The prevailing scientific consensus about the relationship between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals has been reversed, as reported in this article:
Humans Did Indeed Mate with Neanderthals
I've always been disappointed by articles and TV programs in which evolutionary anthropologists expressed near-certainty that no Neanderthal DNA had crept into the human genome. Of course, that didn't necessarily mean occasional matings that left no permanent trace never occurred, but the hypothesis seemed to disprove major plot elements in one of my favorite novels, CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR. Now I can rejoice that Ayla's half-Cro-Magnon, half-Neanderthal baby could have existed.
Recent developments indicate that the human family tree is much more tangled than the diagrams in older books suggested. Several kinds of early hominids coexisted, rather than one species or subspecies following the last in orderly progression. I always found the idea of crossbreeding between "modern humans" and their close kin an intriguing possibility—if not that, at least close interaction between our kind and the "missing links." In the 1939 story "The Gnarly Man," by L. Sprague de Camp, a man in a sideshow claims to be the last of the Neanderthals. Isaac Asimov's "The Ugly Little Boy" portrays a Neanderthal child kidnapped by near-future scientists with a time machine. I don't remember reading any stories about surviving colonies of Neanderthals among us, but surely some author must have written one. I'd like to believe a Bigfoot population exists in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, and if so, I imagine them as a species of hominid displaced by our conquest of the Earth but not driven to extinction. And now we know about the "hobbits," an extinct, diminutive not-quite-human island-dwelling people.
One thing I don't like about that article on Neanderthal-human interbreeding—the writer's contrast between "Neanderthals" and "people." It has long been established that they were no less intelligent than the "modern humans" (Cro-Magnons) living alongside them in Ice Age Europe, even if their minds worked a bit differently, so they were "people" too. It's exciting to imagine the plot possibilities of sharing the planet with a different humanoid species. Civil rights for Neanderthals? Would racism and speciesism slip into society's treatment of them under the guise of "protecting" creatures who don't look quite like us and therefore are clearly a "lower" species of primate? I've just finished Charlaine Harris's latest novel, DEAD IN THE FAMILY; in her alternate universe, the legal rights of vampires are limited, and there's a push for legislation to force all were-creatures to register with a government agency. Our society's past track record with interracial relations, not to mention the current plight of gorillas and chimpanzees, hints that "cave men" among us wouldn't fare much better. By the way, did anybody watch the short-lived TV series by that title? From the reviews, it sounded so dumb I didn't bother. What a cool premise that could have been if treated seriously!
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
The Hurt Locker, Indie Films, Financing TV - Part I
I'll cut this long post into two parts again as an experiment.
-----------
Introduction
The topic here is "If you want to understand the world, follow the money." And by following the business model and financing sources for the fiction delivery system, we might understand things well enough to boost the Alien Romance field's respectability. So here is a history lesson in financing fiction, followed by how that historical root has shaped what's happening now and reveals what might happen next. If you anticipate what's going to happen next, you can turn a profit on it.
---------
Part I
The world of commercial fiction has been turned inside out, upside down, and backwards by the advent of the Web, and especially Web 2.0 with Web 3.0 and even 4.0, all going mobile.
iPhones, iPads, TV sets that hook up to your home network and let you fish for TV shows and films posted online, with or without a fee, nevermind Kindle and now iPads that can access Kindle's library.
The result of all this technology is a world which closely resembles the world STAR TREK fanzine writers really wanted to create.
And I don't mean in their fiction. Most portrayals of The Enterprise in STAR TREK fanzine stories was less futuristic than the 1960's TV show itself.
I mean in the ability to participate in joint story creations, to communicate instantly, to collaborate and share, all to the purpose of expressing in fiction what is nearest and dearest to the heart. To share universes.
In order to create and purvey their pastiche fiction based on a TV show, fan writers invented an entirely new world.
But they didn't do it all by themselves out of nothing.
Here's how it happened, and I'll show you below what all this has to do with The Hurt Locker (the film about a bomb squad in Iraq that won an Academy Award in 2010).
This also relates to the transformation of the artist's business model by the re-defining of "copyright" erupting from the whole Open Source software movement, and Creative Commons Licensing.
And that copyright issue can be traced back to Star Trek fanzine writers too. Oh, what a tangled web!
Before 1966 and Star Trek, in the 1930's, science fiction magazines connected readers of science fiction and basically invented modern SF as well as SF fandom. In fact, the very people who invented modern SF and created that community (called First Fandom) actually invented the word "fandom" out of "fanatic" and "domain" or "Kingdom."
Science Fiction fans, a bunch of guys, mostly in New York and Philadelphia, got together (physically met in one physical place), and kept meeting regularly and irregularly and created "conventions" as the events where the most of them would turn up.
They admired the writers in the magazines and the very few books. As it became hard to get together physically, they began writing to each other about the stories in the magazines and books, and about the writers, and about each other, and about the most recent gatherings. They invented an entire language to discuss these matters.
There came to be more and more of them, so they needed many copies of their letters to each other, and invented "fanzines." At first these were a few pages filled with letters and essays, copied on a spirit duplicator (which printed in purple ink), and later on mimeograph (decades before xerox copiers were invented), and stapled, then mailed to each other via the Post Office. Yes, snail mailed.
The letters would typically be a few weeks or a few months old by the time you got to read them.
At first, nobody charged money for these fanzines. You got them by contributing a letter or article. The publisher footed the expense out of pocket.
Some 'zines became so large that publishers asked non-contributors to pay a fee for paper, printing and postage. Audiences grew.
I have a fanzine of this variety with a letter from me in it, and my contributor's copy took more than 3 years to catch up with me, what with all the forwarded addresses.
I joined SF snailmail fandom when I was in 7th grade and have been a member of the N3F ever since (National Fantasy Fan Federation - founded by damon knight who also founded SFWA, the profession SF writer's organization where I'm also a Life Member).
Into this world of SF Fandom, Star Trek was born. The show captured the attention of SF Fen (the plural of fan is fen). They discussed it in fanzines.
Devra Langsam and some other New York fen who were captivated by Star Trek started a Star Trek fanzine called Spockanalia -- on mimeo, paper now totally disintegrated, ink faded, and I still have my copies. I had an article MR. SPOCK ON LOGIC, in the 4th issue.
The idea caught on, and suddenly Spockanalia was publishing fiction.
SF 'zines usually didn't publish fiction except as send-ups, spoofs, farces and gotcha's.
But suddenly, dozens of Star Trek fanzines were publishing fiction and articles and letters of comments on the fan written fiction and articles. A whole new world of Star Trek was born.
And Star Trek conventions where fanzines were sold, and story ideas concocted for more fanzines.
I created the Star Trek Welcommittee (modeled on the N3F Welcommittee which had welcomed me into fandom)to answer fan mail from STAR TREK LIVES! ST Welcommittee connected thousands of new and isolated Star Trek fans to the snailmail network. It's being reincarnated on facebook by another fan now.
Today that snailmail world of fanfic and letters of comment on fanfic lives and grows online. Last week here (May 4th, 2010) we derived a writing lesson in SHOW DON'T TELL from a bit of fanfic based on the TV show White Collar published on fanfiction.net.
What has SF Snailmail Fandom to do with Indie Films?
Star Trek fandom produced (is still producing) billions of words of fiction derived from a TV show. It connected thousands of writers and readers in a network that spanned the globe and discussed life in terms of fiction.
The content of that fanfiction violated all the "rules" and requirements of published SF, but was in most cases actually SF.
For a quick overview of classic Star Trek fanfic and some prime examples you can read free see:
http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/
The SF-Romance was, I believe, first explored in one of those fanzines, an Inspirational SF Romance.
http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/showcase/
Those first classic ST fanzines sold and traded at Star Trek conventions gave rise to the "genzine" -- 'zines that contained not just Star Trek but pastiche derived from other TV shows (Man From Uncle, The Professionals). Then whole 'zines devoted to other shows (Dr. Who, etc).
Today, fanfiction.net has almost every TV show's fans posting fanfic.
These original TV spinoff fanzines had to be non-profit (and able to prove it) because of violation of copyright. At first, Star Trek, and other shows tried to stop fanzines being printed and circulated with actual legal cease and desist notices for copyright infringement.
This led to a clarification of the copyright law called today "fair use" and with a proper disclaimer and proof you make no profit, you can distribute fanfic.
That re-energized the fanfic community, and now a whole generation has grown up with a very different idea of what copyright is and what it's for.
Remember, Star Trek gathered, connected and energized whole communities of very geekish tech-minded young people. Out of that community's attitudes and activities has arisen the "Open Source" software movement and Creative Commons licensing.
Now we have a whole philosophy of life based on the "Open Source" concepts.
Meanwhile, also out of the (mostly) women fiction writers and readers arose another boundary shattering behavior.
The women who wrote TV pastiche wanted SF-Romance, and wouldn't let the traditional publishers deny it to them. They wrote it themselves.
At that time, you could not sell (professionally) any original SF or Fantasy that had even ONE sex scene in it.
Fanzine markets grew explosively after STAR TREK LIVES! was published by Bantam.
Then you could have go-to-black sex scenes in prof SF/F novels but human/non-human sexual relationship was considered, well, ...kinky?
1985, my SF Romance DUSHAU won the first Romantic Times Award for SF. (3rd novel in that trilogy gets right down to the sexual issue)
For Kindle edition and free chapters see
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
November 16, 1986 issue of The New York Times Book Review published (now famous traditionally published SF author) Camille Bacon-Smith's article SPOCK AMONG THE WOMEN featuring Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg's Star Trek fan fiction.
Then you could have chaste, non-anatomical-language sex scenes in prof SF/F novels.
Academic books mentioned ST fanfic, other newspapers, TV interviews, the internet -- online fanfic explosion.
And now you can hardly sell SF or Fantasy without fully orchestrated, every detailed action revealed, sex scenes. And prof Romance novels use sex scenes the way SF novels once used action-scenes -- as a pacing, punctuation between plot developments.
As the teen fanfic writers and readers grew up, the professional market accommodated their demand for more sex in their adventure fiction (i.e. mixing genres).
Now the biggest professional market is kickass heroine fantasy with combat punctuated by sex scenes. SF without sex isn't selling so well.
SF Snailmail Fandom formed the basis of ST snailmail fandom which created a market which is now served by traditional publishers.
The Indie Film community is following the same developmental path.
The Hurt Locker is an Indie Film. (Independent Film; not a product of Disney, Warner Brothers, big studios).
It's not even the first Indie to win that kind of major attention. Low budget, non-studio films, have done this before.
And that's not a new path. The women's Gothic Novel, once circulated in handwritten manuscripts woman-to-woman, eventually emerged into professionally printed novels.
What young teen fans do quietly on their own, even privately, eventually (used to take 40 years; now it may be only 10 years) emerges to dominate the adult world.
The Indie Film was essentially a fanzine until recent years, and at some levels still is. Most of the indies made are made by beginners or amateurs just for the fun of it.
YouTube has unleashed a flood of talent among the youngest people, learning to entertain an audience with a video, just as young people learned to entertain readers with fanfic and moved on to become professional writers and editors -- who now publish material with those same quirks professionally.
Recent works, like The Hurt Locker, are blazing a trail for works done as much from love of the subject and the medium as for the profit, are reaching award levels.
You must see this one, starring Nichelle Nichols -- click this link to see all the very interesting awards this film won --
Lady Magdelene's
(if you've got 2 or 3 hours - you can watch it on amazon video on-demand for $3)
http://www.amazon.com/Lady-Magdalenes/dp/B002XKK3ZM/rereadablebooksr/
Clicking that link won't force you to pay. You can see all about the movie.
This is a well marketed indie film.
I loved it because the flaws don't bother me any more than the flaws in a fanzine. It showed me a lot about what's happening in the low budget, indie film market, and what real professional skill used in a bare-bones budget film can achieve.
And this one won a number of film festival awards besides the one listed on imdb.com
The point here is that Indie Films have become the modern fanzine, even more than text pastiche on fanfiction.net
And the off-beat, violate-all-the-rules content of these films is becoming mainstream because these indie films are creating an audience.
This Indie Film audience is like the readers of SF in the 1970's who stopped buying traditionally published SF to spend their time and money on Star Trek fanzines.
And then, when Star Trek novels were published by Pocket, they might read those novels, but flatly refuse to follow the professional SF authors who wrote those novels into the author's other SF/F universes.
The publishers concluded that Star Trek fans were not interested in SF/F.
They were wrong.
It was the traditional publisher's rules that turned the readers off.
----------
So here I'll cut you off in suspense. Look for Part II next Tuesday.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
-----------
Introduction
The topic here is "If you want to understand the world, follow the money." And by following the business model and financing sources for the fiction delivery system, we might understand things well enough to boost the Alien Romance field's respectability. So here is a history lesson in financing fiction, followed by how that historical root has shaped what's happening now and reveals what might happen next. If you anticipate what's going to happen next, you can turn a profit on it.
---------
Part I
The world of commercial fiction has been turned inside out, upside down, and backwards by the advent of the Web, and especially Web 2.0 with Web 3.0 and even 4.0, all going mobile.
iPhones, iPads, TV sets that hook up to your home network and let you fish for TV shows and films posted online, with or without a fee, nevermind Kindle and now iPads that can access Kindle's library.
The result of all this technology is a world which closely resembles the world STAR TREK fanzine writers really wanted to create.
And I don't mean in their fiction. Most portrayals of The Enterprise in STAR TREK fanzine stories was less futuristic than the 1960's TV show itself.
I mean in the ability to participate in joint story creations, to communicate instantly, to collaborate and share, all to the purpose of expressing in fiction what is nearest and dearest to the heart. To share universes.
In order to create and purvey their pastiche fiction based on a TV show, fan writers invented an entirely new world.
But they didn't do it all by themselves out of nothing.
Here's how it happened, and I'll show you below what all this has to do with The Hurt Locker (the film about a bomb squad in Iraq that won an Academy Award in 2010).
This also relates to the transformation of the artist's business model by the re-defining of "copyright" erupting from the whole Open Source software movement, and Creative Commons Licensing.
And that copyright issue can be traced back to Star Trek fanzine writers too. Oh, what a tangled web!
Before 1966 and Star Trek, in the 1930's, science fiction magazines connected readers of science fiction and basically invented modern SF as well as SF fandom. In fact, the very people who invented modern SF and created that community (called First Fandom) actually invented the word "fandom" out of "fanatic" and "domain" or "Kingdom."
Science Fiction fans, a bunch of guys, mostly in New York and Philadelphia, got together (physically met in one physical place), and kept meeting regularly and irregularly and created "conventions" as the events where the most of them would turn up.
They admired the writers in the magazines and the very few books. As it became hard to get together physically, they began writing to each other about the stories in the magazines and books, and about the writers, and about each other, and about the most recent gatherings. They invented an entire language to discuss these matters.
There came to be more and more of them, so they needed many copies of their letters to each other, and invented "fanzines." At first these were a few pages filled with letters and essays, copied on a spirit duplicator (which printed in purple ink), and later on mimeograph (decades before xerox copiers were invented), and stapled, then mailed to each other via the Post Office. Yes, snail mailed.
The letters would typically be a few weeks or a few months old by the time you got to read them.
At first, nobody charged money for these fanzines. You got them by contributing a letter or article. The publisher footed the expense out of pocket.
Some 'zines became so large that publishers asked non-contributors to pay a fee for paper, printing and postage. Audiences grew.
I have a fanzine of this variety with a letter from me in it, and my contributor's copy took more than 3 years to catch up with me, what with all the forwarded addresses.
I joined SF snailmail fandom when I was in 7th grade and have been a member of the N3F ever since (National Fantasy Fan Federation - founded by damon knight who also founded SFWA, the profession SF writer's organization where I'm also a Life Member).
Into this world of SF Fandom, Star Trek was born. The show captured the attention of SF Fen (the plural of fan is fen). They discussed it in fanzines.
Devra Langsam and some other New York fen who were captivated by Star Trek started a Star Trek fanzine called Spockanalia -- on mimeo, paper now totally disintegrated, ink faded, and I still have my copies. I had an article MR. SPOCK ON LOGIC, in the 4th issue.
The idea caught on, and suddenly Spockanalia was publishing fiction.
SF 'zines usually didn't publish fiction except as send-ups, spoofs, farces and gotcha's.
But suddenly, dozens of Star Trek fanzines were publishing fiction and articles and letters of comments on the fan written fiction and articles. A whole new world of Star Trek was born.
And Star Trek conventions where fanzines were sold, and story ideas concocted for more fanzines.
I created the Star Trek Welcommittee (modeled on the N3F Welcommittee which had welcomed me into fandom)to answer fan mail from STAR TREK LIVES! ST Welcommittee connected thousands of new and isolated Star Trek fans to the snailmail network. It's being reincarnated on facebook by another fan now.
Today that snailmail world of fanfic and letters of comment on fanfic lives and grows online. Last week here (May 4th, 2010) we derived a writing lesson in SHOW DON'T TELL from a bit of fanfic based on the TV show White Collar published on fanfiction.net.
What has SF Snailmail Fandom to do with Indie Films?
Star Trek fandom produced (is still producing) billions of words of fiction derived from a TV show. It connected thousands of writers and readers in a network that spanned the globe and discussed life in terms of fiction.
The content of that fanfiction violated all the "rules" and requirements of published SF, but was in most cases actually SF.
For a quick overview of classic Star Trek fanfic and some prime examples you can read free see:
http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/
The SF-Romance was, I believe, first explored in one of those fanzines, an Inspirational SF Romance.
http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/showcase/
Those first classic ST fanzines sold and traded at Star Trek conventions gave rise to the "genzine" -- 'zines that contained not just Star Trek but pastiche derived from other TV shows (Man From Uncle, The Professionals). Then whole 'zines devoted to other shows (Dr. Who, etc).
Today, fanfiction.net has almost every TV show's fans posting fanfic.
These original TV spinoff fanzines had to be non-profit (and able to prove it) because of violation of copyright. At first, Star Trek, and other shows tried to stop fanzines being printed and circulated with actual legal cease and desist notices for copyright infringement.
This led to a clarification of the copyright law called today "fair use" and with a proper disclaimer and proof you make no profit, you can distribute fanfic.
That re-energized the fanfic community, and now a whole generation has grown up with a very different idea of what copyright is and what it's for.
Remember, Star Trek gathered, connected and energized whole communities of very geekish tech-minded young people. Out of that community's attitudes and activities has arisen the "Open Source" software movement and Creative Commons licensing.
Now we have a whole philosophy of life based on the "Open Source" concepts.
Meanwhile, also out of the (mostly) women fiction writers and readers arose another boundary shattering behavior.
The women who wrote TV pastiche wanted SF-Romance, and wouldn't let the traditional publishers deny it to them. They wrote it themselves.
At that time, you could not sell (professionally) any original SF or Fantasy that had even ONE sex scene in it.
Fanzine markets grew explosively after STAR TREK LIVES! was published by Bantam.
Then you could have go-to-black sex scenes in prof SF/F novels but human/non-human sexual relationship was considered, well, ...kinky?
1985, my SF Romance DUSHAU won the first Romantic Times Award for SF. (3rd novel in that trilogy gets right down to the sexual issue)
For Kindle edition and free chapters see
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
November 16, 1986 issue of The New York Times Book Review published (now famous traditionally published SF author) Camille Bacon-Smith's article SPOCK AMONG THE WOMEN featuring Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg's Star Trek fan fiction.
Then you could have chaste, non-anatomical-language sex scenes in prof SF/F novels.
Academic books mentioned ST fanfic, other newspapers, TV interviews, the internet -- online fanfic explosion.
And now you can hardly sell SF or Fantasy without fully orchestrated, every detailed action revealed, sex scenes. And prof Romance novels use sex scenes the way SF novels once used action-scenes -- as a pacing, punctuation between plot developments.
As the teen fanfic writers and readers grew up, the professional market accommodated their demand for more sex in their adventure fiction (i.e. mixing genres).
Now the biggest professional market is kickass heroine fantasy with combat punctuated by sex scenes. SF without sex isn't selling so well.
SF Snailmail Fandom formed the basis of ST snailmail fandom which created a market which is now served by traditional publishers.
The Indie Film community is following the same developmental path.
The Hurt Locker is an Indie Film. (Independent Film; not a product of Disney, Warner Brothers, big studios).
It's not even the first Indie to win that kind of major attention. Low budget, non-studio films, have done this before.
And that's not a new path. The women's Gothic Novel, once circulated in handwritten manuscripts woman-to-woman, eventually emerged into professionally printed novels.
What young teen fans do quietly on their own, even privately, eventually (used to take 40 years; now it may be only 10 years) emerges to dominate the adult world.
The Indie Film was essentially a fanzine until recent years, and at some levels still is. Most of the indies made are made by beginners or amateurs just for the fun of it.
YouTube has unleashed a flood of talent among the youngest people, learning to entertain an audience with a video, just as young people learned to entertain readers with fanfic and moved on to become professional writers and editors -- who now publish material with those same quirks professionally.
Recent works, like The Hurt Locker, are blazing a trail for works done as much from love of the subject and the medium as for the profit, are reaching award levels.
You must see this one, starring Nichelle Nichols -- click this link to see all the very interesting awards this film won --
Lady Magdelene's
(if you've got 2 or 3 hours - you can watch it on amazon video on-demand for $3)
http://www.amazon.com/Lady-Magdalenes/dp/B002XKK3ZM/rereadablebooksr/
Clicking that link won't force you to pay. You can see all about the movie.
This is a well marketed indie film.
I loved it because the flaws don't bother me any more than the flaws in a fanzine. It showed me a lot about what's happening in the low budget, indie film market, and what real professional skill used in a bare-bones budget film can achieve.
And this one won a number of film festival awards besides the one listed on imdb.com
The point here is that Indie Films have become the modern fanzine, even more than text pastiche on fanfiction.net
And the off-beat, violate-all-the-rules content of these films is becoming mainstream because these indie films are creating an audience.
This Indie Film audience is like the readers of SF in the 1970's who stopped buying traditionally published SF to spend their time and money on Star Trek fanzines.
And then, when Star Trek novels were published by Pocket, they might read those novels, but flatly refuse to follow the professional SF authors who wrote those novels into the author's other SF/F universes.
The publishers concluded that Star Trek fans were not interested in SF/F.
They were wrong.
It was the traditional publisher's rules that turned the readers off.
----------
So here I'll cut you off in suspense. Look for Part II next Tuesday.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Sunday, May 09, 2010
Racism and Romance, Speciesism And Subplot
Sometimes, the nastiest topics make for the best stories. Horror, Murder, forbidden love... almost every taboo.
Book Four of the Raine Benares Novels got me thinking about racism and speciesism. And Romance.
I feel I ought to say that Lisa Shearin has been an auto-buy for me since I read her first book in the series, Magic Lost, Trouble Found. I've enjoyed all four of Raine's adventures to date, and am pleased to hear that there will be two more books. I finished Bewitched and Betrayed in the small hours of Wednesday, and have not yet quite recovered.
Yes, it was a page-turner, and I was thoroughly self-indulgent/irresponsible to stay up half the night to finish it. I'm too old for that! Moreover, as I painted a ceiling yesterday, I found myself reciting the name of one of the fascinating male characters. Now, I'm really too old for that!!!!
Spoiler alert.
I'm going to try to avoid a spoiler.... but I suppose most of Lisa Shearin's avid readers and followers know that Lisa announced on her blog that there would be a decision made regarding Raine's love triangle.
Moreover, Lisa Shearin's world-building, characterization, and creativity is so enchanting that I cannot believe that the primary reason people read books two, three and four was because they wanted to know how the love triangle would be resolved.
Possibly, a menage would have been more interesting as a solution. Definitely, actually.
Which brings me back to speciesm.
To my way of reading this series, everything boils down to the simmering hatred that the goblins have for the elves and vice versa. It's like Iran and Israel. The insane and evil goblin King and his current administration would like to purge the world of elves. The elves would like to exist. If they are attacked, they will defend themselves vigorously.
Everyone wants the ultimate weapon, even the undead. (Which reminds me of Harry Potter and The Sorceror's Stone on steroids, because the only safe person to have the weapon --a stone-- is the one person who does not want to use it.)
Not every goblin is bent on world domination. There are broad-minded goblins. There are goblins who are sexually attracted to elves. Society disapproves of inter-species liaisons, but lust rules --or at least, it rules the loins of goblin dark mages-- so there are half-breeds, and the half-breeds tend to be badly treated by both high elves and old goblins.
There are also evil-minded elves who favor pre-emptive strikes and ethnic cleansing. One can be beheaded for having a mismatched pair of parents, or for marrying into the wrong race, provided more reasonable charges can be trumped up for a legal figleaf.
Pun intended, goblins come in all shades of grey. The elves run the entire moral gamut, from the darkest of elven dark mages to bright white avenging archangels.
Traditionally, do forbidden love stories have to either end badly? Could an elven Juliet ever expect to live happily ever after with a goblin Romeo? Would Shakespeare's play have been classed a successful comedy if the nice, virtuous Paris (Juliet's father's choice for her) had been a little more proactive?
Master Plot #15 in Ronald B Tobias's "20 Master Plots (And How to Build Them)."
Forbidden love stories never end well. Abelard was lucky. He only got castrated.
Much as I would like to read a forbidden love story with a happy ending, Raine's is not a forbidden love story at all. The racism and speciesism are background and motivation for the bad guys.
Pity! Then again, off the top of my head, I cannot think of any good examples of SFR where an alien hero's people seriously want to wipe out the human heroine's people.
Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed Bewitched and Betrayed, and recommend it highly.
Book Four of the Raine Benares Novels got me thinking about racism and speciesism. And Romance.
I feel I ought to say that Lisa Shearin has been an auto-buy for me since I read her first book in the series, Magic Lost, Trouble Found. I've enjoyed all four of Raine's adventures to date, and am pleased to hear that there will be two more books. I finished Bewitched and Betrayed in the small hours of Wednesday, and have not yet quite recovered.
Yes, it was a page-turner, and I was thoroughly self-indulgent/irresponsible to stay up half the night to finish it. I'm too old for that! Moreover, as I painted a ceiling yesterday, I found myself reciting the name of one of the fascinating male characters. Now, I'm really too old for that!!!!
Spoiler alert.
I'm going to try to avoid a spoiler.... but I suppose most of Lisa Shearin's avid readers and followers know that Lisa announced on her blog that there would be a decision made regarding Raine's love triangle.
Moreover, Lisa Shearin's world-building, characterization, and creativity is so enchanting that I cannot believe that the primary reason people read books two, three and four was because they wanted to know how the love triangle would be resolved.
Possibly, a menage would have been more interesting as a solution. Definitely, actually.
Which brings me back to speciesm.
To my way of reading this series, everything boils down to the simmering hatred that the goblins have for the elves and vice versa. It's like Iran and Israel. The insane and evil goblin King and his current administration would like to purge the world of elves. The elves would like to exist. If they are attacked, they will defend themselves vigorously.
Everyone wants the ultimate weapon, even the undead. (Which reminds me of Harry Potter and The Sorceror's Stone on steroids, because the only safe person to have the weapon --a stone-- is the one person who does not want to use it.)
Not every goblin is bent on world domination. There are broad-minded goblins. There are goblins who are sexually attracted to elves. Society disapproves of inter-species liaisons, but lust rules --or at least, it rules the loins of goblin dark mages-- so there are half-breeds, and the half-breeds tend to be badly treated by both high elves and old goblins.
There are also evil-minded elves who favor pre-emptive strikes and ethnic cleansing. One can be beheaded for having a mismatched pair of parents, or for marrying into the wrong race, provided more reasonable charges can be trumped up for a legal figleaf.
Pun intended, goblins come in all shades of grey. The elves run the entire moral gamut, from the darkest of elven dark mages to bright white avenging archangels.
Traditionally, do forbidden love stories have to either end badly? Could an elven Juliet ever expect to live happily ever after with a goblin Romeo? Would Shakespeare's play have been classed a successful comedy if the nice, virtuous Paris (Juliet's father's choice for her) had been a little more proactive?
Master Plot #15 in Ronald B Tobias's "20 Master Plots (And How to Build Them)."
Forbidden love stories never end well. Abelard was lucky. He only got castrated.
Much as I would like to read a forbidden love story with a happy ending, Raine's is not a forbidden love story at all. The racism and speciesism are background and motivation for the bad guys.
Pity! Then again, off the top of my head, I cannot think of any good examples of SFR where an alien hero's people seriously want to wipe out the human heroine's people.
Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed Bewitched and Betrayed, and recommend it highly.
Thursday, May 06, 2010
Vision and Intelligence
About a week ago I saw a TV show on the Science Channel about animal intelligence. I'd heard about most of the phenomena before, such as the evidence that parrots don't merely "parrot" words but apply them in the proper context. For instance, a parrot won't say "goodbye" when a person is arriving. A parrot on this program actually knew how to add, or at least to count cumulatively, which is basically the essence of adding. While the trainer was testing another bird on identifying numbers, the older bird spoke up with "two" when the first two items were shown. When another pair of items was shown, instead of "two," the older bird said "four." And when yet two more items appeared, he said "six." There was no chance of cues from the trainer, as is the usual explanation for animals who "count," because the trainer was trying to get the less experienced bird to say "two," not even interacting directly with the older one.
One feature on this program was completely new to me, though: Monkeys can recognize—and count—objects in pictures. The experimenters put out two boxes, one with a picture of an apple, the other with a picture of one and a half apples. The monkeys consistently went to the box with the image of a larger amount of fruit. A further experiment tested whether they knew the difference between an image and a real object, which human babies don't, at first (below a certain age, a baby will try to pick up a pictured object off a page). Monkeys do know the difference; they always went for a real fraction of an apple taped on a box rather than box with a picture of whole apples. (It was not explained how the experimenters ruled out the possibility that the animals identified the real fruit by smell rather than by three-dimensionality.)
Suppose, however, we meet aliens with eyes or brains so different from ours that, although intelligent, they don't recognize that a two-dimensional image is supposed to represent an object? Remember the rabbits in WATERSHIP DOWN, who are presented as living and thinking like rabbits but with a human degree of self-awareness. Like those potential aliens, they are baffled by another rabbit warren's attempt to portray events from their myth cycle in the medium of two-dimensional mosaics. How can colored stones stuck on a wall "be" the rabbit god? Human beings are so used to learning and teaching by means of pictures that this difference might present a major impediment to recognizing the other species' intelligence or, at least, communicating with them. In a different medium, suppose those ETs had literally no concept of or capacity for nonfactual speech? Imagine the alienness of trying to communicate with a species that couldn't understand stories or even hypothetical examples.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
One feature on this program was completely new to me, though: Monkeys can recognize—and count—objects in pictures. The experimenters put out two boxes, one with a picture of an apple, the other with a picture of one and a half apples. The monkeys consistently went to the box with the image of a larger amount of fruit. A further experiment tested whether they knew the difference between an image and a real object, which human babies don't, at first (below a certain age, a baby will try to pick up a pictured object off a page). Monkeys do know the difference; they always went for a real fraction of an apple taped on a box rather than box with a picture of whole apples. (It was not explained how the experimenters ruled out the possibility that the animals identified the real fruit by smell rather than by three-dimensionality.)
Suppose, however, we meet aliens with eyes or brains so different from ours that, although intelligent, they don't recognize that a two-dimensional image is supposed to represent an object? Remember the rabbits in WATERSHIP DOWN, who are presented as living and thinking like rabbits but with a human degree of self-awareness. Like those potential aliens, they are baffled by another rabbit warren's attempt to portray events from their myth cycle in the medium of two-dimensional mosaics. How can colored stones stuck on a wall "be" the rabbit god? Human beings are so used to learning and teaching by means of pictures that this difference might present a major impediment to recognizing the other species' intelligence or, at least, communicating with them. In a different medium, suppose those ETs had literally no concept of or capacity for nonfactual speech? Imagine the alienness of trying to communicate with a species that couldn't understand stories or even hypothetical examples.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, May 04, 2010
TV Show White Collar Fanfic And Show Don't Tell
The previous two weeks, we have looked at 7 Pursuits to engage in that will help you teach yourself to write. Those posts are:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/7-pursuits-to-teach-yourself-writing.html
and
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/7-pursuits-to-teach-yourself-writing_27.html
One very fruitful exercise in teaching yourself to write is writing fan fiction about your favorite TV show or movie characters.
So now we're going to use the USA Networks TV show White Collar for a lesson (an arduous lesson) in SHOW DON'T TELL. I'm going to try to show-not-tell how to show-not-tell, then explain what I did and give you a chance to do the drill.
You don't need to have watched White Collar to grasp the elements in this drill, but it might help to browse the website for White Collar.
http://www.usanetwork.com/series/whitecollar/ (the website comes on with audio-commercials)
Writing is a performing art, as I've told you I was taught, and as such it is a vocation, a calling, more than a profession. Writing is a lifestyle.
Writers do it even when reading. Can't help it. If you're a writer, you are constantly and incessantly rewriting everything you read, or even TV shows you watch -- even great TV shows like White Collar. Yes, Watching TV is work for a writer. I watch about 6 hours of fiction a week.
So a friend of mine pointed me to a bit of fanfic she had written based on White Collar. She's a seasoned professional writer who can't write without plot, pacing, style, structure, and conflict that resolves. Like all writers, she rewrites TV shows as she watches them, then continues to write the show's story-arc, fixing little things here and there.
Like me, she watches White Collar with an eye on the pickle Neal finds himself in.
That situational pickle is why I like the show. I liked Remington Steele, Quantum Leap and It Takes A Thief for the same reason - the pickle inherent in the situation.
Most TV series, especially anthology series, don't address the inherent pickle.
That pickle is called the "springboard" and is a vehicle to get you into the story, not something that they intend to resolve.
Quantum Leap is a good example. Only occasional episodes addressed the physics of the problem that got Dr. Sam Beckett stuck leaping from one time to another or how to get him out of that pickle. The point of the show was "solving problems" in people's lives by taking over their life from inside their own body.
But the only thing that interested me was the pickle and the solution, not the problems of the people he visited.
Time Travel Romance routinely does this too. The mechanism of the time travel leap is more fascinating to me than the Romance unless the writer can make them one and the same -- the novel A Knight In Shining Armor now out on Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/Knight-Shining-Armor-ebook/dp/B000FC0QO8/rereadablebooksr/
is an example of making the Romance more prominent than the time-travel mechanism.
So, in the TV Show White Collar, the Romance and the pickle are intertwined perfectly. You've got to solve the pickle to solve the Romance. You've got to solve the Romance to solve the pickle.
Neal agrees to work for the F.B.I. helping catch white collar criminals (his colleagues and rivals) in order to get out of jail so that he can find and maybe rescue his lover, the one serious relationship in his life.
At the point of this story, Neal has just seen his soul mate killed in an explosion and has nothing left. The F.B.I. has him on a leash (an ankle tracking device). Meanwhile, he's become good friends with the only cop ever to catch him. The cop keeps tempting him to go straight. And any romance reader can see Neal's wide-open to a new lover, but not emotionally settled enough yet.
So my friend the writer starts plotting, and out comes a (brilliant) solution to Neal's pickle.
It's 2AM after a hard day writing for pay, and she's jumping up and down with this fabulous idea. Got to write it or she won't sleep a wink, nevermind write the next piece in a way that can earn her pay. The mind writes what the mind writes.
So she wades in to solve Neal's pickle in a real quick fanfic. She's tired and wants to get right to her idea. This piece is aimed only at those who watch this show's episodes over and over and probably write fanfic about it themselves. They know the material, they don't need an introduction just a quick sketch of her particular variation on Neal's character, and then into the story she wants to write.
So she perpetrates the biggest no-no in the writing craft, right up front of her story where it really matters, she starts off with tell rather than show, cramming in some foreshadowing that doesn't belong in the opening, then dashes off the story itself and posts it. As an afterthought, she points me to the first chapter of the story (which already has rave reviews being posted), "Look what I wrote. What do you think?" And of course she's referring to her solution to the pickle.
And what do I do?
I rewrite her opening tell into show and send it to her.
I had a grand old time writing fanfic to my friend's fanfic. Then I realized I'd done a writing lesson I could use to show you what I've been talking about when I say "show don't tell" -- my friend does not need this lesson and knows that I know that. She was not offended when I showed her my scene, and even agreed to let me use it for you.
Here's the URL for the story she posted - it has 7 chapters you can find in the dropdown at the upper right:
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5885164/1/Grace_In_The_Confidence_of_Others
Here's the opening paragraphs as she wrote them. Read them, study, and rewrite them as SHOW rather than TELL before reading what I did.
------------
Summary – When Neal is playing a con, pulling a heist or creating a forgery, he has all the confidence in the world. But when these tools are not an option the only thing he has to save himself and the lives of others is something he's not too sure of at all, his own self worth.
Grace in the con fidence of others
Chapter 1/7
By Ultracape
They hung in almost every office, were tacked on nearly all the peg boards and some having been enthusiastically signed with a flourish by the grinning artist were framed and brought home and displayed in places of honor. There were few in the F.B.I.'s White Collar Crime Division who had not yet felt graced with a Neal Caffery original sketch.
It was the easiest con he'd every pulled, even if it was totally unintentional, and nothing to be proud of. As far as Neal was concerned if they were foolish enough to think his creations were any good he'd brag about his talent and play along. Then maybe he would not be the first one people looked to when something went missing in the office. Maybe he could get through a day feeling like his honest work meant something.
Even when he put his life on the line, something that happened with increasing frequency it seemed, it was not his word people trusted, it was his tracking anklet and the ever present threat of prison for the slightest infraction of what he felt were arbitrary and inconvenient rules, just begging to be broken for a good or even not so good cause.
The thing was, while it was rare for Neal to find any task difficult, when he did face difficulty, he did not have the experience to work it through. Fitting in, being accepted; playing by the rules eluded him, frustrated him and turned every day into a struggle to achieve what seemed to come so easily to others.
Gaining people's respect and trust in a persona for a con, for a heist, for the space of no more than a few weeks, was easy, especially for a man of Neal's brilliance. But earning the trust of others with nothing to show for his life but a list of alleged crimes, one conviction and a prison term was a greater challenge than he'd ever faced.
None but Neal's handler, partner and friend, F.B.I. Special Agent Peter Burke, could see through the armor of his fashionable suits, his charming veneer, his eagerness to be helpful, his know it all (because he did) attitude and his wit and puppy dog eyes to the troubled, childlike soul, the person who thought of himself as worth less than his doodles.
Now, just months since his girlfriend, Kate, had been killed, Neal's self-confidence was at an all time low. As far as Neal was concerned, the murder of his lady love, had been the final blow showing him that no matter what he did, what he accomplished, he was worth nothing, just some tool to be used by whoever needed his considerable criminal talents.
If trading his life for a hostage was needed it was no problem, and good riddance if said trade ended in his death. Thievery and coercion were against the law except if some mysterious uber-leader wanted to maneuver Neal into steeling something that supposedly didn't exist from a foreign government. But once Neal accomplished the deed, blowing him up was a convenient way to get rid of his inconvenient presence. And just for fun, pining a crime on him to cover up someone else's misdeeds was no big deal. As far as everyone was concerned, Neal deserved to be in prison, or dead.
Fine, he got the message. He was free as long as they could use him and his choices were prison or death and Neal did not want to go back to prison. Maybe this early morning meeting with Peter would lead to a means to an end. His experience as a consultant for the F.B.I. showed him how easy it was to step in front of a bullet even when he wasn't trying.
Having arrived early, Neal took out his small sketch pad he always kept with him to occupy his time. As usual, his thoughts drifted off to Kate and flashes of their life together, always ending with the explosion that took her from him. It was just that burst of brightness, this time from the sun angling its rays against a building and reflecting suddenly onto his face that he became aware he was staring out at the clear day, the tall glass monoliths sparkling in the morning light. He was halfway done before he even realized he was sketching the cityscape, somehow, even in black and white, capturing the brilliance of sparkling buildings, giving them a vitality unseen by passersby. His back to the door, Neal was so focused on his work that he did not notice the two men, one carrying a file, who walked into the room until one of them gasped.
"Oh my G-d, Peter!"
------------
OK, to do a good job rewriting this opening, you should read the whole story, all 7 Chapters, but I had read only this first chapter to the end before I couldn't resist creating a SHOW out of this TELL opening.
For the purposes of this drill, just reading that first chapter should be enough.
I'm going to show you here an illustration of a simple fact I learned from Marion Zimmer Bradley. Writing is a craft. It can be trained into you like driving, tennis, pottery. The training consists of drill-drill-drill, and that's about it. Talent of course helps, but is neither a necessary or sufficient condition to doing what I'm going to show you.
This is an exercise in "put in the data and grind the crank." It is a mechanical exercise devoid of artistic dimensions. It is an exercise in walking and chewing gum. It is an exercise in doing a lot of writing craft techniques simultaneously, and cross-integrating each with the other.
This scene appeared in my mind, WHOLE and complete, produced by the training my subconscious has endured over the years. Writing it down only took a few minutes. I did not think about this. I didn't laboriously figure it out. My subconscious produced the scene in a flash-photo and I knew it was the SHOW that corresponds to the TELL in this story opening just twisted into my own characters.
I watch this TV show, and I have inside my own head, a Neal & Peter set that doesn't resemble those my friend writes about here. So in writing the scene down, I distorted her characters, and deleted points she had inserted as foreshadowing of the subsequent events that I hadn't read about yet.
For her to attach my opening scene to her story would mean the entire thing would have to be rewritten, after rewriting my opening to correct the characters to be her own characters. The foreshadowing I deleted would have to be moved to later. And then the pacing and plot and everything else would have to be adjusted.
Had she stopped to create an opening scene instead of the long "tell" opening, it would have been an entirely different scene than the one I concocted.
This will be the case with anything you come up with to cast that TELL opening into a SHOW opening. Your Neal (whether you've watched the show or not) is not my Neal or Ultracape's Neal.
That's what makes fanfic so much fun! You can have your cake and eat it too! You can have dozens, even hundreds, of versions of the same character in various versions of a pickle, and watch the problem get worked out in thousands of ways.
If you have no idea how to transform her TELL into a SHOW, here's a clue. You need to create a SCENE in which almost all the information in her TELL is illustrated by visuals, by things, by actions, and by acting business.
To show not tell, you need to create a scene, so your piece must have a scene's STRUCTURE.
If you don't know the rules for creating a scene, first read:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure.html
And it's sequel post:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html
Yes, "show don't tell" means "construct a scene that conveys this without saying this."
Scene Structure mastery cures Expository Lumps.
Ultracape's opening "TELL" is mostly exposition.
If you don't know what an Expository Lump is, or have been excoriated by your beta readers for expository lumps (or told your writing is boring), read these posts first:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/source-of-expository-lump.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/sexy-information-feed.html
And this one focusing on Michelle West's novel THE HIDDEN CITY as an example of information feed.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/for-my-review-column-httpwww.html
I call what Ultracape did for the opening "information feed" - and she chose telling the information as exposition and narrative instead of showing it with a full fleshed scene.
She did that because it's easier and faster. You will find that you do it often, too, and on rewrite you are faced with the problem of how to fix it. Sometimes a scene is the solution, so this exercise may help you meet a looming deadline one day.
WRITE YOUR OWN SCENE NOW.
OK, now here's what I did with it. Read what I did, then we'll go through it again, identifying the craft skills for various items in this scene. Then you can rewrite what you did, if you think it's warranted. You can post your results as a comment on this blog to get feedback.
------------
GRACE IN THE CON FIDENCE OF OTHERS
(opening rewrite by Jacqueline Lichtenberg)
The motor pool sedan lumbered over the broken field.
Neal Caffrey sat beside his handler, Peter Burke, who wrestled the car up next to a row of identical ones and parked it precisely in line. Neal clutched a plain brown wrapped package in his lap and noted the hint of a smirk on Peter's otherwise friendly face.
Peter got out, pocketing the keys and leaned on the open door. He surveyed the immense bon fire smoking downwind of the parked cars. On the other side of the fire, a small fire truck and four geared up firemen supervised the flames. On this side, four guys in F.B.I. jackets watched, hands in their pockets.
Peter looked back at Neal, eyebrows raised. "Well? You going to pay off this bet, or not?"
I'm not a welcher. Never have been. Even Peter knows that. I thought.
Neal got out, slammed his door, and tucked the package under his arm. "What now?" The bon fire of counterfeit currency blazed merrily.
"Follow me."
Peter led the way up to the group of F.B.I. guys, hitched his suit jacket back and shoved his hands in his pockets, starting to talk before Neal got close enough to hear against the wind.
As he approached, Neal's artist's eye took a snapshot of the tableau.
In one instant, the group opened and swallowed Peter, becoming a group of five F.B.I. guys, one of which didn't wear a labeled jacket. But five F.B.I. guys, solid and unbreakable.
Odd man out, Neal joined the group, very aware that it was still five guys and him, not six guys.
"...sure thing," one of them was saying. "But I have to see what's in the package first."
"No problem," replied Peter, and gestured casually to Neal to unwrap the package in his arm.
Neal held the bottom of the package and ripped the taped shut top open.
"Oil paintings, on canvass," said Peter. "They'll burn easily. All forgeries, we don't ever want to get back into circulation, if you know what I mean."
One of the guys plucked a rolled canvass out of the package and held it open. He whistled. "You sure this isn't the real thing?"
Neal interjected, "They're not."
The guy asked, "How do you know?" And he scrutinized Neal, as if checking his face against memorized wanted photos.
"I painted them."
All four guys riveted eyes on Neal.
"So," Peter broke in, "can we feed your fire?"
"Go ahead." The guy handed Neal back the rolled painting.
Peter gestured to Neal and the moment of paying off his bet with Peter came upon him like a cold shower. He'd been stupid to open his mouth and volunteer to burn these himself. He had been so sure he'd been right about Dorothy Putnam's double timing her S.E.C. boss on those CDO's. But she'd been lily white, and Peter had won the bet.
Neal walked up to the fire, gaining the alert attention of both firemen at the left and right of the pile of burning currency.
A gust of wind drove the flames and smoke away from Neal, and he took that moment to hurl the first painting onto the fire.
I can make more. he thought grimly as he flung each painting onto the leaping flames. So why does this hurt?
The brown wrapper followed the canvasses, flapping in the wind.
Neal turned to face the welded together group of five F.B.I. guys and paced the distance back to them.
He could have just let me burn them in my fireplace. He made it back to the car certain he'd shown no hint of the pain he didn't let himself feel.
By the time they arrived at the office, Neal's back had relaxed enough for him to stride freely down the corridor, even though fully aware of each of his freehand sketches displayed on the walls.
They hung in almost every office, were tacked on nearly all the peg boards and some having been enthusiastically signed with a flourish by the grinning artist were framed and brought home and displayed in places of honor.
He realized he'd been doing a lot more of those sketches since the murder of his lady love. There were few in the F.B.I.'s White Collar Crime Division who had not been captured in a Neal Caffery original sketch.
Why do they keep them? The scene of the morning returned full force, Peter melding seamlessly into the group of four F.B.I. guys, and himself apart. He tried to shake it off. They don't see me as just some tool to be used by whoever needs my unique skills!
But Neal knew that as far as those four guys were concerned, he deserved to be in prison, or dead, if they could only remember the right wanted poster.
But I've decided to do whatever it takes to stay out of prison, and I can do whatever I decide to do. Right?
Peter's phone rang. As he slipped it from his pocket, he said, "Neal, wait for me in my office, okay? I'll be right back." And he took off down the hall, phone to his ear.
Neal sighed and watched him go. See? What did I tell you? he told himself silently. I'm just a convenience, a crime solving appliance.
He slipped into Peter's office and took out his small sketch pad he he carried for waiting-room-moments.
As usual, his thoughts drifted off to Kate and flashes of their life together, always ending with the explosion that took her from him.
But this time, it was just a burst of brightness from the sun angling its rays against a building and reflecting suddenly onto his face, not an orange and angry black explosion.
He became aware he was staring out at the clear day, the tall glass monoliths sparkling in the morning light. His hand was sketching the cityscape, a simple pencil sketch capturing the brilliance of sparkling buildings, giving them a vitality unseen by passersby.
His back to the door, Neal was so focused on his work that he did not notice the two men, one carrying a file, who walked into the room until one of them leaned over his shoulder and gasped.
"Oh my G-d, Peter!"
-------------
And from there it's as Ultracape wrote it, presenting Neal with an opportunity to wriggle out of his pickle.
This is an exercise in SHOW DON'T TELL.
In narrative or screenwriting, you must create VISUAL IMAGES out of intangibles, just as commercial writers have to make you want to buy a perfume or a particular brand of toothpaste.
Things that have to be illustrated are emotions, attitudes, moods, character, relationship, background, backstory without exposition.
So let's go through what I wrote again, looking for how I did that. Then you can go through what you did, and see if you can think of a better way to do what you did.
So here's my scene again with comments in CAPS.
---------
The motorpool sedan lumbered over the broken field. (OPENING IMAGE - A ROUGH JOURNEY NEARING AN END)
Neal Caffrey sat beside his handler, Peter Burke, who wrestled the car up next to a row of identical ones and parked it precisely in line.
(CHARACTERIZATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP (BESIDE) AND OF PETER (NEAT, CAREFUL, ORGANIZED, RULE-CONSCIOUS). SETTING AND BACKSTORY INDICATED - IDENTICAL CARS - FORESHADOWS THEY ARE FBI - FORESHADOWS THE IMAGE OF 4 MEN TOGETHER)
Neal clutched a plain brown wrapped package in his lap
MYSTERY, A QUESTION IS PLANTED, WHAT'S IN THE PACKAGE, WHY CLUTCHED? CHARACTERIZATION, CLUTCHING - NOT LIKE NEAL TO HANG ON. RELUCTANT TO CHANGE.
ALSO NOTE USE OF SYMBOLISM THROUGHOUT -- IF YOU HAVEN'T STUDIED THE USE OF SYMBOLISM SEE THIS POST
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/communicating-in-symbols.html
and noted the hint of a smirk on Peter's otherwise friendly face.
CHARACTERIZATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP - WHAT NEAL NOTICES; OF PETER'S PERSONALITY; AND FORESHADOWS TO THOSE WHO WATCH THE SHOW THAT SOMETHING REALLY INTERESTING IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN AND NEAL ISN'T HAPPY ABOUT THAT.
Peter got out, pocketing the keys and leaned on the open door.
BACKSTORY SYMBOLIZED WITH TYPICAL COP STANCE BEHIND OPEN CAR DOOR, CHARACTERIZES PETER IN METICULOUS POCKETING OF KEYS, ALSO SHOWS WITHOUT TELLING THAT NEAL HAS NO WAY OUT OF THIS SCENE EXCEPT FORWARD -- ONLY WE ALL KNOW HE CAN HOTWIRE THE CAR IN 15 SECONDS. BUT IF HE DID, WHAT WOULD THAT DO TO THE RELATIONSHIP. SO HE'S TRAPPED.
He surveyed the immense bon fire smoking downwind of the parked cars.
VISUAL IMAGE THAT BEGINS TO REVEAL WHERE THEY ARE AND WHAT'S HAPPENING. IT'S ALSO A VISUAL HOOK INTO THE SCENE.
On the other side of the fire, a small fire truck and four geared up firemen supervised the flames.
SHOWS WITHOUT TELLING THAT THIS BON FIRE IS LEGIT, ON PURPOSE.
On this side, four guys in F.B.I. jackets watched, hands in their pockets.
TYPICAL GUY STANCE WHEN COMMUNING WITH BUDDIES, NON-THREATENING BODY LANGUAGE, YET STRONG, INDIVIDUAL AND SELF-CONFIDENT BODY LANGUAGE. ALSO JACKETS SHOW DON'T TELL THAT THIS IS AN FBI OP.
Peter looked back at Neal, eyebrows raised. "Well? You going to pay off this bet, or not?"
AHA, DOWN TO BRASS TACKS OF THE SCENE. PAY OFF WHAT?
NOTICE THAT SHOWING WITHOUT TELLING IS ROOTED IN PROMPTING THE READER/VIEWER TO ASK QUESTIONS BEFORE YOU PROVIDE ANSWERS. THAT'S INFORMATION FEED TECHNIQUE, AND THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF STORYTELLING.
I'm not a welcher. Never have been. Even Peter knows that. I thought.
NEAL'S SELF-IMAGE IS SHOWN BY HIS PRIDE IN KEEPING HIS WORD. RELATIONSHIP IS SHOWN IN THAT NEAL KNOWS PETER KNOWS NEAL'S CHARACTER IS STRONG. THEN DOUBT CREEPS IN - THE BAREST HINT WITH "I THOUGHT". ULTRACAPE TOLD US NEAL'S SELF-IMAGE WAS CRUMBLING UNDER THE REALITY OF HIS LOSS OF HIS SOUL-MATE, AND HERE WE SEE WITH OUR OWN EYES THE FRISSON OF THE FIRST CRACKS IN NEAL'S SELF-IMAGE SHOWING UP IN HIS SOLID RELATIONSHIP WITH PETER.
Neal got out, slammed his door, and tucked the package under his arm. "What now?" The bon fire of counterfeit currency blazed merrily.
ACTION MOVES THE PLOT OF THIS SCENE ALONG. AND A TAG-LINE OF TELL REVEALS WHAT WE HAVE BEEN LOOKING AT, AND MOST READERS NO DOUBT SUSPECTED, A CONTROLLED DISPOSAL OF COUNTERFEIT CURRENCY -- NEAL'S BIGGEST SKILL IS COUNTERFEITING CURRENCY OR ARTWORK. IT'S HIS LIFE, THE PRODUCT OF ALL HIS EFFORTS TO LIVE WELL, GOING UP IN SMOKE UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE AUTHORITIES. IT IS DEFEAT IN IMAGES.
"WHAT NOW?" IS THE CORE OF THE DILEMMA ULTRACAPE SKETCHES IN THE OPENING TELL. NEAL IS AT A SYMBOLIC CROSSROADS IN HIS LIFE, NOTHING LEFT BEHIND, NOTHING VISIBLE AHEAD, FAILURE AT EVERYTHING, NOTHING TO PEG HIS SELF-ESTEEM ON ANY MORE. HE HIMSELF IS GOING UP IN SMOKE.
"Follow me."
AGAIN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THEM IS SHOWN.
AN ALTERNATIVE WAY TO DEPICT THIS BIT OF THE SCENE IS TO HAVE NEAL HEAVE HIMSELF OUT OF THE CAR, STALK AGGRESSIVELY ACROSS THE FIELD, AND HURL HIS PACKAGE INTO THE FLAMES WITHOUT ASKING PERMISSION, TURN AND BELLIGERANTLY YELL AT PETER, "SATISFIED?" -- THAT WOULD CHANGE THE CHARACTERIZATION, THE RELATIONSHIP, AND THE GIST OF THE STORY.
Peter led the way up to the group of F.B.I. guys, hitched his suit jacket back and shoved his hands in his pockets, starting to talk before Neal got close enough to hear against the wind.
SHOW'S WITHOUT TELLING PETER'S A MEMBER OF THE FRATERNITY, ACCEPTED. ALL ULTRACAPE'S EXPOSITION ABOUT ACCEPTANCE IS WRAPPED UP IN THIS AND SUBSQUENT IMAGES, SHOWN IN IMAGES NOT TOLD IN WORDS.
As he approached, Neal's artist's eye took a snapshot of the tableau.
THIS STORY IS ABOUT NEAL'S ARTISTIC ABILITY, SO HERE THAT IS SHOWN WITHOUT TELLING, SHOWN WITH ACTION AND DESCRIPTION.
NOW COMES SOME DESCRIPTION TO ILLUSTRATE THE EMOTIONAL CONTENT OF THE IMAGE NEAL CAPTURES WITH HIS ARTIST'S EYE.
In one instant, the group opened and swallowed Peter, becoming a group of five F.B.I. guys, one of which didn't wear a labeled jacket. But five F.B.I. guys, solid and unbreakable.
Odd man out, Neal joined the group, very aware that it was still five guys and him, not six guys.
AGAIN NEAL'S UNCHARACTERISTIC SENSE OF ALIENATION SURFACES, AND IT SURFACES IN THE IMAGE OF THE FIVE GUYS AND HIM -- IT IS THE ARTIST IN HIM THAT IS ABLE TO EXPRESS EMOTION THAT HE OTHERWISE COULD NOT FACE VERBALLY.
"...sure thing," one of them was saying. "But I have to see what's in the package first."
"No problem," replied Peter, and gestured casually to Neal to unwrap the package in his arm.
AGAIN, WHO'S BOSS AND WHO'S OUTSIDER ILLUSTRATED, AND WE NOW MOVE TO REVEAL WHAT WAS CONCEALED IN THE SECOND PARAGRAPH OF THIS SCENE, CLUTCHING A BROWN PAPER WRAPPED PACKAGE.
Neal held the bottom of the package and ripped the taped shut top open.
"Oil paintings, on canvass," said Peter. "They'll burn easily. All forgeries, we don't ever want to get back into circulation, if you know what I mean."
One of the guys plucked a rolled canvass out of the package and held it open. He whistled. "You sure this isn't the real thing?"
FORESHADOWING THAT THIS ENTIRE THING IS ABOUT NEAL'S ART - AND ALSO HIGHLIGHTING THE SELF-ESTEEM ISSUE AT THE CORE OF THE STORY.
Neal interjected, "They're not."
WORD INTERJECTED ILLUSTRATES NEAL IS THE OUTSIDER HERE. AN INSIDER WOULD ADD OR ANSWER. HE'S NOT EVEN BEING ADDRESSED AND MUST INTERJECT.
The guy asked, "How do you know?" And he scrutinized Neal, as if checking his face against memorized wanted photos.
AGAIN REJECTION. SURELY BY NOW EVERYONE IN THE FBI KNOWS NEAL'S FACE. BUT NO, HERE'S A CREW THAT DOESN'T RECOGNIZE HIM. NEAL IS FORCED TO SAY:
"I painted them."
BY LEAVING OUT LONG DESCRIPTION OF THE STRANGLED TONE OF VOICE NEAL IS USING HERE, THE GRATING SOUND OF IT ON HIS OWN EARS, THE BARE WORDS CARRY THE SUBTEXT AND LET EACH READER INTERPRET HOW THE LINE IS DELIVERED FOR THEMSELVES, THUS MAKING THIS SCENE THEIR OWN.
All four guys riveted eyes on Neal.
NOW HE'S GOT THEIR ATTENTION - DOES HE REALLY WANT IT. BUT AGAIN, HE'S ODD MAN OUT.
"So," Peter broke in, "can we feed your fire?"
ILLUSTRATES THEIR RELATIONSHIP - PETER SAVING NEAL FROM EMBARRASSMENT AT THE HANDS OF PETER'S COLLEAGUES. PETER, MEMBER OF THE FRATERNITY; NEAL, OUTSIDER.
"Go ahead." The guy handed Neal back the rolled painting.
STAGE BUSINESS HERE AN ACTOR COULD MAKE A LOT OUT OF. LET THE READER READ IT.
Peter gestured to Neal and the moment of paying off his bet with Peter came upon him like a cold shower. He'd been stupid to open his mouth and volunteer to burn these himself. He had been so sure he'd been right about Dorothy Putnam's double timing her S.E.C. boss on those CDO's. But she'd been lily white, and Peter had won the bet.
HERE NEAL'S INNER DIALOGUE IS REVEALED WITH SOME NARRATIVE, AND THE OFFHAND REFERENCE TO AN EVENT NOT MENTIONED IN ULTRACAPE'S OPENING IS INSERTED TO SHOW DON'T TELL THAT NEAL IS NOT ONLY AT THE NADIR OF HIS LIFE, BUT INSULT TO INJURY HE'D LEAD THE FBI IN THE WRONG DIRECTION ON THEIR LAST CASE -- ON THE TV SHOW THERE IS NO DOROTHY PUTNAM OR SEC SCANDAL OR CDO BUSINESS. I JUST MADE THAT UP FOR A BET NEAL HAD JUST LOST.
Neal walked up to the fire, gaining the alert attention of both firemen at the left and right of the pile of burning currency.
A gust of wind drove the flames and smoke away from Neal, and he took that moment to hurl the first painting onto the fire.
SYMBOLIC OF WHERE HE IS IN LIFE, HURLING HIS PAST INTO THE FIRE BECAUSE IT'S ALL A WORTHLESS SHAM.
I can make more. he thought grimly as he flung each painting onto the leaping flames. So why does this hurt?
AS MOST MEN, NEAL FEELS HIS FEELINGS BUT HAS NO CLUE (AND DOESN'T WANT TO HAVE) WHERE THEY COME FROM OR WHY HE FEELS. HE KNOWS HE CAN "MAKE MORE" -- REBUILD HIS LIFE -- BUT ON MORE SHAM, MORE CONS, A FALSE AND FAKE LIFE WORTH NOTHING BUT BURNING IN A BLEAK, OPEN FIELD UNDER THE WATCHFUL EYES OF THE AUTHORITIES.
The brown wrapper followed the canvasses, flapping in the wind.
REALLY NOTHING LEFT, NOT EVEN THE WRAPPER.
WHAT HE HAD CLUTCHED TO HIMSELF, HE HAS NOW THROWN AWAY. THIS IS THE BACKSTORY OF THE WHOLE TV SERIES UP TO "NOW" WHEN ULTRACAPE SOLVES THE PROBLEM EVER SO NEATLY.
Neal turned to face the welded together group of five F.B.I. guys and paced the distance back to them.
OK, BRAVELY FACE THE FUTURE.
He could have just let me burn them in my fireplace.
AGAIN THE MORPHING RELATIONSHIP, THE UNCERTAINTY THAT HE EVEN UNDERSTANDS PETER.
He made it back to the car certain he'd shown no hint of the pain he didn't let himself feel.
THIS INVITES FANFIC READERS TO RE-WATCH ALL THE SHOWS FOR HINTS OF NEAL'S INNER LIFE SHOWING THROUGH WHEN HE THINKS IT DOESN'T. ALSO AGAIN, ANOTHER SHOW DON'T TELL OF HOW THE FACE HE TURNS TO THE OUTER WORLD IS A CONSTRUCT, NOT WHAT HE KNOWS AS HIS TRUE SELF. HE DOESN'T LET HIMSELF FEEL HIS OWN PAIN, SO IT WON'T SHOW, BECAUSE - WHAT? IF IT DID SHOW WHAT WOULD HAPPEN? REJECTION? AGAIN, THE POINTS OF CHARACTERIZATION ULTRACAPE HIGHLIGHTED ARE SHOWN, NOT TOLD. BUT IT'S JUST A LITTLE DIFFERENT THAN HER NEAL WOULD DO IT.
By the time they arrived at the office, Neal's back had relaxed enough for him to stride freely down the corridor, even though fully aware of each of his freehand sketches displayed on the walls.
HERE WE JOIN THE NARRATIVE ULTRACAPE WROTE WITH A DIFFERENT SEGUE. HER OPENING "THEY HUNG IN ALMOST EVERY OFFICE" IS REALLY COOL, AND I WAS VERY SORRY TO LOSE IT. SO I PUT IT IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH, AFTER REVEALING WHAT "THEY" ARE -- BETTER THAN SCRAPPING IT TOTALLY.
They hung in almost every office, were tacked on nearly all the peg boards and some having been enthusiastically signed with a flourish by the grinning artist were framed and brought home and displayed in places of honor.
He realized he'd been doing a lot more of those sketches since the murder of his lady love. There were few in the F.B.I.'s White Collar Crime Division who had not been captured in a Neal Caffery original sketch.
Why do they keep them? The scene of the morning returned full force, Peter melding seamlessly into the group of four F.B.I. guys, and himself apart. He tried to shake it off. They don't see me as just some tool to be used by whoever needs my unique skills!
But Neal knew that as far as those four guys were concerned, he deserved to be in prison, or dead, if they could only remember the right wanted poster.
But I've decided to do whatever it takes to stay out of prison, and I can do whatever I decide to do. Right?
Peter's phone rang. As he slipped it from his pocket, he said, "Neal, wait for me in my office, okay? I'll be right back." And he took off down the hall, phone to his ear.
Neal sighed and watched him go. See? What did I tell you? he told himself silently. I'm just a convenience, a crime solving appliance.
BLENDING INTO ULTRACAPE'S FIRST SCENE, BRINGING A SHOW DON'T TELL IMAGE INTO THE APPROACH TO THE OFFICE, CREATING AN EXIT FOR PETER SO HE CAN RE-ENTER WITH THE GUEST AND NEW OFFER.
He slipped into Peter's office and took out his small sketch pad he he carried for waiting-room-moments.
As usual, his thoughts drifted off to Kate and flashes of their life together, always ending with the explosion that took her from him.
But this time, it was just a burst of brightness from the sun angling its rays against a building and reflecting suddenly onto his face, not an orange and angry black explosion.
He became aware he was staring out at the clear day, the tall glass monoliths sparkling in the morning light. His hand was sketching the cityscape, a simple pencil sketch capturing the brilliance of sparkling buildings, giving them a vitality unseen by passersby.
His back to the door, Neal was so focused on his work that he did not notice the two men, one carrying a file, who walked into the room until one of them leaned over his shoulder and gasped.
"Oh my G-d, Peter!"
AS PETER BRINGS HIS GUEST AND SUGGESTION INTO NEAL'S LIFE, WITH THAT BURNING PAINTINGS SCENE TACKED ONTO THE OPENING, WE HAVE A REVERSAL OR SWITCH, A BIG TURNABOUT IN THE RELATIONSHIP.
IN MY OPENING SCENE, NEAL IS FEELING -- NOT THINKING -- THAT PETER HAS REALLY ABANDONED HIM, THAT PETER IS BEING CRUEL ON PURPOSE IN SOME WAY, AND NEAL ISN'T SURE HE DOESN'T DESERVE IT. NEAL IS JUST IN GRIEVING MODE, TOTALLY LOST, AND FEELING ABANDONED BY PETER, HIS LAST FRIEND. BUT HERE, ALL OF A SUDDEN, IT'S REVERSED, AND PETER IS PROVIDING A SOLUTION THAT TAKES INTO ACCOUNT WHAT ART REALLY MEANS TO NEAL, A MEANING NEAL HIMSELF HAS NO CLUE (YET) EXISTS.
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Now, go over the scene you constructed, identify the techniques you did use, and make sure you've used all of the ones I've noted above.
Make your scene says what you want it to say, and with the characterization spin that you prefer -- but make it clear and vivid what your spin actually is.
This is a drill in SHOW DON'T TELL which is designed to prompt you to carry the dynamic evolution of a new icon for modern Romance into the future. It's all about Relationship shown but not told.
For more on the Romance iconization, see:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/turning-action-into-romance.html
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/7-pursuits-to-teach-yourself-writing.html
and
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/7-pursuits-to-teach-yourself-writing_27.html
One very fruitful exercise in teaching yourself to write is writing fan fiction about your favorite TV show or movie characters.
So now we're going to use the USA Networks TV show White Collar for a lesson (an arduous lesson) in SHOW DON'T TELL. I'm going to try to show-not-tell how to show-not-tell, then explain what I did and give you a chance to do the drill.
You don't need to have watched White Collar to grasp the elements in this drill, but it might help to browse the website for White Collar.
http://www.usanetwork.com/series/whitecollar/ (the website comes on with audio-commercials)
Writing is a performing art, as I've told you I was taught, and as such it is a vocation, a calling, more than a profession. Writing is a lifestyle.
Writers do it even when reading. Can't help it. If you're a writer, you are constantly and incessantly rewriting everything you read, or even TV shows you watch -- even great TV shows like White Collar. Yes, Watching TV is work for a writer. I watch about 6 hours of fiction a week.
So a friend of mine pointed me to a bit of fanfic she had written based on White Collar. She's a seasoned professional writer who can't write without plot, pacing, style, structure, and conflict that resolves. Like all writers, she rewrites TV shows as she watches them, then continues to write the show's story-arc, fixing little things here and there.
Like me, she watches White Collar with an eye on the pickle Neal finds himself in.
That situational pickle is why I like the show. I liked Remington Steele, Quantum Leap and It Takes A Thief for the same reason - the pickle inherent in the situation.
Most TV series, especially anthology series, don't address the inherent pickle.
That pickle is called the "springboard" and is a vehicle to get you into the story, not something that they intend to resolve.
Quantum Leap is a good example. Only occasional episodes addressed the physics of the problem that got Dr. Sam Beckett stuck leaping from one time to another or how to get him out of that pickle. The point of the show was "solving problems" in people's lives by taking over their life from inside their own body.
But the only thing that interested me was the pickle and the solution, not the problems of the people he visited.
Time Travel Romance routinely does this too. The mechanism of the time travel leap is more fascinating to me than the Romance unless the writer can make them one and the same -- the novel A Knight In Shining Armor now out on Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/Knight-Shining-Armor-ebook/dp/B000FC0QO8/rereadablebooksr/
is an example of making the Romance more prominent than the time-travel mechanism.
So, in the TV Show White Collar, the Romance and the pickle are intertwined perfectly. You've got to solve the pickle to solve the Romance. You've got to solve the Romance to solve the pickle.
Neal agrees to work for the F.B.I. helping catch white collar criminals (his colleagues and rivals) in order to get out of jail so that he can find and maybe rescue his lover, the one serious relationship in his life.
At the point of this story, Neal has just seen his soul mate killed in an explosion and has nothing left. The F.B.I. has him on a leash (an ankle tracking device). Meanwhile, he's become good friends with the only cop ever to catch him. The cop keeps tempting him to go straight. And any romance reader can see Neal's wide-open to a new lover, but not emotionally settled enough yet.
So my friend the writer starts plotting, and out comes a (brilliant) solution to Neal's pickle.
It's 2AM after a hard day writing for pay, and she's jumping up and down with this fabulous idea. Got to write it or she won't sleep a wink, nevermind write the next piece in a way that can earn her pay. The mind writes what the mind writes.
So she wades in to solve Neal's pickle in a real quick fanfic. She's tired and wants to get right to her idea. This piece is aimed only at those who watch this show's episodes over and over and probably write fanfic about it themselves. They know the material, they don't need an introduction just a quick sketch of her particular variation on Neal's character, and then into the story she wants to write.
So she perpetrates the biggest no-no in the writing craft, right up front of her story where it really matters, she starts off with tell rather than show, cramming in some foreshadowing that doesn't belong in the opening, then dashes off the story itself and posts it. As an afterthought, she points me to the first chapter of the story (which already has rave reviews being posted), "Look what I wrote. What do you think?" And of course she's referring to her solution to the pickle.
And what do I do?
I rewrite her opening tell into show and send it to her.
I had a grand old time writing fanfic to my friend's fanfic. Then I realized I'd done a writing lesson I could use to show you what I've been talking about when I say "show don't tell" -- my friend does not need this lesson and knows that I know that. She was not offended when I showed her my scene, and even agreed to let me use it for you.
Here's the URL for the story she posted - it has 7 chapters you can find in the dropdown at the upper right:
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5885164/1/Grace_In_The_Confidence_of_Others
Here's the opening paragraphs as she wrote them. Read them, study, and rewrite them as SHOW rather than TELL before reading what I did.
------------
Summary – When Neal is playing a con, pulling a heist or creating a forgery, he has all the confidence in the world. But when these tools are not an option the only thing he has to save himself and the lives of others is something he's not too sure of at all, his own self worth.
Grace in the con fidence of others
Chapter 1/7
By Ultracape
They hung in almost every office, were tacked on nearly all the peg boards and some having been enthusiastically signed with a flourish by the grinning artist were framed and brought home and displayed in places of honor. There were few in the F.B.I.'s White Collar Crime Division who had not yet felt graced with a Neal Caffery original sketch.
It was the easiest con he'd every pulled, even if it was totally unintentional, and nothing to be proud of. As far as Neal was concerned if they were foolish enough to think his creations were any good he'd brag about his talent and play along. Then maybe he would not be the first one people looked to when something went missing in the office. Maybe he could get through a day feeling like his honest work meant something.
Even when he put his life on the line, something that happened with increasing frequency it seemed, it was not his word people trusted, it was his tracking anklet and the ever present threat of prison for the slightest infraction of what he felt were arbitrary and inconvenient rules, just begging to be broken for a good or even not so good cause.
The thing was, while it was rare for Neal to find any task difficult, when he did face difficulty, he did not have the experience to work it through. Fitting in, being accepted; playing by the rules eluded him, frustrated him and turned every day into a struggle to achieve what seemed to come so easily to others.
Gaining people's respect and trust in a persona for a con, for a heist, for the space of no more than a few weeks, was easy, especially for a man of Neal's brilliance. But earning the trust of others with nothing to show for his life but a list of alleged crimes, one conviction and a prison term was a greater challenge than he'd ever faced.
None but Neal's handler, partner and friend, F.B.I. Special Agent Peter Burke, could see through the armor of his fashionable suits, his charming veneer, his eagerness to be helpful, his know it all (because he did) attitude and his wit and puppy dog eyes to the troubled, childlike soul, the person who thought of himself as worth less than his doodles.
Now, just months since his girlfriend, Kate, had been killed, Neal's self-confidence was at an all time low. As far as Neal was concerned, the murder of his lady love, had been the final blow showing him that no matter what he did, what he accomplished, he was worth nothing, just some tool to be used by whoever needed his considerable criminal talents.
If trading his life for a hostage was needed it was no problem, and good riddance if said trade ended in his death. Thievery and coercion were against the law except if some mysterious uber-leader wanted to maneuver Neal into steeling something that supposedly didn't exist from a foreign government. But once Neal accomplished the deed, blowing him up was a convenient way to get rid of his inconvenient presence. And just for fun, pining a crime on him to cover up someone else's misdeeds was no big deal. As far as everyone was concerned, Neal deserved to be in prison, or dead.
Fine, he got the message. He was free as long as they could use him and his choices were prison or death and Neal did not want to go back to prison. Maybe this early morning meeting with Peter would lead to a means to an end. His experience as a consultant for the F.B.I. showed him how easy it was to step in front of a bullet even when he wasn't trying.
Having arrived early, Neal took out his small sketch pad he always kept with him to occupy his time. As usual, his thoughts drifted off to Kate and flashes of their life together, always ending with the explosion that took her from him. It was just that burst of brightness, this time from the sun angling its rays against a building and reflecting suddenly onto his face that he became aware he was staring out at the clear day, the tall glass monoliths sparkling in the morning light. He was halfway done before he even realized he was sketching the cityscape, somehow, even in black and white, capturing the brilliance of sparkling buildings, giving them a vitality unseen by passersby. His back to the door, Neal was so focused on his work that he did not notice the two men, one carrying a file, who walked into the room until one of them gasped.
"Oh my G-d, Peter!"
------------
OK, to do a good job rewriting this opening, you should read the whole story, all 7 Chapters, but I had read only this first chapter to the end before I couldn't resist creating a SHOW out of this TELL opening.
For the purposes of this drill, just reading that first chapter should be enough.
I'm going to show you here an illustration of a simple fact I learned from Marion Zimmer Bradley. Writing is a craft. It can be trained into you like driving, tennis, pottery. The training consists of drill-drill-drill, and that's about it. Talent of course helps, but is neither a necessary or sufficient condition to doing what I'm going to show you.
This is an exercise in "put in the data and grind the crank." It is a mechanical exercise devoid of artistic dimensions. It is an exercise in walking and chewing gum. It is an exercise in doing a lot of writing craft techniques simultaneously, and cross-integrating each with the other.
This scene appeared in my mind, WHOLE and complete, produced by the training my subconscious has endured over the years. Writing it down only took a few minutes. I did not think about this. I didn't laboriously figure it out. My subconscious produced the scene in a flash-photo and I knew it was the SHOW that corresponds to the TELL in this story opening just twisted into my own characters.
I watch this TV show, and I have inside my own head, a Neal & Peter set that doesn't resemble those my friend writes about here. So in writing the scene down, I distorted her characters, and deleted points she had inserted as foreshadowing of the subsequent events that I hadn't read about yet.
For her to attach my opening scene to her story would mean the entire thing would have to be rewritten, after rewriting my opening to correct the characters to be her own characters. The foreshadowing I deleted would have to be moved to later. And then the pacing and plot and everything else would have to be adjusted.
Had she stopped to create an opening scene instead of the long "tell" opening, it would have been an entirely different scene than the one I concocted.
This will be the case with anything you come up with to cast that TELL opening into a SHOW opening. Your Neal (whether you've watched the show or not) is not my Neal or Ultracape's Neal.
That's what makes fanfic so much fun! You can have your cake and eat it too! You can have dozens, even hundreds, of versions of the same character in various versions of a pickle, and watch the problem get worked out in thousands of ways.
If you have no idea how to transform her TELL into a SHOW, here's a clue. You need to create a SCENE in which almost all the information in her TELL is illustrated by visuals, by things, by actions, and by acting business.
To show not tell, you need to create a scene, so your piece must have a scene's STRUCTURE.
If you don't know the rules for creating a scene, first read:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure.html
And it's sequel post:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html
Yes, "show don't tell" means "construct a scene that conveys this without saying this."
Scene Structure mastery cures Expository Lumps.
Ultracape's opening "TELL" is mostly exposition.
If you don't know what an Expository Lump is, or have been excoriated by your beta readers for expository lumps (or told your writing is boring), read these posts first:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/source-of-expository-lump.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/sexy-information-feed.html
And this one focusing on Michelle West's novel THE HIDDEN CITY as an example of information feed.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/for-my-review-column-httpwww.html
I call what Ultracape did for the opening "information feed" - and she chose telling the information as exposition and narrative instead of showing it with a full fleshed scene.
She did that because it's easier and faster. You will find that you do it often, too, and on rewrite you are faced with the problem of how to fix it. Sometimes a scene is the solution, so this exercise may help you meet a looming deadline one day.
WRITE YOUR OWN SCENE NOW.
OK, now here's what I did with it. Read what I did, then we'll go through it again, identifying the craft skills for various items in this scene. Then you can rewrite what you did, if you think it's warranted. You can post your results as a comment on this blog to get feedback.
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GRACE IN THE CON FIDENCE OF OTHERS
(opening rewrite by Jacqueline Lichtenberg)
The motor pool sedan lumbered over the broken field.
Neal Caffrey sat beside his handler, Peter Burke, who wrestled the car up next to a row of identical ones and parked it precisely in line. Neal clutched a plain brown wrapped package in his lap and noted the hint of a smirk on Peter's otherwise friendly face.
Peter got out, pocketing the keys and leaned on the open door. He surveyed the immense bon fire smoking downwind of the parked cars. On the other side of the fire, a small fire truck and four geared up firemen supervised the flames. On this side, four guys in F.B.I. jackets watched, hands in their pockets.
Peter looked back at Neal, eyebrows raised. "Well? You going to pay off this bet, or not?"
I'm not a welcher. Never have been. Even Peter knows that. I thought.
Neal got out, slammed his door, and tucked the package under his arm. "What now?" The bon fire of counterfeit currency blazed merrily.
"Follow me."
Peter led the way up to the group of F.B.I. guys, hitched his suit jacket back and shoved his hands in his pockets, starting to talk before Neal got close enough to hear against the wind.
As he approached, Neal's artist's eye took a snapshot of the tableau.
In one instant, the group opened and swallowed Peter, becoming a group of five F.B.I. guys, one of which didn't wear a labeled jacket. But five F.B.I. guys, solid and unbreakable.
Odd man out, Neal joined the group, very aware that it was still five guys and him, not six guys.
"...sure thing," one of them was saying. "But I have to see what's in the package first."
"No problem," replied Peter, and gestured casually to Neal to unwrap the package in his arm.
Neal held the bottom of the package and ripped the taped shut top open.
"Oil paintings, on canvass," said Peter. "They'll burn easily. All forgeries, we don't ever want to get back into circulation, if you know what I mean."
One of the guys plucked a rolled canvass out of the package and held it open. He whistled. "You sure this isn't the real thing?"
Neal interjected, "They're not."
The guy asked, "How do you know?" And he scrutinized Neal, as if checking his face against memorized wanted photos.
"I painted them."
All four guys riveted eyes on Neal.
"So," Peter broke in, "can we feed your fire?"
"Go ahead." The guy handed Neal back the rolled painting.
Peter gestured to Neal and the moment of paying off his bet with Peter came upon him like a cold shower. He'd been stupid to open his mouth and volunteer to burn these himself. He had been so sure he'd been right about Dorothy Putnam's double timing her S.E.C. boss on those CDO's. But she'd been lily white, and Peter had won the bet.
Neal walked up to the fire, gaining the alert attention of both firemen at the left and right of the pile of burning currency.
A gust of wind drove the flames and smoke away from Neal, and he took that moment to hurl the first painting onto the fire.
I can make more. he thought grimly as he flung each painting onto the leaping flames. So why does this hurt?
The brown wrapper followed the canvasses, flapping in the wind.
Neal turned to face the welded together group of five F.B.I. guys and paced the distance back to them.
He could have just let me burn them in my fireplace. He made it back to the car certain he'd shown no hint of the pain he didn't let himself feel.
By the time they arrived at the office, Neal's back had relaxed enough for him to stride freely down the corridor, even though fully aware of each of his freehand sketches displayed on the walls.
They hung in almost every office, were tacked on nearly all the peg boards and some having been enthusiastically signed with a flourish by the grinning artist were framed and brought home and displayed in places of honor.
He realized he'd been doing a lot more of those sketches since the murder of his lady love. There were few in the F.B.I.'s White Collar Crime Division who had not been captured in a Neal Caffery original sketch.
Why do they keep them? The scene of the morning returned full force, Peter melding seamlessly into the group of four F.B.I. guys, and himself apart. He tried to shake it off. They don't see me as just some tool to be used by whoever needs my unique skills!
But Neal knew that as far as those four guys were concerned, he deserved to be in prison, or dead, if they could only remember the right wanted poster.
But I've decided to do whatever it takes to stay out of prison, and I can do whatever I decide to do. Right?
Peter's phone rang. As he slipped it from his pocket, he said, "Neal, wait for me in my office, okay? I'll be right back." And he took off down the hall, phone to his ear.
Neal sighed and watched him go. See? What did I tell you? he told himself silently. I'm just a convenience, a crime solving appliance.
He slipped into Peter's office and took out his small sketch pad he he carried for waiting-room-moments.
As usual, his thoughts drifted off to Kate and flashes of their life together, always ending with the explosion that took her from him.
But this time, it was just a burst of brightness from the sun angling its rays against a building and reflecting suddenly onto his face, not an orange and angry black explosion.
He became aware he was staring out at the clear day, the tall glass monoliths sparkling in the morning light. His hand was sketching the cityscape, a simple pencil sketch capturing the brilliance of sparkling buildings, giving them a vitality unseen by passersby.
His back to the door, Neal was so focused on his work that he did not notice the two men, one carrying a file, who walked into the room until one of them leaned over his shoulder and gasped.
"Oh my G-d, Peter!"
-------------
And from there it's as Ultracape wrote it, presenting Neal with an opportunity to wriggle out of his pickle.
This is an exercise in SHOW DON'T TELL.
In narrative or screenwriting, you must create VISUAL IMAGES out of intangibles, just as commercial writers have to make you want to buy a perfume or a particular brand of toothpaste.
Things that have to be illustrated are emotions, attitudes, moods, character, relationship, background, backstory without exposition.
So let's go through what I wrote again, looking for how I did that. Then you can go through what you did, and see if you can think of a better way to do what you did.
So here's my scene again with comments in CAPS.
---------
The motorpool sedan lumbered over the broken field. (OPENING IMAGE - A ROUGH JOURNEY NEARING AN END)
Neal Caffrey sat beside his handler, Peter Burke, who wrestled the car up next to a row of identical ones and parked it precisely in line.
(CHARACTERIZATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP (BESIDE) AND OF PETER (NEAT, CAREFUL, ORGANIZED, RULE-CONSCIOUS). SETTING AND BACKSTORY INDICATED - IDENTICAL CARS - FORESHADOWS THEY ARE FBI - FORESHADOWS THE IMAGE OF 4 MEN TOGETHER)
Neal clutched a plain brown wrapped package in his lap
MYSTERY, A QUESTION IS PLANTED, WHAT'S IN THE PACKAGE, WHY CLUTCHED? CHARACTERIZATION, CLUTCHING - NOT LIKE NEAL TO HANG ON. RELUCTANT TO CHANGE.
ALSO NOTE USE OF SYMBOLISM THROUGHOUT -- IF YOU HAVEN'T STUDIED THE USE OF SYMBOLISM SEE THIS POST
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/communicating-in-symbols.html
and noted the hint of a smirk on Peter's otherwise friendly face.
CHARACTERIZATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP - WHAT NEAL NOTICES; OF PETER'S PERSONALITY; AND FORESHADOWS TO THOSE WHO WATCH THE SHOW THAT SOMETHING REALLY INTERESTING IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN AND NEAL ISN'T HAPPY ABOUT THAT.
Peter got out, pocketing the keys and leaned on the open door.
BACKSTORY SYMBOLIZED WITH TYPICAL COP STANCE BEHIND OPEN CAR DOOR, CHARACTERIZES PETER IN METICULOUS POCKETING OF KEYS, ALSO SHOWS WITHOUT TELLING THAT NEAL HAS NO WAY OUT OF THIS SCENE EXCEPT FORWARD -- ONLY WE ALL KNOW HE CAN HOTWIRE THE CAR IN 15 SECONDS. BUT IF HE DID, WHAT WOULD THAT DO TO THE RELATIONSHIP. SO HE'S TRAPPED.
He surveyed the immense bon fire smoking downwind of the parked cars.
VISUAL IMAGE THAT BEGINS TO REVEAL WHERE THEY ARE AND WHAT'S HAPPENING. IT'S ALSO A VISUAL HOOK INTO THE SCENE.
On the other side of the fire, a small fire truck and four geared up firemen supervised the flames.
SHOWS WITHOUT TELLING THAT THIS BON FIRE IS LEGIT, ON PURPOSE.
On this side, four guys in F.B.I. jackets watched, hands in their pockets.
TYPICAL GUY STANCE WHEN COMMUNING WITH BUDDIES, NON-THREATENING BODY LANGUAGE, YET STRONG, INDIVIDUAL AND SELF-CONFIDENT BODY LANGUAGE. ALSO JACKETS SHOW DON'T TELL THAT THIS IS AN FBI OP.
Peter looked back at Neal, eyebrows raised. "Well? You going to pay off this bet, or not?"
AHA, DOWN TO BRASS TACKS OF THE SCENE. PAY OFF WHAT?
NOTICE THAT SHOWING WITHOUT TELLING IS ROOTED IN PROMPTING THE READER/VIEWER TO ASK QUESTIONS BEFORE YOU PROVIDE ANSWERS. THAT'S INFORMATION FEED TECHNIQUE, AND THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF STORYTELLING.
I'm not a welcher. Never have been. Even Peter knows that. I thought.
NEAL'S SELF-IMAGE IS SHOWN BY HIS PRIDE IN KEEPING HIS WORD. RELATIONSHIP IS SHOWN IN THAT NEAL KNOWS PETER KNOWS NEAL'S CHARACTER IS STRONG. THEN DOUBT CREEPS IN - THE BAREST HINT WITH "I THOUGHT". ULTRACAPE TOLD US NEAL'S SELF-IMAGE WAS CRUMBLING UNDER THE REALITY OF HIS LOSS OF HIS SOUL-MATE, AND HERE WE SEE WITH OUR OWN EYES THE FRISSON OF THE FIRST CRACKS IN NEAL'S SELF-IMAGE SHOWING UP IN HIS SOLID RELATIONSHIP WITH PETER.
Neal got out, slammed his door, and tucked the package under his arm. "What now?" The bon fire of counterfeit currency blazed merrily.
ACTION MOVES THE PLOT OF THIS SCENE ALONG. AND A TAG-LINE OF TELL REVEALS WHAT WE HAVE BEEN LOOKING AT, AND MOST READERS NO DOUBT SUSPECTED, A CONTROLLED DISPOSAL OF COUNTERFEIT CURRENCY -- NEAL'S BIGGEST SKILL IS COUNTERFEITING CURRENCY OR ARTWORK. IT'S HIS LIFE, THE PRODUCT OF ALL HIS EFFORTS TO LIVE WELL, GOING UP IN SMOKE UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE AUTHORITIES. IT IS DEFEAT IN IMAGES.
"WHAT NOW?" IS THE CORE OF THE DILEMMA ULTRACAPE SKETCHES IN THE OPENING TELL. NEAL IS AT A SYMBOLIC CROSSROADS IN HIS LIFE, NOTHING LEFT BEHIND, NOTHING VISIBLE AHEAD, FAILURE AT EVERYTHING, NOTHING TO PEG HIS SELF-ESTEEM ON ANY MORE. HE HIMSELF IS GOING UP IN SMOKE.
"Follow me."
AGAIN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THEM IS SHOWN.
AN ALTERNATIVE WAY TO DEPICT THIS BIT OF THE SCENE IS TO HAVE NEAL HEAVE HIMSELF OUT OF THE CAR, STALK AGGRESSIVELY ACROSS THE FIELD, AND HURL HIS PACKAGE INTO THE FLAMES WITHOUT ASKING PERMISSION, TURN AND BELLIGERANTLY YELL AT PETER, "SATISFIED?" -- THAT WOULD CHANGE THE CHARACTERIZATION, THE RELATIONSHIP, AND THE GIST OF THE STORY.
Peter led the way up to the group of F.B.I. guys, hitched his suit jacket back and shoved his hands in his pockets, starting to talk before Neal got close enough to hear against the wind.
SHOW'S WITHOUT TELLING PETER'S A MEMBER OF THE FRATERNITY, ACCEPTED. ALL ULTRACAPE'S EXPOSITION ABOUT ACCEPTANCE IS WRAPPED UP IN THIS AND SUBSQUENT IMAGES, SHOWN IN IMAGES NOT TOLD IN WORDS.
As he approached, Neal's artist's eye took a snapshot of the tableau.
THIS STORY IS ABOUT NEAL'S ARTISTIC ABILITY, SO HERE THAT IS SHOWN WITHOUT TELLING, SHOWN WITH ACTION AND DESCRIPTION.
NOW COMES SOME DESCRIPTION TO ILLUSTRATE THE EMOTIONAL CONTENT OF THE IMAGE NEAL CAPTURES WITH HIS ARTIST'S EYE.
In one instant, the group opened and swallowed Peter, becoming a group of five F.B.I. guys, one of which didn't wear a labeled jacket. But five F.B.I. guys, solid and unbreakable.
Odd man out, Neal joined the group, very aware that it was still five guys and him, not six guys.
AGAIN NEAL'S UNCHARACTERISTIC SENSE OF ALIENATION SURFACES, AND IT SURFACES IN THE IMAGE OF THE FIVE GUYS AND HIM -- IT IS THE ARTIST IN HIM THAT IS ABLE TO EXPRESS EMOTION THAT HE OTHERWISE COULD NOT FACE VERBALLY.
"...sure thing," one of them was saying. "But I have to see what's in the package first."
"No problem," replied Peter, and gestured casually to Neal to unwrap the package in his arm.
AGAIN, WHO'S BOSS AND WHO'S OUTSIDER ILLUSTRATED, AND WE NOW MOVE TO REVEAL WHAT WAS CONCEALED IN THE SECOND PARAGRAPH OF THIS SCENE, CLUTCHING A BROWN PAPER WRAPPED PACKAGE.
Neal held the bottom of the package and ripped the taped shut top open.
"Oil paintings, on canvass," said Peter. "They'll burn easily. All forgeries, we don't ever want to get back into circulation, if you know what I mean."
One of the guys plucked a rolled canvass out of the package and held it open. He whistled. "You sure this isn't the real thing?"
FORESHADOWING THAT THIS ENTIRE THING IS ABOUT NEAL'S ART - AND ALSO HIGHLIGHTING THE SELF-ESTEEM ISSUE AT THE CORE OF THE STORY.
Neal interjected, "They're not."
WORD INTERJECTED ILLUSTRATES NEAL IS THE OUTSIDER HERE. AN INSIDER WOULD ADD OR ANSWER. HE'S NOT EVEN BEING ADDRESSED AND MUST INTERJECT.
The guy asked, "How do you know?" And he scrutinized Neal, as if checking his face against memorized wanted photos.
AGAIN REJECTION. SURELY BY NOW EVERYONE IN THE FBI KNOWS NEAL'S FACE. BUT NO, HERE'S A CREW THAT DOESN'T RECOGNIZE HIM. NEAL IS FORCED TO SAY:
"I painted them."
BY LEAVING OUT LONG DESCRIPTION OF THE STRANGLED TONE OF VOICE NEAL IS USING HERE, THE GRATING SOUND OF IT ON HIS OWN EARS, THE BARE WORDS CARRY THE SUBTEXT AND LET EACH READER INTERPRET HOW THE LINE IS DELIVERED FOR THEMSELVES, THUS MAKING THIS SCENE THEIR OWN.
All four guys riveted eyes on Neal.
NOW HE'S GOT THEIR ATTENTION - DOES HE REALLY WANT IT. BUT AGAIN, HE'S ODD MAN OUT.
"So," Peter broke in, "can we feed your fire?"
ILLUSTRATES THEIR RELATIONSHIP - PETER SAVING NEAL FROM EMBARRASSMENT AT THE HANDS OF PETER'S COLLEAGUES. PETER, MEMBER OF THE FRATERNITY; NEAL, OUTSIDER.
"Go ahead." The guy handed Neal back the rolled painting.
STAGE BUSINESS HERE AN ACTOR COULD MAKE A LOT OUT OF. LET THE READER READ IT.
Peter gestured to Neal and the moment of paying off his bet with Peter came upon him like a cold shower. He'd been stupid to open his mouth and volunteer to burn these himself. He had been so sure he'd been right about Dorothy Putnam's double timing her S.E.C. boss on those CDO's. But she'd been lily white, and Peter had won the bet.
HERE NEAL'S INNER DIALOGUE IS REVEALED WITH SOME NARRATIVE, AND THE OFFHAND REFERENCE TO AN EVENT NOT MENTIONED IN ULTRACAPE'S OPENING IS INSERTED TO SHOW DON'T TELL THAT NEAL IS NOT ONLY AT THE NADIR OF HIS LIFE, BUT INSULT TO INJURY HE'D LEAD THE FBI IN THE WRONG DIRECTION ON THEIR LAST CASE -- ON THE TV SHOW THERE IS NO DOROTHY PUTNAM OR SEC SCANDAL OR CDO BUSINESS. I JUST MADE THAT UP FOR A BET NEAL HAD JUST LOST.
Neal walked up to the fire, gaining the alert attention of both firemen at the left and right of the pile of burning currency.
A gust of wind drove the flames and smoke away from Neal, and he took that moment to hurl the first painting onto the fire.
SYMBOLIC OF WHERE HE IS IN LIFE, HURLING HIS PAST INTO THE FIRE BECAUSE IT'S ALL A WORTHLESS SHAM.
I can make more. he thought grimly as he flung each painting onto the leaping flames. So why does this hurt?
AS MOST MEN, NEAL FEELS HIS FEELINGS BUT HAS NO CLUE (AND DOESN'T WANT TO HAVE) WHERE THEY COME FROM OR WHY HE FEELS. HE KNOWS HE CAN "MAKE MORE" -- REBUILD HIS LIFE -- BUT ON MORE SHAM, MORE CONS, A FALSE AND FAKE LIFE WORTH NOTHING BUT BURNING IN A BLEAK, OPEN FIELD UNDER THE WATCHFUL EYES OF THE AUTHORITIES.
The brown wrapper followed the canvasses, flapping in the wind.
REALLY NOTHING LEFT, NOT EVEN THE WRAPPER.
WHAT HE HAD CLUTCHED TO HIMSELF, HE HAS NOW THROWN AWAY. THIS IS THE BACKSTORY OF THE WHOLE TV SERIES UP TO "NOW" WHEN ULTRACAPE SOLVES THE PROBLEM EVER SO NEATLY.
Neal turned to face the welded together group of five F.B.I. guys and paced the distance back to them.
OK, BRAVELY FACE THE FUTURE.
He could have just let me burn them in my fireplace.
AGAIN THE MORPHING RELATIONSHIP, THE UNCERTAINTY THAT HE EVEN UNDERSTANDS PETER.
He made it back to the car certain he'd shown no hint of the pain he didn't let himself feel.
THIS INVITES FANFIC READERS TO RE-WATCH ALL THE SHOWS FOR HINTS OF NEAL'S INNER LIFE SHOWING THROUGH WHEN HE THINKS IT DOESN'T. ALSO AGAIN, ANOTHER SHOW DON'T TELL OF HOW THE FACE HE TURNS TO THE OUTER WORLD IS A CONSTRUCT, NOT WHAT HE KNOWS AS HIS TRUE SELF. HE DOESN'T LET HIMSELF FEEL HIS OWN PAIN, SO IT WON'T SHOW, BECAUSE - WHAT? IF IT DID SHOW WHAT WOULD HAPPEN? REJECTION? AGAIN, THE POINTS OF CHARACTERIZATION ULTRACAPE HIGHLIGHTED ARE SHOWN, NOT TOLD. BUT IT'S JUST A LITTLE DIFFERENT THAN HER NEAL WOULD DO IT.
By the time they arrived at the office, Neal's back had relaxed enough for him to stride freely down the corridor, even though fully aware of each of his freehand sketches displayed on the walls.
HERE WE JOIN THE NARRATIVE ULTRACAPE WROTE WITH A DIFFERENT SEGUE. HER OPENING "THEY HUNG IN ALMOST EVERY OFFICE" IS REALLY COOL, AND I WAS VERY SORRY TO LOSE IT. SO I PUT IT IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH, AFTER REVEALING WHAT "THEY" ARE -- BETTER THAN SCRAPPING IT TOTALLY.
They hung in almost every office, were tacked on nearly all the peg boards and some having been enthusiastically signed with a flourish by the grinning artist were framed and brought home and displayed in places of honor.
He realized he'd been doing a lot more of those sketches since the murder of his lady love. There were few in the F.B.I.'s White Collar Crime Division who had not been captured in a Neal Caffery original sketch.
Why do they keep them? The scene of the morning returned full force, Peter melding seamlessly into the group of four F.B.I. guys, and himself apart. He tried to shake it off. They don't see me as just some tool to be used by whoever needs my unique skills!
But Neal knew that as far as those four guys were concerned, he deserved to be in prison, or dead, if they could only remember the right wanted poster.
But I've decided to do whatever it takes to stay out of prison, and I can do whatever I decide to do. Right?
Peter's phone rang. As he slipped it from his pocket, he said, "Neal, wait for me in my office, okay? I'll be right back." And he took off down the hall, phone to his ear.
Neal sighed and watched him go. See? What did I tell you? he told himself silently. I'm just a convenience, a crime solving appliance.
BLENDING INTO ULTRACAPE'S FIRST SCENE, BRINGING A SHOW DON'T TELL IMAGE INTO THE APPROACH TO THE OFFICE, CREATING AN EXIT FOR PETER SO HE CAN RE-ENTER WITH THE GUEST AND NEW OFFER.
He slipped into Peter's office and took out his small sketch pad he he carried for waiting-room-moments.
As usual, his thoughts drifted off to Kate and flashes of their life together, always ending with the explosion that took her from him.
But this time, it was just a burst of brightness from the sun angling its rays against a building and reflecting suddenly onto his face, not an orange and angry black explosion.
He became aware he was staring out at the clear day, the tall glass monoliths sparkling in the morning light. His hand was sketching the cityscape, a simple pencil sketch capturing the brilliance of sparkling buildings, giving them a vitality unseen by passersby.
His back to the door, Neal was so focused on his work that he did not notice the two men, one carrying a file, who walked into the room until one of them leaned over his shoulder and gasped.
"Oh my G-d, Peter!"
AS PETER BRINGS HIS GUEST AND SUGGESTION INTO NEAL'S LIFE, WITH THAT BURNING PAINTINGS SCENE TACKED ONTO THE OPENING, WE HAVE A REVERSAL OR SWITCH, A BIG TURNABOUT IN THE RELATIONSHIP.
IN MY OPENING SCENE, NEAL IS FEELING -- NOT THINKING -- THAT PETER HAS REALLY ABANDONED HIM, THAT PETER IS BEING CRUEL ON PURPOSE IN SOME WAY, AND NEAL ISN'T SURE HE DOESN'T DESERVE IT. NEAL IS JUST IN GRIEVING MODE, TOTALLY LOST, AND FEELING ABANDONED BY PETER, HIS LAST FRIEND. BUT HERE, ALL OF A SUDDEN, IT'S REVERSED, AND PETER IS PROVIDING A SOLUTION THAT TAKES INTO ACCOUNT WHAT ART REALLY MEANS TO NEAL, A MEANING NEAL HIMSELF HAS NO CLUE (YET) EXISTS.
------------
Now, go over the scene you constructed, identify the techniques you did use, and make sure you've used all of the ones I've noted above.
Make your scene says what you want it to say, and with the characterization spin that you prefer -- but make it clear and vivid what your spin actually is.
This is a drill in SHOW DON'T TELL which is designed to prompt you to carry the dynamic evolution of a new icon for modern Romance into the future. It's all about Relationship shown but not told.
For more on the Romance iconization, see:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/turning-action-into-romance.html
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Monday, May 03, 2010
Intergalactic Bar & Grille Party Photos
Okay, it's that time of year. The fantabulous Romantic Times BOOKlovers Convention just concluded--this year in Columbus, OH. The 5th (I think it's 5th) annual Intergalactic Bar & Grille Party was a hit! Here are some photos from the fun and mayhem. Authors hosting the party, along with me, are: Jess Granger, Karin Shah, Jade Lee, Catherine Asaro, Isabo Kelly, Colby Hodge aka Cindy Holby, Liddy Midnight, Janet Miller, and Stacey Kade aka Stacey Klemstein...
Special thanks to Nikki (aka Expendable) for these photos!
Next year, Los Angeles!
~Linnea
www.linneasinclair.com
Special thanks to Nikki (aka Expendable) for these photos!
Next year, Los Angeles!
~Linnea
www.linneasinclair.com
Sunday, May 02, 2010
Authors Raising Money For Charity
May is the month during which Brenda Novak and her publishing industry friends auction off books, critiques, promo packages, advertising space, book tours, chocolate, jewelry and much, much more to raise money for Diabetes Research.
Here's Brenda's Home page
http://brendanovak.auctionanything.com/
Here's Rowena Cherry's page.
http://brendanovak.auctionanything.com/Bidding.taf?_function=detail&Auction_uid1=1773459
Here's Brenda's Home page
http://brendanovak.auctionanything.com/
Here's Rowena Cherry's page.
http://brendanovak.auctionanything.com/Bidding.taf?_function=detail&Auction_uid1=1773459
Here's my demo (mine is 7 minutes long and is the first chapter of Mating Net) although the offer is for 2 minutes.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Technology and the Writing Biz
Here’s an op-ed article from the Baltimore SUN contrasting traditional books with e-books, with special reference to reading WINNIE THE POOH aloud to a child:
Reading and Computers
And here’s a piece from the same day’s editorial page about writing on the computer versus the old-fashioned way:
Writing and Computers
And last, a long article from the NEW YORKER about whether the iPad can “save books.” This one is mainly about the BUSINESS of publishing:
iPad and Kindle
The first piece listed above skirts annoyingly close to the fallacious contrast often made between e-books and “real books.” Once and for all, media folks, e-books are BOOKS. I can remember similar scorn for paperbacks as “not real books” (“trashy paperback” in some circles was one word, like “damnyankee”). E-books serve better than paper books for some functions and not so well for others. I agree with the writer of that article about children’s picture books; even a full-color electronic display would be only a second-choice substitute for the traditional format. On the other hand, children’s material composed specifically for the electronic format could take advantage of features unavailable to old-fashioned books, such as interactivity.
The editorial about writing on the computer makes one assertion I heartily disagree with—that a word processor never improved anyone’s writing. It has certainly improved, if not revolutionized, mine! Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I was reluctant to rewrite because every change meant retyping a page, and a major rewrite would require weeks of repetitious work. I tended to think long and hard about whether replacing a not-quite-there phrase with a better alternative was worth the time and manual labor. (Not to mention the risk of introducing new typos with each iteration.) Now I can keep revising until the work is as close to perfect as it’s likely to get. And responding to editors’ revision requests may not be exactly a pleasure, but it’s no longer a nightmare. Viva technology!
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Reading and Computers
And here’s a piece from the same day’s editorial page about writing on the computer versus the old-fashioned way:
Writing and Computers
And last, a long article from the NEW YORKER about whether the iPad can “save books.” This one is mainly about the BUSINESS of publishing:
iPad and Kindle
The first piece listed above skirts annoyingly close to the fallacious contrast often made between e-books and “real books.” Once and for all, media folks, e-books are BOOKS. I can remember similar scorn for paperbacks as “not real books” (“trashy paperback” in some circles was one word, like “damnyankee”). E-books serve better than paper books for some functions and not so well for others. I agree with the writer of that article about children’s picture books; even a full-color electronic display would be only a second-choice substitute for the traditional format. On the other hand, children’s material composed specifically for the electronic format could take advantage of features unavailable to old-fashioned books, such as interactivity.
The editorial about writing on the computer makes one assertion I heartily disagree with—that a word processor never improved anyone’s writing. It has certainly improved, if not revolutionized, mine! Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I was reluctant to rewrite because every change meant retyping a page, and a major rewrite would require weeks of repetitious work. I tended to think long and hard about whether replacing a not-quite-there phrase with a better alternative was worth the time and manual labor. (Not to mention the risk of introducing new typos with each iteration.) Now I can keep revising until the work is as close to perfect as it’s likely to get. And responding to editors’ revision requests may not be exactly a pleasure, but it’s no longer a nightmare. Viva technology!
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
7 Pursuits To Teach Yourself Writing Part II
This is Part II, continued from Tuesday April 20.
3) What Is Your Favorite Story
Of all the stories you have floating around inside you, which one(s) are your real favorites?
Which universe have you created that you really live in, while just visiting our shared reality occasionally?
Which character pops up leading your stories most often?
Oh, yes, you have dozens, right?
Probably not. Probably, if you are like most writers, for long stretches of your life you will actually write only one story, about one character, with one problem.
Those Literary Criticism writers I discussed above actually do produce some useful information as they compare works from a given writer over a lifetime.
One thing that turns up among many prolific writers is very similar to what movie critics find about Lead Actors -- there is a single character or "type" and a single story-theme that the writer or actor does with exceptional audience "reach" (breadth of appeal).
And as I have said that I learned from my first writing teacher, Alma Hill, Writing Is A Performing Art.
Writing and Acting are really the same profession.
The skills of one apply to the other.
Very likely, your favorite story will be the story you can craft with the broadest possible "reach."
In Hollywood marketing, "reach" is the measure of how many different demographics will pay to see a work. Does it appeal to 15 year old boys AND 30 year old women, AND 25 year old men and women, and Parents taking their kids, AND 20 year olds taking a date? Can you get them all into the theater? Then you have "reach."
Or you might be in a "niche" market, and not have a very broad reach but really, really REALLY hit that single demographic, 15 year old boys who will drag their date into the theater whether she likes it or not.
And woe betide her if she says she doesn't.
If you read enough biographies, you'll find a lot of very popular writers have been shocked and surprised by the explosion in popularity of a particular thing they've written. Some can duplicate that success, and some can't. I think mostly those who can't are those who have written something very well indeed, but it isn't a favorite inner story of their own.
Why are we talking about this? Because one pursuit you can't stray from is the pursuit of the right mentor for you at this particular time in your development.
That mentor will be someone who is currently selling your favorite character in your favorite story.
If you pursued the study of archetypes, you will be able to see why you resonate to that author's work. Your story, inside of you, is somehow also the same as this author's. But the similarity will be on the highest abstract level, and the differences will mask that similarity in every way possible.
It's the differences that you have to sell. That's your stock in trade.
But what makes your stuff sell is the "vehicle" - the archetype behind it all.
Well mastered craftsmanship lets you showcase the differences and hide the similarities. And that's what gives you penetrating power into an existing market.
If you can't find books on writing by a writer whose work tells you that you belong in his orchestra, in his classroom, among his peers, playing his song, then you must learn by studying how and why you respond to his stories.
A "pantser" learns best by studying what others have externalized. A plotter learns best by studying what's inside themselves. I do both.
4) What Is Your Natural Trope?
One of the pursuits of a writer who wants to reach a broad and deep market, to extract money out of her audience, is the formal education in "literature."
Since the printing press is much older than the moving-picture, there's a lot more written about story-craft in reference to text-based stories than about films.
A film, though, is a story. It's a story in pictures. It's images and iconography, and in many ways far more powerful than the written word. But in other ways, pictures are less powerful than the written word.
But if you have studied the Shamanistic story telling, the Bardic tale, the living oral traditions that led to the Ancient Greek theater, to Rome, to Shakespeare, etc., you surely have noted that the genres created in each medium bear a haunting similarity to each other.
The Adventure, The War Story, The Costume Drama, The Coming Of Age Tale, The Hero's Journey.
Each prototype is adaptable to each medium we've invented so far.
Now, it seems 3-D is the next big thing, but it's so expensive that only the simplest, most visual stories (AVATAR) can be distributed in that medium.
So for the next few decades, I would suggest new writers perfect ways of crating their stories to blend both text and images. In time, distribution costs may come down to where a select few "classics" written for future media will reach future generations.
So, search the inventory of stories floating around in your mind, then learn the popular tropes, the genres, the rule-bound formulaic stories, and study how old genres evolve into new genres.
Consider the "Dime Novel Western," Hard Boiled Detective novel, the Bodice Ripper, the Gothic Romance, the Kickass Heroine SF-Romance, the time-travel Romance, the adventure, the soap opera, the sourcerer's apprentice and all the ever morphing forms.
Then contrast-compare those extant forms with the classic, eternal "storytelling" tropes.
Learn the forms that make classics, then search through the stories inside you and find out what you have in those forms.
Now, it may happen that almost all the stories inside you are of one or another classic form. That could make life easy because you already have inventory to sell. Or it could make life hard because you don't know which one to work up into selling form or where to market it.
But more likely, you will find your own stories are the same as the extant forms you imbibe a lot of. Your favorite entertainment shapes your inner dialogue, but you also gravitate to the extant form that most resonates with your own personal story.
I've discussed how and why this matching happens in several posts on Astrology Just For Writers, with a list of links to them here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html
And in a discussion of Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series on screenwriting, is a discussion of what you can achieve with the knowledge of how your internal stories match (or don't) with the tropes that are most popular now, and classically.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html
If it happens that your internal stories just don't match any of the commercial genres, then you have at least three possibilities.
a) You can found a genre with a blockbuster they'll name the genre after.
b) You can whittle, craft, rearrange, develope, unfold, and morph your internal dialogue to match one of the currently extant genres.
c) You can develope a whole new internal dialogue.
Or you can do all of the above. None of this is a betrayal of your personal artistic nature or the gift you bring to the world. It's just mastering a craft, no more complex than learning to talk at age 2.
Storycraft is a language you can acquire as a native speaker -- without knowing grammar, spelling or punctuation. Or it's a language you can learn as an adult, a second language meticulously learned through grammar, vocabulary drill,and ennuciation.
If you speak story as a native, you become a pantser whose stories sell because your internal stories are already in the language everyone else speaks.
If you learn it as an adult, you become a plotter who tells only part of their internal story - the part that can be translated.
So when you've sifted the seething mass of stories inside you down to a set of those that match the external market.
So discovering your natural trope is the 4th pursuit in teaching yourself to write. If your natural trope isn't popular right now, that's a problem to solve by taking up the 5th pursuit, the study of your natural audience.
5) Who Is In Your Natural Audience?
You might think of this pursuit as "Where did everybody go?"
Or perhaps, when everyone is stampeding in the opposite direction from where you're going, you might ask, "What do they know that I don't know?"
As I noted above, actors and writers are really doing the same thing, and so spend a lot of time people watching, especially stampeding herds of people (i.e. trends in reading tastes).
Studying your audience, finding out what amuses them, what they laugh at, what they think about, what they worry about, is very likely the biggest life-long pursuit of a writer.
The commercial fiction writing craft is all about audience "reach" -- how broad an audience can you entertain? How little do they have to have in common with one another to enjoy your product?
But you don't have to be a commercial fiction writer to slice out a demographic of your own and entertain them fully and deeply.
Today, you have self-publishing options, and ebook publishers who are developing famous imprints in very narrow niche audiences.
Today you have many more choices for what to do with your internal story dialogue than ever before.
Find your natural audience, then ask yourself if you want to do what it takes to reach beyond that natural audience.
Very often, that might mean reducing the emotional impact on your natural audience in order to stir and fascinate a broader audience.
Once you've made that decision, you can choose a medium of delivery.
Today, there is a thriving independent film market beginning to develop niche audiences.
In any delivery medium, though, reaching your audience is all about cost, investment, up-front expense.
Part of your expenses as a writer include your education (not tax deductible yet), and the time spent on your day-job.
Who you want to write for, and what mechanism you want to use to reach that audience will shape and empower the fiction you produce.
For example, there was a time you couldn't write a sex scene in a YA novel. That world has changed. But the rules for YA sex and general audience sex scenes, and "Adult" sex scenes are still different.
So you will find yourself re-evaluating what audience you want to write for, and what medium to write in, for each individual work you tackle. Thus studying your natural audience, and audiences around the fringes of your natural audience will become a lifelong pursuit, not a single career decision graven in stone.
When you write a story, you are just like the oldest of old time storytellers. You are standing up before an audience, and what you say, how you say it, when you pause, and when you shout, all depends on how well you know the people behind the faces looking up at you from across the campfire.
Writers are just like actors, singers or dancers. It's the same craft performed in different media.
Writing is a performing art. To master it, you must perform.
And that doesn't mean just write a 1,000 words a day.
The story is not told until someone hears it.
The story is not written until someone reads it.
How well you can get your story to "go over" with your natural audience depends on practice - incessant practice.
But how well you can reach beyond your natural audience also depends on practice. A lot of that practice is practice at getting rejection slips and figuring out what to do about any comments on them.
Learning to reach beyond your natural audience, to reach enough people to justify book publication expenses, to justify a stage production or film production, takes persistent practice.
The more expensive the medium of production, the farther beyond your natural audience you must "reach." And so the more practice it takes.
Finding your natural audience is the first step in a long, involved pursuit. Once you identify your natural audience, you must figure out what they have in common with other audience-fragments you might reach with only tiny adjustments in your internal story's tropes.
And you have to do this over and over again for each story you want to tell. So again and again, it becomes a lifelong pursuit in teaching yourself to write.
However, just as telling your story can't happen until there is someone to tell it TO -- likewise, teaching yourself can't be done in total isolation.
6) Who Is Your Natural Mentor?
When you have done all you can do by yourself, when you have produced several works you have polished until you can't see a difference between your work and the other similar works in your genre, then you need a mentor.
Again, a mentor is not a teacher. A mentor is more like a drill instructor, a martial arts sensei, or a dance teacher or orchestra leader.
Before a mentor can help you at all, you must have the basics down pat, but not to the point where you believe you know it all, or where you've practiced your errors to be habits you can't change.
A mentor does something. You copy it. The mentor tells you what you did wrong, kicks your feet into allignment for the posture, drills you in the forms, tells you your note is flat, sets the tempo. You do it again and again and again until you conform your output to standard.
Who will you accept that kind of discipline from? How do you find that person? How will that person recognize you?
In teaching yourself to write, you will adopt many lifelong pursuits. Searching for your mentor -- and your next mentor and the next -- becomes a lifelong pursuit.
A mentor can't teach you. You can use a mentor to teach yourself, but only if you have defined what you must master and what you're willing to suffer through to master it.
The other 5 pursuits listed here help you define what you must master.
Only you can set limits on what you will suffer to achieve mastery.
Generally speaking, searching for a mentor will most likely not prove successful.
Mentors find you.
A potential mentor is someone who has just recently mastered what you now need to master.
People who are ready and willing to "pay it forward" - to pass on what they have internalized to a non-verbal understanding, will not generally go around looking for someone to mentor.
But they will be working in the field, demonstrating their mastery, cutting a swath through all the competition.
In the course of that, they may stumble upon your output, and recognize that the one thing it lacks is this newly mastered technique.
And they will offer a clue, a comment, a crumb, to help you recognize what's missing.
If you respond by accepting that casual input and putting it to use, incorporating it easily and quickly, and producing something ELSE to show them (not saying, "I made these changes. Is it right now?" but creating something new that does demonstrate an attempt at the technique) -- then perhaps you will capture this mentor's attention.
Once captured, you may not be able to shake that attention off so be careful who you respond to.
The flip side of the coin is that once you accept input from a mentor, you then must "pay it forward." You can't fail to offer that crumb to someone else who is lacking it.
Accepting a mentor doesn't cost money. It's much more expensive than that.
"By your students you'll be taught."
When you offer to mentor someone, you have to be vulnerable to what comes back at you because of it.
From that experience, though, will come your next great work.
Ultimately, that's where all our ideas come from -- other people.
Today, you can accept mentoring after a fashion via printed or ebooks on the craft.
But as with living, hands-on mentors, no one single source will inculcate everything you must master.
As I mentioned above, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of books on screenwriting and on novel writing.
They all pretty much say the same thing, over and over, in different ways, just as living mentors impart their craft in different ways.
Which book is good for you will depend on who you are and where you are in the learning curve at the moment you pick it up.
You can read the same advice 6 times and think you have it -- then read a 7th book and WHAM finally get it.
It all boils down to little sayings all professional writers know -- such as "show don't tell" "conflict, resolution" "characters must arc" -- but exactly how you personally implement these sigils of the craft depends on who you are.
If you go to
http://www.triggerstreet.com/
Sign up, and then look for JLichtenberg, you will find about 19 in depth analyses that I have done of screenplays others have written (some of the screenplays are still available there for free reading - some subsequently rewritten).
Quickly look through the screenplays and what I singled out as the main problem, and you will find that the same thing happens with screenplays as with novels -- over and over, the real and only problem with beginning writers (and seasoned pros, too) is CONFLICT.
Identifying, developing, and resolving a single main conflict, a thread that runs right through the work as the backbone of the work, is the one thing necessary to sell a work, and the last thing writers master.
Really. All these books on writing try to convey ways, means and methods of getting your mind to grapple with a conflict in such a way that a reader/viewer can grasp that conflict and experience its resolution as the personal payoff to sitting through the storytelling.
Every trope and genre has a specific conflict, and a pattern of events that leads to a resolution of that conflict.
All our lives have a main conflict (the story of your life) -- read my posts on Astrology and Tarot for more specifics.
We resonate to fiction that discusses our main life conflict "off the nose" - subconsciously, or by distancing the issue.
It's CONFLICT that connects your internal stories to your audience's internal stories.
Showing rather than telling CONFLICT is the main technique all books on writing try to mentor new writers into realizing in their drama.
Here are some books that do a fine job of it - books recommended by Rowena Cherry. In my opinion, you would do just fine picking a book off the library shelves or out of the discard bin at a used book store.
7)Books others use or recommend.
Three suggestions from Rowena Cherry - the writer who started this co-blog:
-------
Laughing at myself. Some would say that I did not do a very good job of teaching myself to write... so my list might not be a good recommendation.
Ronald B Tobias's "20 Master Plots" is always close at hand when I draft a new book, but I tend to take two of his master plots at a time, and mix them, one for the hero, the other for the heroine.
"I rely heavily on "The Joy Of Writing Sex" by Elizabeth Benedict (I think), because I don't naturally enjoy writing about sex."
"Al Zuckerman's "Writing The Blockbuster Novel" has some excellent recommendations of blockbusters to read (Thorn birds, The Godfather, Gone With The Wind..." However, I have yet to write a blockbuster, so either the advice left too much to extrapolation, or I am a lousy student.
Probably the latter!"
"Orson Scott Card's "Characterization" book is excellent, but if you read "How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy" you find the same great advice, pretty much."
--------
I would agree with all three of those.
Pray hard, close your eyes, pick a book, start reading in the middle of the book. You'll find the mentoring advice you need to get started on this pursuit.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
3) What Is Your Favorite Story
Of all the stories you have floating around inside you, which one(s) are your real favorites?
Which universe have you created that you really live in, while just visiting our shared reality occasionally?
Which character pops up leading your stories most often?
Oh, yes, you have dozens, right?
Probably not. Probably, if you are like most writers, for long stretches of your life you will actually write only one story, about one character, with one problem.
Those Literary Criticism writers I discussed above actually do produce some useful information as they compare works from a given writer over a lifetime.
One thing that turns up among many prolific writers is very similar to what movie critics find about Lead Actors -- there is a single character or "type" and a single story-theme that the writer or actor does with exceptional audience "reach" (breadth of appeal).
And as I have said that I learned from my first writing teacher, Alma Hill, Writing Is A Performing Art.
Writing and Acting are really the same profession.
The skills of one apply to the other.
Very likely, your favorite story will be the story you can craft with the broadest possible "reach."
In Hollywood marketing, "reach" is the measure of how many different demographics will pay to see a work. Does it appeal to 15 year old boys AND 30 year old women, AND 25 year old men and women, and Parents taking their kids, AND 20 year olds taking a date? Can you get them all into the theater? Then you have "reach."
Or you might be in a "niche" market, and not have a very broad reach but really, really REALLY hit that single demographic, 15 year old boys who will drag their date into the theater whether she likes it or not.
And woe betide her if she says she doesn't.
If you read enough biographies, you'll find a lot of very popular writers have been shocked and surprised by the explosion in popularity of a particular thing they've written. Some can duplicate that success, and some can't. I think mostly those who can't are those who have written something very well indeed, but it isn't a favorite inner story of their own.
Why are we talking about this? Because one pursuit you can't stray from is the pursuit of the right mentor for you at this particular time in your development.
That mentor will be someone who is currently selling your favorite character in your favorite story.
If you pursued the study of archetypes, you will be able to see why you resonate to that author's work. Your story, inside of you, is somehow also the same as this author's. But the similarity will be on the highest abstract level, and the differences will mask that similarity in every way possible.
It's the differences that you have to sell. That's your stock in trade.
But what makes your stuff sell is the "vehicle" - the archetype behind it all.
Well mastered craftsmanship lets you showcase the differences and hide the similarities. And that's what gives you penetrating power into an existing market.
If you can't find books on writing by a writer whose work tells you that you belong in his orchestra, in his classroom, among his peers, playing his song, then you must learn by studying how and why you respond to his stories.
A "pantser" learns best by studying what others have externalized. A plotter learns best by studying what's inside themselves. I do both.
4) What Is Your Natural Trope?
One of the pursuits of a writer who wants to reach a broad and deep market, to extract money out of her audience, is the formal education in "literature."
Since the printing press is much older than the moving-picture, there's a lot more written about story-craft in reference to text-based stories than about films.
A film, though, is a story. It's a story in pictures. It's images and iconography, and in many ways far more powerful than the written word. But in other ways, pictures are less powerful than the written word.
But if you have studied the Shamanistic story telling, the Bardic tale, the living oral traditions that led to the Ancient Greek theater, to Rome, to Shakespeare, etc., you surely have noted that the genres created in each medium bear a haunting similarity to each other.
The Adventure, The War Story, The Costume Drama, The Coming Of Age Tale, The Hero's Journey.
Each prototype is adaptable to each medium we've invented so far.
Now, it seems 3-D is the next big thing, but it's so expensive that only the simplest, most visual stories (AVATAR) can be distributed in that medium.
So for the next few decades, I would suggest new writers perfect ways of crating their stories to blend both text and images. In time, distribution costs may come down to where a select few "classics" written for future media will reach future generations.
So, search the inventory of stories floating around in your mind, then learn the popular tropes, the genres, the rule-bound formulaic stories, and study how old genres evolve into new genres.
Consider the "Dime Novel Western," Hard Boiled Detective novel, the Bodice Ripper, the Gothic Romance, the Kickass Heroine SF-Romance, the time-travel Romance, the adventure, the soap opera, the sourcerer's apprentice and all the ever morphing forms.
Then contrast-compare those extant forms with the classic, eternal "storytelling" tropes.
Learn the forms that make classics, then search through the stories inside you and find out what you have in those forms.
Now, it may happen that almost all the stories inside you are of one or another classic form. That could make life easy because you already have inventory to sell. Or it could make life hard because you don't know which one to work up into selling form or where to market it.
But more likely, you will find your own stories are the same as the extant forms you imbibe a lot of. Your favorite entertainment shapes your inner dialogue, but you also gravitate to the extant form that most resonates with your own personal story.
I've discussed how and why this matching happens in several posts on Astrology Just For Writers, with a list of links to them here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html
And in a discussion of Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series on screenwriting, is a discussion of what you can achieve with the knowledge of how your internal stories match (or don't) with the tropes that are most popular now, and classically.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html
If it happens that your internal stories just don't match any of the commercial genres, then you have at least three possibilities.
a) You can found a genre with a blockbuster they'll name the genre after.
b) You can whittle, craft, rearrange, develope, unfold, and morph your internal dialogue to match one of the currently extant genres.
c) You can develope a whole new internal dialogue.
Or you can do all of the above. None of this is a betrayal of your personal artistic nature or the gift you bring to the world. It's just mastering a craft, no more complex than learning to talk at age 2.
Storycraft is a language you can acquire as a native speaker -- without knowing grammar, spelling or punctuation. Or it's a language you can learn as an adult, a second language meticulously learned through grammar, vocabulary drill,and ennuciation.
If you speak story as a native, you become a pantser whose stories sell because your internal stories are already in the language everyone else speaks.
If you learn it as an adult, you become a plotter who tells only part of their internal story - the part that can be translated.
So when you've sifted the seething mass of stories inside you down to a set of those that match the external market.
So discovering your natural trope is the 4th pursuit in teaching yourself to write. If your natural trope isn't popular right now, that's a problem to solve by taking up the 5th pursuit, the study of your natural audience.
5) Who Is In Your Natural Audience?
You might think of this pursuit as "Where did everybody go?"
Or perhaps, when everyone is stampeding in the opposite direction from where you're going, you might ask, "What do they know that I don't know?"
As I noted above, actors and writers are really doing the same thing, and so spend a lot of time people watching, especially stampeding herds of people (i.e. trends in reading tastes).
Studying your audience, finding out what amuses them, what they laugh at, what they think about, what they worry about, is very likely the biggest life-long pursuit of a writer.
The commercial fiction writing craft is all about audience "reach" -- how broad an audience can you entertain? How little do they have to have in common with one another to enjoy your product?
But you don't have to be a commercial fiction writer to slice out a demographic of your own and entertain them fully and deeply.
Today, you have self-publishing options, and ebook publishers who are developing famous imprints in very narrow niche audiences.
Today you have many more choices for what to do with your internal story dialogue than ever before.
Find your natural audience, then ask yourself if you want to do what it takes to reach beyond that natural audience.
Very often, that might mean reducing the emotional impact on your natural audience in order to stir and fascinate a broader audience.
Once you've made that decision, you can choose a medium of delivery.
Today, there is a thriving independent film market beginning to develop niche audiences.
In any delivery medium, though, reaching your audience is all about cost, investment, up-front expense.
Part of your expenses as a writer include your education (not tax deductible yet), and the time spent on your day-job.
Who you want to write for, and what mechanism you want to use to reach that audience will shape and empower the fiction you produce.
For example, there was a time you couldn't write a sex scene in a YA novel. That world has changed. But the rules for YA sex and general audience sex scenes, and "Adult" sex scenes are still different.
So you will find yourself re-evaluating what audience you want to write for, and what medium to write in, for each individual work you tackle. Thus studying your natural audience, and audiences around the fringes of your natural audience will become a lifelong pursuit, not a single career decision graven in stone.
When you write a story, you are just like the oldest of old time storytellers. You are standing up before an audience, and what you say, how you say it, when you pause, and when you shout, all depends on how well you know the people behind the faces looking up at you from across the campfire.
Writers are just like actors, singers or dancers. It's the same craft performed in different media.
Writing is a performing art. To master it, you must perform.
And that doesn't mean just write a 1,000 words a day.
The story is not told until someone hears it.
The story is not written until someone reads it.
How well you can get your story to "go over" with your natural audience depends on practice - incessant practice.
But how well you can reach beyond your natural audience also depends on practice. A lot of that practice is practice at getting rejection slips and figuring out what to do about any comments on them.
Learning to reach beyond your natural audience, to reach enough people to justify book publication expenses, to justify a stage production or film production, takes persistent practice.
The more expensive the medium of production, the farther beyond your natural audience you must "reach." And so the more practice it takes.
Finding your natural audience is the first step in a long, involved pursuit. Once you identify your natural audience, you must figure out what they have in common with other audience-fragments you might reach with only tiny adjustments in your internal story's tropes.
And you have to do this over and over again for each story you want to tell. So again and again, it becomes a lifelong pursuit in teaching yourself to write.
However, just as telling your story can't happen until there is someone to tell it TO -- likewise, teaching yourself can't be done in total isolation.
6) Who Is Your Natural Mentor?
When you have done all you can do by yourself, when you have produced several works you have polished until you can't see a difference between your work and the other similar works in your genre, then you need a mentor.
Again, a mentor is not a teacher. A mentor is more like a drill instructor, a martial arts sensei, or a dance teacher or orchestra leader.
Before a mentor can help you at all, you must have the basics down pat, but not to the point where you believe you know it all, or where you've practiced your errors to be habits you can't change.
A mentor does something. You copy it. The mentor tells you what you did wrong, kicks your feet into allignment for the posture, drills you in the forms, tells you your note is flat, sets the tempo. You do it again and again and again until you conform your output to standard.
Who will you accept that kind of discipline from? How do you find that person? How will that person recognize you?
In teaching yourself to write, you will adopt many lifelong pursuits. Searching for your mentor -- and your next mentor and the next -- becomes a lifelong pursuit.
A mentor can't teach you. You can use a mentor to teach yourself, but only if you have defined what you must master and what you're willing to suffer through to master it.
The other 5 pursuits listed here help you define what you must master.
Only you can set limits on what you will suffer to achieve mastery.
Generally speaking, searching for a mentor will most likely not prove successful.
Mentors find you.
A potential mentor is someone who has just recently mastered what you now need to master.
People who are ready and willing to "pay it forward" - to pass on what they have internalized to a non-verbal understanding, will not generally go around looking for someone to mentor.
But they will be working in the field, demonstrating their mastery, cutting a swath through all the competition.
In the course of that, they may stumble upon your output, and recognize that the one thing it lacks is this newly mastered technique.
And they will offer a clue, a comment, a crumb, to help you recognize what's missing.
If you respond by accepting that casual input and putting it to use, incorporating it easily and quickly, and producing something ELSE to show them (not saying, "I made these changes. Is it right now?" but creating something new that does demonstrate an attempt at the technique) -- then perhaps you will capture this mentor's attention.
Once captured, you may not be able to shake that attention off so be careful who you respond to.
The flip side of the coin is that once you accept input from a mentor, you then must "pay it forward." You can't fail to offer that crumb to someone else who is lacking it.
Accepting a mentor doesn't cost money. It's much more expensive than that.
"By your students you'll be taught."
When you offer to mentor someone, you have to be vulnerable to what comes back at you because of it.
From that experience, though, will come your next great work.
Ultimately, that's where all our ideas come from -- other people.
Today, you can accept mentoring after a fashion via printed or ebooks on the craft.
But as with living, hands-on mentors, no one single source will inculcate everything you must master.
As I mentioned above, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of books on screenwriting and on novel writing.
They all pretty much say the same thing, over and over, in different ways, just as living mentors impart their craft in different ways.
Which book is good for you will depend on who you are and where you are in the learning curve at the moment you pick it up.
You can read the same advice 6 times and think you have it -- then read a 7th book and WHAM finally get it.
It all boils down to little sayings all professional writers know -- such as "show don't tell" "conflict, resolution" "characters must arc" -- but exactly how you personally implement these sigils of the craft depends on who you are.
If you go to
http://www.triggerstreet.com/
Sign up, and then look for JLichtenberg, you will find about 19 in depth analyses that I have done of screenplays others have written (some of the screenplays are still available there for free reading - some subsequently rewritten).
Quickly look through the screenplays and what I singled out as the main problem, and you will find that the same thing happens with screenplays as with novels -- over and over, the real and only problem with beginning writers (and seasoned pros, too) is CONFLICT.
Identifying, developing, and resolving a single main conflict, a thread that runs right through the work as the backbone of the work, is the one thing necessary to sell a work, and the last thing writers master.
Really. All these books on writing try to convey ways, means and methods of getting your mind to grapple with a conflict in such a way that a reader/viewer can grasp that conflict and experience its resolution as the personal payoff to sitting through the storytelling.
Every trope and genre has a specific conflict, and a pattern of events that leads to a resolution of that conflict.
All our lives have a main conflict (the story of your life) -- read my posts on Astrology and Tarot for more specifics.
We resonate to fiction that discusses our main life conflict "off the nose" - subconsciously, or by distancing the issue.
It's CONFLICT that connects your internal stories to your audience's internal stories.
Showing rather than telling CONFLICT is the main technique all books on writing try to mentor new writers into realizing in their drama.
Here are some books that do a fine job of it - books recommended by Rowena Cherry. In my opinion, you would do just fine picking a book off the library shelves or out of the discard bin at a used book store.
7)Books others use or recommend.
Three suggestions from Rowena Cherry - the writer who started this co-blog:
-------
Laughing at myself. Some would say that I did not do a very good job of teaching myself to write... so my list might not be a good recommendation.
Ronald B Tobias's "20 Master Plots" is always close at hand when I draft a new book, but I tend to take two of his master plots at a time, and mix them, one for the hero, the other for the heroine.
"I rely heavily on "The Joy Of Writing Sex" by Elizabeth Benedict (I think), because I don't naturally enjoy writing about sex."
"Al Zuckerman's "Writing The Blockbuster Novel" has some excellent recommendations of blockbusters to read (Thorn birds, The Godfather, Gone With The Wind..." However, I have yet to write a blockbuster, so either the advice left too much to extrapolation, or I am a lousy student.
Probably the latter!"
"Orson Scott Card's "Characterization" book is excellent, but if you read "How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy" you find the same great advice, pretty much."
--------
I would agree with all three of those.
Pray hard, close your eyes, pick a book, start reading in the middle of the book. You'll find the mentoring advice you need to get started on this pursuit.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Monday, April 26, 2010
Meridian Magazine:: Ideas and Society: Orson Scott Card on the Dismantling of America
Meridian Magazine:: Ideas and Society: Orson Scott Card on the Dismantling of America
Maybe this article by Orson Scott Card doesn't paint the picture of cause and effect, the relationship between culture and storytelling, just exactly right, but it's a clear statement.
And I have definitely seen this shift happen, as he describes it. I also think something Good has been discarded along with Old Culture quirks that weren't working well.
So if you intend to publish your storytelling, I'd definitely recommend you read this article, save it, and maybe re-read it in 20 more years.
Research your genre's books published in the 1960's, and write contrast/compare essays between them and books being published today. See if you can nail the difference, and use that as the core conflict to generate yourself an original universe to tell stories about.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Maybe this article by Orson Scott Card doesn't paint the picture of cause and effect, the relationship between culture and storytelling, just exactly right, but it's a clear statement.
And I have definitely seen this shift happen, as he describes it. I also think something Good has been discarded along with Old Culture quirks that weren't working well.
So if you intend to publish your storytelling, I'd definitely recommend you read this article, save it, and maybe re-read it in 20 more years.
Research your genre's books published in the 1960's, and write contrast/compare essays between them and books being published today. See if you can nail the difference, and use that as the core conflict to generate yourself an original universe to tell stories about.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Jobs
What do people do for a living in our science fiction romance and alien romance worlds?
I see farmer-colonists, teachers (magical and religious), healers, a plethora of law enforcers, also law makers, nightclub owners and bar tenders, entertainers (and pleasure-givers) and athletes, explorers, warriors, rulers, traders, doctors, newsmen, pilots and other functionaries necessary for the running of a military or civilian space station or space ark. Also the pirates, bounty hunters, assassins, smugglers, freedom fighters.
Maybe that's a comprehensive list, after all. Are there any glaring omissions that strike you?
If so, what gets glossed over, and why?
Have you read a small stack of books and been left with a niggling feeling that some of today's (and yesterday's) worldbuilding is rather superficial?
On the other hand, the submission guidelines for mid-list books seem to be calling for shorter manuscripts. Few debut authors could write a rich, sprawling Dickensian work.
I watch Mike Rowe's "Dirty Jobs" with great interest, and wonder how much of civilization's truly nasty jobs could be presumed to be done by robots in the future.
I see farmer-colonists, teachers (magical and religious), healers, a plethora of law enforcers, also law makers, nightclub owners and bar tenders, entertainers (and pleasure-givers) and athletes, explorers, warriors, rulers, traders, doctors, newsmen, pilots and other functionaries necessary for the running of a military or civilian space station or space ark. Also the pirates, bounty hunters, assassins, smugglers, freedom fighters.
Maybe that's a comprehensive list, after all. Are there any glaring omissions that strike you?
If so, what gets glossed over, and why?
Have you read a small stack of books and been left with a niggling feeling that some of today's (and yesterday's) worldbuilding is rather superficial?
On the other hand, the submission guidelines for mid-list books seem to be calling for shorter manuscripts. Few debut authors could write a rich, sprawling Dickensian work.
I watch Mike Rowe's "Dirty Jobs" with great interest, and wonder how much of civilization's truly nasty jobs could be presumed to be done by robots in the future.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Limited Editions and E-Books
Cemetery Dance Publications will soon put out a limited edition of a new novella called “Blockade Billy” by Stephen King. Judging from the blurb, the story combines baseball and horror. This news even got a big article in the Baltimore SUN:
Baltimore Sun
This isn’t the first King title Cemetery Dance has published, but it’s the first time they’ve had an “exclusive” on a limited first edition by him. Although I subscribe to CEMETERY DANCE magazine, I’ve never bought one of their books. They produce deluxe, short-run products that are too expensive for me. I’m not a collector; I buy books strictly to read the words, and the idea of spending $25 for a novella makes me go “eek!” and run the other way. Even if it does include extras such as collectible baseball cards. (Thanks to online bookstore discounts, I never spend that much for NOVELS.) But I really, really wanted this novella now instead of many months later when it may get included in a King story collection at standard hardcover prices. To my delight, Amazon.com offered copies of the Cemetery Dance release at a deep discount of $13 and change. So I ordered it.
A few days later, it was announced that Cemetery Dance would not have enough copies (it’s a 10,000-copy run) to fill outside orders. Amazon canceled the availability of the book. Bummer. Then, happily, King’s regular publisher stepped up to the plate (to draw upon the baseball theme). They will release a non-limited edition in May at the reasonable price of about $14. Yay! I put that product in my Amazon shopping cart but did not pre-order. When I discovered today that the Kindle edition, still cheaper, has just been released, I bought it. Instant gratification, no waiting until nearly the end of May.
You may have figured out that I’m chintzy when it comes to shopping. I buy too many books not to seek bargains wherever available. (If my husband ever looked at the statements for the credit card I use at Amazon, he would doubtless say I buy too many books, period.) If I simply must read a new book right now, I buy the hardcover at the Amazon or Barnes and Noble online discount. If there’s a cheaper Kindle edition and it’s not one of the authors I feel I need to have in hard copy, I buy that. If I can wait, I either request the book from the library or buy the paperback later (or both). With older books, I often buy used copies from the online sites, especially if it’s something I’m not sure I’ll be enthusiastic about. As for highly overpriced items such as academic books, in most cases I couldn’t own them at all if not for cheap used copies.
The point of all this rambling—aside from “new Stephen King horror novella, yay!”—is to applaud what a wealth of format and price choices readers have nowadays and what innovative things some publishers and retailers are doing in the book distribution business. Well, some of them; some are trying to expect exorbitant prices for e-books and claiming that $9.99 Kindle editions are underpriced! If major publishers start charging near-hardcover prices for e-books and then act surprised when readers won’t buy them—well, they would be shooting themselves in the foot. The argument that e-books need just as much editing, formatting, etc. as print books, coming from mass market publishers, is disingenuous. When an e-book comes into existence as an additional format of a book that has already been released in print, all that work has already been done. Profits from the e-book should be mainly gravy. Our independent e-publishers (Hard Shell, Amber Quill, Ellora’s Cave, Mundania, etc.) seem to get along just fine pricing e-books at or below mass market paperback rates. Granted, they probably pay their editors a lot less than New York publishers pay theirs. But that difference couldn’t justify pricing e-books equal to (or even near) the print edition of the same book.
On the whole, though, there’s much going on to celebrate. In DIFFERENT SEASONS Stephen King labeled the novella the “banana republic” of fiction, the format nobody wanted. (As in, “Senor, your story is going to be here a long, long time.”) Now, thanks to the Internet, fiction of that length can be published and profitably sold to readers as a stand-alone unit. No longer do we have to hunt for a magazine or anthology willing to give the poor thing a home.
Speaking of anthologies, there’s a new one called WARRIORS that includes stories by three of my SF and fantasy favorite authors. The topic in general, though, doesn’t interest me a bit. I’d love to read those stories, but I’m not willing to pay the cost of a whole hardcover for them. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could buy electronic versions of individual stories out of an anthology, like individual songs off a music album? Actually, the Marion Zimmer Bradley estate is doing that very thing with items from the Darkover and SWORD AND SORCERESS volumes. They’re offering the individual tales separately on Fictionwise.com, with a generous cut to the authors. I wish more anthology editors would think of doing that.
So many potential opportunities for readers and writers. Truly, we live in frabjous times.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Baltimore Sun
This isn’t the first King title Cemetery Dance has published, but it’s the first time they’ve had an “exclusive” on a limited first edition by him. Although I subscribe to CEMETERY DANCE magazine, I’ve never bought one of their books. They produce deluxe, short-run products that are too expensive for me. I’m not a collector; I buy books strictly to read the words, and the idea of spending $25 for a novella makes me go “eek!” and run the other way. Even if it does include extras such as collectible baseball cards. (Thanks to online bookstore discounts, I never spend that much for NOVELS.) But I really, really wanted this novella now instead of many months later when it may get included in a King story collection at standard hardcover prices. To my delight, Amazon.com offered copies of the Cemetery Dance release at a deep discount of $13 and change. So I ordered it.
A few days later, it was announced that Cemetery Dance would not have enough copies (it’s a 10,000-copy run) to fill outside orders. Amazon canceled the availability of the book. Bummer. Then, happily, King’s regular publisher stepped up to the plate (to draw upon the baseball theme). They will release a non-limited edition in May at the reasonable price of about $14. Yay! I put that product in my Amazon shopping cart but did not pre-order. When I discovered today that the Kindle edition, still cheaper, has just been released, I bought it. Instant gratification, no waiting until nearly the end of May.
You may have figured out that I’m chintzy when it comes to shopping. I buy too many books not to seek bargains wherever available. (If my husband ever looked at the statements for the credit card I use at Amazon, he would doubtless say I buy too many books, period.) If I simply must read a new book right now, I buy the hardcover at the Amazon or Barnes and Noble online discount. If there’s a cheaper Kindle edition and it’s not one of the authors I feel I need to have in hard copy, I buy that. If I can wait, I either request the book from the library or buy the paperback later (or both). With older books, I often buy used copies from the online sites, especially if it’s something I’m not sure I’ll be enthusiastic about. As for highly overpriced items such as academic books, in most cases I couldn’t own them at all if not for cheap used copies.
The point of all this rambling—aside from “new Stephen King horror novella, yay!”—is to applaud what a wealth of format and price choices readers have nowadays and what innovative things some publishers and retailers are doing in the book distribution business. Well, some of them; some are trying to expect exorbitant prices for e-books and claiming that $9.99 Kindle editions are underpriced! If major publishers start charging near-hardcover prices for e-books and then act surprised when readers won’t buy them—well, they would be shooting themselves in the foot. The argument that e-books need just as much editing, formatting, etc. as print books, coming from mass market publishers, is disingenuous. When an e-book comes into existence as an additional format of a book that has already been released in print, all that work has already been done. Profits from the e-book should be mainly gravy. Our independent e-publishers (Hard Shell, Amber Quill, Ellora’s Cave, Mundania, etc.) seem to get along just fine pricing e-books at or below mass market paperback rates. Granted, they probably pay their editors a lot less than New York publishers pay theirs. But that difference couldn’t justify pricing e-books equal to (or even near) the print edition of the same book.
On the whole, though, there’s much going on to celebrate. In DIFFERENT SEASONS Stephen King labeled the novella the “banana republic” of fiction, the format nobody wanted. (As in, “Senor, your story is going to be here a long, long time.”) Now, thanks to the Internet, fiction of that length can be published and profitably sold to readers as a stand-alone unit. No longer do we have to hunt for a magazine or anthology willing to give the poor thing a home.
Speaking of anthologies, there’s a new one called WARRIORS that includes stories by three of my SF and fantasy favorite authors. The topic in general, though, doesn’t interest me a bit. I’d love to read those stories, but I’m not willing to pay the cost of a whole hardcover for them. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could buy electronic versions of individual stories out of an anthology, like individual songs off a music album? Actually, the Marion Zimmer Bradley estate is doing that very thing with items from the Darkover and SWORD AND SORCERESS volumes. They’re offering the individual tales separately on Fictionwise.com, with a generous cut to the authors. I wish more anthology editors would think of doing that.
So many potential opportunities for readers and writers. Truly, we live in frabjous times.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
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