Last week
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/poetic-justice-in-paranormal-romance.html
we ended off with a load of loaded questions:
Is Justice a figment of the imagination? Or is it a property of Reality?
Is Justice real? Does it exist? Or is it imaginary?
Then there's the problem of what exactly is poetry? Does it mean rhyme?
Maybe the term "poetic justice" is an oxymoron?
And of course we have to add, "What does poetic justice have to do with Paranormal Romance, or any other sort of Romance?"
We developed a list of concepts for the worldbuilder of a Paranormal Romance novel to include in the premise of the universe so that the Happily Ever After ending will seem plausible even to those who are absolutely convinced it can never happen in reality.
1) Free Will
2) The Reality of the Soul (otherwise no Soul Mates)
3) Uniqueness of the Individual
4) Love Conquers All
5) Happily Ever After is possible though not guaranteed
6) Poetic Justice is real
I've mentioned here before that the main reason Romance novels as a whole don't seem realistic to most readers is that the genre has a rule against challenging the underlying premise of Romance.
The commercial concept "genre" is all about repeating a specific experience for a specific readership that comes to the bookstore looking for that exact experience.
Science Fiction genre is based on the emotional experience that science works, it solves problems when it's used by someone with knowledge and creativity.
Fantasy challenges the Science Fiction premise by using the SF premise and turning it on itself -- "What if everything you think is real actually isn't?" Fantasy has developed genre rules that aim it at readers whose assumptions about reality are in flux.
Romance genre in general is aimed at those who want to experience that ineffable, once in a lifetime, feeling of having a part of the brain activated that normally doesn't respond - the part that melds you to a Soul Mate.
Or we can look at it all from a different direction.
Science fiction, and in fact most Literature, reaches the largest audiences when the unconscious premise of the readers is directly challenged -- and definitively exonerated or blown to smitherines then reassembled into something new.
The Paranormal Romance is popular because it's doing just that -- challenging the widely accepted premise about reality that science can (and mostly has) explained everything..
Science Fiction flourished as the literature that challenged the absolute conviction of the majority that we can never, ever, "go to the stars" and that there are no civilizations "out there" for us to meet, no planets for us to colonize.
Now science (mostly via the internet) has convinced a majority that the galaxy or maybe the whole universe is what science fiction portrayed. Now we have actual discoveries of real planets, even probably earth-like planets around other stars. It is possible that there are "people" out there, or empty planets to colonize. "Life" at least is a near certainty among the stars, when a few decades ago it was a silly idea for the useless idiots of society.
But now along comes Stephen Hawking and declares we can never - ever - reach those planets because of the inherent nature of space-time.
So once again the majority view has become absolute and unassailable and unquestionable, as "majority" almost always is. There will be no interstellar civilization for us to join, or create. You can hardly sell an interstellar adventure these days. Even one without any non-human aliens like Joss Whedon's Firefly doesn't fly.
The torch of vital, creative imagination has passed to the realm of Fantasy, particularly Urban Fantasy which postulates MAGIC IS REAL. The interest in the Paranormal has surpassed the high water mark of the interest in interstellar civilizations.
Science declares absolutely, (and proves it convincingly) that magic is superstition and not real. Only stupid fools "believe in" Tarot, Astrology, Ceremonial Magic.
Science can explain every human experience as a bit of brain chemistry or brain-electronics, including out of body experiences and near-death experiences.
So creative writers take up the challenge.
What if Magic is not impossible? What if "reality" really is multi-layered, and magic and/or religion actually had it right and science has run up a blind alley?
What if we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater?
What if Ancient Wisdom actually was wise if not totally "right?"
So we have a plethora of Urban Fantasy novels portraying our everyday world as a thin film over a seething cauldron of (something -- Evil? Mystical Good? Armegeddon being fought or prevented?).
The Potterverse is probably the most widely known of these, with the magic users being schooled and interpenetrating our world with train station doorways in pillars.
We get through that door and into an otherwhere -- and find the same old/ same-old human stories of power use and abuse, of politics and skullduggery, of heroism and search for identity.
But you know what? If you look closely, you'll find Poetic Justice (and a good dollop of Love Conquers All) laced through the foundation of the Potterverse.
So how do we duplicate that popularity?
Nobody has ever found the magical combination for making a runaway best seller. For every success, there are several dozen contemporarily published novels or films that have the same elements, but don't capture the public eye.
Yet every really big, big success has these certain elements, including Poetic Justice.
Poetic Justice must be a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition, for popularity.
For famous films, study Saving Private Ryan and Elf. Both illustrate poetic justice in action.
I'm sure that if you hadn't studied this element before last week's post, you've looked for it now and can't find anything really popular that does not have this element.
If it's not Poetic Justice -- then it illustrates poetic injustice, which establishes the "reality" of the underlying concept of poetic justice. Even a story about poetic injustice illustrates the point.
Poetic Justice can be the source of the primary thematic statement for any work of fiction.
But how do you, as a writer, use Poetic Justice as a fictional element?
You need to settle on a working definition of Poetry and one of Justice. It doesn't have to be what you believe. It doesn't have to be what others believe, or part of any religion.
It just has to be a statement that your fictional characters illustrate graphically (i.e. in pictures, in actions, not in words).
It doesn't have to be unique, or new to your audience. Cliche actually works well when generating a theme from an axiom you're building into your world.
"What goes around, comes around."
"As you sow, so shall you reap."
"Hoist on his own petard."
"Gets his just deserts."
So let's hack out a working definition of poetry.
You know we're not talking about doggerel, or any cheap rhyming words that only work in one language.
We're talking about the abstract level of reality which is recognizable as things like "poetry in motion."
What exactly is that and where does it come from?
Poetry is like Soul, in that the whole world is made of it, so it's very hard to see that it's there.
In Judaism, the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, which are the story of the life of Moses, starts poetically.
In fact, the whole Torah is a poem -- it's a song that's sung, not read. That's right, it has a tune, and a rhythm, and all the words fit --- do you know how long it is? Check it out. That's epic.
Well, the story of this one man's life starts out, "In the beginning," and tells the story of God creating everything by simply saying words. And it ends with Moses' death. It doesn't end with entering the Land of Israel. Moses doesn't get to do that. He goes up on a mountain and dies in a place that is to remain unknown (so he won't be worshiped). He doesn't get to enter the Land of Israel, his life's work complete. But he gets to see it. It's not a tragedy - he gets to know how it all will come out and that his life's work will be complete, and why he can't be the leader into the Land of Israel. It's not a "Happily Ever After" because we know how it came out later. But it is poetry. It is poetic justice.
Isn't that cool? The whole of reality is described as a poem. We are the words that God is speaking (not spoke; is speaking) recreating this reality with the vibration of Voice every split-instant. We are a song.
If you take that view, and really think about last week's post where we explored how it is that we can be unaware that we have a Soul, just as maybe a fish is unaware of water, it's small wonder that the concept "poetry" is so difficult.
We are a song. How can we understand songs if that's what we are?
We are vibration. Science has dug down far enough to portray matter as vibrating particles. There is nothing but energy, vibrating energy -- it just seems solid.
So the music analogy, the music of the spheres, can give us a working tool for injecting our fiction with poetic justice.
Think of a musical chord. If you don't know, go look up how musical chords are formed. The individual tones relate to each other in a specific way (and yes, there are many 'scales' in different cultures; some seem like noise to the untrained ear.)
But the tones of a scale, and the chords made out of that scale, relate to each other in precise mathematically defined ways.
Here's a whole presentation on this subject:
http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/eecs20/week8/scale.html
When you put the tones of a chord together, they resonate to produce a unique sound, a recognizable sound.
Now, think of each tone in a scale as a personality trait. In Western music, we use octaves - 7 distinct tones.
Way back when, astrology only knew 7 "planets" -- Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. And that was enough to describe all the permutations and combinations of human personality, the ways we are the same and the ways we are different. (Today we have Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, too -- but they are regarded as "generational" -- so that everyone born in a given 20 year stretch mostly has these slow moving planets in similar enough places that the individuals of a generation move with commonality through life -- the Baby Boomer Generation is a real example.)
We are unique, each and every one of us, but we are all composed of combinations of the SAME 7 traits.
The combinations make us unique, not the ingredients.
There are 7 days in the week, and Kaballah identifies 7 levels to the Soul and 7 cardinal emotions to be mastered by the Soul in this life. You can go on and on identifying 7's - think Rainbow. The universe is made of groups of 7.
7 is a biggie, so the Western musical scale is a great analogy to use in worldbuilding.
Poetry and music are different level manifestations of the same thing. Poetry is not just the sounds of the words, but the abstract meanings. Concepts can be mapped onto this system of 7 or 7X7. One of those concepts is "Justice."
Poetry is not about rhyming, but it is about harmony.
Poetry is as much about the groups-of-7 as it is about the intervals between those 7 elements in a group.
Poetry is about how very distinctively different things interact with, blend with, meld with, unite with each other.
Poetry is about how two can become one.
Poetry is about the underlying unity of reality.
Poetry is about Love Conquers All.
Think about that, and next week we'll look at how to hack out a working definition of Justice.
Live Long and Prosper,
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Poison for breakfast?
The gentle bouncer guarding the Bat Mitzvah party favors was a giant. As I waited for my daughter, I reflected that I've never stood so close to a man over seven feet in height.
Paradoxically, on the drive home, my daughter informed me that the human race is getting smaller. My thoughts flew to attractive but diminutive male celebrities in the entertainment and motor racing circles, but of course, they could not possibly spread their DNA widely enough to affect statistics. Not on a global scale.
So, I posed the question to Google, "Are we getting shorter?"
Apparently, we are.
People have got shorter and our brains have shrunk - and scientists believe farming could be to blame.
Modern humans are about 10 percent smaller and shorter than our hunter-gatherer ancestors, scientists have found, and our brains have fallen in size by the same proportion.
The entire article is worth reading, especially the suggestion:
I've never understood why it is considered normal and healthy to eat processed, preserved cereals with other unnatural additives, cooked to make them crunchy, then served in milk to make them soggy. No doubt, if I serve an alien breakfast on Earth, he will muse along similar lines.
The other appalling thought is that the CEO of PepsiCo apparently is determined that everything we eat and drink will be a Pepsi product.
One might be pardoned for concluding that we Westerners drug and poison our children with opioids and dopamines for breakfast, then drug them with pharmaceuticals when they can't concentrate.
If the introduction of farming might have been one of man's greatest mistakes ever (as http://www.sott.net/articles/show/229880 suggests, perhaps the invention of television (or at least, the tolerance of commercial advertising on television) may be another great error of collective judgment.
What do you eat for breakfast?
Paradoxically, on the drive home, my daughter informed me that the human race is getting smaller. My thoughts flew to attractive but diminutive male celebrities in the entertainment and motor racing circles, but of course, they could not possibly spread their DNA widely enough to affect statistics. Not on a global scale.
So, I posed the question to Google, "Are we getting shorter?"
Apparently, we are.
The Devastating Effects of Agriculture: We're Getting Shorter NOT Taller and Our Brains are Shrinking, So is Farming to Blame?
Modern humans are about 10 percent smaller and shorter than our hunter-gatherer ancestors, scientists have found, and our brains have fallen in size by the same proportion.
The entire article is worth reading, especially the suggestion:
Comment: It is not puzzling so much as horrifying to realize that the introduction of agriculture led to a systematic degradation of the human race, with a shrinking of the brain being the unavoidable result. The consumption of poisonous grains actually carries much sinister ramifications than shrinking bodies and a gradually increasing rate of higher mortality.
Greg Wadley and Angus Martin, authors of Origins of Agriculture - Did Civilization Arise to Deliver a Fix? write the following: Recent discoveries of potentially psychoactive substances in certain agricultural products - cereals and milk - suggest an additional perspective on the adoption of agriculture and the behavioral changes ('civilisation') that followed it. In this paper we review the evidence for the drug-like properties of these foods, and then show how they can help to solve the biological puzzle just described...
Greg Wadley and Angus Martin, authors of Origins of Agriculture - Did Civilization Arise to Deliver a Fix? write the following: Recent discoveries of potentially psychoactive substances in certain agricultural products - cereals and milk - suggest an additional perspective on the adoption of agriculture and the behavioral changes ('civilisation') that followed it. In this paper we review the evidence for the drug-like properties of these foods, and then show how they can help to solve the biological puzzle just described...
I've never understood why it is considered normal and healthy to eat processed, preserved cereals with other unnatural additives, cooked to make them crunchy, then served in milk to make them soggy. No doubt, if I serve an alien breakfast on Earth, he will muse along similar lines.
The other appalling thought is that the CEO of PepsiCo apparently is determined that everything we eat and drink will be a Pepsi product.
One might be pardoned for concluding that we Westerners drug and poison our children with opioids and dopamines for breakfast, then drug them with pharmaceuticals when they can't concentrate.
If the introduction of farming might have been one of man's greatest mistakes ever (as http://www.sott.net/articles/show/229880 suggests, perhaps the invention of television (or at least, the tolerance of commercial advertising on television) may be another great error of collective judgment.
What do you eat for breakfast?
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Copyright Protection Online
Here's Cory Doctorow's latest essay on copyright and Internet regulation. Briefly, his major premise is that because the Internet has become so pervasive in daily life (and for many people is fast becoming necessary to routine activities such as communication and banking) "there is no Internet policy, only policy." As the online realm increasingly interpenetrates every area of our lives, attempts to regulate online copying and distribution may have the unintended effect of regulating all sorts of other things most of us don't want official interference with:
Talking About Copyright
As usual, I have reservations about some directions in which Doctorow’s argument develops. On the other hand, the idea of an entire household losing Internet access because one member has been accused (not necessarily convicted) of piracy strikes me as deeply scary. And not that farfetched—similar draconian measures have been imposed in cases where the accused are suspected of downloading child pornography, haven't they? I’m exasperated by some of the page’s commenters’ wrongheaded notions about electronic theft, but I’m also a fanatical advocate of privacy rights. It won’t be easy to map out the right places to draw the lines.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Talking About Copyright
As usual, I have reservations about some directions in which Doctorow’s argument develops. On the other hand, the idea of an entire household losing Internet access because one member has been accused (not necessarily convicted) of piracy strikes me as deeply scary. And not that farfetched—similar draconian measures have been imposed in cases where the accused are suspected of downloading child pornography, haven't they? I’m exasperated by some of the page’s commenters’ wrongheaded notions about electronic theft, but I’m also a fanatical advocate of privacy rights. It won’t be easy to map out the right places to draw the lines.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, November 08, 2011
Poetic Justice In Paranormal Romance Novels Part 1
We've been focusing on the plausibility (in real life) of the Happily Ever After ending, employing Astrology and every other philosophical tool we can find to explore how such a wish-fulfillment fantasy can actually be "real."
We added 2 posts on astrology just for writers, part 10 and part 11, to the collection in the last few months, finding ways a Paranormal Romance book can be constructed without ever mentioning astrology or Tarot.
I wrote:
The key the writer needs to grasp is how a character's free will choices combine with the prevailing influence in her life to produce events which, though decades apart in time and place, nevertheless are related poetically.
Two foundation concepts that make the Happily Ever After (HEA) ending plausible are Free Will and the Uniqueness of the Individual.
In the fishbowl analogy:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-11.html
we discussed how souls can meld while lives remain separate, though reflective and in harmony.
Now we need to consider how these 2 premises, Free Will and Uniqueness, apply specifically to the Paranormal Romance novel.
The most concrete manifestation I have yet found of how these two human properties combine to produce the Happily Ever After in real life is often called Poetic Justice.
Literature teachers sometimes demand that a "book review" written by students to prove they read the novel in question should point out how the ending demonstrates poetic justice. Old classic novels all had this element, though it's harder to find in recently published SF Fantasy or Romance.
If your education hasn't supplied that drill for finding the poetic justice in a novel, I suggest you adopt it as a regimen for a few years. It will give you a handle on the subconscious beliefs of the largest audiences.
Today's Paranormal Romance novels don't all demonstrate poetic justice.
The reason may be that the writers and editors aren't sensitive to it, or that they don't think the intended audience understands it, or wants it in life, or fantasizes about it, or yearns for it. Since finding Poetic Justice in fiction may not be taught in all High Schools as it once was, those writers and editors might be correct.
So the new writer's job becomes bigger and much harder. To break into the field of Paranormal Romance novel writing, you may need to explain what poetic justice is, where it comes from, how to recognize it in "real" life, and then blindside the reader with a revelation at the ending that will leave them gasping, in tears, or maybe even with a religious experience.
Yes, I said religious -- an encounter with God that brings the reality of the Eternal Soul out of Religion and into real life.
As I've said in this blog, one of the premises of Romance novels in general, but particularly the Paranormal Romance novel, is that the Soul is real.
The Soul may not be tangible, or even subject to definition in words, but it's real, just like gravity and Kepler's Equations are real.
Very often, an individual human's first awareness, first loss of virginity, is in the first blush of Love. The idea of Love At First Sight is based on that kind of touch to the Soul by another Soul.
Think about that. If nothing touches your Soul, you don't know your Soul is there, can't feel it as yourself, your Identity.
If your whole inner world is untouched by anything, anyone, outside you, you don't know you have an inner world at all.
Here's a theory of Soul. Souls are like candle flames. A family is a group of Souls that all have been ignited from one, ancestral, candle. Parents ignite your soul, you then ignite your children's souls. These are not the same flame. Each is individual, each dances in the breeze differently, each candle burns down at a different rate, slanting this way and that according to the substance of the candle and wick. But there is an underlying similarity, a commonality among Souls ignited by the same Flame.
The first Soul, Adam, was ignited by God's breath. We all have been ignited from Adam.
Think about the Soul conflagration that engulfs the whole Earth.
We are one flame, but each is a unique individual.
A child, among family, doesn't feel that "individual" until puberty when the be-all of existence is to separate from The Mother and become an independent individual.
When that sense of individuality is established, the first thing it does is reach out to TOUCH another Soul. Puppy love. Teen crushes.
When the reach is returned, the newly individualized Soul finally gets a sense of having a Soul by being touched by another Soul.
That's the first loss of virginity, something very special that never happens again in a lifetime -- until the actual Soul Mate touches and unites in that special way.
Finding a Soul Mate does not guarantee a Happily Ever After. But it awakens the yearning for it.
That's the yearning the Romance Novel can fulfill. By painting that vision vividly and with depth of detail, the Romance Novel writer can touch the reader's soul and open doors into possible futures. The inspiration can sustain a reader through the search for a real life Happily Ever After.
The Paranormal Romance novel can open bigger doors into a bigger world, just as the Science Fiction Romance Novel can ignite a curiosity about science and the role of science in Love.
The Science Fiction Romance novel deals with the adventures of a Soul in the single, shallow, layer of "reality" that science addresses.
For more on what part of reality science addresses, see my posts on Tarot. 20 posts on Tarot are listed in these posts, but we keep coming back to this subject as we do to astrology and religion.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_23.html
The Paranormal Romance Novel deals with the other dimensions of reality portrayed in my Tarot posts.
The Paranormal deals with that which is above, beyond or maybe beneath the "normal."
The assumption is that what we ordinarily see as "reality" is actually only a thin film, a crust, or a "user interface" like the "skin" you can "download" to decorate your Yahoo page.
As in the Potterverse, the "muggles" or normal people, just have no clue what's really out there.
In Horror genre, what's "out there" is truly ugly and a serious threat of which most people must be kept ignorant. There's no way to conquer it at all. The most you can do is closet it away for future generations to deal with (think enchanted chains on the Vampire's coffin, sealed with the Seal of Solomon and magical sigils of angels.)
In Paranormal Romance novels, what's "out there" is scary at first, but with the strength of Love, it can be conquered and perhaps even turned to Good.
Love Conquers All is an assumption of all Romance, but truly vital in the Paranormal Romance story.
So a Paranormal Romance worldbuilder must include at least some axioms about such topics as:
1) Free Will
2) The Reality of the Soul (otherwise no Soul Mates)
3) Uniqueness of the Individual
4) Love Conquers All
5) Happily Ever After is possible though not guaranteed
6) Poetic Justice is real
Different writers can use different axioms to cover these elements, but failing to cover these elements and make all the components of the worldbuilding behind the story conform to whatever axioms you use will cause readers to respond that the story is "contrived" or "unrealistic" or the villains are cardboard or the hero and heroine are idiots not worth reading about. Yeah, that's the level of worldbuilding in SF or Paranormal or Fantasy novels that causes willing suspension of disbelief.
The reader doesn't have to believe in God, or find God real in their own life. The reader just has to be able to relate to the position of the characters on these subjects -- without any single word ever making these philosophical abstractions explicit in the novel.
If you miss any one of those elements, the Happily Ever After ending will seem more implausible to more readers than you might guess.
So let's see if we can find a poetic justice definition that can work for authors of Paranormal Romance. It's one thing to unravel a Romance story to find the poetic justice inside, and quite a different thing to portray poetic justice in your romance story. The one process is not the opposite of the other.
Now think about this: God is a paranormal element.
I don't think religion is a paranormal element. Religion is a word we use to designate an organization, or a belief system, more than a law of the universe. Religion is what other people tell you about God. So religion is a different subject that belongs to anthropology and culture, two other aspects of worldbuilding.
Here we're looking for the universal, underlying, principles of reality that can make a Paranormal Romance world seem utterly real to the readers for whom The Paranormal is ridiculous in daily life. The point of the exercise is to find a way to present and explain Poetic Justice to readers, editors, and the general public that adds to their sense of how real a fictional universe is.
Science Fiction writers specialize in imagining a universe where what we absolutely know for a fact turns out to be not at all true. Happily Ever After is in that category for a lot of readers, the same category as intelligent life on other planets.
We have to show not tell that the Happily Ever After with a Soul Mate is actually Poetic Justice, even though Happily Ever After is a ridiculous premise in real life.
If you just slap Poetic Justice into your Paranormal world, it will be one more thing readers have to suspend disbelief about. If you grow your version of Poetic Justice from the core premise of your world, it becomes one of the elements that convince readers your world is real.
So we have to find out what justice is and what poetry is, and why people in all cultures the world over cherish these notions while they only yearn for a Soul Mate and Happily Ever After and call those silly wishfulfillment fantasy.
Do you need God in your worldbuilding as an axiom? A postulate? A premise? Do you need God as an element in your fiction in order to portray Justice in the world?
Does "Justice" come from outside or inside "reality?"
What exactly is justice and how do you tell if it has manifested (yet)?
If you know enough mythology, you have many gods to choose from, fickle ones, ones that come from dysfunctional families, benign ones, neutral ones, bribable ones. You also have a cast of thousands of demons, elves, pixies, trolls, and a plethora of supernatural creatures to include or exclude from your world.
You can use (though you might not be able to sell it right now) Islam and the Prophet, or any Islamic concept of Justice and how it can be arrived at. All of those beliefs belong to the paranormal, and can be inventoried in a Paranormal Romance novel's worldbuilding.
You can study the era of the Prophets in Judaism -- theory is that at one time, during the days of the Temple, nearly everyone received Prophecy from God, but only a few got prophetic visions that pertained to the future history of Judaism, visions that were worth preserving. Most people got information about ordinary things or matters of personal concern. As far as I know, no Paranormal Romances have been set in that time and place -- could blow the whole Paranormal Romance publishing industry to the top of the charts.
Theory in Judaism, particularly Kabbalah, is that today people get real "prophetic" visions in dreams -- personally applicable information, on a routine basis. "Prophetic" doesn't necessarily mean "about the future" -- but it can mean just deep insight into the true meaning, the Paranormal meaning, of what's happening on the surface of events today.
So Prophecy is a Paranormal element that can be used in Romance worldbuilding, and has been. Many stories begin with a dream of the One who will be the Soul Mate.
Fantasy Romance is routinely lumped in under Paranormal Romance. But most people associate the word Fantasy with "impossible" or "unreal" -- or even consider it unhealthy to dwell on, mentally or emotionally.
That's why "wish fulfillment fantasy" is a pejorative.
Paranormal, however, is often associated with "crazy."
Which brings us to the question: Is Justice a figment of the imagination? Or is it a property of Reality?
Is Justice real? Does it exist? Or is it imaginary?
Then there's the problem of what exactly is poetry? Does it mean rhyme?
Maybe the term "poetic justice" is an oxymoron?
We'll explore this a little more next week in Part 2 of Poetic Justice in Paranormal Romance novels.
Live Long and Prosper,
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
We added 2 posts on astrology just for writers, part 10 and part 11, to the collection in the last few months, finding ways a Paranormal Romance book can be constructed without ever mentioning astrology or Tarot.
I wrote:
The key the writer needs to grasp is how a character's free will choices combine with the prevailing influence in her life to produce events which, though decades apart in time and place, nevertheless are related poetically.
Two foundation concepts that make the Happily Ever After (HEA) ending plausible are Free Will and the Uniqueness of the Individual.
In the fishbowl analogy:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-11.html
we discussed how souls can meld while lives remain separate, though reflective and in harmony.
Now we need to consider how these 2 premises, Free Will and Uniqueness, apply specifically to the Paranormal Romance novel.
The most concrete manifestation I have yet found of how these two human properties combine to produce the Happily Ever After in real life is often called Poetic Justice.
Literature teachers sometimes demand that a "book review" written by students to prove they read the novel in question should point out how the ending demonstrates poetic justice. Old classic novels all had this element, though it's harder to find in recently published SF Fantasy or Romance.
If your education hasn't supplied that drill for finding the poetic justice in a novel, I suggest you adopt it as a regimen for a few years. It will give you a handle on the subconscious beliefs of the largest audiences.
Today's Paranormal Romance novels don't all demonstrate poetic justice.
The reason may be that the writers and editors aren't sensitive to it, or that they don't think the intended audience understands it, or wants it in life, or fantasizes about it, or yearns for it. Since finding Poetic Justice in fiction may not be taught in all High Schools as it once was, those writers and editors might be correct.
So the new writer's job becomes bigger and much harder. To break into the field of Paranormal Romance novel writing, you may need to explain what poetic justice is, where it comes from, how to recognize it in "real" life, and then blindside the reader with a revelation at the ending that will leave them gasping, in tears, or maybe even with a religious experience.
Yes, I said religious -- an encounter with God that brings the reality of the Eternal Soul out of Religion and into real life.
As I've said in this blog, one of the premises of Romance novels in general, but particularly the Paranormal Romance novel, is that the Soul is real.
The Soul may not be tangible, or even subject to definition in words, but it's real, just like gravity and Kepler's Equations are real.
Very often, an individual human's first awareness, first loss of virginity, is in the first blush of Love. The idea of Love At First Sight is based on that kind of touch to the Soul by another Soul.
Think about that. If nothing touches your Soul, you don't know your Soul is there, can't feel it as yourself, your Identity.
If your whole inner world is untouched by anything, anyone, outside you, you don't know you have an inner world at all.
Here's a theory of Soul. Souls are like candle flames. A family is a group of Souls that all have been ignited from one, ancestral, candle. Parents ignite your soul, you then ignite your children's souls. These are not the same flame. Each is individual, each dances in the breeze differently, each candle burns down at a different rate, slanting this way and that according to the substance of the candle and wick. But there is an underlying similarity, a commonality among Souls ignited by the same Flame.
The first Soul, Adam, was ignited by God's breath. We all have been ignited from Adam.
Think about the Soul conflagration that engulfs the whole Earth.
We are one flame, but each is a unique individual.
A child, among family, doesn't feel that "individual" until puberty when the be-all of existence is to separate from The Mother and become an independent individual.
When that sense of individuality is established, the first thing it does is reach out to TOUCH another Soul. Puppy love. Teen crushes.
When the reach is returned, the newly individualized Soul finally gets a sense of having a Soul by being touched by another Soul.
That's the first loss of virginity, something very special that never happens again in a lifetime -- until the actual Soul Mate touches and unites in that special way.
Finding a Soul Mate does not guarantee a Happily Ever After. But it awakens the yearning for it.
That's the yearning the Romance Novel can fulfill. By painting that vision vividly and with depth of detail, the Romance Novel writer can touch the reader's soul and open doors into possible futures. The inspiration can sustain a reader through the search for a real life Happily Ever After.
The Paranormal Romance novel can open bigger doors into a bigger world, just as the Science Fiction Romance Novel can ignite a curiosity about science and the role of science in Love.
The Science Fiction Romance novel deals with the adventures of a Soul in the single, shallow, layer of "reality" that science addresses.
For more on what part of reality science addresses, see my posts on Tarot. 20 posts on Tarot are listed in these posts, but we keep coming back to this subject as we do to astrology and religion.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_23.html
The Paranormal Romance Novel deals with the other dimensions of reality portrayed in my Tarot posts.
The Paranormal deals with that which is above, beyond or maybe beneath the "normal."
The assumption is that what we ordinarily see as "reality" is actually only a thin film, a crust, or a "user interface" like the "skin" you can "download" to decorate your Yahoo page.
As in the Potterverse, the "muggles" or normal people, just have no clue what's really out there.
In Horror genre, what's "out there" is truly ugly and a serious threat of which most people must be kept ignorant. There's no way to conquer it at all. The most you can do is closet it away for future generations to deal with (think enchanted chains on the Vampire's coffin, sealed with the Seal of Solomon and magical sigils of angels.)
In Paranormal Romance novels, what's "out there" is scary at first, but with the strength of Love, it can be conquered and perhaps even turned to Good.
Love Conquers All is an assumption of all Romance, but truly vital in the Paranormal Romance story.
So a Paranormal Romance worldbuilder must include at least some axioms about such topics as:
1) Free Will
2) The Reality of the Soul (otherwise no Soul Mates)
3) Uniqueness of the Individual
4) Love Conquers All
5) Happily Ever After is possible though not guaranteed
6) Poetic Justice is real
Different writers can use different axioms to cover these elements, but failing to cover these elements and make all the components of the worldbuilding behind the story conform to whatever axioms you use will cause readers to respond that the story is "contrived" or "unrealistic" or the villains are cardboard or the hero and heroine are idiots not worth reading about. Yeah, that's the level of worldbuilding in SF or Paranormal or Fantasy novels that causes willing suspension of disbelief.
The reader doesn't have to believe in God, or find God real in their own life. The reader just has to be able to relate to the position of the characters on these subjects -- without any single word ever making these philosophical abstractions explicit in the novel.
If you miss any one of those elements, the Happily Ever After ending will seem more implausible to more readers than you might guess.
So let's see if we can find a poetic justice definition that can work for authors of Paranormal Romance. It's one thing to unravel a Romance story to find the poetic justice inside, and quite a different thing to portray poetic justice in your romance story. The one process is not the opposite of the other.
Now think about this: God is a paranormal element.
I don't think religion is a paranormal element. Religion is a word we use to designate an organization, or a belief system, more than a law of the universe. Religion is what other people tell you about God. So religion is a different subject that belongs to anthropology and culture, two other aspects of worldbuilding.
Here we're looking for the universal, underlying, principles of reality that can make a Paranormal Romance world seem utterly real to the readers for whom The Paranormal is ridiculous in daily life. The point of the exercise is to find a way to present and explain Poetic Justice to readers, editors, and the general public that adds to their sense of how real a fictional universe is.
Science Fiction writers specialize in imagining a universe where what we absolutely know for a fact turns out to be not at all true. Happily Ever After is in that category for a lot of readers, the same category as intelligent life on other planets.
We have to show not tell that the Happily Ever After with a Soul Mate is actually Poetic Justice, even though Happily Ever After is a ridiculous premise in real life.
If you just slap Poetic Justice into your Paranormal world, it will be one more thing readers have to suspend disbelief about. If you grow your version of Poetic Justice from the core premise of your world, it becomes one of the elements that convince readers your world is real.
So we have to find out what justice is and what poetry is, and why people in all cultures the world over cherish these notions while they only yearn for a Soul Mate and Happily Ever After and call those silly wishfulfillment fantasy.
Do you need God in your worldbuilding as an axiom? A postulate? A premise? Do you need God as an element in your fiction in order to portray Justice in the world?
Does "Justice" come from outside or inside "reality?"
What exactly is justice and how do you tell if it has manifested (yet)?
If you know enough mythology, you have many gods to choose from, fickle ones, ones that come from dysfunctional families, benign ones, neutral ones, bribable ones. You also have a cast of thousands of demons, elves, pixies, trolls, and a plethora of supernatural creatures to include or exclude from your world.
You can use (though you might not be able to sell it right now) Islam and the Prophet, or any Islamic concept of Justice and how it can be arrived at. All of those beliefs belong to the paranormal, and can be inventoried in a Paranormal Romance novel's worldbuilding.
You can study the era of the Prophets in Judaism -- theory is that at one time, during the days of the Temple, nearly everyone received Prophecy from God, but only a few got prophetic visions that pertained to the future history of Judaism, visions that were worth preserving. Most people got information about ordinary things or matters of personal concern. As far as I know, no Paranormal Romances have been set in that time and place -- could blow the whole Paranormal Romance publishing industry to the top of the charts.
Theory in Judaism, particularly Kabbalah, is that today people get real "prophetic" visions in dreams -- personally applicable information, on a routine basis. "Prophetic" doesn't necessarily mean "about the future" -- but it can mean just deep insight into the true meaning, the Paranormal meaning, of what's happening on the surface of events today.
So Prophecy is a Paranormal element that can be used in Romance worldbuilding, and has been. Many stories begin with a dream of the One who will be the Soul Mate.
Fantasy Romance is routinely lumped in under Paranormal Romance. But most people associate the word Fantasy with "impossible" or "unreal" -- or even consider it unhealthy to dwell on, mentally or emotionally.
That's why "wish fulfillment fantasy" is a pejorative.
Paranormal, however, is often associated with "crazy."
Which brings us to the question: Is Justice a figment of the imagination? Or is it a property of Reality?
Is Justice real? Does it exist? Or is it imaginary?
Then there's the problem of what exactly is poetry? Does it mean rhyme?
Maybe the term "poetic justice" is an oxymoron?
We'll explore this a little more next week in Part 2 of Poetic Justice in Paranormal Romance novels.
Live Long and Prosper,
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Sunday, November 06, 2011
About Asteroids
In my opinion, the most interesting comment about Asteroid YU 55 passing within approximately 202,000 miles of Earth is not that
"...(it)... will be visible from the planet's northern hemisphere," or that, "The best time to observe it would be in the early evening on November 8 from the East Coast of the United States," but that, "It will be too dim to be seen with the naked eye, however, and it will be moving too fast for viewing by the Hubble Space Telescope."
Senior research scientist Don Yeomans, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California told the Reuters news agency, "It is going to be very faint, even at its closest approach. You will need a decent-sized telescope to be able to actually see the object as it flies by."
That interests me (as an author of alien romances) because it means I can plausibly go on using spaceships disguised as asteroids and comets. (And for the grammatical purists, I deliberately echoed a "boldly go" phrase.)
Of course, my own alien spacecraft are larger that this large asteroid. YU 55 is described as the size of a battleship, and is estimated at a quarter-mile wide. Mine, influenced by a variety of How To manuals was concealed under a mile of water ice. (The "water" part of "water ice" was considered important at the time, because one can have ice that is not water-based.) That would make a battleship sized alien space craft at least two-and-a-quarter miles wide.
Which might be visible to the naked human eye. However, my original spacecraft, which I drafted in 1994 about the time that Steven Spielberg was polishing his game Dig (involving humans landing on what they think is an asteroid, and discovering that it is a spaceship), is set -- as it were -- in ice. I cannot suddenly turn it into something cooler, like YU 55, which is blacker than charcoal,and is thought to be made of carbon-based materials and some silicate rock.
It's a C-type. Sounds rather Mercedes, doesn't it? And it gets better. There is an S-type!
The best resource I've seen on Asteroids is http://nineplanets.org/asteroids.html
It will tell you the size of the largest known asteroid ( 1 Ceres. 974 km in diameter.) And explain the classifications of asteroids into types according to their spectra (and hence their chemical composition) and albedo (to do with reflection of starlight/sunlight).
C-type, includes more than 75% of known asteroids: extremely dark (albedo 0.03); similar to carbonaceous chondrite meteorites; approximately the same chemical composition as the Sun minus hydrogen, helium and other volatiles;
S-type, 17%: relatively bright (albedo .10-.22); metallic nickel-iron mixed with iron- and magnesium-silicates;
M-type, most of the rest: bright (albedo .10-.18); pure nickel-iron.
Nine Planets also talks about classification of asteroids according to their location in the solar system, which gives us designations such as Trojans, Centaurs, Amors.... and more.
Another fact that I really appreciated was that some asteroids are not solid at all, but may resemble compacted space rubble.
Another site I like is Universe Today, for instance to keep me straight about the differences between an asteroid and a comet.
For example "The main difference between an asteroid and a comet is what they are made of. Asteroids are made up of metals and rocky material, while comets are made up of ice, dust and rocky material. Both of these space objects were formed during the earliest times of the solar system, around 4.5 billion years ago. Asteroids formed much closer to the Sun, where it was too warm for ices to remain solid..."
There's a lot more fantastic information, and links, so if interested, do visit http://www.universetoday.com/33006/what-is-the-difference-between-asteroids-and-comets/
Thursday, November 03, 2011
The Decline of Violence?
I recently read a book by Steven Pinker on why violence has declined, both worldwide and in Western culture, over the millennia and even within the past century. Here’s a part of my review of this book in my November newsletter:
“THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: WHY VIOLENCE HAS DECLINED, by Steven Pinker. Pinker is one of my favorite nonfiction authors, a psychologist, author of THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT, HOW THE MIND WORKS, and THE BLANK SLATE. As the author acknowledges, the first reaction of many readers may be disbelief in this book’s major premise, that violence HAS declined. He lays out in great detail examples throughout history, backed up by exhaustive statistics, to demonstrate that the contemporary world does in fact suffer from much less personal, official (such as harsh legal punishments and torture by governments), and international violence than any prior era. As a percentage of the world’s population, death tolls from these causes have steeply decreased. I was mildly dubious about war, but he does have the statistics to support his position, and one can’t argue when he points out that we haven’t had a war between major powers in over sixty years. Conflicts between smaller nations (as opposed to civil wars) have also become less frequent. Concerning terrorism, a high-profile phenomenon whose actual death toll is negligible compared to all other forms of carnage, it, too, has been around for millennia but has declined from its historical peak. As for the reduction of other kinds of violence, Pinker is clearly right, and, equally significant if not more, our toleration of it in North America and western Europe has conspicuously decreased, not only from preindustrial centuries but even from the mid-twentieth century. He attributes this trend to several factors but most prominently to the rise of centralized governments that suppress violence within their borders through their official monopoly on the use of force. He also discusses at length the “humanitarian revolution” that began with the Enlightenment. Two chapters, “Inner Demons” and “Better Angels,” explore in depth the psychological, social, and cultural factors that influence our behavior toward violent or peaceful expression. Particularly interesting to me was the section on the biology and psychology of self-control.”
Although this book comprises almost 700 pages not counting bibliography and index, it held my attention throughout (except that I confess I didn’t study the graphs and charts). Pinker is a lucid, lively writer with a gift for making technical topics understandable to the general reader. He convinced me that our perception of the twentieth century as the most violent in history is mostly an illusion of perspective (it looks that way because we’re so close to it), and in fact things have actually gotten better. He assesses the devastation of war in proportional terms rather than only in terms of absolute numbers and points out that, contrary to popular belief, traditional hunter-gatherer societies didn’t live in Edenic peace. The percentage of the total population who died as a result of raids and battles far exceeds the comparable statistics (as a percentage of population) in modern warfare. As for violence on a more personal level, there’s no contest. Up through the early modern period, criminals could be condemned to death for petty offenses, torture was an accepted judicial procedure, and slavery was universally legal. Today the first doesn’t happen in “civilized” nations, and the last two are illegal worldwide (when they do happen, they’re condemned by public opinion). Even within the lifetime of some of us here, domestic abuse and rape have been treated as fit subjects for humor. Now their victims’ demand for justice is taken seriously. As Pinker mentions, in some areas the pendulum has swung so far that “political correctness” has grown to ludicrous heights, but regarding it as a sign of our culture’s attempt to treat people fairly, consider the alternatives. I don’t buy every one of Pinker’s assertions, and I think his section on the ancient world is a bit weak (conflating myth, legend, and fiction with real-world violence), but I definitely recommend this book.
If you’re as taken aback as I initially was by the premise that our world is becoming steadily less violent, you’d probably find THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE as intriguing as I did.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
“THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: WHY VIOLENCE HAS DECLINED, by Steven Pinker. Pinker is one of my favorite nonfiction authors, a psychologist, author of THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT, HOW THE MIND WORKS, and THE BLANK SLATE. As the author acknowledges, the first reaction of many readers may be disbelief in this book’s major premise, that violence HAS declined. He lays out in great detail examples throughout history, backed up by exhaustive statistics, to demonstrate that the contemporary world does in fact suffer from much less personal, official (such as harsh legal punishments and torture by governments), and international violence than any prior era. As a percentage of the world’s population, death tolls from these causes have steeply decreased. I was mildly dubious about war, but he does have the statistics to support his position, and one can’t argue when he points out that we haven’t had a war between major powers in over sixty years. Conflicts between smaller nations (as opposed to civil wars) have also become less frequent. Concerning terrorism, a high-profile phenomenon whose actual death toll is negligible compared to all other forms of carnage, it, too, has been around for millennia but has declined from its historical peak. As for the reduction of other kinds of violence, Pinker is clearly right, and, equally significant if not more, our toleration of it in North America and western Europe has conspicuously decreased, not only from preindustrial centuries but even from the mid-twentieth century. He attributes this trend to several factors but most prominently to the rise of centralized governments that suppress violence within their borders through their official monopoly on the use of force. He also discusses at length the “humanitarian revolution” that began with the Enlightenment. Two chapters, “Inner Demons” and “Better Angels,” explore in depth the psychological, social, and cultural factors that influence our behavior toward violent or peaceful expression. Particularly interesting to me was the section on the biology and psychology of self-control.”
Although this book comprises almost 700 pages not counting bibliography and index, it held my attention throughout (except that I confess I didn’t study the graphs and charts). Pinker is a lucid, lively writer with a gift for making technical topics understandable to the general reader. He convinced me that our perception of the twentieth century as the most violent in history is mostly an illusion of perspective (it looks that way because we’re so close to it), and in fact things have actually gotten better. He assesses the devastation of war in proportional terms rather than only in terms of absolute numbers and points out that, contrary to popular belief, traditional hunter-gatherer societies didn’t live in Edenic peace. The percentage of the total population who died as a result of raids and battles far exceeds the comparable statistics (as a percentage of population) in modern warfare. As for violence on a more personal level, there’s no contest. Up through the early modern period, criminals could be condemned to death for petty offenses, torture was an accepted judicial procedure, and slavery was universally legal. Today the first doesn’t happen in “civilized” nations, and the last two are illegal worldwide (when they do happen, they’re condemned by public opinion). Even within the lifetime of some of us here, domestic abuse and rape have been treated as fit subjects for humor. Now their victims’ demand for justice is taken seriously. As Pinker mentions, in some areas the pendulum has swung so far that “political correctness” has grown to ludicrous heights, but regarding it as a sign of our culture’s attempt to treat people fairly, consider the alternatives. I don’t buy every one of Pinker’s assertions, and I think his section on the ancient world is a bit weak (conflating myth, legend, and fiction with real-world violence), but I definitely recommend this book.
If you’re as taken aback as I initially was by the premise that our world is becoming steadily less violent, you’d probably find THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE as intriguing as I did.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, November 01, 2011
Astrology Just For Writers Part 11-The Fishtank Model of Romance
Most writers and readers don't want to know anything about Astrology, and that's fine. There are plenty of other systems for parsing the patterns of human life.
A writer only needs one such system, but having several can give a writer the flexibility to work with vastly different audiences. Adding Astrology to your toolbox can position you to take advantage of unexpected opportunities with unruffled aplomb.
But you don't need to become an astrologer, or even to "learn" astrology or do it. You only need to learn to think like an astrologer, and to understand what lives look like from the point of view of someone well versed in this craft.
Here are the previous posts in this Astrology Just For Writers series that help you get the perspective we'll discuss next.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html lists posts on Astrology
And here are additional ones:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/01/astrology-just-for-writers-part-9-high.html
Part 10 was on August 30, 2010.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/astrology-just-for-writers-part-10.html
And this is Part Eleven. The intention is to collect this series into an e-book and make it available for download on simegen.com.
The 20 posts on the Tarot Swords and Pentacles that I've done here will likewise be published along with the discussions in volumes on Wands and Cups, plus a volume on how and why to study Tarot, and when and how to shun it.
Here are two posts indexing the 20 Tarot posts available.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_23.html
When using Tarot to structure a novel, never mention cards, suits, mysticism, foretelling the future, etc. Keep your use of these tools "off the nose" and be able to say, "It just came to me."
To achieve that unruffled aplomb, that level of "Cool," in the face of the opportunity of a lifetime, the one thing a writer needs to learn about using Astrology in their writing is, just as with Tarot, never mention the name "Astrology" or "Natal Chart" -- or any of the planets or stars that Astrology tracks. Never mention "influenced by" or "under a transit." Not even "Horoscope!"
Mentioning the source is what Hollywood screenwriters call being "on the nose" -- or in the parlance of the narrative text writer, "telling" rather than "showing."
I've seen this "on the nose" error in text a lot lately, even from seasoned professional best sellers. That happens because the editors don't catch it and send it back for rewrite. Editors need to know this stuff just as writers do.
Lazy writers, or any writer just in a hurry or being lazy, tend to try to disguise expository lumps as dialogue or description. When that is done, the dialogue or description comes out "on the nose."
Here are some of my entries about Expository Lumps:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/06/crumbling-business-model-of-writers.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-much-is-too-much-world-buliding.html
And there's another on August 23rd, 2011
Also see my series on Editing. Here's the final installment, and it has a list of the previous parts at the top.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vii-how-do.html
A master craftsman writer portrays the life (and arc) of a character in a way that is familiar to the readers -- they know real people who've lived through that pattern (or died in it). But you must not tell the reader how you found out about that pattern. It just came to you.
There is a popular commercial running in 2011 for Progressive Insurance in which the iconic saleswoman shows a prospective buyer the "Bundling" machine. You put your information in once, and get out two products in a box.
The buyer turns to her marveling and asks, "How did you think of that?"
She answers, "Oh, it just came to us." Then looks over at a centaur shopping the shelves of bundles.
That line, "Oh, it just came to us." is supposed to be a tickler, funny, amusing, memorable to the viewers.
What most viewers don't know is that it is the stock answer to that question in Hollywood.
It's so routine, and so stock, and so necessary when a producer or director asks a writer "How did you think of that?" that the "never let them see you sweat" rule kicks in automatically, and the only answer is a nonchalant shrug with, "Oh, it just came to me." Saying essentially you have a genius that the nuts-n-bolts people who make your story real for viewers just don't have. You are indispensable to the process, but not overly impressed with yourself. It was an accident you thought of this ingenious solution.
This is so absolutely ingrained in the Hollywood culture that Blake Snyder ( http://blakesnyder.com ) of the Save The Cat! books insists this is the only way a writer can respond to that question. He teaches writing, and goes out of his way to make this point. There's skill, craft, and lots of sweat behind these ingenious solutions to production problems, but you as a seller of your skills must never let them see you sweat.
And that's true of the relationship between you and your reader as well.
You must never let the reader know how you know -- know what process you used to create the magic they adore.
It won't be magic if you do.
Think of a painter facing a well prepared blank canvass. Most often, after settling on the subject, the painter reaches for charcoal not pigment, and maybe a ruler, and draws in a whole lot of very faint lines later to be erased. Those lines set up the composition, the perspective, the point of view from which the subject's inner nature will be revealed. The painter deliberately plans how the viewer's eye will sweep across the images, and what they will notice first, what next, and what will be in focus and remembered.
Yes, it's all very deliberate skill in painting. It's learned early and practiced like a musician practices scales until the painter can have an image "just come to him" and boom, it's on the canvass and you never know what happened even if you were watching. The Master Craftsman usually isn't conscious of "what happened" either -- he really lives the "it just came to me" moment without asking himself how that happened.
Teachers on the other hand have to unravel that "just came to me" moment and convey the individual skills to the craftsman one at a time, in boring repetitive drills.
That's what we're doing here in this blog for writers who want to figure out how better writers achieve those marvelous effects.
Today's craft point is a look at Astrology from the writer's point of view.
So let's look at the two lead characters in a Romance. Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series of books on screenwriting, says all Romances belong to his "genre" called Buddy Love. I recommend you read those books.
Blake Snyder On Amazon
Also, because of the encroachment of graphic novels, film, webisodes, games, and other visual media on storytelling, today's text-narrative writers must incorporate the pacing and visual emphasis that fiction consumers have become accustomed to.
So I recommend getting Snyder's screenwriting SOFTWARE that goes with the books, and using that to lay out the structure of your novel. I am particularly involved with that software right now because I'm a beta tester on version 3.0 and I really love the improvements.
You can find it at blakesnyder.com or Amazon. The software is also called SAVE THE CAT! You can also find it on professional screenwriting software sites like Final Draft. It's integrated with Final Draft 8
So now you're looking at a blank canvass to create your characters, their arcs, and the story they must live through.
You've nailed the transit influences affecting them. Since this is a Romance, of course Neptune is hard at their respective sensitive spots. But other influences can fly through that long-arc Neptune transit as well.
So you need a mental model too understand what these two people are and why they act and react as they do.
And that model has to be comprehensible to your readers especially because you're not going to explain it "on the nose."
Without learning astrology, what can you visualize that will tell you what is happening to this couple, this pair of Soul Mates, falling in love?
Visualize it like this, and see if this works for you.
A Soul incarnates at a particular moment. Astrology captures the moment of birth in a flash-photo still shot called the Natal Chart.
That chart delineates the positions of the planets of the solar system, and the Sun and Moon, at the time of birth. It further captures the two lines delineating the path to the horizon east and west, plus the point directly overhead at Noon - the highest point the Sun reaches on that day at that longitude and latitude. The opposite point is directly under foot, opposite the Sun's peak of arc, midnight. That line is called the MC, and defines the 10th House and the 4th House, the mystical purpose for taking this life vs. the foundation of the Home under the person's metaphorical feet.
The Ascendant defines the view of "reality" the person has from inside his life, and what others see when they look at him. Opposite the Ascendant is the 7th House cusp, which delineates partnerships, significant others, spouses, and the public (when you figure what all those things have to do with each other, how they're all absolutely identical, you'll have an understanding you can use to write fiction.)
Different astrological systems of mathematics assign different ways to calculate the positions of the other 8 "House cusps" -- I favor Placidus, Tropical, and it works well enough for my purposes (creating characters).
This up/down, horizon to horizon framework delineates the support structure of this character's life. When you put the planets, Moon and Sun, into the framework positioned relative to the birthplace on Earth at that moment the baby draws first breath, you then have a giant clock with at least 10 "hands" moving at different paces. You can get fancy, and delineate 20 hands to the clock. But a writer doesn't need that.
You don't need to understand how those clock hands move as much as you need to understand that they're there, they're set with precision, there's no escaping, and everyone alive is utterly familiar with their permutations and combinations in dynamic effects.
That "setup" of life at birth is the part of astrology that lets you make your characters "the same" as Hollywood always wants, and as Manhattan publishers need and will buy.
When something has become popular (like Harry Potter) the purveyors of fiction strive to duplicate exactly what it was that sold so well.. And that's why they always want "the same but different."
Writers, however, have read a lot of books, and usually want to put their work forward as "different" and not at all the same. "Different" feels like the essence of art, the essence of your soul. (because it is)
You can do "different" and get small readerships. Or you can add in "the same" dimension and strike for larger readerships. It's a choice. Create a pen name for each career path.
But first see my entries on PEN NAMES.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/should-you-make-up-pen-name-part-ii.html
The Blake Snyder Save the Cat! books and software show you how to do "the same" without infringing on your personal "different" and thus unleash your full potential as a commercial writer.
Now visualize this giant clock everyone is born inside. Each of us live inside a clock set to a different time zone, a unique (or nearly unique -- even twins are born at different times) time zone.
This clock forms the framework of your life, the outside of your life, not the inside.
Think of this framework as the walls of a fishtank.
Fishtanks come in a lot of shapes and sizes, but they have transparency in common. At least one wall is transparent (think of the giant aquarium at a zoo). Most fishtanks are transparent on at least 3 sides.
The tank you live in, your natal chart, defines the size and shape of your life just like the walls of a fish tank.
You can think of it as walling you away from what's out there. Or you can think of it as containing a benign environment uniquely suited just to you, thus protecting others from your environment. This should be familiar to SF readers of space adventures with intelligent aquatic creatures. Metaphor? Maybe.
Unlike most fish, you can see OUT, hazily. With distortion. You can see the reflective walls of other people's tanks, and sometimes glimpse through those walls into the life of another.
In this (admittedly limited and distorted) analogy, your Soul is the fish.
Unlike fish, you can create, shape, decorate, personalize and customize your tank. You create your inner environment.
What your Soul is capable of creating, how nicely you can arrange things, what you can "do with the place" is limited by your talent, determination, and other resources your soul brings into this life.
You live your life within your natal chart, within your clock, by the choices your Soul makes, and the resources and wisdom it has brought with it, and what it learns from this life.
The "clock" does not say "You will meet a tall, dark, non-human, stranger and fall in unrequited love."
The clock does not say a tall dark stranger will come into your life.
The clock says it's time to meet strangers, go find one.
Whether there's a stranger there or not, and how you respond to that particular individual stranger, is a matter of the Soul, not the clock.
It's not that there's no such thing as "destiny" -- it's that "destiny" is far more complex than the Ancient Greeks ever knew.
"Destiny" is crafted from the material at hand (via the clock, the shape of the fishtank, the limits of imagination in fixing up the place inside the tank), by freewill choices, but not just your own. Everyone has free will and makes choices which you respond to. And others respond to your choices. You interact (i.e. fall in Love) with others who likewise live in fishtanks of their own, tanks you can sometimes almost see into, but never enter.
In my universe paradigm, there's a third force acting to shape and reshape "destiny" for each of us and all of us collectively - God. But the fishtank analogy holds whether there's a third outside force or not.
So here your character is inside her fishtank, and is moving stuff around trying to make the place (her life) comfortable. (i.e. has landed a plum of a job promotion, and really sees the big bucks coming soon)
And she decides out of pride of place to clean her tank walls nice and clear and transparent so she can see and understand the world (i.e. takes a course and learns something, or proves something).
She wants love, so she makes herself more visible, her real self, or what she wants to believe is her real self.
And what happens when she cleans her tank wall is that she SEES another tank out there because it's time to meet strangers, and she can now see through her own reflection to something that is not herself.
She sees another tank wall, and reflective though it is, it seems to curve around the edges of her tank very neatly, and with the angle just so, she can SEE the Soul swimming around inside his life. Or she thinks she does. Part of the image is a reflection of herself, but having cleaned her tank walls, she is seeing something that is not herself. Thrill of a lifetime.
Wow. He's gorgeous. Just look at those sweeping, draping fins!
The two souls can get close, nudge their tanks right up to touching, so it seems the walls have merged into one wall, and they can create new life together. But neither can leap over into the other's tank and swim there.
The analogy kind of breaks down because Soul Mates who marry do actually merge into one. Those two tanks bond and stick together.
But the insides are always separate, even when most of the reflection effect at the tank surfaces is eliminated by bonding the two tank walls together.
Lives are SEPARATE -- Souls merge.
We each live in our fishtanks, isolated and alone. But we can share a Soul, mate with a Soul.
Think of this analogy. The two tanks come together, the walls fuse so they can almost just about see into each others' tanks (there's always reflection -- what we see when we look at others is a reflection of our inner Self). So they move into such harmony that they each redecorate their tanks to match, so you can't tell it's two rooms.
Maybe she quits her job, and he quits his (ok, today it's more likely they'll get laid off), and they start a business together -- a shop, a newspaper, a blog-for-money operation, e-Bay sales, whatever. They change their lives to harmonize.
That's what "Happily Ever After" -- the HEA ending -- actually looks like.
We talked about the Happily Ever After concept in a 4 part series the Tuesdays in October 2011 titled Believing In Happily Ever After.
Using the fishtank analogy of lives that are set up at Birth, and Souls trapped inside those lives at least for this incarnation, you can see immediately why people today just don't credit the Happily Ever After goal as realistic.
You can never really get inside another person's life. You can't let them inside yours.
You can't even see inside other people clearly, which leads to misunderstandings.
Consider a good marriage where, after some time, one partner wanders off to live mostly in the far end of his tank, becoming mostly invisible from the mated tank. Left alone, she ends up living at the far end of her tank, where there's a view into someone else's tank.
No matter how close some part of your life is to another's, or how visible, there's a part of your life they can't see or share.
That's what it means to be an individual, a unique person, a sovereign person.
Since everyone has that experience, it's easy to see why most people don't believe another person would deliberately live their life only in the corner of their tank that touches the other tank.
Until you mix in the Soul Mate dimension, that delineates the unique pleasure of being near another, willingly sharing a life (redecorating) for the sheer pleasure of the meaningfulness you find in the other's company, there's no way to explain Happily Ever After to those who have no experiential model for it.
That is, there is no way to explain unless you're a writer who has mastered show don't tell, the off-the-nose techniques Blake Snyder teaches so ably. The genre that specializes in making the unbelievable real to the reader is Science Fiction and its more recent offshoot adult Fantasy. When you mix SF/F with Romance or just plain Love, you get PNR and SFR.
PNR writers need a firm grasp of the esoteric or occult disciplines such as Tarot and Astrology to make the rules of magic of a constructed fictional world real to their readers.
Here is where you can find my novels, and my co-author Jean Lorrah's, to see how we apply these principles.
http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
A writer only needs one such system, but having several can give a writer the flexibility to work with vastly different audiences. Adding Astrology to your toolbox can position you to take advantage of unexpected opportunities with unruffled aplomb.
But you don't need to become an astrologer, or even to "learn" astrology or do it. You only need to learn to think like an astrologer, and to understand what lives look like from the point of view of someone well versed in this craft.
Here are the previous posts in this Astrology Just For Writers series that help you get the perspective we'll discuss next.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html lists posts on Astrology
And here are additional ones:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/01/astrology-just-for-writers-part-9-high.html
Part 10 was on August 30, 2010.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/astrology-just-for-writers-part-10.html
And this is Part Eleven. The intention is to collect this series into an e-book and make it available for download on simegen.com.
The 20 posts on the Tarot Swords and Pentacles that I've done here will likewise be published along with the discussions in volumes on Wands and Cups, plus a volume on how and why to study Tarot, and when and how to shun it.
Here are two posts indexing the 20 Tarot posts available.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_23.html
When using Tarot to structure a novel, never mention cards, suits, mysticism, foretelling the future, etc. Keep your use of these tools "off the nose" and be able to say, "It just came to me."
To achieve that unruffled aplomb, that level of "Cool," in the face of the opportunity of a lifetime, the one thing a writer needs to learn about using Astrology in their writing is, just as with Tarot, never mention the name "Astrology" or "Natal Chart" -- or any of the planets or stars that Astrology tracks. Never mention "influenced by" or "under a transit." Not even "Horoscope!"
Mentioning the source is what Hollywood screenwriters call being "on the nose" -- or in the parlance of the narrative text writer, "telling" rather than "showing."
I've seen this "on the nose" error in text a lot lately, even from seasoned professional best sellers. That happens because the editors don't catch it and send it back for rewrite. Editors need to know this stuff just as writers do.
Lazy writers, or any writer just in a hurry or being lazy, tend to try to disguise expository lumps as dialogue or description. When that is done, the dialogue or description comes out "on the nose."
Here are some of my entries about Expository Lumps:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/06/crumbling-business-model-of-writers.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-much-is-too-much-world-buliding.html
And there's another on August 23rd, 2011
Also see my series on Editing. Here's the final installment, and it has a list of the previous parts at the top.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vii-how-do.html
A master craftsman writer portrays the life (and arc) of a character in a way that is familiar to the readers -- they know real people who've lived through that pattern (or died in it). But you must not tell the reader how you found out about that pattern. It just came to you.
There is a popular commercial running in 2011 for Progressive Insurance in which the iconic saleswoman shows a prospective buyer the "Bundling" machine. You put your information in once, and get out two products in a box.
The buyer turns to her marveling and asks, "How did you think of that?"
She answers, "Oh, it just came to us." Then looks over at a centaur shopping the shelves of bundles.
That line, "Oh, it just came to us." is supposed to be a tickler, funny, amusing, memorable to the viewers.
What most viewers don't know is that it is the stock answer to that question in Hollywood.
It's so routine, and so stock, and so necessary when a producer or director asks a writer "How did you think of that?" that the "never let them see you sweat" rule kicks in automatically, and the only answer is a nonchalant shrug with, "Oh, it just came to me." Saying essentially you have a genius that the nuts-n-bolts people who make your story real for viewers just don't have. You are indispensable to the process, but not overly impressed with yourself. It was an accident you thought of this ingenious solution.
This is so absolutely ingrained in the Hollywood culture that Blake Snyder ( http://blakesnyder.com ) of the Save The Cat! books insists this is the only way a writer can respond to that question. He teaches writing, and goes out of his way to make this point. There's skill, craft, and lots of sweat behind these ingenious solutions to production problems, but you as a seller of your skills must never let them see you sweat.
And that's true of the relationship between you and your reader as well.
You must never let the reader know how you know -- know what process you used to create the magic they adore.
It won't be magic if you do.
Think of a painter facing a well prepared blank canvass. Most often, after settling on the subject, the painter reaches for charcoal not pigment, and maybe a ruler, and draws in a whole lot of very faint lines later to be erased. Those lines set up the composition, the perspective, the point of view from which the subject's inner nature will be revealed. The painter deliberately plans how the viewer's eye will sweep across the images, and what they will notice first, what next, and what will be in focus and remembered.
Yes, it's all very deliberate skill in painting. It's learned early and practiced like a musician practices scales until the painter can have an image "just come to him" and boom, it's on the canvass and you never know what happened even if you were watching. The Master Craftsman usually isn't conscious of "what happened" either -- he really lives the "it just came to me" moment without asking himself how that happened.
Teachers on the other hand have to unravel that "just came to me" moment and convey the individual skills to the craftsman one at a time, in boring repetitive drills.
That's what we're doing here in this blog for writers who want to figure out how better writers achieve those marvelous effects.
Today's craft point is a look at Astrology from the writer's point of view.
So let's look at the two lead characters in a Romance. Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series of books on screenwriting, says all Romances belong to his "genre" called Buddy Love. I recommend you read those books.
Blake Snyder On Amazon
Also, because of the encroachment of graphic novels, film, webisodes, games, and other visual media on storytelling, today's text-narrative writers must incorporate the pacing and visual emphasis that fiction consumers have become accustomed to.
So I recommend getting Snyder's screenwriting SOFTWARE that goes with the books, and using that to lay out the structure of your novel. I am particularly involved with that software right now because I'm a beta tester on version 3.0 and I really love the improvements.
You can find it at blakesnyder.com or Amazon. The software is also called SAVE THE CAT! You can also find it on professional screenwriting software sites like Final Draft. It's integrated with Final Draft 8
So now you're looking at a blank canvass to create your characters, their arcs, and the story they must live through.
You've nailed the transit influences affecting them. Since this is a Romance, of course Neptune is hard at their respective sensitive spots. But other influences can fly through that long-arc Neptune transit as well.
So you need a mental model too understand what these two people are and why they act and react as they do.
And that model has to be comprehensible to your readers especially because you're not going to explain it "on the nose."
Without learning astrology, what can you visualize that will tell you what is happening to this couple, this pair of Soul Mates, falling in love?
Visualize it like this, and see if this works for you.
A Soul incarnates at a particular moment. Astrology captures the moment of birth in a flash-photo still shot called the Natal Chart.
That chart delineates the positions of the planets of the solar system, and the Sun and Moon, at the time of birth. It further captures the two lines delineating the path to the horizon east and west, plus the point directly overhead at Noon - the highest point the Sun reaches on that day at that longitude and latitude. The opposite point is directly under foot, opposite the Sun's peak of arc, midnight. That line is called the MC, and defines the 10th House and the 4th House, the mystical purpose for taking this life vs. the foundation of the Home under the person's metaphorical feet.
The Ascendant defines the view of "reality" the person has from inside his life, and what others see when they look at him. Opposite the Ascendant is the 7th House cusp, which delineates partnerships, significant others, spouses, and the public (when you figure what all those things have to do with each other, how they're all absolutely identical, you'll have an understanding you can use to write fiction.)
Different astrological systems of mathematics assign different ways to calculate the positions of the other 8 "House cusps" -- I favor Placidus, Tropical, and it works well enough for my purposes (creating characters).
This up/down, horizon to horizon framework delineates the support structure of this character's life. When you put the planets, Moon and Sun, into the framework positioned relative to the birthplace on Earth at that moment the baby draws first breath, you then have a giant clock with at least 10 "hands" moving at different paces. You can get fancy, and delineate 20 hands to the clock. But a writer doesn't need that.
You don't need to understand how those clock hands move as much as you need to understand that they're there, they're set with precision, there's no escaping, and everyone alive is utterly familiar with their permutations and combinations in dynamic effects.
That "setup" of life at birth is the part of astrology that lets you make your characters "the same" as Hollywood always wants, and as Manhattan publishers need and will buy.
When something has become popular (like Harry Potter) the purveyors of fiction strive to duplicate exactly what it was that sold so well.. And that's why they always want "the same but different."
Writers, however, have read a lot of books, and usually want to put their work forward as "different" and not at all the same. "Different" feels like the essence of art, the essence of your soul. (because it is)
You can do "different" and get small readerships. Or you can add in "the same" dimension and strike for larger readerships. It's a choice. Create a pen name for each career path.
But first see my entries on PEN NAMES.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/should-you-make-up-pen-name-part-ii.html
The Blake Snyder Save the Cat! books and software show you how to do "the same" without infringing on your personal "different" and thus unleash your full potential as a commercial writer.
Now visualize this giant clock everyone is born inside. Each of us live inside a clock set to a different time zone, a unique (or nearly unique -- even twins are born at different times) time zone.
This clock forms the framework of your life, the outside of your life, not the inside.
Think of this framework as the walls of a fishtank.
Fishtanks come in a lot of shapes and sizes, but they have transparency in common. At least one wall is transparent (think of the giant aquarium at a zoo). Most fishtanks are transparent on at least 3 sides.
The tank you live in, your natal chart, defines the size and shape of your life just like the walls of a fish tank.
You can think of it as walling you away from what's out there. Or you can think of it as containing a benign environment uniquely suited just to you, thus protecting others from your environment. This should be familiar to SF readers of space adventures with intelligent aquatic creatures. Metaphor? Maybe.
Unlike most fish, you can see OUT, hazily. With distortion. You can see the reflective walls of other people's tanks, and sometimes glimpse through those walls into the life of another.
In this (admittedly limited and distorted) analogy, your Soul is the fish.
Unlike fish, you can create, shape, decorate, personalize and customize your tank. You create your inner environment.
What your Soul is capable of creating, how nicely you can arrange things, what you can "do with the place" is limited by your talent, determination, and other resources your soul brings into this life.
You live your life within your natal chart, within your clock, by the choices your Soul makes, and the resources and wisdom it has brought with it, and what it learns from this life.
The "clock" does not say "You will meet a tall, dark, non-human, stranger and fall in unrequited love."
The clock does not say a tall dark stranger will come into your life.
The clock says it's time to meet strangers, go find one.
Whether there's a stranger there or not, and how you respond to that particular individual stranger, is a matter of the Soul, not the clock.
It's not that there's no such thing as "destiny" -- it's that "destiny" is far more complex than the Ancient Greeks ever knew.
"Destiny" is crafted from the material at hand (via the clock, the shape of the fishtank, the limits of imagination in fixing up the place inside the tank), by freewill choices, but not just your own. Everyone has free will and makes choices which you respond to. And others respond to your choices. You interact (i.e. fall in Love) with others who likewise live in fishtanks of their own, tanks you can sometimes almost see into, but never enter.
In my universe paradigm, there's a third force acting to shape and reshape "destiny" for each of us and all of us collectively - God. But the fishtank analogy holds whether there's a third outside force or not.
So here your character is inside her fishtank, and is moving stuff around trying to make the place (her life) comfortable. (i.e. has landed a plum of a job promotion, and really sees the big bucks coming soon)
And she decides out of pride of place to clean her tank walls nice and clear and transparent so she can see and understand the world (i.e. takes a course and learns something, or proves something).
She wants love, so she makes herself more visible, her real self, or what she wants to believe is her real self.
And what happens when she cleans her tank wall is that she SEES another tank out there because it's time to meet strangers, and she can now see through her own reflection to something that is not herself.
She sees another tank wall, and reflective though it is, it seems to curve around the edges of her tank very neatly, and with the angle just so, she can SEE the Soul swimming around inside his life. Or she thinks she does. Part of the image is a reflection of herself, but having cleaned her tank walls, she is seeing something that is not herself. Thrill of a lifetime.
Wow. He's gorgeous. Just look at those sweeping, draping fins!
The two souls can get close, nudge their tanks right up to touching, so it seems the walls have merged into one wall, and they can create new life together. But neither can leap over into the other's tank and swim there.
The analogy kind of breaks down because Soul Mates who marry do actually merge into one. Those two tanks bond and stick together.
But the insides are always separate, even when most of the reflection effect at the tank surfaces is eliminated by bonding the two tank walls together.
Lives are SEPARATE -- Souls merge.
We each live in our fishtanks, isolated and alone. But we can share a Soul, mate with a Soul.
Think of this analogy. The two tanks come together, the walls fuse so they can almost just about see into each others' tanks (there's always reflection -- what we see when we look at others is a reflection of our inner Self). So they move into such harmony that they each redecorate their tanks to match, so you can't tell it's two rooms.
Maybe she quits her job, and he quits his (ok, today it's more likely they'll get laid off), and they start a business together -- a shop, a newspaper, a blog-for-money operation, e-Bay sales, whatever. They change their lives to harmonize.
That's what "Happily Ever After" -- the HEA ending -- actually looks like.
We talked about the Happily Ever After concept in a 4 part series the Tuesdays in October 2011 titled Believing In Happily Ever After.
Using the fishtank analogy of lives that are set up at Birth, and Souls trapped inside those lives at least for this incarnation, you can see immediately why people today just don't credit the Happily Ever After goal as realistic.
You can never really get inside another person's life. You can't let them inside yours.
You can't even see inside other people clearly, which leads to misunderstandings.
Consider a good marriage where, after some time, one partner wanders off to live mostly in the far end of his tank, becoming mostly invisible from the mated tank. Left alone, she ends up living at the far end of her tank, where there's a view into someone else's tank.
No matter how close some part of your life is to another's, or how visible, there's a part of your life they can't see or share.
That's what it means to be an individual, a unique person, a sovereign person.
Since everyone has that experience, it's easy to see why most people don't believe another person would deliberately live their life only in the corner of their tank that touches the other tank.
Until you mix in the Soul Mate dimension, that delineates the unique pleasure of being near another, willingly sharing a life (redecorating) for the sheer pleasure of the meaningfulness you find in the other's company, there's no way to explain Happily Ever After to those who have no experiential model for it.
That is, there is no way to explain unless you're a writer who has mastered show don't tell, the off-the-nose techniques Blake Snyder teaches so ably. The genre that specializes in making the unbelievable real to the reader is Science Fiction and its more recent offshoot adult Fantasy. When you mix SF/F with Romance or just plain Love, you get PNR and SFR.
PNR writers need a firm grasp of the esoteric or occult disciplines such as Tarot and Astrology to make the rules of magic of a constructed fictional world real to their readers.
Here is where you can find my novels, and my co-author Jean Lorrah's, to see how we apply these principles.
http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Suzette Haden Elgin
Linguist and SF writer Suzette Haden Elgin, author of the "Native Tongue" and "Planet Ozark" novels and numerous nonfiction books in her "Verbal Self Defense" series, hasn't posted on her blog since April. This week a message appeared on her Live Journal blog, passed on from her husband, that she can no longer focus well enough even to answer e-mails. In fact, she has Alzheimer's. Here's a reaction to the news from one of her many fans:
Brilliant Writer Falls Silent
This article includes a link to the original discussion on Elgin's blog.
What a shock. I always eagerly followed her warm, witty, thought-provoking comments on Live Journal and have missed them. She generously posted drafts of poems, inviting reader comment and often revising the poems in response. She also gave us regular reports on the progress of the latest SF novel she was working on. Now that novel won't be finished (at least, not by her). She was a shining model of an author's interaction with readers.
With Terry Pratchett (who's still writing), that makes two of my favorite authors I know of who've developed Alzheimer's. As one of the commenters on Elgin's blog remarked, it's especially sad to see this fate befall someone whose life's work has been so deeply engaged with language.
Margaret Carter
Carter's Crypt
Brilliant Writer Falls Silent
This article includes a link to the original discussion on Elgin's blog.
What a shock. I always eagerly followed her warm, witty, thought-provoking comments on Live Journal and have missed them. She generously posted drafts of poems, inviting reader comment and often revising the poems in response. She also gave us regular reports on the progress of the latest SF novel she was working on. Now that novel won't be finished (at least, not by her). She was a shining model of an author's interaction with readers.
With Terry Pratchett (who's still writing), that makes two of my favorite authors I know of who've developed Alzheimer's. As one of the commenters on Elgin's blog remarked, it's especially sad to see this fate befall someone whose life's work has been so deeply engaged with language.
Margaret Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Believing in Happily Ever After Part 4: Nesting Huge Themes Inside Each Other
Last week we looked at two conflict sets that form the basis for huge thematic statements that can be simplified down to something as stark and elegant as the underpinnings of the TV show Leverage. Now we'll see if we can combine these 4 thematic elements into a set of themes that generate conflicts and thus plots for large, multi-point of view novels as we began discussing in
Verisimilitude vs. Reality Part 2 September 13,2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-2-master.htmlVerisimilitude vs. Reality Part 3, September 20, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-3-game.html
The previous posts in this series were posted on:
October 4, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-1.htmlOctober 11, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-2.htmlOctober 18, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-3.html
Secret vs. Private + Standardized vs. Customized
You can "nest" those two sets of conflicts to produce a huge novel with a dizzying array of Point of View Characters.
You can nest them because they are philosophically related. If you can explicate that philosophical relationship all in Show and without any Tell (i.e. tell the story in pictures, in icons and images) you will have a masterpiece of commentary on the current human condition.
To start, note that in a Standardized culture anything about you that you don't hang right out in public is going to be regarded as grounds for suspicion about you.
Why is that?
Think about it.
In a Standardized culture, we're all alike. So if there's something about you that you aren't forthcoming about, then it must be something that identifies you as "Different" -- as unacceptable. It has to be something you're ashamed of, because after all we're all the same, so why would you keep it secret?
Once you've seen a naked woman, you've seen a naked woman.
Why would any woman "hide" their nakedness (or any part of their body) from you when all women are the same? Men, too, for that matter. What's to hide?
If you're not displaying your nakedness for all to see, you are keeping something secret. It's only logical.
There's physical nakedness, and there's psychological nakedness. In a Standardized culture, if you're not as naked as everyone else, you're not politically correct. You're keeping something secret.
In a Standardized culture (science fiction extrapolation to vast extreme for the sake of illustration), there can be no such thing as "private." There is only "secret." And in a Standardized culture, secret is evil.
Why is secret evil? Because something different might undermine the standardization of everyone.
In a Customized culture, on the other hand, there can be secrets and some of them may be about Evil, but most of what you don't know about another person is just private, and you're really not curious at all about other people's private business. You have your own private business to fill up the empty spaces inside you.
That's right, in a Customized (carry to extremes, remember? It's a principle of screenwriting) culture, a seriously totally customized culture, people would still be intensely curious about all kinds of things, but never about someone else's private business.
In a Customized culture, people don't dress or talk all alike. In a Standardized culture, they do.
In the 1950's, each year brought a specific fashion-necessary hemline length. If you couldn't afford a new dress (women didn't wear pants much), then you took up or let down the hemlines to within a half-inch of the specified proper fashion, usually sewing by hand. Standardization reigned in car-manufacturing, and in fashion. Uniform spelling was not just admired but an absolute requirement. Radio announcers had even become standardized for accent. (today you hear regional accents on TV announcers -- in the 1950's you didn't., though regional accents were more redolent.)
In the 2010's, walk along any street and see some women in pants suits, others in jeans, ankle length skirts, mini-skirts, all going the same place.
The other day I saw a video clip of a bunch of people walking out of the White House after a high level conference they were reporting on. I watched the women. They ALL wore skirt-suits (not a one of dozens wore a pants suit), and the skirts were above the knee in every case. Their dress for business wear had become standardized to a new standard. Even just 5 years ago, there were lots of pants suits in such shots. Remember Hilary Clinton wore and still wears pants suits more than anything else.
In between, there was a trend where women on TV non-fiction shows (there was a time when no TV anchor on a news show was female) all wore suits, sometimes with tailored shirts and ties, sometimes pants suits, but sometimes skirt-suits and they weren't mini-skirt suits.
I've taken a recent poll cruising news shows. All the newswomen are showing a lot of skin, cleavage, and often wear skin-tight dresses with cleavage and no sleeves, showing more of themselves than they would in a bathing suit. Just a few years ago, those same women wore suits with jackets when seen among men wearing suits with jackets. Today, female reporters stand on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (which is being bought by the Germans) among men in suits, but the women are showing cleavage and lots of skin, or if it's cold outside, they wear very tight sweaters.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/15/dboerse-nyse-idUSN1E76E16C20110715
And the Germans have a very different culture than the U.S.A. does. As much as German culture (via immigrants) has influenced us, we are still very different.
I'm not passing value judgements here. I'm surveying details that sketch the context of your reader's real-world, against which they judge the plausibility of your fictional world. I'm selecting details here that infer other types of details. Think about the reasons for these fashion shifts. This is how you "build" a world for your characters from the substance of your theme. When you build your fictional world from the elements of your reader's real world, the readers will believe your entire story - it will seem plausible. Your reader reads about how people dress, and your reader infers the value system of the culture in which those characters walk abroad.
Women wore suits to be like men, or to seek respect for not presenting themselves as a sex object.
There was a cultural conflict there generating that fashion choice -- the striving to be taken seriously. In prior times, women news reporters were never allowed to report on business stories or crimes (or from the locker room at a sporting event). Women reporters covered women's stories only. Nothing a woman said was ever taken seriously.
Today that cultural conflict is gone, and women are behaving as if they can be taken seriously and display as much skin as they (or the news producers) want. Yes, it seems the real reason for the cleavage display is that sex sells. Nothing rivets a man's attention like cleavage and the producers (even the women producers) of news shows see that in their ratings demographics. But the men don't wear wet T-shirts to display a six-pack.
I've seen prime time hard-news TV shows with a female anchor and a couple of female reporters, all showing a lot of skin, and reporting on serious news. Big change, and I haven't seen anyone note it even in passing.
The writer's eye must observe these things and translate the visuals into thematic substance.
Compare that cultural shift to the one described in the article I sited earlier in this Believing In Happily Ever After series about the increasing internet speeds and what enterprise has been able to do with that technological advance.
Here's the link again:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/07/speed-matters/
Microsoft and Google, the two publicly traded titans who, along with amazon.com, reign supreme in the Customized culture, actually operate on the old Standardized Worker-bee model. Though their products are created by wildly dressed individuals, they are developed and marketed by standardized workers, in standard business suits.
Consider that Facebook became a publicly traded company in 2011. Now Google has launched Google+ a serious competitor to Facebook. Google+ is another example of a user customizable service that's standardized on the back end.
I was talking with an employee of GoDaddy the other day about this very thing, and we agreed that GoDaddy is the Home Depot of the digital world (GoDaddy is a do-it-yourself website hosting service with customer service phone answerers who really know what they're talking about just as Home Depot clerks know what the products on their shelves actually do).
While GoDaddy is enabling individuals to create totally Customized (or templated Standardized; your choice) websites, they treat their employees like identical worker-bees, and pay really low wages, rewarding the best sales people with bonuses. (Sears does the same, as do many department stores).
At GoDaddy the art staff gets paid less than the customer service reps, according to my informant.
Well, that's how it used to be. Things may be changing there, too. See this?
http://mashable.com/2011/07/02/godaddy-sold/
GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain registrar, has been sold to three private equity firms in a deal valued at $2.25 billion, the company announced in early July 2011.
So these successful businesses (creating those rich folks who take what they want) are now hybrids of the Standardized and Customized cultures.
They sell customizable products (all the same out of the box; you make them different), but manufacture them in a Standardized Henry Ford style way. Do you smell a conflict generating a plot yet?
Now, you all know of the "privacy" issues on the internet, and the hacking incursions into bank records, even personal cell phones of celebrities.
Take that "real" world your reader lives in, slice and dice it just as you sliced and diced the TV Show Leverage which we discussed in Part 2 of this series.
Build an alien culture from one of these sets of themes, and a futuristic (extrapolated to extreme) human culture from the other set, put them in CONFLICT over a problem, resolve the problem, and you have a major novel that seethes with Romance one way or another, because the only thing that can Conquer this stuff is Love.
In the Standardized culture in which every instinct to Privacy is regarded as keeping illicit Secrets, the unique individual strives to 'break free' of a stultifying oppression. The Standardization is the problem.
In The Customized culture in which Privacy is treasured (what happens in the family, stays in the family), the Businessman who seeks to maximize profits via standardizing both workers and products, strives to hammer slippery individuals into shape and make everyone want the same thing. The Individualization, the sacredness of privacy, is the problem.
In a previous post we discussed the origins of the science of Public Relations. You should read the wikipedia article on PR and advertising.
Here are 3 posts on PR and altering the perception of reality in the way described above with fashion.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/glenn-beck-didnt-invent-overton-window.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/01/failure-of-imagination-part-4-teasing.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-to-change-perception-of-romance.html
Remember the principle, create a frustration then sell the solution and alter the general perception of reality.
To get the greater readership to accept the reality of the Happily Ever After ending, that ending has to become the solution to their greatest frustration -- like increasing internet speed and selling data connections by the megabyte.
The greatest frustration out there right now is the conflict between the innate (and I believe intrinsic in human nature) desire for individual uniqueness to be recognized (i.e. unconditional love) and the survival-instinct need to hunker down as one of the herd, to be a worker-bee and get a paycheck, to use the most popular brand of shampoo.
God Forbid anyone should think you're Different - because you know you are. That's CONFLICT the very essence of STORY. But more than that, it's the essence of Romance, because Romance starts with the impact of the vision of a future where you are not alone in your privacy.
The desire to be unique, and yet the same, and also recognized and appreciated for your individual uniqueness is the "problem" in the us vs. a problem conflict formula.
Right now, our genera population can't see Love Conquers All as the solution to that uniting problem in our culture.
Use Art to demonstrate that solution, and sell big time.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Verisimilitude vs. Reality Part 2 September 13,2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-2-master.htmlVerisimilitude vs. Reality Part 3, September 20, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-3-game.html
The previous posts in this series were posted on:
October 4, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-1.htmlOctober 11, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-2.htmlOctober 18, 2011
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-3.html
Secret vs. Private + Standardized vs. Customized
You can "nest" those two sets of conflicts to produce a huge novel with a dizzying array of Point of View Characters.
You can nest them because they are philosophically related. If you can explicate that philosophical relationship all in Show and without any Tell (i.e. tell the story in pictures, in icons and images) you will have a masterpiece of commentary on the current human condition.
To start, note that in a Standardized culture anything about you that you don't hang right out in public is going to be regarded as grounds for suspicion about you.
Why is that?
Think about it.
In a Standardized culture, we're all alike. So if there's something about you that you aren't forthcoming about, then it must be something that identifies you as "Different" -- as unacceptable. It has to be something you're ashamed of, because after all we're all the same, so why would you keep it secret?
Once you've seen a naked woman, you've seen a naked woman.
Why would any woman "hide" their nakedness (or any part of their body) from you when all women are the same? Men, too, for that matter. What's to hide?
If you're not displaying your nakedness for all to see, you are keeping something secret. It's only logical.
There's physical nakedness, and there's psychological nakedness. In a Standardized culture, if you're not as naked as everyone else, you're not politically correct. You're keeping something secret.
In a Standardized culture (science fiction extrapolation to vast extreme for the sake of illustration), there can be no such thing as "private." There is only "secret." And in a Standardized culture, secret is evil.
Why is secret evil? Because something different might undermine the standardization of everyone.
In a Customized culture, on the other hand, there can be secrets and some of them may be about Evil, but most of what you don't know about another person is just private, and you're really not curious at all about other people's private business. You have your own private business to fill up the empty spaces inside you.
That's right, in a Customized (carry to extremes, remember? It's a principle of screenwriting) culture, a seriously totally customized culture, people would still be intensely curious about all kinds of things, but never about someone else's private business.
In a Customized culture, people don't dress or talk all alike. In a Standardized culture, they do.
In the 1950's, each year brought a specific fashion-necessary hemline length. If you couldn't afford a new dress (women didn't wear pants much), then you took up or let down the hemlines to within a half-inch of the specified proper fashion, usually sewing by hand. Standardization reigned in car-manufacturing, and in fashion. Uniform spelling was not just admired but an absolute requirement. Radio announcers had even become standardized for accent. (today you hear regional accents on TV announcers -- in the 1950's you didn't., though regional accents were more redolent.)
In the 2010's, walk along any street and see some women in pants suits, others in jeans, ankle length skirts, mini-skirts, all going the same place.
The other day I saw a video clip of a bunch of people walking out of the White House after a high level conference they were reporting on. I watched the women. They ALL wore skirt-suits (not a one of dozens wore a pants suit), and the skirts were above the knee in every case. Their dress for business wear had become standardized to a new standard. Even just 5 years ago, there were lots of pants suits in such shots. Remember Hilary Clinton wore and still wears pants suits more than anything else.
In between, there was a trend where women on TV non-fiction shows (there was a time when no TV anchor on a news show was female) all wore suits, sometimes with tailored shirts and ties, sometimes pants suits, but sometimes skirt-suits and they weren't mini-skirt suits.
I've taken a recent poll cruising news shows. All the newswomen are showing a lot of skin, cleavage, and often wear skin-tight dresses with cleavage and no sleeves, showing more of themselves than they would in a bathing suit. Just a few years ago, those same women wore suits with jackets when seen among men wearing suits with jackets. Today, female reporters stand on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (which is being bought by the Germans) among men in suits, but the women are showing cleavage and lots of skin, or if it's cold outside, they wear very tight sweaters.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/15/dboerse-nyse-idUSN1E76E16C20110715
And the Germans have a very different culture than the U.S.A. does. As much as German culture (via immigrants) has influenced us, we are still very different.
I'm not passing value judgements here. I'm surveying details that sketch the context of your reader's real-world, against which they judge the plausibility of your fictional world. I'm selecting details here that infer other types of details. Think about the reasons for these fashion shifts. This is how you "build" a world for your characters from the substance of your theme. When you build your fictional world from the elements of your reader's real world, the readers will believe your entire story - it will seem plausible. Your reader reads about how people dress, and your reader infers the value system of the culture in which those characters walk abroad.
Women wore suits to be like men, or to seek respect for not presenting themselves as a sex object.
There was a cultural conflict there generating that fashion choice -- the striving to be taken seriously. In prior times, women news reporters were never allowed to report on business stories or crimes (or from the locker room at a sporting event). Women reporters covered women's stories only. Nothing a woman said was ever taken seriously.
Today that cultural conflict is gone, and women are behaving as if they can be taken seriously and display as much skin as they (or the news producers) want. Yes, it seems the real reason for the cleavage display is that sex sells. Nothing rivets a man's attention like cleavage and the producers (even the women producers) of news shows see that in their ratings demographics. But the men don't wear wet T-shirts to display a six-pack.
I've seen prime time hard-news TV shows with a female anchor and a couple of female reporters, all showing a lot of skin, and reporting on serious news. Big change, and I haven't seen anyone note it even in passing.
The writer's eye must observe these things and translate the visuals into thematic substance.
Compare that cultural shift to the one described in the article I sited earlier in this Believing In Happily Ever After series about the increasing internet speeds and what enterprise has been able to do with that technological advance.
Here's the link again:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/07/speed-matters/
Microsoft and Google, the two publicly traded titans who, along with amazon.com, reign supreme in the Customized culture, actually operate on the old Standardized Worker-bee model. Though their products are created by wildly dressed individuals, they are developed and marketed by standardized workers, in standard business suits.
Consider that Facebook became a publicly traded company in 2011. Now Google has launched Google+ a serious competitor to Facebook. Google+ is another example of a user customizable service that's standardized on the back end.
I was talking with an employee of GoDaddy the other day about this very thing, and we agreed that GoDaddy is the Home Depot of the digital world (GoDaddy is a do-it-yourself website hosting service with customer service phone answerers who really know what they're talking about just as Home Depot clerks know what the products on their shelves actually do).
While GoDaddy is enabling individuals to create totally Customized (or templated Standardized; your choice) websites, they treat their employees like identical worker-bees, and pay really low wages, rewarding the best sales people with bonuses. (Sears does the same, as do many department stores).
At GoDaddy the art staff gets paid less than the customer service reps, according to my informant.
Well, that's how it used to be. Things may be changing there, too. See this?
http://mashable.com/2011/07/02/godaddy-sold/
GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain registrar, has been sold to three private equity firms in a deal valued at $2.25 billion, the company announced in early July 2011.
So these successful businesses (creating those rich folks who take what they want) are now hybrids of the Standardized and Customized cultures.
They sell customizable products (all the same out of the box; you make them different), but manufacture them in a Standardized Henry Ford style way. Do you smell a conflict generating a plot yet?
Now, you all know of the "privacy" issues on the internet, and the hacking incursions into bank records, even personal cell phones of celebrities.
Take that "real" world your reader lives in, slice and dice it just as you sliced and diced the TV Show Leverage which we discussed in Part 2 of this series.
Build an alien culture from one of these sets of themes, and a futuristic (extrapolated to extreme) human culture from the other set, put them in CONFLICT over a problem, resolve the problem, and you have a major novel that seethes with Romance one way or another, because the only thing that can Conquer this stuff is Love.
In the Standardized culture in which every instinct to Privacy is regarded as keeping illicit Secrets, the unique individual strives to 'break free' of a stultifying oppression. The Standardization is the problem.
In The Customized culture in which Privacy is treasured (what happens in the family, stays in the family), the Businessman who seeks to maximize profits via standardizing both workers and products, strives to hammer slippery individuals into shape and make everyone want the same thing. The Individualization, the sacredness of privacy, is the problem.
In a previous post we discussed the origins of the science of Public Relations. You should read the wikipedia article on PR and advertising.
Here are 3 posts on PR and altering the perception of reality in the way described above with fashion.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/glenn-beck-didnt-invent-overton-window.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/01/failure-of-imagination-part-4-teasing.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-to-change-perception-of-romance.html
Remember the principle, create a frustration then sell the solution and alter the general perception of reality.
To get the greater readership to accept the reality of the Happily Ever After ending, that ending has to become the solution to their greatest frustration -- like increasing internet speed and selling data connections by the megabyte.
The greatest frustration out there right now is the conflict between the innate (and I believe intrinsic in human nature) desire for individual uniqueness to be recognized (i.e. unconditional love) and the survival-instinct need to hunker down as one of the herd, to be a worker-bee and get a paycheck, to use the most popular brand of shampoo.
God Forbid anyone should think you're Different - because you know you are. That's CONFLICT the very essence of STORY. But more than that, it's the essence of Romance, because Romance starts with the impact of the vision of a future where you are not alone in your privacy.
The desire to be unique, and yet the same, and also recognized and appreciated for your individual uniqueness is the "problem" in the us vs. a problem conflict formula.
Right now, our genera population can't see Love Conquers All as the solution to that uniting problem in our culture.
Use Art to demonstrate that solution, and sell big time.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Sunday, October 23, 2011
My battle with Big Pizza
Also with EBay; Google AdWords Express; Virgin/Samsung; Ford; Papa John's Pizza, from whom I had an extraordinary response to a "red flag" below; a law firm (!) advertising on a pirate site; Lifelock, who will protect my identity -allegedly-- but not my livelihood, Lulu.com (a publisher of sorts); and more.
My admittedly Quixotic battles perfectly demonstrate something over which Congress is deliberating, according to a recent mailing from the copyrightalliance.org.
To cut to the chase....: Complain to your Congressmen about copyright infringement
This form goes automatically to your representatives in Washington. There is a form email, and you simply add your contact info. PO Boxes work.
Click on this URL to take action now
http://capwiz.
This is the serious stuff: The highlighting is my own.
Dear Copyright Advocates,
RUMOR HAS IT that the U.S. House of Representatives will be introducing its version of the rogue sites legislation in the coming weeks. I have been reporting to you about the legislation over the past year. We have seen it take on various forms and names, but the underlying purpose of the bill remains the same: to provide new tools to remove advertising and legitimate payment processing from foreign rogue internet sites that are dedicated to infringing activities, and to make those sites less accessible to US users.
You may recall that the Senate introduced its version of the bill in May. For a recap of that bill, click here.
The Debate Heats Up
Washington, DC has been teeming with supporters and opponents over the bill in the recent weeks, and we expect the debates to continue over the coming months. Though the Copyright Alliance holds a position that this bill will support both artists/creators and the creative industries broadly, technology giants and others are lining up organizations to misrepresent what the bill does. They are claiming that by preventing unscrupulous parties from making money distributing your works without your authorization, the bill is somehow a threat to free speech and innovation. But it is clear that no one has a "free speech" right to commercialize your work over your objections.
I hear from many of you about your struggles with digital theft through these rogue websites and know that protecting the rights and work of artists enhances creativity, free speech and innovation. If you want to share your story of digital theft, send an email to: info@copyrightallia
Additional Help for Small Business and Individual Copyright Owners
As preparations continue for introducing the bill in the House of Representatives, we have also heard from Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX). As part of his effort to crack down on rogue sites, his office is interested in exploring additional remedies to help effectively enforce the rights of small businesses and individual copyright owners harmed by infringement. He has requested that the U.S. Copyright Office conduct a study about the feasibility of alternate "small claims court" procedures that could be quicker and less expensive for copyright owners to pursue. We will keep you posted so that you can help us weigh in once the study begins.
Take Action
Show your Senators that you support the bill and encourage your Representatives to quickly introduce their version of the bill by sending this letter to Capitol Hill.
Feel passionate about this issue? Let us know. . .we are looking for a few strong voices to help us get the word out about these issues. To chime in send an email with your name, address and contact information, and a little bit about yourself to info@copyrightallia
(redacted paragraph, cut for lack of links and length)
Best,
Lucinda Dugger
Director of Outreach
ONE VOI©E: SPEAK UP FOR CREATORS' RIGHTS
I wrote to Papa John's Pizza using the only online contact available. They are not set up to receive DMCA complaints and obviously a robot is in charge of Customer Service. Check out the response I received to my complaint that they are funding copyright infringement.
Rowena,
On behalf of Papa John's Pizza, we would like to apologize for any
inconvenience you encountered with your recent order from Papa John's. We
are truly sorry the problem from the restaurant caused your order not to
meet expectations. Our goal is to provide not only a superior quality
pizza, but also a World Class Customer Experience to our consumers at all
times. Your comments have been sent to the Owners/Operators for this
location and someone should be contacting you soon.
Thank you for taking the time to complete the Internet Feedback form.Your
incident number is PJIA-8MTTW8; please refer to this number in any future
correspondence. We want to encourage you to call your local Papa John's
whenever you have questions or comments, but if we can be of further
assistance, please visit us again at www.papajohns.com.
Sincerely,
Consumer Services Team
For the record, I've also complained to PayPal 's Infringement Report team, because there is a Donate button at the bottom of the page (in a footer run by wibiya to whom I have also complained) which does work, and PayPal does take 1c of profit for every $1.00 donated to the site owner.
Since the Donate button is still there and still goes to PayPal, I infer that PayPal needs a bit of Congressional scrutiny.
My admittedly Quixotic battles perfectly demonstrate something over which Congress is deliberating, according to a recent mailing from the copyrightalliance.org.
To cut to the chase....: Complain to your Congressmen about copyright infringement
This form goes automatically to your representatives in Washington. There is a form email, and you simply add your contact info. PO Boxes work.
Click on this URL to take action now
http://capwiz.
This is the serious stuff: The highlighting is my own.
Letter from the Copyright Alliance Director of Outreach, Lucinda Dugger.
RUMOR HAS IT that the U.S. House of Representatives will be introducing its version of the rogue sites legislation in the coming weeks. I have been reporting to you about the legislation over the past year. We have seen it take on various forms and names, but the underlying purpose of the bill remains the same: to provide new tools to remove advertising and legitimate payment processing from foreign rogue internet sites that are dedicated to infringing activities, and to make those sites less accessible to US users.
You may recall that the Senate introduced its version of the bill in May. For a recap of that bill, click here.
The Debate Heats Up
Washington, DC has been teeming with supporters and opponents over the bill in the recent weeks, and we expect the debates to continue over the coming months. Though the Copyright Alliance holds a position that this bill will support both artists/creators and the creative industries broadly, technology giants and others are lining up organizations to misrepresent what the bill does. They are claiming that by preventing unscrupulous parties from making money distributing your works without your authorization, the bill is somehow a threat to free speech and innovation. But it is clear that no one has a "free speech" right to commercialize your work over your objections.
I hear from many of you about your struggles with digital theft through these rogue websites and know that protecting the rights and work of artists enhances creativity, free speech and innovation. If you want to share your story of digital theft, send an email to: info@copyrightallia
Additional Help for Small Business and Individual Copyright Owners
As preparations continue for introducing the bill in the House of Representatives, we have also heard from Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX). As part of his effort to crack down on rogue sites, his office is interested in exploring additional remedies to help effectively enforce the rights of small businesses and individual copyright owners harmed by infringement. He has requested that the U.S. Copyright Office conduct a study about the feasibility of alternate "small claims court" procedures that could be quicker and less expensive for copyright owners to pursue. We will keep you posted so that you can help us weigh in once the study begins.
Take Action
Show your Senators that you support the bill and encourage your Representatives to quickly introduce their version of the bill by sending this letter to Capitol Hill.
Feel passionate about this issue? Let us know. . .we are looking for a few strong voices to help us get the word out about these issues. To chime in send an email with your name, address and contact information, and a little bit about yourself to info@copyrightallia
(redacted paragraph, cut for lack of links and length)
Best,
Lucinda Dugger
Director of Outreach
ONE VOI©E: SPEAK UP FOR CREATORS' RIGHTS
Now, for my little anecdote.
I've been watching, semi-helplessly, as a site that ignores DMCA notices shares one of my ebooks. Banner ads by various businesses fund this digital theft, as you can see for yourself.... which is why I include the link.I wrote to Papa John's Pizza using the only online contact available. They are not set up to receive DMCA complaints and obviously a robot is in charge of Customer Service. Check out the response I received to my complaint that they are funding copyright infringement.
Rowena,
On behalf of Papa John's Pizza, we would like to apologize for any
inconvenience you encountered with your recent order from Papa John's. We
are truly sorry the problem from the restaurant caused your order not to
meet expectations. Our goal is to provide not only a superior quality
pizza, but also a World Class Customer Experience to our consumers at all
times. Your comments have been sent to the Owners/Operators for this
location and someone should be contacting you soon.
Thank you for taking the time to complete the Internet Feedback form.Your
incident number is PJIA-8MTTW8; please refer to this number in any future
correspondence. We want to encourage you to call your local Papa John's
whenever you have questions or comments, but if we can be of further
assistance, please visit us again at www.papajohns.com.
Sincerely,
Consumer Services Team
For the record, I've also complained to PayPal 's Infringement Report team, because there is a Donate button at the bottom of the page (in a footer run by wibiya to whom I have also complained) which does work, and PayPal does take 1c of profit for every $1.00 donated to the site owner.
Since the Donate button is still there and still goes to PayPal, I infer that PayPal needs a bit of Congressional scrutiny.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Cyborgs Revisited
Recently I watched JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN, a horrifying, nearly hopeless movie about a maimed World War I veteran, based (mostly faithfully) on an equally grim novel. The protagonist, Joe, has lost all his limbs and had his face blown off, unable to hear, see, or talk. He breathes and gets nourishment through tubes. His torso is intact, however, and his mind fully functional, although he's in the additionally nightmarish plight of having the doctors think he isn't conscious. By feeling the warmth of sunlight from the window of his room, he distinguishes day from night and starts keeping track of time. A kind nurse spells "Merry Christmas" with her finger on his chest, giving him a fixed point in the year. Eventually he communicates with the military doctors by tapping out Morse code with his head. He asks either to be allowed to die or to be taken on tour and displayed as an example of the horrors of war. The officer in charge refuses both requests. The movie expands the narrative that, in the novel, remains entirely inside the protagonist’s head. In the film, we see the hospital staff and hear their conversations about Joe, so we know he’s considered a hopeless vegetable until he reaches out with Morse code. If anything, the movie's ending seems more negative than the book's, which implies a faint chance that he might later succeed in opening further communications.
I started thinking about how Joe's story would play out in the present day. First, DNA testing would identify him, so he wouldn’t spend the rest of his life anonymously confined to a foreign military hospital. (In the book, he’s glad he can’t be identified, because he doesn’t want his family and sweetheart to learn of his horrible fate.) EEG readings would let the medical personnel know he’s conscious and aware of his environment. He would not be simply warehoused but would probably get regular stimulation such as massages, even if the exact extent of his mental capacity were unknown. Unless the auditory nerves are completely destroyed, implants might restore some degree of hearing. And he might get advanced prosthetic limbs. Coincidentally, this past Sunday I came across an article about an experimental robotic arm controlled by a chip implanted in the paralyzed patient’s brain. The user makes the arm move by thinking, like a natural limb!
Robotic Arm
Other technology would probably allow Joe to communicate through a computer, either by similar implanted electrodes or by the lower-tech method of teaching him to operate a keyboard with head motions.
A writing question: Could a man in that situation be a hero in a romance? Why not? The patient who’s testing the robotic arm in the above article has a girlfriend whom he met after his injury. In the novel JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN, Joe occasionally refers to “feeling romantic,” which I read as a euphemistic term for sexual stirrings; a doctor at the beginning of the movie, whose script was written by the author of the book, mentions that Joe’s genitals are undamaged. Although I wouldn’t be up to the challenge of writing that story, a gifted author could certainly accomplish it.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
I started thinking about how Joe's story would play out in the present day. First, DNA testing would identify him, so he wouldn’t spend the rest of his life anonymously confined to a foreign military hospital. (In the book, he’s glad he can’t be identified, because he doesn’t want his family and sweetheart to learn of his horrible fate.) EEG readings would let the medical personnel know he’s conscious and aware of his environment. He would not be simply warehoused but would probably get regular stimulation such as massages, even if the exact extent of his mental capacity were unknown. Unless the auditory nerves are completely destroyed, implants might restore some degree of hearing. And he might get advanced prosthetic limbs. Coincidentally, this past Sunday I came across an article about an experimental robotic arm controlled by a chip implanted in the paralyzed patient’s brain. The user makes the arm move by thinking, like a natural limb!
Robotic Arm
Other technology would probably allow Joe to communicate through a computer, either by similar implanted electrodes or by the lower-tech method of teaching him to operate a keyboard with head motions.
A writing question: Could a man in that situation be a hero in a romance? Why not? The patient who’s testing the robotic arm in the above article has a girlfriend whom he met after his injury. In the novel JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN, Joe occasionally refers to “feeling romantic,” which I read as a euphemistic term for sexual stirrings; a doctor at the beginning of the movie, whose script was written by the author of the book, mentions that Joe’s genitals are undamaged. Although I wouldn’t be up to the challenge of writing that story, a gifted author could certainly accomplish it.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Believing in Happily Ever After Part 3: Standardization vs. Customization
Part 1 of this "Believing in Happily Ever After" series is:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-1.html
Part 2 is:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-2.html
Last week, we left off in the midst of examining the TV Show Leverage noting that Leverage has a "Tell Don't Show" opening that sets out the premise starkly, and explicitly states the theme.
The opening voice-over is:
"The Rich And Powerful take what they want. We steal it back for you."
Now we're putting that TV show's premise and theme into the context of the world of the viewers it's aimed at, (you and me, actually, though Leverage is not a Romance.)
Consider, this is a world in which huge social forces (not the least of which is the Internet and dot-com companies that are going "public" on the stock exchange and wielding more power than any other kind of company before) are striving in two directions, creating conflict and a philosophical argument so big it's nearly impossible to see or define.
I parse it this way. (do your own parsing).
I see, via Leverage's window on the philosophical/fiction-theme world, the conflict as Customization Vs. Standardization.
Remember all the times I've sent you to read Alvin Toffler's non-fiction book, Future Shock. He gave me the insight to be able to see things in this light now.
Remember that the Essence of Story is Conflict.
Plot is a sequence of events on a because-line -- because this happened we have a problem, which causes us to do this, which results in that, which causes us to do something else, and so on because-because- in unbroken chain all the way to problem-is-resolved.
The conflict is Us vs. Problem.
The conflict is resolved by a sequence of actions which resolve the conflict -- after the problem is solved, there is no further conflict. (Happily Ever After)
Out there in our everyday reality, the reality your reader lives in and uses to judge the 'plausibility' of your fictional worldbuilding, there are nested conflicts.
We discussed nesting plots in Verisimilitude Vs. Reality parts 2 and 3, September 13 and 20, 2011.
To create nested plots, you need nested conflicts, which means you divide one huge abstract theme into sub-themes, factoring a philosophical conundrum into smaller pieces and arranging them one inside the other, like Russian dolls.
So I'm looking through the window of a TV show (in this case Leverage, but this process works with any show, movie or novel) - and imagining the audience, the reality they live in, what they know about it and what they don't know about it. I'm imagining the audience that Leverage is speaking to.
People love this show for a reason -- well, each person for a different reason -- but they see the show as trivial, as light entertainment, and of course it's not real. But it's plausible for a reason. We as writers need to know that reason. Or reasons.
The audience's emotional reactions come from their own unconscious assumptions and mostly from what they don't know about themselves.
Playing on that unconscious part of a reader's mind is called "art."
Remember in the Big Love Sci-Fi series we discussed the social boundaries between Private and Secret shifting, melting and reforming.
That's one of the huge philosophical issues younger readers are unaware of but affected by emotionally.
So private vs. secret can be a thematic conflict line that generates a plot (thousands of plots).
Another conflict line even bigger than private vs. secret can be Standardization vs. Customization
So let's make a little list:
CONFLICTS:
a) Secret vs. Private
b) Customization vs. Standardization
c) Statistics vs. Prejudice
Each of these 6 components of conflict represents a huge, complex, abstract, and powerful thematic concept.
Let's think about Customization vs. Standardization in our world and how we can use that nascent argument to create plot generating themes and conflicts.
In the 1800's the Industrial Revolution took off steaming into the 1900s where Henry Ford popularized The Assembly Line method of producing thousands of identical copies of a complicated thing.
The more complex machinery became, the less economically viable hand-building such machines became. With Ford's advent, the frustration of business men and industrialists with "craftsmen" who worked slowly and methodically to produce a non-uniform (custom made) product was resolved.
Read Toffler's Future Shock and the description of how our public schools adopted the "covert curriculum" of hammering kids into identical "workers" for assembly lines, because that's what Big Business needed schools to do (and of course Big Business was and is the source of political campaign funds that can not be ignored).
So until the World Wide Web, Microsoft, AOL, Google, Blogs, email, ebooks, etc, Standardization was the Holy Grail of Business.
Products had to be made uniform -- all alike -- or it wasn't cost effective.
But people weren't all alike. So business set out to create consumers who all wanted the same thing.
Radio advertising and then TV advertising worked to satisfy that requirement -- that uniform products required uniform consumers to want them, and uniformity was the solution to consumer's frustration with things that don't work.
Different Is Dead became the rallying cry of the 1940's and 1950's.
The 1960's brought the Internet and Star Trek and Spock who was DIFFERENT!!!
Star Trek portrayed on the ultra-uniform medium of series TV a UNIQUE INDIVIDUAL character. He stuck out like a sore thumb, and was admired, respected, obeyed and even loved by his crew-mates for his differences.
Vulcan was a culture that lauded the philosophy of I.D.I.C. -- Infinite Diversity In Infinite Combinations.
The 1970's ushered in an era of (Alvin Toffler's Future Shock was published in the 1970's and is in new editions today) an era of CUSTOMIZATION.
Toffler predicted the cottage industry of telecommuting and even named it. Today a lot of your customer service online is done via chat by workers working from home on customized schedules and individually varying computers.
Women's Lib and Martin Luther King all belong to this, but branch off into the conflict of Statistics vs. Prejudice.
Let's focus on this Customization vs. Standardization for a bit more.
This is a huge, multigeneration trend that most of your 20-something readers won't be aware of because this long perspective on history isn't taught in schools, nor is the philosophy behind it addressed below graduate level in college.
We are now in the crunch-zone of this conflict. Schools world wide hammer young kids into identical bricks.
The counter trend is only found in private schools for the gifted or rejected, schools that let young kids wander around a rich classroom and pick up things to learn about as they become interested.
Mass market education is still aimed at turning out identical product - workers for factories that no longer really exist.
Note how the Federal Department of Education (I'm in the USA and use that perspective), could be viewed as a huge and bloated agency created by combining agencies and then not purging out redundancies but rather fighting turf wars for good paying federal jobs. As a result of that, and various administrations (this is not party-specific) efforts to appease campaign finance sources and do the right thing by our kids anyway, we now have a Federal series of tests that all students have to pass.
That's standardizing people to function in a standardized world.
But as Toffler pointed out, we're not in a standardized world any more.
Small wonder we can't produce enough employable people. Small wonder there are whole segments of TV viewerships who see their lives as mashed down and unjustly ruined by these huge forces -- "the rich" or "the government" or whatever huge thing their squeaky voices can't reach.
That plight produces emotions that are likewise widespread. As a result, fiction that would not otherwise be popular, is popular.
Think like a Romance Writer for a moment. Can Romance be standardized?
Or is Romance the enemy of standardization?
Here's an article, I hope is still online, about facial recognition software, facebook, google, and online dating sites -- and the whole issue of using your "real" identity online.
http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/08/04/7254996-your-face-and-the-web-can-tell-everything-about-you
Remember the popularity of the Western Romance.
What are Western Romances about? Rugged individualists (not unlike the A-Team or the Leverage team).
Victorian Romance, Steampunk, you name it -- Romance is always about the misfit's unique qualification to succeed because of their differences not in spite of them. (so is Science Fiction, for that matter) And the TV show Leverage, the show Psych, the USA shows White Collar, Burn Notice, Royal Pains -- all of them feature unique individuals.
This country was founded by folks who didn't fit the mold back home and went pioneering into the wilderness. Those who survived to forge this country into a Nation were individualists who visualized a customized world, where each individual was valued for their unique qualities.
They lived in a "handmade world" where no two quilts were alike, no two butter churns were alike. People wrote with quills - bird feathers - and no two of them are alike. In fact, if you read original manuscripts from the 1700's even the most educated and erudite did not spell words in any uniform way, not even in the same document.. And precious few could read, though in the 1700's in America, that was changing.
Has anyone noted that there is a re-casting of the newspaper articles from the 1700's where folks were arguing about what kind of Nation we would become? It's in modern English now because the originals are almost incomprehensible, (wild spelling, archaic words, involuted sentences like I write) and it became an overnight New York Times best seller. The Federalist Papers. It's on amazon.com.
Standardization wasn't even a concept back then. There was no conflict, not a lot of stories to write, about the vast sea of identical people and the one individual who stands out from "the masses." "The Masses" as a concept didn't exist, though philosophical theorists were busily inventing the whole movement we label as "Liberal" or "Progressive" today.
One novel series I do love from that era though is Cooper's The Leather Stocking Tales. The story of two unique individuals reaching across a cultural gulf (European to Native American), against the backdrop of imported European armies fighting a war for territory. By that era, Armies were rows of standardized troops moving in unison. It may be that armies became the first standardization of people -- dating from Roman times, for sure.
The power of Rome lay in that standardizing of troops, maneuvers, uniforms. When Rome fell, England and Europe were left with Knights -- individuals in tin-can armor fighting for Honor.
Standardization , the assembly line, screws all the same size, brought vast wealth to this Nation, and a revolution to the world.
It also brought the idea of Unions, of the rights of the peasants, the poor, the downtrodden, the "masses" of identical, expendable canon fodder peasants, into a political world.
But we haven't won that battle yet. The USA is still the only country with our style of government -- every other country that elects governments that actually govern uses the Parliamentary System of the country the USA broke away from, England. The USA is still unique.
But there has arisen an entire society within the society of the USA - that might be a majority now - that values "fitting in" above "unique." Some are so desperate to make sure everyone fits in and is thus happy that they're willing to use force to make others fit in, and that makes for great conflict to generate stories.
That's the conflict most teen-romance features -- think Twilight. Harry Potter. The argument for the unique individual is presented in both those formidable series by the depiction of the environment and the people around the main characters, who stand out or are rejected by the masses of people who value being identical to others.
Next week, in Believing in Happily Ever After Part 4, we'll look at how to link two of these "super-themes" -- themes so huge you can't pitch them in a voice over in front of a TV series and call it a premise.
Secret vs. Private + Standardized vs. Customized
See if you can find how these two huge conflicts blend into a nested theme structure.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-1.html
Part 2 is:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-2.html
Last week, we left off in the midst of examining the TV Show Leverage noting that Leverage has a "Tell Don't Show" opening that sets out the premise starkly, and explicitly states the theme.
The opening voice-over is:
"The Rich And Powerful take what they want. We steal it back for you."
Now we're putting that TV show's premise and theme into the context of the world of the viewers it's aimed at, (you and me, actually, though Leverage is not a Romance.)
Consider, this is a world in which huge social forces (not the least of which is the Internet and dot-com companies that are going "public" on the stock exchange and wielding more power than any other kind of company before) are striving in two directions, creating conflict and a philosophical argument so big it's nearly impossible to see or define.
I parse it this way. (do your own parsing).
I see, via Leverage's window on the philosophical/fiction-theme world, the conflict as Customization Vs. Standardization.
Remember all the times I've sent you to read Alvin Toffler's non-fiction book, Future Shock. He gave me the insight to be able to see things in this light now.
Remember that the Essence of Story is Conflict.
Plot is a sequence of events on a because-line -- because this happened we have a problem, which causes us to do this, which results in that, which causes us to do something else, and so on because-because- in unbroken chain all the way to problem-is-resolved.
The conflict is Us vs. Problem.
The conflict is resolved by a sequence of actions which resolve the conflict -- after the problem is solved, there is no further conflict. (Happily Ever After)
Out there in our everyday reality, the reality your reader lives in and uses to judge the 'plausibility' of your fictional worldbuilding, there are nested conflicts.
We discussed nesting plots in Verisimilitude Vs. Reality parts 2 and 3, September 13 and 20, 2011.
To create nested plots, you need nested conflicts, which means you divide one huge abstract theme into sub-themes, factoring a philosophical conundrum into smaller pieces and arranging them one inside the other, like Russian dolls.
So I'm looking through the window of a TV show (in this case Leverage, but this process works with any show, movie or novel) - and imagining the audience, the reality they live in, what they know about it and what they don't know about it. I'm imagining the audience that Leverage is speaking to.
People love this show for a reason -- well, each person for a different reason -- but they see the show as trivial, as light entertainment, and of course it's not real. But it's plausible for a reason. We as writers need to know that reason. Or reasons.
The audience's emotional reactions come from their own unconscious assumptions and mostly from what they don't know about themselves.
Playing on that unconscious part of a reader's mind is called "art."
Remember in the Big Love Sci-Fi series we discussed the social boundaries between Private and Secret shifting, melting and reforming.
That's one of the huge philosophical issues younger readers are unaware of but affected by emotionally.
So private vs. secret can be a thematic conflict line that generates a plot (thousands of plots).
Another conflict line even bigger than private vs. secret can be Standardization vs. Customization
So let's make a little list:
CONFLICTS:
a) Secret vs. Private
b) Customization vs. Standardization
c) Statistics vs. Prejudice
Each of these 6 components of conflict represents a huge, complex, abstract, and powerful thematic concept.
Let's think about Customization vs. Standardization in our world and how we can use that nascent argument to create plot generating themes and conflicts.
In the 1800's the Industrial Revolution took off steaming into the 1900s where Henry Ford popularized The Assembly Line method of producing thousands of identical copies of a complicated thing.
The more complex machinery became, the less economically viable hand-building such machines became. With Ford's advent, the frustration of business men and industrialists with "craftsmen" who worked slowly and methodically to produce a non-uniform (custom made) product was resolved.
Read Toffler's Future Shock and the description of how our public schools adopted the "covert curriculum" of hammering kids into identical "workers" for assembly lines, because that's what Big Business needed schools to do (and of course Big Business was and is the source of political campaign funds that can not be ignored).
So until the World Wide Web, Microsoft, AOL, Google, Blogs, email, ebooks, etc, Standardization was the Holy Grail of Business.
Products had to be made uniform -- all alike -- or it wasn't cost effective.
But people weren't all alike. So business set out to create consumers who all wanted the same thing.
Radio advertising and then TV advertising worked to satisfy that requirement -- that uniform products required uniform consumers to want them, and uniformity was the solution to consumer's frustration with things that don't work.
Different Is Dead became the rallying cry of the 1940's and 1950's.
The 1960's brought the Internet and Star Trek and Spock who was DIFFERENT!!!
Star Trek portrayed on the ultra-uniform medium of series TV a UNIQUE INDIVIDUAL character. He stuck out like a sore thumb, and was admired, respected, obeyed and even loved by his crew-mates for his differences.
Vulcan was a culture that lauded the philosophy of I.D.I.C. -- Infinite Diversity In Infinite Combinations.
The 1970's ushered in an era of (Alvin Toffler's Future Shock was published in the 1970's and is in new editions today) an era of CUSTOMIZATION.
Toffler predicted the cottage industry of telecommuting and even named it. Today a lot of your customer service online is done via chat by workers working from home on customized schedules and individually varying computers.
Women's Lib and Martin Luther King all belong to this, but branch off into the conflict of Statistics vs. Prejudice.
Let's focus on this Customization vs. Standardization for a bit more.
This is a huge, multigeneration trend that most of your 20-something readers won't be aware of because this long perspective on history isn't taught in schools, nor is the philosophy behind it addressed below graduate level in college.
We are now in the crunch-zone of this conflict. Schools world wide hammer young kids into identical bricks.
The counter trend is only found in private schools for the gifted or rejected, schools that let young kids wander around a rich classroom and pick up things to learn about as they become interested.
Mass market education is still aimed at turning out identical product - workers for factories that no longer really exist.
Note how the Federal Department of Education (I'm in the USA and use that perspective), could be viewed as a huge and bloated agency created by combining agencies and then not purging out redundancies but rather fighting turf wars for good paying federal jobs. As a result of that, and various administrations (this is not party-specific) efforts to appease campaign finance sources and do the right thing by our kids anyway, we now have a Federal series of tests that all students have to pass.
That's standardizing people to function in a standardized world.
But as Toffler pointed out, we're not in a standardized world any more.
Small wonder we can't produce enough employable people. Small wonder there are whole segments of TV viewerships who see their lives as mashed down and unjustly ruined by these huge forces -- "the rich" or "the government" or whatever huge thing their squeaky voices can't reach.
That plight produces emotions that are likewise widespread. As a result, fiction that would not otherwise be popular, is popular.
Think like a Romance Writer for a moment. Can Romance be standardized?
Or is Romance the enemy of standardization?
Here's an article, I hope is still online, about facial recognition software, facebook, google, and online dating sites -- and the whole issue of using your "real" identity online.
http://redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/08/04/7254996-your-face-and-the-web-can-tell-everything-about-you
Remember the popularity of the Western Romance.
What are Western Romances about? Rugged individualists (not unlike the A-Team or the Leverage team).
Victorian Romance, Steampunk, you name it -- Romance is always about the misfit's unique qualification to succeed because of their differences not in spite of them. (so is Science Fiction, for that matter) And the TV show Leverage, the show Psych, the USA shows White Collar, Burn Notice, Royal Pains -- all of them feature unique individuals.
This country was founded by folks who didn't fit the mold back home and went pioneering into the wilderness. Those who survived to forge this country into a Nation were individualists who visualized a customized world, where each individual was valued for their unique qualities.
They lived in a "handmade world" where no two quilts were alike, no two butter churns were alike. People wrote with quills - bird feathers - and no two of them are alike. In fact, if you read original manuscripts from the 1700's even the most educated and erudite did not spell words in any uniform way, not even in the same document.. And precious few could read, though in the 1700's in America, that was changing.
Has anyone noted that there is a re-casting of the newspaper articles from the 1700's where folks were arguing about what kind of Nation we would become? It's in modern English now because the originals are almost incomprehensible, (wild spelling, archaic words, involuted sentences like I write) and it became an overnight New York Times best seller. The Federalist Papers. It's on amazon.com.
Standardization wasn't even a concept back then. There was no conflict, not a lot of stories to write, about the vast sea of identical people and the one individual who stands out from "the masses." "The Masses" as a concept didn't exist, though philosophical theorists were busily inventing the whole movement we label as "Liberal" or "Progressive" today.
One novel series I do love from that era though is Cooper's The Leather Stocking Tales. The story of two unique individuals reaching across a cultural gulf (European to Native American), against the backdrop of imported European armies fighting a war for territory. By that era, Armies were rows of standardized troops moving in unison. It may be that armies became the first standardization of people -- dating from Roman times, for sure.
The power of Rome lay in that standardizing of troops, maneuvers, uniforms. When Rome fell, England and Europe were left with Knights -- individuals in tin-can armor fighting for Honor.
Standardization , the assembly line, screws all the same size, brought vast wealth to this Nation, and a revolution to the world.
It also brought the idea of Unions, of the rights of the peasants, the poor, the downtrodden, the "masses" of identical, expendable canon fodder peasants, into a political world.
But we haven't won that battle yet. The USA is still the only country with our style of government -- every other country that elects governments that actually govern uses the Parliamentary System of the country the USA broke away from, England. The USA is still unique.
But there has arisen an entire society within the society of the USA - that might be a majority now - that values "fitting in" above "unique." Some are so desperate to make sure everyone fits in and is thus happy that they're willing to use force to make others fit in, and that makes for great conflict to generate stories.
That's the conflict most teen-romance features -- think Twilight. Harry Potter. The argument for the unique individual is presented in both those formidable series by the depiction of the environment and the people around the main characters, who stand out or are rejected by the masses of people who value being identical to others.
Next week, in Believing in Happily Ever After Part 4, we'll look at how to link two of these "super-themes" -- themes so huge you can't pitch them in a voice over in front of a TV series and call it a premise.
Secret vs. Private + Standardized vs. Customized
See if you can find how these two huge conflicts blend into a nested theme structure.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
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