Two blockbuster classic SF films based on an essential child-fantasy (rescue me from this oppressive life; or "Get Me Out Of Here" -- or "Beam Me Up, Scotty!") are worth comparing because they are the obverse of each other.
When you add in Harry Potter, it's even more interesting.
Last week we discussed Finding the Opening of a story.
http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/06/finding-story-opening-part-1-action-vs.html
Avatar and The Day The Earth Stood Still have the same opening, while Harry Potter has a different opening.
The "opening" moment of a story is when SOMETHING CHANGES.
In film, you "lay pipe" as Blake Snyder puts it in his Save The Cat! Series -- you orient the viewer within the life that is about to change, within the framework of the Hero's situation, or the society or civilization's situation.
In a novel you CHANGE SOMETHING, then orient the reader.
Each venue borrows the other venue's technique, just to keep people off balance and interested, but those are general rules.
If you're teaching yourself to write, first do 5 or 10 stories with one of those techniques, then another 5 or 10 with the other technique, master doing them, then interchanging them. After you've fully internalized them and succeeded in placing stories using these techniques and analyzed your reader feedback, then venture into inventing variations.
But to start off, study why each of these works reliably with wide-wide-WIDE audiences.
In Avatar, we meet Our Hero at the moment when he WAKES UP -- generally in text narrative storytelling that "Hero Wakes Up In Strange Place" is a recipe for failure to engage the reader.
But in film you have the two channels of communication with the viewer that you don't have in text. In film you have VISUALS that contain information (we're on a space ship and the hero is waking from cryostorage is all conveyed by visuals in a space of time that narrative can't achieve), and you have SOUND that can carry information as well as mood and build suspense.
With just words in front of a reader, you are much more limited. In fact, in screenwriting you are limited to words and a lot of white-space on the page to engage a producer's imagination. So in essence, a writer has the same problem in both media.
The question is, "What will interest the reader in this story?"
You have two parameters to fit your imagination into so that what you're thinking will be couched in interesting terms for a readership/viewership:
a) Where is the origin of the conflict that will be resolved at the end of this story?
b) What is it about this story that this readership/viewership will find FASCINATING?
In other words, the opening of the story has to presage, (technical term is FORESHADOW) the PUNCH you are going to deliver, but not deliver that punch at the opening.
If you open on a PUNCH (i.e. an action scene, army combat, explosions, destruction) then you have to keep PUNCHING with each punch coming harder, bigger, longer, more spectacular and with higher and higher and HIGHER stakes.
In classic theater, there is the adage "less is more" -- and so the quiet, slow, creeping opening which is much LESS than what you will deliver, is actually MORE effective.
So look at the story of AVATAR.
The story actually has two beginnings that many writers might be tempted to write out in detail:
1) When the twin brother dies and how that grief hits Our Hero
2) When Our Hero becomes paralyzed, and all the usual angst/grief/remorse/shock/anger etc that goes with the story of such a physical loss for a physical person.
Note in AVATAR the combat-grunt-corporal loses use of his legs, but the intellectual-trained-knowledge-oriented twin loses his life, leaving the physically oriented twin a means of regaining the use of his legs.
What a potent story, what deep textured drama, what karmic questions and tormenting ethical decisions?
A novelist who "has the idea" for this story would be tempted to dive right into the tale where the two brothers have their conflicts over being physical or being intellectual, then race headlong into the major tragedies that spin off into the horrendous decisions regarding the extremely expensive Avatar body.
The film maker, however, STARTS way after the end of the novel and barely mentions in a couple of lines of dialogue the situations that "must have been" ever so dramatic. Our Physical Hero barely mentions his Twin Brother The Genius, and we have no idea if there was resentment or strife between them!
So AVATAR the film starts where Our Hero who will hurl himself into an artificial body for the rest of his life (which decision is never debated with all the angst it deserves) first wakes up at his new job -- driving an Avatar body on an alien planet where he can't breathe the atmosphere as a human.
Think about that. AVATAR starts not where the Hero DIVES INTO A NEW LIFE but where he actually hits the water. The story doesn't start where he decides to take the job, or where he sets foot on the ship -- no, the story starts where he wakes up.
Note after "pipe is laid" -- the first scene is Our Hero running free in his new Avatar body. Think of the symbolism of that, and how we discussed icons on this blog.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/turning-action-into-romance.html -- see the two iconic images, the poster of Face/Off and the cover of Gini Koch's novel TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/01/constructing-opening-of-action-romance.html
Avatar as a film takes off on the fantasy that sucks the young into videogames and creates the yearning to enter that alternate reality and stay there. The very title of the film suggests gaming because plays choose an "avatar" (just as we do when creating a social network profile.)
So look again at a) and b) requirements for an opening.
a) conflict that will be resolved in AVATAR is "to walk or not to walk again." It exists in this OPENING scene only as the inoperative legs of the Hero, which situation is not explained until we've already become fascinated.
That conflict is not defined until Quaritch offers Our Hero (Jake Sully of the jarhead clan) the side-job of spying on his employers, the biologists studying the planet. The "pay" for this side-job for the military against the scientists is to get his human body's legs fixed and walk again. His background is military (jarhead) so he seemingly has no conflict about taking this side-job. The resolution is that our Hero does walk again, but in his Avatar body which he now inhabits permanently.
b) the conflict about Our Hero's legs is NOT what's fascinating to the target audience. This film baits in the audience by a glimpse of the vast POWER of a huge corporate structure exploring space, gaining ownership of a whole PLANET and the "right" to mine that planet for "unobtainium" -- the most valuable substance known. The real villains of the piece (as in real life) never appear on screen. A "corporation" doesn't have a face. You can't argue with it, you can only defeat it. That vast power is glimpsed manipulating "the little people" who have their own life-agendas (pure science; getting legs back; proving military dominance). Space exploration per se is not what's fascinating here. POWER in the hands of the venal, short-sighted humans who would destroy life to strip-mine for wealth is fascinating.
So the STORY OPENING for Avatar is where CORPORATE POWER resurrects LITTLE HERO to a NEW LIFE. The ENDING is "little guy wins." It's David vs. Goliath or Gulliver's Travels. There's nothing original in this film except the special effects technologies (which were new then.) Check out the writer/producer/director's career on imdb.com You don't start a film career with a script like this, nor will it work well to start a novelist's career.
Now look at THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL.
The HERO is the plain, ordinary human woman with family, ordinary professor, ordinary but somewhat flaky minded dreamers on Earth.
The Story Opening of THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL is where THE UNKNOWN comes into the ORDINARY LIVES (space ship lands on White House Lawn). The ending sees "ordinary life" changed forever, and as in Avatar "Love Conquers All."
Notice how the ending of DAY is the story before the beginning of AVATAR? In DAY our Hero hurls herself into The Unknown, into the spaceship. DAY ends with the decision to seize the unknown, get on the ship. AVATAR begins with what happens after seizing the unknown, getting off the ship.
Ends and Beginnings have something in common. Study that. Stories are circular, or at least sine waves.
Life is full of cycles and epicycles which is why the study of Astrology is useful to writers regardless of whether you "believe" any of it.
One common error beginning writers make is to confuse the ending and the beginning of the story they are trying to tell. The Opening and the Closing points are not necessarily the same as the beginning and the end. Very often drama is better served by "closing" before the "ending" and letting the reader imagine their own ending.
So compare DAY with AVATAR again. In DAY, THE UNKNOWN comes into THE ORDINARY. In AVATAR the Story Opening is where ORDINARY LIVES come into THE UNKNOWN.
It is the same opening in obverse.
And this is the mainstay of the "formula" for the opening of any story -- where two contrasting elements meet and conflict, changing both in the end.
A story does not necessary OPEN at the BEGINNING of the story, and it isn't always necessary to recount or dramatize the beginning if you have a good opening.
Now consider HARRY POTTER -- go back to the first novel.
Harry is ORDINARY BOY living in oppressive but ordinary circumstances it seems. What's extraordinary about his home life is revealed as his history is peeled back, and most of the extraordinary part is in his distant family or deceased family, not the adults who are raising him or his intolerable cousin-in-residence whom we meet in Chapter One.
But many kids feel oppressed and out of place at the threshold of adolescence. Part of the job of the YA category of fiction is to rationalize that formless fear/fascination of adulthood's confrontation with Identity.
This is a biological process common to all humanity. We all live with the conviction that who we really are is not who friends, family, employers etc think we are. Hence the gamer's Avatar, the avatar on your profile, and some people's cherishing the ability to post online anonymously -- or the utter fascination with Second Life as a game - can be seen as the adult extension of that state of mind.
So Harry Potter is growing up in a family that doesn't seem to him to "know" who he is, and he doesn't know who he is. Worse, he has no clue (he discovers) who his parents were.
Into his ordinary, dreary, intolerable life comes THE UNKNOWN -- the message carried by the Owl, sweeping him away to a boarding school where he can become a new person to himself.
But it's not THE UNKNOWN from outside that comes into his life -- as in DAY where a UFO lands, or in AVATAR where a human lands. With Harry the Unknown is inside him, unbeknownst to him. The Unknown doesn't come from outside, and he isn't lured, bribed or injected into the Unknown -- he discovers it inside himself, as we all do at adolescence. He doesn't get to leave his horrid life behind and emerge as a butterfly from a cocoon as in AVATAR. And he doesn't get rescued from mundanity by Love as in DAY. He meets himself in the legacy of his parents, a legacy in his genes but denied by those who raised him.
Compare all three openings, and notice the similarities among the obvious differences. When you've nailed that, you'll nail the opening of your own story, if not the beginning.
Think about how, with the years, Harry learns of all the baggage left him by his parents and matures into the young man who can handle it all.
But the STORY OPENING occurs long after the STORY BEGINNING (where his parents die).
Harry arrives at his new school and doesn't know he's starting a mad scramble to catch up with his life and learn the truth about what happened to his parents -- and prevent that from happening to him (and others).
Imagine what it would have been like for him to know what he was getting into before he first boarded the train (or spaceship, depending how you look at it) to his new school. He would have been tied in knots with dread and terror. He wouldn't have behaved as well, found his feet and begun to unfold into an adult able to handle Situations.
Imagine what AVATAR'S Hero would have done if he'd known he was going to end up stuck in an alien body when he first woke from cryosleep.
And what Earthwoman could really consider bonding to an Alien?
Uh, wait a minute.... isn't that what we imagine on this blog?
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Showing posts with label Avatar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Avatar. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Turning Action Into Romance
You all know that I'm an SF writer and professional reviewer - if not, please look at this post on the inside of a reviewer's life.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/glimpse-of-reviewers-life.html
The subject I've been pursuing here for the last few years is the converging of the SF/F fields and the Romance field, and the problem of how Romance can gain the high regard of the general public that it so richly deserves.
Recently we've seen the release of yet another Romantic Comedy film, SHE'S OUT OF MY LEAGUE, March 12, 2010:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0815236/
And we ask why is "Romance" only acceptable in Hollywood as a "Comedy?"
OK, there was ROMANCING THE STONE and THE AFRICAN QUEEN, but think about Romance-hybrids and box-office respect. Almost all the recent romance films are hybrid genre.
So we note the commentary on IMDB for SHE'S OUT OF MY LEAGUE, and the whole focus on "it's funny" rather than "it's romantic."
The hybrid genre labels as I've pointed out in previous posts are formulated as DECORATION + PLOT-STYLE. SHE'S OUT OF MY LEAGUE is a ROMANTIC COMEDY - a plot structured as a comedy with romance as the decoration. And rom-com is a big seller in Hollywood now, especially in indie films.
Look at the film AVATAR. It's action with relationship as a decoration. At most, Romance is a complication to the action-plot.
But are we seeing a trend gathering toward merging the plot and the decoration into a single, united whole?
What would it take to accomplish that merger?
In a word, CHARACTER.
The essential core of the main character's character has to shift in order to merge the two elements of a hybridized genre. What is considered admirable in a person of solid character has to change. That is, the value, or the standard of admirability has to change from being entirely of one of the genres to being a balance of both genres.
When this kind of shift happens in a culture, new icons emerge, new IMAGES that "tell the story."
Remember what Blake Snyder taught us in SAVE THE CAT! which he learned from his elder mentors - a screenplay is a story in pictures. And remember what I noted about the film AVATAR
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/tv-shows-leverage-and-psych.html
The requirement for a broad "reach" needed for a high budget film is that the whole story is pictures, not dialogue, and the pictures have to translate across cultural boundaries -- the pictures have to be exportable because the USA market can't support high budget films by itself.
Text-fiction writers have to evoke images with words, and so must choose images just as deliberately as a high budget film writer would.
The audience has become fragmented in the USA because our culture has shattered and is reforming around new icons, new images. The hybrid-genre fiction we're seeing now is a result of the search for new icons as change accelerates.
Here are two images to ponder deeply because they say "it all." These might be blended into a new icon if we can find the common meaning.
The cover of TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN by Gini Koch (DAW Books April 2010)
Gini Koch is a pen name of Jeanne Cook
http://eposic.net/blog/archives/196
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51tZtzTeQjL._SL500_AA240_.jpg
Note he's holding a gun in his left hand while she's holding a gun in her right. It's two people turned toward each other, guns in hand but neglected.
Now look at this still from a movie titled FACE/OFF.
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Film/Pix/pictures/2009/5/21/1242924794594/John-Travolta-and-Nicolas-001.jpg
Pay off ... John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in Face/Off. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Paramount
Two men stand almost arm's length from each other, each holding a gun out straight into the other's face, faced-off.
I ran across this image in an article referenced on twitter:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/may/22/shane-black-12-rounds
The subtitle of the article:
Summer means action at the cinema, so here's Shane Black, the master of the art, giving Sam Delaney a masterclass in thrills
THRILLS???? Romance isn't thrill packed?
Notice the stance in the FACE/OFF photo - the distance - and how the guns are held. The IMAGE is all, the COMPOSITION carries the theme non-verbally.
Now just ponder and ponder that.
TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN (an excellent novel!) back cover copy reads thusly:
---------
IT WAS JUST ANOTHER DAY IN ARIZONA AND THEN THE MONSTER SHOWED UP --
Marketing manager Katherine "Kitty" Katt had just finished a day on jury duty. When she stepped out of the Pueblo Caliente courthouse, all she was thinking about was the work she had to get caught up on. Then her attention was caught by a fight between a couple - a domestic dispute that looked like it was about to turn ugly. But ugly didn't even begin to cover it when the "man" suddenly transformed into a huge, winged monster right out of a grade Z science fiction movie and went on a deadly killing spree. In hindsight, Kitty realized she probably should have panicked and run screaming the way everyone around her was doing. Instead she got mad, searched her purse for a weapon, and, armed with a Mont Blanc pen, sprinted into action to take down the alien.
In the middle of all the screeching and the ensuing chaos, a tall handsome hunk of a guy in an Armani suit suddenly appeared beside her, examined the body, introduced himself as Jeff Martini with "the agency," called out to an Armani-clad colleague to perform crowd control, and then insisted on leading her to a nearby limo to talk to his "boss."
And that was how Kitty's new life among the aliens began ...
-----------
TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN delivers as promised, luscious hunk, complex and progressively sexual relationship, cognitive dissonance, and a heroine modeled after "Mrs. King" of "Scarecrow And Mrs. King" the TV show. Solidly crafted writing with the complex backgrounding handled with a minimum of expository lumping. Highly recommended.
But not recommended just as a good read. This is a book that explains a lot about what's going on in this real world of publishing.
Notice this "science so advanced it seems like magic" novel is published by DAW as Science Fiction, not fantasy - and is styled with all the relationship and sexuality you see in modern Paranormal Romance. The science is only science because we are told it is science not magic, but there are strong "magical" elements there too.
Now study those two images again and think ICON.
Think of the writing styling emerging from the cross-genre trends, especially hybrid-Romance styles, and now holding those images in mind, let's look at the entire field from the point of view of a literary agent.
There's a wonderful blog I've been following for some time by a really good agent who also seems to be a very good hearted person (not an odd combination among agents, mind you, but Rachelle Gardner here is an excellent example of that hybrid combination. Just read some of her other blog entries to see that.)
I found the following blog entry where Rachelle presents a query from a new author seeking representation that grabbed her attention and prompted her to ask to see the manuscript.
http://cba-ramblings.blogspot.com/2010/03/query-critique-dealers-of-light.html
I read the query and the 30 or so responses already posted with great attention, noting it was fraught with passive verbs and passive sentence constructs indicating passive plotting or wrong choice of POV character that would disqualify it from consideration as a screenplay pitch, or as a novel query in SF or Fantasy genres.
I thought about the two iconic images posted above, and about TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN, and about everything marketers, book publicists, agents, editors and most of all film producers have gone to such great lengths to teach me about how to project professionalism into concise pitches.
TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN is almost the same novel as the one described in this query Rachelle Gardner posted, except for Kitt's attitude, which is anything but passive. Kitt is not "drawn into" this conflict; she plunges into it bare-fisted!
Note the only passive construction in the back cover copy of TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN is "her attention was caught." I would have rewritten that to "when she saw" and would have tweaked a lot of the other wording in that copy to sharpen it according to the rules another literary agent, Kristen Nelson illustrated with Linnea Sinclair's back cover copy at Denvention III:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/denvention-3-walk-con.html
But the TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN cover copy gets the point across about this very interesting woman, Kitty, a MANAGER heading toward the peak of her formidable career, who reacts out of the core of her personality to take charge and exercise her innate sense of responsibility and thereby plunges herself into a whole new reality and a new life.
That "reacts out of the core" and "plunges into" phrasing comes from Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series which explains why these attitudes are required in a POV character and this construction is an absolute requirement for a feature film screenplay.
I thought about all the kick-ass heroines leading the charge in Paranormal Romance acceptability to the general audiences and especially about the size of the world-audience for AVATAR.
One of the signatures of the Fantasy-SF-kick-ass-heroine novel is that the male and female leads have to be equals, whether they both know it or not. Very often the conflict is about establishing that equality as a prerequisite for a blazing-hot-romance.
If they are not equals, then any sexual relationship smacks of abuse to some (not all) of our modern sensibilities.
Part of our culture has already adopted this icon of equality as the ideal in relationship, and part has rejected it resoundingly. The interesting thing is that sometimes both parts reside in the same reader. The question then becomes, "Are the proportions of these parts that accept or reject equality still changing? If so, in which direction?"
Remember the 1983 film SCARECROW & MRS. KING, and the 2005 film MR.& MRS. SMITH which I discussed:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html
Compare the plot of MR.& MRS. SMITH which starts and ends in a marriage counselor's office with the query chosen by Rachelle Gardner.
We're in the midst of a churning harrowing of our cultural values. The pivot point may have been signified by the film WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT, the story of Tina Turner's emergence from abused and neglected child to towering icon of the music scene.
WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT (1993)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108551/
Compare that with the film of same title about modernizing the dating game
WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT (2002)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425645/
Notice the 10 and 20 year intervals and correlate with the generational tastes issues I discussed with respect to Pluto transits:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html
And now, something new is happening.
Look again at the images above - the two with guns drawn, facing one another vs. guns hanging neglected in lax hands and the two embracing one another.
I look at that and I see two images of relationship based on equality of power, authority, efficaciousness, fearlessness, self-respect and mutual respect.
What do you see?
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/glimpse-of-reviewers-life.html
The subject I've been pursuing here for the last few years is the converging of the SF/F fields and the Romance field, and the problem of how Romance can gain the high regard of the general public that it so richly deserves.
Recently we've seen the release of yet another Romantic Comedy film, SHE'S OUT OF MY LEAGUE, March 12, 2010:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0815236/
And we ask why is "Romance" only acceptable in Hollywood as a "Comedy?"
OK, there was ROMANCING THE STONE and THE AFRICAN QUEEN, but think about Romance-hybrids and box-office respect. Almost all the recent romance films are hybrid genre.
So we note the commentary on IMDB for SHE'S OUT OF MY LEAGUE, and the whole focus on "it's funny" rather than "it's romantic."
The hybrid genre labels as I've pointed out in previous posts are formulated as DECORATION + PLOT-STYLE. SHE'S OUT OF MY LEAGUE is a ROMANTIC COMEDY - a plot structured as a comedy with romance as the decoration. And rom-com is a big seller in Hollywood now, especially in indie films.
Look at the film AVATAR. It's action with relationship as a decoration. At most, Romance is a complication to the action-plot.
But are we seeing a trend gathering toward merging the plot and the decoration into a single, united whole?
What would it take to accomplish that merger?
In a word, CHARACTER.
The essential core of the main character's character has to shift in order to merge the two elements of a hybridized genre. What is considered admirable in a person of solid character has to change. That is, the value, or the standard of admirability has to change from being entirely of one of the genres to being a balance of both genres.
When this kind of shift happens in a culture, new icons emerge, new IMAGES that "tell the story."
Remember what Blake Snyder taught us in SAVE THE CAT! which he learned from his elder mentors - a screenplay is a story in pictures. And remember what I noted about the film AVATAR
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/tv-shows-leverage-and-psych.html
The requirement for a broad "reach" needed for a high budget film is that the whole story is pictures, not dialogue, and the pictures have to translate across cultural boundaries -- the pictures have to be exportable because the USA market can't support high budget films by itself.
Text-fiction writers have to evoke images with words, and so must choose images just as deliberately as a high budget film writer would.
The audience has become fragmented in the USA because our culture has shattered and is reforming around new icons, new images. The hybrid-genre fiction we're seeing now is a result of the search for new icons as change accelerates.
Here are two images to ponder deeply because they say "it all." These might be blended into a new icon if we can find the common meaning.
The cover of TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN by Gini Koch (DAW Books April 2010)
Gini Koch is a pen name of Jeanne Cook
http://eposic.net/blog/archives/196
Note he's holding a gun in his left hand while she's holding a gun in her right. It's two people turned toward each other, guns in hand but neglected.
Now look at this still from a movie titled FACE/OFF.
Pay off ... John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in Face/Off. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Paramount
Two men stand almost arm's length from each other, each holding a gun out straight into the other's face, faced-off.
I ran across this image in an article referenced on twitter:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/may/22/shane-black-12-rounds
The subtitle of the article:
Summer means action at the cinema, so here's Shane Black, the master of the art, giving Sam Delaney a masterclass in thrills
THRILLS???? Romance isn't thrill packed?
Notice the stance in the FACE/OFF photo - the distance - and how the guns are held. The IMAGE is all, the COMPOSITION carries the theme non-verbally.
Now just ponder and ponder that.
TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN (an excellent novel!) back cover copy reads thusly:
---------
IT WAS JUST ANOTHER DAY IN ARIZONA AND THEN THE MONSTER SHOWED UP --
Marketing manager Katherine "Kitty" Katt had just finished a day on jury duty. When she stepped out of the Pueblo Caliente courthouse, all she was thinking about was the work she had to get caught up on. Then her attention was caught by a fight between a couple - a domestic dispute that looked like it was about to turn ugly. But ugly didn't even begin to cover it when the "man" suddenly transformed into a huge, winged monster right out of a grade Z science fiction movie and went on a deadly killing spree. In hindsight, Kitty realized she probably should have panicked and run screaming the way everyone around her was doing. Instead she got mad, searched her purse for a weapon, and, armed with a Mont Blanc pen, sprinted into action to take down the alien.
In the middle of all the screeching and the ensuing chaos, a tall handsome hunk of a guy in an Armani suit suddenly appeared beside her, examined the body, introduced himself as Jeff Martini with "the agency," called out to an Armani-clad colleague to perform crowd control, and then insisted on leading her to a nearby limo to talk to his "boss."
And that was how Kitty's new life among the aliens began ...
-----------
TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN delivers as promised, luscious hunk, complex and progressively sexual relationship, cognitive dissonance, and a heroine modeled after "Mrs. King" of "Scarecrow And Mrs. King" the TV show. Solidly crafted writing with the complex backgrounding handled with a minimum of expository lumping. Highly recommended.
But not recommended just as a good read. This is a book that explains a lot about what's going on in this real world of publishing.
Notice this "science so advanced it seems like magic" novel is published by DAW as Science Fiction, not fantasy - and is styled with all the relationship and sexuality you see in modern Paranormal Romance. The science is only science because we are told it is science not magic, but there are strong "magical" elements there too.
Now study those two images again and think ICON.
Think of the writing styling emerging from the cross-genre trends, especially hybrid-Romance styles, and now holding those images in mind, let's look at the entire field from the point of view of a literary agent.
There's a wonderful blog I've been following for some time by a really good agent who also seems to be a very good hearted person (not an odd combination among agents, mind you, but Rachelle Gardner here is an excellent example of that hybrid combination. Just read some of her other blog entries to see that.)
I found the following blog entry where Rachelle presents a query from a new author seeking representation that grabbed her attention and prompted her to ask to see the manuscript.
http://cba-ramblings.blogspot.com/2010/03/query-critique-dealers-of-light.html
I read the query and the 30 or so responses already posted with great attention, noting it was fraught with passive verbs and passive sentence constructs indicating passive plotting or wrong choice of POV character that would disqualify it from consideration as a screenplay pitch, or as a novel query in SF or Fantasy genres.
I thought about the two iconic images posted above, and about TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN, and about everything marketers, book publicists, agents, editors and most of all film producers have gone to such great lengths to teach me about how to project professionalism into concise pitches.
TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN is almost the same novel as the one described in this query Rachelle Gardner posted, except for Kitt's attitude, which is anything but passive. Kitt is not "drawn into" this conflict; she plunges into it bare-fisted!
Note the only passive construction in the back cover copy of TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN is "her attention was caught." I would have rewritten that to "when she saw" and would have tweaked a lot of the other wording in that copy to sharpen it according to the rules another literary agent, Kristen Nelson illustrated with Linnea Sinclair's back cover copy at Denvention III:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/denvention-3-walk-con.html
But the TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN cover copy gets the point across about this very interesting woman, Kitty, a MANAGER heading toward the peak of her formidable career, who reacts out of the core of her personality to take charge and exercise her innate sense of responsibility and thereby plunges herself into a whole new reality and a new life.
That "reacts out of the core" and "plunges into" phrasing comes from Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series which explains why these attitudes are required in a POV character and this construction is an absolute requirement for a feature film screenplay.
I thought about all the kick-ass heroines leading the charge in Paranormal Romance acceptability to the general audiences and especially about the size of the world-audience for AVATAR.
One of the signatures of the Fantasy-SF-kick-ass-heroine novel is that the male and female leads have to be equals, whether they both know it or not. Very often the conflict is about establishing that equality as a prerequisite for a blazing-hot-romance.
If they are not equals, then any sexual relationship smacks of abuse to some (not all) of our modern sensibilities.
Part of our culture has already adopted this icon of equality as the ideal in relationship, and part has rejected it resoundingly. The interesting thing is that sometimes both parts reside in the same reader. The question then becomes, "Are the proportions of these parts that accept or reject equality still changing? If so, in which direction?"
Remember the 1983 film SCARECROW & MRS. KING, and the 2005 film MR.& MRS. SMITH which I discussed:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html
Compare the plot of MR.& MRS. SMITH which starts and ends in a marriage counselor's office with the query chosen by Rachelle Gardner.
We're in the midst of a churning harrowing of our cultural values. The pivot point may have been signified by the film WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT, the story of Tina Turner's emergence from abused and neglected child to towering icon of the music scene.
WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT (1993)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108551/
Compare that with the film of same title about modernizing the dating game
WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT (2002)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425645/
Notice the 10 and 20 year intervals and correlate with the generational tastes issues I discussed with respect to Pluto transits:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html
And now, something new is happening.
Look again at the images above - the two with guns drawn, facing one another vs. guns hanging neglected in lax hands and the two embracing one another.
I look at that and I see two images of relationship based on equality of power, authority, efficaciousness, fearlessness, self-respect and mutual respect.
What do you see?
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Competing For A Mate
On twitter I found the following somewhat rhetorical question - or perhaps perennial complaint:
jeannevb Divorce lawyer on train talking nonstop on phone w client. Y can't ppl be civil/mature during divorce & remember they USED to luv ea other?
One possible explanation lies at the interface between love and business.
The dynamics of business competition for a market share leading to the resulting monetary profit have altogether too-spooky-much in common with the dynamics of a bid for a share of a partner's romantic attention and the resulting boost to self-esteem from being chosen and loved.
Having believed oneself to be chosen and loved - only to discover it is not so leaves one with less self esteem than before the romance.
Believing that one has received Love triggers an investment of giving Love, of giving the Self. This great out-pouring of the self can create an inner deficit, but in real Love that doesn't matter. Eventually, it all flows back in even greater abundance.
It's the same with a manufacturer who sells you a product, which you open and use, then return for a full refund. The manufacturer has invested more than just the price of the product, and thus has poured out more than can ever be recouped because a return means bad word-of-mouth rumors around the product.
Manufacturers figure returns into their list prices.
People don't figure returns in when they give their hearts to another only to have their S.O. choose a third person instead.
Divorce is as bitterly powerful whether you're legally married or living together. The investment is the same. The loss is felt as robbery, or worse a scam.
We read, write, and extol stories about the eternal triangle. Two women want the same man. Two men want the same women. Three men. Three women. Whatever the triangle, one will be chosen. The other not.
And sometimes, even after choice and full investment, decisions can be changed.
Mating seems to be a zero sum game (where if one wins, the other must therefore "lose.")
Many Alien Romance novels are actually about trying to change that situation of the zero-sum-game. I have to refer you to my interstellar, human/non-human love story novels, Molt Brother and City Of A Million Legends (both available as e-books on fictionwise.com - for free chapters see the middle of http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com ) as examples of "different" ways humans can arrange their family affairs.
There can be arrangements where 3 make a couple. If it works, who's to complain? We can always point to Biblical stories about really strange living arrangements.
As I pointed out on #scifichat (on twitter where I'm jlichtenberg) on Friday Jan 15th, 2010, fiction writing is actually, when you come right down to the essence of the process, merely editing reality.
We take a point of view, (a theme), narrow the angle (select a character), and present a picture of reality that is both actually real and totally not-real. But because it's not-real, it is actually more real than reality.
That is the conundrum created by "modeling" reality as a scientist builds a mathematical model of a system in order to predict the behavior of the real system. The simplification of the "model" allows the moving parts to become comprehensible. But the simplification makes the whole thing very not-real.
Any resemblance to reality is purely accidental, as the disclaimer goes.
I have repeatedly mentioned that the whole structure of the business of "being a writer" -- of being self-employed as a freelance writer in fiction or non-fiction -- has changed totally with the advent of the e-book, of Print on Demand, and perhaps most markedly, of digital video and YouTube.
These changes are more profound than the changes brought about by the invention of the microprocessor chip.
Our fiction consuming customers now spend most of what used to be "reading time" either watching TV, DVD movies, or online videos. For both instruction and entertainment, people now prefer a real "show don't tell" in the form of a video.
Online comics and novels told in picture-panels (both animated and not), as well as games like World of Warcraft and Second Life absorb the time that such creative and intellectually developed people would have spent reading printed books say, 50 years ago (or even maybe 30 years ago).
Meanwhile, the whole generation born to a world when radio drama was THE new-fangled thing has been dying off. Those folks were readers, too, and though they enjoyed an occasional theater movie, really never learned to program a VCR.
It's not just taste in entertainment sources that has changed. It's a turnover in generations that has brought to the peak purchasing years a generation raised on the internet.
The current set of 40 year olds raising their own kids barely remember a time when their home didn't have a computer, and only vaguely remember that computers weren't originally attached to the internet. Most of them remember the tweedle-tweet of dialup song.
Those folks, raised in an online environment learned "keyboarding" in school, and spent a good portion of their college years working on a screen instead of on paper. Today, they earn their livings staring at computer screens.
And these are the tiny slice of the world who would have become book readers.
Those who read as children don't read as many books today as their parents did when their parents were 40.
There used to be an estimated 10% of the population that read 3 or 4 novels a year. They were considered our customers, the audience writers had to write to, to "hit" to sell enough copies to get paid enough to buy groceries.
There still are young people becoming addicted to text-reading for pleasure, but the % of the total population that does that has been shrinking.
I haven't seen any really recent statistics on this, but judging from the way big publishers are twitching this way and that every time something changes in the e-book market, I suspect that the total percentage of people who read fiction for fun may actually have started increasing again -- but only on the e-book side.
There is a whole population of commuters, busy carpool drivers (who have to arrive early to get a good spot in front of the school, then sit for 20 minutes), take-the-kids-to-the-park parents, stop-at-the-doctor-on-the-way-home-and-wait errand runners, people in a hurry-up-and-wait lifestyle who are opting to spend their waiting intervals reading e-books.
Of course, they also play games on their cell phones, read twitter, scan the news, and text-text-text, not to mention gab-gab-gab.
But kicking back with a good book no longer requires carrying even a paperback stuffed in a pocket. And you don't have to depend on a doctor's waiting room to have a current magazine either. Read magazines on your cell, or on Kindle and other readers.
The price of paper books is going up and up (because in mass market, volume determines price), while the price of e-books and electronic copies of magazines seems to be going down and down because the e-book doesn't have to be mass market to turn a profit.
Big players like Barnes&Noble and Amazon are trying to capture and cage a segment of that e-reader marketplace.
Which brings me back to "competing for a mate."
The Romance plot resembles Marketing in a host of particulars.
Marketers are focused on "luring" you with "enticing" advertisements designed to attract your attention with the promise of pleasure or satisfaction.
Typically women (and men too) "package" themselves with clothing that makes a "political statement" or an "availability" statement about themselves. Or maybe a "prosperity" statement. Who hunts for a poor mate on purpose?
Marketers compete for your attention and your money.
The un-mated compete for attention -- and maybe a dinner date and more.
Now we have online dating services that leverage that competition for a potential mate -- as a business model.
Finding a mate is a business which, to be profitable, needs a good "business model" (a way to take raw input and create output that shows a profit).
Business is often viewed as "combat" -- often in the form of Chess or less elegantly in the form of Football. The language is the same as any action novel would use -- "beat the competition" = "beat the enemy."
Finding a mate is often viewed the same way. A woman may dress to "out-shine" her rival at a party, or very possibly to "vanquish that bitch once and for all." Competitive dressing is learned in High School. (Just watch Buffy The Vampire Slayer episodes!)
And finding a mate is all about "possession" as is business.
"He's MINE!" she snarls just as the businessman closing a deal on a hotel at a prestigious address might snarl, "That's my hotel now!"
Avariciousness, acquisitiveness, jealousy, revenge, protectiveness, all that and more are motives in business and in romance.
In love, the object is to marry, to cement a permanent relationship involving the giving and receiving of fertile material.
In business, the object is to "close the deal," to cement a reciprocal relationship involving the giving and receiving of money.
It's really the very same transaction, for very similar motives.
So a good writer should have no trouble understanding the world of publishing?
Nothing could be further from the truth.
No? You think you understand publishing both as a writer and a reader?
Let's look a bit deeper.
Here is a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. It was brought to my attention by Patric Michael, a writer and Roweena Cherry noted it on Facebook.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703414504575001271351446274.html
That article is titled THE DEATH OF THE SLUSHPILE.
It essentially says that publishers (and producers) simply will not and can not so much as flip through unsolicited manuscripts.
To sell your fiction to such markets, you must come to them through an agent (a matchmaker!) whom that particular editor trusts, or you don't even get glanced at, nevermind "attract attention."
In the world of arranged marriages, parents ponder long and hard before choosing a matchmaker. Furthermore, matchmakers are paid really big bucks because the matches they have arranged do NOT end in divorce but happiness and fertility (the HEA ending personified).
The article essentially says that publishers (and producers) have decided for business reasons that they can't afford the time and expertise that has to be devoted to reading slush (unsolicited manuscripts) and making matches.
They will look at manuscripts that come through agents. But agents can't afford to read slush either (just browse some Agents websites and see.) I know enough Agents that I understand their business model. It does not include leeway to make the investment of time and money necessary to sort through a slushpile.
So THERE WILL BE NO NEW WRITERS DISCOVERED OR PUBLISHED.
That's it. A decree made simply because of the profit motive.
Why has this happened?
As I've been noting from time to time, the entire world of the Fiction Delivery System is under major stress and is changing markedly.
Publishers were once (as recently as 35 years ago) in the business of delivering fiction (and non-fiction) to their specific markets. They chose books to publish not because of how many copies they could sell, but because the content of the book should be read, should be published, should be preserved for future generations. Readers could trust their favorite publisher's judgment on that.
That is no longer true.
With a change in the USA tax laws a couple decades ago, it became unprofitable to print a slew of copies (price per copy goes down as number of copies in the print-run goes up) and warehouse the copies until the little trickle of sales for that title ended, then "remainder" the rest. That's a business model. It was changed by Congress, the elected folks who rarely have any business experience, are not known to be avid fiction readers, and who made a law that treats printed books the same as say, boxes of roof nails.
"Remaindered" means the book goes out of print, and the publisher can continue to sell copies but not pay the writer a royalty. Roof nails don't "go out of print" and then not-pay the nail-designer.
That tax law still taxes inventory kept in a warehouse. E-books don't have an inventory in a warehouse. Neither do POD books.
This tax law drove many publishers out of business and started the cascading collapsed the entire book distribution system in the USA, a collapse which is continuing today.
As a result, bigger more predatory businesses with a different business model bought up publishing and distribution. Most of the USA publishing houses now have been bought by non-USA based publishers.
Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt is one of the biggest publishers, and the company that owns Houghton Mifflin recently filed for "restructuring" (which means they just don't pay their debts -- it's one step above bankruptcy).
Here's the story from Reuters.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1418697020100114?type=swissMktRpt
And it's the same story we've been hearing with banks and other businesses going bankrupt during this recession -- too much debt, too much risk.
The new publishing system is in the business of making a profit, not of delivering fiction. And it has failed to make a profit.
The new distribution system, automated though it is now with robots and computers, still can't get enough of a "margin" to thrive, and distributors are still folding or being bought, or raising prices to where publishers can't afford to publish.
The smaller publishers went first, and now the biggest are failing. Meanwhile newspapers and magazines likewise have fired writers and reduced payroll.
Why can't they move this printed paper through the system at a profit?
Because the MARKET has changed.
Those willing to pay to read text on paper are dying off. Of the tiny fraction of all humanity that has ever been willing to read text for entertainment, the newest additions to the ranks actually prefer electronic copy. But the ranks of new readers are not growing as fast as the elders are dying off. Younger people prefer other forms of entertainment.
Marketers tried to turn publishing into a profitable business. They failed.
Perhaps they failed because they chose books to publish for profit, not because the content "ought" to be preserved for humanity?
Maybe not. Publishing was never, ever, run for a profit. Just ask the Monks in the Middle Ages who spent a lifetime copying books. They were supported by donations to The Church and didn't make a profit on their books. (and they didn't do a lot of fiction, either)
Meanwhile, today, self-publishing and e-books carefully chosen by small publishers for well defined markets are thriving.
There's a question I seldom heard anyone ask. "Are e-books competing for the attention of the same readers who read print books?"
I don't think so. People who want an e-book won't buy a print book. People who want a print book simply will not buy an e-book. There's a bit of a venn diagram style overlap in the two populations, but it's a tiny slice who are "in transition" -- and who tend to drop paper buying once they get "the right" reader device, one they really like.
Many traditional publishers are trying to distribute their titles as e-books either simultaneously or after the print edition. They see e-books as an alternate distribution channel, another way to make a profit with titles carefully chosen for profit potential (and no other attribute).
Unfortunately, the proliferation of e-books and self-published books (not the same thing; "e-book" publishers do edit and select for profit potential) created something of a different problem. A self-published book may not go through the "select" process, but the author usually dreams of a profit.
There is just so much stuff being published (and produced) that "should not be published" that there is no economic way for anyone to find, amidst the torrent, the one or two items that humanity really, REALLY needs preserved.
The noise has swamped the signal.
And the gatekeepers have given up and welded the gate shut, as you see from the article sited above.
This is not the first time this gate-shutting has happened. And I don't think it will last.
But for the moment, no new writers are being admitted except via agents (who are not set up to read slush). And agents can only deal with items that actually will make a big profit -- and already appear enticing to marketers.
Sunday, January 17, 2010, I found an article that puts another perspective on all this.
Listen up, worldbuilders, because this is how world building is done.
Observe reality, edit reality, create a new world.
While text-based fiction on paper is declining, and/or shifting to e-delivery, a portion of those who would have become text readers are shunning text for movies and TV. But text-consumers have never been a significant market. That's why films make so much money. Text-readers will go to films, but film-buffs won't read a book (unless it's a spinoff).
It's all economics and business model.
"I'll make you a star!" was the cry that went up in the 1930's -- not from publishing but from Hollywood.
Hollywood became the world's iconic source of video entertainment.
But the USA is a tiny market compared to the world. So by the 1970's, no Hollywood studio could make a profit without a strong after-market in other countries. By the 1980's or so, Hollywood products also needed a strong VHS sell-through, and now DVD, Blu-ray, download and streaming video.
Alien Romance readers all know how Manga and other Japanese products have swept into the USA. The Japanese have specialized in telling tender people-stories in video done very cheaply -- so it's very profitable. British TV and film has always been popular here, but not with every demographic, and it takes "every demographic" to make a profit on an expensive product.
The market in the USA for foreign films has always been small. But with the success of Canadian TV imports (now made unprofitable by a USA tax law so we don't get made-in-Canada TV shows like Forever Knight and Highlander anymore), the USA has shown itself open to other country's fiction products.
Meanwhile, Hollywood, once the unquestioned source of all films worldwide, met up with the "Spaghetti Western" made in Italy, then higher quality items emmanating from less likely markets. The world learned a lesson. Hollywood's products could be out-competed for the necessary "mate".
In the last 20 years, the technical production of Hollywood films has moved "offshore" -- to Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and less likely places. New Zealand did the LORD OF THE RINGS and other extravaganzas. The biggest driving force behind that move was the artificial increase in the value of the US dollar - held too high too long, contributing to the worldwide recession we're in now.
It's all taxes and politics, competition and compromise. (The SFR question is, "Does it have to be?")
As I said above, you'd think knowing how to plot a Romance would teach you how to run a business.
But if you have missed the connection between the politics behind the value of the US Dollar, the choice of Federal Reserve governors and Chairmen and the choice of which scripts or screenwriters to buy and make into expensive films, you have no clue what business is all about and are seriously impaired when it comes to worldbuilding.
So, back to Hollywood. The US film industry began losing market share in markets much bigger than the USA. Recently, "Bollywood" has become the primary supplier of motion picture entertainment in India, unseating the US films.
The icon status of Hollywood is confirmed by the nickname "Bollywood" -- a name which isn't Indian at all.
Hollywood, this great, iconic engine of entertainment which iconicised American Culture many places in this world, saw their market share trickling away.
The value of the US dollar tanked, big time and that has a huge effect on profits of international companies. There's talk of abandoning the US dollar as the "Reserve Currency" and the denomination for pricing oil.
Panic set in. Dominance and ownership is threatened.
This is a feeling just exactly like the feeling the losing member of a love-triangle feels. "Oh, no!"
And the response of Hollywood was very much the same as a spurned lover.
Gradually, over the last 20 years as Bollywood became the preferred source of motion picture entertainment in India, Hollywood has strained to capture the attention, to preen, strutt and entice that international market.
Why? Because even with offshoring production costs (when the US dollar was strong, it became ultra-cheap to do extravagant productions in Australia or Canada), Hollywood was dancing on a razor thin margin as dangerous as that now totally lost by paper publishing. With the reversal in the value of the dollar, the whole business model of Hollywood had to change - fast!
The world was out-competing the USA in entertainment-production for the first time in history.
So what did Hollywood do?
A long time ago, Hollywood began selecting and creating scripts entirely and totally for the story's ability to be understood WITHOUT DIALOGUE.
Subtitles are awkward and translations and dubbing only "work" across narrow cultural gulfs.
The biggest audiences flock to films they don't have to understand, just to be wowwed by intense and impossible visuals.
Hollywood went for the ACTION FILM that needs no translation (i.e. primal as I've mentioned so often in connection with Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series).
Hollywood has been practicing and in this latest crisis environment, has perfected the ability to choose this type of film script. The biggest big bucks have to go to the projects that can sell well in all worldwide markets.
And since that's what Hollywood was investing the big bucks in, that's ALL USA audiences were ever allowed access to, which has cultivated a taste for that type of film in the USA too.
The scripts have become subordinated to the actual people-stories to avoid cultural gaffs, and bewilderment.
We've all wondered why that is. We've seen it on TV -- scripts with holes you can drive a truck through win awards.
Why? Because they're exportable. They were never done for the USA audience to begin with, and nobody really cares what we like because we're a minority in the world audience.
Anything not exportable to the broader market just doesn't get made -- or if it does, it gets mangled in order to simplify it and make room for more self-explanatory (a cave man could understand it) visuals, chase scenes, fight scenes, battle scenes, sex scenes.
So Hollywood, the great icon of the USA's industrialization years, went to war with all rivals to win the "mate" of India's movie-going population.
IN 2009, Hollywood finally began to win. The film AVATAR is a perfect example.
Here's an article in TIME magazine on Hollywood vs. Bollywood in 2009/2010.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20100117/wl_time/08599195281500
And this article says:
"Hollywood films, which only cashed in on 1% of the total Indian market 10 years ago, now skim 7% of that growing market."
As a result of that win, however narrow, you can expect the product coming out of the big production companies in Hollywood to become more and more suited to the non-USA marketplace, i.e. Bollywood's market, or China's market.
With the US dollar becoming cheaper, an imported Rupee buys Hollywood more Dollars. That makes it more imperative to please India's movie-goers than it does to please USA movie-goers.
It's the same in publishing, especially in e-book. Fiction writers' mating habits must change to woo the international market's fiction consumer.
Your reader/viewer is the mate you as a writer are seeking and the clergy who will marry you is your publisher, the Agent is the matchmaker. Other writers are your competitors.
That's how it is in 2010. How will it be in 2025?
Can publishing and producing (via small publishers, e-book publishers, small producers, the indie producers) once again afford to disseminate fiction because it "ought" to be cherished and passed on to posterity?
Or are we forever trapped in a for-profit-or-die scenario?
Can you see a similarity between that question and the question, "Can lovers afford to get married for love alone? Or are they forever trapped in a for-sex-or-die scenario?" Or maybe, "...in a marry a rich spouse" scenario?
Sex and money are the obvious profit. But love is the real point of romance, just as "ought to be preserved for posterity" is the real point of publishing.
Or not?
Build your own world. Then write in it.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
jeannevb Divorce lawyer on train talking nonstop on phone w client. Y can't ppl be civil/mature during divorce & remember they USED to luv ea other?
One possible explanation lies at the interface between love and business.
The dynamics of business competition for a market share leading to the resulting monetary profit have altogether too-spooky-much in common with the dynamics of a bid for a share of a partner's romantic attention and the resulting boost to self-esteem from being chosen and loved.
Having believed oneself to be chosen and loved - only to discover it is not so leaves one with less self esteem than before the romance.
Believing that one has received Love triggers an investment of giving Love, of giving the Self. This great out-pouring of the self can create an inner deficit, but in real Love that doesn't matter. Eventually, it all flows back in even greater abundance.
It's the same with a manufacturer who sells you a product, which you open and use, then return for a full refund. The manufacturer has invested more than just the price of the product, and thus has poured out more than can ever be recouped because a return means bad word-of-mouth rumors around the product.
Manufacturers figure returns into their list prices.
People don't figure returns in when they give their hearts to another only to have their S.O. choose a third person instead.
Divorce is as bitterly powerful whether you're legally married or living together. The investment is the same. The loss is felt as robbery, or worse a scam.
We read, write, and extol stories about the eternal triangle. Two women want the same man. Two men want the same women. Three men. Three women. Whatever the triangle, one will be chosen. The other not.
And sometimes, even after choice and full investment, decisions can be changed.
Mating seems to be a zero sum game (where if one wins, the other must therefore "lose.")
Many Alien Romance novels are actually about trying to change that situation of the zero-sum-game. I have to refer you to my interstellar, human/non-human love story novels, Molt Brother and City Of A Million Legends (both available as e-books on fictionwise.com - for free chapters see the middle of http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com ) as examples of "different" ways humans can arrange their family affairs.
There can be arrangements where 3 make a couple. If it works, who's to complain? We can always point to Biblical stories about really strange living arrangements.
As I pointed out on #scifichat (on twitter where I'm jlichtenberg) on Friday Jan 15th, 2010, fiction writing is actually, when you come right down to the essence of the process, merely editing reality.
We take a point of view, (a theme), narrow the angle (select a character), and present a picture of reality that is both actually real and totally not-real. But because it's not-real, it is actually more real than reality.
That is the conundrum created by "modeling" reality as a scientist builds a mathematical model of a system in order to predict the behavior of the real system. The simplification of the "model" allows the moving parts to become comprehensible. But the simplification makes the whole thing very not-real.
Any resemblance to reality is purely accidental, as the disclaimer goes.
I have repeatedly mentioned that the whole structure of the business of "being a writer" -- of being self-employed as a freelance writer in fiction or non-fiction -- has changed totally with the advent of the e-book, of Print on Demand, and perhaps most markedly, of digital video and YouTube.
These changes are more profound than the changes brought about by the invention of the microprocessor chip.
Our fiction consuming customers now spend most of what used to be "reading time" either watching TV, DVD movies, or online videos. For both instruction and entertainment, people now prefer a real "show don't tell" in the form of a video.
Online comics and novels told in picture-panels (both animated and not), as well as games like World of Warcraft and Second Life absorb the time that such creative and intellectually developed people would have spent reading printed books say, 50 years ago (or even maybe 30 years ago).
Meanwhile, the whole generation born to a world when radio drama was THE new-fangled thing has been dying off. Those folks were readers, too, and though they enjoyed an occasional theater movie, really never learned to program a VCR.
It's not just taste in entertainment sources that has changed. It's a turnover in generations that has brought to the peak purchasing years a generation raised on the internet.
The current set of 40 year olds raising their own kids barely remember a time when their home didn't have a computer, and only vaguely remember that computers weren't originally attached to the internet. Most of them remember the tweedle-tweet of dialup song.
Those folks, raised in an online environment learned "keyboarding" in school, and spent a good portion of their college years working on a screen instead of on paper. Today, they earn their livings staring at computer screens.
And these are the tiny slice of the world who would have become book readers.
Those who read as children don't read as many books today as their parents did when their parents were 40.
There used to be an estimated 10% of the population that read 3 or 4 novels a year. They were considered our customers, the audience writers had to write to, to "hit" to sell enough copies to get paid enough to buy groceries.
There still are young people becoming addicted to text-reading for pleasure, but the % of the total population that does that has been shrinking.
I haven't seen any really recent statistics on this, but judging from the way big publishers are twitching this way and that every time something changes in the e-book market, I suspect that the total percentage of people who read fiction for fun may actually have started increasing again -- but only on the e-book side.
There is a whole population of commuters, busy carpool drivers (who have to arrive early to get a good spot in front of the school, then sit for 20 minutes), take-the-kids-to-the-park parents, stop-at-the-doctor-on-the-way-home-and-wait errand runners, people in a hurry-up-and-wait lifestyle who are opting to spend their waiting intervals reading e-books.
Of course, they also play games on their cell phones, read twitter, scan the news, and text-text-text, not to mention gab-gab-gab.
But kicking back with a good book no longer requires carrying even a paperback stuffed in a pocket. And you don't have to depend on a doctor's waiting room to have a current magazine either. Read magazines on your cell, or on Kindle and other readers.
The price of paper books is going up and up (because in mass market, volume determines price), while the price of e-books and electronic copies of magazines seems to be going down and down because the e-book doesn't have to be mass market to turn a profit.
Big players like Barnes&Noble and Amazon are trying to capture and cage a segment of that e-reader marketplace.
Which brings me back to "competing for a mate."
The Romance plot resembles Marketing in a host of particulars.
Marketers are focused on "luring" you with "enticing" advertisements designed to attract your attention with the promise of pleasure or satisfaction.
Typically women (and men too) "package" themselves with clothing that makes a "political statement" or an "availability" statement about themselves. Or maybe a "prosperity" statement. Who hunts for a poor mate on purpose?
Marketers compete for your attention and your money.
The un-mated compete for attention -- and maybe a dinner date and more.
Now we have online dating services that leverage that competition for a potential mate -- as a business model.
Finding a mate is a business which, to be profitable, needs a good "business model" (a way to take raw input and create output that shows a profit).
Business is often viewed as "combat" -- often in the form of Chess or less elegantly in the form of Football. The language is the same as any action novel would use -- "beat the competition" = "beat the enemy."
Finding a mate is often viewed the same way. A woman may dress to "out-shine" her rival at a party, or very possibly to "vanquish that bitch once and for all." Competitive dressing is learned in High School. (Just watch Buffy The Vampire Slayer episodes!)
And finding a mate is all about "possession" as is business.
"He's MINE!" she snarls just as the businessman closing a deal on a hotel at a prestigious address might snarl, "That's my hotel now!"
Avariciousness, acquisitiveness, jealousy, revenge, protectiveness, all that and more are motives in business and in romance.
In love, the object is to marry, to cement a permanent relationship involving the giving and receiving of fertile material.
In business, the object is to "close the deal," to cement a reciprocal relationship involving the giving and receiving of money.
It's really the very same transaction, for very similar motives.
So a good writer should have no trouble understanding the world of publishing?
Nothing could be further from the truth.
No? You think you understand publishing both as a writer and a reader?
Let's look a bit deeper.
Here is a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. It was brought to my attention by Patric Michael, a writer and Roweena Cherry noted it on Facebook.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703414504575001271351446274.html
That article is titled THE DEATH OF THE SLUSHPILE.
It essentially says that publishers (and producers) simply will not and can not so much as flip through unsolicited manuscripts.
To sell your fiction to such markets, you must come to them through an agent (a matchmaker!) whom that particular editor trusts, or you don't even get glanced at, nevermind "attract attention."
In the world of arranged marriages, parents ponder long and hard before choosing a matchmaker. Furthermore, matchmakers are paid really big bucks because the matches they have arranged do NOT end in divorce but happiness and fertility (the HEA ending personified).
The article essentially says that publishers (and producers) have decided for business reasons that they can't afford the time and expertise that has to be devoted to reading slush (unsolicited manuscripts) and making matches.
They will look at manuscripts that come through agents. But agents can't afford to read slush either (just browse some Agents websites and see.) I know enough Agents that I understand their business model. It does not include leeway to make the investment of time and money necessary to sort through a slushpile.
So THERE WILL BE NO NEW WRITERS DISCOVERED OR PUBLISHED.
That's it. A decree made simply because of the profit motive.
Why has this happened?
As I've been noting from time to time, the entire world of the Fiction Delivery System is under major stress and is changing markedly.
Publishers were once (as recently as 35 years ago) in the business of delivering fiction (and non-fiction) to their specific markets. They chose books to publish not because of how many copies they could sell, but because the content of the book should be read, should be published, should be preserved for future generations. Readers could trust their favorite publisher's judgment on that.
That is no longer true.
With a change in the USA tax laws a couple decades ago, it became unprofitable to print a slew of copies (price per copy goes down as number of copies in the print-run goes up) and warehouse the copies until the little trickle of sales for that title ended, then "remainder" the rest. That's a business model. It was changed by Congress, the elected folks who rarely have any business experience, are not known to be avid fiction readers, and who made a law that treats printed books the same as say, boxes of roof nails.
"Remaindered" means the book goes out of print, and the publisher can continue to sell copies but not pay the writer a royalty. Roof nails don't "go out of print" and then not-pay the nail-designer.
That tax law still taxes inventory kept in a warehouse. E-books don't have an inventory in a warehouse. Neither do POD books.
This tax law drove many publishers out of business and started the cascading collapsed the entire book distribution system in the USA, a collapse which is continuing today.
As a result, bigger more predatory businesses with a different business model bought up publishing and distribution. Most of the USA publishing houses now have been bought by non-USA based publishers.
Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt is one of the biggest publishers, and the company that owns Houghton Mifflin recently filed for "restructuring" (which means they just don't pay their debts -- it's one step above bankruptcy).
Here's the story from Reuters.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1418697020100114?type=swissMktRpt
And it's the same story we've been hearing with banks and other businesses going bankrupt during this recession -- too much debt, too much risk.
The new publishing system is in the business of making a profit, not of delivering fiction. And it has failed to make a profit.
The new distribution system, automated though it is now with robots and computers, still can't get enough of a "margin" to thrive, and distributors are still folding or being bought, or raising prices to where publishers can't afford to publish.
The smaller publishers went first, and now the biggest are failing. Meanwhile newspapers and magazines likewise have fired writers and reduced payroll.
Why can't they move this printed paper through the system at a profit?
Because the MARKET has changed.
Those willing to pay to read text on paper are dying off. Of the tiny fraction of all humanity that has ever been willing to read text for entertainment, the newest additions to the ranks actually prefer electronic copy. But the ranks of new readers are not growing as fast as the elders are dying off. Younger people prefer other forms of entertainment.
Marketers tried to turn publishing into a profitable business. They failed.
Perhaps they failed because they chose books to publish for profit, not because the content "ought" to be preserved for humanity?
Maybe not. Publishing was never, ever, run for a profit. Just ask the Monks in the Middle Ages who spent a lifetime copying books. They were supported by donations to The Church and didn't make a profit on their books. (and they didn't do a lot of fiction, either)
Meanwhile, today, self-publishing and e-books carefully chosen by small publishers for well defined markets are thriving.
There's a question I seldom heard anyone ask. "Are e-books competing for the attention of the same readers who read print books?"
I don't think so. People who want an e-book won't buy a print book. People who want a print book simply will not buy an e-book. There's a bit of a venn diagram style overlap in the two populations, but it's a tiny slice who are "in transition" -- and who tend to drop paper buying once they get "the right" reader device, one they really like.
Many traditional publishers are trying to distribute their titles as e-books either simultaneously or after the print edition. They see e-books as an alternate distribution channel, another way to make a profit with titles carefully chosen for profit potential (and no other attribute).
Unfortunately, the proliferation of e-books and self-published books (not the same thing; "e-book" publishers do edit and select for profit potential) created something of a different problem. A self-published book may not go through the "select" process, but the author usually dreams of a profit.
There is just so much stuff being published (and produced) that "should not be published" that there is no economic way for anyone to find, amidst the torrent, the one or two items that humanity really, REALLY needs preserved.
The noise has swamped the signal.
And the gatekeepers have given up and welded the gate shut, as you see from the article sited above.
This is not the first time this gate-shutting has happened. And I don't think it will last.
But for the moment, no new writers are being admitted except via agents (who are not set up to read slush). And agents can only deal with items that actually will make a big profit -- and already appear enticing to marketers.
Sunday, January 17, 2010, I found an article that puts another perspective on all this.
Listen up, worldbuilders, because this is how world building is done.
Observe reality, edit reality, create a new world.
While text-based fiction on paper is declining, and/or shifting to e-delivery, a portion of those who would have become text readers are shunning text for movies and TV. But text-consumers have never been a significant market. That's why films make so much money. Text-readers will go to films, but film-buffs won't read a book (unless it's a spinoff).
It's all economics and business model.
"I'll make you a star!" was the cry that went up in the 1930's -- not from publishing but from Hollywood.
Hollywood became the world's iconic source of video entertainment.
But the USA is a tiny market compared to the world. So by the 1970's, no Hollywood studio could make a profit without a strong after-market in other countries. By the 1980's or so, Hollywood products also needed a strong VHS sell-through, and now DVD, Blu-ray, download and streaming video.
Alien Romance readers all know how Manga and other Japanese products have swept into the USA. The Japanese have specialized in telling tender people-stories in video done very cheaply -- so it's very profitable. British TV and film has always been popular here, but not with every demographic, and it takes "every demographic" to make a profit on an expensive product.
The market in the USA for foreign films has always been small. But with the success of Canadian TV imports (now made unprofitable by a USA tax law so we don't get made-in-Canada TV shows like Forever Knight and Highlander anymore), the USA has shown itself open to other country's fiction products.
Meanwhile, Hollywood, once the unquestioned source of all films worldwide, met up with the "Spaghetti Western" made in Italy, then higher quality items emmanating from less likely markets. The world learned a lesson. Hollywood's products could be out-competed for the necessary "mate".
In the last 20 years, the technical production of Hollywood films has moved "offshore" -- to Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and less likely places. New Zealand did the LORD OF THE RINGS and other extravaganzas. The biggest driving force behind that move was the artificial increase in the value of the US dollar - held too high too long, contributing to the worldwide recession we're in now.
It's all taxes and politics, competition and compromise. (The SFR question is, "Does it have to be?")
As I said above, you'd think knowing how to plot a Romance would teach you how to run a business.
But if you have missed the connection between the politics behind the value of the US Dollar, the choice of Federal Reserve governors and Chairmen and the choice of which scripts or screenwriters to buy and make into expensive films, you have no clue what business is all about and are seriously impaired when it comes to worldbuilding.
So, back to Hollywood. The US film industry began losing market share in markets much bigger than the USA. Recently, "Bollywood" has become the primary supplier of motion picture entertainment in India, unseating the US films.
The icon status of Hollywood is confirmed by the nickname "Bollywood" -- a name which isn't Indian at all.
Hollywood, this great, iconic engine of entertainment which iconicised American Culture many places in this world, saw their market share trickling away.
The value of the US dollar tanked, big time and that has a huge effect on profits of international companies. There's talk of abandoning the US dollar as the "Reserve Currency" and the denomination for pricing oil.
Panic set in. Dominance and ownership is threatened.
This is a feeling just exactly like the feeling the losing member of a love-triangle feels. "Oh, no!"
And the response of Hollywood was very much the same as a spurned lover.
Gradually, over the last 20 years as Bollywood became the preferred source of motion picture entertainment in India, Hollywood has strained to capture the attention, to preen, strutt and entice that international market.
Why? Because even with offshoring production costs (when the US dollar was strong, it became ultra-cheap to do extravagant productions in Australia or Canada), Hollywood was dancing on a razor thin margin as dangerous as that now totally lost by paper publishing. With the reversal in the value of the dollar, the whole business model of Hollywood had to change - fast!
The world was out-competing the USA in entertainment-production for the first time in history.
So what did Hollywood do?
A long time ago, Hollywood began selecting and creating scripts entirely and totally for the story's ability to be understood WITHOUT DIALOGUE.
Subtitles are awkward and translations and dubbing only "work" across narrow cultural gulfs.
The biggest audiences flock to films they don't have to understand, just to be wowwed by intense and impossible visuals.
Hollywood went for the ACTION FILM that needs no translation (i.e. primal as I've mentioned so often in connection with Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series).
Hollywood has been practicing and in this latest crisis environment, has perfected the ability to choose this type of film script. The biggest big bucks have to go to the projects that can sell well in all worldwide markets.
And since that's what Hollywood was investing the big bucks in, that's ALL USA audiences were ever allowed access to, which has cultivated a taste for that type of film in the USA too.
The scripts have become subordinated to the actual people-stories to avoid cultural gaffs, and bewilderment.
We've all wondered why that is. We've seen it on TV -- scripts with holes you can drive a truck through win awards.
Why? Because they're exportable. They were never done for the USA audience to begin with, and nobody really cares what we like because we're a minority in the world audience.
Anything not exportable to the broader market just doesn't get made -- or if it does, it gets mangled in order to simplify it and make room for more self-explanatory (a cave man could understand it) visuals, chase scenes, fight scenes, battle scenes, sex scenes.
So Hollywood, the great icon of the USA's industrialization years, went to war with all rivals to win the "mate" of India's movie-going population.
IN 2009, Hollywood finally began to win. The film AVATAR is a perfect example.
Here's an article in TIME magazine on Hollywood vs. Bollywood in 2009/2010.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20100117/wl_time/08599195281500
And this article says:
"Hollywood films, which only cashed in on 1% of the total Indian market 10 years ago, now skim 7% of that growing market."
As a result of that win, however narrow, you can expect the product coming out of the big production companies in Hollywood to become more and more suited to the non-USA marketplace, i.e. Bollywood's market, or China's market.
With the US dollar becoming cheaper, an imported Rupee buys Hollywood more Dollars. That makes it more imperative to please India's movie-goers than it does to please USA movie-goers.
It's the same in publishing, especially in e-book. Fiction writers' mating habits must change to woo the international market's fiction consumer.
Your reader/viewer is the mate you as a writer are seeking and the clergy who will marry you is your publisher, the Agent is the matchmaker. Other writers are your competitors.
That's how it is in 2010. How will it be in 2025?
Can publishing and producing (via small publishers, e-book publishers, small producers, the indie producers) once again afford to disseminate fiction because it "ought" to be cherished and passed on to posterity?
Or are we forever trapped in a for-profit-or-die scenario?
Can you see a similarity between that question and the question, "Can lovers afford to get married for love alone? Or are they forever trapped in a for-sex-or-die scenario?" Or maybe, "...in a marry a rich spouse" scenario?
Sex and money are the obvious profit. But love is the real point of romance, just as "ought to be preserved for posterity" is the real point of publishing.
Or not?
Build your own world. Then write in it.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
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