course, we know Vulcans aren’t truly devoid of emotion; they simply control it more thoroughly than most of us do. What about Data? Before he got his emotion chip, he made choices and decisions as if his mind corresponded to a human being’s in that respect. Would he actually be able to do so?

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Research-Plot Integration in Historical Romance Part 4

In calm situations, teenagers can rationalize almost as well as adults. But stress can hijack what Ron Dahl, a pediatrician and child psychiatric researcher at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center calls "hot cognition" and decision-making. The frontal lobes help put the brakes on a desire for thrills and taking risk -- a building block of adolescence; but, they're also one of the last areas of the brain to develop fully.

---------end quote------------

Indications in this research are that the brain continues to change with age, and especially with usage. Thus a teen who reads ends up with a different brain than one who does not. A teen who reads THIS as opposed to THAT may actually end up with a different wiring. Given that books (cold text) delivers different emotional experiences, it could be that subject matter actually does make a difference. Sexual excitement induced by reading cold text may differ from that associated with images, and from that coming via reality.

It has already been shown that adult and elder brains can repair or relearn function after motor injuries. So targeting your reader by age, and by experience is important in delivering the emotional roller-coaster ride a novel is expected to carry.

The adult's emotional triggers are the hooks or handles by which the writer can take hold of the reader.

Back to art, music and now dance. The writer is dancing with the reader, rhythmically moving with the reader's emotions, leading them into other emotions, and onwards perhaps into unexplored territory and new emotions.

As with music, it is the pauses in the dance that give it meaning, just as the silence gives the musical beat it's rhythm.

A fictional theme is composed of abstract ideas, each one lit up like the pixel on a TV screen or computer monitor -- the clarity of the piece of fiction, it's penetrating ability, it's gosh-wow-gasp effect depends not on what is said but on what is not said -- on the stark, absolute darkness and silence surrounding each idea. But the theme is not "art" unless all the ideas composing it add up to a picture of "Life, The Universe, And Everything" - on matters of ultimate concern.

This can be done in many ways. The bestselling way is to use the writer's craft to depict the universe in the exact way that the majority of readers either see it or wish it were. The "genre way" -- the smaller, more defined audience way (i.e. Romance fans, History buffs, Geeks, Murder Mystery fans, Western Action fans) is to depict the universe in a way that the target reader has never seen or thought of before - to say something that has never been said in fiction, to astonish, mesmerize, and impress.

If you have something new to say, genre rules and strict structure can give you the backbone of a story which can be the vehicle for that theme. By using an established structure the reader knows (like picking a "theme" for your email), you can showcase your idea in the forefront. The security of already understanding the structure lets the reader focus on what you have to say.

If you're saying the same old thing everyone already knows, you invent a new way to say it, a new genre structure or variation, or you find a new setting against which to fling your old-hat idea as Maggie Anton has done.

If you put a new idea into a new structure, the reader gets the impression of a "busy" field of view, a 'cluttered' page, something they can't sort any sense out of and so don't pay money for.

To get rid of the "cluttered" or "busy" impression, the writer integrates the story-structure elements into a unified whole. You smooth and blend, to get that effect, you shake not stir.

So how do you "shake not stir" Research into Plot?

What's the exact mechanism a writer's mind uses to achieve that smooth blend of hard facts the reader already knows and the Events in the story that happen to the character?

What is it Maggie Anton didn't do with her novels?

She did take the old, worn, done to death, feminist vs. the establishment conflict and fling it into a new setting -- 1040 C.E. in Rashi's family.

She astonished us by showing Rashi's family just barely resisting the feminist daughters who won all their freedoms with barely a struggle (while in the rest of their world, women were killed for less but Anton doesn't discuss that except via one character, the daughter of a parchment maker -- from whom we learn a lot about how parchment is made). And Anton got the Rashi's Daughters trilogy published without a genre label.

That's a fairly solid publishing success, but what do you do if you want to go Anton one better?

You ask yourself questions - certain HARD questions about the reality in which the characters are embedded and how the character would see the world differently than the writer would in the same circumstance.

Instead of projecting yourself onto your characters (Mary Sue) - you project your characters onto yourself and look for the life lesson to be extracted from the events, a lesson you wouldn't be aware of if you were living through the events because it would affect you subconsciously, not consciously.

The life-lesson is the origin of the theme; the events become the plot.

Here are some previous posts I've done on theme and how to apply it to plot and story generation:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-4.html
which has links to the previous parts in that sequence.

The post topics are:

Believing in Happily Ever After Part 1, Stephen King on Potter VS Twilight
Believing in Happily Ever After Part 2, The Power of Theme-Plot Integration.
Believing in Happily Ever After Part 3, Standardization vs Customization
Believing in Happily Ever After Part 4, Nesting Huge Themes Inside Each Other

So I'm going to proceed on the assumption you've read those posts and the posts referred to inside them.

Of course we're talking about HISTORICAL (actual, factual) fiction here, Rashi's Daughters.

We all know how unhappily ever after the European Jewish population lived. We know that the era in which Rashi's family lived had been preceded by a number of really horrendous slaughters, and that more slaughters were to come. That was Maggie Anton's problem - to depict convincingly the flourishing years of that historic community through the eyes of one generation of that historic family who knew the past and weren't oblivious to where it all was headed.

Anton had the historic fact and the ambition to show us how strong, heroic women might have survived in and contributed to that flourishing intellectual culture. She had a feminist mindset to project onto historic figures, proposing the notion that our current feminist breakout may have had its roots in the spiritual heritage all Jewish women share.

Anton hit on a hellishly commercial fictional CONCEPT -- like in "Hollywood High Concept" that I've written about at such length.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2006/11/converting-novel-to-screenplay.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/medium-is-message_19.html

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

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html

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

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/worldbuilding-from-reality.html

I wouldn't be surprised if these novels are made into films or a TV miniseries -- this stuff is high concept to the max.

Assuming you've got the principles discussed in those posts fully internalized, let's move on.

Anton just didn't use the writing techniques to blend her HIGH CONCEPT into the historic facts without distorting them. She didn't generate her fictional facts from the historic facts to create characters with enough depth to make readers such as I quoted in Part 2 of this sequence of posts suspend disbelief long enough to entertain the notion that Rashi's daughters might have been feminists in an anti-feminist society.

The hard-fact research truth is that Rashi's daughters did not live in an anti-feminist society because that's not the kind of atmosphere Rashi's community generated -- as the commentator I quoted in Part 2 mentioned, that's the truth. The surrounding Christian community, though, is a totally different kettle of themes.

If Anton's research is as well done as indicated, Anton knows that truth. In a number of places, she indicated that the customs lived in Rashi's times were different from the customs later introduced by an even more beleaguered Jewish community after even more slaughters, so I can only assume that she also knew that Rashi's community was not anti-feminist. Even today, in a certain corner of the community that lives the world-view that Rashi chronicled in his commentaries, feminism is a non-issue because there's no oppression to spark it. Therefore, to those in that community, Anton's novels seem to lack verisimilitude.

But the novels didn't have to fail to engage that corner of the community if suspension of disbelief had succeeded.

Remember the connection between plot and story is the character whose decisions and actions cause events which splash-back to affect the character. Those decisions and actions are the only real clue the reader has about the theme.

The story is the sequence of emotional states and reactions the character experiences when impacted by events that leads the character to CHANGE -- to "arc" -- to learn a life lesson in the school of hard knocks.

The plot is the sequence of events that ensue BECAUSE the character acts prompted by emotion.

The story is the sequence of inner emotions the character experiences that CAUSE the character to act in specific ways, that cause the plot to happen.

The character's actions cause reactions which deflect the character from his/her intended course of action -- the plot is the sequence of events that take the character either back to their original target (achieving an objective) which is the "Likeable hero struggles against seemingly overwhelming odds toward a worthwhile goal" plot, or to a new destination that is either a) better than the original target or b) worse (in which case there's a sequel coming) -- which is the "Johnny gets his fanny caught in a bear trap and has his adventures getting it out" plot.

So where does theme come in? How can theme integrate Researched facts with Imaginary facts (worldbuilding) and with plot?

The theme embodies what the character learns about life, a transcendent truth that becomes customized specifically for that character.

A life-lesson has a practical, concrete component, but it also has an emotional component. After one of those hard-knocks that only "life" can delivery, our emotional triggers are changed, and we react differently to situations, colors, tastes, the sound of a voice, the flash of a camera in the face.

For example, consider a rape victim learning to love and have sex freely again. Consider a soldier who dives under the bed every time it thunders learning to walk in the rain and laugh.

Those kinds of turn-arounds happen because of a deep and meaningful Relationship moving through various stages, impacting the person on many levels. Those turn-arounds are the story, and what changes inside the character is emotional.

What brings a reader into a story, making the reader want to suspend disbelief, and willing to work to shut off the mental jangle of "that's ridiculous" is the way the character's emotional responses connect to the reader's emotional responses.

Where do emotions come from?

The various answers to that question that you as the writer have, and that your target readership has or wants to have, will determine how you work with theme.

With my novel that I discussed last week, Unto Zeor, Forever, I used the theory that emotions come from your philosophy -- and vice-verso, your philosophy comes from your emotions. Yeah, chicken and the egg -- they interact with and cause each other.

Think of that TV screen analogy again. When the screen is turned off, the pixels are still there but they are as black as the surrounding background. The screen still has a pixel array structure, but you can't see it without special instruments.

The structure is a certain number of pixels in rows across and columns down - an array. The pixels are all the same size, the rim around them, separating them is also uniform.

That all-black pattern, or array of pixels is your philosophy. It's a structure that is fixed and unwavering, a screen UPON WHICH you project your reality.

The specific choices you make about story, plot, setting, characters, will light up the pixels, and each succeeding choice will reveal more of the whole picture. But whether that picture is intelligible to your reader will depend on the blacks around each pixel. In other words, your reader's suspension of disbelief depends on what you leave out.

You will "see" your mental reality only as clearly as the blacks around your pixels. The smaller the pixels, the more numerous the pixels (or axioms and postulates of your philosophy) the finer your picture of reality will be.

Some people work on their philosophy and achieve a picture quality like High Definition. Some have LED quality screens, some have Plasma quality colors. Some are still living with analog screens, large fuzzy pixels, a blurry picture of reality.

The artist's job is to show the consumer of the art how the world would look with deeper blacks around the pixels, with LED back-lighting, with clearer vision.

The artist draws a picture of reality the consumer would never sort out by themselves by sorting the signal from the noise, and suppressing the noise until the signal reveals a coherent picture of life, the universe, and everything. The artist distinguishes signal from noise by filtering the signal through a philosophy -- not necessarily the artist's own philosophy, though most beginners start there.

The writer has a philosophy, her characters each have a philosophy, and the reader has a philosophy. Very likely, all are different.

The writer's job is to know their own philosophy in order to know how it differs from the character's philosophy. That's how you avoid writing a Lt. Mary Sue, who is just yourself idealized.

Most ordinary people don't know their own philosophy -- don't know they have one, and barely have a notion of what the word means. Normal people don't enjoy discussing philosophy. Writers thrive on it. Artists thrive on it.

The other thing writers thrive on is "research" -- most of us grow up reading the dictionary and encyclopedia for FUN not profit! We love words, their meanings, their implications, their emotional nuances and semantic loading. We collect facts like a dragon collects gems and brood on our hoard of trivia for years before hatching an idea for a novel using those facts.

Maggie Anton, in a comment on one of the reader comments on Amazon, says she studied Talmud for 10 years in order to make the story of Rashi's daughters authentic -- she believes she did it. She also amassed a lot of information about the technologies and practices of the time period and location.

So this week we'll leave off there and give you time to finish reading Anton's trilogy and/or the comments on Amazon or any other online source you can find.

Next week we'll finish up this study with a brief description of what Anton might have done instead, and how it could be done - what tools she might have used that you've seen discussed on this blog.

Remember, this blog series is about Research-Plot Integration, not a critique of a trilogy about a Medieval Jewish community.

Wherever the Jewish elements are mentioned, substitute the worldbuilding elements you might make up from the historic facts you might have amassed.

Soon, we'll talk a little about the Television Series, Once Upon A Time which has an odd thematic relationship to this Rashi's Daughters trilogy.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Welcome to the Future Again (Today)

We recently bought our first iPad. I wanted a lightweight, portable device for only two purposes, to watch streaming videos on something other than the desktop computer and to read e-mail away from home. My husband needed the iPad for navigational functions and other apps related to flying.

This wondrous gadget stimulated me to think about the technology in J. D. Robb’s Eve Dallas series, set around 2060. One thing I like about these mysteries is that they portray a future I can believe, for the most part, my grandchildren as middle-aged adults will live in.

I have no trouble believing in orbital space station colonies fifty years from now. We still don’t have the flying cars driven by Lt. Dallas’s police department and wealthy civilians (and would you really want them widely available, considering how much havoc some drivers wreak in only two dimensions?). But there’s no reason they couldn’t be built, and “smart cars” that drive themselves are coming soon. Experimental models already exist, whether they will ultimately need special highways (as in Heinlein’s “The Roads Must Roll”) or operate independently.

Eve’s almost magical handheld forensic gadget (similar to Dr. McCoy’s medical tricorder), which can even instantaneously read a precise time of death for a corpse, seems a little bit out there. However, the “link” that everyone in 2060 carries now looks awfully familiar. It’s essentially an iPad with a lot of futuristic apps and reduced to about the size of a phone. We’re almost there!

In Eve’s time people don’t watch TV. They watch “screen.” All their media access comes through the computer. Already in the present day, some people choose to get news, music, movies, and TV shows on their computers (and Robb’s novels started imagining this development decades ago). As hardware gets cheaper and the Internet more versatile, the routine integration of all forms of media into one outlet can’t be far behind.

One more futuristic invention in the Eve Dallas series, though, still seems fantastic to me: Robot workers (“droids”) that can converse intelligently and, at a glance, can hardly be distinguished from live people. I’m not so sure we’ll achieve those in fifty years.

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Research-Plot Integration in Historical Romance Part 3

Two weeks ago I introduced this odd hybrid historical romance trilogy, Rashi's Daughters:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/01/research-plot-integration-in-historical.html

Last week ...
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/01/research-plot-integration-in-historical_17.html

... I made a few spoiler comments and showed you one of those bizarre karmic links that pepper my existence -- how Maggie Anton inserted a bit of dialogue in her third novel that had no business in her novel but was just about the most illuminating and important bit of data to randomly pop up before my eyes in decades.

Anton had researched the 1040 C.E. era to a fair-the-well, and given her main character of the third book, Rashi's Daughters: Book III Rachel, a task, a goal, and the ability to learn an entire craft and invent a business model for it. She put Rachel into the textile industry and had her discuss wool cloth manufacture and dye.

Readers of Sime~Gen already see my hair standing on end. Coincidence abounds in this world, but folks, there's a LIMIT you know!

The datum that blew me out of the water was simply a reminder of something I had known for decades but had no memory of ever having learned -- that BLACK wool cloth is very difficult, rare, costly, and that at the beginning of the dye industry, the true black dye was a trade secret for each dyer.

It was knowing that obscure fact about the early cloth dye industry that caused me to assign BLACK as the single most special color in the Sime~Gen novels, Farris Black.

And those few lines of dialogue Anton wrote, which I quoted last week, prompted me to assemble my observations about these novels into this advanced writing lesson, the integration of Research and Plot which creates the foundation for every Paranormal Romance novel.

The "paranormal" has an immense amount of non-fiction literature to research, everything from mythology to ESP research, and all the way into the depths of theology -- down deep enough to get into Kabbalah. You can assemble facts to support almost any kind of worldbuilding you need for your particular Romance.

Anton knew about wool dye what I had known long before building it into the Sime~Gen novel, House of Zeor, associating it with the Farris family, but Anton used her knowledge in a different way than I used mine -- and the result is a set of totally different reader responses. I pointed you to those on amazon last week, and picked out two contrasting ones, one from her first novel and one from mine.

As I've said, it seems to me that the Rashi's Daughters trilogy (he had only three daughters and no sons) should be classed as Paranormal Romance, and with only very slight changes in the stories, would fall right into the model for some of the very best Paranormal Romances.

The Medieval world Anton has built includes all the beliefs and practices of Jewish Astrology, and the demonology extant among the general public. Disease was caused by demons and other supernatural influences, and could be averted or cured by charms, sigils and signs, and chanting.

Anton even sites the first thing anyone starting on the Occult Studies path learns - that the more advanced on that path you get, the more of a target you become for the negative forces that abound in the world (and mostly leave ordinary people alone). Rashi, being extremely advanced spiritually, was such a target as were his family members - simply for being his family members. Once the daughters embarked on spiritual advancement, they too became targets in their own right. That's a principle from Kabbalah. But Rashi, himself, did not study Kabbalah. Anton walked right by the most incendiary plot-elements her hard-fact research turned up.

Anton does have her characters cure or avert evil influences with Kabbalistic practices, but without internal consequences to the characters. The actions don't adhere to what I've termed in my posts on plotting, "the because line." Any one of these incidents could have supported the entire envelope plot for the trilogy, but because she has just inserted these simple facts, the plot events become incidents and vignettes interesting in themselves but without consequence to the story-line. (remember plot and story are different, but must be connected by theme).

To us, today, such ideas as disease caused by demons sound ridiculous. But we have no problem with them when reading Paranormal Romance -- even television series incorporate witches and spells, otherworldly occurrences and magic. For the most part, the worldbuilding behind Paranormal Romance novels is not nearly as coherent, interesting, deep, and plausible as the very real Medieval belief systems Anton only refers to briefly.

Few of the comments on amazon even mention the demonology, or criticize or critique it. It's throwaway techno-babble to most general readers, even historical fiction experts. Yet Anton walked right by a chance to explain that dimension of reality to modern readers, what it could mean in modern terms and what it means to those on a spiritual journey.

Maybe she didn't know how, or maybe she didn't explain it because Rashi, himself, is famous for his entry-level, beginner's explanations of the Torah, Mishna and Gemara. Rashi didn't incorporate any of the far out, mystical, Kabbalistic material in his explanations. Most of the literature on Kabbalah that we use today wasn't written down until a couple hundred years later, but there were scholars who knew and practiced it in Rashi's day.

Anton does mention a Mezuzah scribe who uses some Kabbalistic knowledge, and has her characters use such a Mezuzah to protect and heal sick people and bring them back from death's door. But then the incident just sits there - having no consequence to the inner, subconscious or spiritual life of the Daughters. It's just that the person lives a little longer. That's not plot, that's incident.

How do you tell a plot event from an incident?

A plot event changes the main character's understanding of his/her reality. That is a plot event affects the story-line.

An incident illustrates something the writer wants the reader to know about the main character's understanding of his/her reality, but does not change the character's behavior or the menu of options the character has to choose from.

In a plot-event, the reader walks in the character's moccasins. In an incident, the reader learns that something happened or how it happened, but it doesn't happen to the reader.

Anton constructs her narrative line from the researched facts about the lives of this family, then inserts incidents along that narrative line, giving the strong impression of a plot without having an actual plot.

As I pointed out last week, in the Rashi's Daughter's trilogy, interesting hard-fact details of Medieval life are tossed in on top of Anton's narrative about three women living in Medieval times who possess a modern feminist self-image and attitude -- pure fantasy, a kind of fantasy that works fabulously well with Paranormal Romance writing techniques and fails abysmally with only Historical Novel writing techniques.

The incident-structure causes us to be informed that Rashi's Daughters had a modern feminist attitude -- but not how they acquired it, what their attitude did to them, and what they did to our world because of their attitude. Because of the incident-structure, readers who don't already have a feminist attitude don't come to walk-a-mile as a feminist. Readers who do have a feminist attitude may feel nice about having their attitude validated, but will not come away from these novels with a usable impression of life in Rashi's home.

If the trilogy had a genuine trilogy plot-structure, all readers would come away from the trilogy with a good, emotional, non-verbal grasp of how Rashi's household lifestyle created feminist attitudes in all the women associated with it, and caused them to blossom into full realized, highly spiritual women.

One of the researched hard-facts that Anton must have come across studying Mishna is that Jewish culture understands women to be on a higher spiritual level than men, just inherently more spiritually advanced (the opposite of Christianity), which is why men are commanded to listen to their wives. Women carry a tremendously weighty responsibility because of that position of being closer to G-d (which is why women pray in a whisper when men shout out prayers -- because it's rude to shout right into G-d's ear) -- and therein lies the material for Anton's overall trilogy plot. But she walked right by that opportunity as if she had no clue how to worldbuild to springboard a plot.

Remember, we're talking about crafting Paranormal Romance here - not about the realities of Medieval Judaism. You can replace the "Medieval Judaism" elements in Anton's trilogy with any fantasy world you are building to support your story. If Anton had used world she built herself here, I'd be making the exact same comments about the incident-structure vs the plot-structure method of storytelling.

Anton's view of Medieval Judaism "works" in these romance books just the way any fantasy world would work.

With application of the techniques for integrating research into plot, Anton could have "sold" her fantasy to her readers and made them suspend disbelief long enough to finish the trilogy and go off with a furious hunger for finding out the reality behind the Talmud.

Her fantasy Talmud would only whet the appetite. As it is, few of the commentators on Amazon are talking about the Talmud itself or their experience of it in real life.

Using the string of incidents structure, Anton manages to inform us that Rashi's Daughters loved Talmud as much as Rashi did -- but does not make us love Talmud the same way.

The reader commentaries on Amazon about the trilogy show either a sense of outrage at Anton's "inaccuracies," a delight at the upstanding female characters and their stories, or the commentaries get all wound up in the Medieval background.

Many readers found the second or third books disappointing because they didn't deliver on the expectations aroused by the first book. Each reader is seeing only one level of this work because the "research" facts lay on top of the character-story like oil on water.

"Shaken, not stirred" comes to mind. There are writing techniques for creating a smooth blend of antagonistic elements -- like Talmud and sexuality, or sexuality and willful independence.

Now keep in mind that I feel Anton intended to do with this series what other Romance authors have done with Historical Romance: graft a feminist attitude onto female characters who lived in an oppressive world, were raised to be subservient and obedient, self-effacing, and never show their intelligence to a male. That's alternate-history fantasy, and it's great fun to read, but can be misleading if the reader doesn't know it's a game the writer is playing, not an actual window into the past.

The way Anton's trilogy is written, I can't tell if she knew she was playing the alternate-history-paranormal-romance game with her readers. The tantalizing thing about this trilogy is that Anton almost got it right, whether she knew what she was doing or not.

Some people need to know what they're doing in order to do it "right" (so they get the results they aim at) -- and some people really need to NOT KNOW what they're doing, how they do it, or possibly even that they're doing it, in order to do it "right."

That applies to how to write books, historical fiction novels, and most especially historical fiction romance novels.

Knowledge is one level of cognition, but there are many others (intuition, emotion, assumptions) that all operate at the same time.

Each level of cognition can show up on special brain scans as "circuits" or whole areas of the brain energized or activated -- sometimes in one location of the brain, sometimes connecting several locations. There are a number of studies ongoing now about how our brain functions, mostly with the focus on how to repair damage or correct birth defects. These studies also have an application to the writing craft, to the understanding of how we respond to entertainment, how and why entertainment is a necessity not a luxury.

We can emphasize one level of brain activity over another, but we can't shut off the other levels completely. Consider all the studies you've read about brain damage and how loss of a part of the brain can affect personality, perception and judgement. We use all of our brains all the time on everything we do -- we just shift the emphasis.

That's why when we read books and novels, we want the input we're absorbing to trigger brain activity on all our levels -- but emphasize one level above the others, then orchestrate a changing emphasis in a pleasing way from one scene to another, one chapter to another, just as we experience in real life.

Note that word "orchestrate" -- reading a novel is like listening to a symphony. Every word triggers associations (semantic loading) that light up pathways in the brain. Every sentence, image, scene, emotional-engagement among characters, is a "voice" of an instrument in the symphony. The writer is the conductor, bringing one section of the orchestra then another up to the fore (making them louder or softer with a gesture). The audience feels their pleasure is from the players of the individual instruments (liking one character over another) -- but the actual source of pleasure is the conductor's skills.

The conductor's job is to gently, smoothly shift the way the pathways of the listeners' brains light up, producing pleasure.

No orchestra is any better than its least skilled player. But any orchestra can fail abysmally even with world-class players in every seat if the players aren't all playing the same score, or if the conductor puts each section of the orchestra in a separate soundproof booth so they can't hear each other or see the conductor.

That's what I think happened with the Rashi's Daughters trilogy.

The research on Talmud, the feminism, the political world of Medieval France, the astronomy, the astrology, Muslim Spain, Muslim marriage customs, Medieval midwifery, plagues, textiles, dyes, inter-city trade, numerology, Christian Priests studying Bible with Rashi, the economics of Jewish merchants traveling with ransom money because Jews ransom other Jews, Jewish women in business lending money to other Jewish women in secret from their husbands, raising chickens, open sewers, -- all of that is like the individual instruments in an orchestra all playing different parts of a symphony at the same time, each trying to be louder than the other, grabbing center stage for a solo while all the other instruments scream for attention.

It's no surprise to me that so many commenters on amazon couldn't make sense of these historical fiction novels.

It's an orchestra without a conductor.

I'm very familiar with this problem from a writer's point of view.

The Rashi's Daughter's trilogy reads a little bit like the early drafts of my Sime~Gen novel, Unto Zeor, Forever.

As I mentioned last time, that's my first award winner, and it went through 5 drafts to get there.

Here it is on Amazon in Kindle, but there are paper editions and a forthcoming audiobook edition (unabridged)

It is labeled, by this publisher as #2 in a "series" -- but it's not. It's the second published in the Sime~Gen Universe, and many people have fallen in love with the novels by entering here.

I lost the first few drafts, but a very close version of the 3rd draft has been assembled and posted online for free reading. It's titled Sime Surgeon (like a Nurse Nancy which is what it was at that stage), and has a long introduction explaining the editing history.

http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/rimonslibrary/surgeon/ and click the links on the left for the various parts.

Jean Lorrah commented extensively on the 3rd draft, and I made vast changes because of what she understood and misunderstood (just like the amazon comments on Rashi's Daughters). Jean saw the "oil and water not mixing" in that 3rd draft, didn't quite know how to explain the problem or the solution, but with close study, I was able to see what she was driving at and made many changes.

The 4th draft was turned in to the publisher, and the editor, Sharon Jarvis, sent it back with numerous notations, plus the advice that if I would delete one character, eliminate one entire chapter, and shift the climaxes so that they rose in a smooth hyperbolic curve to the final one, then she'd publish it. The Sime Surgeon climax structure rises, falls hard, rises, falls, rises to the end. She wanted the falls removed by removing one character, which eliminated a lot of techno-babble. Many fans love Sime Surgeon much better than the commercially smooth Unto Zeor, Forever -- just as some Amazon commenters love Anton's trilogy as it is.

The final draft of Unto Zeor, Forever was published, and because of Sharon's insistence on unifying the theme, eliminating all elements distracting from the theme, deleting a lot of the researched real-world-facts and the imaginary facts, answering character motivation questions with show-don't-tell, that published version won an award -- essentially because it's shaken not stirred.

But Unto Zeor, Forever was never drafted as a series of incidents. It had a plot from the first glimmering of an idea, a strong plot welded inextricably to a story that is essentially, at bedrock, a Romance of Helen of Troy proportions, just as Anton's trilogy depicts the Romances of Rashi's Daughters that produced the children whose Commentaries on Rashi shape what we know today of his Commentaries.

Sharon Jarvis, as editor, could not have brought the manuscript of Unto Zeor, Forever up to publishable standards had Jean Lorrah not "shaken not stirred" the composition into a somewhat finer emulsion.

Anton's trilogy was published at a development stage somewhere between Unto's 3rd and 4th drafts -- still in layers of historical fact and imaginary fact floating on top of a narrative but not integrated with it.

Her historical fact is what's known about Rashi and his writings, what's known about the world events at the time he lived, and what's known about the technologies and trade practices of that time, and of course the men the daughters married and the children the daughters had. Her imaginary facts are the personalities and feminist attitudes of Rashi's Daughters. Her plot is a series of incidents that may have seemed like "show don't tell" application of her research discoveries, but isn't.

It's as if, along with all her research on Rashi, Anton also researched "how to write novels" -- found "show don't tell" and then applied that with workmanlike diligence.

Anton's trilogy does have a kind of wandering "because line" -- as I've explained in previous posts on plotting.

Here are some of my posts on Integration that pertain to what's missing in Rashi's Daughters, discussing techniques one at a time:

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

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-2-master.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-3-game.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/dissing-formula-novel.html

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

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/04/gold-under-ice-by-carol-buchanan.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/04/worldbuilding-building-fictional-but.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/carol-buchanan-on-writing-tricks-and.html

That last post in the list is by Carol Buchanan who is a historical fiction writer whose product is so thoroughly blended you can't separate the layers at all. And her work is precisely true to the Historical genre -- it's just about an era the big publishers aren't pursuing right now. But that's true of Rashi's Daughters, also.

If you've read Buchanan's Gold Under Ice as I recommended, use that instead of Unto Zeor, Forever, and think about it with Rashi's Daughters in mind. Do a contrast/compare. Chances are you know more about the Montana Goldrush era and the Civil War than you do about the very early years of the Crusades when Rashi lived.

Consider the effect that a full blending of techniques can achieve and then decide which effect you want. A professional writer needs to be able to achieve the effect he/she intends - not at random or by inspiration but on purpose.

Anton's trilogy isn't really romance, or really historical, or fantasy or paranormal genre. The trilogy is a mixture, a "cross-genre" mashup, just as Unto Zeor, Forever was when it was published.

In the future, we may look back and see how Anton started a new genre! If you find imitators of her work, please drop a note on this blog entry. Separating "oil" from "water" may become a popular writing style, and if so, then you need to master it as well as "shaken not stirred."

To see how Unto Zeor, Forever affected one woman from the time it was published all the way to a re-reading after the field of Science Fiction Romance appeared, see my blog entry:

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

Where I wrote:
--------QUOTE-------------
In 2010, I found my name mentioned (via feeddemon search) in an Australian blog and discovered a woman who had read UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER years ago, and only now, on re-reading realized that it is indeed SCIENCE FICTION ROMANCE and belongs with the modern books she likes. That's why UNTO stood out to the point where she had obsessed over it. At that time, it was almost unique as an "Alien Romance" - and now it belongs to a genre.

http://lovecatsdownunder.blogspot.com/2010/05/rachel-needs-book-advice.html

(if that link doesn't work, look in the archive of the blog for the entry of May 13, 2010 )
----------END QUOTE-------------

Isn't it odd that this blogger's name is Rachel? That's Rashi's youngest daughter's name, and the title of the book which mentions the Medieval techniques of creating black dye for textiles which I used in House of Zeor.

And here's another karmic echo -- on lovecatsdownunder.blogspot.com Rachel wrote:

----------QUOTE FROM LOVECATSDOWNUNDER ---
I’ve been reading historicals as my main genre of pleasure for a couple of years now. Thing was, I’d been resisting reading them because I was such a huge Jane Austen fan, and… well, I don’t know what I thought, but once I found them I was hooked and I realized I'd wasted heaps of years in not reading them!

Obviously I’ve been reading other genres in there as well, but more than 50% would have been historicals. I found some fabulous, fabulous authors who are now autobuys.

But I’m starting to get itchy feet.

I’m thinking the next genre I want to fall into will be romantic fantasy. Maybe with some romantic science fiction thrown in. I read a fair bit of fantasy and science fiction when I was a late-teen early-20’s gal—things like, Mists of Avalon (boy did I love that book at the time); Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (laugh? I *still* laugh at lines I read then); Unto Zeor Forever (the first book I remember being obsessed about, and then trying to glom the author, Jacqueline Lichtenberg); Dune (the whole series); plus a heap of Arthur C Clarke and other sci fi big names.

This was before I found romance. And looking back, the only one on the list that’s really a romance (and probably the only one of all the books I read at the time) is Unto Zeor Forever. Interesting that it was the romance that I obsessed about the most, yes?

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

So what is "getting to" these readers, getting under their skins, invading dreams and creating obsessions?

My answer is "shaken not stirred."

It's the Integration Technique that glues your real-world-research facts to your imaginary facts to your characters to your story to your plot.

The only way I know of to achieve the Integration of all these story telling elements is on the level of Theme.

Marion Zimmer Bradley, the author of Mists of Avalon mentioned by Lovecatsdownunder taught me to start the final draft by stating the story in one sentence (screenwriting element called the pitch), identify whose story it is, and distill the theme (the point of the tale) into a single sentence. Tack a 3X5 card (today make a "STICKY NOTE" on your monitor desktop) to the wall behind your desk and test every sentence, every word-choice, against that list. Anything (and I mean anything) that doesn't exemplify the theme gets deleted.

In the more basic posts, I've examined what a theme is and how to identify it in novels that others have written.

Identifying your theme in a novel you have written is much endeavor.

A "theme" is not a single idea, a single voice in the orchestra. A theme, just as in music, is a repeated sequence -- a sequence you play with, run variations on, uptempo and downtempo. A theme can be a sequence of chords -- it can be very complex in music, but is easily identified by the trained ear. Think of the tiny bit of music that plays every time Captain Kirk walks into a scene in Star Trek. Other shows do the same thing -- identify the appearance of the main character with a theme.

In novels, a theme is a set of related ideas which trigger a set of related emotions.

In novels, the word-choice relates the theme to a set of emotions. That's called semantic loading.

Just as in music, the "ear" of the listener may be well trained, untrained, or partly deaf in some frequencies and ultra-sensitive in others.

Readers experience chords of emotions -- whole swaths of related emotions conditioned into them by "life" as they have experienced it, and by their dreams as they wish to experience them. (two levels - oil and water). The brain "lights up" in the corresponding areas as the writer triggers those emotions in the reader, bringing first one then another to dominance.

In Kabbalah there are seven "primary" emotions defined. Fiction combines those seven in different proportions -- and again, oil and water.

Think of the color scales and how we obtain certain shades by combining primary colors.

Emotion works the same way. And like music, emotion has as it's backbone structural element, rhythm.

Rhythm is created not by the BEATS -- but by the silence between them.

Next week, in Part 4, we'll get technical.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
For more on Gemara, check this out:
http://www.beverlyhillschabad.com/gemara.htm

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Cyber Robin Hood

     At least the Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest saw the so-called rich that he robbed. He could be said to have a good faith belief that if his victim dressed like a rich person, traveled like a rich person, spoke like a rich person, smelled like a rich person (etc, etc) he probably was indeed able to afford having the moneybags and jewels on his person at the time ripped off.

     Also, the Robin Hood of medieval times (if he actually did give to the poor) probably saw them, and could deduce from their clothes, deportment, speech, the state of their hands and feet (and so forth) that they were underfed and underpaid.

     Cyber Robin Hoods rip everyone off. They have no way to know, for instance, whether the "millionaire" author that they are ripping off is in fact a single mother, waiting tables by day or night to make ends meet, and writing every day at three am.

     Similarly, the so-called "poor" who allegedly cannot afford to purchase the movie and e-book treats that Cyber Robin distributes, nevertheless own e-readers, computers, high speed internet access and can afford to pay the pirate a nominal monthly subscription for access to his links. They can afford a subscription to the hosting site so they can quickly and efficiently download illegal copies of "complimentary" movies and e-books. Moreover, the advertisement aggregators obviously have a good faith belief (if one believes the pitch about life-style-targeted advertising) that these "deserving poor" can afford luxury cars and high-end tech products.

   Was Robin Hood the first romantic mugger? Why does literature of a certain type glorify pirates, highwaymen, spies and assassins? (Whether historical, modern, or futuristic). Is it simply because they live dangerous lives that make for page-turners and action-packed movies? Let's not forget modern computer games. What effect does Grand Theft Auto have on a person's morality?

     Give me my chess sets, Mancala, Reversi, and my Wii where the most violent and destructive game I play is careening into beach balls on a Segway with the intent to burst them!

By the way, if something as mild as SOPA caused such uproar.... maybe the reason is not all that meets the eye. It appears that many people signed The Petition multiple times under the impression that SOPA would take away their assumed "right" to "share" copyrighted e-books and movies. True. People were trying to stop the DMCA (from 1998) by petitioning against SOPA in 2011.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Bujold on SF Romance

In the January LOCUS there’s an interview with Lois McMaster Bujold, who comments briefly on “hybrids of romance and science fiction.” She thinks creating such fiction is a difficult challenge because “the genres are kind of immiscible”—for this reason:

“One wants politically-driven stories in which characters gain status, and the other is more interested in romantically-driven stories where the characters gain mates. Different underlying biological drives are being served by these two different kinds of stories.”

I’ve never considered SF romance from that angle. I have reservations about Bujold’s analysis in that she seems to be defining science fiction too narrowly, focusing on only one of the many subsets of SF. Still, she makes an intriguing point.

As an aside, she makes an amusing remark about progressively narrower subgenre categories being like “overbred dog breeds that go past the point of being healthy anymore.” Not that she’s worried; she regards the process as an unstoppable “economic cycle” that, presumably, is self-correcting in the long run.

Any thoughts?

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt