The May 2012 issue of DISCOVER magazine contains an excerpt from "The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating Heart Cadavers -- How Medicine Is Blurring The Line Between Life And Death" by Dick Teresi.
I was shocked to read that the American organ transplant industry is so profitable (for everyone except the donor, the donor's family, and the donor's estate!) that doctors and hospitals (who are paid finders' fees) will torture and butcher (without anaesthetic) "suitable" donors, even if those so-called brain dead, beating heart cadavers draw breath on their own, or flinch in pain, or respond when their nipples or penises are stroked, or have a heart attack or seizure.
Torture may be too strong a word. Doctors establish brain death by pouring ice water into their (hopefully) unreceptive and unresponsive patient's ears and subjecting limbs to "the most intensely painful stimuli".
At least, in Europe, these "beating heart cadavers" are given anaesthesia while their hearts, livers, kidneys, corneas, lungs and so forth are being removed. Just in case. In America, unresponsive organ donors receive no such consideration.
The author, Dick Teresi, points out that anyone who goes under general anaesthetic for routine surgery is
technically put into a state of brain death. Temporarily. The only difference between being "under" for surgery and passing the Beating Heart Cadaver test is that the former state is not "irreversible" and the later state is deemed "irreversible" by a physician.
I'm troubled by the possibility that the physician who might do the deeming, might also be paid a finder's fee. Whatever happened to "First, Do No Harm"?
I lived in Europe during the decade of mad cow disease. Therefore, I am not permitted to donate blood. I've offered. I've tried. Now, I wonder whether I ought to get myself a nice, tasteful tattoo in a clear font explaining my unsuitability as a donor.
Anyway, I thought that the historical horror stories of coffins scratched from the inside were bad. I thought that the assembly-line organ-harvesting machine in Lexx was grisly!
Sunday, April 08, 2012
Thursday, April 05, 2012
Rebuttal to Cracked.com
I just came across a rebuttal to the article, cited in my last post, about "5 Ways Men Are Trained to Hate Women":
Misogyny
This blogger has a lot of good points. However, I don't think she's accurate in saying the Cracked essay claims men want sex and women don't. Its premise (as I read it) is that men are controlled by their sex drive in a way women aren't, which is a different matter. Am I misreading one or both of these essays?
Misogyny
This blogger has a lot of good points. However, I don't think she's accurate in saying the Cracked essay claims men want sex and women don't. Its premise (as I read it) is that men are controlled by their sex drive in a way women aren't, which is a different matter. Am I misreading one or both of these essays?
Are Men Trained to Hate Women?
Here’s an essay on Cracked.com about “5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women”:
Cracked
Now, this is a satirical website, so there’s obviously a bit of exaggeration involved—but also a considerable amount of unsettling frankness. Images and plotlines in popular media teach males that, like the heroes of adventure thrillers, they’re “entitled” to a hot woman and within their rights to be angry at all females if they don’t get this “prize” that they’re “owed.” Really? Men always seek power and status mainly to impress women? On an evolutionary, biology-driven level, okay. As a conscious, personal motivation? I’m skeptical. Some men must have other motives for pursuing success (to impress other men, for one thing).
By the time I finished reading this essay, I sympathized with the hypothetical woman mentioned in the text, who reacts, when the elements of this mindset are explained to her, as if she’s just realized all men are “secretly werewolves.”
Two other thoughts that crossed my mind:
The ideal fictional hero (created by a female author) with whom the typical romance heroine falls in love doesn’t display these attitudes. The blog gives an example from a scene by a male novelist in which it’s clear that the author imagines women think about themselves the same way men think about them. It’s probably almost as hard for a woman, no matter how long and happily married, to get inside a man’s head.
If the typical adventure story (e.g., a James Bond movie) portrays heterosexual relationships from the man’s viewpoint and shows the woman as a “prize” the hero will “get” at the end of his quest, a romance novel differs from the default of most other genres by portraying these relationships from the woman’s angle. And from the two sexes’ viewpoints the relationship dynamics apparently look quite different.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Cracked
Now, this is a satirical website, so there’s obviously a bit of exaggeration involved—but also a considerable amount of unsettling frankness. Images and plotlines in popular media teach males that, like the heroes of adventure thrillers, they’re “entitled” to a hot woman and within their rights to be angry at all females if they don’t get this “prize” that they’re “owed.” Really? Men always seek power and status mainly to impress women? On an evolutionary, biology-driven level, okay. As a conscious, personal motivation? I’m skeptical. Some men must have other motives for pursuing success (to impress other men, for one thing).
By the time I finished reading this essay, I sympathized with the hypothetical woman mentioned in the text, who reacts, when the elements of this mindset are explained to her, as if she’s just realized all men are “secretly werewolves.”
Two other thoughts that crossed my mind:
The ideal fictional hero (created by a female author) with whom the typical romance heroine falls in love doesn’t display these attitudes. The blog gives an example from a scene by a male novelist in which it’s clear that the author imagines women think about themselves the same way men think about them. It’s probably almost as hard for a woman, no matter how long and happily married, to get inside a man’s head.
If the typical adventure story (e.g., a James Bond movie) portrays heterosexual relationships from the man’s viewpoint and shows the woman as a “prize” the hero will “get” at the end of his quest, a romance novel differs from the default of most other genres by portraying these relationships from the woman’s angle. And from the two sexes’ viewpoints the relationship dynamics apparently look quite different.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, April 03, 2012
The Education of an Action Romance Hero
Officially, the 2005 film titled SAHARA is described thusly:
---
Master explorer Dirk Pitt goes on the adventure of a lifetime of seeking out a lost Civil War battleship known as the "Ship of Death" in the deserts of West Africa while helping a UN doctor being hounded by a ruthless dictator. (124 mins.)
Director: Breck Eisner
Stars: Matthew McConaughey, Penélope Cruz, Steve Zahn, William H. Macy
---
There are a lot of DVD's on Amazon titled SAHARA - this is the 2005 movie about treasure hunters looking for a battleship in the desert -- As I was watching ( logging the SAVE THE CAT! "beats" with part of my mind), I was imagining the story I would have written: LIKE THIS: “ Indiana Jones on Tatooine with McGiver for a sidekick and Captain Kirk in orbit ”
The film SAHARA also reminds me of the Action-Romance film ROMANCING THE STONE -- the two-guys-and-a-tough-gal in a chase/battle for life and limb (with larger stakes beyond themselves) format is now an entrenched classic, though there was a time when the gal was only there to be rescued and do stupid things to get caught again.
Looking at the dates - early 1980's to just before 2008, I think these films hit big because they were hammering away at a stereotype the people of theater-going-age desperately wanted to break (all females are helpless, or if not, are "Evil.") Power in the hands of a woman turns Dark, or destroys the woman.
Today, (2012) we have NEW STEREOTYPES that the teens of this time will hammer away at. These are recently born stereotypes, almost too new to be called cliche. Yet the rate of change in our society has exploded to the point where the brand new stereotype is an old cliche before the movies to challenge it have been shown in theaters.
We're seeing those challenges I think in the "Indie" market - the films made on low budget by the brilliant producers honing their craft on YouTube and Vimeo.
The question the beginning writer must answer is, "What are today's stereotypes?"
I suspect you'll find a lot of answers by examining the condition of "the family" in today's world.
Statistics recently posted indicate that a man and a woman who marry and raise their kids in a structured, family environment, have a much MUCH lower chance of unemployment, poverty, -- and I haven't yet seen the statistic but I suspect someone is crunching numbers on the juvenile delinquency rate. We do have a "bullying" problem erupting in the early grades of schools, a precursor to real trouble in life (both for the bully and the victim).
One development we have seen between 1980 and 2010 is the advent in the Romance Genre of the novel centering on the divorced or single-parent woman finding true romance the second (or third) time around, despite having attained a sense of total independence -- or perhaps because of it.
The broken family mends, might be the theme of that sub-genre.
The stereotype that may be forming (to be broken soon) would be that seen by the children of these "broken" marriages -- the next generation looking back and seeing "family" and the distaste, strife, and even real hatred between their parents and their grandparents.
"The Family" broke during those decades along two axes -- horizontally via divorce rate, and vertically as children found the "generation gap" (that has always existed) widening beyond comprehension.
It's probably not irrelevant to include the advent of the internet as a household utility between 1980 and 2010. The cell phone revolution of the 1990's just added fuel to the fire. Social networking, Web 2.0 and up, ebooks, and a whole new curriculum in the schools widen that vertical gap.
I do hope by now you've all read Alvin Toffler's non-fiction book, FUTURE SHOCK -- he predicted all this and more. If you are looking for the next stereotype to break and sell a blockbuster movie, read that book.
Toffler notes that the public school system in the U.S.A. (an innovation that changed the world, PUBLIC schooling) has always been the tool of industry, politically dominated in such a way as to turn out workers suitable for the jobs that industry needs to fill.
The nature of the jobs needing filling has shifted markedly in this 30 year period -- to the point where those educated in the 1980's public schools don't qualify for modern jobs unless they've acquired more certificates or skills, degrees, and resume items in between.
The "covert curriculum" that Toffler points out prevailed in the 1970's actually cripples folks for the workforce today -- it shifted and then shifted again. But then in the 1990's or so, the covert curriculum in the schools was turned much more "overt" -- saying "on the nose" that the purpose of schooling is to prepare you to work a job rather than to educate you to think for yourself.
Some of this peaked as the Unions became powerful enough to challenge industry's control of the job market, setting the idea that the monetary compensation for a "job" should be determined by what the worker thinks it should be - not what the employer thinks the job actually produces.
And another notion ebbed and flowed all the way into the university level -- that the purpose of education was to learn certain things are true, and others are not true. That the world "should" be this way, but never "that" way.
I've had some long, deep conversations with teachers retiring from the workforce who have taught at the High School and college levels (and I know some Middle School teachers too) who have felt this shifting wind of philosophy altering the textbooks.
Two rules I've seen imposed that exemplify this shift creating a new stereotype that new films will attack:
A) If one student in a class misbehaves, punish the entire class. There are no individuals, just the group, and the whole group is responsible for the behavior of individuals.
B) Never allow students to read ahead in the textbook, or ask questions from the "next chapter." The full weight of Teacher Authority must squash any notion that a student should teach themselves without supervision.
The covert curriculum thus becomes control of the group by authority.
Now this is not yet entirely visible across the nation, not at all. It turns up here and there, gets dismissed, turns up again, and is tossed out. Parents get outside tutoring for their children, take them to dance and music classes and all those things that break the grip of the public school authority.
But just anecdotal evidence from teachers I've spoken to indicates it's a rising tide not a receding one. The children who grew up trained by authority not to teach themselves are almost at the level of being in charge of things. The main result of having gone through school being punished for the misbehavior of others (over whom we have no control) is to hammer at government to CONTROL the misbehavior of others lest it hurt us.
Safety from the misbehavior of others and a deep seated conviction (irrational as it may be) that we can't solve problems that haven't been solved before, may be creating an even wider generation gap, or a very wide gap between spouses.
In the 1970's, the biggest business and the biggest category of self-help books was the DO-IT-YOURSELF industry (father of Home Depot). Today, you don't do-it-yourself, you go to Home Depot and ask a clerk how to do it and what to buy.
The oldest joke since the popularization of the automobile is the difference between the husband and wife as they try to find an unfamiliar location. Ask or read the map? That's gone now by the GPS!
So, the writer should be asking, "Will the imposition of Authority over Thinking For Yourself bring us together and heal the Family?"
At one time, "Father Knows Best" -- a man was King of his Castle and the wife had to shut up and take orders. That let at least half the people in the world vent their frustrations at being bossed around at work on their stay-at-home-do-nothing-but-rest-all-day spouse.
Did we have healthy family dynamics then? Do we need to go "back" to that? Or forward into something new that's never been tried before in human history?
In the film SAHARA the characters are on a treasure hunt -- and they find more than they were looking for, but only after harrowing, near-death experiences that only miracles could rescue them from (yes like INDIANA JONES).
Take the beat structure from SAHARA, strip out the subject matter, and replace it with THE FAMILY. That's the treasure the treasure hunter searches for - the HEA.
Remember in the HEA ending, the Happily Ever After of the Romance story, the result of happiness is children (one way or another). That means HEA is the equivalent of FOUNDING A FAMILY though "Romance Genre" doesn't usually deal with after the wedding.
Ancestry.com is a very big and growing web-based enterprise now. People are curious about their distant heritage (even if they hate their parents).
Yes, I know, you don't hate your parents -- nor do I. But if you watch a few TV series, you'll see the modern "cliche" stereotype when the parents come to visit. There's always anticipation of strife, and then really serious strife -- sometimes it's resolved in the show, or at least partially, but the RIFT between generations is routinely portrayed as so common it doesn't need explaining to the audience.
The other thing you see mentioned offhandedly with the implication that the audience understands the nature of the strife implied -- that's the phrase "my Ex" -- everyone has an Ex and knows what meetings with him/her mean. Strife. Galore.
The reason Romance Genre doesn't deal with "after the wedding" is that we, as a culture, now expect Family Life to be fraught with strife. There's me vs. my parents. There's spouse vs. spouse's parents. There's me vs. my spouse's parents. There's my spouse vs. my parents. Children only make it worse. Then there's his children from a prior marriage vs. my children from a prior marriage.
Remember THE BRADY BUNCH? Could you put that on TV today and make it a hit? Why was it a hit then? (1969 and a film in 1995)
It was a hit because divorce had become common, but "The Family" was still strong. An amalgamated family was plausible because despite the inherent strife between generations, Family was plausible in a way it is not today.
Remember The Waltons TV Series?
The Waltons On Amazon
Remember Little House on the Prairie?
If you don't remember them, you can probably get them streaming on Netflix etc.
As a writer, you have to learn to discern the intended audience's characteristics and interests by looking at the piece of fiction with a writer's eye. But just because you're studying one thing, don't think you are allowed to forget everything else you've studied.
One of the things with WRITING as a craft, discipline, business, and artform is that you must teach yourself in defiance of most every teacher you've ever had in a formal school setting.
In truth, nobody can teach you. Honestly. There are a lot of expensive courses in writing all over the web now, but the truth is none of them will do you any good at all unless you are completely free of the ideas in A) and B) above -- that you get punished if someone else misbehaves and that you must not look ahead in the textbook.
In fact, that trick of looking ahead in the textbook is the one thing that got me through college. The very first day when I got the syllabus that said what the textbook would be, I'd run to the bookstore and get the books, then while in waiting rooms, around anywhere I was, I'd be reading the textbooks from back to front -- that's right, BACKWARDS, starting with the index and ending with the table of contents, until I understood what the course was about, what the underlying covert-curriculum thrust underneath the material actually was (whether the professor knew it or not, and it was usually NOT).
When I went to college, professors and TA's didn't take role call, didn't know or care whether you were in class (unless there was a pop quiz you needed to score on). If you knew your stuff, you got the grade commensurate with what you knew. They did not grade "on the curve" -- everyone in the class could get an A or an F and the administration wouldn't blink. Everyone had an equal shot at an A because no rule forced the teacher to sort the class by statistics.
All you had to do was take the mid-terms and final. Sometimes you didn't need to bother with the mid-terms if you aced the Final. Some courses you could get credit for by just taking the Final before the course was given (History was one of those). It was called "placing out" of the course to satisfy a pre-requisite for some other course. Some courses didn't have mid-terms or quizzes. A term paper and a final was your only chance. Nobody cared whether you lived or died, and the other students didn't even know your name. In that environment, you grow up fast or you flunk out.
There was no hand-holding or encouragement. All that baby-ing of students stopped for me in 12th grade. And I thought that was fine. I had known it was coming and was looking forward to it with relish. As soon as the hand-holding stopped, my grade-point-average shot up.
The maturity gained from being treated like that is what I see lacking in today's college age people. It takes them years after college to attain that level of maturity. I strongly suspect that the cohesiveness of FAMILY illustrated in those TV Series comes from having been educated in elementary school the way I was educated in college.
I suspect that because I know that is how my parents were educated in grammar school and that's where they learned how to teach me to go to college and succeed.
That lesson is one of the reasons I love my parents. They turned me loose in the world with a fully mature sense of self at about age 15 when I got my driver's license. At that time license-age was 15 1/2, and kids that age had never smoked a cigarette or taken a drink of hard liquor, not because it was forbidden but because it was uninteresting and irrelevant. I'm not kidding, this culture has changed that much that fast.
That environment where you must achieve certain goals without anyone supervising you to force you to do the work creates a sense of individuality -- a sense of Identity. You don't have to do the 1960's thing of "finding yourself" because your Self emerges strong, very early in life, and can never be threatened by anyone else's behavior or misbehavior.
The key, I think, is that covert curriculum item of "nobody cares whether you live or die" -- what you do doesn't affect whether they succeed so they have no stake in you failing (thus no bullying). No grading on a curve means how well you do doesn't depend on how poorly someone else does. Thus there's no reason to hate, resent, or undermine other students.
It is that strong sense of individual self that is the absolute bedrock requirement for the ability to Pair-Bond, i.e. to experience ROMANCE that leads to the HEA not to just another fling ir at best the HFN (Happily For Now).
Now, go back to the film SAHARA. Like ROMANCING THE STONE this film has a back-and-forth, rescuing and rescued, between a guy and gal who eventually do get to have their dream-date-on-a-beach.
These films depict the forging of a Pair-Bonded Relationship based on two people having that strong sense of Self. That kind of educational experience I outlined that produces Heroes (no wonder women were excluded from college, from becoming doctors and Lawyers -- they might then become Heroes.)
Remember the film LEGALLY BLONDE?
Remember we're talking about hammering at stereotypes? The "dumb blonde" is a big one, and the dumb blonde beauty who's a lawyer? Think about that in terms of the "nobody cares if you live or die" educational method producing Heroes instead of herds of cattle or nice tractable, obedient soldiers or employees all in a row.
That "nobody cares if you live or die" is the feeling that the street urchin gets, the tough street kid who grows up to be a boss (Mob or otherwise).
Now there's a difference in the effect of receiving that attitude at the age of say, 8, and at the age of 18.
FIRST must come the warmth, coddling, and protection of a strong family environment. THEN comes being thrown out into the cold, cruel world to fend for yourself. If you're never thrown out, or are thrown out too late in life, you never develop the ability to fend for yourself. You remain dependent and in need of protection (read some Regency Romances written prior to say 1980, then some from today which overlay today's woman on the Regency heroine.)
So, given cell phones and social networking peer support groups that parents know nothing about, what kind of pair-bonding potential will this new generation have built into them? (We're looking for the stereotype that will be popular to attack, don't forget that.)
If family bonds that are both vertical and horizontal are now shattered beyond repair, what next set of bonds are under attack? And by what tools?
We've seen the advent of the "flash mob." We've seen it used to attack social order by robbing stores for fun and profit; or even by robbing stories in the name of demanding justice for a kid shot by a Neighborhood Watch fellow.
We've seen flashmobs used to build a strong community (actually coming together to clean garbage off a street or spend time gardening or building houses for the poor.)
The flash-mob by itself is a neutral development, but the purpose a group chooses will be the result of the values of the individuals in the group.
Is the flash-mob itself our next stereotype or cliche to be hammered by a great film?
Remember the film, You've Got Mail?
Is school bullying the stereotype to attack?
Look carefully at this selection of films and TV series and ponder what the current set of 10 year olds (born in 2002) will be 10 years from now. If you start on a film script today, that's about when it will hit the theaters. Most original novels take about 5 years from "Idea!" to published book. 10 years for a First Novel isn't out of the ballpark.
Don't dismiss any of this famous-film-based perspective on our fiction market from your mind when you watch the political gyrations and contortions flow out of your TV News or Videos online. If you can think both these kinds of thoughts at the same time, you'll have the belly-laugh of a lifetime! "LEGALLY BLONDE indeed!" Politics is, first and foremost, entertainment. To understand politics (especially the ads on TV) you must understand the fiction market.
Also scrutinize the political map of the USA vs population density. Notice how the fiction markets of New York and California differ from those of Kansas and Nebraska, then compare with Florida and Ohio. A novel has to sell in all those markets, and a film must be a hit in New York and California to survive the first day in the theaters.
For reviews of 5 novels in terms of Tarot cards that represent their plot/theme structure, with a further discussion of the concept of what is (or is not) "Fair" in our current culture, see my April review column, now archived here: http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2012/
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
---
Master explorer Dirk Pitt goes on the adventure of a lifetime of seeking out a lost Civil War battleship known as the "Ship of Death" in the deserts of West Africa while helping a UN doctor being hounded by a ruthless dictator. (124 mins.)
Director: Breck Eisner
Stars: Matthew McConaughey, Penélope Cruz, Steve Zahn, William H. Macy
---
There are a lot of DVD's on Amazon titled SAHARA - this is the 2005 movie about treasure hunters looking for a battleship in the desert -- As I was watching ( logging the SAVE THE CAT! "beats" with part of my mind), I was imagining the story I would have written: LIKE THIS: “ Indiana Jones on Tatooine with McGiver for a sidekick and Captain Kirk in orbit ”
The film SAHARA also reminds me of the Action-Romance film ROMANCING THE STONE -- the two-guys-and-a-tough-gal in a chase/battle for life and limb (with larger stakes beyond themselves) format is now an entrenched classic, though there was a time when the gal was only there to be rescued and do stupid things to get caught again.
Looking at the dates - early 1980's to just before 2008, I think these films hit big because they were hammering away at a stereotype the people of theater-going-age desperately wanted to break (all females are helpless, or if not, are "Evil.") Power in the hands of a woman turns Dark, or destroys the woman.
Today, (2012) we have NEW STEREOTYPES that the teens of this time will hammer away at. These are recently born stereotypes, almost too new to be called cliche. Yet the rate of change in our society has exploded to the point where the brand new stereotype is an old cliche before the movies to challenge it have been shown in theaters.
We're seeing those challenges I think in the "Indie" market - the films made on low budget by the brilliant producers honing their craft on YouTube and Vimeo.
The question the beginning writer must answer is, "What are today's stereotypes?"
I suspect you'll find a lot of answers by examining the condition of "the family" in today's world.
Statistics recently posted indicate that a man and a woman who marry and raise their kids in a structured, family environment, have a much MUCH lower chance of unemployment, poverty, -- and I haven't yet seen the statistic but I suspect someone is crunching numbers on the juvenile delinquency rate. We do have a "bullying" problem erupting in the early grades of schools, a precursor to real trouble in life (both for the bully and the victim).
One development we have seen between 1980 and 2010 is the advent in the Romance Genre of the novel centering on the divorced or single-parent woman finding true romance the second (or third) time around, despite having attained a sense of total independence -- or perhaps because of it.
The broken family mends, might be the theme of that sub-genre.
The stereotype that may be forming (to be broken soon) would be that seen by the children of these "broken" marriages -- the next generation looking back and seeing "family" and the distaste, strife, and even real hatred between their parents and their grandparents.
"The Family" broke during those decades along two axes -- horizontally via divorce rate, and vertically as children found the "generation gap" (that has always existed) widening beyond comprehension.
It's probably not irrelevant to include the advent of the internet as a household utility between 1980 and 2010. The cell phone revolution of the 1990's just added fuel to the fire. Social networking, Web 2.0 and up, ebooks, and a whole new curriculum in the schools widen that vertical gap.
I do hope by now you've all read Alvin Toffler's non-fiction book, FUTURE SHOCK -- he predicted all this and more. If you are looking for the next stereotype to break and sell a blockbuster movie, read that book.
Toffler notes that the public school system in the U.S.A. (an innovation that changed the world, PUBLIC schooling) has always been the tool of industry, politically dominated in such a way as to turn out workers suitable for the jobs that industry needs to fill.
The nature of the jobs needing filling has shifted markedly in this 30 year period -- to the point where those educated in the 1980's public schools don't qualify for modern jobs unless they've acquired more certificates or skills, degrees, and resume items in between.
The "covert curriculum" that Toffler points out prevailed in the 1970's actually cripples folks for the workforce today -- it shifted and then shifted again. But then in the 1990's or so, the covert curriculum in the schools was turned much more "overt" -- saying "on the nose" that the purpose of schooling is to prepare you to work a job rather than to educate you to think for yourself.
Some of this peaked as the Unions became powerful enough to challenge industry's control of the job market, setting the idea that the monetary compensation for a "job" should be determined by what the worker thinks it should be - not what the employer thinks the job actually produces.
And another notion ebbed and flowed all the way into the university level -- that the purpose of education was to learn certain things are true, and others are not true. That the world "should" be this way, but never "that" way.
I've had some long, deep conversations with teachers retiring from the workforce who have taught at the High School and college levels (and I know some Middle School teachers too) who have felt this shifting wind of philosophy altering the textbooks.
Two rules I've seen imposed that exemplify this shift creating a new stereotype that new films will attack:
A) If one student in a class misbehaves, punish the entire class. There are no individuals, just the group, and the whole group is responsible for the behavior of individuals.
B) Never allow students to read ahead in the textbook, or ask questions from the "next chapter." The full weight of Teacher Authority must squash any notion that a student should teach themselves without supervision.
The covert curriculum thus becomes control of the group by authority.
Now this is not yet entirely visible across the nation, not at all. It turns up here and there, gets dismissed, turns up again, and is tossed out. Parents get outside tutoring for their children, take them to dance and music classes and all those things that break the grip of the public school authority.
But just anecdotal evidence from teachers I've spoken to indicates it's a rising tide not a receding one. The children who grew up trained by authority not to teach themselves are almost at the level of being in charge of things. The main result of having gone through school being punished for the misbehavior of others (over whom we have no control) is to hammer at government to CONTROL the misbehavior of others lest it hurt us.
Safety from the misbehavior of others and a deep seated conviction (irrational as it may be) that we can't solve problems that haven't been solved before, may be creating an even wider generation gap, or a very wide gap between spouses.
In the 1970's, the biggest business and the biggest category of self-help books was the DO-IT-YOURSELF industry (father of Home Depot). Today, you don't do-it-yourself, you go to Home Depot and ask a clerk how to do it and what to buy.
The oldest joke since the popularization of the automobile is the difference between the husband and wife as they try to find an unfamiliar location. Ask or read the map? That's gone now by the GPS!
So, the writer should be asking, "Will the imposition of Authority over Thinking For Yourself bring us together and heal the Family?"
At one time, "Father Knows Best" -- a man was King of his Castle and the wife had to shut up and take orders. That let at least half the people in the world vent their frustrations at being bossed around at work on their stay-at-home-do-nothing-but-rest-all-day spouse.
Did we have healthy family dynamics then? Do we need to go "back" to that? Or forward into something new that's never been tried before in human history?
In the film SAHARA the characters are on a treasure hunt -- and they find more than they were looking for, but only after harrowing, near-death experiences that only miracles could rescue them from (yes like INDIANA JONES).
Take the beat structure from SAHARA, strip out the subject matter, and replace it with THE FAMILY. That's the treasure the treasure hunter searches for - the HEA.
Remember in the HEA ending, the Happily Ever After of the Romance story, the result of happiness is children (one way or another). That means HEA is the equivalent of FOUNDING A FAMILY though "Romance Genre" doesn't usually deal with after the wedding.
Ancestry.com is a very big and growing web-based enterprise now. People are curious about their distant heritage (even if they hate their parents).
Yes, I know, you don't hate your parents -- nor do I. But if you watch a few TV series, you'll see the modern "cliche" stereotype when the parents come to visit. There's always anticipation of strife, and then really serious strife -- sometimes it's resolved in the show, or at least partially, but the RIFT between generations is routinely portrayed as so common it doesn't need explaining to the audience.
The other thing you see mentioned offhandedly with the implication that the audience understands the nature of the strife implied -- that's the phrase "my Ex" -- everyone has an Ex and knows what meetings with him/her mean. Strife. Galore.
The reason Romance Genre doesn't deal with "after the wedding" is that we, as a culture, now expect Family Life to be fraught with strife. There's me vs. my parents. There's spouse vs. spouse's parents. There's me vs. my spouse's parents. There's my spouse vs. my parents. Children only make it worse. Then there's his children from a prior marriage vs. my children from a prior marriage.
Remember THE BRADY BUNCH? Could you put that on TV today and make it a hit? Why was it a hit then? (1969 and a film in 1995)
It was a hit because divorce had become common, but "The Family" was still strong. An amalgamated family was plausible because despite the inherent strife between generations, Family was plausible in a way it is not today.
Remember The Waltons TV Series?
The Waltons On Amazon
Remember Little House on the Prairie?
If you don't remember them, you can probably get them streaming on Netflix etc.
As a writer, you have to learn to discern the intended audience's characteristics and interests by looking at the piece of fiction with a writer's eye. But just because you're studying one thing, don't think you are allowed to forget everything else you've studied.
One of the things with WRITING as a craft, discipline, business, and artform is that you must teach yourself in defiance of most every teacher you've ever had in a formal school setting.
In truth, nobody can teach you. Honestly. There are a lot of expensive courses in writing all over the web now, but the truth is none of them will do you any good at all unless you are completely free of the ideas in A) and B) above -- that you get punished if someone else misbehaves and that you must not look ahead in the textbook.
In fact, that trick of looking ahead in the textbook is the one thing that got me through college. The very first day when I got the syllabus that said what the textbook would be, I'd run to the bookstore and get the books, then while in waiting rooms, around anywhere I was, I'd be reading the textbooks from back to front -- that's right, BACKWARDS, starting with the index and ending with the table of contents, until I understood what the course was about, what the underlying covert-curriculum thrust underneath the material actually was (whether the professor knew it or not, and it was usually NOT).
When I went to college, professors and TA's didn't take role call, didn't know or care whether you were in class (unless there was a pop quiz you needed to score on). If you knew your stuff, you got the grade commensurate with what you knew. They did not grade "on the curve" -- everyone in the class could get an A or an F and the administration wouldn't blink. Everyone had an equal shot at an A because no rule forced the teacher to sort the class by statistics.
All you had to do was take the mid-terms and final. Sometimes you didn't need to bother with the mid-terms if you aced the Final. Some courses you could get credit for by just taking the Final before the course was given (History was one of those). It was called "placing out" of the course to satisfy a pre-requisite for some other course. Some courses didn't have mid-terms or quizzes. A term paper and a final was your only chance. Nobody cared whether you lived or died, and the other students didn't even know your name. In that environment, you grow up fast or you flunk out.
There was no hand-holding or encouragement. All that baby-ing of students stopped for me in 12th grade. And I thought that was fine. I had known it was coming and was looking forward to it with relish. As soon as the hand-holding stopped, my grade-point-average shot up.
The maturity gained from being treated like that is what I see lacking in today's college age people. It takes them years after college to attain that level of maturity. I strongly suspect that the cohesiveness of FAMILY illustrated in those TV Series comes from having been educated in elementary school the way I was educated in college.
I suspect that because I know that is how my parents were educated in grammar school and that's where they learned how to teach me to go to college and succeed.
That lesson is one of the reasons I love my parents. They turned me loose in the world with a fully mature sense of self at about age 15 when I got my driver's license. At that time license-age was 15 1/2, and kids that age had never smoked a cigarette or taken a drink of hard liquor, not because it was forbidden but because it was uninteresting and irrelevant. I'm not kidding, this culture has changed that much that fast.
That environment where you must achieve certain goals without anyone supervising you to force you to do the work creates a sense of individuality -- a sense of Identity. You don't have to do the 1960's thing of "finding yourself" because your Self emerges strong, very early in life, and can never be threatened by anyone else's behavior or misbehavior.
The key, I think, is that covert curriculum item of "nobody cares whether you live or die" -- what you do doesn't affect whether they succeed so they have no stake in you failing (thus no bullying). No grading on a curve means how well you do doesn't depend on how poorly someone else does. Thus there's no reason to hate, resent, or undermine other students.
It is that strong sense of individual self that is the absolute bedrock requirement for the ability to Pair-Bond, i.e. to experience ROMANCE that leads to the HEA not to just another fling ir at best the HFN (Happily For Now).
Now, go back to the film SAHARA. Like ROMANCING THE STONE this film has a back-and-forth, rescuing and rescued, between a guy and gal who eventually do get to have their dream-date-on-a-beach.
These films depict the forging of a Pair-Bonded Relationship based on two people having that strong sense of Self. That kind of educational experience I outlined that produces Heroes (no wonder women were excluded from college, from becoming doctors and Lawyers -- they might then become Heroes.)
Remember the film LEGALLY BLONDE?
Remember we're talking about hammering at stereotypes? The "dumb blonde" is a big one, and the dumb blonde beauty who's a lawyer? Think about that in terms of the "nobody cares if you live or die" educational method producing Heroes instead of herds of cattle or nice tractable, obedient soldiers or employees all in a row.
That "nobody cares if you live or die" is the feeling that the street urchin gets, the tough street kid who grows up to be a boss (Mob or otherwise).
Now there's a difference in the effect of receiving that attitude at the age of say, 8, and at the age of 18.
FIRST must come the warmth, coddling, and protection of a strong family environment. THEN comes being thrown out into the cold, cruel world to fend for yourself. If you're never thrown out, or are thrown out too late in life, you never develop the ability to fend for yourself. You remain dependent and in need of protection (read some Regency Romances written prior to say 1980, then some from today which overlay today's woman on the Regency heroine.)
So, given cell phones and social networking peer support groups that parents know nothing about, what kind of pair-bonding potential will this new generation have built into them? (We're looking for the stereotype that will be popular to attack, don't forget that.)
If family bonds that are both vertical and horizontal are now shattered beyond repair, what next set of bonds are under attack? And by what tools?
We've seen the advent of the "flash mob." We've seen it used to attack social order by robbing stores for fun and profit; or even by robbing stories in the name of demanding justice for a kid shot by a Neighborhood Watch fellow.
We've seen flashmobs used to build a strong community (actually coming together to clean garbage off a street or spend time gardening or building houses for the poor.)
The flash-mob by itself is a neutral development, but the purpose a group chooses will be the result of the values of the individuals in the group.
Is the flash-mob itself our next stereotype or cliche to be hammered by a great film?
Remember the film, You've Got Mail?
Is school bullying the stereotype to attack?
Look carefully at this selection of films and TV series and ponder what the current set of 10 year olds (born in 2002) will be 10 years from now. If you start on a film script today, that's about when it will hit the theaters. Most original novels take about 5 years from "Idea!" to published book. 10 years for a First Novel isn't out of the ballpark.
Don't dismiss any of this famous-film-based perspective on our fiction market from your mind when you watch the political gyrations and contortions flow out of your TV News or Videos online. If you can think both these kinds of thoughts at the same time, you'll have the belly-laugh of a lifetime! "LEGALLY BLONDE indeed!" Politics is, first and foremost, entertainment. To understand politics (especially the ads on TV) you must understand the fiction market.
Also scrutinize the political map of the USA vs population density. Notice how the fiction markets of New York and California differ from those of Kansas and Nebraska, then compare with Florida and Ohio. A novel has to sell in all those markets, and a film must be a hit in New York and California to survive the first day in the theaters.
For reviews of 5 novels in terms of Tarot cards that represent their plot/theme structure, with a further discussion of the concept of what is (or is not) "Fair" in our current culture, see my April review column, now archived here: http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2012/
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Sunday, April 01, 2012
No Laughing Matter
It was with great dismay that I read law professor Stuart P. Green's NYT opinion piece titled
When Stealing Isn’t Stealing
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/opinion/theft-law-in-the-21st-century.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
How many people glanced at the piece, took in the credentials of the eminent author, registered the standard
copyright infringers' argument that"sharing" isn't stealing, and entirely missed the point that the good professor
does not condone copyright infringement?
I respectfully disagree with the professor's argument that copyright owners use the wrong terminology when they
compare copyright infringement to stealing.
How many law professors publish opinions that IDENTITY theft should not be called "identity THEFT"?
Someone's identity isn't tangible property, any more than intellectual property is tangible, yet most sensible people agree that Identity Theft is THEFT and Fraud, and "theft" is an appropriate and widely accepted term to use for that crime.
How long does it take to establish a valuable identity? In some cases, one only has to be born. Far less active work goes into one's identity than an author puts into writing a work of fiction.
One spends nothing to create an identity, but an author could easily spend $40,000 or more in time, materials, equipment, licenses, services, advertising etc etc in the course of creating a full-length novel.
Please consider that in many cases of copyright infringement, a form of identity theft does indeed take place. As does fraud.
Authors' identities are stolen for the specific, limited purpose of "sharing" their works without their knowledge or permission and in violation of various laws.
The Terms Of Service for many hosting sites state that only the author of a work may upload the work.
Similarly, auction sites state that only the copyright owner may sell an e-book, or collection of ebooks. One prominent auction site obliges "Sellers" to publish statements that the e-books they are selling are their own, or are in the public domain.
Copyright infringers falsely and fraudulently purport to BE the author and claim to OWN the copyright, sometimes to tens of thousands of copyrighted works by living authors.
Copyright Infringers do not pay attention to hosting sites' default settings intended for the use of copyright owners (authors/musicians) who wish to distribute their works freely under Creative Commons Licenses. Therefore, the hosting site explicitly advertises that these (copyrighted works) are in the public domain, or that they are shareware, or that they are GNU licensed for free sharing.
This is not true.
Unfortunately, the DMCA does not require these sites to verify that their users make truthful representations, and it does not require the sites to use reasonable judgement, even when a User appears to believe that he/she is simultaneously Nora Roberts, James Patterson, John Grisham, Clive Cussler, Barack Obama, Georgette Heyer and a couple of thousand erotica authors as well.
The law is an equine ass.
The result is that every day, more and more internet users believe that current bestsellers are in the public domain, and that there is nothing illegal about uploading e-books to file hosting/sharing sites and publishing and distributing them to all the world.
Moreover, copyright infringers claim to be "Non Profit" and make money from advertising and subscriptions and donations and bounties "for traffic" paid by hosting sites.... while "finding" illegally uploaded e-books and distributing copies for profit. Their subscribers wish to believe that it is lawful to upload and download new movies before they open in cinemas, and new books before they are released for sale.
How can people possibly believe that a book or a movie is in the public domain before it is even released for sale? Perhaps because teachers and law professors tell them that Stealing isn't Stealing if they would not have paid to see the movie or read the book if it hadn't been available free? You think?
Copyright infringement does not stop with "sharing" in private yahoogroups and on "sharing" sites. Auction site users believe that it is perfectly legal for them to copy tens of thousands of modern ebooks --from these hosting sites and torrents and yahoogroups and SocialGo sites-- onto DVDs, and to sell those collections.
Those who purchase these "thousand-ebook collections formatted for Kindle or Nook or what-have-you" go on to Re-Sell the collections again and again, and believe with a passion that what they are doing is both incredibly profitable and legal.
It isn't.
What is more, when one reads the Feedback left for these Mass Copyright Infringers, time and again their satisfied customers say, "I will never have to buy another book in my life!"
Chances are, if readers have 200,000 modern bestsellers in 10 different genres on their e-book readers and on DVD, they indeed will never buy another book.
That's no joke.
All the best,
Rowena Cherry
SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/
When Stealing Isn’t Stealing
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/opinion/theft-law-in-the-21st-century.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
How many people glanced at the piece, took in the credentials of the eminent author, registered the standard
copyright infringers' argument that"sharing" isn't stealing, and entirely missed the point that the good professor
does not condone copyright infringement?
I respectfully disagree with the professor's argument that copyright owners use the wrong terminology when they
compare copyright infringement to stealing.
How many law professors publish opinions that IDENTITY theft should not be called "identity THEFT"?
Mar 19, 2012 – Identity theft is the fastest growing crime in the U.S., with over nine million victims each year.Try googling "When Identity Theft Isn't Theft".
Someone's identity isn't tangible property, any more than intellectual property is tangible, yet most sensible people agree that Identity Theft is THEFT and Fraud, and "theft" is an appropriate and widely accepted term to use for that crime.
How long does it take to establish a valuable identity? In some cases, one only has to be born. Far less active work goes into one's identity than an author puts into writing a work of fiction.
One spends nothing to create an identity, but an author could easily spend $40,000 or more in time, materials, equipment, licenses, services, advertising etc etc in the course of creating a full-length novel.
Please consider that in many cases of copyright infringement, a form of identity theft does indeed take place. As does fraud.
Authors' identities are stolen for the specific, limited purpose of "sharing" their works without their knowledge or permission and in violation of various laws.
The Terms Of Service for many hosting sites state that only the author of a work may upload the work.
Similarly, auction sites state that only the copyright owner may sell an e-book, or collection of ebooks. One prominent auction site obliges "Sellers" to publish statements that the e-books they are selling are their own, or are in the public domain.
Copyright infringers falsely and fraudulently purport to BE the author and claim to OWN the copyright, sometimes to tens of thousands of copyrighted works by living authors.
Copyright Infringers do not pay attention to hosting sites' default settings intended for the use of copyright owners (authors/musicians) who wish to distribute their works freely under Creative Commons Licenses. Therefore, the hosting site explicitly advertises that these (copyrighted works) are in the public domain, or that they are shareware, or that they are GNU licensed for free sharing.
This is not true.
Unfortunately, the DMCA does not require these sites to verify that their users make truthful representations, and it does not require the sites to use reasonable judgement, even when a User appears to believe that he/she is simultaneously Nora Roberts, James Patterson, John Grisham, Clive Cussler, Barack Obama, Georgette Heyer and a couple of thousand erotica authors as well.
The law is an equine ass.
The result is that every day, more and more internet users believe that current bestsellers are in the public domain, and that there is nothing illegal about uploading e-books to file hosting/sharing sites and publishing and distributing them to all the world.
Moreover, copyright infringers claim to be "Non Profit" and make money from advertising and subscriptions and donations and bounties "for traffic" paid by hosting sites.... while "finding" illegally uploaded e-books and distributing copies for profit. Their subscribers wish to believe that it is lawful to upload and download new movies before they open in cinemas, and new books before they are released for sale.
How can people possibly believe that a book or a movie is in the public domain before it is even released for sale? Perhaps because teachers and law professors tell them that Stealing isn't Stealing if they would not have paid to see the movie or read the book if it hadn't been available free? You think?
Copyright infringement does not stop with "sharing" in private yahoogroups and on "sharing" sites. Auction site users believe that it is perfectly legal for them to copy tens of thousands of modern ebooks --from these hosting sites and torrents and yahoogroups and SocialGo sites-- onto DVDs, and to sell those collections.
Those who purchase these "thousand-ebook collections formatted for Kindle or Nook or what-have-you" go on to Re-Sell the collections again and again, and believe with a passion that what they are doing is both incredibly profitable and legal.
It isn't.
What is more, when one reads the Feedback left for these Mass Copyright Infringers, time and again their satisfied customers say, "I will never have to buy another book in my life!"
Chances are, if readers have 200,000 modern bestsellers in 10 different genres on their e-book readers and on DVD, they indeed will never buy another book.
That's no joke.
All the best,
Rowena Cherry
SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/
APRIL FOOLS
EFF (the Electronic Freedom Foundation) shared the following today, April 1st 2012.
and persons going about private business in the supposed privacy of their enclosed gardens (such as deterring pestiferous herbivores by scent-marking their shrubberies), this backscatter story makes sense.
Considering that Google has published aerial photographs of bending back yard gardeners' posterior cleavages,Google's New "Nude View" Program Raises Privacy Concerns
Privacy advocates are calling foul on a new partnership between Google and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) that would index the backscatter x-ray images taken at airline security checkpoints. "This will help singles get a first look even before the first date," said a Google spokesman. "Google Nude View," as the program is called, represents the first major initiative for the company since it changed its venerable slogan from "Don't Be Evil" to "Mwahahaha!"Reproduction of this publication in electronic media is encouraged.
and persons going about private business in the supposed privacy of their enclosed gardens (such as deterring pestiferous herbivores by scent-marking their shrubberies), this backscatter story makes sense.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
ICFA 2012
Last week I attended the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando. As usual, I spent time with Jacqueline's co-author Jean Lorrah, who is one of the founding members. She has never missed even one year since the beginning of the con!
Author guests of honor were China Mieville and Kelly Link. At one of the luncheons Mieville gave a speech focused on the "uncanny," proposing a new category of horror, the "abcanny." He then, with illustrative slides, riffed on other potential categories, getting ever wilder with the surcanny, subcanny, supercanny, and almost any prefix you could think of. The guest scholar, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, spoke at the other luncheon on "The Undead," with many zombie-related slides.
The theme of the conference was "The Monstrous Fantastic." Distinctions were made between "monsters" and people or entities that perform monstrous actions. Panel discussions often developed the concept of the monster as a reflection of us -- the familiar "when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back" idea.
Our vampire-and-revenant division, the Lord Ruthven Assembly, presented its fiction award to THE LAST WEREWOLF, by Glen Duncan (which does include vampires as prominent secondary characters), and its nonfiction award to THE VAMPIRE DEFANGED, by Susannah Clements.
To give you another glimpse of what this conference is like, one poetry reading session had the theme of Monstrous Pets and was titled, "It Might Kill You, But It's So Cute."
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Author guests of honor were China Mieville and Kelly Link. At one of the luncheons Mieville gave a speech focused on the "uncanny," proposing a new category of horror, the "abcanny." He then, with illustrative slides, riffed on other potential categories, getting ever wilder with the surcanny, subcanny, supercanny, and almost any prefix you could think of. The guest scholar, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, spoke at the other luncheon on "The Undead," with many zombie-related slides.
The theme of the conference was "The Monstrous Fantastic." Distinctions were made between "monsters" and people or entities that perform monstrous actions. Panel discussions often developed the concept of the monster as a reflection of us -- the familiar "when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back" idea.
Our vampire-and-revenant division, the Lord Ruthven Assembly, presented its fiction award to THE LAST WEREWOLF, by Glen Duncan (which does include vampires as prominent secondary characters), and its nonfiction award to THE VAMPIRE DEFANGED, by Susannah Clements.
To give you another glimpse of what this conference is like, one poetry reading session had the theme of Monstrous Pets and was titled, "It Might Kill You, But It's So Cute."
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Dialogue Part 3 - Romance Erotica vs. Porn
I was in a Romance writing discussion on Google+ and somehow the subject of porn came up.
The question distilled from the discussion was: "How can a writer confront sexuality as a component of Romance with pure honesty, and still avoid writing porn?"
It seems obvious to me, and probably seems obvious to you as well -- but I've read a lot of Romance in various genre-mixtures, and I've only seen this done full-out, no holds barred, once -- and that was in a fanfic!
But that's where I learned to look for this subtle but extremely distinctive signature that divides erotica from porn. I believe the writer was a professional fiction writer who was writing fanfic because the story was organic to the TV show universe it was derived from. But maybe she (or he? who can tell?) was simply a good writer who had never felt like writing professionally (I've known many fanfic writers who work that way).
The technique is very simple to say but very difficult to do. In that, it's like the rule "Show Don't Tell" -- every writer presenting their work for evaluation and expecting praise believes with absolute conviction that they have indeed shown not told their story! Even when they have not.
And this simple distinction between erotica and porn is just exactly like that. Erotica writers believe they have in fact done this, when they have not.
The reader may not even notice the failing!
That's because it's a technique which combines most of the craft techniques we've explored in these Tuesday posts on this blog.
You've seen an accomplished portrait artist doing an oil painting, comparing the painting to the subject, putting down one brush, picking up another, dousing the brush with this and that, daubing on a bit of color, putting that brush down and selecting another -- considering, and selecting another, daubing, etc.
Writing a great sex scene is like that, at least the first few times you do it because you have to train yourself to the technique mixture. In that, writing sex scenes is just exactly like writing "action" or "chase" scenes -- an artform within a precisely defined structure.
Writing a great sex scene that isn't porn is just like painting a portrait.
A portrait isn't a photograph of reality; an erotic sex scene isn't REAL sex.
Exactly the same thing is said of dialogue -- good dialogue is not transcribed real speech.
Exactly the same thing is said of action -- good fight scenes are not REAL fighting.
Like a good portrait, a good sex scene is a selective representation of reality.
But above that and more than that, a good sex scene is a SCENE.
A "scene" is a clearly defined unit, a building block of story.
Like a "chapter" a scene does not start in an arbitrary place nor does it end in an arbitrary place. The "middle" point of a scene is not arbitrarily determined by dividing the number of words in half.
Like a novel, or a story of any length, a scene has a beginning, middle and end defined by what happens.
Here's part 2 of an entry here on scene structure with a link to the previous part.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html
Here's a post with links to Verisimilitude vs. Reality series:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-4.html
Here's Plot vs. Story
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
Shifting Point of View
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/shifting-pov.html
And what you can do in a Novel that you can't do in a Film:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-you-can-do-in-novel-that-you-cant.html
All of these blog posts introduce concepts and techniques that must be orchestrated when you construct a sex scene that is not porn.
But we're talking here about the sex scene.
First and foremost, it must be a SCENE -- with all the components of a scene in their proper places and proportions as delineated in those previous posts.
Secondly, this peculiar scene, the sex scene, usually (not always) delineates an encounter between two people.
These two people do certain things to, with, beside, and for each other -- they interact.
Read that last sentence again, carefully and think about it hard. What does it really say about what the two people in the sex scene are DOING?
One acts, the other reacts by doing something, to which the first reacts by doing something, to which the second reacts by DOING something.
Read that last sentence again and think about it. What does it describe?
Does it describe a fight scene?
Does it describe a conversation? High Tea? A waltz? A chase scene?
It describes any and all of the above -- including a red-hot-steaming sex scene.
Just like a conversation, a sex scene can be in total private, in complete public (such as on a stage before an audience), in private but overheard or peeped at, etc.
So what exactly is a sex scene? What distinguishes it from other scenes in a story?
Is the distinguishing characteristic that the two people have, mimic, or approach and retreat from intercourse?
If that's the case, what exactly is intercourse that distinguishes it from a) violence b) chase c) conversation?
From the dramatist's point of view, strictly speaking, nothing distinguishes the sex scene from any of these other kinds of scenes.
All of these types of "scenes" (violence, chase, conversation, dance, -- anything two people do) is fundamentally sexual in nature.
The key to good drama of all kinds (mystery, suspense, wargames, strategy-and-tactics of say, Napoleon, Civil War, Helen of Troy, King Arthur) -- all of these kinds of drama are fundamentally sexual in nature, and the dramatic component takes its power, its fuel, from the basic human sex drive.
Watch some Indiana Jones movies with your finger on pause, and note down what happens in sequence in the chase scenes. Strip that out into RISING and FALLING tension -- look at the pattern. Use that pattern in a sex scene. DYNAMITE. Because that's what it is.
Or at least that's one way of looking at the world, or perhaps just the human world.
Personally, it's not my way of looking at the human world, but it is a way that I learned to look -- as a portrait artist has to learn to see light and shadow instead of a person. For me, it's an optical illusion, but a very useful one to a dramatist.
So if all dramatic art is essentially just a sex scene, what's the difference between eroticism and pornography?
It must be a very fine line because most people don't see it and don't really care. They either throw out all eroticism as porn or imbibe all porn as if it were mere eroticism.
To me, that's like saying a novel that has a Vampire as a character must be a horror novel.
That's actually a pretty good analogy because one easy way to get a handle on the difference between porn and eroticism is to understand the difference between "dark" and "light" in drama.
What is the difference between Romance and Horror?
In publishing jargon, Romance is a genre and Horror is a genre, and you can't mix them because their formulas are opposite.
All good Romance has to have an HEA - a Happily Ever After ending.
Romance may dip a tiny bit into the dark side of life, just for dramatic contrast, but the fundamental assumption of the nature of reality behind the Romance is the existence of the HEA, that it's real, permanent, attainable, and a final ending. You get to win.
All good Horror has to have an Equivocal Ending -- the nature of the universe is such that Evil can not be conquered by Good, nor can Good ever permanently be separated from Evil. All happiness is "just for now" -- and Evil Will Rise Again. Virtue, Honor, Good Deeds, etc do not exempt anyone from being wontonly destroyed by Evil. Horror lurks in the basement of reality. You can't win.
Which is true? Probably neither. These are marketing requirements, genres, not livable philosophies.
But understanding these two views of reality can give you a start at grasping the difference between erotica and porn.
Erotica is of the Light. Porn is of the Dark. (genre wise; not reality-wise).
To make the HEA possible, the couple involved in the sex scene has to achieve communication. That two-way flow of emotional understanding is the essence of Love and of Happiness. "When I tell him how I feel, he knows what I mean." That's erotica. It arouses the hope of fulfillment on a soul-level.
In a reality where the HEA is not possible, nobody can achieve communication with anyone else. Communication on an emotional level as well as a spiritual level is a thing of the Light - it makes us one with each other. Porn is a thing of the dark. It is self-gratification using another person without understanding that person's humanity or respecting the divine essence within the other human.
Humans, possessing an animal body, can have sex without communicating with each other. The exercise can go on and on, or repeat, without achieving an HEA, just as all animals do. Humans can go through the gymnastics of sexual intercourse without communicating. It even results in procreation! Or not.
And here's the shocker.
Humans can say words at each other without communicating, too.
Think of a punch-and-judy-puppet show. Round and round and round, with no resolution, no progress in the RELATIONSHIP, no change at the soul level. That's porn personified.
Now think of one of those scenes where the feuding couple get trapped in a collapsed mine in the dark, or imprisoned in adjacent cells with only a hole to talk to each other through -- the raw, defenses-down-communication with rock-bottom confessions, self-admissions, etc, -- true honesty. The relationship changes -- even if later, they deny it.
Now here's the secret I learned from a fanfic writer about sex scenes.
A Non-Porn Sex scene is a DIALOGUE SCENE, even when no word is spoken.
Caresses, movements, positions, shifts, touches of this part to that part, pauses for sensation to rise, fall, rise again -- it's DIALOGUE.
It's like sign language, a dialogue in movements.
And like dialogue in spoken words, it's not transcribed reality.
The rules for constructing such a conversation of caresses are the same as for constructing dialogue.
It's a discussion of problems. If it's just hitting, venting, yelling and using the other person as your emotional garbage pail, then it's porn. If it's a two-way dialogue, a problem solving session that results in a CHANGE IN THE SITUATION (as every scene must in a story) then it's erotica.
A sex scene is a scene first, sex later.
It must advance the story, and must do so in a limited number of words (based on a percentage of the total number of words in the piece) or it will distort the pacing.
The same is true of a dialogue scene where the characters only pace the room and talk, exchange information, duel innuendo, threaten, plan together, whatever they're doing -- if it's done in dialogue, it is still a scene first, dialogue second, and must conform to the structural requirements of a scene.
So there's the definition in a nutshell:
A sex scene is erotica if the participants communicate (albeit silently) to advance the plot and the story at a well-paced scene length toward a definitive resolution of the initial conflict.
A sex scene is pornography if the participants fail to communicate, and/or fail to advance the plot AND the story at a well-paced scene length and the activity does not lead to a definitive resolution of the initial conflict.
I saw this video series on YouTube which crystallizes these notions precisely.
The screenwriting teacher (famous for his screenwriting) says a writer doesn't write dialogue, a writer writes STORY.
And that's it. A writer doing a sex scene isn't writing sex, but STORY.
Now go analyze the movie DIRTY DANCING -- the older versions are better for this exercise. It's erotica, but by the standards of a culture long gone and buried, so you should be able to see the silent conversation with an alien's eye. By the older cultural standards, this film was "edgy" -- i.e. on the edge of what is publicly acceptable. Compare the older and newer versions for another lesson.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
The question distilled from the discussion was: "How can a writer confront sexuality as a component of Romance with pure honesty, and still avoid writing porn?"
It seems obvious to me, and probably seems obvious to you as well -- but I've read a lot of Romance in various genre-mixtures, and I've only seen this done full-out, no holds barred, once -- and that was in a fanfic!
But that's where I learned to look for this subtle but extremely distinctive signature that divides erotica from porn. I believe the writer was a professional fiction writer who was writing fanfic because the story was organic to the TV show universe it was derived from. But maybe she (or he? who can tell?) was simply a good writer who had never felt like writing professionally (I've known many fanfic writers who work that way).
The technique is very simple to say but very difficult to do. In that, it's like the rule "Show Don't Tell" -- every writer presenting their work for evaluation and expecting praise believes with absolute conviction that they have indeed shown not told their story! Even when they have not.
And this simple distinction between erotica and porn is just exactly like that. Erotica writers believe they have in fact done this, when they have not.
The reader may not even notice the failing!
That's because it's a technique which combines most of the craft techniques we've explored in these Tuesday posts on this blog.
You've seen an accomplished portrait artist doing an oil painting, comparing the painting to the subject, putting down one brush, picking up another, dousing the brush with this and that, daubing on a bit of color, putting that brush down and selecting another -- considering, and selecting another, daubing, etc.
Writing a great sex scene is like that, at least the first few times you do it because you have to train yourself to the technique mixture. In that, writing sex scenes is just exactly like writing "action" or "chase" scenes -- an artform within a precisely defined structure.
Writing a great sex scene that isn't porn is just like painting a portrait.
A portrait isn't a photograph of reality; an erotic sex scene isn't REAL sex.
Exactly the same thing is said of dialogue -- good dialogue is not transcribed real speech.
Exactly the same thing is said of action -- good fight scenes are not REAL fighting.
Like a good portrait, a good sex scene is a selective representation of reality.
But above that and more than that, a good sex scene is a SCENE.
A "scene" is a clearly defined unit, a building block of story.
Like a "chapter" a scene does not start in an arbitrary place nor does it end in an arbitrary place. The "middle" point of a scene is not arbitrarily determined by dividing the number of words in half.
Like a novel, or a story of any length, a scene has a beginning, middle and end defined by what happens.
Here's part 2 of an entry here on scene structure with a link to the previous part.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html
Here's a post with links to Verisimilitude vs. Reality series:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-4.html
Here's Plot vs. Story
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
Shifting Point of View
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/shifting-pov.html
And what you can do in a Novel that you can't do in a Film:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-you-can-do-in-novel-that-you-cant.html
All of these blog posts introduce concepts and techniques that must be orchestrated when you construct a sex scene that is not porn.
But we're talking here about the sex scene.
First and foremost, it must be a SCENE -- with all the components of a scene in their proper places and proportions as delineated in those previous posts.
Secondly, this peculiar scene, the sex scene, usually (not always) delineates an encounter between two people.
These two people do certain things to, with, beside, and for each other -- they interact.
Read that last sentence again, carefully and think about it hard. What does it really say about what the two people in the sex scene are DOING?
One acts, the other reacts by doing something, to which the first reacts by doing something, to which the second reacts by DOING something.
Read that last sentence again and think about it. What does it describe?
Does it describe a fight scene?
Does it describe a conversation? High Tea? A waltz? A chase scene?
It describes any and all of the above -- including a red-hot-steaming sex scene.
Just like a conversation, a sex scene can be in total private, in complete public (such as on a stage before an audience), in private but overheard or peeped at, etc.
So what exactly is a sex scene? What distinguishes it from other scenes in a story?
Is the distinguishing characteristic that the two people have, mimic, or approach and retreat from intercourse?
If that's the case, what exactly is intercourse that distinguishes it from a) violence b) chase c) conversation?
From the dramatist's point of view, strictly speaking, nothing distinguishes the sex scene from any of these other kinds of scenes.
All of these types of "scenes" (violence, chase, conversation, dance, -- anything two people do) is fundamentally sexual in nature.
The key to good drama of all kinds (mystery, suspense, wargames, strategy-and-tactics of say, Napoleon, Civil War, Helen of Troy, King Arthur) -- all of these kinds of drama are fundamentally sexual in nature, and the dramatic component takes its power, its fuel, from the basic human sex drive.
Watch some Indiana Jones movies with your finger on pause, and note down what happens in sequence in the chase scenes. Strip that out into RISING and FALLING tension -- look at the pattern. Use that pattern in a sex scene. DYNAMITE. Because that's what it is.
Or at least that's one way of looking at the world, or perhaps just the human world.
Personally, it's not my way of looking at the human world, but it is a way that I learned to look -- as a portrait artist has to learn to see light and shadow instead of a person. For me, it's an optical illusion, but a very useful one to a dramatist.
So if all dramatic art is essentially just a sex scene, what's the difference between eroticism and pornography?
It must be a very fine line because most people don't see it and don't really care. They either throw out all eroticism as porn or imbibe all porn as if it were mere eroticism.
To me, that's like saying a novel that has a Vampire as a character must be a horror novel.
That's actually a pretty good analogy because one easy way to get a handle on the difference between porn and eroticism is to understand the difference between "dark" and "light" in drama.
What is the difference between Romance and Horror?
In publishing jargon, Romance is a genre and Horror is a genre, and you can't mix them because their formulas are opposite.
All good Romance has to have an HEA - a Happily Ever After ending.
Romance may dip a tiny bit into the dark side of life, just for dramatic contrast, but the fundamental assumption of the nature of reality behind the Romance is the existence of the HEA, that it's real, permanent, attainable, and a final ending. You get to win.
All good Horror has to have an Equivocal Ending -- the nature of the universe is such that Evil can not be conquered by Good, nor can Good ever permanently be separated from Evil. All happiness is "just for now" -- and Evil Will Rise Again. Virtue, Honor, Good Deeds, etc do not exempt anyone from being wontonly destroyed by Evil. Horror lurks in the basement of reality. You can't win.
Which is true? Probably neither. These are marketing requirements, genres, not livable philosophies.
But understanding these two views of reality can give you a start at grasping the difference between erotica and porn.
Erotica is of the Light. Porn is of the Dark. (genre wise; not reality-wise).
To make the HEA possible, the couple involved in the sex scene has to achieve communication. That two-way flow of emotional understanding is the essence of Love and of Happiness. "When I tell him how I feel, he knows what I mean." That's erotica. It arouses the hope of fulfillment on a soul-level.
In a reality where the HEA is not possible, nobody can achieve communication with anyone else. Communication on an emotional level as well as a spiritual level is a thing of the Light - it makes us one with each other. Porn is a thing of the dark. It is self-gratification using another person without understanding that person's humanity or respecting the divine essence within the other human.
Humans, possessing an animal body, can have sex without communicating with each other. The exercise can go on and on, or repeat, without achieving an HEA, just as all animals do. Humans can go through the gymnastics of sexual intercourse without communicating. It even results in procreation! Or not.
And here's the shocker.
Humans can say words at each other without communicating, too.
Think of a punch-and-judy-puppet show. Round and round and round, with no resolution, no progress in the RELATIONSHIP, no change at the soul level. That's porn personified.
Now think of one of those scenes where the feuding couple get trapped in a collapsed mine in the dark, or imprisoned in adjacent cells with only a hole to talk to each other through -- the raw, defenses-down-communication with rock-bottom confessions, self-admissions, etc, -- true honesty. The relationship changes -- even if later, they deny it.
Now here's the secret I learned from a fanfic writer about sex scenes.
A Non-Porn Sex scene is a DIALOGUE SCENE, even when no word is spoken.
Caresses, movements, positions, shifts, touches of this part to that part, pauses for sensation to rise, fall, rise again -- it's DIALOGUE.
It's like sign language, a dialogue in movements.
And like dialogue in spoken words, it's not transcribed reality.
The rules for constructing such a conversation of caresses are the same as for constructing dialogue.
It's a discussion of problems. If it's just hitting, venting, yelling and using the other person as your emotional garbage pail, then it's porn. If it's a two-way dialogue, a problem solving session that results in a CHANGE IN THE SITUATION (as every scene must in a story) then it's erotica.
A sex scene is a scene first, sex later.
It must advance the story, and must do so in a limited number of words (based on a percentage of the total number of words in the piece) or it will distort the pacing.
The same is true of a dialogue scene where the characters only pace the room and talk, exchange information, duel innuendo, threaten, plan together, whatever they're doing -- if it's done in dialogue, it is still a scene first, dialogue second, and must conform to the structural requirements of a scene.
So there's the definition in a nutshell:
A sex scene is erotica if the participants communicate (albeit silently) to advance the plot and the story at a well-paced scene length toward a definitive resolution of the initial conflict.
A sex scene is pornography if the participants fail to communicate, and/or fail to advance the plot AND the story at a well-paced scene length and the activity does not lead to a definitive resolution of the initial conflict.
I saw this video series on YouTube which crystallizes these notions precisely.
The screenwriting teacher (famous for his screenwriting) says a writer doesn't write dialogue, a writer writes STORY.
And that's it. A writer doing a sex scene isn't writing sex, but STORY.
Now go analyze the movie DIRTY DANCING -- the older versions are better for this exercise. It's erotica, but by the standards of a culture long gone and buried, so you should be able to see the silent conversation with an alien's eye. By the older cultural standards, this film was "edgy" -- i.e. on the edge of what is publicly acceptable. Compare the older and newer versions for another lesson.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Thursday, March 22, 2012
IFCA
This week I'm in Orlando at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, the annual gathering of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. Since many authors and editors attend in addition to scholars, this event combines the best features of academic conferences and SF cons (well, except for costumes, which we don't have). I'll report on it next week.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Marketing Fiction In A Changing World Part 2
Part 1 of this series was posted May 26, 2009.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html
Since then, Google invented Google+ which I was sucked into via the hostess of a twitter chat #litchat (which I adore). That connected me on Google+ with a huge number of writers, and that number has grown to thousands now.
On Google+ a post flew by me (and I didn't snag the name of the poster) which pointed to this website:
http://www.21streeturbanediting.com/
This is an online business staffed by people who will, for a fee, edit your manuscript. I don't know them, and I have no idea what exactly they do for how much of a fee, or what the value of that might be. I hope they'll turn up and comment on this post.
I know a number of freelance editors who do good work with copyediting detail, and with finding continuity errors, factual errors, and even pacing and structural errors (getting a climax in the wrong spot in the word-count).
But they don't work for publishing houses. And getting an edit from such a freelance editor doesn't lead to publication.
Last week I introduced you to Azure Boone who had a lot to say about rejection letters:
http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/03/dreaded-rejection-letter.html
So after that exchange, Azure and I got to talking about how writers 'break into print' -- and what the real role of an editor is. She read my 7 part series on "What Is An Editor" and re-evaluated and sharpened her business model for marketing her fiction.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vii-how-do.html -- has links to previous 6 parts.
So when I saw the post about this business offering editing for a fee -- not entirely a new concept at all -- I thought about the things we've discussed here in previous posts on the changing business model for writers.
It's the entire fiction delivery system that's shifting and changing under the impact of three factors:
a) the Supreme Court decision discussed here: (which I've pointed you to previously)
http://www.sfwa.org/bulletin/articles/thor.htm
b) E-books and mostly the screen technology that makes e-readers like Kindle and Nook - iPhone, iPad, etc - feasible.
c) Accessibility of software that allows individual writers to become publishers, and the hosting of their efforts at websites like smashwords and amazon.com
I keep seeing older people -- often in ophthalmologist's offices and other waiting rooms -- reading Kindle with print set to extra-large, and happily "swiping" to turn the page. This is very significant - especially when you factor in that you can plug in an earphone and LISTEN to the book being read to you, or buy an audiobook with the book performed by an actor.
In fact, two of my own novels, MOLT BROTHER (the sequel, CITY OF A MILLION LEGENDS is being recorded) and HOUSE OF ZEOR, SIME~GEN #1 (the sequel, UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER, SIME~GEN #2) is being recorded:
So the world changed -- and is still changing. There's an even bigger impact brewing from internet-delivered TV style video programs, as most young people getting their own apartments are not subscribing to cable at all.
That's a change in the structure of the delivery system that's been visible to many for 10 years at least.
What's new between 2009 and today is the way WRITERS are changing to adapt to this new world's fiction delivery system.
Maybe it's the turning of a generation, but I haven't seen that. I am seeing many writers in their 40's and 50's adapting and changing their business model as fast (sometimes faster) than the world is changing.
And many are just getting into publishing for the first time.
That is remarkable, but because the world has changed so fast, it's possible for someone who is barely 40 to trip over their assumptions about publishing that are obsolete.
There are two separate issues to address: story-craft itself, and marketing.
These two issues intersect on the editor's desk.
At that point, the imaginative ramblings of a fertile mind have to be targeted toward a specific market, a readership, a group with something in common.
All the readers who've gotten a Kindle and madly downloaded "free" books over Christmas or some other holiday promotion have learned that self-publishing has two kinds of writers -- those the reader wants to invest their scarce reading time in, and those the reader does not want to pay for, even at FREE as the price.
And it isn't just spelling, punctuation, grammar, and story-continuity errors that repel potential readers.
All of those corrections go in at the level of the copyediting -- which takes place after EDITING itself.
I just finished editing an anthology titled VAMPIRE'S DILEMMA (doesn't have any story by me in it). So I have this experience fresh in mind.
I recently read a blog on screenwriting about "coverage" -- a screenwriting term for what novel publishers call editing.
The screenwriting blog said what new self-publishing writers who have decided to self-publish because of the "dreaded rejection letters" they have gotten need to know.
"Coverage" you pay for, even from someone who has worked doing "coverage" for a major production company, isn't necessarily worth what you must pay for it.
"Coverage" differs from 'editing' in that it consists mostly of a form that the script-reader fills out, identifying how well certain mechanical parts of the script are done (such as dialogue, climax placement, A story characters face-time, B story, etc). "Coverage" doesn't tell the writer what to do to fix the problems, it simply categorizes the problems. An Editor at a major publishing house will say how to fix the problems to suit the publishing house.
What many beginning writers don't know is that Editors aren't Writing Teachers.
"Coverage" isn't for the writer, either. "Coverage" is designed to inform a producer if this script is within X number of rewrites of the specific property the producer needs to create the film his backers (putting up money in a gamble to make money) expect.
"Coverage" is designed to sift the slush pile for a particular property that fits exacting -- pre-set -- requirements.
So, in effect, there is no such thing as "freelance" coverage. You can pay someone who knows basically what producers they have worked for need, and they can tell you if your script meets such needs -- and finger the points that would have to be rewritten to fit such needs. They can't assess whether your script CONCEPT will sell.
And it's the same with freelance EDITORS. They can copyedit -- and if you find you have a lot of copyediting errors, you should use a copyeditor before you send your manuscript for editing. But the freelance editor can't conform your manuscript to SELL.
The freelance editor works for the writer, not a publisher.
If you can tell the freelance editor that this property is to be submitted to a particular line at a particular publishing house, and that editor has read, studied (or worked for) that line -- they can conform your work to the publisher's requirements.
If you are self-publishing, creating a "line" -- you may be able to give an accomplished and skilled freelance editor a list of your requirements and have them conform your product to your own requirements.
If you know your market and can create a set of requirements, you may find yourself founding a publishing company.
Or, as a freelance writer, you may write, then hire a company like
http://www.21streeturbanediting.com/
to do the editing, possibly another freelance editor to do the copyediting, then pay a techie to conform the manuscript to the requirements at smashwords (pretty simple these days, but still a technical challenge if you're including artwork, charts, graphs, colors, etc), and pay someone to make a cover that will look right at Kindle's thumbnail size, AND pay a publicist who will try to get your product reviewed while you write the next item.
What's happened today, though, is that the sales breakpoint above "free" is 99Cents. People are buying books that have been through professional editors at the big publishing houses, and are "clean" of most errors for a dollar! How will they view your product against that quality assurance item?
Yes, 99cents is the hot-sales price for a reprint. You'll find a lot of such books on
http://backlistebooks.com -- along with some higher priced ones like $2.99 for longer works.
I'm a member of Backlist e-Books, but have no idea who these people at the editing shop are.
How many copies of your novel do you have to sell to make back all those costs before you make a single cent?
How many dollars per your work-hour are you going to make from your book after you've paid all these costs and fees?
Trust me, you'd make more packing grocery bags at the supermarket or collecting grocery carts from the parking lott.
Envision this carefully, then think it all through.
The bottom line is that publishers, agents, editors, etc are worth what you pay them.
But to pay them, to make your business model function at a profit (albeit a thin margin) you must perfect the writing craft to the point where you do not have to do much rewriting.
To achieve that, you must learn to lay out the piece (story, novel, article) in your mind before you begin to create the words. The functional components of the story must lock into place (i.e. follow a trope of some sort, even if it's one you invented) before you start typing words.
When you're finished, you have Microsoft's spellcheck and grammar check to find most of your typos, and then a copyediting run for which you need experienced professional input, maybe two or three of those, with no more work required than to tweak some words.
If you can write 4 books a year -- say 80,000 to 100,000 words apiece -- and make them all appeal to the same readership who will keep coming back for more, after 5 years of sustained effort, you might gross $30,000/year in a good year.
But this world isn't up to supporting that yet.
We are generating the freelance self-publishing writers, and the mechanism for distributing books via smashwords, amazon.com, createspace.com etc. We're getting the companies that provide just editing (such as the one I'm featuring here which could be gone tomorrow, or be successful and get bought up).
And we're getting the freelance cover art creators, such as Penny Ash, who did the cover for VAMPIRE'S DILEMMA.
We've had freelance publicists working by email for a while -- but as a professional reviewer, I have to say that there are very few of them that I accept books from because of discovering discrepancies between the "pitch" for the book and the book itself.
We have a growing industry of freelance bloggers who do reviews, and many readerships have flocked to them for help in sorting the avalanche of novels pouring out of the e-publishing business.
What are we missing to make this re-construction of the publishing industry around a new business model actually work?
We're missing the agents.
A writer needs to be able to put her head into her stories and just write -- to produce those 4 books a year (which is a common workload for working writers). To focus like that, the writer needs an agent to manage this entire circus of other skilled professionals that waft the writer's product to the reader.
And the other thing that exists but isn't yet notched into place in the mechanism in text storytelling is the professional level writing school, or writing teacher.
From the website, I do not see how http://www.21streeturbanediting.com/ distinguishes itself from a writing school.
In my experience, beginning writers think they need an editor's attention when in fact they need a writing teacher.
That's where the bewilderment over the "The Dreaded Rejection Letter" we talked about last week comes from. The beginner in this industry expects the editor to say what's wrong with the manuscript, not just reject it.
The screenwriting industry seems to have generated a school that is successfully doing this polish coat on the craft of screenwriters. In fact, I know of three such --
http://www.screenwritingu.com/rewrite_conference4.html
And the Supermentors round table project of
http://www.zicree.com/
And blakesnyder.com and the SAVE THE CAT! seminars and books.
These are the serious, and very expensive, entrees to screenwriting (there are others of this type using similar business models).
In screenwriting, though, because there are more ambitious people trying to get into what amounts to a necessarily limited number of working slots, there are a number of very predatory organizations that purport to teach screenwriting or to provide entree to the industry, but who use a business model based on fleecing the innocent by soothing their egos rather than whipping them into shape.
On another front, we have YouTube growing us a generation of skilled videographers and storytellers exhibiting worldclass skills. Watch the top-hit producers on YouTube and study what you're looking at. THERE is the generation of a new industry.
But all these writers create more than any one person could read in a lifetime.
The next functional component of this business model has to be a replacement for what many call "the gatekeepers" -- the people who decide what will be bought, what will be invested in with the expectation of making a profit, and what will not be invested in.
These "gatekeepers" are the folks who the reader, the person who lays down their money and invests their time, depends on to narrow the choices, and spot the one item that the reader actually wants to spend their evening with.
There is, perhaps, a misconception on the part of the marketers when it comes to marketing fiction.
If you look at the shifts in the TV cable industry, and how internet delivered TV and video are chopping up the TV market, you will see it.
There are those who market a delivery service (such as Netflix or Amazon Prime, Apple TV) by boasting "we have X hundred thousand films and TV episodes."
They are marketing to people who have free time to kill and just want a distraction.
But most of the readers I know don't read just to fill up time that's heavy on their hands.
People go after a particular product to read because of the payload they expect that specific thing to deliver.
People imbibe fiction for a personal reward -- not to waste away time.
The pace of life has picked up today to the point where people don't have time to read, or watch TV regularly. We're just too busy and too frantic. Movies are too expensive (Christmas weekend boxoffice was off this year).
So we see advertisements on TV for the big expensive movies (like WARHORSE), and we go "I want to see that."
What we see advertised, what comes to us, we "want" and go after.
But what about all the rest of the stuff that we might actually like better -- but don't know exists?
Google is working on tailoring the advertising that appears beside the website you're on or beside your gmail mailbox to have some relevance to what else has captured your interest. They haven't nailed it yet, but they're making progress.
This political season may see more progress. I've noticed how political polls have gotten better at predicting winners -- or at least losers.
What we're seeing with advertising and polling is a technical application that may allow self-publishing or small-publishers to target readerships accurately enough to make a real living with the fiction delivery system.
Yes, I know political ads are odious in the extreme, but hold your nose and study them.
They are "romancing" the voter! It's very aggressive stuff. But if you penetrate that surface, you will find the "gatekeeper" model behind it all -- the very thing that new writers get so resentful of.
There is a mathematics behind all this, predicting the behavior of large numbers of people. It's called Public Relations now, but that's a euphemism. The mathematics is based on games theory. (Google "The Overton Window").
There are two sides to this. A) doing what large numbers of people want from you B) making large numbers of people do what you want from them.
Sound familiar? Change "large numbers" to "one person" and you could write that sex scene from a pickup in a bar to the morning after.
That's the marketing business, and it's product independent. It doesn't matter if it's a novel or a politician, marketing works the same.
And they use social networking now -- a tool that's accessible to writers (if only they had time).
What the mathematicians doing "game theory" and the tech companies like Google are trying to figure out is how to be an agent.
Google apparently wants to be the Agent between product producers (such as writers) and product marketers -- such as the fiction delivery system components I've been discussing here.
But there are some missing pieces to this puzzle of Marketing fiction in a changing world.
Two things I see missing (that may turn up in 2012 or 2013) are:
A) Ultra-cheap ways of "routing" (or agenting) the right story to the right reader
B) Ultra-accurate ways of determining what will give you want you want or need so it can be routed to you.
Right now the fiction delivery system is in chaos and thrashing around delivering product at random, trying this, trying that.
The high-budget risk takers are sticking to the old tried-and-true "remakes" and sequels to films that have been hits. I've already heard folks on twitter complaining about that lack of originality.
Watch YouTube -- there is a new arbiter of taste emerging from the applications of "hit counters" and that Google +1 button -- by counting the responses of people at random, "they" are going to try to replicate what the author's agent has traditionally done.
If you want an image of that task in your mind -- think of what your household "router" does for your computer connection to the internet -- putting several householding devices onto the internet from your single account.
If you don't know how that works, you should learn because I suspect it will be the dominent piece of the puzzle for the next "build" of the fiction delivery system.
Google is not fooling around here. It's making money from a) predicting behavior and b) creating behavior -- and interacting these two processes to "correct" behavior. (check out Google Chrome and its battle against Windows Explorer)
The highest level tech applications and the smartest people are participating in this remake of the world.
Every move Google makes changes the Writer's Business Model, and how you market your fiction depends on how "they" change the world.
If you think that publishing's "gatekeepers" have been an onerous burden, you need to think about the drummers hammering out the beat that the "gatekeepers" dance to.
Figure out what dance (fictional tropes are just like dances) comes next on the playlist, and get the right shoes (editor) for that dance.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html
Since then, Google invented Google+ which I was sucked into via the hostess of a twitter chat #litchat (which I adore). That connected me on Google+ with a huge number of writers, and that number has grown to thousands now.
On Google+ a post flew by me (and I didn't snag the name of the poster) which pointed to this website:
http://www.21streeturbanediting.com/
This is an online business staffed by people who will, for a fee, edit your manuscript. I don't know them, and I have no idea what exactly they do for how much of a fee, or what the value of that might be. I hope they'll turn up and comment on this post.
I know a number of freelance editors who do good work with copyediting detail, and with finding continuity errors, factual errors, and even pacing and structural errors (getting a climax in the wrong spot in the word-count).
But they don't work for publishing houses. And getting an edit from such a freelance editor doesn't lead to publication.
Last week I introduced you to Azure Boone who had a lot to say about rejection letters:
http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/03/dreaded-rejection-letter.html
So after that exchange, Azure and I got to talking about how writers 'break into print' -- and what the real role of an editor is. She read my 7 part series on "What Is An Editor" and re-evaluated and sharpened her business model for marketing her fiction.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vii-how-do.html -- has links to previous 6 parts.
So when I saw the post about this business offering editing for a fee -- not entirely a new concept at all -- I thought about the things we've discussed here in previous posts on the changing business model for writers.
It's the entire fiction delivery system that's shifting and changing under the impact of three factors:
a) the Supreme Court decision discussed here: (which I've pointed you to previously)
http://www.sfwa.org/bulletin/articles/thor.htm
b) E-books and mostly the screen technology that makes e-readers like Kindle and Nook - iPhone, iPad, etc - feasible.
c) Accessibility of software that allows individual writers to become publishers, and the hosting of their efforts at websites like smashwords and amazon.com
I keep seeing older people -- often in ophthalmologist's offices and other waiting rooms -- reading Kindle with print set to extra-large, and happily "swiping" to turn the page. This is very significant - especially when you factor in that you can plug in an earphone and LISTEN to the book being read to you, or buy an audiobook with the book performed by an actor.
In fact, two of my own novels, MOLT BROTHER (the sequel, CITY OF A MILLION LEGENDS is being recorded) and HOUSE OF ZEOR, SIME~GEN #1 (the sequel, UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER, SIME~GEN #2) is being recorded:
So the world changed -- and is still changing. There's an even bigger impact brewing from internet-delivered TV style video programs, as most young people getting their own apartments are not subscribing to cable at all.
That's a change in the structure of the delivery system that's been visible to many for 10 years at least.
What's new between 2009 and today is the way WRITERS are changing to adapt to this new world's fiction delivery system.
Maybe it's the turning of a generation, but I haven't seen that. I am seeing many writers in their 40's and 50's adapting and changing their business model as fast (sometimes faster) than the world is changing.
And many are just getting into publishing for the first time.
That is remarkable, but because the world has changed so fast, it's possible for someone who is barely 40 to trip over their assumptions about publishing that are obsolete.
There are two separate issues to address: story-craft itself, and marketing.
These two issues intersect on the editor's desk.
At that point, the imaginative ramblings of a fertile mind have to be targeted toward a specific market, a readership, a group with something in common.
All the readers who've gotten a Kindle and madly downloaded "free" books over Christmas or some other holiday promotion have learned that self-publishing has two kinds of writers -- those the reader wants to invest their scarce reading time in, and those the reader does not want to pay for, even at FREE as the price.
And it isn't just spelling, punctuation, grammar, and story-continuity errors that repel potential readers.
All of those corrections go in at the level of the copyediting -- which takes place after EDITING itself.
I just finished editing an anthology titled VAMPIRE'S DILEMMA (doesn't have any story by me in it). So I have this experience fresh in mind.
I recently read a blog on screenwriting about "coverage" -- a screenwriting term for what novel publishers call editing.
The screenwriting blog said what new self-publishing writers who have decided to self-publish because of the "dreaded rejection letters" they have gotten need to know.
"Coverage" you pay for, even from someone who has worked doing "coverage" for a major production company, isn't necessarily worth what you must pay for it.
"Coverage" differs from 'editing' in that it consists mostly of a form that the script-reader fills out, identifying how well certain mechanical parts of the script are done (such as dialogue, climax placement, A story characters face-time, B story, etc). "Coverage" doesn't tell the writer what to do to fix the problems, it simply categorizes the problems. An Editor at a major publishing house will say how to fix the problems to suit the publishing house.
What many beginning writers don't know is that Editors aren't Writing Teachers.
"Coverage" isn't for the writer, either. "Coverage" is designed to inform a producer if this script is within X number of rewrites of the specific property the producer needs to create the film his backers (putting up money in a gamble to make money) expect.
"Coverage" is designed to sift the slush pile for a particular property that fits exacting -- pre-set -- requirements.
So, in effect, there is no such thing as "freelance" coverage. You can pay someone who knows basically what producers they have worked for need, and they can tell you if your script meets such needs -- and finger the points that would have to be rewritten to fit such needs. They can't assess whether your script CONCEPT will sell.
And it's the same with freelance EDITORS. They can copyedit -- and if you find you have a lot of copyediting errors, you should use a copyeditor before you send your manuscript for editing. But the freelance editor can't conform your manuscript to SELL.
The freelance editor works for the writer, not a publisher.
If you can tell the freelance editor that this property is to be submitted to a particular line at a particular publishing house, and that editor has read, studied (or worked for) that line -- they can conform your work to the publisher's requirements.
If you are self-publishing, creating a "line" -- you may be able to give an accomplished and skilled freelance editor a list of your requirements and have them conform your product to your own requirements.
If you know your market and can create a set of requirements, you may find yourself founding a publishing company.
Or, as a freelance writer, you may write, then hire a company like
http://www.21streeturbanediting.com/
to do the editing, possibly another freelance editor to do the copyediting, then pay a techie to conform the manuscript to the requirements at smashwords (pretty simple these days, but still a technical challenge if you're including artwork, charts, graphs, colors, etc), and pay someone to make a cover that will look right at Kindle's thumbnail size, AND pay a publicist who will try to get your product reviewed while you write the next item.
What's happened today, though, is that the sales breakpoint above "free" is 99Cents. People are buying books that have been through professional editors at the big publishing houses, and are "clean" of most errors for a dollar! How will they view your product against that quality assurance item?
Yes, 99cents is the hot-sales price for a reprint. You'll find a lot of such books on
http://backlistebooks.com -- along with some higher priced ones like $2.99 for longer works.
I'm a member of Backlist e-Books, but have no idea who these people at the editing shop are.
How many copies of your novel do you have to sell to make back all those costs before you make a single cent?
How many dollars per your work-hour are you going to make from your book after you've paid all these costs and fees?
Trust me, you'd make more packing grocery bags at the supermarket or collecting grocery carts from the parking lott.
Envision this carefully, then think it all through.
The bottom line is that publishers, agents, editors, etc are worth what you pay them.
But to pay them, to make your business model function at a profit (albeit a thin margin) you must perfect the writing craft to the point where you do not have to do much rewriting.
To achieve that, you must learn to lay out the piece (story, novel, article) in your mind before you begin to create the words. The functional components of the story must lock into place (i.e. follow a trope of some sort, even if it's one you invented) before you start typing words.
When you're finished, you have Microsoft's spellcheck and grammar check to find most of your typos, and then a copyediting run for which you need experienced professional input, maybe two or three of those, with no more work required than to tweak some words.
If you can write 4 books a year -- say 80,000 to 100,000 words apiece -- and make them all appeal to the same readership who will keep coming back for more, after 5 years of sustained effort, you might gross $30,000/year in a good year.
But this world isn't up to supporting that yet.
We are generating the freelance self-publishing writers, and the mechanism for distributing books via smashwords, amazon.com, createspace.com etc. We're getting the companies that provide just editing (such as the one I'm featuring here which could be gone tomorrow, or be successful and get bought up).
And we're getting the freelance cover art creators, such as Penny Ash, who did the cover for VAMPIRE'S DILEMMA.
We've had freelance publicists working by email for a while -- but as a professional reviewer, I have to say that there are very few of them that I accept books from because of discovering discrepancies between the "pitch" for the book and the book itself.
We have a growing industry of freelance bloggers who do reviews, and many readerships have flocked to them for help in sorting the avalanche of novels pouring out of the e-publishing business.
What are we missing to make this re-construction of the publishing industry around a new business model actually work?
We're missing the agents.
A writer needs to be able to put her head into her stories and just write -- to produce those 4 books a year (which is a common workload for working writers). To focus like that, the writer needs an agent to manage this entire circus of other skilled professionals that waft the writer's product to the reader.
And the other thing that exists but isn't yet notched into place in the mechanism in text storytelling is the professional level writing school, or writing teacher.
From the website, I do not see how http://www.21streeturbanediting.com/ distinguishes itself from a writing school.
In my experience, beginning writers think they need an editor's attention when in fact they need a writing teacher.
That's where the bewilderment over the "The Dreaded Rejection Letter" we talked about last week comes from. The beginner in this industry expects the editor to say what's wrong with the manuscript, not just reject it.
The screenwriting industry seems to have generated a school that is successfully doing this polish coat on the craft of screenwriters. In fact, I know of three such --
http://www.screenwritingu.com/rewrite_conference4.html
And the Supermentors round table project of
http://www.zicree.com/
And blakesnyder.com and the SAVE THE CAT! seminars and books.
These are the serious, and very expensive, entrees to screenwriting (there are others of this type using similar business models).
In screenwriting, though, because there are more ambitious people trying to get into what amounts to a necessarily limited number of working slots, there are a number of very predatory organizations that purport to teach screenwriting or to provide entree to the industry, but who use a business model based on fleecing the innocent by soothing their egos rather than whipping them into shape.
On another front, we have YouTube growing us a generation of skilled videographers and storytellers exhibiting worldclass skills. Watch the top-hit producers on YouTube and study what you're looking at. THERE is the generation of a new industry.
But all these writers create more than any one person could read in a lifetime.
The next functional component of this business model has to be a replacement for what many call "the gatekeepers" -- the people who decide what will be bought, what will be invested in with the expectation of making a profit, and what will not be invested in.
These "gatekeepers" are the folks who the reader, the person who lays down their money and invests their time, depends on to narrow the choices, and spot the one item that the reader actually wants to spend their evening with.
There is, perhaps, a misconception on the part of the marketers when it comes to marketing fiction.
If you look at the shifts in the TV cable industry, and how internet delivered TV and video are chopping up the TV market, you will see it.
There are those who market a delivery service (such as Netflix or Amazon Prime, Apple TV) by boasting "we have X hundred thousand films and TV episodes."
They are marketing to people who have free time to kill and just want a distraction.
But most of the readers I know don't read just to fill up time that's heavy on their hands.
People go after a particular product to read because of the payload they expect that specific thing to deliver.
People imbibe fiction for a personal reward -- not to waste away time.
The pace of life has picked up today to the point where people don't have time to read, or watch TV regularly. We're just too busy and too frantic. Movies are too expensive (Christmas weekend boxoffice was off this year).
So we see advertisements on TV for the big expensive movies (like WARHORSE), and we go "I want to see that."
What we see advertised, what comes to us, we "want" and go after.
But what about all the rest of the stuff that we might actually like better -- but don't know exists?
Google is working on tailoring the advertising that appears beside the website you're on or beside your gmail mailbox to have some relevance to what else has captured your interest. They haven't nailed it yet, but they're making progress.
This political season may see more progress. I've noticed how political polls have gotten better at predicting winners -- or at least losers.
What we're seeing with advertising and polling is a technical application that may allow self-publishing or small-publishers to target readerships accurately enough to make a real living with the fiction delivery system.
Yes, I know political ads are odious in the extreme, but hold your nose and study them.
They are "romancing" the voter! It's very aggressive stuff. But if you penetrate that surface, you will find the "gatekeeper" model behind it all -- the very thing that new writers get so resentful of.
There is a mathematics behind all this, predicting the behavior of large numbers of people. It's called Public Relations now, but that's a euphemism. The mathematics is based on games theory. (Google "The Overton Window").
There are two sides to this. A) doing what large numbers of people want from you B) making large numbers of people do what you want from them.
Sound familiar? Change "large numbers" to "one person" and you could write that sex scene from a pickup in a bar to the morning after.
That's the marketing business, and it's product independent. It doesn't matter if it's a novel or a politician, marketing works the same.
And they use social networking now -- a tool that's accessible to writers (if only they had time).
What the mathematicians doing "game theory" and the tech companies like Google are trying to figure out is how to be an agent.
Google apparently wants to be the Agent between product producers (such as writers) and product marketers -- such as the fiction delivery system components I've been discussing here.
But there are some missing pieces to this puzzle of Marketing fiction in a changing world.
Two things I see missing (that may turn up in 2012 or 2013) are:
A) Ultra-cheap ways of "routing" (or agenting) the right story to the right reader
B) Ultra-accurate ways of determining what will give you want you want or need so it can be routed to you.
Right now the fiction delivery system is in chaos and thrashing around delivering product at random, trying this, trying that.
The high-budget risk takers are sticking to the old tried-and-true "remakes" and sequels to films that have been hits. I've already heard folks on twitter complaining about that lack of originality.
Watch YouTube -- there is a new arbiter of taste emerging from the applications of "hit counters" and that Google +1 button -- by counting the responses of people at random, "they" are going to try to replicate what the author's agent has traditionally done.
If you want an image of that task in your mind -- think of what your household "router" does for your computer connection to the internet -- putting several householding devices onto the internet from your single account.
If you don't know how that works, you should learn because I suspect it will be the dominent piece of the puzzle for the next "build" of the fiction delivery system.
Google is not fooling around here. It's making money from a) predicting behavior and b) creating behavior -- and interacting these two processes to "correct" behavior. (check out Google Chrome and its battle against Windows Explorer)
The highest level tech applications and the smartest people are participating in this remake of the world.
Every move Google makes changes the Writer's Business Model, and how you market your fiction depends on how "they" change the world.
If you think that publishing's "gatekeepers" have been an onerous burden, you need to think about the drummers hammering out the beat that the "gatekeepers" dance to.
Figure out what dance (fictional tropes are just like dances) comes next on the playlist, and get the right shoes (editor) for that dance.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Thursday, March 15, 2012
EPICCon 2012
EPIC (the Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition) is holding its annual EPICCon in San Antonio this week. My erotic, Lovecraft-inspired paranormal romance "Song from the Abyss" is a finalist in the Novella category of the annual e-book competition. Here's the list of finalists:
http://www.epicorg.org/competitions/2012-awards-finalists.html
This is the first year novellas have had their own category instead of competing with novels in their respective genres (a change about which I have reservations, because it seems to me that novellas have more in common with novels in the same genre than with dissimilar works of their same length, but we'll have to wait and see how it turns out). Since I couldn't make it to the conference this year, I'll be eagerly watching the EPIC lists this weekend to find out how "Song from the Abyss" stacks up.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
http://www.epicorg.org/competitions/2012-awards-finalists.html
This is the first year novellas have had their own category instead of competing with novels in their respective genres (a change about which I have reservations, because it seems to me that novellas have more in common with novels in the same genre than with dissimilar works of their same length, but we'll have to wait and see how it turns out). Since I couldn't make it to the conference this year, I'll be eagerly watching the EPIC lists this weekend to find out how "Song from the Abyss" stacks up.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
The Dreaded Rejection Letter
This may turn out to be Part 1 of a series.
Among my "circles" on Google+ I met a Paranormal Romance Writer (what a co-incidence!). Her name is Azure Boone, and I haven't read any of her romance stories yet, but her Google+ profile says (irresistibly) "Writer of paranormal romance involving demons and angels."
So I saw her note about a blog post she'd written:
http://motherfugnwriters.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/190/
That's a Wordpress blog so you don't see the title in the link. It's "Rejection is not my color." It's a suggestion that editors use a color code with rejection letters, pointing to a set of "reasons for rejection" posted online, so the rejected writer can know why their manuscript wasn't suitable. I have way too much to say about that, but I've said most of it previously on this blog.
I let the post pass by me, then went back and dropped a comment, and pointed Azure to another item I'd just dropped on Google+.
It went like this:
I posted about Talentville.com
---------- QUOTE--------
Now this is an intriguing concept, but it's expensive to join in.
-----------END QUOTE------
Talentville.com is a new online screenwriting community connecting aspiring writers with Hollywood Insiders, created by Final Draft co-founder and creator Ben Cahan. It charges an annual fee, and is for very serious screenwriters investing in their education.
I found Talentville.com mentioned on a Facebook Group of screenwriters I belong to, and Final Draft is my software-of-choice for screenwriting.
Then I saw Azure Boone's post about rejection -- and "click" went my mind.
So I posted to Azure using her "handle" so she'd see it, on the Talent.com post, and flagged a Screenwriter ( +Randall Oelerich )who had just noted how much fun Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had starting out at the beginning of the PC revolution.
------------ Here's what I said ---------
+azure boone Saw your note on rejection letters. I've gotten my share, and my share of acceptance letters, and my share of queries. Professionals ahead of me on the career track always said don't listen to others who are at your level of development as a writer. "If you listen to the dogs barking, you'll go deaf before you learn anything." -- But I found that adage to be dwindling into the middens of history.
With fan-fiction writing and now with organizations like Taletnville.com (there are a number of these things around), peer-review is beginning to be the training ground. Screenwriters are getting "audience-review" on YouTube when they hook up with short-film makers. Some enterprising folks are monetizing these efforts, so participants have to think "business model" when deciding to join.
We are creating an entirely new world. As +Randall Oelerich noted about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, they had fun in "the early days." THESE are our early days. We have to learn to use language accurately, and not call it "rejection" when an outlet takes a pass on a project.
----------------
Azure responded very quickly with this:
--------Azure---------
Hello, and thanks for the wisdom. I was thinking that no rejection letters come with the word rejection written anywhere on it, but a writer doesn't need it to, a rejection is a rejection, or a pass, is a pass.
The issue I addressed isn't about the word or term as we have come to understand the process of "rejection" but the manner in which the pass/rejection is made. I think the publishing industry would further the entire cause for writers and publishers if they worked together on meeting needs, not at a feel good word level, but at a functional level. The solution I presented in my blog was literally a solution, even though I made it fun.
Did I misunderstand you?
--------------
Well, no, she didn't misunderstand me, but even though it was only a few minutes later, I'd already thought a thousand thoughts. Well, you know me, I think and my fingers fly over the keyboard, and before I knew it, I had a whole blog post in my answer to her. Here's what I answered.
-----------
+Azure Boone Before I drop the link I have for you, I need to say this. Yes, I do in fact love your basic thinking behind suggesting quick-color-code answers -- and yes, I got it that the suggestions were laced with humor. This is the kind of thinking that we need to keep doing, not just stop right there where you ended off. Your post should be a springboard into this knotty topic.
And it is knotty, because it's a whole "point of view" thing, and it is the BIG point of view/business-model thing that new writers (in text and image industries both) come acropper on over and over. There's "art" and there's "craft" and there's "social networking" and there's "audience building" and there's far-out nebulous philosophy stuff of which thematic statements are made. AND THEN THERE'S BUSINESS.
But ultimately, delivering the artist's view on a theme to a consumer who's in the mood to be enchanted by participating in a game of ideas, is a business. At least in this world we currently live in, it is a business. Note how quickly media promotion folks grabbed onto social networking, and are busy twisting "social" into a tool to warp behavior.
When you present your art-product to an "editor" (producer, first reader, whatever), when you take your product to market you are crossing the line from creation of a product to the marketing of that product. You are not talking to a "partner" but to an "exploiter" whose living depends on taking your product and putting it on a store shelf.
Think about those drum-pounding people who try to sucker "inventors" into patenting something through their business. Or think about that "seen on TV" website where these handy inventions are marketed - think about the catalogs that market gadgets.
That's the realm you venture into when you first send your manuscript out the door.
And right outside your door, the path to your audience takes a right-angle bend!
You and the editor are actually working at cross purposes.
If you ever studied vector analysis, you know that I'm describing the straight line that goes up the graph at a 45 degree angle -- that's the path that leads to the audience, or market.
The editor is looking for a product that can be shoved along that 45degree angle path directly to the market that editor has been hired to reach.
It is not the editor's JOB to educate writers in the business. Nor is it the Agent's job to teach writing.
(truth is, that's become my job these days!)
If the editor spends even one second trying to determine how to explain (to a total stranger who might be an amateur writer with their heart on their sleeve) what exactly disqualifies this manuscript from this publication line, that will probably mean the editor will get fired for not performing the job they were hired to do.
That job is to provide a steady stream of product for a conveyor belt that CAN NOT BE STOPPED OR PAUSED -- it is a relentless, timed, mechanism that only makes a profit if it moves at that steady pace.
Editors rarely last long in any job. And long-working editors are getting rarer and rarer. They run panic-stricken most of the time, when the sales numbers come back. Sales tracking is a whole new world too!
Editors can't stop to tell you why your product doesn't fit their requirements.
Mostly they don't know, and don't have the time to care, nevermind figure out how to explain it.
Their job isn't explaining. Their job is picking, and picking correctly. Then picking again, and again. FAST.
But they can (and do) tell you what they need. And your color-code system has potential to streamline the editor's direct call for a particular product. Only they won't call to writers. They will call to Agents.
Used to be that was done over the Power Lunch (I've been at many such Manhattan lunches). Agents and editors hang out, make friends, and the agent scopes out the editor's "buttons" -- what they really like, and what they are madly searching for. Then the agent lets certain writers in their stable know what there's a market for -- the agent chooses those writers by what the writer has already produced along that line. (I've been on all sides of this process.) The Agent's profit margin depends on generating the right product for the right editor.
The reason it works this way is simply, "TIME IS MONEY." Nobody has any time to waste, training writers to write. This is even more true in the screenwriting biz.
Agents have the same biz model. Time is money. They must supply product to the editors in a form the editor can use to fill their conveyor belt. The product must FIT that pre-built conveyor belt. It's a pipeline from the publisher to the reader who will pay for that product. The pipeline is built by business, and it's as fixed and solid as an oil pipeline. Like an oil pipeline traversing thousands of miles, it carries product that's hot and under pressure, and must arrive at the destination exactly, thusly, so!
The pipeline costs a lot to build and maintain, so it must deliver enough product to make back that cost plus the salaries of everyone who shoves product into that pipeline -- and these days, it must also make a profit for the shareholders of big corporations that own publishers (or film companies).
The commercial art delivery system is a relentless business model. If the pressure ever slackens, the razor-thin margins collapse bringing the company down with it.
If you find that you, as a writer, can't or don't want to produce for pre-built pipelines, then maybe you don't want to write commercial fiction. Today there's a market for "handmade" (no two alike) novels.
Manhattan, the Big Six, and Hollywood are mass producers. That's why it's called "Mass Market Paperback" -- because it's a product designed to be mass produced, like the Model T Ford and all its successors. Thousands of identical items produced and moving through that delivery system fulfill the voracious needs of a "mass" market -- i.e. lowest common denominator taste. Many novels, different authors and titles, the same words arranged differently, identical product that gets assembled along the conveyor belt and then fits the pipeline. Model T's were all black. Today we get cars in different colors, but the production principle is the same. Mass produced cars; mass produced entertainment.
Maybe you, as a writer, would prefer the "Tailor Made" or "Hand Made" business model, of original art pieces, no two alike, no duplications -- paintings such as you see in an upper class Art Gallery, not prints you find in Target.
It's something to think about before you launch a career. You can do both. That's what Pen Names are for!
You might want to read my blog post on whether you should create a pen name.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/should-you-make-up-pen-name-part-i.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/should-you-make-up-pen-name-part-ii.html
So now I've accidentally written a whole blog post, I'll insert the link to my 7-part series on EDITING, which is aimed at trying to give writers insight into the editor's point of view, so the writer can make a smoother approach and carry on the business of selling art to the commercial market.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vii-how-do.html
That link leads to Part 7, which has links to the previous parts at the top of the post. (yes, I write humongous-long-insanely-abstract blog posts).
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Among my "circles" on Google+ I met a Paranormal Romance Writer (what a co-incidence!). Her name is Azure Boone, and I haven't read any of her romance stories yet, but her Google+ profile says (irresistibly) "Writer of paranormal romance involving demons and angels."
So I saw her note about a blog post she'd written:
http://motherfugnwriters.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/190/
That's a Wordpress blog so you don't see the title in the link. It's "Rejection is not my color." It's a suggestion that editors use a color code with rejection letters, pointing to a set of "reasons for rejection" posted online, so the rejected writer can know why their manuscript wasn't suitable. I have way too much to say about that, but I've said most of it previously on this blog.
I let the post pass by me, then went back and dropped a comment, and pointed Azure to another item I'd just dropped on Google+.
It went like this:
I posted about Talentville.com
---------- QUOTE--------
Now this is an intriguing concept, but it's expensive to join in.
-----------END QUOTE------
Talentville.com is a new online screenwriting community connecting aspiring writers with Hollywood Insiders, created by Final Draft co-founder and creator Ben Cahan. It charges an annual fee, and is for very serious screenwriters investing in their education.
I found Talentville.com mentioned on a Facebook Group of screenwriters I belong to, and Final Draft is my software-of-choice for screenwriting.
Then I saw Azure Boone's post about rejection -- and "click" went my mind.
So I posted to Azure using her "handle" so she'd see it, on the Talent.com post, and flagged a Screenwriter ( +Randall Oelerich )who had just noted how much fun Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had starting out at the beginning of the PC revolution.
------------ Here's what I said ---------
+azure boone Saw your note on rejection letters. I've gotten my share, and my share of acceptance letters, and my share of queries. Professionals ahead of me on the career track always said don't listen to others who are at your level of development as a writer. "If you listen to the dogs barking, you'll go deaf before you learn anything." -- But I found that adage to be dwindling into the middens of history.
With fan-fiction writing and now with organizations like Taletnville.com (there are a number of these things around), peer-review is beginning to be the training ground. Screenwriters are getting "audience-review" on YouTube when they hook up with short-film makers. Some enterprising folks are monetizing these efforts, so participants have to think "business model" when deciding to join.
We are creating an entirely new world. As +Randall Oelerich noted about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, they had fun in "the early days." THESE are our early days. We have to learn to use language accurately, and not call it "rejection" when an outlet takes a pass on a project.
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Azure responded very quickly with this:
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Hello, and thanks for the wisdom. I was thinking that no rejection letters come with the word rejection written anywhere on it, but a writer doesn't need it to, a rejection is a rejection, or a pass, is a pass.
The issue I addressed isn't about the word or term as we have come to understand the process of "rejection" but the manner in which the pass/rejection is made. I think the publishing industry would further the entire cause for writers and publishers if they worked together on meeting needs, not at a feel good word level, but at a functional level. The solution I presented in my blog was literally a solution, even though I made it fun.
Did I misunderstand you?
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Well, no, she didn't misunderstand me, but even though it was only a few minutes later, I'd already thought a thousand thoughts. Well, you know me, I think and my fingers fly over the keyboard, and before I knew it, I had a whole blog post in my answer to her. Here's what I answered.
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+Azure Boone Before I drop the link I have for you, I need to say this. Yes, I do in fact love your basic thinking behind suggesting quick-color-code answers -- and yes, I got it that the suggestions were laced with humor. This is the kind of thinking that we need to keep doing, not just stop right there where you ended off. Your post should be a springboard into this knotty topic.
And it is knotty, because it's a whole "point of view" thing, and it is the BIG point of view/business-model thing that new writers (in text and image industries both) come acropper on over and over. There's "art" and there's "craft" and there's "social networking" and there's "audience building" and there's far-out nebulous philosophy stuff of which thematic statements are made. AND THEN THERE'S BUSINESS.
But ultimately, delivering the artist's view on a theme to a consumer who's in the mood to be enchanted by participating in a game of ideas, is a business. At least in this world we currently live in, it is a business. Note how quickly media promotion folks grabbed onto social networking, and are busy twisting "social" into a tool to warp behavior.
When you present your art-product to an "editor" (producer, first reader, whatever), when you take your product to market you are crossing the line from creation of a product to the marketing of that product. You are not talking to a "partner" but to an "exploiter" whose living depends on taking your product and putting it on a store shelf.
Think about those drum-pounding people who try to sucker "inventors" into patenting something through their business. Or think about that "seen on TV" website where these handy inventions are marketed - think about the catalogs that market gadgets.
That's the realm you venture into when you first send your manuscript out the door.
And right outside your door, the path to your audience takes a right-angle bend!
You and the editor are actually working at cross purposes.
If you ever studied vector analysis, you know that I'm describing the straight line that goes up the graph at a 45 degree angle -- that's the path that leads to the audience, or market.
The editor is looking for a product that can be shoved along that 45degree angle path directly to the market that editor has been hired to reach.
It is not the editor's JOB to educate writers in the business. Nor is it the Agent's job to teach writing.
(truth is, that's become my job these days!)
If the editor spends even one second trying to determine how to explain (to a total stranger who might be an amateur writer with their heart on their sleeve) what exactly disqualifies this manuscript from this publication line, that will probably mean the editor will get fired for not performing the job they were hired to do.
That job is to provide a steady stream of product for a conveyor belt that CAN NOT BE STOPPED OR PAUSED -- it is a relentless, timed, mechanism that only makes a profit if it moves at that steady pace.
Editors rarely last long in any job. And long-working editors are getting rarer and rarer. They run panic-stricken most of the time, when the sales numbers come back. Sales tracking is a whole new world too!
Editors can't stop to tell you why your product doesn't fit their requirements.
Mostly they don't know, and don't have the time to care, nevermind figure out how to explain it.
Their job isn't explaining. Their job is picking, and picking correctly. Then picking again, and again. FAST.
But they can (and do) tell you what they need. And your color-code system has potential to streamline the editor's direct call for a particular product. Only they won't call to writers. They will call to Agents.
Used to be that was done over the Power Lunch (I've been at many such Manhattan lunches). Agents and editors hang out, make friends, and the agent scopes out the editor's "buttons" -- what they really like, and what they are madly searching for. Then the agent lets certain writers in their stable know what there's a market for -- the agent chooses those writers by what the writer has already produced along that line. (I've been on all sides of this process.) The Agent's profit margin depends on generating the right product for the right editor.
The reason it works this way is simply, "TIME IS MONEY." Nobody has any time to waste, training writers to write. This is even more true in the screenwriting biz.
Agents have the same biz model. Time is money. They must supply product to the editors in a form the editor can use to fill their conveyor belt. The product must FIT that pre-built conveyor belt. It's a pipeline from the publisher to the reader who will pay for that product. The pipeline is built by business, and it's as fixed and solid as an oil pipeline. Like an oil pipeline traversing thousands of miles, it carries product that's hot and under pressure, and must arrive at the destination exactly, thusly, so!
The pipeline costs a lot to build and maintain, so it must deliver enough product to make back that cost plus the salaries of everyone who shoves product into that pipeline -- and these days, it must also make a profit for the shareholders of big corporations that own publishers (or film companies).
The commercial art delivery system is a relentless business model. If the pressure ever slackens, the razor-thin margins collapse bringing the company down with it.
If you find that you, as a writer, can't or don't want to produce for pre-built pipelines, then maybe you don't want to write commercial fiction. Today there's a market for "handmade" (no two alike) novels.
Manhattan, the Big Six, and Hollywood are mass producers. That's why it's called "Mass Market Paperback" -- because it's a product designed to be mass produced, like the Model T Ford and all its successors. Thousands of identical items produced and moving through that delivery system fulfill the voracious needs of a "mass" market -- i.e. lowest common denominator taste. Many novels, different authors and titles, the same words arranged differently, identical product that gets assembled along the conveyor belt and then fits the pipeline. Model T's were all black. Today we get cars in different colors, but the production principle is the same. Mass produced cars; mass produced entertainment.
Maybe you, as a writer, would prefer the "Tailor Made" or "Hand Made" business model, of original art pieces, no two alike, no duplications -- paintings such as you see in an upper class Art Gallery, not prints you find in Target.
It's something to think about before you launch a career. You can do both. That's what Pen Names are for!
You might want to read my blog post on whether you should create a pen name.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/should-you-make-up-pen-name-part-i.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/should-you-make-up-pen-name-part-ii.html
So now I've accidentally written a whole blog post, I'll insert the link to my 7-part series on EDITING, which is aimed at trying to give writers insight into the editor's point of view, so the writer can make a smoother approach and carry on the business of selling art to the commercial market.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vii-how-do.html
That link leads to Part 7, which has links to the previous parts at the top of the post. (yes, I write humongous-long-insanely-abstract blog posts).
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Thursday, March 08, 2012
The Wolf Gift
Anne Rice has just released her first werewolf novel, THE WOLF GIFT. The protagonist, Reuben, at first looks like a typical movie werewolf. In fact, the text makes explicit comparisons to the Lon Chaney film. Reuben gets transformed by a bite, and he looks like a bipedal beast man, not a wolf. He thinks of himself as the Man Wolf, which is what the media call him. The first transformations come over him involuntarily; he gradually develops some control. Since the author is Anne Rice, naturally the apparent movie-pastiche simplicity of the premise soon grows more complicated.
Reuben is a difficult character for me to identify with. Although working as a reporter in San Francisco, he’s so independently rich (family money) that he can consider buying a five-million-dollar mansion on a whim. He’s repeatedly described as “beautiful,” of which he’s fully aware (though, to be fair, not conceited about his attractiveness). He cheats on his fiancee, twice, with women he has just met—though the narrative does make the second lapse understandable, since he’s in beast form at the time. Nevertheless, the plot premise and the metaphysical and spiritual threads woven into the story kept me interested in Reuben’s plight.
Whether the word “gift” is meant ironically remains in question for most of the book. Would you think of the power to become a beast—if you could control it somewhat—as a gift or a curse? In the terms of Rice’s story, the transformation has many pluses: Reuben heals supernaturally fast. He has preternatural sensory perception. He’s super-strong. Even in human form, he keeps his enhanced senses. His kind, the “Morphenkind,” can be killed only by decapitation or equally drastic means. Eventually he discovers he has acquired a lifespan of centuries (an odd detail that makes a werewolf almost equivalent to a vampire with flesh-craving instead of blood-craving, but lots of contemporary fictional lycanthropes seem to share that trait of near-immortality).
On the minus side, resisting the change remains hard. Still harder is fighting the Morphengift’s compulsion to destroy evil. Reuben’s change includes the ability to sense, almost to smell, people’s evil intentions. When a person about to commit a vile deed comes within Reuben’s range, the beast is irresistibly compelled to slay and devour the evildoer. By saving victims of muggers and rapists, he becomes famed as a mysterious superhero. On the other hand, of course, he is wanted by the law and in danger of being either jailed, killed, or locked in a research lab.
So—gift or curse? Would you want this power? If not, under what conditions, if any, would you want the “gift” of animal transformation?
Personally, I wouldn’t mind being able to turn into a cat. An occasional interlude of having to do nothing but eat, sleep, and get petted sounds good to me.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Reuben is a difficult character for me to identify with. Although working as a reporter in San Francisco, he’s so independently rich (family money) that he can consider buying a five-million-dollar mansion on a whim. He’s repeatedly described as “beautiful,” of which he’s fully aware (though, to be fair, not conceited about his attractiveness). He cheats on his fiancee, twice, with women he has just met—though the narrative does make the second lapse understandable, since he’s in beast form at the time. Nevertheless, the plot premise and the metaphysical and spiritual threads woven into the story kept me interested in Reuben’s plight.
Whether the word “gift” is meant ironically remains in question for most of the book. Would you think of the power to become a beast—if you could control it somewhat—as a gift or a curse? In the terms of Rice’s story, the transformation has many pluses: Reuben heals supernaturally fast. He has preternatural sensory perception. He’s super-strong. Even in human form, he keeps his enhanced senses. His kind, the “Morphenkind,” can be killed only by decapitation or equally drastic means. Eventually he discovers he has acquired a lifespan of centuries (an odd detail that makes a werewolf almost equivalent to a vampire with flesh-craving instead of blood-craving, but lots of contemporary fictional lycanthropes seem to share that trait of near-immortality).
On the minus side, resisting the change remains hard. Still harder is fighting the Morphengift’s compulsion to destroy evil. Reuben’s change includes the ability to sense, almost to smell, people’s evil intentions. When a person about to commit a vile deed comes within Reuben’s range, the beast is irresistibly compelled to slay and devour the evildoer. By saving victims of muggers and rapists, he becomes famed as a mysterious superhero. On the other hand, of course, he is wanted by the law and in danger of being either jailed, killed, or locked in a research lab.
So—gift or curse? Would you want this power? If not, under what conditions, if any, would you want the “gift” of animal transformation?
Personally, I wouldn’t mind being able to turn into a cat. An occasional interlude of having to do nothing but eat, sleep, and get petted sounds good to me.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
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