Targeting A Readership Part 15 Why Readers Feel They Have Outgrown A Genre

Targeting a Readership

Part 15

Why Readers Feel They Have Outgrown A Genre

by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Previous parts in this series are indexed at:
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/10/index-to-targeting-readership-series-by.html

In Part 14, we noted in passing how resolving a subconscious conflict can change a reader's taste in fiction.

People grow up reading Romance genre, then just drift away once they have found their spouse.  Others, hitting hard going in marriage, drift back to reading Romance, but look for a different sort of setting, or problem or issue.

Romance novels used to serve only the young women who wanted wish-fulfillment fantasy come true.  Today's older women readers were once just such young girls, but now they want a different story.

One such popular new story is, the divorced or widowed heroine makes her own way in a tough world and becomes a kickass heroine in her own right -- then meets her Soul Mate.

Another whole panoply of stories have emerged in the Vampire Romance and other Paranormal creatures women are fascinated by.

Each of these sub-genres emerges, sells huge for years, then submerges, perhaps surviving with a smaller readership.

Why does this happen?  

As a reader (all writers are voracious readers)  you know you have times when you're not in the mood for this kind of book, but will leap into that kind.

Moods come and go, but through life the mood that predominates will shift from one kind of book to another, and yet another.

One theory seems to cover most all of the mysterious changes people undergo with age.  And it's all about Conflict.

We say that as you become old, you don't become different, but you become "more-so."  Whatever traits persist and dominate across the phases of life, from High School, to College, to first job, to Marriage, to kids, to empty-nest, become engrained, perfected, showcased as seminal to the personality.

Or put another way, every human has within both a Wolf and a Tiger fighting for their life.  Which one will win?  The one you feed the most.  It's up to you to choose which of your traits will predominate.

In other words, as we mature, the fight-to-the-death within us begins.  Everyone has an internal conflict, and as that conflict see-saws back and forth, we make irrevocable life-course choices, and sometimes have to ditch an entire decade or more of investment, and just take off in another direction.

As we wrestle with these decisions, mostly on a subconscious level, we search for clues in our real world environment, and we search for interpretations of our real world environment in our fiction.

Different genres specialize in different sorts of Conflict, but all genres of fiction focus "story" around a "conflict."

Conflict is the essence of story. 

We are fascinated by certain stories because the Conflicts that drive those stories are derived from the same Master Theme  that roils around underneath our real world lives.  There's a resonance, a harmony, that energizes the subconscious issues that discomfort us.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/08/how-to-use-theme-in-writing-romance.html

Readers and writers discuss theme by sharing a story, walking miles in the Main Character's moccasins, and ultimately in addressing and resolving Conflict.

The fictional piece is energized and driven by a Conflict as ferocious as the conflict inside all humans.  Once fed enough, one element in that conflict will prevail, and the conflict will be over.  Peace, inner peace, and very often peace in the surrounding world will prevail.

It will prevail until a new conflict is joined, a new topic, a new problem in life.

Sometimes readers continue or resume reading a favorite genre, entertained by the predictable, reliable, firm resolution of the conflict.  But very often, readers will feel they have outgrown a genre because the conflict that genre specializes seems like something only a child or young adult would still be wrestling with.

Writers often come to writing late enough in life that they have resolved some conflicts, and experienced the peace that brings.  Such writers may want to share that peace with readers.

It doesn't work on a commercial level.  It can work with family and friends who have been associated with the writer through the fight and resolution, but it doesn't  "sell."

A personal story, a memoir, or autobiography is of interest only to those who have some knowledge of who this person is.  The main character in a world of fiction has to be introduced to the reader, all fresh and new, yet somehow familiar.

The "yet somehow familiar" (or 'give me something the same but different') part is the Conflict and the underlying theme that fires up that Conflict.

New writers, I have found, most often sidestep, duck, or ignore their Character's internal conflict.

I'm not the only one who has noticed this common issue among new writers.

Here is an excerpt from a blog I follow on Twitter about Screenwriting.

https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/the-power-of-conflict-in-storytelling-178d09105c5b

--------quote------
A few years ago, I posted this question on my blog: Why do we find conflict entertaining? The responses were fascinating and informative:

• Conflict is interesting: In real life, we tend to socialize with likeminded people, so when we see characters in a movie who disagree, argue and fight, that is different and therefore stimulating.
• Conflict is speaking one’s mind: In our daily lives, we often have to bite our tongue, but movie characters can give voice to things we wish we had the opportunity and courage to say.
• Conflict involves risk: Whereas we may play it safe in our regular routines, we never know what could happen with characters involved in a conflict, an unpredictable dynamic implicit in every fight.
• Conflict requires stakes: Characters don’t get into conflict unless there is something of importance at stake.
• Conflict is about goals: One character wants one thing, another character wants something different.
• Conflict is a battle of wills: There is always the question, “Who is going to win” which makes for an intriguing scenario.
• Conflict is emotional: When characters are engaged in a struggle, it is not a mere exercise in logic, but charged up with feelings.

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

Notice how superficial these answers are, but every one of them would satisfy a professional Editor at a traditional publishing house.  They are not, however, useful from the writer's operational perspective to answer the question:  How do you DO THAT?

Think about each of those answers and about which sorts of Themes can best drive one of those conflict hooks.

Each of those reasons for being interested by conflict defines a Readership.

Which readership is naturally yours?

Feed the Readership you want to prevail in the real world Conflicts that are tearing you apart inside.

Ponder all that we've discussed about Theme, how to define it, how to use it, and how to blend it seamlessly, integrate it into a work of fiction to make that fiction a work of Art.

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

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

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

Once you have your Theme you will not be conflict-shy, pulling back or tip-toeing around a Conflict your Characters must resolve.

As you progress through life, you will evolve new Themes and new conflicts.  Literary critics define "periods" in a writer's life, and whether they know it or not, they are tracing that writer's personal resolution of personal internal conflicts.

When you're finished with a Conflict, you are finished.  You are at Peace.  And Peace is not Story.  Peace is what happens between Stories that happen to Characters.

Peace is not "Happily Ever After."  Many who disbelieve in the Happily Ever After ending think happiness is perpetual peace.  It isn't.  And that, in itself, constitutes a Theme Bundle -- an entire array of statements about reality.

If you, as a writer, want to share the experience of peace from conflict with your readers, learn to share the moment of resolution of a conflict.  That resolution-moment is the climax of your story and your plot (in the same Event, at the same moment, on the same page).  How and by what a conflict is resolved is your Theme.  The theme generates the conflict and resolves it.

Conflict isn't interesting for any of the reasons in the quoted list.  Conflict is interesting because of what/how/when it RESOLVES.  That's part of the reason viewers want a remake of Season 8 of Game of Thrones.

Here is a post on nesting Themes, creating a theme bundle that is large enough to support a long-running series (novels, TV shows, spinoffs).

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-4.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Depiction Part 31 - Depicting Random Luck

Depiction

Part 31

Depicting Random Luck

by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Previous parts of the Depiction Series can be found here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/04/index-to-depiction-series-by-jacqueline.html

One bewildering criticism editors level at writers is, "But, why did this just happen???  Why did this Character deserve this?"

You can't sell the book by answering, "By sheer, dumb luck."  At least you can't unless the main Theme is luck as an "undocumented feature of the Universe."

Editors worry about readers finding a novel "contrived" -- nothing throws readers out of a novel faster than the impression that the writer just artificially threw something in because they didn't know how to get the story to go where they wanted it to go so the writer just forced it to go there, just said this is where the story is going.

That's "contriving" -- deciding what you want to happen in your story, and just writing that it happened.

In real life, we all know, things "just happen" at random, with bewildering and derailing impact.  Life just gets shattered for no discernible reason and you just don't understand it.  Nobody you ask can explain it.  It is just the way the world is, lump it.

But in fiction it is different.  We go to fiction for entertainment, and a  change of emotional framework, a different way to look at the world.  We go to fiction to walk in someone else's moccasins, someone who does not live in a random world of hurt.

Romance Novels are for people who do understand the world in terms of "luck" -- but in terms of both good and bad luck, and how those two types of events are connected through the depths of the Spirit -- through the Soul, and thus through Soul Mates.

The world is a tempestuous sea, and often our life's boat must plow straight through a hurricane, through the eye of the storm and out the other side to get to that peaceful tropical island of Happily Ever After.

The waves that batter us this way and that may seem random as they dump us under, but they are not random.  The Soul knows that, but we mortals can't see it, and don't grasp it.  But like a hurricane that swirls around a center, the storms that derail our lives do have a pattern behind them.

What angle we attack those ranks of waves from, which way we go relative to the wind, and how well we buckled our flotation harness, how well dressed we are against the cold ocean, and maybe what sort of boat (family, Church, community, work-friends, Facebook friends, etc) we have chosen to use, all determine how well and how easily we may survive.

All these choices (made long before adversity appears) depend on our Character -- how compromising, how careless, how obliviously accepting, how Prayerfully Faithful, how self-confident (with or without justification), how studious in researching, how strategically planning, how foresightful, depend on all the Character traits that are innate, and then honed by upbringing. Thus parenting matters, schooling matters, work experience matters, and the crowd you hang with matters.

We may imagine we see patterns in the furious and destructive waves driving us off our chosen life-course, or we may imagine them random, without a pattern.  Readers live in a real world where either or both of these views is their normal way of looking at the world.

But every one of your readers knows, at the Soul level, that there is sense behind this somewhere.

Some are convinced that it is incumbent upon them to figure out what that sense is.  Some know beyond doubt that there is no such sense, and we live in a random universe just imagining patterns because our brains can't process life any other way.  We are just animals, subject to whimsical floods of hormones -- unable to "resist" the temptations of the world, especially sex with the hottest one you have ever encountered.

These are two entrenched beliefs you will find in literature as far back as literature goes -- Ancient Greek and older.

We are animals, subject to animalistic drives -- and it is insane to fight those drives.

We are Immortal Souls here to learn harsh lessons, to suffer here so we may attain Heaven after death.

We all live in the same world, but SEE that world and the import of Events (novel plots) differently.

Reality is an optical illusion - like Rubin's Vase - two vases or two faces?  Well -- in truth, both!

It is easier to see on the black and white, but you'll find it on the yellow and white, too.  This is a perfect example of the "difference" between those who see the world as created and run by God, and those who see the world as run by humans, or a machine humans are slowly learning to work.

It isn't "point of view" -- you are looking at the same pattern with the same eyes, but your mind can shift focus to "reveal" a truth you hadn't noticed before.  Keep it up, and you can get confused.  But there does exist a Truth -- it's just that the truth is not either/or.  We don't live in a binary world, but we can make it binary for convenience.  We don't live in a zero-sum-game universe, but for FUN (so we can all fight to the death) we can make it zero-sum and steal from each other for fear of not having enough.

Truth exists - somewhere "out there" -- and maybe somewhere "in here" -- but it is often inconvenient.  We studied "truth" in several blog entries under several topics.  Conflict is the essence of story -- but truth is the essence of conflict.

Listen to a famous person saying something on TV, then listen to the commentators or read some articles reporting on what was said.  Look for it, and you will find 3 things --
What you heard --
What Reporter One heard --
What Reporter Two heard --

We all heard these same things, but interpreted them differently depending on whether we view the world as two-faces or two-vases or have the ability to switch, or see  both at once.  Writers see both at once.  The writer's job is to show readers what a "both at once" world looks like.

The difference in what is heard or seen is inside the listener/viewer, in the filters created by basic assumptions about The World and the Nature of Reality.

Some of us learn to switch filters to suit the occasion, others consider that switching dishonest, and still others become frozen in one or another state.  Strong Characters retain or recreate that choice, and then make that choice deliberately.

The Animals vs Souls argument is like interpretations of what famous people said -- each person hears it differently.  Animal vs Souls is like two-faces/two-vases -- or the shadow of the cylinder being round or square depending on the angle of the "light" (spiritual light by which we "see" truth with the "third eye.")

So what is a writer to do to make readers understand what these Characters are SAYING (to each other, and to themselves inside their own heads).

How does a writer scoop up a bedraggled person from their real world and transport them to another world, to become another person with different concerns living in a world that makes sense?

If you take the view that humans are only Animals, you lose half your readers.

If you take the view that humans are basically Souls, you lose half your readers.

However, if you (as the writer) can see both Faces&Vases, you can take the view that the human animal body carries the Soul through life -- sometimes as an onlooker, sometimes as a helpless passenger, and sometimes in the driver's seat -- different people being so very different -- then you may scoop up the vast majority of readers who are "in the middle" or "confused" or "don't care" or who tend to vacillate from one view to another, sometimes depending on if it's Sunday or not.

"The book the reader reads is not the book the writer wrote." 

You may write vases and some readers read faces.

Our current culture has adopted a social stance requiring us not to "judge" each other, not to be judgmental (which is taken to mean exclusionary) but rather to be accepting (which is taken to create diversity).

But the thing is all humans, for all time, have always "judged" each other and nothing will make that stop.  Try it.  Try writing a novel about a Character hitting a Life-Storm who never - ever - judges any other Character they interact with.  See how much story you can write before your main Character has to decide who to trust, who is guilty, who has to be fired, or who to hire.

Damsel In Distress, running away, slips into a tavern by the docks and has to pick out a ship's Captain to approach about passage.  She has to judge that man or woman.  How far can you write your story without a character passing judgement on another character?

To choose a mate (Soul or otherwise), we form a judgement about that person.

The only way to learn to form accurate and useful judgments, to form reliable judgments of other people is to practice -- a lifelong practice starting at about Age 2 -- which is famous as the Terrible Twos because at that dawning of judgement of others, all humans but Mommy are threats of the first magnitude.

Later, all strangers are attractive -- hence it is easy to kidnap a 10 year old by offering a car ride.

Sometime in the teens, with arduous exercise, judgement will (or will not) develop, steadying down between those two polar opposites -- trust no one, or trust everyone.

We learn to tell people apart.  By 20, you've got it, or you never will, unless a hurricane sweeps your life aside and hammers the lesson home the hard way.  Disillusionment works wonders, but that usually takes a string of hard luck events.

We learn to tell people apart after age 21.  The third quartering of Saturn to its own Natal position happens at about age 21, chosen as the Majority year, or maturity for a good reason.  Saturn represents judgement, and everything related to separating this from that, to discipline and focus.

Learning to distinguish between animal sexual attraction, infatuation, and Soul Mate level attraction Love, is the subject of most Romance Novels, whatever sub-genre they belong to, Paranormal or Nuts-n-Bolts science fiction.  The hurricane that blows life off course in the Romance Novel is usually an unexpected, and highly improbable Love, the incongruous love that shifts the view of life from two vases to two faces.  In a blink, you suddenly know you were all wrong.  What does a strong person do when discovering an error of that magnitude?

Saturn is "exclusive" -- it severs ties, sorts friends from enemies, and its transits often signify divorce (or even bereavement).

By contrast, Jupiter is "inclusive" -- and our solar system has both a Saturn and a Jupiter (a face and a vase) for a reason.

Plot is the sequence of events.  I have said many times in this blog, that plot = because line.

Because Character One did this, Character Two responded by doing that, whereupon Character One countered by doing something else.  Etc. to the resolution of the initial Conflict.

Note, though, that Plot (e.g. Life) is generated by a Character Doing Something.  What a Character does about a circumstance or happenstance, about an Event that seems sheer dumb luck,  reveals the strength of that Character's character.

Characters choose what to do by those mental "filters" that cause us to hear the famous people saying things that others proclaim they did not say, that make the world always two-faces, or always a circle.

You have read self-help books that urge you to change your life by changing your internal dialogue. There is a science behind that.  What we tell ourselves, over and over, habitually, does direct our choices, especially in an emergency when action must be taken without sufficient information -- we fill in the gaps in our information by imagining what "must be there."  That is why soldiers and emergency workers "drill" -- doing the motions over and over until they become conditioned reflex.  What you say to yourself, over and over, will determine what you do in an unfamiliar situation.

Fictional characters do that, too, which is what makes them seem like real people.

Recently, a lot of money has been spent studying human behavior.  We've discussed that in the mathematical development behind PR or Public Relations (an obscuring term for manipulating large groups of people, fooling people into buying your product, advertising).

Some studies are turning up in the popular press, and they are worth noting and thinking about. These are traits ordinary people use to judge other people as friend, foe, or victim.  These are the scripts ordinary people repeat in their minds, hoping to acquire desirable traits.

I found an article in Inc magazine that is a case in point.

These articles are now called Listicles and have become click-bait.  But this is a good one for writers:

13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do
Give up the bad habits that drain your mental strength.

http://www.inc.com/amy-morin/13-things-mentally-strong-people-dont-do.html

Probably without knowing it, the author, Amy Morin, has summarized a set of tests or guidelines for writers doing the internal dialogue and plot-driving-responses of the Main Character or Hero of the story who must be a Strong Character -- or at least a stronger character by the end.

Take any one of these weak-character signals in an otherwise strong character, and portray it clearly. Then you can hurl a "random" bit of bad or good luck at that trait, a hurricane of events to drive the character to remedy that flaw - making them stronger by the end of the story.

The weakness caused the hurricane, so the Character deserved to get smashed by a wave out of nowhere.  Fighting through the storm causes the unexpected strength (that comes out of nowhere in response to a test) that we see at the end.

Here is Amy's list - the article discusses and describes each item, so read that article.
------quote-----
1. They don't waste time feeling sorry for themselves.

2. They don't give away their power.

3. They don't shy away from change.

4. They don't focus on things they can't control.

5. They don't worry about pleasing everyone.

6. They don't fear taking calculated risks.

7. They don't dwell on the past.

8. They don't make the same mistakes over and over.

9. They don't resent other people's success.

10. They don't give up after the first failure.

11. They don't fear alone time.

12. They don't feel the world owes them anything.

13. They don't expect immediate results.
------end quote---

Now you know how to tell readers which characters are weak in specific character traits and thus why it is poetic justice that some ignominious fate befalls them.  Editors will be able to see "why" this random event happened to this Character, and readers will come away satisfied.

What readers want to see is how the weakness is remedied by the plot disaster.

Get that structure right so that otherwise implausible, random events make for reader satisfaction. The key clue is that articles like this delineate how people you do not know assess other people who are not like you.

Transport your life-bedraggled reader to a world where things make sense.

It's not random luck: it's Karma.  Life is a poem.  It makes sense if you know how to listen.

If you are not strong - you must become stronger.

Note how this plays into SAVE THE CAT! -- the writing book I keep recommending.  You introduce your Character "saving the helpless" - doing an act of kindness, which is the kind of thing done by someone whose self-image is strong.  The "cat" is weak, scared, helpless, and needs saving.  I am strong, powerful, brave, and will do the saving.

Now the reader has a "first impression" (which is lasting, you know) of this Character as Strong. Whatever weakness (as delineated in this article) your character displays next will be interpreted (like the words of famous people) through the filter of the sure knowledge this Character is Strong.

The things that happen because of the Character's weak-spot-flaw as demonstrated by the 13 traits above, will then be "well deserved" and caused by the weakness.  The resolution of the Conflict will remedy that weakness. The Life Lesson will be learned (next time, wait for the Queen Mary -- dingy will not make it across the Atlantic).

In a Romance Novel, the Lesson is driven home by the Character of the Soul Mate.

One useful definition of Love is that the True Love's presence makes you exhibit your very best Self -- maybe even be a much better person than you think you really are -- maybe be so good you actually like yourself.

You gravitate to that person, you want to be with that person, and you admire that person.

Few love what they admire (hence Numbers 9 and 12 on that Listicle).  But loving what you admire is a master trait of the Strong Character.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Depiction Part 5 Depicting Dynastic Wealth by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Depiction Part 5
Depicting Dynastic Wealth
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

There is an old saying, "If you want to understand what's really going on, follow the money."

This is true in real life, yes, but because your readers live in that "real" life, it is exceptionally true in fiction.

When you do worldbuilding to create the society, government, laws, geography, political in-fighting, social status, technology, weaponry, economy, and dynamic evolution of culture that led to the situation your main theme and conflict depict, you must include not just MONEY -- but WEALTH. 

Money and Wealth (two different things) are the lifeblood of your world, not just of the economy but of the whole world. 

We discussed "wealth distribution" and the 1% here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/10/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-7.html

And we've been in hot-pursuit of the secret to the mechanism behind a type of novel we all enjoy -- the HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE (King, Prince Charming, Lord something,), the Tall Dark Stranger who turns out to have power, connections, status, and sweep us away into a new life of prominence and privilege. 

Yet our society today (in the USA) is adamantly averse to the entire concept that there should be such wealthy people (how much did you say that CEO made per year?). 

We hold up the statistics about billionaires as examples of what's wrong with everything.

http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/#tab:overall

So how could there be any Romance in marrying a Billionaire (or King, or Prince, Mogul, Mob Kingpin, whatever)?  Why would anyone think that such a marriage would improve life?  You'd just be viciously hated.  Where's the romance?

And where's the Science Fiction in marrying a 1%-er -- since on this blog we deal with the hybrid genres that combine the appeal of Romance with any and every other genre.

We are especially focused on blending Science Fiction and/or Urban Fantasy or Paranormal into Romance.

Once blended, once you "have an idea" for a science fiction romance novel, you have to frame that idea with a "world" that you build to show-don't-tell the idea.  That's where the technical craft skill of "depiction" comes in.

Here are previous posts in the Depiction series and some hybrid topics:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/10/dialogue-part-9-depicting-culture-with.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/09/depiction-part-1-depicting-power-in.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/09/depiction-part-2-conflict-and-resolution.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/09/depiction-part-3-internal-conflict-by.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/12/depiction-part-4-depicting-power-in.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/10/theme-plot-integration-part-14-ruling.html

One of my favorite types of reading is Historical Romances about the Aristocracy. 

I've always been enamored of hoop-skirts, and so one of my favorite movie scenes is the Polka sequence in THE KING AND I "Shall We Dance." 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcWNhCdDkMQ

The classic rags-to-riches character arc is incessantly popular.  Anna in THE KING AND I has inherent "values" that govern her behavior even in the presence of royalty (and she comes from a country with Royalty) and immense wealth (and the power of life-and-death that goes with it in Siam but not England.) 

That immense wealth is (historically) viewed as "unearned" wealth and power that is bestowed by the "accident of birth" or somehow stolen, usurped (think Robin Hood and Maid Marian.)  Historically, such wealth/power was bestowed by the King upon the valiant Knight who saved the Crown (or whatever service). 

Given a Knighthood, a commoner might sally forth and win a Barony, marry well and beget sons who would marry up the hierarchy, and their sons might inherit a wife's inherited lands, and gradually over 6 generations or so, the family would be considered genuine Nobility -- and perhaps beget an heir to the throne.  Dynastic Wealth Personified.  Thus every Mother who raised a son could dream of being the (forgotten, and embarrassing) ancestress of a King.

The theme is: "Nobody could ever possibly earn such Royal wealth/power (1%-er Billionaire) in one lifetime."  If they have such wealth, it means they stole it.  That is a THEME. 

Wealth like that can't belong to any one person because that is "impossible."  Kings don't make their money, they steal it.  Everyone knows that. 

Remember, we're writing Science Fiction Romance.  So we can use any science to form the foundation of the worldbuilding.  We can postulate anything that violates the reader's current understanding of that science, then depict the world and portray the Characters and Conflict to argue the reader into believing the postulate (however impossible it might be.) 

The core essence of Science Fiction is "We do the improbable immediately; the impossible takes a little longer."  Think Scotty on STAR TREK. 

Or think Spock. 

The most scintillating line Spock delivers is "Unknown, Captain." -- when something is currently unknown to a scientist with 6 Ph.D.'s (like Spock) and it is now confronting the character, then we have a science fiction story. 

The plot's main conflict must be resolved to doing the impossible, by exceeding design specifications, by learning something that has never been known by humanity, and applying that knowledge to human advantage. 

Science Fiction is all about doing what you can't do. 

In science fiction, the characters do not ever say, "I'm doing all I can." or "We'll do everything possible."  NEVER!!! 

In science fiction, the characters live in a universe where there are no limits on humanity, and the stories are about the individuals whose conflicts are caused by an impact with an apparent human limit that is simply unacceptable.

The conflict resolution is by transcendence of that apparent limit, proving it was never a limit at all.  This pushes back the borders of human knowledge and capability -- which is what science is all about. 

In Science, there is no such thing as, "Man Was Not Meant To Know."  Today, a lot of research money is being spent on proving the Soul is not real, and everything humans experience can be explained by brain physics and chemistry. 

In Romance, the exact same conflict works: 

Right there stands MY MAN -- recognized at First Sight -- but he is unattainable.  The resolution of that conflict is the wedding, the impossible is attained. 

This, of course, works just as well, if not better, when it's "There is MY WOMAN" but she's unattainable.

That's why Science Fiction and Romance blend so well, and so easily.  Both are always about doing the impossible and changing the course of human history by that deed. 

Science's product is the Cell Phone.  Romance's product is a child.  The cell phone was invented by someone's child.  Science Fiction and Romance are identical, at the core. 

Today, the contemporary romance market consists of women who are the children and grandchildren of a USA culture shaped by many forces.  Most prominent among thos forces is Taxes. 

Politicians call shaping public behavior by Tax incentives or dis-incentives  "social engineering."

"Social Engineering" is the idea that tax incentives can control the "masses" who live limited by the laws made by those who know better, who understand the world better, or who have a better idea of what correct behavior should be.  That's how Aristocrats think.  "Us vs. Them"

To tag a Character as one who thinks of himself as an Aristocrat, use the dialogue phrase, "Out There" -- but not "In Here." 

A character who says, "There is a lot of fraud out there," tags himself as an Aristocrat and a perpetrator of various frauds he/she considers legitimate privileges his Class has but other Classes do not. 

The "out there" phrase is modern American for the assumption of the existence of a Class Structure.  The Constitution was framed with the assumption that there is no such thing as Class.  But it was framed by Aristocrats. 

The USA is founded on the principle that anyone can attain anything.  It's often termed "upward mobility" -- but it really means upward and downward mobility -- and if you think about it, you see that if an "up" or a "down" can be defined at all, then the entire philosophy is founded on a Class Structure.

Some writers term the USA a Meritocracy -- where those of merit gain elevated status.  About 40% of your readers subconsciously look at it that way. 

The individual who refuses to accept barriers to achievement is a great subject for fiction -- especially romance, and these days doubly especially Fantasy or Paranormal Romance. 

Those who refuse to accept limitations or barriers are called Heros.

All Romance that depicts an HEA is Heroic Literature because the HEA is so fundamentally impossible in our modern world.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/01/if-hea-is-implausible-how-come-it.html

Nevertheless, the HEA is real and does happen (frequently). 

Your job as a writer of Romance Novels is to make the Happily Ever After ending seem plausible to your readers, and attainable in real life, even if that requires writing in Historical times of Kings and arranged marriages for Dynastic reasons.

In the historical days of Kings and their horse-mounted tax collectors, taxes were used by Kings to do social engineering, controlling the peasants, and later the Merchant and Craftsman classes. 

Tax Collectors would raid farming villages and steal the seed corn, then come back the next year and punish the people for not having enough for them to steal.

The Kings and the Aristocracy needed the money to support armies (to defend themselves against peasant revolts), and their lavish lifestyles of conspicuous waste.  They needed money (and food) for Armies to conquer neighboring Kingdoms, gain more peasants and better land, and stop neighboring Kings from raiding their peasants. 

It was all very raw, very brutal -- and very much in the current events News of today where the Kings are Drug Kingpins, Cartel bosses, one or another Terrorist cult, or Street Gang.  All those groups are totalitarian.  The law is what the strongest guy says it is, unless he changes his mind.   

And yet, the ultimate rags-to-riches Romance in the Cinderella story is still very popular.  It's a fantasy complete with fairy godmother and ravishing Prince Charming, and kids grow up on it. 

There is an assumption behind that story, that is never questioned.  Adding science fiction to Romance means incorporating such never-asked-questions into the worldbuilding and into the theme. 

So ask yourself, "When Cinderella was identified by the Prince via the glass slipper, was it 'A GOOD THING' for Cinderella?"

If Aristocrats and Kings (and Billionaires) are such horrible, unprincipled, vicious, death-dealing, selfish, bullies, then why would what happened to Cinderella be A GOOD THING for Cinderella? 

Why would anyone want to join with such people, have their children, raise their children to be selfish, horrible bullies in their turn?  What sort of selfish-horrible-bully was Cinderella that she'd be willing to have anything to do with the scion of such a family?

If a person is a bully with their money, won't they bully their wives - and God Forbid, abuse their children?  If Cinderella's Prince is not a selfish-bully when she meets him, inheriting wealth and power (the Crown) would turn him into something worse than Darth Vader -- wouldn't it?  So why wouldn't she run for her life when he finds her? 

Is she that stupid?  If she wises up, what will she do as Queen?  Become a worse bully than her Prince and put him in his place?  Hire an Assassin?  Stage her own death and run for the hills? 

Those are the sort of questions that science fiction themes ask, but Romance themes shy away from because they require direct confrontation with emotional pain, and the pain of uncertainty, in a way that is softened by being in love.

When you combine science fiction and romance, you get an explosive combination that gives that softened world of love some hard edges. 

We know that Cinderella was the step-daughter in an aristocratic House - a minor House that coveted an invitation to the royal Ball (Major Houses don't covet such invitations; they ponder whether to accept or not.) 

Cinderella was "entitled" because she was a relative, but they enslaved her to do the work of a servant. 
(Servants are slaves is a theme). 

Note how THEME, CONFLICT, and DEPICTION dovetail into an artistic composition. 

Here are some posts that are indexes to lists of posts on Theme and how it integrates with other components of a composition.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/07/index-to-theme-character-integration.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/04/index-to-theme-worldbuilding.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/05/index-to-theme-plot-integration.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/08/how-to-use-theme-in-writing-romance.html

The theme behind the Cinderella type of Rags-to-Riches Historical Romance about the Aristocracy is Tax Collectors Are Thieves.

What has Cinderella, the abused step-child, to do with Taxes? 

If you want to understand what's really happening, follow the money. 

Why was the family mean to Cinderella?  Because they hated her?  Well, why did they hate her?  None of the versions show her as a person of bad character in a family of solidly good characters. 

This was a family which, to Cinderella the child, seemed rich and privileged, but she didn't understand the Situation because she didn't know how to "follow the money." 

The step-mother's objective was to marry her own daughters off to RICH MEN (Billionaires, the 1%).  To do that, she had to appear to be still as rich as her husband would have let her be.  Her only hope for her own existence was to bag a 1%-er for at least one, if not all, her daughters.

To do that, she had to have A SERVANT -- and no "servant" could aspire to marry a 1%-er, or  A Billionaire.  A CEO. 

So the Step-mother made a servant out of her step-daughter, whereupon said step-daughter no longer owed her any loyalty. 

That started a downward spiral in the relationship with Cinderella, and it became not only OK but REQUIRED that she be abused so she wouldn't get uppity.  She had to learn her place (which was difficult because it was in fact not her place, and step-mother and step-sisters knew it.)

Meanwhile, the step-mother is required to PAY TAXES as if she still commanded a fortune.  When the King gets taxes from his aristocracy, he sees those tax-payers as his supporters (think Campaign Donations), and supporters get access (Ball Invitations.)  What Cinderella does not know is that the step-mother has no money left because of the taxes.  This Ball is her last chance, and Prince Charming is her only hope. 

Remember, Tax Collectors also have wives and children.  But who dreams of being a tax collector's wife or husband?

What if your true Soul Mate is a tax collector (or today, an accountant, bookkeeper, or IRS Bureaucrat).  They make a good living, but aren't "rich" by the 1% rule, not on the Forbes Billionaire List.

And tax collectors don't make the tax laws.  In fact, the tax collectors and IRS auditors don't even get to make the IRS "regulations" which are enforced by the IRS as if they were actual Law.  "Bureaucrats" that you, as a tax-payer, never get to talk to, make those Regulations. 

You can go to jail for violating a regulation made by people you did not elect, but who were appointed by your enemies. 

Is your reader's situation fundamentally different from Cinderella's step-mother's situation?  Or Cinderella's for that matter -- underpaid working-stiff.

Is today any different from the days of Aristocrats and Kings? 

Is there something less "romantic" about contemporary Romance novels than Historical or Regency Romance novels?

In a realm of Kings and Aristocrats, the tax collectors siphoned off the "profit" made by "peasants" (usually farmers, but merchants and craftsmen too), and accumulated that wealth in "storehouses."  The King had a treasury, would buy gold, jewels, etc as a means of storing wealth, and as an investment.

When it came time for a war, the King would sell gems and whatever to buy Mercenaries, and conscript, train and arm young men from his peasantry.  Merchants and craftsmen could buy their children out of the army with -- yep, taxes.

In the historical days of Kings and Aristocrats, even at the top, lives were short.  A 40 year old man was elderly.

So marriages were early, especially for girls, and children were the main agenda item for any marriage into wealth.  The production of the Heir was paramount.

Study History all the way back to, say 2,000 BCE, maybe 3,000 BCE.  Look for the beginning of Civilization.

OK, "history" actually begins (according to historians) at the year 1,000 CE when we have some documentation.

But I consider History stretches at least back to the Biblical accounts of Kings and Prophets.

If you read the books of Kings and Prophets, it is clear that cities existed and were taken for granted even then.  Egypt had cities.

Archeology has dug up cities farther back -- Persia, Babylon, etc.

Anthropology dates "civilization" (the transition from hunter-gatherer, tribal nomads) from the discovery of agriculture -- and that's around 9,000 years ago, or more in some places.

The ability to domesticate animals and grow food creates the ability to live in one place, year round. 

And then structures are built, crafts are invented, bridges installed and things are made.

Economics is the study of how transforming human time, effort, energy, and cleverness into THINGS which increase lifespan and lifestyle stability, creates WEALTH.  THINGS are "wealth."  When those things change ownership, you begin to have "money."

Kings coin "money."  A medium of exchange of wealth -- to transfer wealth from one person to another by a symbolic intermediary (coin).  So money becomes a proxy for wealth.  And in some minds, money becomes wealth itself.  Pointing out the fallacy behind such thinking is what writers do, in every genre, by formulating themes that expose the fallacy.

Here are some posts on the ways writers can use Fallacy:

"Fallacies and Endorphins"
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/01/theme-plot-integration-part-4-fallacies.html

"The Fallacy of Safety"
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/01/theme-plot-integration-part-6-fallacy.html

"The Fallacy of Trust"
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/03/theme-plot-integration-part-7-fallacy.html

Kings get their wealth by stealing it (calling that taxes.)  This  can be considered a Misnomer or a Fallacy, depending on the point of view.

Here are some posts on Misnomers -- a powerful dramatic technique:

"The Use Of Media Headlines"
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/02/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-6.html

"The Gigolo and the Lounge Lizard"
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/05/dialogue-part-7-gigolo-and-lounge.html

If they are clever Kings, they steal it a little at a time so as not to kill off the peasants who did the work to make the profit which working-stiffs can't be allowed to keep because then they'd have POWER.

The King's profession is keeping power out of the control of peasants.

To do that, the Kings have to convince most of the peasants (and merchants and craftsmen) that peasants can't manage wealth.  There's something unique and special about a King that bestows the wisdom to manage vast wealth or power to make lives miserable. 

This knack of wealth-management is inherited by the Heir. 

Some use the theory of "Divine Right" -- others admit it's just being the best swordsman or the most ruthless killer.

But in either case, the populace needs the legitimate Heir to inherit and manage that Power.

So look back all the way to the beginning of civilization, living in cities with people who are not related to you by blood or marriage. 

Scientific advancements (such as domesticating animals and agriculture) allowed peasants to make a profit (enough to buy food, clothing, shelter) and pay taxes.  Kings slowly accumulated into enough wealth to wield real POWER.

Follow the money.

Wealth, turned into money, flowed to a central point, came under the control of individuals (who hadn't worked to earn it), and became POWER which was used to control the peasants as if they were slaves or possessions.  Their freedom was only an illusion. 

Over thousands of years, we have records of good kings and bad kings, kings who delivered prosperity, and kings who delivered poverty.

If you haven't reviewed the Book of Kings lately, you should do a quick read-through. 

Yes, it is a book of The Bible, but those are accounts of real people who really lived, and struggled to do their best (edited to show a specific theme, but still facts about what people did).  A lot of those Kings were really bad Kings. 

The heirs of Good Kings turned out to be Bad Kings -- leading their kingdoms into war, or ill-fated alliances.  But their heirs were good Kings, returning to the values and principles that had produced prosperity some generations ago.

The trend, though, was downhill. 

The succession of Kings shows increasing ineptitude, culminating in Exile(s).

Some essential skill at Wealth Management did not transmit across generations.  It would be established, last maybe two or three generations, and fizzle away.  That pattern seems to repeat throughout all human history, all over the world.

Science Fiction looks at accounts of this kind and asks questions such as, "What did they do right when skills did transmit to the next generation?"  "What did they do wrong when skills were lost?" 

The spiritual answer is the simple and obvious one made by the Books of Kings and Prophets -- follow God's Commandments, you do just fine; stray away after the gods of other cultures, you crash-and-burn. 

Romance novelists ask the question, "Why does a next generation ever -- EVER -- absorb the parents' values?  How can it be that skills of wealth-management ever transmit properly to the next generation?" 

And the Romance Novelist will come up with the best answer I've ever encountered.  It works because of the Wife - it works because of the Soul Mate - it works because of the WOMEN!!! 

The right woman is the flywheel stabilizing a man's power-management judgement calls. 

The theory behind the "arranged marriage" (which is another type of romance novel I adore) is that the adults (remember, historically marriage had to happen in early-teens because life-expectancy was short) had a better chance of mating a pair who were in fact Soul Mates than there would be if the children just chose.  Children are still growing into themselves and make choices they out-grow in a few years.  A Mother can foresee what the child will grow to be. 

Remember High School?  How many boys did you date?  How many heart-throbs did you fall for?  How many crushes did you have?  How many boys did you yearn after, hoping they'd notice you and now you're glad they didn't? 

Do you now have confidence that you had enough wisdom to choose a life-partner during those years?  Yet those are the years in which marriages had to be consummated in order for civilization to continue, because life spans were so short.  You had to have your children in your teens in order to live long enough to transmit any values to them by the time they were teens.  (Romeo and Juliet were kids, remember?)

Of course, when we are in our early teens, we have no clue that our choices aren't wise, and no idea what information adults have that we don't.  Adults are really stupid. 

There's another consideration about teen-marriages.  The following 10 years, maybe all the way through age 28, produce enormous changes in an individual's agenda, coping strategies, and operating premises.  The basic personality doesn't change, but the implementation of that basic personality's main attributes does change.  So a marriage appropriate for a 16 year old girl to an 18 year old (or 25 year old) guy has a high probability of going bad within a decade. 

Arranged Marriage is not anti-feminist, but it's not focused on romance. 

When an arranged-marriage couple hits it lucky, they grow together, toward each other, rather than away during the first decade or two, and after that they are comfortable.

Now, here's the question.  What sort of marriage process results in transmission of wealth-management skills on the level a King requires?  What heir apparent upbringing is necessary to produce a future King who won't destroy the Kingdom? 

Or phrase it for a contemporary romance novel: What sort of marriage does the protagonist require to grow to understand he/she is a King, the decision-making boss whose will shapes the behavior of Elected Officials.  Remember, the US Constitution was written in revolt against a King, and put The People in charge instead of a King. 

The People were to interview and hire a President to manage administration, and others to make laws - and those two would hire Judges to make sure laws were consistent.  Today Voters are the Kings, and government workers the peasants.  Or employees are the Kings and Corporations the peasants who work for the employees.  This is all POINT OF VIEW SHIFTING - a skill writers must practice.

In Depiction Part 6, February 3, 2015) we'll look at what it takes to learn and then transmit the difference between money and wealth. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Marketing Fiction In A Changing World Part 11: Terminology in Romance by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Marketing Fiction In A Changing World
Part 11
Terminology in Romance
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg 

Last week we looked again at Marketing Fiction, and at what sells besides Sex & Violence.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/11/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html

So today we're going to discuss the part terminology plays in marketing and propose a new term to replace the term "fanfic."  We need to replace the term "fanfic" because of the Changing World in the title of this series of blog posts.

Fanfic has been the driving force behind much of the change, but fanfic itself came from something and has now leaped up to something that makes it require a new label.  That label will open vistas of potential only some of you have seen coming. 

So publishing terminology has its roots inside the fiction that's being marketed, which in turn is rooted in the writer's subconscious, in choice of objectives, in motivation for writing at all.

That's very abstract stuff, but language itself tries to make it concrete.

The classic question, "Why do you write?" is based on the assumption that there is A reason (not a plethora, not a whole personality profile).

Marketing fiction is all about finding fiction that is "aimed at" a specific "audience."  That assumes that a whole bunch of people all share ONE motive for reading (i.e. buying) fiction.

That assumption of a writer and reader sharing just one motivation is the reason that the question, "Why do you writer?" stymies writers. 

There is a why in there somewhere -- but it is not composed of anything you can articulate in a single word or sentence.

Yet all fiction is about that why.

You write a story that is about something (even if you don't consciously know what at the time).  The point of the exercise is not the "something" that the story is "about" -- but rather the "about" itself.  Being ABOUT is what Art is.

As I've discussed in these blog posts on writing craft, stories are Art.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/communicating-in-symbols.html

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

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/05/theme-plot-integration-part-9-use-of-co.html

Art depicts reality - it is not reality, itself.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/09/depiction-part-1-depicting-power-in.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/09/depiction-part-2-conflict-and-resolution.html

And marketing Art shifts and changes, more rapidly now than ever.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-important-book-what-makes-novel.html

Now consider that language, any language, also "depicts" -- the map is not the territory.  Language itself is symbolism.

We've discussed symbolism at some length:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/communicating-in-symbols.html

The essential ingredient in fiction is conflict.  Therefore, the writer must depict both sides of a philosophical argument (a thematic statement) in order for the fiction to be 'about.'  The two sides of an argument must conflict, and ultimately resolve (even if there are issues left over for a sequel.)

The "both sides" structure of a story conflict is artificial.  That division into just two sides is symbolism, not reality.

Sifting two clear, opposing points of view out of the pea-soup morass of human experience so that each side can be clearly depicted is Art.

The process of sifting and defining the two sides is the same as the process of paining a picture.  The graphic artist "selects" certain lines, composition, arrangement, colors, sharp/fuzzy focus, perspective, to "lead the eye" just as a story-writer "leads the mind" via composition.

Having laid out a clean, clear, two-sided conflict, the writer must aim the narrative (a narrative is a beginning, middle, end set of points that are given connection by the writer's composition of the picture extracted from reality).

The narrative must be structured to aim at a particular audience.

If that audience is large enough, the economics of "publishing" (traditional publishing) takes over.  The widely-aimed story becomes commercially viable at a certain break point.  That break point is constantly changing.  It used to be the volume of cardboard consumed by China dictated that break point by dictating the price of newsprint paper used to print paperbacks.

China at that time was just beginning to become a manufacturing powerhouse, and needed boxes made from cardboard to ship finished product.

So trade treaties with China (politically controversial because of China's Communism) governed the subject matter and narrative structure, the composition, of mass market paperbacks, and thus of hardcovers that could be re-published as paperbacks reaching a larger readership.

Then came our "changing world" that I've been writing about here since 2007.


With the advent of usable e-reading screens, the e-book market which had grown via PDF download, dedicated reading devices of dubious worth, html websites posting fanfic, just plain exploded.

It pretty much caught traditional publishers by surprise.

They hadn't followed the growth of hits on fanfic websites. 

And for various reasons, traditional publishers had always been way out of touch with what "readers want" -- and more in touch with what a reader will buy based on a cover, or cover-blurb, or based on what books are placed in a bookstore window or "dump" carton in an aisle. 

Book sales are all that matter to a publisher.  And book sales don't matter at all to a reader, as long as the reader gets satisfaction, or can find the next book in a series they're following.

Book sales matter to a writer only insofar as their income stream is satisfactory.  When income is satisfactory, the matter of sales fades from the writer's consciousness.  The writer is concerned only with ABOUT, with the urge to DEPICT the world in a revealing light that makes sense out of chaos.

To a writer, only the story matters, only the narrative matters. 

That's why writers are so hurt and bewildered when a traditional publisher turns down the next book in a series.  The writer is about finishing the story.  The reader is about finding out the ending of the story.  The publisher is about efficient use of resources to make a profit. 

So with the advent of usable reading screens, the readers who wanted to finish reading the story, and the writers who wanted to finish publishing the story, and some entrepreneurs who saw that connection, founded small publishing via e-books.

The first commercial level explosion of e-book sales for such small publishers was in the Vampire Romance.

Traditional Publishing started this trend -- some might say, Anne Rice's Interview With A Vampire started the trend, but I think it appeared first in YA novels about a Vampire who turns up in a High School, either as a student, a teacher, or on the periphery.  13 year old readers become adult readers in about 5 years.

And it was about 5 years after the popularity of YA vampires that we saw the Vampire Romance emerge onto bookstore shelves, buried inside the Romance genre paperbacks.

A  couple years later, Vampire Romance got a label on the spine, different labels from different publishers.

Sales peaked, then started to fall off as other sorts of Paranormal Romance appeared sporadically.  How do I know sales peaked and fell?  Because I was marketing my own material via an agent at that time, and Manhattan lunches gleaned proprietary stats and reports on how the purchasing editors were thinking.

I found that by the time I wanted into that Vampire Romance market, the publishers were saying they were over-bought on Vampire Romance, had more than a year's worth in stock or under contract, and would not even consider another submission.

They ran out of Vampire Romances, and by then other sub-genres were selling better. 

There's a perverse logic in the publishing business model, rooted in the disconnect between the objectives of a writer and the objectives of a publisher.

So when Vampire Romance readers suddenly could not find any more paperbacks to suit them, they quickly learned on the grapevine that Vampire Romance was alive and well, thriving and growing in the e-book market.

That demand for Vampire Romance, in part, drove the demand for readers that drove the technological improvements in screens.  Improved screens increased demand for e-books, and other varieties of novels, and now even non-fiction, are all e-book.

And of course, you've all heard of the contretemps between Amazon and Hatchet and other publishers over the price of e-books.  Readers have been saying for a long time that e-book prices are about double what they should be.

Small publishers are consolidating (buying each other), and refining the business model.  Many, many publishers that started up in the nascent e-book market have closed.  And now the traditional publishers used their marketing strength (and Amazon & B&N) to yank the e-book market away from small publishers. 

http://www.booksandsuch.com/blog/amazon-hachette-battle-matters/

So writers who wanted to reach their own readers self-published.

Many self-publishing writers are New York Times Bestselling writers, taking back the rights to their NYT best sellers, re-publishing them by themselves or through small e-book publishers, and then finishing their series.  Sometimes they bring out new books in new series.

Meanwhile, a lot of writers who could not sell to traditional publishing went with self-publishing.

Some of these had honed their craft on fanfic websites, getting feedback from readers, learning to use beta-readers, and grow into a skill set that works to produce good novels that hit their readers nerves squarely.

Other self-publishing writers learned as they went. 

There's an organization for e-book publishers and writers something like SFWA or RWA, complete with genre book awards and cover art awards which I joined years ago when I had my first e-book out, Molt Brother.  Now it's in paper, e-book, and also audiobook, along with the sequel, City of a Million Legends.



http://www.epicorg.com/  is the website of the e-book professionals organization and it also has an active forum where people exchange a lot of information, writers find publishers, and so on.

These are the people generating the change in the world of publishing.

So we are seeing an increasing level of quality in self-published books.

Historically, Science Fiction Fandom invented fanfic -- fiction written by fans for fans.  For the most part, science fiction fanzines never published fiction, but rather discussed conventions and novels.  But fan fiction thrived in smaller circulation, often on carbon paper, though usually not using established characters of a professional writer. 

With the advent of Spockanalia and T-Negative, Star Trek fans discovered the joys of fanfic written to expand and expound on the TV characters.  And gradually, fan writers created original characters to interact with the established characters, revealing new depths to the shallow TV depictions.

That evolution of fan fiction is the main subject of my Bantam Paperback STAR TREK LIVES!



STAR TREK was the first TV Series to engage the fertile imagination of organized science fiction fandom.  Yes, organized.  There were (and are) clubs with constitutions, slates of officers, and annual elections, plus dues and publications.  The World Science Fiction Society holds the annual World Science Fiction Convention (worldcon) and awards the Hugo, as well as other Awards.

Science Fiction fandom was (and is) organized and connected.  Today it's connected via Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks.  Then it was snailmail and telephone.

From STAR TREK LIVES! and the New York Star Trek Conventions, the media picked up on the term fanfic (especially slash), and popularized the term FAN, fanzine, fan fiction, and eventually the term FANFIC. 

In that term, FANFIC, may lie the barricade between self-published Romance novels and the prestige they deserve.  It may also give us a clue as to where the resistance against Romance comes from in the general population, even though they flock to films with a tear-jerking Romance, and give awards to the RomCom (the romantic comedy) -- yet shy from Romance per se.

Terminology is key to changing people's assumptions, or prejudices.  We changed from the term "nigger" to the term Black to indicate elevating the prestige, the potential value of a person. 

The terms Liberal and Progressive, Communist and Socialist, Independent, etc etc are continuously redefined, and then changed. 

So let's examine the origin of the term "fan" to see what it is telling the world about us.

The media, and now dictionaries and major sources, keep insisting on a misconception about the origin and meaning of the term "fan."

They insist that the science fiction fan is a FANATIC (i.e. not sane but obsessed.)

That is the label that was slapped on science fiction fandom way back before it was organized, and even afterward for decades.

A fanatic is a person who is not in their "right mind."  And usually, being a mild conditiion, the fanatic "out-grows it" or "gets over it."

Can you imagine out-growing or getting over Romance?  Come on! 

But they are saying that science fiction is a "phase" that some teens go through and therefore it is negligible, and can safely be tolerated and disregarded.  There is nothing in it (they said in the 1930's) that has any bearing on reality or the future.

30 years later, that generation sent men to the Moon. 

The next generation of science fiction fanatics invented the internet and the web.

The next twenty years saw the advent of the cell phone, then the smartphone.

Fanaticism is a mental disorder suffered by teens, like measles was considered a childhood disease you just had to suffer through. 

Fanaticism is a disease.

Today they say of the same age-group that Videogaming is "addictive."  That's it's unhealthy for teens to communicate with each other via social media.

In the 1940's they said the same thing of that generation's teens who were communicating with each other via telephone.  The picture of the teen monopolizing the ONLY phone-line in a household, holding long conversations with fellow teens (often of opposite gender) was a feature of life in the 1950's, tolerated and scorned by adults.

If you're a writer intending to grab a market-share for your work, watch what teens are doing now.  It takes about 5 years to write a novel, from Idea to published, and in 5 years today's teens will be at peak entertainment consumer years. 

But they may pick up the scorn associated with terminology used when talking about Romance Genre novels, and never explore the rich, complex, and satisfying worlds Romance writers build.

Or, if they do browse mass market paperbacks, they may never discover the worlds being created by writers using small publishers or self-publishing in e-books.

I get a couple of newsletters pitching free and 0.99cent e-books, Romance genre, Mysteries, etc. 

https://www.bookbub.com/home/

I often see books pitched as having many hundreds of 5-star reviews on Amazon.

The star-review has become the self-publisher's marketing tool, and yes, there is some fraud associated with this statistic, even though Amazon tries to prevent that. 

Still, read some of those reviews.  Even if you would scorn the book because of typos or need for editing out inconsistencies and filling plot-holes, look at the comments by readers who focus entirely on the payload, the way the STORY made them feel, not the technical flaws in the writing craft.

Those 5-star reviews are typical of fanzine reader responses to fanfic based on a TV-show. 

Get that free newsletter, click through to Amazon on a title with lots of 5-star reviews and read carefully.  And while reading, think about this.

Self-publishing is hard (writing the novel is easy by comparison).  The odds are against you selling a single copy to anyone you don't know personally. 

But there are associations of self-publishing writers who can teach you how to connect with cheap promotional strategies that might work. 

There is very likely an audience hungry for what you want to sell them.  You finding them, them finding you, or "going viral" is a long-shot.  Finding and serving a market is what publishers do -- their business model is suited to that process.  Writing uses a different business model.

But because of the adequate e-reader screens now available fairly cheap, there is a readership starving for what you write.  They just won't recognize it when starting right at it. 

What do we need to get that instant recognition?

We need a label, a symbol, a TERM which describes what this kind of fiction is, where it comes from, why it deserves their attention, and most important what it actually delivers.

The term self-published has gathered scorn because of the missing editorial steps people have become used to.

The term fanfic has gathered scorn because of the old (and inaccurate) term fanatic. 

What other artform besides writing has, historically, been a source of pure satisfaction and meaningful entertainment (and information)?

Think about the music industry.

Commercially available music has its origins in the Bards taking news, information, and historical Events and gossip from town to town, presenting it all as song. 

Isolated towns had their own youngsters who sang and played music.

Think about the old West.  Whoever in town could saw on a fiddle played for the square dancing. 

Along with all this, came one of the oldest artforms, which became known as Folk Music. 

Here's a wikipedia article on 1940's folk music.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_folk_music_revival

In the 1960's, people like Pete Seeger, Theodore Bikel, Woodie Guthrie, Johnny Cash, and people you've never heard of because they only played and sang at weddings and birthday parties.  Yesteryear's Garage Bands.

You can get this old music on Amazon, iTunes, and other websites. 

http://www.last.fm/music/Peter,+Paul+&+Mary/+similar

http://tropicalglen.com/Jukebox/Genre/FolkMusic/NewChannel.html

Yes, politics grabbed the folk song and ran with it.  Theodore Bikel's concert records have patter that reveals all that. 

But folk music reflects the life and times of those who perform and those who foster it.  It's folk, not professional.

In the 1960's it became big time professional, and highly respected -- because it made money for the music industry in records and concerts (and movies).

Country Music is the professional development of old, folk music by people who farmed and lived too far away from cities to associate with city folks.  Country was isolated because transit was slow, and internet didn't exist.  Today, many places only have satellite service if that. 

A lot of money has been made from Country Music -- and don't forget Elvis Presley came from that venue.

Today the term folk music doesn't carry the opprobrium that fanfic does.

But, if you examine folk music down to the roots, you will see that folk music and self-published novels (from people who were nerve traditionally published and actively do not want to be traditionally published) share a similar kind of popularity. 

And if you juxtapose real folk music (by folks not getting paid to do it) with professional music (by people who do it for profit), you will see an artistic similarity between folk and professional music that exactly parallels the similarity between fanfic and traditionally published fic.

Trace origins and development, find the driving force behind music, and trace how that force generated the Music Industry, and then do the same for novels.

Go back into the 1800's and study women's Gothic novels, circulating as hand-written copies among housewives.  That was fanfic.

I expect you can do the same study with Art.  There are Great Artists who are "Great" because we've heard of them.  And we've heard of them because they had Patrons and got commissions to decorate famous places (like the Cysteine Chapel, for example).  And there are folk artists whose work is left to us only as fragmentary remains on pottery sherds dug up by archeologists.

There's commercial art -- advertisements, book covers -- and there's fine art shown in galleries.  And then there's folk art, which you find in people's homes, done for the pleasure of their families.  Think about quilting, and going out to "the Country" to buy handmade quilts to hang on the wall as art. Those quilts are folk art, and they are respected.

Today, we also have Fan Art published in fanzines. 

All of these art-forms have a folk version, and a professional version.

Why shouldn't fan fiction and self-published fan fiction be the FOLKFIC of our world?

Self-publishing is so closely parallel, and often related to, fanfic devoted to underlying works and  published on websites for free reading, that the only difference is the homage paid to the underlying work.

Fanfic writers introduce original characters, and re-interpret existing characters, sometimes take them to new worlds, tell parts of a story not treated in the professionally published novels, but it is original writing.

You all know how much fanfic my Sime~Gen Universe novels have generated.  There are millions of words posted on simegen.com alone.

http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/

Also, on simegen.com we have posted some classic Trek fanzine material.

http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/

You might note on that /startrek/ index page that we have a new addition, the Scholastic Voice Magazine Star Trek Story Contest Winner from 1980.  It was written by a High School boy,  Thomas Vinciguerra, who went on to become a nationally published journalist, and who wrote many articles about Star Trek.  You can find links and the story at:

http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/contestwinner/

Here's a 2014 contest on marketing on the internet.
http://www.geekwire.com/2014/seattle-public-library-internet/
-------quote---------
As part of its ongoing Seattle Writes initiative, the library has partnered with self-publishing and distribution platform Smashwords to encourage local writers to package their writing for an audience. The eyeball icing on the finger-typing cake? A contest, open until midnight on October 15, in which up to three entrants who publish via Smashwords will have their eBooks included for circulation in the SPL eBook collection.
The fine print is hardly daunting. Have an SPL library card. Be 18 or older. Publish your eBook (for free) with Smashwords on its website. Enter the contest.
Oh. And write the eBook.
....
-------end quote------


Also a new addition to the simegen.com/fandom/ section is a short novel by a Sime~Gen fanfic writer, Mary Lou Mendum, done in Catherine Asaro's Skolian Empire universe, using some of Catherine's characters, and a whole cast of original characters.

http://www.simegen.com/fandom/skolianempire/ 

Mary Lou is an example of a writer who specifically does not want to write professionally.  It's a hobby, and she does it to please specific people.  In the case of the Skolian Universe novel, it was done to entertain someone while ill.

She's an example of a folk-writer, writing folk-fic.

Or perhaps it should be called filkfic as akin to Filk Singing.

The term Filk to describe the original lyrics sung to popular tunes done at Science Fiction Conventions dates back to a typo in a con program book.  The term was immediately adopted as a badge of honor, though what they did with music was one of the oldest traditions in folk music (new words to old songs, variations on old tunes to adapt to new lyrics).

Folk Art is the baseline creativity of humanity singing the song of the universe.

Commercial Art (mass market paperbacks) is Folk Art leveled to the lowest common denominator, made accessible to all.

Fanfic and self-publishing are both types of folk art, folk-storytelling.

The material is popular not because an insane person created it, a fanatic, but because perfectly sane people with experiences in common resonate to it, enjoy it, and elevate the performers of it to local celebrity status.

The folk of the town admire and reward the local bard, the story-teller who teaches morality to children, the shaman who teaches history to children in rhyme, and the artist who draws pictures of local events.

Fanfic and Self-published works resemble Folk Music both in content, and appeal and business model. 

But "Folk" carries a much higher prestige than "Fanatic." 

The most powerful force in civilization is the folks, not insanity or teen phases.

You don't tolerate the folks.  You admire them.   Discount the power of the folks at your peril (or so the rulers of France discovered to their tribulation.  England had a problem with those pesky colonists and their Boston Tea Party, too.)

So I propose replacing the term fanfic with the term folkfic or Folk-fic, or some variant so it includes self-published original universe fiction.  Here you find the stories the folk (the largest market there is) really want. 

The More Things Change; The More They Stay The Same.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Theme-Character Integration Part 5 - Fame And Glory: When You're Rich They Think You Really Know by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Theme-Character Integration Part 5

Fame And Glory: When You're Rich They Think You Really Know

by Jacqueline Lichtenberg 

Theodore Bikel, my favorite actor (Worf's human father on Star Trek), singer, raconteur, did an album a long time ago with a song from FIDDLER ON THE ROOF (he played Tevye on Broadway and toured it for years). 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000QQZQNY/  99cents for that single song

There's a line in "If I Were A Rich Man" -- "when you're rich, they think you really know!"

That is a wondrous song that captures the depths of human psychology, line after line.

It looks at being rich from a poor man's perspective, but not a poor man powered by greed, avarice, jealousy or resentment of those who are rich. 

The song is really about what stops us from great achievements, and what keeps us going toward great achievements which we sometimes achieve!

Would it ruin some "Master Plan" if I were a rich man?  The assumption is that riches "just happen" -- that there is no fundamental difference between a person who happens to be rich, and a person who just happens to be poor.  What kind of strength of character does it take to look at the world that way, when you just happen to be poor? 


So today we're going to use Point of View to talk about Strength of Character as a thematic element in the episodic novel (or series) Springboard. 

Here are some previous posts on the Springboard construction:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/11/index-post-to-art-and-craft-of-story.html

In Part 3 of this series,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/11/story-springboards-part-3-art-of.html
we started sketching topics relevant to constructing an Episodic Plot.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/11/story-springboards-part-4-art-of.html

We will return to the Springboards series with a Part 5 on Zombies and a Part 6 on Earning a Sobriquet.  But first we pick up the issue of Springboard Construction for a long series of novels by delving deeper into issues of Theme-Character Integration.

There was a TV show a while back titled FAME.  And that was the theme of the series -- all about a special High School teaching performers the skills to achieve fame on the stage.

The Klingons in Star Trek embodied WAR IS GLORIOUS as a theme.

"Fame" and "Glory" often equal "Riches" in the minds of Characters who do not have these traits.  Notice Tevye only yearned for "a small fortune." 

The starry-eyed attraction toward "fame" (or local popularity) and the sense of achieving something "glorious" (e.g. something that goes viral on YouTube), are deep human responses that are laced with raw thematic material writers can use with wondrous results.

I had a quick exchange on Twitter a few months ago with Rex Sikes and Becket Adams

Twitter Bios:

Rex Sikes' Movie Beat conversations w filmmakers Inet radio show, website & blog - subscribe to podcast actor/producer/director/ filmmaker & interview host

And Becket Adams bio:

Business writer @theblaze. Opinions are my own. Re-tweets because they're funny, foolish, or newsworthy. badams@theblaze.com

------twitter exchange--------

BecketAdams 9:02am via Web

Pro tip: Just because someone famous and/or inspirational said it doesn't mean it's wise or true.

RexSikesMovieBT 9:04am via TweetDeck

How2 get your movie funded @FlywayFilmFest @Trigonis "it's bout who you R (who r you?) becuz people give2 people not2 projects"

JLichtenberg 9:04am via HootSuite

@BecketAdams Agreed, one should not idolize the famous. Just because you're rich doesn't mean you REALLY KNOW!

JLichtenberg 9:06am via HootSuite

@RexSikesMovieBT It's a combo! "who you R" = "what project U choose" = "what ppl you know who know U" = "FUNDING INVESTED IN U"

JLichtenberg 9:09am via HootSuite

@RexSikesMovieBT "Who U R" = Keeping Ur Word = delivering ON TIME = No gossip, bad-mouthing others, or Put-Downs. Character is a MUSCLE

And after a couple minutes, @RexSikesMovieBT answered me, so I Retweeted.

JLichtenberg 9:25am via HootSuite

RT @RexSikesMovieBT: @JLichtenberg very wise words you share! ==> THANK YOU!

Somewhat later RexSikesMovieBT answered:
I am quoting speaker in my tweets.RT @JLichtenberg: @BecketAdams @RexSikesMovieBT Excerpted Ur tweets on getting movie funded…

-----------end twitter exchange----------

Which praise got me to thinking.  Most people just preen themselves when praised, or maybe get shy and crawl under a rock. 

Me?  I THINK -- I dissect and analyze what I said, what that praising person thought I said, why they thought that, why I said what I said just that way and not another way, and how the exchange created a "stirring in The Force" as they say.

THINKING-THINKING-THINKING

It is often said men consider thinking about emotion to be anathema, a horror to be avoided at all costs, and a sure sign of a lack of strong character.  Only WOMEN think about feelings -- and only women talk about feelings, articulate emotions "on the nose."

That's certainly true in our current culture.

But is it a universal truth about humankind?

After all, we have the whole Book of Psalms which has been preserved and is read regularly to this day -- and it is mostly poetry about feelings written mostly by men (I can't prove only by men, but the attributions are all to men, mostly King David.)

Being a science fiction writer by trade, I generally come to "but is it a universal human trait" with the immediate backlash of, "what would non-humans for whom it is a universal trait create for a culture?"  Or what if they didn't have that trait at all? 

That's how Gene Roddenberry (as I learned while interviewing GR and the actors and crew of Star Trek (ToS) for the Bantam Paperback STAR TREK LIVES!)  arrived at the concept "Vulcans" and why Gene fought to have Spock retained, combining "Number One" (the unemotional female first officer) with Spock-half-Vulcan-science-officer character, who turned out to be the source of SCIENCE FICTION ROMANCE as a genre.

Yes, the first human/alien romances were Star Trek Fan Fiction --  the first Christian SFR (written by a Reverend's wife!) is posted for free reading on simegen.com:

http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/showcase/

It is Star Trek fan fiction about a Romance with Spock involving a Christian woman who is a very devoted and sincere Christian -- so the conflict is inherent in the situation.  The work abounds with deep themes.  And it's well crafted, easy reading. 

SFR and romance novels in general are really about character.

One of the signature expressions of "character" is the way people respond to "Fame and Glory" (Spock is a great example of both) -- either by being famous and preening under yes-men praise and fawning-fans, or by lusting after the Glory of Fame from a low-self-esteem position.  Hence the Spock character became the center of many "Mary Sue" stories. 

Part of the appeal of Romance to the very young teen girl is the aura of "what it will feel like to have HIS attention on ME."  Awakening sexual awareness is all about very greedy attention-grabbing.  Hold that thought.  We'll get back to greed at the end of this blog entry.

Attention-grabbing is the core of fame.  It is also the core of the High School yearning for "popularity."

"Glory" is often seen as the pre-requisite to Fame.  The HS Football Star's girlfriend, for example. 

Being voted "Most Popular" in High School, it turns out, is not the key to success in the rest of life.  But during the High School years, popularity is often seen the only way to success in life. 

Likewise, in college -- being the Party Guest Of The Year is not the key to success that can substitute for actually learning how to think, and how to teach yourself anything you subsequently need or want to know.

Fame does not mean you really KNOW!!!

The only ones who think that fame means you really know are those who are not famous.

Do you see the subject we're circling around here?

It is the simple thesis I've been harping on in these blogs.

CONFLICT IS THE ESSENCE OF STORY

And a whole lot of "conflict" that generates story-movement is all about Point Of View.

The famous look at the world from one point of view; the non-famous see it all from a different point of view. 

Likewise with riches, with real expertise, with age, with wisdom, with disability due to injury, with disability due to birth defects, etc etc -- each of these points of view provide different perspectives which, when pitted against each other, create conflict that causes the characters to change. 

Story is the sequence of lessons learned by the main character whose story you are telling, the lessons that are mileposts along that character's arc.  "Story" means how that character changed his point of view. 

The plot is the sequence of events that happen TO the character who internalizes a lesson from that event.

The main character does something on page 1 -- makes a decision, parses a problem and sets a goal, evaluates a character and decides to invest in that character's project, or tries to get others to invest in their own project.

How is Romance related to investing? 

Romance is related to investing via the investment that one makes in the Significant Other -- the Soul Mate.

Soul Mating is all about joining two into one -- just like merging a business. 

To make the joint-venture profitable, both firms must eliminate the overlapping and duplicated departments (secretarial pool, rented space in the cloud). 

In the case of Romance, it can be the renting of two apartments that has to be eliminated.  It used to be that record collections and book collections would be merged, discarding duplicates -- with iTunes and e-books, that isn't how it's done anymore.  Today it's more about cancelling duplicate ISP accounts.

Once joined, the Soul Mates each "lack" something ( look up "packing fraction" in atomic physics -- the energy an atomic nucleus does not have because it was emitted when the components joined to create that nucleus.)  In a Romance, the packing-fraction would be the discarded duplicate DVD, book, or ISP account, the extra square-footage rented, etc. 

Now look again at Star Trek. 

Gene Roddenberry joined two characters into one, in order to get his show on the air, in order to appease the Network which refused to risk money on a show that put a woman in command of men on a bridge crew.

GR had to discard either Spock or Number One (by making her male), and chose the non-human crew member to speak of how humans look from the outside.  

Science Fiction is all about Point of View from inside a Character.  Crafting and expressing that Point of View requires clarity of a theme wholly integrated into (married to) a character. 

To do that, Gene Roddenberry lost the avante guarde thrust into a feminist culture that he wanted Trek to be. He got it back with the first inter-racial kiss on TV, Kirk and Uhura, but when he made this decision to drop Number One, he didn't know he'd be able to pull that off.

So Uhura got lines like, "I'm scared, Captain."  But the show got on the air.

Gene Roddenberry (and quite a few others) got fairly rich from it all -- a "small fortune."  He got rich because "they" invested in him, not in Trek. 

Does that mean the Rich Really Know?  Does that mean GR really knew? 

Well, he did become famous, too, so obviously that means he really knew, right? 

Think about it.  THINK-THINK-THINK.

Combining Number One and Spock drove human male Characters on the show to speaking about emotion, out-loud on TV.  What a concept! 

I knew Roddenberry -- spoke with him in private, personally, recorded and transcribed interviews with him, studied what he said and excerpted it for the book STAR TREK LIVES!  (all this while writing Sime~Gen Novels, too). 

So during this twitter exchange cited above, my thoughts went from considering why people invest in getting movies made (usually via Kickstarter) -- to the idea that they are investing in YOU, in the person not the project, to why "they" invested in Roddenberry.  He was, at that time, a known Character -- it was only the Idea that was crazy-nuts-ridiculous.  They invested in him, not Trek. 

*I*N*V*E*S*T*I*N*G* in YOU -- wow. 

It is not the project but YOU that gets the investment.  How very personal that makes all business -- just like romance gets really, intimately, personal.

OK, person not project.  Hmmm.  And Conflict is the Essence of Story as well as of Plot.

If you want to understand the world, you have to "follow the money." 

So in your novel that you are writing, you depict how investment money (or emotion) flows to the Character not the Project that the Character is launching.

Remember that THEME is the glue that holds the entire artistic composition of a novel, TV screenplay, Series, Feature Film, -- any fictional work -- together.

That's why SAVE THE CAT! emphasizes the necessity of getting that "Theme Stated Beat" just right. 

I happened to have been watching the fall, 2013 first episode of the season of ONCE UPON A TIME just before engaging in that twitter exchange, and I had noted how (once again) this show delivered a picture-perfect THEME STATED BEAT. 

At this moment, I don't remember what that theme was -- I just remember how that beat leaped out at me in vivid technicolor as being just, absolutely, p*e*r*f*e*c*t*l*y executed.

And that perfection came from the construction of the characters. 

Consider that each of the characters in ONCE UPON A TIME is "famous" in their own right -- from the fairy tale characters they are based upon.  Some of them are "rich" too.

When you're rich, they think you really know.

So with all of this sizzling around in my head, I got into a conversation with a professional writer in a chatroom between tweets in that twitter exchange.

The conversation was about "life, the universe, and everything" -- A.K.A. "what's wrong with this world?"  I mean what else do professional writers talk about in off moments in private?  It went from current political campaign maneuvers to assisted living facilities to water quality control to building new bridges and infrastructure, all the way to G-d Himself.

During that chatroom exchange I got onto one of my hobbyhorses -- CHARACTER. 

We follow fictional characters episode after episode because of the story of the characters -- not because of the PLOT. 

It is the character arc that intrigues us.   

During the years of ST:ToS, series characters were not allowed to "arc" -- because the shows had to be viewable in any order to qualify for syndication and thus be worth the cost of production.

But fans wouldn't accept that "anthology" structure.  Fans wanted to follow the characters through life-changes -- such as finding true love.  So they wrote and shared their own Trek stories. 

For fans, aired-Trek was just the springboard for the stories they shared. 

Here is a non-fiction book about the development of Fan Fiction.  I have an essay in here, as does Rachel Caine, author of the best-selling Morganville Vampires series.
http://www.amazon.com/Fic-Fanfiction-Taking-Over-World/dp/1939529190/

A "springboard" -- like a diving board -- must flex under the weight of the character, then "spring" upward to hurl the character into the arc. 

The board must not break at the bottom of the flex.  What gives your story springboard that flexibility and strength to support the weight of the character is theme. 

Fame and Glory Makes "them" Think You Really Know so "they" invest in you rather than your project

That is a concept replete with strong and flexible thematic material. 

So as I was tweeting, I found myself in this chat room expounding on a thesis -- a point that seems to be escaping notice by the general public, and is therefore a theme to generate a Best Seller. 

Fame, Glory, Riches are tools.  Who is the tool user? 

Your characters are tool-users, just like real people.  Sometimes a Character gets used, as if he/she were a tool.  They invest in you, not your project.  That's how politicians get "chosen" by the financial backers to be "groomed" for office.  The money gets invested in grooming the politician's image, not in what the politician stands for, not his personal hobby-horse, not his project but in him. 

Lots of really great books and films have spoken on themes such as The Hollywood Producer who says, "I will make you a star!"

Here is the gist of the micro-essays I hammered out between the tweets cited at the top of this entry.

------edited transcript of chatroom discussion ------------

ME 9:46 am
    ...yes, I object strongly to high-density populations -- VERY strongly.  Humans are not built for that.  It ruins all sense of morality. (previously cited studies on rats over-crowded turning violent)
    But schools are AWFUL EVERYWHERE -- graph historical deterioration against growth of Fed Dept of Ed.

 SHE 9:47 am
    The people who were running for school board were against diverting all the tax payer money to the private schools which is stripping the public schools of all the arts and sports programs.
    No music, no art, no sports of any sort, not school plays, no concerts.

 ME 9:48 am
    I'm against arts and sports programs in public schools -- flat against. 
    COERCION AND BULLYING ARE WRONG
    And that's what "sports" has become.  No such thing as "sportsmanship" any more.  Public School sports programs do not build character as they once did.  Sports was all about character building; now it's about winning, not about how you play the game, or behave toward the loser.  Nobody loses, so no character building happens.
.....
 ME 9:50 am
    Art used to be about character building (the shows I love are about STRENGTH OF CHARACTER IS REQUIRED FOR SUCCESS) -- today Fed money supports pub school arts programs that prevent art from expressing necessity to be a STRONG CHARACTER (kids now think "strong" means bulging muscles gained by taking pills). 
  "Art" used to be taught as a method of displaying poetic justice abroad in the world.  Those who adhered to the highest moral standards would win in the end.
    That was THEN -- this is NOW.
    Things have changed.

 SHE 9:51 am
    It's still wrong to strip the public schools of these programs just to send a few other kids to special ed classes.

 ME 9:52 am
    If you make it a fight over money -- bullies win by crying "You victimized me."
    WATCH for the victim mentality and how passive-agressives play the victim card to mask the fact they are bullies.
    THE LESS MONEY THEY CONTROL THE MORE HONEST THEY WILL BE -- control of large amounts of money you didn't make by your own sweat tests character, and it is character that our society is lacking right now. 
------pause chatroom transcript--------------

I was thinking about Tevye's lack of envy and jealousy, about his unconscious assumption that money was not a limited resource, that if he had a small fortune it didn't mean others in the town would have less.  "Would it upset some master plan?" he asks.  In his world, sending some kids to special ed would not mean "stripping the public schools of programs."  Tevye didn't live in an Aristotelian, zero-sum-game world.  Is Tevye a "strong character?"

Remember, we're chasing what it is about "story" that creates "interesting."  Is it in the point of view? 

We are looking into the story-element "character" and pondering the adage "follow the money" to understand why investors invest in the person, not the project (and how that can make for interesting episodic story-structures.)

Some investors may have decided that strength of character is the signature of a person who will be able to bring a project to successful (profitable) conclusion.  Gene Roddenberry was definitely seen as having strength of character. 

Other investors may be looking for a "weak character" who can be manipulated and bamboozled into doing the investor's bidding. 

The twitter exchange above indicates publishers invest in you more than in your novel. 

Do you have the "strength of character" to imbue your fictional characters with strength?

Can you show-don't-tell character strength? 

Can you increase or decrease a fictional character's strength during that character's arc, and pace that change in such a way as to interest your audience?

The essence of story is character while the essence of plot is conflict. 

In this chatscript, I expressed a point of view about the world around us as suffering from a gradual weakening of "strength of character."  If that's true, what does that mean to publishers looking to profit by investing in you, the writer, rather than in your book?

Entertainment that is intrinsically interesting to the greatest number of people, entertainment with "reach," is (today; not in ST:ToS's market) entertainment structured around Character Arc.

Character Arc used to be only growth of characters toward a stronger moral or ethical fiber, an increasing ability to handle large amounts of power over others and not wimp out on choosing "the right course of action" over the "expedient course of action" or the popular course, or the profitable course. 

The advent of the anti-hero has led to popularity of a character arc that traces the devolution of character.

A great example of that is Laurell K. Hamilton's Vampire Series about Anita Blake. 

Up to #22 in that series now:
http://www.amazon.com/Affliction-Anita-Vampire-Hunter-ebook/dp/B009NY3HSG/

I think that anti-hero character devolution trend has bottomed out and we're turning a corner.

I see that turning in the evolution of the Vampire Romance -- the Vampire once represented the epitome of seductive Evil, and has been transformed by Romance fans into a hero returning from the pits of hell to be a staunch advocate of morality (at least to the extent of not-killing his lovers).

The Sexy Vampire Hero is so interesting to me for how he resists temptation (for blood).  Resisting temptation is a measure of strength of character.  The Anita Blake Series describes giving in to temptation as the only sane course. 

-------Back to chatroom discussion where I'm talking to a professional writer -----------

 ME 9:55 am
    You are intrepid -- and you don't see all that's happening around you because you are a person of very strong character. 
    You would not be challenged by being handed control of billions of dollars -- you don't understand the kind of challenge others face when in that position because you are such a GOOD person, down to the core.  They are good people, too  -- and you recognize yourself in them -- but fail to comprehend where exactly they are weak that you are strong.

 SHE 9:57 am
    I guess that's true. When I fantasize about winning the lottery my first thought is all the swimming pools I'm going to fund for the Town, the half-way houses....

 ME 9:58 am
    OK, so you see what I mean.  Watch for it -- it is subtle, but devastating.  And the origin is at the point where the Fed d of ed deleted the teaching of GEOMETRY PROOFS from HS.
    They just lately promulgated an actual prohibition on teaching geometry proofs in that Core thing they're beating down people's throats.  That core thing rewrites history -- in ways only you would see -- considering that praise from your former HS History Teacher.

 SHE 10:00 am
    Actually, I see in the candidates they put up for office how they have no understanding of how things work.
    I don't mean politics either.
    They don't understand the difference between a law and a regulation. The don't understand what jurisdictions are.

 ME 10:01 am
   Yes, law vs reg -- YES!
    Very important.
    Also I watch a lot of shows about grifters and rackets -- watch for those tactics being used on voters and then the voters do not see it even though they watch the same TV shows.

SHE 10:02 am
    I was at a forum where they're asking businesses to discuss outdated and duplicating regulations, ones that cause more harm than good.
    But none of these people spoke about regulations, only laws.
    They had no idea about the difference.
    These people are running businesses.
    Also, I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, "well, that's a good law because it does standardize certain safety measures and make things easier."
    But, THEY consider it too much paperwork.
    It really is nuts. One good thing that came down from, actually I think it was Obama, was that there had to be a country wide standard of chain of command for first responders.

ME 10:03 am
    'REGS THAT DO MORE HARM THAN GOOD'  -- don't confuse the tool with the tool-user when examining the source of a result.
    "Guns don't kill people -- people do"  "videogames don't make children into criminals"  and 'regulations don't cause the harm - it is the regulation creators and users who do the harm'  -- PEOPLE DO THE HARM NOT THE TOOL THEY USE. 
   That's a principle - a theme - in TV shows about grifters and rackets.
  Grifters can only manipulate Marks who haven't the strength of character to ignore their own Greed.  Protection Racket uses the Greed for Safety to manipulate Marks by arousing fear.  The Mark's Greed is the tool the Grifter uses. You can't eliminate Greed from human nature.  That tool is always there for grifters to use.  It's the grifter that does the harm, not the Greed.  
   That's related to what I was saying about CHARACTER.  It's people of weak character who shoot people, become criminals because of their chosen entertainment, waste themselves on the internet, or bully others on Facebook. Facebook is a tool -- IT IS THE TOOL USER WHO DOES THE HARM, not the tool.  A rock can make a meditation garden restful or that same rock can be a weapon to murder someone with or drop off an overpass onto a car.  You can't eliminate harmful behavior by eliminating tools like guns.  The one bent on harm will pick up a rock, which can be even more deadly. 

 SHE 10:06 am
    The Chain of Command Reg is so that CAPTAIN, means the same level of authority and responsibility throughout the country.
    When firemen from New York go to help out in New Mexico and someone says, "ask the Captain," they all know exactly what they all mean.

 ME 10:08 am
    YES - CHAIN OF COMMAND FOR FIRST RESPONDERS -- yes, but it is the tool USER who sees that wondrous powerful tool of Chain of Command and decides to use it for harm (maybe because they don't see the harm but just the personal gain). 
   "Too much paperwork" complaint is because the weak character of the people involved in a long chain of command makes the whole chain REQUIRE SUPERVISION.     They aren't individuals who operate on individual judgement calls made on the spot.  Ordinary, normal people aren't considered smart enough to act on personal recognizance and take the consequences of their actions.  All decision-making must be centralized and "accountable" to others -- no individual judgement allowed.  If we'd done that in WWII, we'd have lost. 
   Today people think personal, on the spot, judgement calls must be eradicated because of the "danger" that the judgement call won't be correct and the person who made that call (or their supervisor) will be legally liable.  In a world where kids are raised to have increasingly strong characters throughout life, they automatically mature to make correct judgement calls (mostly) no matter how fast-moving events may be. 
  Developing strong judgement is the main side effect of developing strong character.    Since we have deteriorating strength of character, we think it's better to have "tight supervision" and "chains of command" (long ones) so responsibility can be escaped as long as you don't act on your own judgement. 
   Once supervision is in place, then the "power-seekers" (who are always of weak character) will flock to the control point of central command and use those regulations to DO HARM (whether they realize what they are doing is harm, or not).  We appoint certain people to become Users of the Tools that we make others into -- but those "power-seekers" are not of stronger character than the "tools" they are appointed to use.
   An entire chain-of-command composed of individuals of weak character will not perform nearly as well as a single individual of strong character -- e.g. a Hero. 
   The source of all the problems making headlines (I'm seeing hot novel-topics all over the place!)  today that all seem unrelated to one another is WEAK CHARACTER. 
    Don't blame the tool (gun, Law, Regulation, or Bible) for the tool user's bad judgement stemming from weak character.
 ----------END TRANSCRIPT--------

So the character trait that you can base a long, interesting episodic series upon lies within that element quoted in the song from FIDDLER - "when you're rich, they think you really know."

Fame, Glory, Riches

Those of "weak character" look upon those traits as something to be desired, something which can solve all their problems, alleviate their emotional pain (about which they will not speak because it's an emotion). 

Those of "strong character" look upon those traits as undesirable because they cause more problems than they solve.

Today's audiences seem to want their fiction to solve all problems without the agony of increasing character strength (that teen-angst-agony used to be called Growing Pains).

The solution to most problems that avoids all Growing Pains, or character Arc, avoids all strengthening of character, is violence -- sometimes substituted for by sex.

Only those of weak character "...kill only when I have to." 

Those of strong character don't kill because they never "have to." 

Writing Exercise

Create a Hero and an Adversary -- imbue one with a strong character and one with a weak character -- then convince your reader that each one has a "project" they want the other to "invest in" which is "right" and "righteous." 

Pit them against each other, let the explosion blow apart and reassemble each of the characters -- let the characters ARC, each becoming stronger in character and thus less prone to use force (of law, regulation, grifter-trickery, or backup Authority such as Religion) to get the other to do what they want.  Get the characters to "invest" in each other (that's the core of the Buddy Story from Save The Cat!). 

Relationships between Lovers who happen to become Buddies are the essence of the kind of Springboard that can propel an episodic plot.   

If you want a model for this, check out the TV Series Suits,

http://www.usanetwork.com/suits/cast/harvey-specter

and look carefully at the characters of Jessica and Harvey and their Relationship.  I think of Mike Ross as the Star of this show, but he doesn't have a love-relationship with his prime Adversary.  Louis Litt, however, just may be the mirror of the Harvey/Jessica relationship.  Look at the "strength" depicted in Harvey (who now has an old love-relationship returning to his life), and watch how he mentors Mike into similar strength -- how he clashes and meshes on values.

Study that show for the almost-but-not-quite tease in these Relationships. 

Watch all the shows in close order to capture the "off-the-nose" discourse on ethics and values -- stating the ideal, then not-quite living up to it, then taking the consequences of that failure. 

You might want to do a contrast/compare study between Suits and The Incredible Hulk TV series
http://www.amazon.com/The-Incredible-Hulk-Pilot/dp/B000WFSLRM/

In HULK, the Hero and the Adversary are the same person. 

Some of the episodes were written by my Facebook friend, Allan Cole, and he has told that story in "My Hollywood Misadventures" which is now in paper, e-book and audiobook:

http://www.audible.com/pd/Bios-Memoirs/My-Hollywood-MisAdventures-Audiobook/B00FAUNP1Q/

If you can trace the character arcs in your own story in a way that reveals the Poetic Justice behind all the events of Life, The Universe, And Everything -- it is very likely that the publishers you submit the story to will view you as a Strong Character worth investing in.

Your strength will be revealed in the path, the dynamic arc, of your characters because the characters will be fully integrated into the theme. 

For a book editor, "investing in you" can mean sending you a contract, then sending you rewrite orders.  The editor will consider that the investment has paid off if you send back a rewritten manuscript that now comes up to the publisher's specs.  Profit comes when the product actually markets easily. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com