Sunday, September 12, 2010
Saturday, September 11, 2010
9-11
In case you aren't familiar with it, here are the lyrics to the best 9-11 song I've ever heard, Alan Jackson's "Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning":
Where Were You
This song acknowledges all the conflicting emotions of that day but in the end focuses on hope and reconciliation. Remember how, just for a while, we all came together and recognized the matters we usually fight over as trivial by comparison? (As Miss Manners sardonically wrote some months later, we knew the terrorists hadn't won when we stopped being nice to each other.) Too bad our fallen human nature is such that it often takes a major disaster to remind us to love our neighbors.
Margaret
Where Were You
This song acknowledges all the conflicting emotions of that day but in the end focuses on hope and reconciliation. Remember how, just for a while, we all came together and recognized the matters we usually fight over as trivial by comparison? (As Miss Manners sardonically wrote some months later, we knew the terrorists hadn't won when we stopped being nice to each other.) Too bad our fallen human nature is such that it often takes a major disaster to remind us to love our neighbors.
Margaret
Thursday, September 09, 2010
Language and Thought
Here's a recent article on whether language shapes thought. The hard-line theory that grammar and vocabulary rigidly constrain a culture's perception of reality has been overturned. Yet the structure of our language does obviously influence our world-view, and it does so in more nuanced ways than simply preventing certain types of thought:
New York Times
Fortunately, Newspeak as designed in the dictatorship of George Orwell's 1984 probably wouldn't work the way its inventors hoped, to ensure that "heretical thought. . . should be literally unthinkable." In Orwell's afterword to the novel, he wisely adds, "so far as thought is dependent on words." The lack of precise terms may make a thought harder to shape, but the human mind is creative enough to get around that problem. We speak in parables and metaphors or invent new words.
What interested me most about that article cited above was the point that our languages force us to *notice* certain things. For example, a French speaker can't refer to a generic cousin, as we can in English. The gendered ending of the word forces the speaker to specify a male or female cousin. Some languages have different words for grandparents, aunts, or uncles depending on whether they belong to the maternal or paternal side of the family. And some languages have a very useful feature that requires every statement to indicate the source of the speaker's knowledge—eyewitness, hearsay, opinion, etc.
Although many people mock what's sometimes called "political correctness" in speech and writing, being careful about the terms used to refer to other people has a valid point. When "man" could mean either "human being" or specifically "adult male," it wasn't hard for phrases such as "the rights of man" to blur with ambiguity at the edges. Latin could avoid the ambiguity with "homo" for the former and "vir" for the latter; English doesn't have that distinction. Changing language doesn't magically change attitudes, but who could deny that language does help to shape attitudes?
And then there's the ever-shifting quality of euphemisms. "Retarded" (implying that the child is just developing a bit slower than others) began as a polite substitute for harsher terms such as "feeble-minded." Nowadays "retarded" has become perceived as an insult, to be replaced by phrases such as "developmentally disabled." The trouble with euphemisms, as the history of "retarded" illustrates, is that new ones eventually pick up the taint, so to speak, of the old ones, so yet another replacement has to be invented. The change in Maryland law from "disabled persons" to the subtly different "persons with disabilities" is an example of this trend.
Metaphors shape thought more powerfully than vocabulary and sentence structure. Consider the implications tucked inside metaphors such as "war on drugs," "war on poverty," and "war on terror." In war, violence is justified, and absolute victory is the only acceptable goal. In fighting against poverty or drugs, who are the enemy combatants?
Here's Orwell's essay about Newspeak:
Principles of Newspeak
He mentions that Newspeak aims to diminish rather than extend the range of thought and, as far as possible, make speech independent of conscious thought. Notice Orwell's sly references to the ways twentieth-century political discourse was already tending in that direction. Just the opposite of what we, as writers, aspire to do with language!
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
New York Times
Fortunately, Newspeak as designed in the dictatorship of George Orwell's 1984 probably wouldn't work the way its inventors hoped, to ensure that "heretical thought. . . should be literally unthinkable." In Orwell's afterword to the novel, he wisely adds, "so far as thought is dependent on words." The lack of precise terms may make a thought harder to shape, but the human mind is creative enough to get around that problem. We speak in parables and metaphors or invent new words.
What interested me most about that article cited above was the point that our languages force us to *notice* certain things. For example, a French speaker can't refer to a generic cousin, as we can in English. The gendered ending of the word forces the speaker to specify a male or female cousin. Some languages have different words for grandparents, aunts, or uncles depending on whether they belong to the maternal or paternal side of the family. And some languages have a very useful feature that requires every statement to indicate the source of the speaker's knowledge—eyewitness, hearsay, opinion, etc.
Although many people mock what's sometimes called "political correctness" in speech and writing, being careful about the terms used to refer to other people has a valid point. When "man" could mean either "human being" or specifically "adult male," it wasn't hard for phrases such as "the rights of man" to blur with ambiguity at the edges. Latin could avoid the ambiguity with "homo" for the former and "vir" for the latter; English doesn't have that distinction. Changing language doesn't magically change attitudes, but who could deny that language does help to shape attitudes?
And then there's the ever-shifting quality of euphemisms. "Retarded" (implying that the child is just developing a bit slower than others) began as a polite substitute for harsher terms such as "feeble-minded." Nowadays "retarded" has become perceived as an insult, to be replaced by phrases such as "developmentally disabled." The trouble with euphemisms, as the history of "retarded" illustrates, is that new ones eventually pick up the taint, so to speak, of the old ones, so yet another replacement has to be invented. The change in Maryland law from "disabled persons" to the subtly different "persons with disabilities" is an example of this trend.
Metaphors shape thought more powerfully than vocabulary and sentence structure. Consider the implications tucked inside metaphors such as "war on drugs," "war on poverty," and "war on terror." In war, violence is justified, and absolute victory is the only acceptable goal. In fighting against poverty or drugs, who are the enemy combatants?
Here's Orwell's essay about Newspeak:
Principles of Newspeak
He mentions that Newspeak aims to diminish rather than extend the range of thought and, as far as possible, make speech independent of conscious thought. Notice Orwell's sly references to the ways twentieth-century political discourse was already tending in that direction. Just the opposite of what we, as writers, aspire to do with language!
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, September 07, 2010
What Exactly Is Editing - Part VI
Part One of this series was posted on August 3, 2010,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-i.html
followed by Part II on Aug 10
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html
and Part III on Aug 17,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iii.html
Part IV on Aug. 24, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iv.html
Part V on Aug. 31, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-v.html
OK, so now down to the very nitty part of the nitty-gritty of rewriting to editorial requirements and getting it done within the deadline (which was probably yesterday).
What do you do first?
Some editors scribble in margins, some write long detailed notes page and paragraph references followed by an explanation of the problem they are having at that point.
It doesn't matter how they present the problem set to you. If you've done the original work solidly, you'll have no problem.
But how do you do that original work "solidly?"
Here is where I discussed "what to do first" when you start out to write a novel.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/denvention-3-walk-con.html
That blog essentially says write the jacket copy FIRST, then explains why that's necessary in terms of the eventual reviews, buzz, and publicity, and adds some clout by "who" agrees with me.
It gives a formula created by an Agent to tell you exactly how to create the jacket copy which you then use to create the novel beat by beat.
I keep raving about Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series on how to create a screenplay from scratch. He didn't invent the concept "beat sheet" but he reverse-engineered hundreds of blockbuster screenplays to discover what they had in common and formulated the universal beat sheet for the 110 page screenplay.
One of his students reduced that beat sheet to a formula for creating the "pitch" (i.e. what a book would use as flap copy or back-copy to sell the book to a reader).
http://www.blakesnyder.com/2008/10/try-this/#comments (and scroll up to the post)
And now here is another excellent summary of how to concoct that all important STARTING POINT for telling a story - the POINT which will, if you use it meticulously, allow you to rewrite to editorial specification successfully no matter how tight the deadline:
http://www.raindance.co.uk/site/10-tips-for-writing-loglines
Now there it is - the entire SECRET of this whole editorial thing.
These 3 posts enumerate the moving parts of your "vehicle" as referred to in the previous 5 parts of this series. And it's the vehicle that is being edited -- not your story, and not your art, but the packaging around it.
So, parts 1-5 of this series are explaining to you what an editor is, what an editor does, and why.
Most of you probably already knew everything in parts 1-5 of this series, but you lose sight of that when confronted with rewrite orders. Everything you "know" goes out the window and all you can think about is what's important to you. All you feel is your own feelings.
The editing process is about putting your personal investment, your feelings, aside and focusing on your customer, your audience, not yourself. The "professional" part of writing is the PERFORMING part, and that's what the editing process is about.
Creating the submission draft is like the dress-rehearsal. The editorial process is like the actual performance with the whole crew standing behind the camera and the director seeing $$$$ flowing across the set by the second. You are on stage before a live audience that paid for the show, and THE SHOW MUST GO ON. One take. That's all you have (publishing is very low-budget stuff).
The objective of the first 5 posts in "What Exactly Is Editing" is to get you to use your writerly instincts to walk a mile in your editor's shoes, to see her job from her eyes, to feel her feelings and share her objectives. She's your customer, and at this point, your audience waiting for that opening night performance.
Your final edit to editorial specification may require a whole lot of changes, but you should not take that fact to mean that you wrote it wrong to begin with (unless of course you wrote it after selling this editor at this publishing house a novel on the basis of a 1 parag description and not even a sample chapter).
If you sold on the basis of a paragraph (yes, I've done that a few times) and then got a torrent of editorial tweaks (thankfully that never happened to me), it does mean you weren't paying enough attention to that Line's specific requirements, or the requirements changed between contract and delivery.
But if you wrote it on spec, for a general market, you should expect any editor or producer to need some tailoring nips and tucks to make your story fit into her vehicle, her packaging.
If your story won't fit into her standard shaped packaging, then it will snag in the publishing channel, the tube that runs between you and your ultimate reader. The thing will just STICK in place, (clogging up the channel and preventing other more smoothly tailored books behind it from getting to their readers). In other words, it won't sell well.
To minimize the need to re-shape your story to any particular editor or producer's market channels, take that market's characteristics into account.
Study the market, internalize the beat-sheet that market prefers, make it part of your subconscious. Here are two posts that may help.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-6.html (this is a different post than the one above - just mis-numbered)
Writing is a performing art. Remember learning to dance? Or drive? At first your attention is on your feet, or you get dizzy juggling all the information approaching a stop sign for a left turn. After a while, some other part of your brain takes over, and you can dance or drive while talking, singing, flirting with your dancer partner, or thinking about your grocery list and yelling at the kids in the back seat. (but not while on a cell phone or texting).
Writing stories is the same way. Once the subconscious is trained, it will organize all the bits of the story into a beat sheet based on a concept and pitch that fits a very specific market. Then it will toss that up into your conscious mind and compel you to write it.
Amateur or beginning writers will "get" an idea before it's been collimated into a beat sheet that fits a specific market. That's why they struggle so much. You can't do all this stuff consciously. You have to drill the moves in deeply, memorize your lines like an actor, memorize your sheet-music like a pianist, then PERFORM that piece.
A particular structure for a particular market is like a specific Shakespearian play, or a Brahms symphony -- it is exactly what it is, but it is made anew, fresh and different by each artist who performs it, by each time that artist performs it.
If you know your business, your submission draft will need only a few tweaks and a clean-up of typos and inconsistencies.
If you do get a torrent of editorial comments that need action, then you start methodically.
#1) Put yourself in your editor's shoes, at her desk, answering her phone, attending her committee meetings.
#2) Pick out two or three novels your editor edited for that line and stack them on the desk before you. (presumably you've reread them a number of times to drive the beat-sheet into your hind-brain). For a screenplay, it's the same drill - study the product of that producer.
#3) Go to the END of your MS. Make sure the climax is RIGHT AT the very end, nothing left over but a nice, sweet denoument if that.
#4) Go to the BEGINNING of your MS. Make sure the beginning contains everything that's at the ending and nothing much else. Delete what does not pertain to the ending.
#5) Go to the MIDDLE of your MS. Make sure that the tension level is correct - low-point for an HEA and high-point for a tragedy.
#6) Go to the 1/4 and 3/4 points for a novel (the act breaks for a screenplay) - check that the plot-development necessary to lead to the ending is exactly at those points and not one page off.
#7) Review the editor's problem points and use those notes to smooth and smooth, to simplify, emphasize, showcase, and show-don't-tell the LINE (that artistic line we talked about in this series on editing) that leads from Beginning to Ending through the Middle.
#8) After entering all the changes the editor wants, check again to make sure the EMOTIONAL LINE and the artistic line, and the plot-line and the story-line and thematic statement all move with the beats.
Make sure no scene goes too long (most writers linger at a scene a few parags or events too long). Make sure all that you originally intended is there for the reader. Make sure your changes don't "show" - don't cause discontinuity or emotional jerking around. Make sure the interna-climax pattern is correct for the length of the novel.
Here are checklists for how to analyze your structure.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/06/writers-eye-finds-symmetry.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
#9) One more read-through if you have time, one more spell-check and make sure your POV shifts "work." Check for the elements cited in the following posts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/7-proofing-steps-for-quality-writing.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/shifting-pov.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-you-can-do-in-novel-that-you-cant.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-learn-to-use-theme-as-art.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/01/worldbuilding-for-science-fiction.html
And you're done.
With experience, it shouldn't take more than 2 or 3 workdays to polish up a 400 page novel MS. That's a target. It could take years and buckets of sweat to get that experienced.
In Part VII on September 14, 2010, find out if you're a writer or an editor.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-i.html
followed by Part II on Aug 10
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html
and Part III on Aug 17,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iii.html
Part IV on Aug. 24, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iv.html
Part V on Aug. 31, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-v.html
OK, so now down to the very nitty part of the nitty-gritty of rewriting to editorial requirements and getting it done within the deadline (which was probably yesterday).
What do you do first?
Some editors scribble in margins, some write long detailed notes page and paragraph references followed by an explanation of the problem they are having at that point.
It doesn't matter how they present the problem set to you. If you've done the original work solidly, you'll have no problem.
But how do you do that original work "solidly?"
Here is where I discussed "what to do first" when you start out to write a novel.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/denvention-3-walk-con.html
That blog essentially says write the jacket copy FIRST, then explains why that's necessary in terms of the eventual reviews, buzz, and publicity, and adds some clout by "who" agrees with me.
It gives a formula created by an Agent to tell you exactly how to create the jacket copy which you then use to create the novel beat by beat.
I keep raving about Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series on how to create a screenplay from scratch. He didn't invent the concept "beat sheet" but he reverse-engineered hundreds of blockbuster screenplays to discover what they had in common and formulated the universal beat sheet for the 110 page screenplay.
One of his students reduced that beat sheet to a formula for creating the "pitch" (i.e. what a book would use as flap copy or back-copy to sell the book to a reader).
http://www.blakesnyder.com/2008/10/try-this/#comments (and scroll up to the post)
And now here is another excellent summary of how to concoct that all important STARTING POINT for telling a story - the POINT which will, if you use it meticulously, allow you to rewrite to editorial specification successfully no matter how tight the deadline:
http://www.raindance.co.uk/site/10-tips-for-writing-loglines
Now there it is - the entire SECRET of this whole editorial thing.
These 3 posts enumerate the moving parts of your "vehicle" as referred to in the previous 5 parts of this series. And it's the vehicle that is being edited -- not your story, and not your art, but the packaging around it.
So, parts 1-5 of this series are explaining to you what an editor is, what an editor does, and why.
Most of you probably already knew everything in parts 1-5 of this series, but you lose sight of that when confronted with rewrite orders. Everything you "know" goes out the window and all you can think about is what's important to you. All you feel is your own feelings.
The editing process is about putting your personal investment, your feelings, aside and focusing on your customer, your audience, not yourself. The "professional" part of writing is the PERFORMING part, and that's what the editing process is about.
Creating the submission draft is like the dress-rehearsal. The editorial process is like the actual performance with the whole crew standing behind the camera and the director seeing $$$$ flowing across the set by the second. You are on stage before a live audience that paid for the show, and THE SHOW MUST GO ON. One take. That's all you have (publishing is very low-budget stuff).
The objective of the first 5 posts in "What Exactly Is Editing" is to get you to use your writerly instincts to walk a mile in your editor's shoes, to see her job from her eyes, to feel her feelings and share her objectives. She's your customer, and at this point, your audience waiting for that opening night performance.
Your final edit to editorial specification may require a whole lot of changes, but you should not take that fact to mean that you wrote it wrong to begin with (unless of course you wrote it after selling this editor at this publishing house a novel on the basis of a 1 parag description and not even a sample chapter).
If you sold on the basis of a paragraph (yes, I've done that a few times) and then got a torrent of editorial tweaks (thankfully that never happened to me), it does mean you weren't paying enough attention to that Line's specific requirements, or the requirements changed between contract and delivery.
But if you wrote it on spec, for a general market, you should expect any editor or producer to need some tailoring nips and tucks to make your story fit into her vehicle, her packaging.
If your story won't fit into her standard shaped packaging, then it will snag in the publishing channel, the tube that runs between you and your ultimate reader. The thing will just STICK in place, (clogging up the channel and preventing other more smoothly tailored books behind it from getting to their readers). In other words, it won't sell well.
To minimize the need to re-shape your story to any particular editor or producer's market channels, take that market's characteristics into account.
Study the market, internalize the beat-sheet that market prefers, make it part of your subconscious. Here are two posts that may help.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-6.html (this is a different post than the one above - just mis-numbered)
Writing is a performing art. Remember learning to dance? Or drive? At first your attention is on your feet, or you get dizzy juggling all the information approaching a stop sign for a left turn. After a while, some other part of your brain takes over, and you can dance or drive while talking, singing, flirting with your dancer partner, or thinking about your grocery list and yelling at the kids in the back seat. (but not while on a cell phone or texting).
Writing stories is the same way. Once the subconscious is trained, it will organize all the bits of the story into a beat sheet based on a concept and pitch that fits a very specific market. Then it will toss that up into your conscious mind and compel you to write it.
Amateur or beginning writers will "get" an idea before it's been collimated into a beat sheet that fits a specific market. That's why they struggle so much. You can't do all this stuff consciously. You have to drill the moves in deeply, memorize your lines like an actor, memorize your sheet-music like a pianist, then PERFORM that piece.
A particular structure for a particular market is like a specific Shakespearian play, or a Brahms symphony -- it is exactly what it is, but it is made anew, fresh and different by each artist who performs it, by each time that artist performs it.
If you know your business, your submission draft will need only a few tweaks and a clean-up of typos and inconsistencies.
If you do get a torrent of editorial comments that need action, then you start methodically.
#1) Put yourself in your editor's shoes, at her desk, answering her phone, attending her committee meetings.
#2) Pick out two or three novels your editor edited for that line and stack them on the desk before you. (presumably you've reread them a number of times to drive the beat-sheet into your hind-brain). For a screenplay, it's the same drill - study the product of that producer.
#3) Go to the END of your MS. Make sure the climax is RIGHT AT the very end, nothing left over but a nice, sweet denoument if that.
#4) Go to the BEGINNING of your MS. Make sure the beginning contains everything that's at the ending and nothing much else. Delete what does not pertain to the ending.
#5) Go to the MIDDLE of your MS. Make sure that the tension level is correct - low-point for an HEA and high-point for a tragedy.
#6) Go to the 1/4 and 3/4 points for a novel (the act breaks for a screenplay) - check that the plot-development necessary to lead to the ending is exactly at those points and not one page off.
#7) Review the editor's problem points and use those notes to smooth and smooth, to simplify, emphasize, showcase, and show-don't-tell the LINE (that artistic line we talked about in this series on editing) that leads from Beginning to Ending through the Middle.
#8) After entering all the changes the editor wants, check again to make sure the EMOTIONAL LINE and the artistic line, and the plot-line and the story-line and thematic statement all move with the beats.
Make sure no scene goes too long (most writers linger at a scene a few parags or events too long). Make sure all that you originally intended is there for the reader. Make sure your changes don't "show" - don't cause discontinuity or emotional jerking around. Make sure the interna-climax pattern is correct for the length of the novel.
Here are checklists for how to analyze your structure.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/06/writers-eye-finds-symmetry.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
#9) One more read-through if you have time, one more spell-check and make sure your POV shifts "work." Check for the elements cited in the following posts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/7-proofing-steps-for-quality-writing.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/shifting-pov.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-you-can-do-in-novel-that-you-cant.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-learn-to-use-theme-as-art.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/01/worldbuilding-for-science-fiction.html
And you're done.
With experience, it shouldn't take more than 2 or 3 workdays to polish up a 400 page novel MS. That's a target. It could take years and buckets of sweat to get that experienced.
In Part VII on September 14, 2010, find out if you're a writer or an editor.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Monday, September 06, 2010
Peter's Evil Overlord List
Peter's Evil Overlord List
With apologies to Linnea, whose "day" it is, but I couldn't resist sharing this link.
With apologies to Linnea, whose "day" it is, but I couldn't resist sharing this link.
Sunday, September 05, 2010
Immigration and Alien Romances
From time to time, I blog about how much there is in our everyday news to inspire speculative thinking, idea-based fiction, and world-building for all types of science fiction/fantasy romance, and especially for one of the "punk" genres. (Steampunk. Cyberpunk. Etc)
In recent posts, I've looked at pollution and man-made disasters, volcanic eruptions, and the potential for disastrous mistakes if we become unreasonably dependent on the products or services of pharmaceutical companies (or any other enterprise, whether for our physical comfort -- the power companies-- or for our spiritual comfort.)
Immigration seems to be a hot topic from the Antipodes, almost to the Arctic. In fact, one eHow Contributor opines that Iceland's Immigration laws are among the most rigorous of all the Western Democracies. I expect that some of my colleagues will pay greater attention to immigration and the treatment of "illegal aliens" in their future alien romances.
I've always been fascinated by the local treatment of foreign royal spouses throughout European history. "Alien" wives haven't always been well received, and I had a little of that sort of thing as a sub-subplot in my alien romance "Knight's Fork" (no longer available unless through private vendors or second-hand).
However the wives of the rich, powerful and influential are probably not put through the frustrations, humiliations and stresses to which GI brides, mail-order brides, and ISP wives are subjected.... to say nothing of the hurdles facing regular good folks who wish to adopt a orphan child from overseas.
King Henry VIII's blind date with Ann of Cleves worked out pretty well for Ann, considering the fate of his other wives, and what the Princess's life might be like if she'd been sent home, rejected.
But... back to the futuristic fiction. I seem to recall that there was some sort of quarantine policy on Babylon 5, but Babylon 5 was more of a way station than a permanent destination for most of the characters who passed through its ports.
Much of the alien romance fiction that I've read hinges upon either conquest, colonization, or the forced importation of desirable captives who possess an ability, talent, skill or gift that is in demand in the aliens' world. If there is a shortage of breeding stock, for instance, local immigration policy is likely to be accommodating.
Lawbreakers and smugglers find themselves in trouble. There's a practical difficulty in terms of cost and logistics in deporting or repatriating inter-stellar stowaways and illegal immigrants. The local authorities' solution in Maria Doria Russell's The Sparrow to the problem of an unwelcome missionary was to use and abuse him for entertainment.
Jack Vance had an interesting and plausible mix of border controls and air traffic control in The Demon Princes.
What immigration policies have you seen in action in your science fiction and fantasy travels?
Best,
Rowena Cherry
Footnotes and Links
German Immigration Law
http://www.workpermit.com/news/germany4.htm
Japanese Immigration Law
http://www.ehow.com/about_5117692_japanese-immigration-laws.html
Russia's Immigration Laws
http://www.ehow.com/list_6165747_russia_s-immigration-laws_.html
Iceland's Immigration Laws
http://www.ehow.com/facts_5150933_icelandic-immigration-laws.html
Pakistan's Immigration Laws
http://www.expatforum.com/articles/visas-permits-and-immigration/pakistan-visas-permits-and-immigration.html
Current Controversy in Australia about Australian Immigration
http://www.embraceaustralia.com/the-australian-immigration-debate-7566.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA9dgq2RPbg&feature=related
An anonymous correspondent's summary of Mexican immigration laws:
American Immigration Laws
http://space-snark.blogspot.com/
In recent posts, I've looked at pollution and man-made disasters, volcanic eruptions, and the potential for disastrous mistakes if we become unreasonably dependent on the products or services of pharmaceutical companies (or any other enterprise, whether for our physical comfort -- the power companies-- or for our spiritual comfort.)
Immigration seems to be a hot topic from the Antipodes, almost to the Arctic. In fact, one eHow Contributor opines that Iceland's Immigration laws are among the most rigorous of all the Western Democracies. I expect that some of my colleagues will pay greater attention to immigration and the treatment of "illegal aliens" in their future alien romances.
I've always been fascinated by the local treatment of foreign royal spouses throughout European history. "Alien" wives haven't always been well received, and I had a little of that sort of thing as a sub-subplot in my alien romance "Knight's Fork" (no longer available unless through private vendors or second-hand).
However the wives of the rich, powerful and influential are probably not put through the frustrations, humiliations and stresses to which GI brides, mail-order brides, and ISP wives are subjected.... to say nothing of the hurdles facing regular good folks who wish to adopt a orphan child from overseas.
King Henry VIII's blind date with Ann of Cleves worked out pretty well for Ann, considering the fate of his other wives, and what the Princess's life might be like if she'd been sent home, rejected.
But... back to the futuristic fiction. I seem to recall that there was some sort of quarantine policy on Babylon 5, but Babylon 5 was more of a way station than a permanent destination for most of the characters who passed through its ports.
Much of the alien romance fiction that I've read hinges upon either conquest, colonization, or the forced importation of desirable captives who possess an ability, talent, skill or gift that is in demand in the aliens' world. If there is a shortage of breeding stock, for instance, local immigration policy is likely to be accommodating.
Lawbreakers and smugglers find themselves in trouble. There's a practical difficulty in terms of cost and logistics in deporting or repatriating inter-stellar stowaways and illegal immigrants. The local authorities' solution in Maria Doria Russell's The Sparrow to the problem of an unwelcome missionary was to use and abuse him for entertainment.
Jack Vance had an interesting and plausible mix of border controls and air traffic control in The Demon Princes.
What immigration policies have you seen in action in your science fiction and fantasy travels?
Best,
Rowena Cherry
Footnotes and Links
German Immigration Law
http://www.workpermit.com/news/germany4.htm
Japanese Immigration Law
http://www.ehow.com/about_5117692_japanese-immigration-laws.html
Russia's Immigration Laws
http://www.ehow.com/list_6165747_russia_s-immigration-laws_.html
Iceland's Immigration Laws
http://www.ehow.com/facts_5150933_icelandic-immigration-laws.html
Pakistan's Immigration Laws
http://www.expatforum.com/articles/visas-permits-and-immigration/pakistan-visas-permits-and-immigration.html
Current Controversy in Australia about Australian Immigration
http://www.embraceaustralia.com/the-australian-immigration-debate-7566.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA9dgq2RPbg&feature=related
An anonymous correspondent's summary of Mexican immigration laws:
1 There will be no special bilingual programs in the schools.2. All ballots will be in this nation's language.3. All government business will be conducted in our language.4. Non-residents will NOT have the right to vote no matter how long they are here.5. Non-citizens will NEVER be able to hold political office.6 Foreigners will not be a burden to the taxpayers. No welfare, no food stamps, no health care, or other government assistance programs. Any burden will be deported.7. Foreigners can invest in this country, but it must be an amount at least equal to 40,000 times the daily minimum wage.8. If foreigners come here and buy land.... options will be restricted. Certain parcels including waterfront property are reserved for citizens naturally born into this country.9. Foreigners may have no protests; no demonstrations, no waving of a foreign flag, no political organizing, no bad-mouthing our president or his policies. These will lead to deportation.
10. If you do come to this country illegally, you will be actively hunted &, when caught, sent to jail until your deportation can be arranged. All assets will be taken from you.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The above laws are the current immigration laws of Mexico
"In order to become a citizen, a person must be able to speak English, pass a United States Citizen test, and have a favorable opinion of America, among other qualifications."
~Caitlin Kelly, eHow Contributor.
American immigration information:
http://www.hg.org/immigration-law.html#1
http://space-snark.blogspot.com/
Thursday, September 02, 2010
Is Consciousness Necessary?
The TIME article I wrote about last week mentions the theory held by many philosophers, notably Descartes, that animals have no consciousness. These people believed nonhuman animals were fleshly automata with no self-awareness, emotions, or capacity to feel pain and pleasure.
Recently I also read an anthology of essays called ZOMBIES, VAMPIRES, AND PHILOSOPHY: NEW LIFE FOR THE UNDEAD. One author, Dale Jacquette, proposes a thought experiment in which zombie-like human beings exist, "people" who operate entirely on instinct and have no consciousness, no inner mental and emotional lives. The difference between the zombies in this essay and those in voodoo tradition or horror movies is that the thought-experiment creatures look and behave exactly like the rest of us. They perfectly simulate not only the behavior and speech of ordinary people but even the outward signs of emotion. Yet we know for a fact that they are automata. Would it be morally acceptable to use them in gory gladiatorial combats to the death? Jacquette concludes it wouldn't, because of the desensitizing effect on the spectators.
What about intelligent beings who have no consciousness? Could intelligence exist without awareness? Peter Watts creates aliens like this in his novel BLINDSIGHT. When they accidentally pick up communications from Earth, they find the evidence of our self-awareness so alien that they consider Earth a threat that must be obliterated. You can read the entire novel on the web (warning, it's heavy going in places, at least I thought so), and Watts also includes his notes on the story's background and the research sources he used. Scroll down to the section on sentience and intelligence:
Blindsight
Here's an excerpt from that section:
"But beneath the unthreatening, superficial question of what consciousness is floats the more functional question of what it's good for. BLINDSIGHT plays with that issue at length, and I won't reiterate points already made. Suffice to say that, at least under routine conditions, consciousness does little beyond taking memos from the vastly richer subconscious environment, rubber-stamping them, and taking the credit for itself. In fact, the nonconscious mind usually works so well on its own that it actually employs a gatekeeper in the anterious cingulate cortex to do nothing but prevent the conscious self from interfering in daily operations. (If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from DILBERT.)
Sentience isn't even necessary to develop a "theory of mind". That might seem completely counterintuitive: how could you learn to recognise that other individuals are autonomous agents, with their own interests and agendas, if you weren't even aware of your own? But there's no contradiction, and no call for consciousness. It is entirely possible to track the intentions of others without being the slightest bit self-reflective."
And here's another quote that I find quite unsettling:
"It turns out that the unconscious mind is better at making complex decisions than is the conscious mind. The conscious mind just can't handle as many variables, apparently. Quoth one of the researchers: “At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we're not very good at it.”"
How do we know people other than ourselves aren't mindless androids like the zombies in Jacquette's article? How do we know they have conscious minds? We assume they do because they have the same body and brain structures we do and display the same outward signs of thinking and feeling. So we accept that they probably have inner lives similar to ours. In the absence of telepathy, though, we have no proof of this hypothesis. We have to accept the consciousness of other people on faith.
The protagonists of the Marquis de Sade's fiction use this situation to justify what most of us would consider inhuman behavior. If there's no way to be sure other human beings have the same emotions and sensations we do, why go out of our way to try to make them feel good? With no direct access to their minds, we have no certainty our efforts are successful, so why bother? If cruelty to others makes US feel good, go for it. Scary.
As for Peter Watts, I have to give him credit for creating truly ALIEN aliens in BLINDSIGHT. I still have trouble getting my mind around the concept, though. Acting and reacting without consciousness can be imagined, but how can the communication of abstract ideas necessary to produce a space-traveling civilization occur without self-awareness and a theory of mind (the hypothesis that other individuals have thought processes like our own)?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Recently I also read an anthology of essays called ZOMBIES, VAMPIRES, AND PHILOSOPHY: NEW LIFE FOR THE UNDEAD. One author, Dale Jacquette, proposes a thought experiment in which zombie-like human beings exist, "people" who operate entirely on instinct and have no consciousness, no inner mental and emotional lives. The difference between the zombies in this essay and those in voodoo tradition or horror movies is that the thought-experiment creatures look and behave exactly like the rest of us. They perfectly simulate not only the behavior and speech of ordinary people but even the outward signs of emotion. Yet we know for a fact that they are automata. Would it be morally acceptable to use them in gory gladiatorial combats to the death? Jacquette concludes it wouldn't, because of the desensitizing effect on the spectators.
What about intelligent beings who have no consciousness? Could intelligence exist without awareness? Peter Watts creates aliens like this in his novel BLINDSIGHT. When they accidentally pick up communications from Earth, they find the evidence of our self-awareness so alien that they consider Earth a threat that must be obliterated. You can read the entire novel on the web (warning, it's heavy going in places, at least I thought so), and Watts also includes his notes on the story's background and the research sources he used. Scroll down to the section on sentience and intelligence:
Blindsight
Here's an excerpt from that section:
"But beneath the unthreatening, superficial question of what consciousness is floats the more functional question of what it's good for. BLINDSIGHT plays with that issue at length, and I won't reiterate points already made. Suffice to say that, at least under routine conditions, consciousness does little beyond taking memos from the vastly richer subconscious environment, rubber-stamping them, and taking the credit for itself. In fact, the nonconscious mind usually works so well on its own that it actually employs a gatekeeper in the anterious cingulate cortex to do nothing but prevent the conscious self from interfering in daily operations. (If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from DILBERT.)
Sentience isn't even necessary to develop a "theory of mind". That might seem completely counterintuitive: how could you learn to recognise that other individuals are autonomous agents, with their own interests and agendas, if you weren't even aware of your own? But there's no contradiction, and no call for consciousness. It is entirely possible to track the intentions of others without being the slightest bit self-reflective."
And here's another quote that I find quite unsettling:
"It turns out that the unconscious mind is better at making complex decisions than is the conscious mind. The conscious mind just can't handle as many variables, apparently. Quoth one of the researchers: “At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we're not very good at it.”"
How do we know people other than ourselves aren't mindless androids like the zombies in Jacquette's article? How do we know they have conscious minds? We assume they do because they have the same body and brain structures we do and display the same outward signs of thinking and feeling. So we accept that they probably have inner lives similar to ours. In the absence of telepathy, though, we have no proof of this hypothesis. We have to accept the consciousness of other people on faith.
The protagonists of the Marquis de Sade's fiction use this situation to justify what most of us would consider inhuman behavior. If there's no way to be sure other human beings have the same emotions and sensations we do, why go out of our way to try to make them feel good? With no direct access to their minds, we have no certainty our efforts are successful, so why bother? If cruelty to others makes US feel good, go for it. Scary.
As for Peter Watts, I have to give him credit for creating truly ALIEN aliens in BLINDSIGHT. I still have trouble getting my mind around the concept, though. Acting and reacting without consciousness can be imagined, but how can the communication of abstract ideas necessary to produce a space-traveling civilization occur without self-awareness and a theory of mind (the hypothesis that other individuals have thought processes like our own)?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
What Exactly Is Editing - Part V
Part One of this series was posted on August 3, 2010,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-i.html
followed by Part II on Aug 10
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html
and Part III on Aug 17,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iii.html
Part IV on Aug. 24, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iv.html
I started this series on Editing actually in response to a question I got on Twitter, but I have forgotten who originally asked.
There was an exchange with a professional writer who had a rewrite order and a deadline and was just going nuts over it, and some others who chimed in. Finally someone asked what were the most rewrites other writers had to do.
I mentioned that my first award winner was published as 5th draft, a record for me that I never equaled again. And I said something (in 140 characters or less) about how quickly other rewrites had gone for me -- even extensive rewrites. And then came the question about how I did that.
I intended to write answer that question - then lost the questioner.
Recently, I decided I had to write up the answer I had so far (this is Part V, and there could be more), and asked on twitter for Questions I could answer in How To Rewrite To Editorial Specification On Deadline.
In response, I got the following from @DreamsGrafter
1)What is your process? What do you look at/tackle first?
2)Apparently the trick is to dig deeper. How do you do that when the scene structure already works? How do you enrich a scene?
3)What is the biggest lesson you've learnt over time re editing to a deadline and how do you deal with it now?
4)How do you know which notes to follow? What if your instincts are telling you something else?
And from another blogger on aliendjinnromances, professional SF/F Romance writer Rowena Cherry provides the following:
A) Is there a standard etiquette for attacking revisions? Is there a formula for how many hard-to-take edits you swallow for every one you argue against?
B) Is there a length of email that is optimum for making your case, but ensuring that the busy editor "gets" it without tuning out or getting annoyed?
----------
Now if you've read Parts I-IV of this little blog series, you may see where these questions lead you astray.
Look again at the questions. Think about the focus, the implicit subtext.
Remember that in solving any problem, phrasing the question correctly is at least 90% of the solution.
Remember all the word-problems you did in grammar school math? You have cherries, and apples and boats on a stream, and you have to make an algebra equation out of it all.
If you get the initial algebra expression wrong, you'll never get the correct answer.
Phrasing the question is most of the solution.
Are these questions phrased in such a way as to get the answer you need in order to look at an editor's rewrite orders (or what screenwriters call "Notes") and know immediately what to do to make your manuscript publishable or producible?
Do you see that I've already answered all those questions in the first 4 parts to this series?
No?
Do any of those questions take into account what an Editor's job is?
Do any of those questions focus on what the editor is trying to accomplish?
Do any of those questions address the real key issue to figuring out what to do with your story to make it "acceptable" to that editor?
No, they don't.
They look at the rewrite order, and at the story -- totally ignoring the Editor's PROBLEM.
Here's a glance at the problem the Editor knows this novel will face in the marketplace.
Again from twitter, a random selection of comments from a chat on publicity.
@BookMarketChat Another thing I think is true - get help. You may not see yourself, your work as clearly as a coach, publicist or honest friend. #bookmarket
--
@BookMarketChat Yea!RT @publishingcoach: Things change so quickly these days, and peoples memories are short. You'll lose some fans, gain others. #bookmarket
--
Two key take-aways: CHANGE and a perspective on yourSELF, what you're doing and how you're doing it. Keeping your eye on a changing market, and changing your behavior as that change happens is a major key to understanding the rewrite orders an editor is sending you -- even though you wrote exactly what the contract required!
Between the time you sign a contract or even seal the deal with a handshake via email -- things have changed in the editor's office!
When an editor (or producer) takes time to give you "Notes" or a rewrite order, direction, or marginal notations on a manuscript, the editor is asking you to finish doing your job, and to solve a problem the editor has, not a problem you have, and not the problem the editor had when you signed the contract.
The editor is not asking you to solve YOUR PROBLEM.
The editor (or producer) is asking you to solve THE EDITOR'S PROBLEM.
Worse, you have to solve the new problem IN TIME to get the product into the pipeline before things change again for the publicity department.
Consider that the way those questions that were sent to me are phrased focuses the attention on the writer's problem ignoring the entire issue of whether the editor has a problem and what that problem might actually be and how it's changed lately.
In those questions, the Editor and the Writer are talking past each other, not even at each other. Certainly there's no communicating going on.
These questions are by are professional writers who have done this work with professional editors. And look what they're asking.
Let's frame it all another way.
A) What exactly is this Editor asking me to do?
B) How do I figure out what the Editor really means by this note?
C) What should the finished product this Editor needs look like?
D) How do I figure out what part of my manuscript to change to get the effect this editor needs?
----------
A) You can tell what the editor is asking you to do by looking at other books in the line the editor is editing for. The editor is asking you to make yours "the same but different" - to conform to the better selling novels in the line.
What does it mean "conform?" It means to use the same structure, the same trope, that has sold well before, but be fresh, original and different in theme, twists, character quirks, details, background.
In editor-speak "conform" means be different.
B) To figure out what an editor "really means" you have to know this editor a little bit at least. But it's usually safe to start with the assumption that the editor is an editor not a writer.
The editor will spot and flag a section, character, element, or detail that isn't "on beat" -- a pacing flaw, a bit that's foreshadowed (set-up) but never happens (pay-off).
The editor checks the emotional-tension of scenes to see that they are placed in the correct order - that climaxes (you should excuse the expression) come in the right places.
Some publishing lines have actual page-number formulas for internal climaxes, a set number of pages for sex scenes, action scenes, etc. But most don't have that strict a formula. Still, every genre (even Literature) does have a structure that determines the BEATS.
Blake Snyder showed you, in the SAVE THE CAT! series, exactly how to reverse engineer products aimed at different audiences to determine the best selling beat structures. Good editors know the beat of their line. The others don't stay in the job long.
What the editor "really means" is that "this "beat" right here where I've made this marginal note or on page-this of the MS is "wrong"."
It isn't the editor's job to tell the writer HOW TO FIX IT. The editor isn't a writer. They often suggest what to change into what, but usually are just trying to express what's bothering them without actually, consciously analyzing what's bothering them.
It's like a computer user calling tech support and yelling "It Doesn't Work" and tech support asking for the error code number, and the user just yelling IT DOESN'T WORK!!! How should I know why???? And tech support says "Well what did you do before it did that?" And the user says "I don't know, that's your job."
The editor is the USER, and you are her TECH SUPPORT. It's up to you to figure out why it doesn't work and fix it. It's only up to her to tell you THAT it doesn't work, not why or how to fix it. Don't call her and ask.
So if you're going to tech-support your own manuscript, you have to know its "computer language" (the symbolism in which it speaks; it's theme) and you have to know how it works, and where the drop-down menus are where other choices can be made.
You have to know the BEATS, the genre, the conflict, and all the moving parts of the composition.
Then when the editor points and says "this doesn't work" -- you don't call the editor up and defend your ART, you figure out why it doesn't work for that editor's line, and that publisher's purpose.
The reason it doesn't work on page 152 probably lies on page 1 -- maybe page 5 -- of a 400 page manuscript.
The editor can't tell you where the problem IS, only where it became noticeable. If you put the manuscript together, you should be able to take it apart, fix page 5 and see how that changes page 152, and it'll satisfy the editor. The editor doesn't care how you fix it, or how you figure out the problem is actually on page 5. The editor only cares that it be fixed and that it work, on deadline.
C) What should the finished product this editor needs look like? Do your homework. Read other books, novels, stories, in that line. If you're in film, read Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series. In fact, if you're in text, read that book anyway. It's all there. It's in the beat. If you can see it in a film, you can see it in a novel!
D) How do you figure out where to make changes to get the effect an editor needs? Again. The editor may not know WHY there's a problem on page 152, or what to do to fix it. But it is the editor's job to know what overall effect the novels in a line (or a film from a production company) should be.
If the effect isn't almost right already, the editor wouldn't take the trouble to ask for rewrite. So the necessary change probably isn't nearly as drastic as the editor thinks! If there's a problem with the "effect" (happy ending, crushing low-point for hero in the middle, a "lighter" or "darker" mood) it's either a pacing problem with the BEAT SHEET structure, or it's just choice of vocabulary. Line editing to adjust where beats fall and/or vocabulary changes can fix a lot with "light" or "dark" mood. Sometimes it can be fixed by deleting a scene or character and putting the information conveyed by that scene or character into another component of the story.
Writing is "magic" to editors. It isn't their job to know how you produce emotional effects, but only to know whether you've done it or not.
So to fulfill a rewrite order on deadline and on schedule, you START by structuring the story with precision beats before you write.
In fact, since most of a writer's work is done subconsciously way before "having an idea" for a story -- the smooth, quick, professional rewrite order response actually starts before you have the idea.
If you know what you did, what you chose, how you chose it, and why, and you know the editor didn't "get" the effect you worked for, you have to make a choice.
Either the effect you worked for has to be deleted entirely, in all its parts. Or something else has to be deleted to make room, and the effect worked up into the foreground.
Now, given this approach -- listen carefully to the editor, understand that this rewrite order is an attempt to conform your product to her Imprint's line, understand that it isn't criticism and has nothing at all to do with your Art, and everything to do with marketing, getting good reviews, and starting buzz.
Doing a fast, smooth job on rewrite is all about listening to the editor, and that's just like listening to any other person. Stop listening to yourself and start listening to the other person.
Now let's go through those questions submitted and answer them:
First @DreamsGrafter
1)What is your process? What do you look at/tackle first?
First- listen. Look at the overall pattern of rewrite notes and find the connecting mechanism built into the story while writing it.
Understanding that the actual problem with the manuscript is very likely NOT at the point where the editor noticed it, find the actual problem and fix that. Often 15-20 scattered complaints sprinkled through a 400 page manuscript can be fixed with one or two tweaks.
2)Apparently the trick is to dig deeper. How do you do that when the scene structure already works? How do you enrich a scene?
To "enrich" a scene that's locked into a nice paced sequence of scenes you don't want to mess up, go for SUBTEXT.
Plant a foreshadowing or "set-up" long before the scene you want enriched. Tiny tweaks to the scene you want to enrich will then make it a super-huge pay-off to the previous setup. And be sure to end the scene with a set-up for a pay-off that'll come several scenes later, maybe at the end. When there's a difference between what the viewer knows and what the character knows, you get rich.
Make sure the reader learns something they have wanted to know for an excruciatingly long time in that scene but still knows they don't know everything - and it will be enriched.
3) What is the biggest lesson you've learnt over time re editing to a deadline and how do you deal with it now?
Sounding spontaneous is a matter of careful preparation.
How quickly and efficiently you can rewrite depends on how carefully you prepared TO REWRITE before you wrote.
It depends on how you kept your own notes and what is connected to what and what foreshadows what, and where the tension builds and where it's released.
Rewrite orders that aren't simple story-logic tweaks (he put his hat on twice without taking it off) are almost always related to adjusting pacing to fit the genre.
Understand how you paced it to begin with, and you'll know what you can delete now to tighten the pacing, and what to add to slow it down.
Editors don't always just tell you the problem is pacing. They may say it's uninteresting or complicated or abstract, or I don't like this character or I don't believe that character would do this -- and it's up to you to understand, as their tech-support, that the real problem they are having is with pacing.
A character who would NEVER do this will do it if in a big HURRY.
4)How do you know which notes to follow? What if your instincts are telling you something else?
Then retrain your instincts if you want to work for this editor. Otherwise find another editor.
Actually, that's not all the choices available. The true professional who has an editor whose rewrite orders violate their "instincts" doesn't throw away their own instincts - but rather just acquires a new set of instincts to broaden versatility and increase chances to hit in other markets.
Your instincts may be perfect for one genre, and mean failure in another. Do you have to spend your own life writing one genre under one byline? Or can you take this opportunity to learn what this editor knows - so later you can choose to use it, or not?
And from another blogger on aliendjinnromances, professional SF/F Romance writer Rowena Cherry provides the following:
A) Is there a standard etiquette for attacking revisions? Is there a formula for how many hard-to-take edits you swallow for every one you argue against?
Yes. It's simple. NEVER ARGUE. If the editor is WRONG (and they can be, especially if the MS is badly messed up) then fix what's really bothering the editor, not what they're complaining about.
It's for sure, SOMETHING is bothering the editor. Fix it so nothing bothers the editor. It's their job at stake - and yours too for that matter.
This is a point where sometimes you have to impose again on your beta-readers, or consult a fellow professional writer. But don't take up the editor's time.
When you figure out what the problem really was and fix it -- then never make that mistake again.
It isn't your job to do what the editor wants. It's your job to do what the editor needs. It isn't their job to know what they need, except that this MS has to work, and it has to work by deadline.
B) Is there a length of email that is optimum for making your case, but ensuring that the busy editor "gets" it without tuning out or getting annoyed?
Yes, again simple. "Here attached is the completed MS. Thank you for catching all my mistakes."
How do I arrive at this insane conclusion?
THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT.
The editor is your customer. The editor is always right even when they haven't a clue what they're talking about. Never argue with a customer. Figure out what they really need and give it to them without hassling them. Make them happy and they'll come back for more.
--------
So what exactly is editing?
It's the process of packaging a piece of art to fit into a delivery system with standard sized tubes that whisk the art to the consumer in a frictionless medium.
Think of a Christmas Giftwrap station in a department store. They have an array of standard sized boxes to put your odd-shaped gift object into.
That's what editors and publishers do for a living: put odd shaped art objects into standard sized boxes, wrap them up pretty and mail them off.
The most onerous part of an editor's job is dealing with writers who somehow think their art has anything to do with publishing.
Publishing is the business of mailing off those standardized boxes. What's inside the box is irrelevant to the business model as long as it fits inside the box. Think about the USPS advertisement "If it fits; it ships for one, low flat rate." That's the publishing business model to a T.
Learn to look at it that way, and you'll never have any problem deciding what to do in response to rewrite orders.
The rewrite orders are the editor's attempt to get you to make your product fit inside the box that their schedule says they must fill at a specific date. It mustn't stick out, and it mustn't rattle too much.
If there are a lot of rewrite orders on a single MS, it's because you did something very wrong. Fix it. Learn from the mistakes and never do them again.
It is a process and does take a few times through the system, often with a couple different editors and agents to get the hang of it.
But you'll learn faster if you can grasp this single fact.
What you're doing isn't what they're doing, and they don't care what you're doing as long as it doesn't get in their way.
It's not your job to convince the editor they don't know how to do their job (even if they don't).
It's your job to give the editor what they need to keep their job, and their job is to drop identical boxes into the tubes.
In Part VI on September 7, we'll look at this from another angle.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-i.html
followed by Part II on Aug 10
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html
and Part III on Aug 17,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iii.html
Part IV on Aug. 24, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iv.html
I started this series on Editing actually in response to a question I got on Twitter, but I have forgotten who originally asked.
There was an exchange with a professional writer who had a rewrite order and a deadline and was just going nuts over it, and some others who chimed in. Finally someone asked what were the most rewrites other writers had to do.
I mentioned that my first award winner was published as 5th draft, a record for me that I never equaled again. And I said something (in 140 characters or less) about how quickly other rewrites had gone for me -- even extensive rewrites. And then came the question about how I did that.
I intended to write answer that question - then lost the questioner.
Recently, I decided I had to write up the answer I had so far (this is Part V, and there could be more), and asked on twitter for Questions I could answer in How To Rewrite To Editorial Specification On Deadline.
In response, I got the following from @DreamsGrafter
1)What is your process? What do you look at/tackle first?
2)Apparently the trick is to dig deeper. How do you do that when the scene structure already works? How do you enrich a scene?
3)What is the biggest lesson you've learnt over time re editing to a deadline and how do you deal with it now?
4)How do you know which notes to follow? What if your instincts are telling you something else?
And from another blogger on aliendjinnromances, professional SF/F Romance writer Rowena Cherry provides the following:
A) Is there a standard etiquette for attacking revisions? Is there a formula for how many hard-to-take edits you swallow for every one you argue against?
B) Is there a length of email that is optimum for making your case, but ensuring that the busy editor "gets" it without tuning out or getting annoyed?
----------
Now if you've read Parts I-IV of this little blog series, you may see where these questions lead you astray.
Look again at the questions. Think about the focus, the implicit subtext.
Remember that in solving any problem, phrasing the question correctly is at least 90% of the solution.
Remember all the word-problems you did in grammar school math? You have cherries, and apples and boats on a stream, and you have to make an algebra equation out of it all.
If you get the initial algebra expression wrong, you'll never get the correct answer.
Phrasing the question is most of the solution.
Are these questions phrased in such a way as to get the answer you need in order to look at an editor's rewrite orders (or what screenwriters call "Notes") and know immediately what to do to make your manuscript publishable or producible?
Do you see that I've already answered all those questions in the first 4 parts to this series?
No?
Do any of those questions take into account what an Editor's job is?
Do any of those questions focus on what the editor is trying to accomplish?
Do any of those questions address the real key issue to figuring out what to do with your story to make it "acceptable" to that editor?
No, they don't.
They look at the rewrite order, and at the story -- totally ignoring the Editor's PROBLEM.
Here's a glance at the problem the Editor knows this novel will face in the marketplace.
Again from twitter, a random selection of comments from a chat on publicity.
@BookMarketChat Another thing I think is true - get help. You may not see yourself, your work as clearly as a coach, publicist or honest friend. #bookmarket
--
@BookMarketChat Yea!RT @publishingcoach: Things change so quickly these days, and peoples memories are short. You'll lose some fans, gain others. #bookmarket
--
Two key take-aways: CHANGE and a perspective on yourSELF, what you're doing and how you're doing it. Keeping your eye on a changing market, and changing your behavior as that change happens is a major key to understanding the rewrite orders an editor is sending you -- even though you wrote exactly what the contract required!
Between the time you sign a contract or even seal the deal with a handshake via email -- things have changed in the editor's office!
When an editor (or producer) takes time to give you "Notes" or a rewrite order, direction, or marginal notations on a manuscript, the editor is asking you to finish doing your job, and to solve a problem the editor has, not a problem you have, and not the problem the editor had when you signed the contract.
The editor is not asking you to solve YOUR PROBLEM.
The editor (or producer) is asking you to solve THE EDITOR'S PROBLEM.
Worse, you have to solve the new problem IN TIME to get the product into the pipeline before things change again for the publicity department.
Consider that the way those questions that were sent to me are phrased focuses the attention on the writer's problem ignoring the entire issue of whether the editor has a problem and what that problem might actually be and how it's changed lately.
In those questions, the Editor and the Writer are talking past each other, not even at each other. Certainly there's no communicating going on.
These questions are by are professional writers who have done this work with professional editors. And look what they're asking.
Let's frame it all another way.
A) What exactly is this Editor asking me to do?
B) How do I figure out what the Editor really means by this note?
C) What should the finished product this Editor needs look like?
D) How do I figure out what part of my manuscript to change to get the effect this editor needs?
----------
A) You can tell what the editor is asking you to do by looking at other books in the line the editor is editing for. The editor is asking you to make yours "the same but different" - to conform to the better selling novels in the line.
What does it mean "conform?" It means to use the same structure, the same trope, that has sold well before, but be fresh, original and different in theme, twists, character quirks, details, background.
In editor-speak "conform" means be different.
B) To figure out what an editor "really means" you have to know this editor a little bit at least. But it's usually safe to start with the assumption that the editor is an editor not a writer.
The editor will spot and flag a section, character, element, or detail that isn't "on beat" -- a pacing flaw, a bit that's foreshadowed (set-up) but never happens (pay-off).
The editor checks the emotional-tension of scenes to see that they are placed in the correct order - that climaxes (you should excuse the expression) come in the right places.
Some publishing lines have actual page-number formulas for internal climaxes, a set number of pages for sex scenes, action scenes, etc. But most don't have that strict a formula. Still, every genre (even Literature) does have a structure that determines the BEATS.
Blake Snyder showed you, in the SAVE THE CAT! series, exactly how to reverse engineer products aimed at different audiences to determine the best selling beat structures. Good editors know the beat of their line. The others don't stay in the job long.
What the editor "really means" is that "this "beat" right here where I've made this marginal note or on page-this of the MS is "wrong"."
It isn't the editor's job to tell the writer HOW TO FIX IT. The editor isn't a writer. They often suggest what to change into what, but usually are just trying to express what's bothering them without actually, consciously analyzing what's bothering them.
It's like a computer user calling tech support and yelling "It Doesn't Work" and tech support asking for the error code number, and the user just yelling IT DOESN'T WORK!!! How should I know why???? And tech support says "Well what did you do before it did that?" And the user says "I don't know, that's your job."
The editor is the USER, and you are her TECH SUPPORT. It's up to you to figure out why it doesn't work and fix it. It's only up to her to tell you THAT it doesn't work, not why or how to fix it. Don't call her and ask.
So if you're going to tech-support your own manuscript, you have to know its "computer language" (the symbolism in which it speaks; it's theme) and you have to know how it works, and where the drop-down menus are where other choices can be made.
You have to know the BEATS, the genre, the conflict, and all the moving parts of the composition.
Then when the editor points and says "this doesn't work" -- you don't call the editor up and defend your ART, you figure out why it doesn't work for that editor's line, and that publisher's purpose.
The reason it doesn't work on page 152 probably lies on page 1 -- maybe page 5 -- of a 400 page manuscript.
The editor can't tell you where the problem IS, only where it became noticeable. If you put the manuscript together, you should be able to take it apart, fix page 5 and see how that changes page 152, and it'll satisfy the editor. The editor doesn't care how you fix it, or how you figure out the problem is actually on page 5. The editor only cares that it be fixed and that it work, on deadline.
C) What should the finished product this editor needs look like? Do your homework. Read other books, novels, stories, in that line. If you're in film, read Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series. In fact, if you're in text, read that book anyway. It's all there. It's in the beat. If you can see it in a film, you can see it in a novel!
D) How do you figure out where to make changes to get the effect an editor needs? Again. The editor may not know WHY there's a problem on page 152, or what to do to fix it. But it is the editor's job to know what overall effect the novels in a line (or a film from a production company) should be.
If the effect isn't almost right already, the editor wouldn't take the trouble to ask for rewrite. So the necessary change probably isn't nearly as drastic as the editor thinks! If there's a problem with the "effect" (happy ending, crushing low-point for hero in the middle, a "lighter" or "darker" mood) it's either a pacing problem with the BEAT SHEET structure, or it's just choice of vocabulary. Line editing to adjust where beats fall and/or vocabulary changes can fix a lot with "light" or "dark" mood. Sometimes it can be fixed by deleting a scene or character and putting the information conveyed by that scene or character into another component of the story.
Writing is "magic" to editors. It isn't their job to know how you produce emotional effects, but only to know whether you've done it or not.
So to fulfill a rewrite order on deadline and on schedule, you START by structuring the story with precision beats before you write.
In fact, since most of a writer's work is done subconsciously way before "having an idea" for a story -- the smooth, quick, professional rewrite order response actually starts before you have the idea.
If you know what you did, what you chose, how you chose it, and why, and you know the editor didn't "get" the effect you worked for, you have to make a choice.
Either the effect you worked for has to be deleted entirely, in all its parts. Or something else has to be deleted to make room, and the effect worked up into the foreground.
Now, given this approach -- listen carefully to the editor, understand that this rewrite order is an attempt to conform your product to her Imprint's line, understand that it isn't criticism and has nothing at all to do with your Art, and everything to do with marketing, getting good reviews, and starting buzz.
Doing a fast, smooth job on rewrite is all about listening to the editor, and that's just like listening to any other person. Stop listening to yourself and start listening to the other person.
Now let's go through those questions submitted and answer them:
First @DreamsGrafter
1)What is your process? What do you look at/tackle first?
First- listen. Look at the overall pattern of rewrite notes and find the connecting mechanism built into the story while writing it.
Understanding that the actual problem with the manuscript is very likely NOT at the point where the editor noticed it, find the actual problem and fix that. Often 15-20 scattered complaints sprinkled through a 400 page manuscript can be fixed with one or two tweaks.
2)Apparently the trick is to dig deeper. How do you do that when the scene structure already works? How do you enrich a scene?
To "enrich" a scene that's locked into a nice paced sequence of scenes you don't want to mess up, go for SUBTEXT.
Plant a foreshadowing or "set-up" long before the scene you want enriched. Tiny tweaks to the scene you want to enrich will then make it a super-huge pay-off to the previous setup. And be sure to end the scene with a set-up for a pay-off that'll come several scenes later, maybe at the end. When there's a difference between what the viewer knows and what the character knows, you get rich.
Make sure the reader learns something they have wanted to know for an excruciatingly long time in that scene but still knows they don't know everything - and it will be enriched.
3) What is the biggest lesson you've learnt over time re editing to a deadline and how do you deal with it now?
Sounding spontaneous is a matter of careful preparation.
How quickly and efficiently you can rewrite depends on how carefully you prepared TO REWRITE before you wrote.
It depends on how you kept your own notes and what is connected to what and what foreshadows what, and where the tension builds and where it's released.
Rewrite orders that aren't simple story-logic tweaks (he put his hat on twice without taking it off) are almost always related to adjusting pacing to fit the genre.
Understand how you paced it to begin with, and you'll know what you can delete now to tighten the pacing, and what to add to slow it down.
Editors don't always just tell you the problem is pacing. They may say it's uninteresting or complicated or abstract, or I don't like this character or I don't believe that character would do this -- and it's up to you to understand, as their tech-support, that the real problem they are having is with pacing.
A character who would NEVER do this will do it if in a big HURRY.
4)How do you know which notes to follow? What if your instincts are telling you something else?
Then retrain your instincts if you want to work for this editor. Otherwise find another editor.
Actually, that's not all the choices available. The true professional who has an editor whose rewrite orders violate their "instincts" doesn't throw away their own instincts - but rather just acquires a new set of instincts to broaden versatility and increase chances to hit in other markets.
Your instincts may be perfect for one genre, and mean failure in another. Do you have to spend your own life writing one genre under one byline? Or can you take this opportunity to learn what this editor knows - so later you can choose to use it, or not?
And from another blogger on aliendjinnromances, professional SF/F Romance writer Rowena Cherry provides the following:
A) Is there a standard etiquette for attacking revisions? Is there a formula for how many hard-to-take edits you swallow for every one you argue against?
Yes. It's simple. NEVER ARGUE. If the editor is WRONG (and they can be, especially if the MS is badly messed up) then fix what's really bothering the editor, not what they're complaining about.
It's for sure, SOMETHING is bothering the editor. Fix it so nothing bothers the editor. It's their job at stake - and yours too for that matter.
This is a point where sometimes you have to impose again on your beta-readers, or consult a fellow professional writer. But don't take up the editor's time.
When you figure out what the problem really was and fix it -- then never make that mistake again.
It isn't your job to do what the editor wants. It's your job to do what the editor needs. It isn't their job to know what they need, except that this MS has to work, and it has to work by deadline.
B) Is there a length of email that is optimum for making your case, but ensuring that the busy editor "gets" it without tuning out or getting annoyed?
Yes, again simple. "Here attached is the completed MS. Thank you for catching all my mistakes."
How do I arrive at this insane conclusion?
THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT.
The editor is your customer. The editor is always right even when they haven't a clue what they're talking about. Never argue with a customer. Figure out what they really need and give it to them without hassling them. Make them happy and they'll come back for more.
--------
So what exactly is editing?
It's the process of packaging a piece of art to fit into a delivery system with standard sized tubes that whisk the art to the consumer in a frictionless medium.
Think of a Christmas Giftwrap station in a department store. They have an array of standard sized boxes to put your odd-shaped gift object into.
That's what editors and publishers do for a living: put odd shaped art objects into standard sized boxes, wrap them up pretty and mail them off.
The most onerous part of an editor's job is dealing with writers who somehow think their art has anything to do with publishing.
Publishing is the business of mailing off those standardized boxes. What's inside the box is irrelevant to the business model as long as it fits inside the box. Think about the USPS advertisement "If it fits; it ships for one, low flat rate." That's the publishing business model to a T.
Learn to look at it that way, and you'll never have any problem deciding what to do in response to rewrite orders.
The rewrite orders are the editor's attempt to get you to make your product fit inside the box that their schedule says they must fill at a specific date. It mustn't stick out, and it mustn't rattle too much.
If there are a lot of rewrite orders on a single MS, it's because you did something very wrong. Fix it. Learn from the mistakes and never do them again.
It is a process and does take a few times through the system, often with a couple different editors and agents to get the hang of it.
But you'll learn faster if you can grasp this single fact.
What you're doing isn't what they're doing, and they don't care what you're doing as long as it doesn't get in their way.
It's not your job to convince the editor they don't know how to do their job (even if they don't).
It's your job to give the editor what they need to keep their job, and their job is to drop identical boxes into the tubes.
In Part VI on September 7, we'll look at this from another angle.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Advice On Giving Advice
I believe that this alien romances blog was one of the first blogs of its kind, where a diverse group of authors focus on sharing unique, original advice and opinions about writing and our genre.
Now, there are scores of blogs of writers offering advice to writers. Setting oneself up as an expert is a savvy promo and marketing technique.
However... it's not always easy to think of something fresh, insightful, on topic etc to say, week after week, year after year. Problems are emerging (not here on this blog). Here's what I think would-be experts ought to know.
1. If you don't have something new to say, recycle great advice you yourself gave in the past.
The gist of this tip was shared with me by Penny Sansevieri when I asked her how she managed to sustain her free and totally brilliant amarketingexpert.com newsletter, and also to Tweet pertinent advice in 120 characters three or more times a day. Her secret is to repackage tried and true good advice, over and over again. She does that so well, I never notice, and always appreciate a reminder of all the things I meant to do, and never got around to doing!
2. As long as you have the original authors permission, and as long as you quote accurately with full and proper attribution, share other experts' advice that you have found valuable.
3. If you wish to blog about a topic, and need help... ask. Usually, people are delighted to share what they know in exchange for the courtesy of kudos where kudos is due.
4. There's nothing wrong with the old adage, "If you've nothing good to say, stay silent."
The problem that is beginning to rear its head among bloggers is that of plagiarism and copyright infringement on advice blogs. In some cases --and as is their right-- some original authors are beginning to take action.
It is not okay to cut and paste someone else's expert post on a topic, replace every sixth word with a synonym, and pass it off as one's own.
What is more, there is software that can detect that sort of cheating. Also, in the absence of an agreement, the injured blogger is entitled to send an invoice for whatever he or she deems a reasonable fee for use of his or her work.
Advice blogs that I like include
http://1stTurningPoint.com
http://www.savvyauthors.com
http://www.amarketingexpert.com/blog/
Newsletters that I appreciate include
Article about a small blog
http://www.amarketingexpert.com/little-fish-in-a-big-pond-understanding-accepting-and-learning-to-love-your-small-blog/
Please leave a comment with your own recommendations for me to add to this post!
Thanks!
Rowena Cherry
Now, there are scores of blogs of writers offering advice to writers. Setting oneself up as an expert is a savvy promo and marketing technique.
However... it's not always easy to think of something fresh, insightful, on topic etc to say, week after week, year after year. Problems are emerging (not here on this blog). Here's what I think would-be experts ought to know.
1. If you don't have something new to say, recycle great advice you yourself gave in the past.
The gist of this tip was shared with me by Penny Sansevieri when I asked her how she managed to sustain her free and totally brilliant amarketingexpert.com newsletter, and also to Tweet pertinent advice in 120 characters three or more times a day. Her secret is to repackage tried and true good advice, over and over again. She does that so well, I never notice, and always appreciate a reminder of all the things I meant to do, and never got around to doing!
2. As long as you have the original authors permission, and as long as you quote accurately with full and proper attribution, share other experts' advice that you have found valuable.
3. If you wish to blog about a topic, and need help... ask. Usually, people are delighted to share what they know in exchange for the courtesy of kudos where kudos is due.
4. There's nothing wrong with the old adage, "If you've nothing good to say, stay silent."
The problem that is beginning to rear its head among bloggers is that of plagiarism and copyright infringement on advice blogs. In some cases --and as is their right-- some original authors are beginning to take action.
It is not okay to cut and paste someone else's expert post on a topic, replace every sixth word with a synonym, and pass it off as one's own.
What is more, there is software that can detect that sort of cheating. Also, in the absence of an agreement, the injured blogger is entitled to send an invoice for whatever he or she deems a reasonable fee for use of his or her work.
Advice blogs that I like include
http://1stTurningPoint.com
http://www.savvyauthors.com
http://www.amarketingexpert.com/blog/
Newsletters that I appreciate include
http://www.writersweekly.com
http://www.ReporterConnection.com/JoinNowFree/subscribe@amarketingexpert.com
Article about a small blog
http://www.amarketingexpert.com/little-fish-in-a-big-pond-understanding-accepting-and-learning-to-love-your-small-blog/
Please leave a comment with your own recommendations for me to add to this post!
Thanks!
Rowena Cherry
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Animal Consciousness
Here's another article about animal intelligence, from TIME magazine of August 16:
Minds of Animals
And here are some pictures that go with it:
Smart Animals
I'm intrigued by Kanzi, the bonobo who communicates with laminated cards bearing symbols of all the words he knows, because examples of his speech make it fairly clear he actually combines words intelligently rather than simply in a rudimentary stimulus-response pattern, as skeptics about earlier experiments in teaching apes language tend to believe. This article says he can use abstract terms such as prepositions and grammatical endings.
In my opinion, though, these accomplishments don't quite overthrow the uniqueness of the human species' use of speech. Gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos may be capable of learning a certain amount of language, but so far nobody has discovered a nonhuman animal inventing symbolic language. Our position at the evolutionary peak, in this respect at least, still seems secure. If it's eventually revealed that dolphins (for example) speak a true language comparable to ours, then we can start to worry. We would have to acknowledge another sapient species sharing the planet with us, and far-reaching repercussions in philosophy and culture would ensue.
Here's a TIME article about dog intelligence:
Dogs
It turns out that dogs are the only known species besides us who can (consistently, at least) understand the meaning of a pointing finger. This ability is linked to the concept of social intelligence. Creatures who live in social groups (such as dogs, dolphins, bonobos, chimps, gorillas, and us) tend to be smarter than solitary animals. It takes more mental effort to function in a group than to live alone. Crows, intriguingly, are very smart, supposedly for this reason.
About pointing to draw attention to objects, however: Chimps in the wild don't do it. But Kanzi, the fluently communicating bonobo, does. Being raised in a human-centered environment makes a difference.
On the subject of our obligations to animals, this article quotes from bioethicist and animal liberationist Peter Singer, who maintains that the ability to suffer pain confers a right to be spared unnecessary suffering. "Similar amounts of pain are equally bad," he says, "whether felt by a human or a mouse." But does the human ability to remember past pain and anticipate future suffering with fear make a difference? Another scientist quoted in the article thinks so. And even Singer doesn't extend his philosophy to all animals; those that almost certainly have no consciousness are exempt.
But suppose we met aliens whose intelligence was of such a different kind from ours that we didn't recognize them as conscious? Could we safely apply our criteria ("theory of mind" and the mirror test, for example) to beings from a distant solar system?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Minds of Animals
And here are some pictures that go with it:
Smart Animals
I'm intrigued by Kanzi, the bonobo who communicates with laminated cards bearing symbols of all the words he knows, because examples of his speech make it fairly clear he actually combines words intelligently rather than simply in a rudimentary stimulus-response pattern, as skeptics about earlier experiments in teaching apes language tend to believe. This article says he can use abstract terms such as prepositions and grammatical endings.
In my opinion, though, these accomplishments don't quite overthrow the uniqueness of the human species' use of speech. Gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos may be capable of learning a certain amount of language, but so far nobody has discovered a nonhuman animal inventing symbolic language. Our position at the evolutionary peak, in this respect at least, still seems secure. If it's eventually revealed that dolphins (for example) speak a true language comparable to ours, then we can start to worry. We would have to acknowledge another sapient species sharing the planet with us, and far-reaching repercussions in philosophy and culture would ensue.
Here's a TIME article about dog intelligence:
Dogs
It turns out that dogs are the only known species besides us who can (consistently, at least) understand the meaning of a pointing finger. This ability is linked to the concept of social intelligence. Creatures who live in social groups (such as dogs, dolphins, bonobos, chimps, gorillas, and us) tend to be smarter than solitary animals. It takes more mental effort to function in a group than to live alone. Crows, intriguingly, are very smart, supposedly for this reason.
About pointing to draw attention to objects, however: Chimps in the wild don't do it. But Kanzi, the fluently communicating bonobo, does. Being raised in a human-centered environment makes a difference.
On the subject of our obligations to animals, this article quotes from bioethicist and animal liberationist Peter Singer, who maintains that the ability to suffer pain confers a right to be spared unnecessary suffering. "Similar amounts of pain are equally bad," he says, "whether felt by a human or a mouse." But does the human ability to remember past pain and anticipate future suffering with fear make a difference? Another scientist quoted in the article thinks so. And even Singer doesn't extend his philosophy to all animals; those that almost certainly have no consciousness are exempt.
But suppose we met aliens whose intelligence was of such a different kind from ours that we didn't recognize them as conscious? Could we safely apply our criteria ("theory of mind" and the mirror test, for example) to beings from a distant solar system?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
What Exactly Is Editing - Part IV
Part One of this series was posted on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com on August 3, 2010, followed by Part II on Aug 10
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html
and Part III on Aug 17,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iii.html
and now Part IV on Aug. 24, 2010
On the "vehicle" vs "payload" model of story structure, see:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/targeting-readership-part-one.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure.html
We left off in Part III with several adages to ponder:
A) Writing Is A Performing Art (which I learned from Alma Hill)
B) Sounding Spontaneous is a Matter of Careful Preparation (an old stage adage which I learned from Robert A. Heinlein)
C) The Show Must Go On (which we all know).
D) Time Is Money (which we wish we didn't know)
Those who work in the film industry are all acutely aware of the cost per minute of leaving Union crews standing around doing nothing.
Bringing a project in on budget is all a matter of timing, management, thinking ahead, planning, and face it, just plain luck.
What writers don't always take into account is the cost to the publisher of producing their novel, and how that cost counts against their editor in terms of the editor keeping their job, and how each thing the writer does can increase (or decrease) the overhead of the publisher.
All those adages apply to publishing just as they do to film making, and they apply more and more precisely as time goes by.
Editing is more and more just like producing. It's a juggling act, and the most volatile and troublesome element is "the talent" -- actors, writers, director, people who see themselves as creating Art.
The rest of the people in the production process couldn't care a tiddly-wink about Art. They just want a paycheck on time.
Beginning writers often see themselves as selling their Art to publishers.
The Great Awakening into professionalism is the discovery that the publisher doesn't see it that way.
The publisher doesn't value their Art even as much as a film producer values chorus dancers.
For most beginning writers, just getting the contract signed is the goal-post or finish line. They learn quickly that signing the contract is the opening gun in the race not the victory lap.
Here's a tweet from the person running the twitter account for the huge line of Del Rey Spectra:
@DelReySpectra I just had back-to-back meetings, and my brain is now fried. And only 45 minutes to go, now
That's a glimpse of real life for your novel after you sign the contract and deliver. That's the state of the folks responsible for your success or failure as a writer.
That is why it's so hard to "break into" print. Good writers are a dime a dozen. Only a very few are able to run fast enough after the contract to make it to the finish line, to run with the big guys who have back-to-back meetings and can barely sit straight at their desks for that last 45 minutes.
For the publisher, the finish line is not contract signed, or even books in the stores, books in translation, or books made into films. The publisher's finish line is books in remainder and off the shelves, the film made from the book no longer sold in DVD/blu-ray/whatever.
The publisher's finish line is when the property is no longer bringing in revenue and rights revert to the author.
The publisher and the writer live in worlds that are that different. They have goals that are that different. That's why the personalities and character traits of editors, publishers, agents and writers are so different that rarely can one person do all those jobs successfully.
If you're half the writer you think you are, you've just invented a character who can do all those things!
What Exactly Is Editing?
Editing is the process of bringing those disparate goals in line, together, into harmony, or somehow getting them to co-exist.
The editor has a fractious, temperamental artiste on one side and a hard-nosed bean-counter on the other. One is yelling about their characters wouldn't do this or that, and the other is yelling about the stockholders demanding a higher dividend despite taxes.
And then there's the legal department. Those people think differently from anyone in the world (and few read any novels). The lucky writer has an Agent to deal with the legal department. The writer pays the Agent a hefty 15% to deal with lawyers. The Agent will put as much effort into legal work as the Agent thinks the writer's product will be worth. The Agent's business is a time=money business too. Lawyers bill by the hour. Their incentive is to make everything take longer. To the publisher, the legal department is just "overhead" and legal fees are part of every book's cover price.
Which brings us to another important point in the Editor's job description.
The publishing industry is governed more by custom than law.
What's written in the contract is not necessarily how things will work out. Writers who want the written contract to trump industry custom probably won't last long in the profession unless they are Amazon.com's #1 book for 6 weeks with every book they write.
Between the time the contract is signed and the time the final manuscript is put into "production" (sent for copyediting and given a publication date), the specifications for the vehicle that carries the payload - the writer's heart and soul - to the reader can change.
The changes can put an extra, emergency burden on the writer. It's a rewrite order that comes in as "drop everything, even the work under contract to a different publisher despite next week's deadline, and rewrite this and get it to us by Monday morning" work order.
Such an emergency rewrite order is an additional cost of production that the publishing company doesn't pay, doesn't account for, and doesn't care about. The writer must deliver.
The changes in the world that cause these expensive emergencies are not entirely under the control of the publishing company, or the editor.
Some have to do with economics - the price of cardboard in China, for example, determines the price Mass Market paperback printers must charge for paper. The price of ink changes with other non-publishing related events.
Some changes are controlled by upper level management decisions at a Publisher (upper level management of a publisher may be the management of a business that owns the publisher and really doesn't care much about publishing) - how many titles will be printed per month, how many reprints, how much promotion money will be spent and on what kind of promotion, how many colors of ink can be used in a cover.
A writer's publication date might be delayed (or moved up!) because another writer with a larger readership was late (or early) with a manuscript.
The editor who signed the contract might leave and be replaced by an editor who dislikes the writer's novel and bumps it down from Lead Title to 3rd, prints and distributes fewer copies, dooms it to low sales, cancels reprints of prior entries in a series, reaches out for a new writer from the slush pile.
Any of these events could mean the editor (or new editor) will issue new rewrite instructions such as make it longer, make it shorter, make the lead character female, make the lead character male, make the lead character human instead of Alien From Outer Space.
Longer or Shorter are always on the table, and should be no problem to a professional writer.
Major changes such as the gender of the lead or the setting (from alien planet to contemporary Earth, for example) are a totally different problem.
Sometimes, such rewrite instructions issued after the contract is signed are really negotiating techniques for getting the author to back out of the contract. That's what Agents are for.
The Professional Writer would look at drastic rewrite instructions from a different angle.
If massive changes are required, changes in the payload rather than just the vehicle, it isn't cost effective for the writer to invest the amount of time required to accomplish them on a work already crafted.
That's the professional attitude - cost vs. reward.
You don't put into a project more than you can get out of it.
You must get out of it more than you put into it. You must turn a profit.
That's the difference between amateur and professional. Profit. Calculate the effort/return ratio and act accordingly.
The professional writer does not withdraw a manuscript because she thinks she's so great nobody can touch her prose.
Words are strung together for sale at a profit.
Time is money.
The Editor needs 75,000 words that say this, not that.
It took six weeks to write 80,000 words which say that.
It would take another six maybe seven weeks to change that into this.
It would take maybe 5 weeks to write a THIS which is entirely new but exactly what the editor needs.
So instead of rewriting, the professional sends in a chapter and outline for a THIS to replace the THAT which is no longer marketable.
You can fulfill the contract with an acceptable THIS and still have the THAT to market elsewhere (at a profit).
You can do it, but only if you're a professional writer who knows what she's doing and can do it to deadline (and have a really good Agent to deal with the lawyers).
A writer is in business to sell word-strings. Time is money. Provide the editor what she needs when she needs it, and likely she'll buy from you again if she can. (it isn't up to her, remember that) But that can happen only if the sales on the current title pass scrutiny by the bean-counters.
So if the deal comes down to truly drastic changes that require more time than the creation of something new, HAVE that something new in the back files ready to produce at a moment's notice.
Professional merchants have stock on the shelf in the back room as well as out in the showroom.
"Sounding spontaneous is a matter of careful preparation."
It's also true that sounding "calm" is a matter of careful preparation. If you know you can supply whatever the higher management folks demand of the editor, your voice won't squeak when the editor tells you a whole line of novels, maybe a whole imprint, is being canceled and your novel was scheduled for that line, and the advance you received so far is the kill-fee.
Know what a kill-fee is? It's a fee you get when they decide to cancel a contract, especially a contract upon which you have delivered. Usually, if you get a kill-fee for a title, you can't sell that title elsewhere. It's dead. Killed. (there are exceptions to that of course - lawyers live in another world altogether)
So what does an Editor do for a living?
Pull the rug out from under hapless writers, that's what. That's part of the job description, Editor.
Really, tweaking and twiddling text and issuing rewrite orders is the least of what an Editor does. Even the time spent reading manuscripts doesn't eclipse the time and emotional energy spent dealing with the production chain, covers, marketing, blurbs, copy-editing, the accounting department that just doesn't get around to cutting the checks for the editor's starving writers, the power lunches placating the bosses, chatting up agents to get at the biggest name writers, and so on.
The writer never gets to deal with the folks on the committee which ultimately decides whether to contract a certain title, or not.
The editor is the face of the publisher turned to the writer, and the poor editor has to deal with all the changes in the world beyond the control of writer, editor, agent, or sales department, then deal with the emotional basket cases all those disruptions create.
The Editor's job is to orchestrate, manage, and connive, to flimflam all these disparate elements into seeming to cooperate so the higher ups never discover what chaos reigns in the editorial department from time to time (it's mostly pretty organized, but there are moments!)
Thus if the world suddenly changes, the publishing company gets bought, the editorial department head leaves, or the Fed manipulates the value of the dollar, it's the Editor that has to tell you about what that means regarding your manuscript in production, your title on the shelves, or your backlist title that was to be reprinted right before the sequel you're working on now.
It's part of the professional writer's job to understand what the Editor's job is (and is not), and have on tap a product that the editor can use instead of the product that has been contracted.
A cooperative, businesslike writer will ultimately get more work than a prima dona.
Because of that nature of the commercial fiction business, there are few prima donas around. There are, however, a lot of working professional writers in both publishing and film who probably know a lot about the editor or producer's job, but don't think about what they know when crafting a piece under rewrite orders.
Now, I'm being very severe here. Reality is never quite so black and white, and never at all static. What ever's true today will be untrue tomorrow, maybe tonight. There is no "Unified Field Theory" solution for human relationships, business or otherwise. When it comes to establishing and maintaining a relationship with editor or agent, we are all "pantsers" plotting our own success by the seat of our pants.
And we all climb a very steep learning curve. Editors and agents will "handhold" new writers for a while, but expect them to show increasing professionalism.
In Part V of "What Exactly Is Editing" (August 31, 2010) we'll look closely at 6 questions posed by professional writers when asked what they wanted to know about the secrets of rewriting to editorial deadline. And my answers will be extremely severe sounding to beginners.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html
and Part III on Aug 17,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iii.html
and now Part IV on Aug. 24, 2010
On the "vehicle" vs "payload" model of story structure, see:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/targeting-readership-part-one.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure.html
We left off in Part III with several adages to ponder:
A) Writing Is A Performing Art (which I learned from Alma Hill)
B) Sounding Spontaneous is a Matter of Careful Preparation (an old stage adage which I learned from Robert A. Heinlein)
C) The Show Must Go On (which we all know).
D) Time Is Money (which we wish we didn't know)
Those who work in the film industry are all acutely aware of the cost per minute of leaving Union crews standing around doing nothing.
Bringing a project in on budget is all a matter of timing, management, thinking ahead, planning, and face it, just plain luck.
What writers don't always take into account is the cost to the publisher of producing their novel, and how that cost counts against their editor in terms of the editor keeping their job, and how each thing the writer does can increase (or decrease) the overhead of the publisher.
All those adages apply to publishing just as they do to film making, and they apply more and more precisely as time goes by.
Editing is more and more just like producing. It's a juggling act, and the most volatile and troublesome element is "the talent" -- actors, writers, director, people who see themselves as creating Art.
The rest of the people in the production process couldn't care a tiddly-wink about Art. They just want a paycheck on time.
Beginning writers often see themselves as selling their Art to publishers.
The Great Awakening into professionalism is the discovery that the publisher doesn't see it that way.
The publisher doesn't value their Art even as much as a film producer values chorus dancers.
For most beginning writers, just getting the contract signed is the goal-post or finish line. They learn quickly that signing the contract is the opening gun in the race not the victory lap.
Here's a tweet from the person running the twitter account for the huge line of Del Rey Spectra:
@DelReySpectra I just had back-to-back meetings, and my brain is now fried. And only 45 minutes to go, now
That's a glimpse of real life for your novel after you sign the contract and deliver. That's the state of the folks responsible for your success or failure as a writer.
That is why it's so hard to "break into" print. Good writers are a dime a dozen. Only a very few are able to run fast enough after the contract to make it to the finish line, to run with the big guys who have back-to-back meetings and can barely sit straight at their desks for that last 45 minutes.
For the publisher, the finish line is not contract signed, or even books in the stores, books in translation, or books made into films. The publisher's finish line is books in remainder and off the shelves, the film made from the book no longer sold in DVD/blu-ray/whatever.
The publisher's finish line is when the property is no longer bringing in revenue and rights revert to the author.
The publisher and the writer live in worlds that are that different. They have goals that are that different. That's why the personalities and character traits of editors, publishers, agents and writers are so different that rarely can one person do all those jobs successfully.
If you're half the writer you think you are, you've just invented a character who can do all those things!
What Exactly Is Editing?
Editing is the process of bringing those disparate goals in line, together, into harmony, or somehow getting them to co-exist.
The editor has a fractious, temperamental artiste on one side and a hard-nosed bean-counter on the other. One is yelling about their characters wouldn't do this or that, and the other is yelling about the stockholders demanding a higher dividend despite taxes.
And then there's the legal department. Those people think differently from anyone in the world (and few read any novels). The lucky writer has an Agent to deal with the legal department. The writer pays the Agent a hefty 15% to deal with lawyers. The Agent will put as much effort into legal work as the Agent thinks the writer's product will be worth. The Agent's business is a time=money business too. Lawyers bill by the hour. Their incentive is to make everything take longer. To the publisher, the legal department is just "overhead" and legal fees are part of every book's cover price.
Which brings us to another important point in the Editor's job description.
The publishing industry is governed more by custom than law.
What's written in the contract is not necessarily how things will work out. Writers who want the written contract to trump industry custom probably won't last long in the profession unless they are Amazon.com's #1 book for 6 weeks with every book they write.
Between the time the contract is signed and the time the final manuscript is put into "production" (sent for copyediting and given a publication date), the specifications for the vehicle that carries the payload - the writer's heart and soul - to the reader can change.
The changes can put an extra, emergency burden on the writer. It's a rewrite order that comes in as "drop everything, even the work under contract to a different publisher despite next week's deadline, and rewrite this and get it to us by Monday morning" work order.
Such an emergency rewrite order is an additional cost of production that the publishing company doesn't pay, doesn't account for, and doesn't care about. The writer must deliver.
The changes in the world that cause these expensive emergencies are not entirely under the control of the publishing company, or the editor.
Some have to do with economics - the price of cardboard in China, for example, determines the price Mass Market paperback printers must charge for paper. The price of ink changes with other non-publishing related events.
Some changes are controlled by upper level management decisions at a Publisher (upper level management of a publisher may be the management of a business that owns the publisher and really doesn't care much about publishing) - how many titles will be printed per month, how many reprints, how much promotion money will be spent and on what kind of promotion, how many colors of ink can be used in a cover.
A writer's publication date might be delayed (or moved up!) because another writer with a larger readership was late (or early) with a manuscript.
The editor who signed the contract might leave and be replaced by an editor who dislikes the writer's novel and bumps it down from Lead Title to 3rd, prints and distributes fewer copies, dooms it to low sales, cancels reprints of prior entries in a series, reaches out for a new writer from the slush pile.
Any of these events could mean the editor (or new editor) will issue new rewrite instructions such as make it longer, make it shorter, make the lead character female, make the lead character male, make the lead character human instead of Alien From Outer Space.
Longer or Shorter are always on the table, and should be no problem to a professional writer.
Major changes such as the gender of the lead or the setting (from alien planet to contemporary Earth, for example) are a totally different problem.
Sometimes, such rewrite instructions issued after the contract is signed are really negotiating techniques for getting the author to back out of the contract. That's what Agents are for.
The Professional Writer would look at drastic rewrite instructions from a different angle.
If massive changes are required, changes in the payload rather than just the vehicle, it isn't cost effective for the writer to invest the amount of time required to accomplish them on a work already crafted.
That's the professional attitude - cost vs. reward.
You don't put into a project more than you can get out of it.
You must get out of it more than you put into it. You must turn a profit.
That's the difference between amateur and professional. Profit. Calculate the effort/return ratio and act accordingly.
The professional writer does not withdraw a manuscript because she thinks she's so great nobody can touch her prose.
Words are strung together for sale at a profit.
Time is money.
The Editor needs 75,000 words that say this, not that.
It took six weeks to write 80,000 words which say that.
It would take another six maybe seven weeks to change that into this.
It would take maybe 5 weeks to write a THIS which is entirely new but exactly what the editor needs.
So instead of rewriting, the professional sends in a chapter and outline for a THIS to replace the THAT which is no longer marketable.
You can fulfill the contract with an acceptable THIS and still have the THAT to market elsewhere (at a profit).
You can do it, but only if you're a professional writer who knows what she's doing and can do it to deadline (and have a really good Agent to deal with the lawyers).
A writer is in business to sell word-strings. Time is money. Provide the editor what she needs when she needs it, and likely she'll buy from you again if she can. (it isn't up to her, remember that) But that can happen only if the sales on the current title pass scrutiny by the bean-counters.
So if the deal comes down to truly drastic changes that require more time than the creation of something new, HAVE that something new in the back files ready to produce at a moment's notice.
Professional merchants have stock on the shelf in the back room as well as out in the showroom.
"Sounding spontaneous is a matter of careful preparation."
It's also true that sounding "calm" is a matter of careful preparation. If you know you can supply whatever the higher management folks demand of the editor, your voice won't squeak when the editor tells you a whole line of novels, maybe a whole imprint, is being canceled and your novel was scheduled for that line, and the advance you received so far is the kill-fee.
Know what a kill-fee is? It's a fee you get when they decide to cancel a contract, especially a contract upon which you have delivered. Usually, if you get a kill-fee for a title, you can't sell that title elsewhere. It's dead. Killed. (there are exceptions to that of course - lawyers live in another world altogether)
So what does an Editor do for a living?
Pull the rug out from under hapless writers, that's what. That's part of the job description, Editor.
Really, tweaking and twiddling text and issuing rewrite orders is the least of what an Editor does. Even the time spent reading manuscripts doesn't eclipse the time and emotional energy spent dealing with the production chain, covers, marketing, blurbs, copy-editing, the accounting department that just doesn't get around to cutting the checks for the editor's starving writers, the power lunches placating the bosses, chatting up agents to get at the biggest name writers, and so on.
The writer never gets to deal with the folks on the committee which ultimately decides whether to contract a certain title, or not.
The editor is the face of the publisher turned to the writer, and the poor editor has to deal with all the changes in the world beyond the control of writer, editor, agent, or sales department, then deal with the emotional basket cases all those disruptions create.
The Editor's job is to orchestrate, manage, and connive, to flimflam all these disparate elements into seeming to cooperate so the higher ups never discover what chaos reigns in the editorial department from time to time (it's mostly pretty organized, but there are moments!)
Thus if the world suddenly changes, the publishing company gets bought, the editorial department head leaves, or the Fed manipulates the value of the dollar, it's the Editor that has to tell you about what that means regarding your manuscript in production, your title on the shelves, or your backlist title that was to be reprinted right before the sequel you're working on now.
It's part of the professional writer's job to understand what the Editor's job is (and is not), and have on tap a product that the editor can use instead of the product that has been contracted.
A cooperative, businesslike writer will ultimately get more work than a prima dona.
Because of that nature of the commercial fiction business, there are few prima donas around. There are, however, a lot of working professional writers in both publishing and film who probably know a lot about the editor or producer's job, but don't think about what they know when crafting a piece under rewrite orders.
Now, I'm being very severe here. Reality is never quite so black and white, and never at all static. What ever's true today will be untrue tomorrow, maybe tonight. There is no "Unified Field Theory" solution for human relationships, business or otherwise. When it comes to establishing and maintaining a relationship with editor or agent, we are all "pantsers" plotting our own success by the seat of our pants.
And we all climb a very steep learning curve. Editors and agents will "handhold" new writers for a while, but expect them to show increasing professionalism.
In Part V of "What Exactly Is Editing" (August 31, 2010) we'll look closely at 6 questions posed by professional writers when asked what they wanted to know about the secrets of rewriting to editorial deadline. And my answers will be extremely severe sounding to beginners.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Sunday, August 22, 2010
I'm Back...
I have just returned, having driven from Detroit to California along Interstate 80 via Illinois, Nebraska, Wyoming, Nevada...
And back via Route 66 and also the 40/44 through Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana.
Along the way, I contemplated a great many things, from the violent sex lives of elephant seals, to geology, to cloud and fog formations. I haven't processed it all, yet....
And back via Route 66 and also the 40/44 through Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana.
 |
| Elephant seals moulting |
 |
| Extraordinary golden hills |
 |
| Lava-like fog off California Coast |
 |
| Husband's car on the concept lawn at Pebble Beach |
 |
| Manic Arizona Jack Rabbit On Motorcycle |
 |
| I'll be baaack. Not! |
Along the way, I contemplated a great many things, from the violent sex lives of elephant seals, to geology, to cloud and fog formations. I haven't processed it all, yet....
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Why "They" Disapprove of Romance: Another Angle
Brian Attebery, in his Introduction to the latest issue (Volume 21, No. 1) of the JOURNAL OF THE FANTASTIC IN THE ARTS, discusses the value of examining fiction from the perspective of "cultural work," that is, "not in terms of what it *is* or even what it *says* but rather what it *does*." In a passage highly relevant to the problem of why "serious" critics often disdain romance, he writes:
"Like women's literature, like socially activist literature such as Stowe's, like literature written for children or by outsider groups, fantasy has been largely ignored or demeaned by the literary establishment on grounds that are presented as aesthetic but are covertly political. Genres such as fantasy and science fiction are dismissed not because the writing is weak or the imagination inferior but because they do the wrong things. Code words like 'juvenile,' 'time waster,' or 'cult' are all clues that the critic disapproves not of the text but of the work it performs."
What does romance "do" that offends its detractors? "Escapist" is another term often applied to all kinds of genre fiction by those who disapprove of it. (We also hear the "beach read" label, implying a frivolous, self-indulgent function for genre novels.) If you've read Tolkien's classic essay on fairy tales, you'll remember that two of the important functions he assigns to "fairy stories" and, by extension, some other kinds of fantasy are consolation and escape. In his argument about why escape can be a good thing, he inquires what sorts of people are most obsessed with keeping others from escaping. Answer: Jailers! When a prisoner breaks out of a concentration camp or a POW compound, we regard him as a hero. We might view romance as "escape" in a similar light.
It's not uncommon to see romance demeaned as "porn for women." Setting aside the nuanced distinctions among erotic romance, erotica, and pornography, if the accusation refers to the fact that some romances arouse sexual feelings—among other kinds of emotions—I have to ask: And what's wrong with that? Why is it legitimate to use candlelight, lingerie, decadent desserts, and soft music to incite passion but not to read explicit fiction for the same purpose? Sometimes detractors of horror or extremely violent stories (and I confess I don't care for ultra-violence myself) label them "porn" by analogy. All fiction, for that matter, has as one of its functions the excitement of emotions in the reader, whether suspense, fear, repugnance, sadness, joy, or others.
Would those who scorn romance and erotica claim that all fiction designed to stimulate the emotions is bad? If so, they'd eliminate all fiction, period, or transform reading it into a purely intellectual exercise. Not to mention throwing out Aristotle's theory of catharsis, enshrined in classical criticism for thousands of years. Or do they mean some kinds of emotion and sensation are legitimate for literature to arouse and others aren't?
So what "work" done by romance causes the "serious" critics to disdain it? (Or they have until recently, at least; now some academic studies of romantic literature are being done by respected scholars.) Romance appeals to emotions often scorned as "sentimental." It usually portrays sexual passion in positive terms. It also celebrates lifelong commitment to a partner in love. What's wrong with "escaping" from the cynicism and violence that pervade too much of our world ("facing reality," the critics might call that realm of experience) into a world where loving relationships (which are also part of "reality") have the highest priority?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
"Like women's literature, like socially activist literature such as Stowe's, like literature written for children or by outsider groups, fantasy has been largely ignored or demeaned by the literary establishment on grounds that are presented as aesthetic but are covertly political. Genres such as fantasy and science fiction are dismissed not because the writing is weak or the imagination inferior but because they do the wrong things. Code words like 'juvenile,' 'time waster,' or 'cult' are all clues that the critic disapproves not of the text but of the work it performs."
What does romance "do" that offends its detractors? "Escapist" is another term often applied to all kinds of genre fiction by those who disapprove of it. (We also hear the "beach read" label, implying a frivolous, self-indulgent function for genre novels.) If you've read Tolkien's classic essay on fairy tales, you'll remember that two of the important functions he assigns to "fairy stories" and, by extension, some other kinds of fantasy are consolation and escape. In his argument about why escape can be a good thing, he inquires what sorts of people are most obsessed with keeping others from escaping. Answer: Jailers! When a prisoner breaks out of a concentration camp or a POW compound, we regard him as a hero. We might view romance as "escape" in a similar light.
It's not uncommon to see romance demeaned as "porn for women." Setting aside the nuanced distinctions among erotic romance, erotica, and pornography, if the accusation refers to the fact that some romances arouse sexual feelings—among other kinds of emotions—I have to ask: And what's wrong with that? Why is it legitimate to use candlelight, lingerie, decadent desserts, and soft music to incite passion but not to read explicit fiction for the same purpose? Sometimes detractors of horror or extremely violent stories (and I confess I don't care for ultra-violence myself) label them "porn" by analogy. All fiction, for that matter, has as one of its functions the excitement of emotions in the reader, whether suspense, fear, repugnance, sadness, joy, or others.
Would those who scorn romance and erotica claim that all fiction designed to stimulate the emotions is bad? If so, they'd eliminate all fiction, period, or transform reading it into a purely intellectual exercise. Not to mention throwing out Aristotle's theory of catharsis, enshrined in classical criticism for thousands of years. Or do they mean some kinds of emotion and sensation are legitimate for literature to arouse and others aren't?
So what "work" done by romance causes the "serious" critics to disdain it? (Or they have until recently, at least; now some academic studies of romantic literature are being done by respected scholars.) Romance appeals to emotions often scorned as "sentimental." It usually portrays sexual passion in positive terms. It also celebrates lifelong commitment to a partner in love. What's wrong with "escaping" from the cynicism and violence that pervade too much of our world ("facing reality," the critics might call that realm of experience) into a world where loving relationships (which are also part of "reality") have the highest priority?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
What Exactly Is Editing - Part III
See Part I of this series,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-i.html
and part II
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html
We left off in Part II with a Science Fiction Romance Editor, a character you yourself created, sweating over a stack of submissions trying to save her job.
The question is, "What Will She Do?" Which manuscript will she choose?
Now we up the ante.
On her desk are a stack of 1 page novel descriptions from her slush pile readers and a few pitches from Agents who have always done business crisply with her.
But the books from the Agents just haven't sold well enough to keep her job off the chopping block.
The clients of these top Agents are all seasoned professionals who rewrite to order, on deadline, never miss a deadline, and don't waste the Editor's time with gossipy phone calls or emotional hand-holding sessions. These are writers who won't "feel honored" to be chosen. They're craftsman proud of their work who will respect the editor who can see the quality in their product. They're ready to do business as equals, not toady to a power-figure.
She doesn't have to maintain a personal relationship with the clients of these top Agents. They are professional writers who know what they're doing and just do it - on time.
Experience has taught our editor (the hard way) that if she picks something out of the slush pile, the writer (who couldn't land an Agent) will then spend whole, long days of the editor's time on the phone basically asking for writing lessons.
Some editors are writers, too, but that's less and less common in the new publishing world. We'll discuss the difference between writer and editor later in this series.
Our editor can't afford to give writing lessons (though some editors do that even when they can't afford the time because they see $$$ if the produce can be perfected).
Our pressured editor, however, actually doesn't know how writers write or how to teach how to write, even if she is a good professional writer herself. She's trained and paid to recognize at the gut level the perfected result of good writing, not to examine the internal, subconscious mechanism by which this product is created.
She has no time, and her job is on the line.
And she's a corporate professional. She knows that she must not let either the Agents or their writers know that her job is on the line.
She needs a best-seller, and she needs it now. The authors of her former best-sellers haven't been selling so well lately. She doesn't know why. Where to turn?
What is she going to do?
Now, as a writer, you have walked a mile in your customer's high-heels. You can feel the starch in her shirt. You know how tight her pantyhose are and how expensive her haircut was.
Do some method-acting. Feel the roiling emotions, the sweating tension, the desperation that must not show.
You know now who you are dealing with.
Whether you connect with this editor via an Agent or through the slush pile, or at a convention tossing her an elevator pitch - you know what your customer needs from you because you can feel it.
Your customer needs to know that you understand the pickle she's in, won't ever - EVER - let anyone know that you know that things are tough - (never let them see you sweat) - and your customer needs to know that you have the solution to her problem.
Now get this straight.
Your customer needs to know that you have the solution to her problem, not that you JUST THINK you have but really do have it.
What is it that professional Editors do?
They keep their jobs so that they can license your next novel.
They keep their jobs by staying calm and producing concrete results that the bean-counters upstairs can use to keep their jobs!
So your job as "a professional writer" - is not just to produce solid prose the publisher can use to make a profit for the publisher, but your job is to keep your editor calm, collected, confident and successful.
How can you do that?
By assuring her that you are a professional writer with the following traits:
1) That you have totally divorced your emotional life from the string of words you have to offer her.
2) That these words are your personal self-expression, and that your Self is very close to the target audience that her salesman want to hit big with, and will hit that audience in the emotions because of it.
3) That even though these words started out very personal to you, you have attained a clinical distance from them (how you did that is none of her business)
4) That if anything in this work doesn't look to her as if it will fit through the marketing channel smoothly, you will change it to fit perfectly with only the vaguest wave from her to indicate where nips-n-tucks are needed and without further detailed direction from her.
5) That you understand the exacting (and ever changing) shape of the marketing channel she's got to feed and your goal is to produce a product that will fit neatly into that marketing channel and boost her career.
6) That you know she is a professional editor and therefore is not out to express her personal artistic message via your words
7) That she is your customer, is always right, and not in need of your instruction in how to do her job.
8) That you know exactly what you're doing and will produce results on deadline no matter what may be going haywire in your personal life. You are a professional writer, and keep your homelife out of the office (but you have a rich homelife and are stable and dependable in that context.)
Read that list of assurances again and mind the repetitions; they are important. Note that the face you turn to your editor is totally antithetical to the inner heart and soul of "a writer." It is the professional writer's face.
Read the list a third time. Think about this. An awful lot of the really big best sellers, writers with books that become movies and movies that become best selling books, were journalists first, or for years. What do journalists have that most aspiring novelists don't? Years and years and YEARS of working to a totally inflexible, absolute, do-it-or-die deadline.
A working journalist presenting a novel to an editor has an edge because the journalist will be assumed to make the production deadlines or die trying.
This is an increasingly rare trait in the modern world, and has thus become a saleable commodity in the prose marketplace. Get a professional credential that bespeaks a habit of living within deadlines and never missing them - and you have an edge against all the competition for an editor's (or producer's) attention.
Read that list a fourth time. Note what's missing: art, artistic value, intrinsic merit of the work, discussion of theme or content. Nothing in that list addresses your art. Nothing in that list captures your interest.
Everything important to you as a writer is in your art. You live for your writing, and all the rest is waiting. That's why you'll argue with editors about whether this character would or wouldn't do that thing - and whether this scene should be deleted or another scene added. That content is important to you.
No other functionary in the fiction delivery system cares about anything that's important to you. Knowing that in your bones makes you a professional writer.
You know that your readers (your fans and potential fans) want your heart, not the commercial formula packaging with which you have surrounded your heart.
But the packaging is necessary insulation to shape your story to the delivery system's tubes leading from you to your reader.
Your readers and fans will never see your heart beating gloriously unless you can package it to survive the 900 pound gorilla that lives in the back of the UPS truck and loads suitcases onto planes. That packaging that protects your heart is the commercial fiction structure, the formula, the trope that academics talk about. It's Blake Snyder's beat sheet and genres.
Read that list of traits a fifth time. It's all about your ability to package a story, not about the story itself.
What makes your product different from the product of other writers (the only real reason you ever write anything) is never mentioned. Nobody in the fiction delivery system is interested in what makes you different from other writers. The only thing of interest here is what makes you the same as all the others. That's what this desperate editor you've invented in your mind is looking for. Someone trust-worthy.
The fiction delivery system workers are all convinced that it's the packaging that sells product and makes a profit. The content is worthless, irrelevant, and perhaps even annoying or repellent. Packaging makes a best seller - but the packaging must fit the content like a glove so the whole thing slides right down the tubes of the distribution system frictionlessly. (friction costs money)
For more on the worthlessness of "content" or Intellectual Property see:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/fix-for-publishing-business-model.html
You and your editor discuss packaging - your heart stays out of the discussion.
It's up to you to create your story or novel such that your heart is deep, deep inside and no possible change an editor needs can touch it.
You, your Agent, and your Editor are dealing only in the packaging, not in the heart itself.
And that's how you can manage the clinical distance necessary to get through editing without wasting days pacing and crying your head off, or disputing the changes the editor has suggested.
No change an Editor might require would touch the part of the story that matters to you - you know that because you are a professional and you constructed the work so that the payload (your heart) is carried in a very sound commercial "vehicle" - a mechanism known to sell to the audience that you secretly know wants your payload.
Now your job (especially if your work has been discovered in the slush pile or captivated the interest of an editor in an elevator) is to convince the editor that you understand the difference between payload and vehicle, and that you are a total master of vehicle repair and maintenance.
That's where most new writers trying to pitch to an editor at a convention will fail. The new writer will tell the editor the story, focus on all the tangled character motivations and rich tapestry of backstory propelling these characters into adventure. But what the editor is listening for is, "I am a proficient vehicle mechanic and I build vehicles your readership has proven it loves." And all that editor is hearing is, "I'm different from all other writers because of my vastly detailed art and I wouldn't ever build a vehicle if my life depended on it."
Payload, heart, the actual story, is very important, but finding useful payload is easy. Good vehicle mechanics are rare.
The Editor will choose a payload that suits the target readership for the line being edited. That's a given. Picking out satisfying payload is the editor's talent and stock in trade, and the process is none of your business. That's why editors you interview always say "Just write a good story." or "I want interesting characters." or asked what makes a good story, they are reduced to something that says in effect "If I like it, it's good."
The payload (the emotional kick) of the story is not under discussion in the Writer-Editor transaction. That hurdle has already been crossed, and it's the reason you have an offer or a contract. This editor knows where to sell your payload and has the means to do so.
The vehicle, the mechanism that has to deliver that payload to the heart of the reader, is entirely mutable during the editing process.
What's the editor's job?
To produce 3 or 5 books every month that all travel in the same model vehicle.
The editor is running an assembly line that produces green Corollas. She might take your red Corolla, but will require a new paint job, and maybe matching interior at your expense.
The editor is running a circus that needs a High Wire Walker, and you got the job auditioning in spangled tights -- but this year's show has a Western theme and she hands you a hoop-skirt costume. It's still wire-walking. You're trained to that. You can do it even though you've never done it in a hoop-skirt before.
Writing is a performing art.
You are a performing artist.
The Editor is mounting a show. She needs singers, dancers, acrobats, a lead actor and actress, some supporting players, and a chorus.
You audition as a singer with one song you know well (your novel), but she hires you and asks for a more upbeat arrangement. You represented yourself as a singer. So re-arrange your song, sing the song her show requires and prove your professionalism.
The show must go on.
Next time we'll look at some of the obstacles to getting the show on the road and the nitty-gritty of what an author under the editing hammer faces in order to accomplish this task.
Readers who aren't writers will begin to suspect they ought to pay more for books than they do, given what writers go through to put those books into the reader's hands.
Part IV of this series posted on Aug. 24, 2010
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-i.html
and part II
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html
We left off in Part II with a Science Fiction Romance Editor, a character you yourself created, sweating over a stack of submissions trying to save her job.
The question is, "What Will She Do?" Which manuscript will she choose?
Now we up the ante.
On her desk are a stack of 1 page novel descriptions from her slush pile readers and a few pitches from Agents who have always done business crisply with her.
But the books from the Agents just haven't sold well enough to keep her job off the chopping block.
The clients of these top Agents are all seasoned professionals who rewrite to order, on deadline, never miss a deadline, and don't waste the Editor's time with gossipy phone calls or emotional hand-holding sessions. These are writers who won't "feel honored" to be chosen. They're craftsman proud of their work who will respect the editor who can see the quality in their product. They're ready to do business as equals, not toady to a power-figure.
She doesn't have to maintain a personal relationship with the clients of these top Agents. They are professional writers who know what they're doing and just do it - on time.
Experience has taught our editor (the hard way) that if she picks something out of the slush pile, the writer (who couldn't land an Agent) will then spend whole, long days of the editor's time on the phone basically asking for writing lessons.
Some editors are writers, too, but that's less and less common in the new publishing world. We'll discuss the difference between writer and editor later in this series.
Our editor can't afford to give writing lessons (though some editors do that even when they can't afford the time because they see $$$ if the produce can be perfected).
Our pressured editor, however, actually doesn't know how writers write or how to teach how to write, even if she is a good professional writer herself. She's trained and paid to recognize at the gut level the perfected result of good writing, not to examine the internal, subconscious mechanism by which this product is created.
She has no time, and her job is on the line.
And she's a corporate professional. She knows that she must not let either the Agents or their writers know that her job is on the line.
She needs a best-seller, and she needs it now. The authors of her former best-sellers haven't been selling so well lately. She doesn't know why. Where to turn?
What is she going to do?
Now, as a writer, you have walked a mile in your customer's high-heels. You can feel the starch in her shirt. You know how tight her pantyhose are and how expensive her haircut was.
Do some method-acting. Feel the roiling emotions, the sweating tension, the desperation that must not show.
You know now who you are dealing with.
Whether you connect with this editor via an Agent or through the slush pile, or at a convention tossing her an elevator pitch - you know what your customer needs from you because you can feel it.
Your customer needs to know that you understand the pickle she's in, won't ever - EVER - let anyone know that you know that things are tough - (never let them see you sweat) - and your customer needs to know that you have the solution to her problem.
Now get this straight.
Your customer needs to know that you have the solution to her problem, not that you JUST THINK you have but really do have it.
What is it that professional Editors do?
They keep their jobs so that they can license your next novel.
They keep their jobs by staying calm and producing concrete results that the bean-counters upstairs can use to keep their jobs!
So your job as "a professional writer" - is not just to produce solid prose the publisher can use to make a profit for the publisher, but your job is to keep your editor calm, collected, confident and successful.
How can you do that?
By assuring her that you are a professional writer with the following traits:
1) That you have totally divorced your emotional life from the string of words you have to offer her.
2) That these words are your personal self-expression, and that your Self is very close to the target audience that her salesman want to hit big with, and will hit that audience in the emotions because of it.
3) That even though these words started out very personal to you, you have attained a clinical distance from them (how you did that is none of her business)
4) That if anything in this work doesn't look to her as if it will fit through the marketing channel smoothly, you will change it to fit perfectly with only the vaguest wave from her to indicate where nips-n-tucks are needed and without further detailed direction from her.
5) That you understand the exacting (and ever changing) shape of the marketing channel she's got to feed and your goal is to produce a product that will fit neatly into that marketing channel and boost her career.
6) That you know she is a professional editor and therefore is not out to express her personal artistic message via your words
7) That she is your customer, is always right, and not in need of your instruction in how to do her job.
8) That you know exactly what you're doing and will produce results on deadline no matter what may be going haywire in your personal life. You are a professional writer, and keep your homelife out of the office (but you have a rich homelife and are stable and dependable in that context.)
Read that list of assurances again and mind the repetitions; they are important. Note that the face you turn to your editor is totally antithetical to the inner heart and soul of "a writer." It is the professional writer's face.
Read the list a third time. Think about this. An awful lot of the really big best sellers, writers with books that become movies and movies that become best selling books, were journalists first, or for years. What do journalists have that most aspiring novelists don't? Years and years and YEARS of working to a totally inflexible, absolute, do-it-or-die deadline.
A working journalist presenting a novel to an editor has an edge because the journalist will be assumed to make the production deadlines or die trying.
This is an increasingly rare trait in the modern world, and has thus become a saleable commodity in the prose marketplace. Get a professional credential that bespeaks a habit of living within deadlines and never missing them - and you have an edge against all the competition for an editor's (or producer's) attention.
Read that list a fourth time. Note what's missing: art, artistic value, intrinsic merit of the work, discussion of theme or content. Nothing in that list addresses your art. Nothing in that list captures your interest.
Everything important to you as a writer is in your art. You live for your writing, and all the rest is waiting. That's why you'll argue with editors about whether this character would or wouldn't do that thing - and whether this scene should be deleted or another scene added. That content is important to you.
No other functionary in the fiction delivery system cares about anything that's important to you. Knowing that in your bones makes you a professional writer.
You know that your readers (your fans and potential fans) want your heart, not the commercial formula packaging with which you have surrounded your heart.
But the packaging is necessary insulation to shape your story to the delivery system's tubes leading from you to your reader.
Your readers and fans will never see your heart beating gloriously unless you can package it to survive the 900 pound gorilla that lives in the back of the UPS truck and loads suitcases onto planes. That packaging that protects your heart is the commercial fiction structure, the formula, the trope that academics talk about. It's Blake Snyder's beat sheet and genres.
Read that list of traits a fifth time. It's all about your ability to package a story, not about the story itself.
What makes your product different from the product of other writers (the only real reason you ever write anything) is never mentioned. Nobody in the fiction delivery system is interested in what makes you different from other writers. The only thing of interest here is what makes you the same as all the others. That's what this desperate editor you've invented in your mind is looking for. Someone trust-worthy.
The fiction delivery system workers are all convinced that it's the packaging that sells product and makes a profit. The content is worthless, irrelevant, and perhaps even annoying or repellent. Packaging makes a best seller - but the packaging must fit the content like a glove so the whole thing slides right down the tubes of the distribution system frictionlessly. (friction costs money)
For more on the worthlessness of "content" or Intellectual Property see:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/fix-for-publishing-business-model.html
You and your editor discuss packaging - your heart stays out of the discussion.
It's up to you to create your story or novel such that your heart is deep, deep inside and no possible change an editor needs can touch it.
You, your Agent, and your Editor are dealing only in the packaging, not in the heart itself.
And that's how you can manage the clinical distance necessary to get through editing without wasting days pacing and crying your head off, or disputing the changes the editor has suggested.
No change an Editor might require would touch the part of the story that matters to you - you know that because you are a professional and you constructed the work so that the payload (your heart) is carried in a very sound commercial "vehicle" - a mechanism known to sell to the audience that you secretly know wants your payload.
Now your job (especially if your work has been discovered in the slush pile or captivated the interest of an editor in an elevator) is to convince the editor that you understand the difference between payload and vehicle, and that you are a total master of vehicle repair and maintenance.
That's where most new writers trying to pitch to an editor at a convention will fail. The new writer will tell the editor the story, focus on all the tangled character motivations and rich tapestry of backstory propelling these characters into adventure. But what the editor is listening for is, "I am a proficient vehicle mechanic and I build vehicles your readership has proven it loves." And all that editor is hearing is, "I'm different from all other writers because of my vastly detailed art and I wouldn't ever build a vehicle if my life depended on it."
Payload, heart, the actual story, is very important, but finding useful payload is easy. Good vehicle mechanics are rare.
The Editor will choose a payload that suits the target readership for the line being edited. That's a given. Picking out satisfying payload is the editor's talent and stock in trade, and the process is none of your business. That's why editors you interview always say "Just write a good story." or "I want interesting characters." or asked what makes a good story, they are reduced to something that says in effect "If I like it, it's good."
The payload (the emotional kick) of the story is not under discussion in the Writer-Editor transaction. That hurdle has already been crossed, and it's the reason you have an offer or a contract. This editor knows where to sell your payload and has the means to do so.
The vehicle, the mechanism that has to deliver that payload to the heart of the reader, is entirely mutable during the editing process.
What's the editor's job?
To produce 3 or 5 books every month that all travel in the same model vehicle.
The editor is running an assembly line that produces green Corollas. She might take your red Corolla, but will require a new paint job, and maybe matching interior at your expense.
The editor is running a circus that needs a High Wire Walker, and you got the job auditioning in spangled tights -- but this year's show has a Western theme and she hands you a hoop-skirt costume. It's still wire-walking. You're trained to that. You can do it even though you've never done it in a hoop-skirt before.
Writing is a performing art.
You are a performing artist.
The Editor is mounting a show. She needs singers, dancers, acrobats, a lead actor and actress, some supporting players, and a chorus.
You audition as a singer with one song you know well (your novel), but she hires you and asks for a more upbeat arrangement. You represented yourself as a singer. So re-arrange your song, sing the song her show requires and prove your professionalism.
The show must go on.
Next time we'll look at some of the obstacles to getting the show on the road and the nitty-gritty of what an author under the editing hammer faces in order to accomplish this task.
Readers who aren't writers will begin to suspect they ought to pay more for books than they do, given what writers go through to put those books into the reader's hands.
Part IV of this series posted on Aug. 24, 2010
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
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