So far, TRUE BLOOD, based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris, has been wildly successful. This fall at least two new fantasy series derived from books will be launched: THE VAMPIRE DIARIES and EASTWICK. I liked L. J. Smith’s “Vampire Diaries” YA books very much when they were originally published, so I’m looking forward to this adaptation (it starts tonight). There are enough novels in the series to carry on a television show for several seasons. I’ll be interested to see what kind of program will be made out of THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK. In this case, because the source work’s story comes to a decisive conclusion, the closed plot of the novel will have to be converted into an open-ended situation that can continue indefinitely if the show becomes popular. I suspect EASTWICK will turn out to be one of those works that I like much better as a TV series than as a book or movie, like THE PAPER CHASE (and MASH, but I haven’t read MASH and can’t claim to have given the movie a fair chance; it took only five minutes of viewing to realize I’d probably dislike the film, which seemed to differ widely in tone from the TV program I loved).
To make a good TV series, a book—or, better yet, a book series—probably needs to contain a world wide enough, with a potential variety of characters and-or events large enough, to support an indefinitely prolonged run. Or, if the story has a built-in definite conclusion, such as graduation from law school in THE PAPER CHASE, the progress toward the conclusion should take long enough to allow the story to grow over several seasons. (Another of my favorite shows, THE WEST WING, although not based on a printed work, illustrates this principle well. The series logically ended with the inauguration of President Bartlet’s successor. Since the story began in the first year of his presidency, that plan allowed a seven-season run.) THE DEAD ZONE, based on the Stephen King novel, was one show I followed devotedly each summer until it was canceled. To make this tragic story into a viable open-ended TV series, the writers did what I expect to be done with EASTWICK; elements of the novel were rewritten so that the protagonist didn’t have to die to achieve his goal of saving the world from a dangerous politician. That change left him free to use his powers to solve many mysteries instead of the few he encountered in the novel.
If such a change isn’t feasible, a novel transferred to television becomes a mini-series. One of my cherished fantasies is someday seeing a mini-series made from THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY by Suzy McKee Charnas. The novel comprises five sections, each with a distinct storyline. The last two are both set in New Mexico, and the fourth is considerably shorter and simpler than the other sections. Therefore, a four-hour miniseries would be the perfect film venue for this novel, with the last two sections combined into the last hour of film.
As for open-ended fiction, a cartoon series was made from Brian Jacques’ Redwall novels, set in a multi-generational world with nearly unlimited room for stories, even if the show had eventually used up the existing tales in the books (which I don’t think it did).
What other book series would make good open-ended TV series? There are quite a few I can think of that contain worlds rich enough to sustain a series for many years. Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah’s Sime-Gen universe, of course. Special effects now permit realistic depiction of tentacles. ALIEN NATION demonstrated that a mass audience could accept relationships between two different kinds of humanity as a subject for prime-time TV. I’d love to see a series based in the Sime-Gen world right before and during the period of Unity. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover. Either the period of THE FORBIDDEN TOWER and SHATTERED CHAIN or the events of a generation later, around the time of THE BLOODY SUN, would work. I think I would go for the earlier period, when Terrans and Darkovans are just starting to learn about each other. The world of the Change in S. M. Stirling’s series that begins with DIES THE FIRE. In the late 1990s, all advanced technology mysteriously and instantaneously stops working. The people who survive the initial collapse of civilization have to build a new society based on pre-industrial culture. Naturally, some have a head start, e.g. survivalists, historical re-enactors, and members of organizations such as the Society for Creative Anachronism. The series comprises six books now, with, apparently, more to come. A couple of short stories set in the same universe, with different settings and characters from those in the novels, have also been published. This fictional world has room for an infinite number of stories, and given that there are at least two post-apocalyptic TV shows premiering in 2009-2010, its theme that would probably appeal to producers and audiences.
With so many fantasy and SF programs on the air (and cable) this year, we may be entering a golden age of spec fic on TV. We can only hope.
What books do you dream of seeing made into TV shows?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Futuristic Romance, Susan Kearney
Hi All,
I promised to bring back some pictures from Dragoncon and I have them. But first I wanted to give you some good news. All over the conference I heard how futuristic romance is the up and coming genre. And lots of readers were buying LUCAN. If you haven't picked up a copy, please do.
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
Are Commercial Writers Born or Made?
Can you "become" a writer? Or is it just something you are that you can choose to exploit, or not, like any other Talent?
I haven't thought about what it takes to launch a writing career in many years. Neither of my children had any interest in writing for a living.
I've done a number of email interviews with High School kids doing the assignment "contact a writer and find out (whatever)" but when this newest request came in, it made me think about what this new world I've been describing on this blog (the E-book, self-publishing or at least self-promoting, Web 2.0 world of social networking) looks like from the point of view of someone in High School wondering if they can make money as a writer.
It's a fascinating point of view and I was rather surprised at my answers.
I found a number of basic human traits that a writer needs, that aren't actually widely distributed among the general population. These traits aren't "talent" for writing, just essential traits necessary for a writing career. Many of these traits are the same now as they were in my grandparents time. The changes and additions are all in the skills and techniques area, not basic personality traits.
And it isn't enough to have these traits, and write a few books, or even sell a few that actually do well in the marketplace. The real question is whether this profession actually chafes your nerves, making you get up every day forcing yourself to do something you'd really rather not do -- or whether you get up each day and mostly just do what you want to do because that happens to be what you have to do.
Then of course, as in every profession, there are "those" days when you just have to do what has to be done.
I have often said of myself that I don't "want to write" -- I "want to have written." As far as I can tell, there's only one way to get to where I want to be, and right now I've got a lot of published material behind me, some on the table in front of me that will be published, and a whole lot more in the compost heap of "Ideas and Concepts."
So here are the questions this High School student thought up for me to answer. Read and think first how you would answer. I did include a number of links with my answer, but here I'm adding a couple more since not everyone reading this post is as familiar with the material as this High School student.
-------------------
1. Who are you and where were you born?
(This one really threw me for a loop. I could write an entire treatise on the concept of "who" and "are" and in fact have written many Review columns on the problem of "Identity" as a mystical component of "Character." But I decided to use my standard short bio instead.)
Jacqueline Lichtenberg, a life member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, (http://www.sfwa.org ). She is creator of the Sime~Gen Universe with a vibrant fan following (http://www.simegen.net ), primary author of the Bantam paperback Star Trek Lives! which blew the lid on Star Trek fandom, founder of the Star Trek Welcommittee, creator of the genre term Intimate Adventure,
http://www.simegen.com/jl/intimateadventure.html
winner of the Galaxy Award for Spirituality in Science Fiction with her second novel, and the first Romantic Times Awards for Best Science Fiction Novel with her later novel Dushau. Her fiction has been in audio-dramatization on XM Satellite Radio. She has been the sf/f reviewer for a professional magazine since 1993. She teaches sf/f writing online while turning to her first love, screenwriting focused on selling to the feature film market.
Screenwriting: http://www.slantedconcept.com
The above is my 200 word bio expanded with hotlinks that appears in program books at conventions, in newspapers, and websites where the URLs can be permitted.
I "am" a great deal more than just "what I've done." One day I may write my autobiography to try to convey some of "who" I think I am. Or not.
2. What was your childhood like?
(Again an entire book worth of answers swarms to mind. But I decided on a brief answer -- well Lichtenberg-brief)
Compared to world famous celebrities, I had a plain vanilla childhood with no real traumas or dramatic events. I was born in New York, grew up in California, lived in a 2 bedroom house with my parents, was an only child, and basically did as little as possible other than read books.
I lived in the same house with the same parents and went to school in the same public school system from Kindergarten to HS graduation, then on to the nearest University (UC Berkeley), commuted to campus from home, and graduated from that one school. All in a straight line.
When I was in 5th Grade, I was failing badly, failing reading in particular. My mother snuck me a book from the adult library. It was science fiction. Battle On Mercury by "Erik Van Lihn" which I learned later was yet another pen name for Lester Del Rey (founder of Del Rey publishing company that popularized adult fantasy).
Search for it on amazon, there are a few used copies.
Pen names proliferated for that entire generation of SF writers because there were fewer writers than there were market slots.
With that book in hand, and my mother's refusal to read it TO me, I taught myself to read nearly overnight and read through the whole adult library SF collection, and tried to read most of the books in the children's library but, except for Andre Norton's titles, they were pretty awful. I also liked the Rick Brandt series but detested Nancy Drew and Nurse Nancy.
Rules in libraries about what kids could and could not read were much more strict then, so I had the collusion of my mother (a Reader) to support my habit, but she drew lines in the sand, too. I did the same raising my kids.
I used to sit on the floor in the stacks at the adult library waiting for my mother to choose a book and gaze at the titles of the books and imagine what the stories I wasn't allowed to read would be.
Then I grew up, got my degree in Chemistry from the University of California, (because a lot of my favorite SF writers had a degree in Chemistry and the University didn't offer a degree in Science Fiction Writing) then I worked in Chemistry for a few years, did some globe-trotting (all the biographies of writers that I'd read showed they had done globe-trotting, so I made that a priority) then got married, had 2 kids, and began writing those books I hadn't been allowed to read.
3. Who or what influenced you to become an author?
Here is a list of the writers I grew up wanting to write like and some anecdotes about finally meeting them professional to professional.
http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/welcommittee/influenc.html
When I was in 7th Grade, I read a good story in an SF magazine but the illustrations were just plain all wrong, not at all what the words described.
At that point, my Dad had bought our family our first typewriter, and he taught me to type over a Christmas vacation. He was a professional teletype operator and taught me the way he had been taught, for speed and accuracy.
I later copped an A in a HS typing course without learning anything, in fact could teach the teacher a thing or two but of course what teacher would allow that?
In a fit of indignation, I pulled out the family typewriter (a manual portable) and typed (without handwriting a draft first) and blasted off a couple paragraphs of a letter lambasting the magazine for daring to publish inaccurate illustrations.
They published the letter, my first publication. HOOKED!
But it only worked to 'hook' me because I was already a 'writer' which is why I could blast out a few succinct but vivid words without a second thought (when I was not-quite in 8th grade mind you) and get my words published in a letter column that was strictly for adults and nobody knew that I was a kid. I made many SF fan friends over the next few years who never knew I was 15 years younger than they were.
The big disappointment? When I finally sold a story to that magazine, the illustration was even more badly messed up than the one I'd complained about some 15 years before.
They also published my name and address with that letter (at that time, there weren't the nasty predators out there who would stalk and attack anyone whose identity was made public.)
After the magazine came out, my parent's mailbox became stuffed with dozens then hundreds of letters from SCIENCE FICTION FANS!!! Which I duly answered. On the typewriter because in SF fandom, handwriting is impolite. Like a Kingdom a Fandom has a culture of its own.
Pause here to see Rowena Cherry's post on cultural dissonance. Entering SF fandom at that time was massive cultural dissonance, but at the same time it was a homecoming. Every strange thing was just "right" and "familiar" though I'd never imagined it before.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/feeling-little-alien.html
I discovered there was a whole, organized, huge, active, brilliant, rollicking, dynamic and just plain wondrous group of people who were interested in all the things I was interested in. In fact they thrived on what I couldn't share even with my parents.
I discovered something I could do that I wanted to do. I just had to figure out how to make a living while doing it because there was (and actually still is) no money in Science Fiction writing.
A QUESTION YOU DIDN'T ASK: my first sale.
Here is the story of my first sale.
http://www.simegen.com/jl/IFS~GConnection.html
That short story is now posted online for free reading.
http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/rimonslibrary/oht.html
It's the first published fiction in what was to become my Sime~Gen Universe novels. There is an omnibus of three novels in that universe that form a trilogy:
4. What does it take to become an author?
My second, and really key, mentor in the art and craft of writing was Marion Zimmer Bradley (look her up on Amazon).
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Marion Zimmer Bradley taught that anyone can write fiction and sell it, provided they have acquired one single skill. The ability to write a literate English sentence.
It's spelling, punctuation, and grammar, plus a huge vocabulary. Today add keyboarding and a facility with word processing programs, especially the tech underpinnings that allow you to manipulate text into various formats (from Word, or Open Office document, to html, to pdf, to Plain Text, to the newest version of whatever software).
A facility with building websites, manipulating images, and an eye for design can be helpful, but if you make enough with your writing, you can hire someone to do that. You will likely not be satisfied though unless you can at least edit the website they make for you.
Online social networking skills, Web 2.0, 3.0, and soon 4.0 plus whatever comes after that is going to be a primary necessity for writers in just a few years.
Public Speaking training. Join anything at school that gets you on a stage before an audience, the more hostile the audience the better.
The ability to throw a party, organize food, invite guests that blend well, attract Media Attention to it, create an EVENT (you may have to throw your own book-launch parties for a while). Training for this can be had by volunteering to run money raisers for charities or your school.
You need experience at being the center of attention at an Event, at being totally ignored and irrelevant to the Event, and at being in charge of the Event. You need to do this over and over until getting dressed for that special night is exactly the same as getting dressed to spend the day lounging around the house all alone. Practice until speaking to 2,000 people, or on a TV talk show, is the same as talking to one person.
All of the above modern skills are the equivalent of "writing a literate English sentence" on a typewriter.
Writing is basically just talking to someone who isn't there at the moment, but you know pretty much who that person is. You always write for a particular audience, fiction or non-fiction you must write to your audience, not above their heads, and not beneath them, just to them.
So start to learn to write by learning to talk. Learn the fine art of conversation, too, not just the art of the monologue. Elocution and Rhetoric are the core of these disciplines, but so is Deportment.
Finally, to become a professional writer, you need to amass a huge amount of trivia, bits and pieces and an understanding of the principles that relate those pieces into a whole. It doesn't have to be the RIGHT principles according to what anyone else thinks. It has to be internally CONSISTENT in your own mind.
In other words you need to study philosophy, anthropology, sociology, criminology, pre-history, archeology, linguistics (diachronic linguistics especially), Law, every bit of science you can lay hands on, and learn every possible culture you can find to learn about. You need to learn all about human behavior, and the human nervous system and brain functions. You need to learn all about Religion (all of them!).
You need to cultivate an attitude toward learning such that it never, ever, occurs to you that this or that subject is out of bounds, or you won't study it because you don't like it. And you need to set yourself a curriculum which you make up and then actually execute to your own specified deadlines.
A good role model from today's modern Romance market is my co-blogger here, Rowena Cherry, whose blog entry on cultural dissonance you just read if you followed the link above.
As Alma Hill my first writing mentor met through Science Fiction Fandom, taught me, Writing Is A Performing Art.
Robert Heinlein taught me the oldest stage adage: "Sounding Spontaneous Is A Matter of Careful Preparation."
To "become" a writer is impossible.
To recognize that you were born a writer, is possible. How do you tell if you're a writer?
Writers write.
That's it. That's the whole thing. Those who can't stop writing have to make a living somehow and the only recourse is to sell what you've written.
My blog post
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/can-serials-work-via-e-publishing.html
Gives you a chance to get a grip on the 'business model' of the independent contractor which is what a professional writer is.
To 'go pro' you have to prepare yourself to do everything it takes to run a small business from incorporating to book keeping to management to advertising. You will be 'self-employed' and that means usually doing absolutely everything with your own hands, at least part of the time.
Marion Zimmer Bradley had a sign over her desk:
"Nobody ever told you not to be a plumber."
Meaning, plumbers make a lot more money more reliably and with a lot less effort than writers do.
Anyone who can be discouraged from "becoming a writer" should be discouraged resoundingly.
Robert A. Heinlein (look him up on Amazon)
Robert A. Heinlein
said that only people who literally couldn't do anything else should consider writing as a career.
He, himself, was actually physically disabled and had no other way to support himself, so he began selling his stories. He always looked at it as competing for some guy's beer money.
Every successful writer I know follows his 3 rules whether they attribute them to Heinlein or not.
1) write it
2) finish it
3) put it on the market and keep it on the market until it sells
I learned those rules when I was a teen.
So what does it take to "become" a professional writer? A certain amount of cussedness, a blazing fire of determination, an ego beyond all bounds of polite society, and a wide and deep understanding of humanity, life, the universe and everything.
5. What's the most rewarding part of being a writer?
As a professional reviewer I get tons of free books from all sorts of publishers which is one way to feed a reading-addict! I just saw a tweet on twitter from a writer who advised new writers that if you don't read, you can't write. Writing means READING. So if you're not addicted to reading, find another way to make a living.
So the biggest kick I ever get from all this work is when I read a book some publicist for some publisher has sent me and love it, then review the book in my review column, send it in to the magazine that pays me for the column, and email a copy of the review to whichever publicist sent it to me, and get an email from the author flipping out over my review because some of my novels had been the inspiration to them to launch a writing career.
The kick is from finding out how this writer I've just become a fan of grew up as a fan of mine! Wow.
This has happened consistently throughout my career, but I only recently started keeping track and asking permission to list the writer online.
So here's a very abbreviated list of some of the authors who will admit in public that I influenced them.
http://www.simegen.com/jl/influencedbyJL/
6. Is there anything you dislike?
Oh, that's way too open ended a question.
Of course there are many things, but the objective of training yourself to be a professional writer (meaning you not only write for money, but you also can and will write whatever they will pay for) is to whittle the list of dislikes you amass as a teenager down to almost nothing by the time you're thirty.
Broad tastes, wide experience, a zest and even lust for life in all its glory is the attitude a writer needs to cultivate.
If you haven't read it by now, do please read Rowena Cherry's post on cultural dissonance.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/feeling-little-alien.html
I didn't tell her to write that post and put it up right before this one. It just "happened" like so many of the connections on this blog. Rowena is prescribing just exactly the medicine a writer needs to become able to create scintillating characters and conflicts.
When you must create a character who is very different from yourself, you must be able to put yourself in his/her shoes and walk a mile in those moccasins. Likes and dislikes are part of the characterization of that character and to make a character consistent, you can't just choose those likes and dislikes at random or just pick what you, yourself like or dislike.
The characteristics or traits of your characters must form a pattern that bespeaks the essence of the character and the theme of the work.
To achieve that, you need to learn to like things you dislike, if only for a few months at a time while you write that book. Using your own personal likes and dislikes creates an effect in the work that labels it amateur.
If all this learning, studying, broadening, self-cultivating, degree work at university, lifelong course taking, lifelong dedication to learning-learning-learning sounds arduous, then you're not a writer.
If it all sounds irresistible, a life of pure vacation time, you might actually sell your work for money one day.
And in fact, that means you are already a writer. Possibly, if you have the right attitude toward the words you produce, valuing those words as if they already were worth money, being willing to barter words for valuable returns, then you may in fact be a professional writer without yet having sold any words.
Professionalism in any profession is all about attitude.
7. What other careers have you had besides being an author?
I trained and worked as a Chemist, but that wasn't another career.
The secret of the universe is that there actually is only one career.
We all write the story of our own lives.
Shakespeare wrote: "All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts."
That was engraved over the stage in my High School's auditorium and during meetings all I had to do was stare at it and ponder.
It is so true. Your story is your History.
So no matter what all a writer does to get money to live on, their career is writing, and all the rest is waiting to write.
8. What advice would you give to someone who aspires to become an author?
As noted above learn everything, master a language, then as many others as possible, and if committing yourself to a life of learning at an even faster pace than you are now learning in school seems to be a burden, DON'T be a writer.
Try everything. If there's anything else you can do, do it.
If you can stop writing, then stop.
9. Was becoming an author something you always wanted to do?
I didn't do it and don't know anyone who has though most of my friends are writers.
It's something you are, not something you become.
And it does not depend on having "talent." The traits I've listed above are not a "talent" but just a quirk you can't get rid of if you have it. You can use those traits to achieve a wide variety of things in life. They don't compel you to sell your writing.
So there is that one additional trait. A writer is a person who can't not write and can't not read even if there's no audience and no pay involved.
All the books of advice will say, 'Write what you know.' But the truth is that's not a good idea.
The better you know something, the less likely you are to be able to convey it well until you've acquired a huge range of skills in the writer's toolbox.
However, it's also true that you really should not expect to go do some research, learn something, then put it in a novel or non-fiction book.
Yes, you must research as you write, to check facts, but just to CHECK.
The research for a novel is done years and years before the novel is even an idea in the back of your mind. You use that storehouse of eclectic trivia as the potting soil to germinate ideas, and when you go to write, your subconscious will arrange that trivia into a pattern that will be art.
In fact, you get 'ideas' because some of that trivia is intrinsically interesting to you.
What you've just learned today will be of artistic use to you in about 20 years. So the sooner you start learning, the sooner you can start turning out publishable material with artistic merit.
A writer is an observer. Most especially, a writer is an observer of people. Like actors, because Writing Is A Performing Art, a writer should cultivate the habit of sitting down at the mall or in airports or other public places and just observe people and divine their life-story (like Sherlock Holmes or Psych) from details.
People-watching is the main avocation of actors and writers. They are allied fields.
10. As a child, did you have any favorite stories?
See my list of authors that influenced me.
http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/welcommittee/influenc.html
All their work was favorite but I did reread Andre Norton's Star Rangers 16 times before I lost count.
For more on that story see the forward to DUSHAU, the first book in the Dushau Trilogy
READ FREE CHAPTERS OF ALL 3 BOOKS IN THE DUSHAU TRILOGY HERE
http://www.simegen.com/jl/dushau/
The Dushau Trilogy's origin is recounted in the forward. I wrote them at Andre Norton's request as a kind of sequel to her novel Star Rangers though in a different Universe.
Star Rangers was the original title of Last Planet -- they used to reissue books with different titles to get you to buy them twice.
Star Rangers
All writers are readers, though not all readers are writers.
A writer is a compulsive reader who will read cereal boxes, toilet paper wrapping, billboards, license plates, even the fine print in contracts and installation instructions. Writers are read-addicts.
If you're not a read-addict, you likely won't make many sales of your words. You'll run out of material fast.
11. Did any life events inspire your works? If so, which ones inspired you most?
No.
I write Science Fiction and Fantasy.
It's all imagination.
12. What is your motivation for being an author?
If you need a motivation, you're not a writer.
But there is one thing that spurs extreme bursts of effort. The promise of a paycheck if you meet a deadline does amazing things.
Deadline training is another skill set writers must acquire.
If you're in school, learn to meet every assignment deadline with plenty of room to spare (days or weeks if possible). You won't get a paycheck if you don't make the deadline.
Keep bugging teachers to give you the assignments for the whole quarter on the first day of class, and work ahead in the textbook, and get ahead and ahead of the class's position.
That's what writers do. You don't need teachers to teach you. You teach yourself and check the teacher's presentation to be sure you didn't miss something important. That way you learn to teach, and every book you write (fiction or non-fiction) is TEACHING which is also a performing art.
If you are a writer, and you accept the teacher's usual reluctance to provide this information (which they do have, no matter what they say, but won't admit it because they're taught in teacher-school that it's bad for students; most students aren't writers so mass-production schooling doesn't accommodate us), so if you are a writer and you accept no for an answer, you will find yourself getting grades way below what you really deserve because you are a different kind of learner than the others in your class.
Writers work ahead of deadlines wherever possible, and manipulate the world around them to allow for that. As a self-employed entrepreneur you can't afford to get sick and not have your work done ahead of the deadline so you can just send it in ON TIME and go barf in private.
13. Does your family support you in what you do?
No.
You'll see many songs of praise in the Acknowledgments of books about how the family supported the writer through the ordeal of creating the book. Much of it is literally TRUE, but few writers actually experience the truth of that until after the ordeal is over. Generally, Acknowledgments are written an hour or two before you send off the final-final rewritten manuscript. By then, the truth of support has come home.
A main complaint of beginning writers is that the family demands time that needs to be spent writing. And that's true. Family doesn't understand what writing is about. But even worse, the writer doesn't "get it" when the family complains.
Many articles have been written about striking that fine balance between competing needs. No two writers solve it the same way.
One of the skill sets a writer needs is Team Leader. This requires the ability to amalgamate disparate people into a team driving toward a goal, and keep them focused until you get them there. Notice in the acknowledgments of the best selling books how many people are involved on various levels, professional and personal. That's a team, and the internal politics pretty much replicates any team (office or sports).
I've never met a writer whose family was actually actively supportive in a way the writer could feel during the writing process except two who are very exceptional: Marion Zimmer Bradley, whose husband was a writer actually wrote an academic book about her writing.
And I know a veteran Romance writer whose husband wrote mysteries and so knew what she went through writing romance to deadline.
But even there, the relationship is not so much supportive as tolerant and understanding.
Most writers never experience any local support, at least not until vast success has been earned, and then there's always the suspicion they only flock to you because you are famous, not because you are you (actors have the same problem, so do Olympic athletes).
If that kind of stress deters you or chisels down your output volume, you're not suited to being a commercial writer.
14. What is a lifelong dream of yours?
I've pretty much fulfilled most of them. Read what I've pointed you to, and follow the links in those pieces.
15. Do you expect to keep producing novels and stories for the rest of your life?
Maybe, or maybe scripts, or non-fiction which I?m working on now (a 7 or 8 book series), or whatever I can find a market for.
---------------END INTERVIEW QUESTIONS----------
So I sent this treatise to the High School student and she answered:
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I was expecting responses but not responses that would make my head swim.
But I learned a lot that I had never even considered before. I do have the start, though, I think. I love to write. And I have a long ways to go.
Thank you very much for taking the time to respond to my questions. I'll go through them and edit the answers. The paper needed to be a minimum of three pages but you've given so much more which will be very helpful to me. It was saved immediately to my computer.
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Now, I ask you, is she a writer, or not?
I told her editing was yet another skill writers need.
I've edited this and added links and side notes to what I sent her, too.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
I haven't thought about what it takes to launch a writing career in many years. Neither of my children had any interest in writing for a living.
I've done a number of email interviews with High School kids doing the assignment "contact a writer and find out (whatever)" but when this newest request came in, it made me think about what this new world I've been describing on this blog (the E-book, self-publishing or at least self-promoting, Web 2.0 world of social networking) looks like from the point of view of someone in High School wondering if they can make money as a writer.
It's a fascinating point of view and I was rather surprised at my answers.
I found a number of basic human traits that a writer needs, that aren't actually widely distributed among the general population. These traits aren't "talent" for writing, just essential traits necessary for a writing career. Many of these traits are the same now as they were in my grandparents time. The changes and additions are all in the skills and techniques area, not basic personality traits.
And it isn't enough to have these traits, and write a few books, or even sell a few that actually do well in the marketplace. The real question is whether this profession actually chafes your nerves, making you get up every day forcing yourself to do something you'd really rather not do -- or whether you get up each day and mostly just do what you want to do because that happens to be what you have to do.
Then of course, as in every profession, there are "those" days when you just have to do what has to be done.
I have often said of myself that I don't "want to write" -- I "want to have written." As far as I can tell, there's only one way to get to where I want to be, and right now I've got a lot of published material behind me, some on the table in front of me that will be published, and a whole lot more in the compost heap of "Ideas and Concepts."
So here are the questions this High School student thought up for me to answer. Read and think first how you would answer. I did include a number of links with my answer, but here I'm adding a couple more since not everyone reading this post is as familiar with the material as this High School student.
-------------------
1. Who are you and where were you born?
(This one really threw me for a loop. I could write an entire treatise on the concept of "who" and "are" and in fact have written many Review columns on the problem of "Identity" as a mystical component of "Character." But I decided to use my standard short bio instead.)
Jacqueline Lichtenberg, a life member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, (http://www.sfwa.org ). She is creator of the Sime~Gen Universe with a vibrant fan following (http://www.simegen.net ), primary author of the Bantam paperback Star Trek Lives! which blew the lid on Star Trek fandom, founder of the Star Trek Welcommittee, creator of the genre term Intimate Adventure,
http://www.simegen.com/jl/intimateadventure.html
winner of the Galaxy Award for Spirituality in Science Fiction with her second novel, and the first Romantic Times Awards for Best Science Fiction Novel with her later novel Dushau. Her fiction has been in audio-dramatization on XM Satellite Radio. She has been the sf/f reviewer for a professional magazine since 1993. She teaches sf/f writing online while turning to her first love, screenwriting focused on selling to the feature film market.
Screenwriting: http://www.slantedconcept.com
The above is my 200 word bio expanded with hotlinks that appears in program books at conventions, in newspapers, and websites where the URLs can be permitted.
I "am" a great deal more than just "what I've done." One day I may write my autobiography to try to convey some of "who" I think I am. Or not.
2. What was your childhood like?
(Again an entire book worth of answers swarms to mind. But I decided on a brief answer -- well Lichtenberg-brief)
Compared to world famous celebrities, I had a plain vanilla childhood with no real traumas or dramatic events. I was born in New York, grew up in California, lived in a 2 bedroom house with my parents, was an only child, and basically did as little as possible other than read books.
I lived in the same house with the same parents and went to school in the same public school system from Kindergarten to HS graduation, then on to the nearest University (UC Berkeley), commuted to campus from home, and graduated from that one school. All in a straight line.
When I was in 5th Grade, I was failing badly, failing reading in particular. My mother snuck me a book from the adult library. It was science fiction. Battle On Mercury by "Erik Van Lihn" which I learned later was yet another pen name for Lester Del Rey (founder of Del Rey publishing company that popularized adult fantasy).
Pen names proliferated for that entire generation of SF writers because there were fewer writers than there were market slots.
With that book in hand, and my mother's refusal to read it TO me, I taught myself to read nearly overnight and read through the whole adult library SF collection, and tried to read most of the books in the children's library but, except for Andre Norton's titles, they were pretty awful. I also liked the Rick Brandt series but detested Nancy Drew and Nurse Nancy.
Rules in libraries about what kids could and could not read were much more strict then, so I had the collusion of my mother (a Reader) to support my habit, but she drew lines in the sand, too. I did the same raising my kids.
I used to sit on the floor in the stacks at the adult library waiting for my mother to choose a book and gaze at the titles of the books and imagine what the stories I wasn't allowed to read would be.
Then I grew up, got my degree in Chemistry from the University of California, (because a lot of my favorite SF writers had a degree in Chemistry and the University didn't offer a degree in Science Fiction Writing) then I worked in Chemistry for a few years, did some globe-trotting (all the biographies of writers that I'd read showed they had done globe-trotting, so I made that a priority) then got married, had 2 kids, and began writing those books I hadn't been allowed to read.
3. Who or what influenced you to become an author?
Here is a list of the writers I grew up wanting to write like and some anecdotes about finally meeting them professional to professional.
http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/welcommittee/influenc.html
When I was in 7th Grade, I read a good story in an SF magazine but the illustrations were just plain all wrong, not at all what the words described.
At that point, my Dad had bought our family our first typewriter, and he taught me to type over a Christmas vacation. He was a professional teletype operator and taught me the way he had been taught, for speed and accuracy.
I later copped an A in a HS typing course without learning anything, in fact could teach the teacher a thing or two but of course what teacher would allow that?
In a fit of indignation, I pulled out the family typewriter (a manual portable) and typed (without handwriting a draft first) and blasted off a couple paragraphs of a letter lambasting the magazine for daring to publish inaccurate illustrations.
They published the letter, my first publication. HOOKED!
But it only worked to 'hook' me because I was already a 'writer' which is why I could blast out a few succinct but vivid words without a second thought (when I was not-quite in 8th grade mind you) and get my words published in a letter column that was strictly for adults and nobody knew that I was a kid. I made many SF fan friends over the next few years who never knew I was 15 years younger than they were.
The big disappointment? When I finally sold a story to that magazine, the illustration was even more badly messed up than the one I'd complained about some 15 years before.
They also published my name and address with that letter (at that time, there weren't the nasty predators out there who would stalk and attack anyone whose identity was made public.)
After the magazine came out, my parent's mailbox became stuffed with dozens then hundreds of letters from SCIENCE FICTION FANS!!! Which I duly answered. On the typewriter because in SF fandom, handwriting is impolite. Like a Kingdom a Fandom has a culture of its own.
Pause here to see Rowena Cherry's post on cultural dissonance. Entering SF fandom at that time was massive cultural dissonance, but at the same time it was a homecoming. Every strange thing was just "right" and "familiar" though I'd never imagined it before.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/feeling-little-alien.html
I discovered there was a whole, organized, huge, active, brilliant, rollicking, dynamic and just plain wondrous group of people who were interested in all the things I was interested in. In fact they thrived on what I couldn't share even with my parents.
I discovered something I could do that I wanted to do. I just had to figure out how to make a living while doing it because there was (and actually still is) no money in Science Fiction writing.
A QUESTION YOU DIDN'T ASK: my first sale.
Here is the story of my first sale.
http://www.simegen.com/jl/IFS~GConnection.html
That short story is now posted online for free reading.
http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/rimonslibrary/oht.html
It's the first published fiction in what was to become my Sime~Gen Universe novels. There is an omnibus of three novels in that universe that form a trilogy:
4. What does it take to become an author?
My second, and really key, mentor in the art and craft of writing was Marion Zimmer Bradley (look her up on Amazon).
Marion Zimmer Bradley
Marion Zimmer Bradley taught that anyone can write fiction and sell it, provided they have acquired one single skill. The ability to write a literate English sentence.
It's spelling, punctuation, and grammar, plus a huge vocabulary. Today add keyboarding and a facility with word processing programs, especially the tech underpinnings that allow you to manipulate text into various formats (from Word, or Open Office document, to html, to pdf, to Plain Text, to the newest version of whatever software).
A facility with building websites, manipulating images, and an eye for design can be helpful, but if you make enough with your writing, you can hire someone to do that. You will likely not be satisfied though unless you can at least edit the website they make for you.
Online social networking skills, Web 2.0, 3.0, and soon 4.0 plus whatever comes after that is going to be a primary necessity for writers in just a few years.
Public Speaking training. Join anything at school that gets you on a stage before an audience, the more hostile the audience the better.
The ability to throw a party, organize food, invite guests that blend well, attract Media Attention to it, create an EVENT (you may have to throw your own book-launch parties for a while). Training for this can be had by volunteering to run money raisers for charities or your school.
You need experience at being the center of attention at an Event, at being totally ignored and irrelevant to the Event, and at being in charge of the Event. You need to do this over and over until getting dressed for that special night is exactly the same as getting dressed to spend the day lounging around the house all alone. Practice until speaking to 2,000 people, or on a TV talk show, is the same as talking to one person.
All of the above modern skills are the equivalent of "writing a literate English sentence" on a typewriter.
Writing is basically just talking to someone who isn't there at the moment, but you know pretty much who that person is. You always write for a particular audience, fiction or non-fiction you must write to your audience, not above their heads, and not beneath them, just to them.
So start to learn to write by learning to talk. Learn the fine art of conversation, too, not just the art of the monologue. Elocution and Rhetoric are the core of these disciplines, but so is Deportment.
Finally, to become a professional writer, you need to amass a huge amount of trivia, bits and pieces and an understanding of the principles that relate those pieces into a whole. It doesn't have to be the RIGHT principles according to what anyone else thinks. It has to be internally CONSISTENT in your own mind.
In other words you need to study philosophy, anthropology, sociology, criminology, pre-history, archeology, linguistics (diachronic linguistics especially), Law, every bit of science you can lay hands on, and learn every possible culture you can find to learn about. You need to learn all about human behavior, and the human nervous system and brain functions. You need to learn all about Religion (all of them!).
You need to cultivate an attitude toward learning such that it never, ever, occurs to you that this or that subject is out of bounds, or you won't study it because you don't like it. And you need to set yourself a curriculum which you make up and then actually execute to your own specified deadlines.
A good role model from today's modern Romance market is my co-blogger here, Rowena Cherry, whose blog entry on cultural dissonance you just read if you followed the link above.
As Alma Hill my first writing mentor met through Science Fiction Fandom, taught me, Writing Is A Performing Art.
Robert Heinlein taught me the oldest stage adage: "Sounding Spontaneous Is A Matter of Careful Preparation."
To "become" a writer is impossible.
To recognize that you were born a writer, is possible. How do you tell if you're a writer?
Writers write.
That's it. That's the whole thing. Those who can't stop writing have to make a living somehow and the only recourse is to sell what you've written.
My blog post
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/can-serials-work-via-e-publishing.html
Gives you a chance to get a grip on the 'business model' of the independent contractor which is what a professional writer is.
To 'go pro' you have to prepare yourself to do everything it takes to run a small business from incorporating to book keeping to management to advertising. You will be 'self-employed' and that means usually doing absolutely everything with your own hands, at least part of the time.
Marion Zimmer Bradley had a sign over her desk:
"Nobody ever told you not to be a plumber."
Meaning, plumbers make a lot more money more reliably and with a lot less effort than writers do.
Anyone who can be discouraged from "becoming a writer" should be discouraged resoundingly.
Robert A. Heinlein (look him up on Amazon)
Robert A. Heinlein
said that only people who literally couldn't do anything else should consider writing as a career.
He, himself, was actually physically disabled and had no other way to support himself, so he began selling his stories. He always looked at it as competing for some guy's beer money.
Every successful writer I know follows his 3 rules whether they attribute them to Heinlein or not.
1) write it
2) finish it
3) put it on the market and keep it on the market until it sells
I learned those rules when I was a teen.
So what does it take to "become" a professional writer? A certain amount of cussedness, a blazing fire of determination, an ego beyond all bounds of polite society, and a wide and deep understanding of humanity, life, the universe and everything.
5. What's the most rewarding part of being a writer?
As a professional reviewer I get tons of free books from all sorts of publishers which is one way to feed a reading-addict! I just saw a tweet on twitter from a writer who advised new writers that if you don't read, you can't write. Writing means READING. So if you're not addicted to reading, find another way to make a living.
So the biggest kick I ever get from all this work is when I read a book some publicist for some publisher has sent me and love it, then review the book in my review column, send it in to the magazine that pays me for the column, and email a copy of the review to whichever publicist sent it to me, and get an email from the author flipping out over my review because some of my novels had been the inspiration to them to launch a writing career.
The kick is from finding out how this writer I've just become a fan of grew up as a fan of mine! Wow.
This has happened consistently throughout my career, but I only recently started keeping track and asking permission to list the writer online.
So here's a very abbreviated list of some of the authors who will admit in public that I influenced them.
http://www.simegen.com/jl/influencedbyJL/
6. Is there anything you dislike?
Oh, that's way too open ended a question.
Of course there are many things, but the objective of training yourself to be a professional writer (meaning you not only write for money, but you also can and will write whatever they will pay for) is to whittle the list of dislikes you amass as a teenager down to almost nothing by the time you're thirty.
Broad tastes, wide experience, a zest and even lust for life in all its glory is the attitude a writer needs to cultivate.
If you haven't read it by now, do please read Rowena Cherry's post on cultural dissonance.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/feeling-little-alien.html
I didn't tell her to write that post and put it up right before this one. It just "happened" like so many of the connections on this blog. Rowena is prescribing just exactly the medicine a writer needs to become able to create scintillating characters and conflicts.
When you must create a character who is very different from yourself, you must be able to put yourself in his/her shoes and walk a mile in those moccasins. Likes and dislikes are part of the characterization of that character and to make a character consistent, you can't just choose those likes and dislikes at random or just pick what you, yourself like or dislike.
The characteristics or traits of your characters must form a pattern that bespeaks the essence of the character and the theme of the work.
To achieve that, you need to learn to like things you dislike, if only for a few months at a time while you write that book. Using your own personal likes and dislikes creates an effect in the work that labels it amateur.
If all this learning, studying, broadening, self-cultivating, degree work at university, lifelong course taking, lifelong dedication to learning-learning-learning sounds arduous, then you're not a writer.
If it all sounds irresistible, a life of pure vacation time, you might actually sell your work for money one day.
And in fact, that means you are already a writer. Possibly, if you have the right attitude toward the words you produce, valuing those words as if they already were worth money, being willing to barter words for valuable returns, then you may in fact be a professional writer without yet having sold any words.
Professionalism in any profession is all about attitude.
7. What other careers have you had besides being an author?
I trained and worked as a Chemist, but that wasn't another career.
The secret of the universe is that there actually is only one career.
We all write the story of our own lives.
Shakespeare wrote: "All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts."
That was engraved over the stage in my High School's auditorium and during meetings all I had to do was stare at it and ponder.
It is so true. Your story is your History.
So no matter what all a writer does to get money to live on, their career is writing, and all the rest is waiting to write.
8. What advice would you give to someone who aspires to become an author?
As noted above learn everything, master a language, then as many others as possible, and if committing yourself to a life of learning at an even faster pace than you are now learning in school seems to be a burden, DON'T be a writer.
Try everything. If there's anything else you can do, do it.
If you can stop writing, then stop.
9. Was becoming an author something you always wanted to do?
I didn't do it and don't know anyone who has though most of my friends are writers.
It's something you are, not something you become.
And it does not depend on having "talent." The traits I've listed above are not a "talent" but just a quirk you can't get rid of if you have it. You can use those traits to achieve a wide variety of things in life. They don't compel you to sell your writing.
So there is that one additional trait. A writer is a person who can't not write and can't not read even if there's no audience and no pay involved.
All the books of advice will say, 'Write what you know.' But the truth is that's not a good idea.
The better you know something, the less likely you are to be able to convey it well until you've acquired a huge range of skills in the writer's toolbox.
However, it's also true that you really should not expect to go do some research, learn something, then put it in a novel or non-fiction book.
Yes, you must research as you write, to check facts, but just to CHECK.
The research for a novel is done years and years before the novel is even an idea in the back of your mind. You use that storehouse of eclectic trivia as the potting soil to germinate ideas, and when you go to write, your subconscious will arrange that trivia into a pattern that will be art.
In fact, you get 'ideas' because some of that trivia is intrinsically interesting to you.
What you've just learned today will be of artistic use to you in about 20 years. So the sooner you start learning, the sooner you can start turning out publishable material with artistic merit.
A writer is an observer. Most especially, a writer is an observer of people. Like actors, because Writing Is A Performing Art, a writer should cultivate the habit of sitting down at the mall or in airports or other public places and just observe people and divine their life-story (like Sherlock Holmes or Psych) from details.
People-watching is the main avocation of actors and writers. They are allied fields.
10. As a child, did you have any favorite stories?
See my list of authors that influenced me.
http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/welcommittee/influenc.html
All their work was favorite but I did reread Andre Norton's Star Rangers 16 times before I lost count.
For more on that story see the forward to DUSHAU, the first book in the Dushau Trilogy
READ FREE CHAPTERS OF ALL 3 BOOKS IN THE DUSHAU TRILOGY HERE
http://www.simegen.com/jl/dushau/
The Dushau Trilogy's origin is recounted in the forward. I wrote them at Andre Norton's request as a kind of sequel to her novel Star Rangers though in a different Universe.
Star Rangers was the original title of Last Planet -- they used to reissue books with different titles to get you to buy them twice.
Star Rangers
All writers are readers, though not all readers are writers.
A writer is a compulsive reader who will read cereal boxes, toilet paper wrapping, billboards, license plates, even the fine print in contracts and installation instructions. Writers are read-addicts.
If you're not a read-addict, you likely won't make many sales of your words. You'll run out of material fast.
11. Did any life events inspire your works? If so, which ones inspired you most?
No.
I write Science Fiction and Fantasy.
It's all imagination.
12. What is your motivation for being an author?
If you need a motivation, you're not a writer.
But there is one thing that spurs extreme bursts of effort. The promise of a paycheck if you meet a deadline does amazing things.
Deadline training is another skill set writers must acquire.
If you're in school, learn to meet every assignment deadline with plenty of room to spare (days or weeks if possible). You won't get a paycheck if you don't make the deadline.
Keep bugging teachers to give you the assignments for the whole quarter on the first day of class, and work ahead in the textbook, and get ahead and ahead of the class's position.
That's what writers do. You don't need teachers to teach you. You teach yourself and check the teacher's presentation to be sure you didn't miss something important. That way you learn to teach, and every book you write (fiction or non-fiction) is TEACHING which is also a performing art.
If you are a writer, and you accept the teacher's usual reluctance to provide this information (which they do have, no matter what they say, but won't admit it because they're taught in teacher-school that it's bad for students; most students aren't writers so mass-production schooling doesn't accommodate us), so if you are a writer and you accept no for an answer, you will find yourself getting grades way below what you really deserve because you are a different kind of learner than the others in your class.
Writers work ahead of deadlines wherever possible, and manipulate the world around them to allow for that. As a self-employed entrepreneur you can't afford to get sick and not have your work done ahead of the deadline so you can just send it in ON TIME and go barf in private.
13. Does your family support you in what you do?
No.
You'll see many songs of praise in the Acknowledgments of books about how the family supported the writer through the ordeal of creating the book. Much of it is literally TRUE, but few writers actually experience the truth of that until after the ordeal is over. Generally, Acknowledgments are written an hour or two before you send off the final-final rewritten manuscript. By then, the truth of support has come home.
A main complaint of beginning writers is that the family demands time that needs to be spent writing. And that's true. Family doesn't understand what writing is about. But even worse, the writer doesn't "get it" when the family complains.
Many articles have been written about striking that fine balance between competing needs. No two writers solve it the same way.
One of the skill sets a writer needs is Team Leader. This requires the ability to amalgamate disparate people into a team driving toward a goal, and keep them focused until you get them there. Notice in the acknowledgments of the best selling books how many people are involved on various levels, professional and personal. That's a team, and the internal politics pretty much replicates any team (office or sports).
I've never met a writer whose family was actually actively supportive in a way the writer could feel during the writing process except two who are very exceptional: Marion Zimmer Bradley, whose husband was a writer actually wrote an academic book about her writing.
And I know a veteran Romance writer whose husband wrote mysteries and so knew what she went through writing romance to deadline.
But even there, the relationship is not so much supportive as tolerant and understanding.
Most writers never experience any local support, at least not until vast success has been earned, and then there's always the suspicion they only flock to you because you are famous, not because you are you (actors have the same problem, so do Olympic athletes).
If that kind of stress deters you or chisels down your output volume, you're not suited to being a commercial writer.
14. What is a lifelong dream of yours?
I've pretty much fulfilled most of them. Read what I've pointed you to, and follow the links in those pieces.
15. Do you expect to keep producing novels and stories for the rest of your life?
Maybe, or maybe scripts, or non-fiction which I?m working on now (a 7 or 8 book series), or whatever I can find a market for.
---------------END INTERVIEW QUESTIONS----------
So I sent this treatise to the High School student and she answered:
----------
I was expecting responses but not responses that would make my head swim.
But I learned a lot that I had never even considered before. I do have the start, though, I think. I love to write. And I have a long ways to go.
Thank you very much for taking the time to respond to my questions. I'll go through them and edit the answers. The paper needed to be a minimum of three pages but you've given so much more which will be very helpful to me. It was saved immediately to my computer.
----------
Now, I ask you, is she a writer, or not?
I told her editing was yet another skill writers need.
I've edited this and added links and side notes to what I sent her, too.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Enter to win a free Kindle from Dorchester
Given that the deadline before which all entries must be received is 9/11, I hope that Linnea Sinclair and Jacqueline Lichtenberg will forgive me for posting out of turn.
http://dorchesterpub.com/Dorch/SpecialFeatures.cfm?ID=2719
This drawing is in connection with Dragoncon.
http://dorchesterpub.com/Dorch/SpecialFeatures.cfm?ID=2719
This drawing is in connection with Dragoncon.
Sunday, September 06, 2009
Feeling a little alien?
Sooner or later, most of us will feel a little alien... and although this is an alien romance blog, I am not talking about sexually groping a diminutive being from Mars, or Europa, or Deneb.
I am talking about cultural dissonance. I make no apologies for using an ambiguous headline to make a point. The news media does it all the time.
Cultural dissonance is (IMHO) one of the most fertile and promising sources of internal and external conflict for heroes and heroines in alien/human romances, and we can all identify on some level with it. How far do we go in researching it?
What Is Cultural Dissonance?
Dissonance is a difference in point of view (or a lack of agreement) about how the world, or society, or a community works or how it ought to work.
We see it in politics, religion, the sciences, and probably in economics. Feelings run high, people feel uncomfortable, not least because they cannot understand why those who do not agree with them --apparently-- fail to see the superior good sense and fairness and reasonableness of their own position.
Cultures differ. If you live in a melting pot, you must expect the pot to boil over. That was a strength and a weakness in the Babylon 5 series. I particularly appreciated the point that there had been four Babylons before Babylon 5.
‘Cultural dissonance’ describes
Teachers know all about cultural dissonance, and how hard it is to teach children from different cultures and to make appropriate allowances for differences in the values, knowledge, skills, and learning styles that children bring to the classroom from their homes.
I suppose most people assume that their own views, habits, lifestyles, expectations are mainstream. Finding out that this is not the case can be deeply disturbing and infuriating.
How realistic are your favorite aliens when they visit Earth, or your humans when they are transported to another planet? Are they adequately angry, frightened, confused, baffled, outraged? Do they know when to keep quiet, and when (if at all) to hash out "where they are coming from"?
What sort of research do you do, or can you visualize your favorite alien romance author doing?
Possibly, this is not a propitious time to try going to a political meeting held by members of a party with whose policies you violently disagree for the sake of research. Safer might be to join a social networking group with whom you have nothing in common. Hang out with the nonogenarians subgroup on Eons, or with the young texting Haters on GoodReads, or the extremely sexually adventurous subgroup on TBD, or in a "pirates" chat room can be quite a good way to glimpse what it might be like to be an alien.
Happy researching.
Rowena Cherry
I am talking about cultural dissonance. I make no apologies for using an ambiguous headline to make a point. The news media does it all the time.
Cultural dissonance is (IMHO) one of the most fertile and promising sources of internal and external conflict for heroes and heroines in alien/human romances, and we can all identify on some level with it. How far do we go in researching it?
What Is Cultural Dissonance?
Dissonance is a difference in point of view (or a lack of agreement) about how the world, or society, or a community works or how it ought to work.
We see it in politics, religion, the sciences, and probably in economics. Feelings run high, people feel uncomfortable, not least because they cannot understand why those who do not agree with them --apparently-- fail to see the superior good sense and fairness and reasonableness of their own position.
Cultures differ. If you live in a melting pot, you must expect the pot to boil over. That was a strength and a weakness in the Babylon 5 series. I particularly appreciated the point that there had been four Babylons before Babylon 5.
‘Cultural dissonance’ describes
a sense of discomfort, discord or disharmony arising from cultural differences or inconsistencies which are unexpected or unexplained and therefore difficult for individuals to negotiate. Dissonance can be experienced by all parties in the cultural interchange and attempts to resolve discordant issues can be bewildering or distressing.
Teachers know all about cultural dissonance, and how hard it is to teach children from different cultures and to make appropriate allowances for differences in the values, knowledge, skills, and learning styles that children bring to the classroom from their homes.
I suppose most people assume that their own views, habits, lifestyles, expectations are mainstream. Finding out that this is not the case can be deeply disturbing and infuriating.
How realistic are your favorite aliens when they visit Earth, or your humans when they are transported to another planet? Are they adequately angry, frightened, confused, baffled, outraged? Do they know when to keep quiet, and when (if at all) to hash out "where they are coming from"?
What sort of research do you do, or can you visualize your favorite alien romance author doing?
Possibly, this is not a propitious time to try going to a political meeting held by members of a party with whose policies you violently disagree for the sake of research. Safer might be to join a social networking group with whom you have nothing in common. Hang out with the nonogenarians subgroup on Eons, or with the young texting Haters on GoodReads, or the extremely sexually adventurous subgroup on TBD, or in a "pirates" chat room can be quite a good way to glimpse what it might be like to be an alien.
Happy researching.
Rowena Cherry
Thursday, September 03, 2009
Interview with Jade Lee
At the RWA conference in July I went to a lively presentation by Chinese-American romance author Jade Lee about the use of setting to enhance character. She expanded the topic to include the character’s clothing and accessories, as well as home and other physical surroundings, in the concept of setting. One fascinating suggestion she made was to pick an overarching metaphor for each major character. For instance, to offer a simple example, “The villainess is a snake.” While you might never explicitly label the female villain a snake in the text, you might make her thin, with a slithery mode of movement, and dress her in a sleek, scale-like fabric. She might figuratively attack people with her venom or try to squeeze the life out of them.
Here’s the mini-review of Lee’s novel based on an actual “Marry the Emperor” contest in Chinese history, THE CONCUBINE (of which she gave away free copies at the workshop), that I included in a recent issue of my author newsletter:
THE CONCUBINE, by Jade Lee. Although the author’s introductory note to this Harlequin Blaze romance compares it to Cinderella, it actually reminds me more of the biblical story of Esther. A king—or in this case, the emperor of China in the nineteenth century—holds a competition to choose a new queen and a handful of concubines. Chen Ji Yue, daughter of a minor, impoverished aristocratic household, is determined to become empress in order to raise her family’s financial and social status. Trouble brews when she and the emperor’s best friend, Sun Bo Tao, who has the task of overseeing the horde of maidens competing for the ruler’s favor, fall in love. Bo Tao has a reputation for indolent, rakish behavior, but behind the scenes he serves as the emperor’s most reliable adviser. He and Ji Yue clash at first, as we’d expect in a romance, but gradually come to acknowledge their mutual attraction. If their love becomes known or, worst of all, Ji Yue loses her virginity, both of them will suffer disgrace or worse. Ji Yue has to cope with the hostility of the dowager empress and the petty sniping of her rivals, while the problems of China’s dealings with foreigners from the West lurk in the background. The story is hot both sensually and emotionally. The setting and its customs are fascinatingly presented. Lee makes the characters easy for the reader to identify with while never letting us lose sight of their alien (for most American readers) culture and world-view.
I’m mentioning Jade Lee because the September issue of my newsletter, just released, contains an interview with her. This e-mail newsletter is a once-monthly message containing news, mini-book-reviews, interviews, and excerpts from my work—no discussion posts to flood your mailbox. Go to this page to subscribe:
News from the Crypt
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Here’s the mini-review of Lee’s novel based on an actual “Marry the Emperor” contest in Chinese history, THE CONCUBINE (of which she gave away free copies at the workshop), that I included in a recent issue of my author newsletter:
THE CONCUBINE, by Jade Lee. Although the author’s introductory note to this Harlequin Blaze romance compares it to Cinderella, it actually reminds me more of the biblical story of Esther. A king—or in this case, the emperor of China in the nineteenth century—holds a competition to choose a new queen and a handful of concubines. Chen Ji Yue, daughter of a minor, impoverished aristocratic household, is determined to become empress in order to raise her family’s financial and social status. Trouble brews when she and the emperor’s best friend, Sun Bo Tao, who has the task of overseeing the horde of maidens competing for the ruler’s favor, fall in love. Bo Tao has a reputation for indolent, rakish behavior, but behind the scenes he serves as the emperor’s most reliable adviser. He and Ji Yue clash at first, as we’d expect in a romance, but gradually come to acknowledge their mutual attraction. If their love becomes known or, worst of all, Ji Yue loses her virginity, both of them will suffer disgrace or worse. Ji Yue has to cope with the hostility of the dowager empress and the petty sniping of her rivals, while the problems of China’s dealings with foreigners from the West lurk in the background. The story is hot both sensually and emotionally. The setting and its customs are fascinatingly presented. Lee makes the characters easy for the reader to identify with while never letting us lose sight of their alien (for most American readers) culture and world-view.
I’m mentioning Jade Lee because the September issue of my newsletter, just released, contains an interview with her. This e-mail newsletter is a once-monthly message containing news, mini-book-reviews, interviews, and excerpts from my work—no discussion posts to flood your mailbox. Go to this page to subscribe:
News from the Crypt
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
LUCAN
LUCAN is out! Excerpts are on my website. And you can view the trailer below.
THEIR LOVE IS FORBIDDEN
Healer and high priestess of her people, Lady Cael is fated to life without a mate. But a mysterious explorer named Lucan Rourke doesn’t know her secrets, and his touch makes her crave a future that her extraordinary birthright has forbidden her...
BUT DANGER IS NO MATCH FOR DESIRE
Lucan has just one mission on Pendragon: to find the mythical Holy Grail, Earth’s only hope for survival. His powerful attraction to Cael is a distraction he can’t afford, unless he convinces her to join forces with him. Yet working so closely together only heightens their passion...even when the terrifying truth of Cael’s heritage threatens to shatter Lucan’s every belief—and the galaxy itself.
THEIR LOVE IS FORBIDDEN
Healer and high priestess of her people, Lady Cael is fated to life without a mate. But a mysterious explorer named Lucan Rourke doesn’t know her secrets, and his touch makes her crave a future that her extraordinary birthright has forbidden her...
BUT DANGER IS NO MATCH FOR DESIRE
Lucan has just one mission on Pendragon: to find the mythical Holy Grail, Earth’s only hope for survival. His powerful attraction to Cael is a distraction he can’t afford, unless he convinces her to join forces with him. Yet working so closely together only heightens their passion...even when the terrifying truth of Cael’s heritage threatens to shatter Lucan’s every belief—and the galaxy itself.
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Can Serials Work Via E-publishing?
I Retweeted a post on twitter and got into a discussion of the Question titling this post.
First a quick primer on basic Twitter which, if you know how twitter works, you may skip. If you don't "do" twitter, please read this.
-------Writer's Tutorial On Twitter -------------
Even if you don't plan to join twitter, you should be aware of the potential use of tweets in your narrative writing to shatter your Expository Lumps. Tweets work in drama because you can optionally set twitter to tweet to your phone, not just in a browser. News Services and TV News Shows twitter breaking news and even Amber Alerts and CDC alerts. Twitter is THE bulletin source for moving plots fast forward.
People in different parts of a theater can tweet or text during a show and discuss dialogue lines, or plan dinner, or plot an assassination (because tweets can be "private" and even coded.
On Twitter, RT means "re-tweet" meaning that you copy a tweet from someone you follow, paste it into your 140 character tweet box at the top of your page, put RT and an @ sign in front of the person's handle, and trim to 140 characters, then send it out. Your own handle gets auto-added so people who follow you and thus get your tweets will see that you are forwarding what someone else said. Only the tweeple who follow you will see what you posted. The tweeple who follow the person you're RT'ing will NOT see your RT unless they follow the person you're RT'ing too.
Twitter is one-way communication unless you make it two-way. But tweets are "public" and can be sorted by keyword, so strangers can converse.
If a RT is interesting, the people who follow you might follow the person you RT'd.
So when you "talk" by tweeting on twitter you have to be aware that readers will see only what you said, not what you're responding to. Like listening to half a telephone conversation. There's an art to including kibitzers gracefully and your Expository Lump suffering readers are kibitzers.
On Twitter, clicking a twitterer's handle (@something) sends you to their homepage where you can find out who they say they are and what they've been tweeting lately.
That's on the crude interface supplied by Twitter. There are "clients" you can download that present twitter data more neatly.
I wrote a long post about Web 2.0 recently,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/i-love-web-20.html
and Twitter is just one of the newer and more popular components of Web 2.0. Twitter can be RSS "syndicated" so you can follow your twitter traffic on friendfeed.com or just follow me on friendfeed.com (scroll down the right sidebar of this post for my friendfeed box). And you can put your tweets in a box on your blog, so your blog always shows what you've just been talking about, with links). Simplify and organize your web-life.
-------END TUTORIAL ON TWITTER---------
So I (who follow KFZuzulo and "hear" all her tweets) retweeted a retweet sent by KFZuzulo where she starts with her own comment, then supplies the comment she's Retweeting.
It looks like so:
@KFZuzulo Or by "episode"=Serials!! ->RT @kriheli prediction on where publishing is heading chapter by chapter publishing #followreader
So KFZuzulo was answering kriheli's comment that publishing is headed for chapter-by-chapter presentation, and KFZuzulo said that means "episode" or "serials" which I know is in fact already successful with certain readerships online.
The hashtag #followreader was in @kriheli's original post. These hashtags are used to let strangers sort the whole twitter feed by subject and find people saying interesting things in order to follow more interesting tweeple.
Frankly you might want to follow @kriheli if you're interested in the E-book business model that Margaret Carter discussed here
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/business-model-of-e-publishing.html
So in response to my RT of her RT, @KFZuzulo asked me a question that looked like so:
KFZuzulo @JLichtenberg Do you think serials can work via e-publishing?
And I replied with a #followfriday hashtag because it was Friday and thus the hashtag was "allowed" by protocol. #followfriday means I recommend that other Tweeple should follow @KFZuzulo who is Kellyann Zuzulo who supplied us with a Guest Post here on this blog
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/living-with-fatal-flaw.html
My reply to her looked like this:
@KFZuzulo Serials working in E-publishing? THAT's a blog topic not 140C's I'll try to cover it #followfriday @KFZuzulo
Another feature twitter has is that you can sort the feed so you can see any post with your handle in it. I'm @jlichtenberg and you can find me at
http://twitter.com/jlichtenberg
Though twitter allows for private Direct Messages, all these posts I've mentioned went to all our followers, in aggregate, probably over 3,000 tweeple.
So my answer is much more than the 140 characters limit on twitter.com
1) My answer is related to the difference between Knowledge and Wisdom (oy, she's waxing metaphysical again!)
2) My answer is related to the history of the media in all its glorious forms.
3) My answer is related to the 4-generation rule (unto the 4th generation); it takes 4 generations to effect a basic cultural change.
4) My answer is related to my blog post here "I Love Web 2.0"
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/i-love-web-20.html
Let's do those points in reverse order.
4) Technology is the natural place to start since this is a question about E-publishing, a new form of delivery system for fiction.
We've finally got handheld screens that are legible to most people, and not most but a lot of people are used to cell phones with some "features" like web access (called smart phones). I read e-books on a PALM TX which has wi-fi access to the internet if there's a hotspot. But it's not a phone and doesn't have wireless access to the internet. I have a phone that does have wireless access to the internet, but it doesn't have a download for mobipocket reader which is the one I use.
And of course, we now have the electronic paper display used by Amazon's Kindle that pleases a lot of other people. Sony and others are making readers, and building in wi-fi or wireless capabilities to make it easy to download e-books and newspapers.
Some new, lower-energy-consuming chips are revolutionizing the palm top market, (with more innovations on the market next year) so we are very close to solving the tech problems and dumbing down the machinery so anyone can use it. At the same time smart-devices like smart-phones are smarting-up the users. Generally, you like what you're used to and you like new things that are easier than you're used to.
I covered a lot of the Cloud Computing and interactivity on the web in my "I Love Web 2.0" post, so we won't go over that again. Just remember it and think about the rising tide of CHANGE sweeping over us. At the same time, think about why Science Fiction is a shrinking genre while SFRomance is a growing genre.
(Though I have to admit EUREKA's use of smart-roads and boson-clouds as a landing field for a crash-down of a space ship is pure SF at its best! TV Shows like EUREKA (on scyfy channel) are also smarting up the users.)
Smarting-up the users is where the 4-generation rule comes into play.
Here's where you should either read or remember Alvin Toffler's first book, FUTURE SHOCK. The point he made is still valid, and much of what he predicted has already come true (the rest seems on the way).
Humans are hardwired to tolerate only so much change. A person can make only so many "decisions" (a brain function as much as it is a mental function) per day. As you age, you can tolerate change less and less, make fewer decisions per day. Read Toffler's book for the full explanation. And trust me, to understand the e-book publishing potential, you need to read FUTURE SHOCK. It's not out-dated (yet).
The result of this purely physical nervous system limitation of humans to make major changes in the way they think and do things during a single lifetime is the 4-Generation rule. It takes nearly 80 years at the very least to make a major change to a culture.
A recent study revealed that multi-tasking (the tempo of the modern world) actually chips away at efficiency and productivity.
Here's an article:
http://www.apa.org/releases/multitasking.html
---------QUOTE-------------
The measurements revealed that for all types of tasks, subjects lost time when they had to switch from one task to another, and time costs increased with the complexity of the tasks, so it took significantly longer to switch between more complex tasks. Time costs also were greater when subjects switched to tasks that were relatively unfamiliar. They got "up to speed" faster when they switched to tasks they knew better, an observation that may lead to interfaces designed to help overcome people's innate cognitive limitations.
---------END QUOTE---------
So the last word on the tech underpinnings of the new Fiction Delivery System has not been posted! But the culture is changing.
3) The 4-generation rule (unto the 4th generation); it takes 4 generations to effect a basic cultural change.
In the last 20 years with the advent of the Web and now Web 2.0 and even 3 and 4.0 starting to show up, with the digitalization of TV broadcasts, and other fundamental infrastructure changes especially integration by "aggregators", we have made several of these fundamental changes in the whole way "the world" works, all at once within one generation.
As a result, there are those of you reading this blog who shudder and flee at the idea of opening a twitter account. You don't know what it is and you don't want to know. You want it to go away, and you can't see any reason why the TV News shows give it so much attention and credence.
Your grandchildren will cling to networks like twitter (it's losing money and may not survive, but microblogging probably will; there's now a micro-blog that lets you use a lot more than 140 characters) and those grandchildren will likewise shudder at the thought of opening a something-else-account.
Through the middle-decades of life, humans embrace these new tools or major changes, shift career direction, experiment with new brands etc. By age 40, advertisers have lost interest in you. By age 50, you've lost interest in advertisers with NEW NEW NEW things to offer. By age 70 you actively resent anyone changing anything.
That's not wrong, or evil, or anti-progress. It actually is progress to resist change! It's progress toward stability, and valuing what progress has already been made more highly than progress that might (or might not) yet be made.
The 70-something's aversion to rapid change is nature's way of stabilizing society because at a certain rate of change, all society will disintegrate. Humans can't tolerate it.
And, according to Alvin Toffler, we're right at the edge of that rate of change.
What happens when a society disintegrates?
WORLDBUILDERS LISTEN UP.
The portrait of a disintegrated society has been painted before our eyes by CNN in these last few decades. Bosnia. (Ireland almost got there) Afghanistan. Iraq. Everyone for himself and devil take the hindmost. Then non-combatants aggregate themselves under the protection of "strongmen" who bears arms to protect, to ferociously exact revenge so his group will be feared and left alone. (Hatfields and McCoys to the 4th or 5th generation).
When the social glue fails, there's blood in the streets (literally) and starvation at home. Foreign countries see an opportunity to seize the disintegrated region for its raw materials and labor resources. Conquest is the result of social disintegration. Starvation. Poverty beyond belief.
So "society" a nebulous, almost indefinable thing (try explaining "social networks" to someone who's not online!) has a use and a purpose, as well as a structure!
So where does society come from? How do we stabilize large groups?
2) That question brings us to the HISTORY OF THE MEDIA IN ALL ITS GLORY.
When society disintegrates, there is no education of the young except in how to scavenge enough to eat today, and build a fire for tonight.
Our vertical integration of generations is what stabilizes society. Lore. Campfire morality tales. Cave paintings. Faith. History. And maybe above all technology, and the science that goes behind it. Technology gave us flint knives and which berries are edible. Today it gives us e-books, a new medium, and "social networks" which are currently "destabilizing" society while they form a totally new platform for stabilization.
But all this change takes time if it's not to be destructive. For a serious tutorial on the hows and whys of that time-requirement, read
C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner Series
Yeah, read SF about a non-human society to understand what humans create and use for "society."
Vertical integration of the generations is why the resistance to change built into the human brain during aging is GOOD. The job of youth is to innovate. The job of age is to discard innovations that are destructive to the stability of society -- because without society we're back to every-man-for-himself-and-devil-take-the-hindmost.
So it isn't improvement or progress toward a better world that elders resist. But they do resist.
They resist INSTABILITY caused by running experiments in change in society at large when such changes really need to start on the lab bench, and proceed to the pilot plant and field testing before being released. But youth is "impatient" with methodical testing. It's the nature of youth, and that's not bad unless it is not restrained by age. Not STOPPED, mind you, but RESTRAINED (slowed).
What the elders understand that youth does not is just what is at stake in their madcap pursuit of "progress" in all directions except stability.
If society disintegrates to hand-to-mouth again, and if two generations don't get book-learning educations, continuity is lost and society disintegrates even further. With climate change threatening famine, sword-rattling threatening mass destruction, and free-travel mixing up the genes of viruses and bacteria, bedbugs making a come-back because of hotels not changing sheets every night, and bedbugs being a prime vector for bubonic plague which is mutating and making a comeback, -- those who have lived long enough to learn to see "4 moves ahead" in the chess game of life want to avoid any innocent looking first move that could lead to destabilization in a 4th move.
Elders can see that we can't afford to be off-balance taking a step forward just when we must face one of those major threats (threats that youth discounts as something that will never happen because youth is immortal).
We stand on the shoulders of giants.
What we have today is the result of vertical integration of the generations - the elders teaching the youth, and restraining youth until they get some sense.
OK, this resistance to change analysis is very simplistic, and you can easily argue against my thesis here, but just wait a few minutes and think about these points as a skeletal outline in the subject of serialization as the future of the fiction delivery system.
So "the media" started around campfires in caves, then minstrels roving the countryside singing for their supper (advertising business model), and continues unbroken to Radio, TV, CNN, satellite feeds, and RSS feeds. (do subscribe to this blog; you won't regret it, and if you don't know how to subscribe to a blog, click one of the SUBSCRIBE icons to the right. Try GOOGLE and it'll lead you to the Google Reader setup.)
Ponder Margaret Carter's post on the business model of the e-book again.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/business-model-of-e-publishing.html
And consider this treasure of a post titled Traditional v self-publishing: a false comparison by Alasdair White (who isn't the famous musician Alasdair White, but rather the famous business management consultant Alasdair White). I met him on LinkedIn where he answered a question on publishing with the following totally brilliant analysis:
http://pm-solutions.com/infosys/blog/?p=32
Note that "e-publishing" is synonymous in some people's minds with "self-publishing" which couldn't be farther from the truth. But the e-publishing industry has grown up from scratch in about 10 years or so. Nobody knows what e-publishing IS, least of all the e-publishers, except that it's a big change. Just as TV started by copying the business model of Radio, e-publishing started copying publishing, and has now diverged markedly.
After reading Alasdair's analysis, I pointed him to Margaret Carter's post on the business model discussion among Romance Writers of America members and he wrote me back with the following illuminating insight which I'm quoting with permission:
----------------FROM ALASDAIR WHITE------------------
LinkedIn
Alasdair White has sent you a message.
Date: 8/31/2009
I read through the post you link below and it seems to me that there are still some fundamental misconceptions as to the relationship between author and publisher (no matter what form the publisher takes). The author, publisher, bookseller and reader form a value chain (in business terms). The author invests their time in the creation of a manuscript. The publisher invests their skills (and adds value) to the manuscript and turns it into a saleable product. The bookseller invests in facilities and stock and takes the product and sells it, The reader invests in buying the product and 'consumes' it.
Each part of the value chain is investing time, skill, and/or money in their part of the activities of the value chain. Each is taking a 'risk' with their investment. Each receives a reward for risk taken once the value chain is completed. Except when the author is commissioned by a publisher (who then effective buys the time and skills of the author who then has no investment in the product) there is no valid reason for an author to assume that they have any relationship with a publisher other than that of supplier.
Normally, if a product is supplied to another part of a value chain, then the supplier is recompensed at a fixed value - but very few authors simply want to be paid a fixed price for their manuscript - they want to garner the rewards of the sales (hence the royalty system). Thus, in exchange for a greater potential reward, they risk their short-term recompense.
BUT, and this really irritates me, authors then want an advance against the royalties - so they are now expecting the publisher to become a bank and to lend them money- which is possibly OK (although poor business management) because the publisher could set up the contract in a way that the author has to repay the advance proportionately if the sales fail to reach a certain break-even level. But can anyone name an author who would accept that?
No, the author wants an advance (fixed amount payment) AND a royalty and consider those publishers that don't pay advances as exploiting the authors and trying to avoid the risk. Now that is pure unadulterated greed speaking - but I bet the same complainers are criticizing those bankers who were paid bonuses in the good times but don't have to repay them in the bad - but it is the same argument.
If authors are paid an advance, then they should receive no royalty whatsoever until the sales reach a break even point which is determined by advance+in-house investment in bringing the manuscript to print+production costs (designers, printers etc)+marketing spend+lost opportunity cost (return that could have been generated had the money not been used as it was). This would, on an average novel push the break even sales to around 3000-5000 copies - which, for most novels is fantasy.
The fact that e-publishing does not have the printing costs (usually less than 30% of the final production cost) means only that producing an e-publication is marginally less costly than doing it as a hard-copy. And authors who feel hard done by need to take a crash course in the economics of publishing.
Even with our parsed down operating model it still costs a lot to link the first part of the value chain with the last part and authors need to consider whether they wish to take a risk of greater rewards (royalties only) or to be paid for their work at a fixed price. Personally (as both an author and a publisher), I feel that the combined advance+royalties model is unworkable and essentially unfair as it penalizes the publisher. If authors want the greatest return then they simply have to be willing to share in the risk.
Alasdair
http://pm-solutions.com/infosys/blog/?p=32
----------------------END QUOTE FROM ALASDAIR WHITE--------------
What has this to do with "Can Serials Work Via e-publishing?"
Well, that question is actually a complex question. First you must understand what publishing is/was. Then get a good grasp of the Web 2.0 model of cyberspace -- and anticipate where Web 4.0 will take us.
Alasdair is teaching us some things about "Media" as an industry that writers don't generally internalize. He's showing us "what" we as writers are actually doing. And his posts reveal a world totally different from what any creative artist would envision as the delivery mechanism for their art to their end-consumer.
Understanding the infrastructure of the fiction delivery system, and the meaning to "society" of the madcap pace of CHANGE in that delivery system over the last few decades, we can turn our attention to the really difficult part of this Question: What exactly is serialization?
In the history of the MEDIA, when did the SERIAL arise?
I honestly don't know.
But I think the origin of the Serial relates to my post on the Medium Is The Message:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/medium-is-message_19.html
Fiction has always been a for-profit endeavor by the fiction creator. The shaman was supported by the tribe in exchange for Wisdom conveyed in a form they could understand and use. The Minstrel brought news and got fed for it. In the Middle Ages, Church copyists copied older documents and were supported by charity gifts to the church, and by their scribe function. Think about it in terms of a business model - the fiction-delivery-system and the news-delivery-system.
The printing press, of course, is the evolutionary step in "The Media" which is comparable to the leap into electronic distribution.
But this one, Web 2.0, social networking, and gaming (interactivity between the consumer and the story), is much bigger even than the printing press or even "motion pictures."
If words are to be distributed FOR PROFIT, they have to go down a delivery system that has a pre-determined size, shape, delivery point and most especially that "value chain" that Alasdair White tutored us in.
The delivery system is the "business" and the words are just the commodity being purveyed by the business.
This is something new writers trying to "sell" their work have a very hard time grasping. They think of editors as "gatekeepers" who favor one person over another rather than African hunters spearing fast-moving antelope in a jungle to supply meat to a Packer shipping to South America.
I wrote a lengthy reply to a Question on a LinkedIn Group I'm on (LinkEds & Writers). I'm going to insert that Answer here because most of you won't be able to access it inside the Social Network and INSIDE a "Group" within that Social Network. Most readers can skip this insert. I'm mostly just sending the new writers to absorb Alasdair White's post on publishing as a business.
-----------FROM Q&A on LINKEDIN.COM LINKEDS&WRITERS----------
Q: I just distilled and posted an email I got from a very disgruntled young writer. It's a rant about the industry - what would you advise this writer?
Here's the transcribed email
http://ontext.com/2009/08/beginning-writer-bitches-publishing-industry/
A: (by Jacqueline Lichtenberg - there are well over 30 Answers so far -- I'm editing mine down)
I have encountered this "beginning writer's rant" that has echoed down the ages.
Beginner Commercial Artists are both right and wrong because they don't understand what they are doing or what the "industry" does or should do, but they do understand that what the industry is doing is wrong somehow, inadequate or philosophically askew.
I'm in a discussion with another LinkedIn member who answered a question on self-publishing with a marvelous analysis of the business models of publishing of all sorts.
His name is Alasdair White (but he isn't the famous Scottish musician).
I saw his answer to a question on LinkedIn and urged him to post it on a blog where anyone could get at it so I could point people at it. I mentioned it on twitter and made White a new fan out of a publisher.
The blog entry is here:
http://pm-solutions.com/infosys/blog/?p=32
Then I linked to White's post in a blog I will post on Tuesday Sept. 1, 2009. I'm a writer and co-blog with other writers on the craft and the industry, with a lot of beginning writers among our readers. My day to post is Tuesday.
I told Alasdair White that I would post a link to his blog, and pointed him to a post on the co-blog about an argument among Romance Writers of America members regarding the status of e-publishing.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/business-model-of-e-publishing.html
Alasdair kindly read that entry by my co-blogger Margaret Carter, and emailed me a lengthy and brilliant answer which I am going to ask if I can insert into my blog with a link to his. But I found this question first.
I think this discussion and analysis of publishing as a business from the management point of view that Alasdair brings to it (and his exemplary articulateness) is just the vision that new authors in the "rant" stage need the most.
Armed with this view of art as commodity, and understanding publishing (or video or TV or other media) as a business that must be managed, a new writer in the throes of The Rant may be able to found his own publishing business and serve his own target audience, or perhaps become the dominant player in the entire Entertainment Delivery System.
I am convinced our Fiction Delivery System is massively out of kilter and about to break. I think it should break. We are entering a new era and need an entirely new Fiction Delivery System.
However, the principles Alasdair so succinctly gives us in plain layman's language, will prevail. Nobody who attempts to create the new Fiction Delivery System can succeed without a full grasp of this picture.
Alasdair gives us the view from outside that artists need to make the leap from Art to Commercial Art.
-----------------END QUOTE FROM Q&A-------------
So again, what has this to do with where Serialization came from and where it's going?
We have serialization because the STORY we want to send down that value-chain delivery system channel is larger than the channel, so we have to break it into pieces (just as an email or web-page is broken to be sent across the internet then reassembled).
A cave dweller's campfire only lasts so long, and dawn's chores come too soon. Stories had to be SHORT -- or serialized.
Dickens serialized his novels in newspapers, same reason. Reach more people, don't try their patience with long involved exposition, leave them wanting MORE, serialize the story.
Magazines, especially genre ones like Action, Mystery and Science Fiction, relied on the Serialized Novel to bait readers into subscribing (back when a magazine cost 25 cents and that was a lot of money).
Radio brought the radio serial, and soap opera serialization which became the story-arc I've discussed here at length along with story structure and how to create and place climaxes, though I didn't address the issue of how to structure climaxes to allow a novel to be serializable. (yes, there is a craft technique for that, too.)
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/amber-benson-tara-on-buffy-vampire.html
Radio serials like The Lone Ranger and Superman translated directly to early TV. Yes, though made in anthology format, The Lone Ranger (also running as a comic strip in newspapers), actually had a story arc, the story of the man who was the lone survivor of a Ranger compliment ambushed by the Cavendish band. The Lone Ranger had a story-arc mission -- nail Cavendish. He wore the mask so Cavendish would not know he was a survivor of that battle, and would drop the mask only after Cavendish was dead.
And of course, don't forget Dr. Who just because it was only in England all those years before we imported the TV show.
And early film resorted to the Serial installments (Buck Rogers etc) to get people into the theater to see the A and B pictures even if they really weren't that interested -- and that loyal audience then made superstars out of actors like Ginger Rogers, Cary Grant, Bing Crosby. The weekly serial installment was the value-added along with a few cartoons.
So serials exist because the delivery mechanism is too narrow for the entire story as one piece, and as bait to get an audience for some other product.
The "delivery mechanism size" issue includes the problem of the audience's attention span.
Cave men couldn't sit by the fire for 6 hours every night. Today's audience won't sit in a theater for 4 or 5 hours to watch 2 movies, 2 serial installments, and 4 cartoons (an afternoon like that used to cost $0.50 -- $0.25 if you were under 12).
So today's theaters offer 2 hours and COMMERCIALS. But films are more and more often becoming series if not actual serials!
Meanwhile, we have a trend I've been documenting in my review columns for the beginning of 2010, reviewing many many books which are parts of long series or beginnings of new series.
http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2010/
Series and serials have one thing in common -- cliffhanger climaxes. It's only the placement of the climaxes and story-arc shape that differs. But they both accomplish one thing. They break a story into short chunks that can fit into the commercially driven business of delivery and parse into that "value chain" that White is tutoring us in.
Although the e-book and blog-posting format doesn't limit the size of posts (except for the technical issue of how long it takes to download which is largely solved), the person who reads the e-media limits the practical length by simply not having the attention span, or the actual time to read, or possibly the interest. (Yes, I know, this post is way too long and very boring, but it's a complicated question!)
The generation raised on Sesame Street has been conditioned to the commercial-break sound-byte length installments.
So though the actual e-medium can carry 6 or even 10 hours of reading in one download, the longer the piece the smaller the audience.
One thing all writers agree on. The objective is to reach a larger audience, the bigger the better. That's why microblogging like Twitter is burgeoning and the quality of a tweeter is measured by the number of followers, and their followers rather than the information density of the tweets put out.
The children of the Sesame Street generation and their children now, are jittery nervous wrecks compared to readers of the Elizabethan era.
The expository lump was regarded as richness in the Elizabethan era, and practiced as an artform (really! I studied it as an artform in High School where it was revered!) Today the expository lump is anathema.
So serialization leaves you with the problem of "What Has Gone Before." The e-serial can solve this with a hyperlink! But most readers won't follow the link.
Which leaves writers with this problem I indicated in my first point.
1) My answer is related to the difference between Knowledge and Wisdom
Can you tell me what that difference is and why it's related to the issue of whether serials can work via E-publishing?
Let's try this easy thumbnail, micro-blog size definition.
Knowledge is facts; Wisdom connects facts into a pattern.
That's wholly inadequate, but let's run with it.
I've talked a lot about pattern recognition on this blog, because it's a basic component of art. Here's one of my posts which is about the key question any Romance has to answer, "What Does She See In Him?"
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html
Notice how I keep tossing in links here to other blog posts? To answer the question Can Serials Work Via E-Publishing?, I have to arrange those little but convoluted points I've made in previous blogs into a pattern you can recognize.
What have I been talking about here since I launched into my 20 posts on The Tarot?
See: http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2007/12/10-pentacles-cake-comes-out-of-oven.html
and follow the links back to Ace of Swords.
The overall objective of my many posts here is to figure out why the Romance genre in general, and maybe the SFR and PNR sub-genres too, are so scorned.
This question, Can Serials Work via E-publishing holds a clue to the answer if you can see the pattern behind these 4 points I'm highlighting.
The solution to a problem lies in the formulation of the problem. How you ask the question determines the answer. You can't solve an algebra problem unless you can state it properly.
KFZuzulo has given us an opening statement that could lead to the solution.
20 years ago, Romance genre publishing shunned the sequel, the series, and the story arc. Each novel had to be self-contained, (have very little if any sex), and end with an HEA.
Each story would have to start with the couple meeting, and end with them deciding to settle down together.
That's a tiny slice out of a story-arc of life, and it's the slice where more than likely Neptune is messing both of the characters up with some transit or another.
Usually, the Romance Novel would cover a time-span of weeks, months at most -- some maybe a year so you could do two Thanksgiving Dinner scenes.
The couple would meet, forget the rest of the world exists, and settle down to live HEA. The background, setting, world news situation, career goals, supporting cast, and everything else was incidental and often not well done. The Historicals, Regencies, etc broke through that mold and gave us richly researched detail from the real world history, showing that the typical Romance reader was educated and curious, and could enjoy learning useless trivia just for fun.
But the main story was still largely without conflict, without combat to the death, without a town or corporation or enterprise that was more important to the couple than their relationship. And most especially without challenging the premise: Love Conquers All.
The general reader would see the Romance as too easy, too comic-book, too facile. Too obvious.
In the old fashioned comic book (not the graphic novel mind you!) the characters would CHANGE the instant they hit epiphany, saw the light, understood who the villain really was, and would act without hesitation or introspection -- and all this would happen within a ridiculously short time frame.
For a real person to undergo serious spiritual enlightenment, character change at a basic level, major maturation, takes TIME. Years, not months. Decades not years. The bigger the lesson, the longer it takes to go from the mental insight to actual behavior.
The Romance often turns on an issue of the commitment-shy, on previously burned lover who just can't be sure this isn't a rerun of that failure.
Other plots use various reasons why one lover can't give her/ himself completely to another person, and use that instead of real conflict. (that's an internal conflict, not enough to turn a plot)
Romance has always explored the deepest psychological urges, wishes, aspirations, and vast issues of self-image, self-esteem -- massive psychological issues.
But 20 years ago, the genre required an author to invent new characters for each book, and resolve that character's deepest (hardest) psychological issues in 400 pages (or less).
These novels would span a few days, weeks, months, and chronicle personality changes that in reality take years, decades, or several lifetimes of karmic progress.
And the characters would walk away from these life-long problems scott free into HEA, as if they would never have that problem again.
This compressed time-frame and abbreviated page-count created a story that most people just couldn't decode. It would seem that the characters were cardboard puppets manipulated by the authors through unrealistic gyrations.
Today that's all changed. (well, not in all branches of the field).
Today though, the Fantasy field has produced the super-sized long novel sometimes spanning decades and generations. Some characters are hundreds of years old already (I do love Vampire novels).
The SFR can span decades of a character's life.
Women in Romances are expected to have a career, hobbies, interests, and an eclectic education. Some women are corporate bosses, and still have Romance in their souls.
Both women and men can be deeply involved in the issues of their world. That means that the internal conflicts that take a lifetime to work through can be REFLECTED in the external world the writer builds, and those conflicts can be tackled and partially resolved externally, or even symbolically, and thus the resolution and character-arc can seem far more realistic to readers (because that's how life actually works as explained in my Tarot posts).
Which means there can be, and usually has to be, a sequel or three.
With more room, the writer can tell you a much more realistic story about the stages of maturation and soul growth any human must go through in order to cement a love relationship that has a chance to last HEA.
Which brings us to the ultimate point.
KNOWLEDGE of what happened to a couple can be conveyed in one of these old fashioned Romance novels. The reader can add the details and stages of development by imagining it all on a more realistic time-frame. The novel only has to convey the KNOWLEDGE of what happened and who it happened to.
But if a reader is not already in the context of the Romance field, ready to imagine the years and years of character arc that are not detailed in the story, and picks up one of these old-style abbreviated novels, and absorbs the KNOWLEDGE of what happened the story makes no sense. And they discard the whole genre because of the "shallowness" of the characters.
The Romance author has given KNOWLEDGE (facts, actions, feelings as facts) but no WISDOM.
The reader outside the context of Romance can't see the PATTERN. They can't see there is a Wisdom to be acquired.
The main theme of the Romance Genre is LOVE CONQUERS ALL.
"Love Conquers All" is WISDOM, not knowledge.
I can tell someone that love conquers all with a straight face and they'll just laugh and shrug it off as inappropriate hyperbole.
They get the FACT that I said it. They have the KNOWLEDGE of what it means. But the WISDOM escapes them totally because they can't see the pattern made by scattered bits of knowledge that I have but they don't.
You can't convey the meaning of Love Conquers All, or the realistic-ness of it, in 400 pages. That's too small a chunk to contain wisdom, though it can contain knowledge.
Artists (and as Alma Hill taught me; Writing Is A Performing Art) reveal those patterns that people with scattered bits of knowledge can't see.
What art is for is to convey WISDOM, not facts.
To convey Wisdom vertically down the generations, binding society together and stabilizing it so the children can grow up secure in self-knowledge is the mission of the Artist.
The old Romance Genre was constrained to eschew Art and thus could only suggest a sketch of the Wisdom that Love Conquers All. To enjoy reading that old genre, you pretty much had to engulf the Wisdom that love conquers all before you started reading.
The new Romance Genre has had the shackles taken off by competition from e-publishing, just as women threw off the shackles of second-class citizenship in the 1970's. That was nearly 40 years ago. 2 X 20 years ago. We're HALFWAY through the 4 generations needed to make this change.
The new Romance Genre may lead us through the second half of this transition because of the advent of (#4 of my points) TECHNOLOGY.
Web 2.0, interactivity, RSS feeds, blogs, all these tools of distribution and publicity, are a new delivery system constrained by the audience to the short-take and the sound-byte. The YouTube video says it all in 90 seconds or less. Usually much less.
Structure the story into SCENES as I described in
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html
The Love Conquers All romance novel SERIES or SERIALIZATION is uniquely suited to convey this intangible, unbelievable but vital bit of wisdom to younger generations because now you can tell your whole story, raise understanding of the rich complexity of identity and relationship, and then connect your data points into a pattern your artist's eye sees.
That pattern seen by the artist, encoded into fiction, and conveyed to the non-artist is Wisdom. And that Wisdom is the "Value" you contribute to Alasdair White's "Value Chain."
So with online technology you can tell a story that spans a long enough time-frame that the psychological changes your characters undergo seem realistic, convincing, maybe inevitable. You can do that by serializing Flash Gordon style -- or maybe invent an entirely new style.
With the 6 tricks of scene structure, you can block your scenes and connect them into neat chapters that will each start with a powerful narrative hook and end with a cliff hanger fraught with questions about what will happen next. Somebody please remind me to do a Part 3 to the scene structure series covering serialization.
With serialization giving you enough space to develop the details of step-wise psychological change, you can tell a Romance to anti-Romance readers and make them believe every word.
It's all about enough space to tell the story, and as our ancestor storytellers have taught us, the way to get more space is to serialize and serialization turns knowledge of isolated facts into the rich tapestry of wisdom.
Love Conquers All as knowledge is worthless. As wisdom, it is priceless.
You can deliver that payload of wisdom, even or maybe especially, in the e-published serialization, whether it's self-published, or in a newsletter or e-zine, or by a volume e-publisher or a big trade publisher. But whatever method you adopt, Aladair White's wisdom about the "Value-Chain" has to be applied.
That Value Chain concept is an Ancient Wisdom we all need to grasp.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://twitter.com/jlichtenberg
First a quick primer on basic Twitter which, if you know how twitter works, you may skip. If you don't "do" twitter, please read this.
-------Writer's Tutorial On Twitter -------------
Even if you don't plan to join twitter, you should be aware of the potential use of tweets in your narrative writing to shatter your Expository Lumps. Tweets work in drama because you can optionally set twitter to tweet to your phone, not just in a browser. News Services and TV News Shows twitter breaking news and even Amber Alerts and CDC alerts. Twitter is THE bulletin source for moving plots fast forward.
People in different parts of a theater can tweet or text during a show and discuss dialogue lines, or plan dinner, or plot an assassination (because tweets can be "private" and even coded.
On Twitter, RT means "re-tweet" meaning that you copy a tweet from someone you follow, paste it into your 140 character tweet box at the top of your page, put RT and an @ sign in front of the person's handle, and trim to 140 characters, then send it out. Your own handle gets auto-added so people who follow you and thus get your tweets will see that you are forwarding what someone else said. Only the tweeple who follow you will see what you posted. The tweeple who follow the person you're RT'ing will NOT see your RT unless they follow the person you're RT'ing too.
Twitter is one-way communication unless you make it two-way. But tweets are "public" and can be sorted by keyword, so strangers can converse.
If a RT is interesting, the people who follow you might follow the person you RT'd.
So when you "talk" by tweeting on twitter you have to be aware that readers will see only what you said, not what you're responding to. Like listening to half a telephone conversation. There's an art to including kibitzers gracefully and your Expository Lump suffering readers are kibitzers.
On Twitter, clicking a twitterer's handle (@something) sends you to their homepage where you can find out who they say they are and what they've been tweeting lately.
That's on the crude interface supplied by Twitter. There are "clients" you can download that present twitter data more neatly.
I wrote a long post about Web 2.0 recently,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/i-love-web-20.html
and Twitter is just one of the newer and more popular components of Web 2.0. Twitter can be RSS "syndicated" so you can follow your twitter traffic on friendfeed.com or just follow me on friendfeed.com (scroll down the right sidebar of this post for my friendfeed box). And you can put your tweets in a box on your blog, so your blog always shows what you've just been talking about, with links). Simplify and organize your web-life.
-------END TUTORIAL ON TWITTER---------
So I (who follow KFZuzulo and "hear" all her tweets) retweeted a retweet sent by KFZuzulo where she starts with her own comment, then supplies the comment she's Retweeting.
It looks like so:
@KFZuzulo Or by "episode"=Serials!! ->RT @kriheli prediction on where publishing is heading chapter by chapter publishing #followreader
So KFZuzulo was answering kriheli's comment that publishing is headed for chapter-by-chapter presentation, and KFZuzulo said that means "episode" or "serials" which I know is in fact already successful with certain readerships online.
The hashtag #followreader was in @kriheli's original post. These hashtags are used to let strangers sort the whole twitter feed by subject and find people saying interesting things in order to follow more interesting tweeple.
Frankly you might want to follow @kriheli if you're interested in the E-book business model that Margaret Carter discussed here
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/business-model-of-e-publishing.html
So in response to my RT of her RT, @KFZuzulo asked me a question that looked like so:
KFZuzulo @JLichtenberg Do you think serials can work via e-publishing?
And I replied with a #followfriday hashtag because it was Friday and thus the hashtag was "allowed" by protocol. #followfriday means I recommend that other Tweeple should follow @KFZuzulo who is Kellyann Zuzulo who supplied us with a Guest Post here on this blog
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/living-with-fatal-flaw.html
My reply to her looked like this:
@KFZuzulo Serials working in E-publishing? THAT's a blog topic not 140C's I'll try to cover it #followfriday @KFZuzulo
Another feature twitter has is that you can sort the feed so you can see any post with your handle in it. I'm @jlichtenberg and you can find me at
http://twitter.com/jlichtenberg
Though twitter allows for private Direct Messages, all these posts I've mentioned went to all our followers, in aggregate, probably over 3,000 tweeple.
So my answer is much more than the 140 characters limit on twitter.com
1) My answer is related to the difference between Knowledge and Wisdom (oy, she's waxing metaphysical again!)
2) My answer is related to the history of the media in all its glorious forms.
3) My answer is related to the 4-generation rule (unto the 4th generation); it takes 4 generations to effect a basic cultural change.
4) My answer is related to my blog post here "I Love Web 2.0"
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/i-love-web-20.html
Let's do those points in reverse order.
4) Technology is the natural place to start since this is a question about E-publishing, a new form of delivery system for fiction.
We've finally got handheld screens that are legible to most people, and not most but a lot of people are used to cell phones with some "features" like web access (called smart phones). I read e-books on a PALM TX which has wi-fi access to the internet if there's a hotspot. But it's not a phone and doesn't have wireless access to the internet. I have a phone that does have wireless access to the internet, but it doesn't have a download for mobipocket reader which is the one I use.
And of course, we now have the electronic paper display used by Amazon's Kindle that pleases a lot of other people. Sony and others are making readers, and building in wi-fi or wireless capabilities to make it easy to download e-books and newspapers.
Some new, lower-energy-consuming chips are revolutionizing the palm top market, (with more innovations on the market next year) so we are very close to solving the tech problems and dumbing down the machinery so anyone can use it. At the same time smart-devices like smart-phones are smarting-up the users. Generally, you like what you're used to and you like new things that are easier than you're used to.
I covered a lot of the Cloud Computing and interactivity on the web in my "I Love Web 2.0" post, so we won't go over that again. Just remember it and think about the rising tide of CHANGE sweeping over us. At the same time, think about why Science Fiction is a shrinking genre while SFRomance is a growing genre.
(Though I have to admit EUREKA's use of smart-roads and boson-clouds as a landing field for a crash-down of a space ship is pure SF at its best! TV Shows like EUREKA (on scyfy channel) are also smarting up the users.)
Smarting-up the users is where the 4-generation rule comes into play.
Here's where you should either read or remember Alvin Toffler's first book, FUTURE SHOCK. The point he made is still valid, and much of what he predicted has already come true (the rest seems on the way).
Humans are hardwired to tolerate only so much change. A person can make only so many "decisions" (a brain function as much as it is a mental function) per day. As you age, you can tolerate change less and less, make fewer decisions per day. Read Toffler's book for the full explanation. And trust me, to understand the e-book publishing potential, you need to read FUTURE SHOCK. It's not out-dated (yet).
The result of this purely physical nervous system limitation of humans to make major changes in the way they think and do things during a single lifetime is the 4-Generation rule. It takes nearly 80 years at the very least to make a major change to a culture.
A recent study revealed that multi-tasking (the tempo of the modern world) actually chips away at efficiency and productivity.
Here's an article:
http://www.apa.org/releases/multitasking.html
---------QUOTE-------------
The measurements revealed that for all types of tasks, subjects lost time when they had to switch from one task to another, and time costs increased with the complexity of the tasks, so it took significantly longer to switch between more complex tasks. Time costs also were greater when subjects switched to tasks that were relatively unfamiliar. They got "up to speed" faster when they switched to tasks they knew better, an observation that may lead to interfaces designed to help overcome people's innate cognitive limitations.
---------END QUOTE---------
So the last word on the tech underpinnings of the new Fiction Delivery System has not been posted! But the culture is changing.
3) The 4-generation rule (unto the 4th generation); it takes 4 generations to effect a basic cultural change.
In the last 20 years with the advent of the Web and now Web 2.0 and even 3 and 4.0 starting to show up, with the digitalization of TV broadcasts, and other fundamental infrastructure changes especially integration by "aggregators", we have made several of these fundamental changes in the whole way "the world" works, all at once within one generation.
As a result, there are those of you reading this blog who shudder and flee at the idea of opening a twitter account. You don't know what it is and you don't want to know. You want it to go away, and you can't see any reason why the TV News shows give it so much attention and credence.
Your grandchildren will cling to networks like twitter (it's losing money and may not survive, but microblogging probably will; there's now a micro-blog that lets you use a lot more than 140 characters) and those grandchildren will likewise shudder at the thought of opening a something-else-account.
Through the middle-decades of life, humans embrace these new tools or major changes, shift career direction, experiment with new brands etc. By age 40, advertisers have lost interest in you. By age 50, you've lost interest in advertisers with NEW NEW NEW things to offer. By age 70 you actively resent anyone changing anything.
That's not wrong, or evil, or anti-progress. It actually is progress to resist change! It's progress toward stability, and valuing what progress has already been made more highly than progress that might (or might not) yet be made.
The 70-something's aversion to rapid change is nature's way of stabilizing society because at a certain rate of change, all society will disintegrate. Humans can't tolerate it.
And, according to Alvin Toffler, we're right at the edge of that rate of change.
What happens when a society disintegrates?
WORLDBUILDERS LISTEN UP.
The portrait of a disintegrated society has been painted before our eyes by CNN in these last few decades. Bosnia. (Ireland almost got there) Afghanistan. Iraq. Everyone for himself and devil take the hindmost. Then non-combatants aggregate themselves under the protection of "strongmen" who bears arms to protect, to ferociously exact revenge so his group will be feared and left alone. (Hatfields and McCoys to the 4th or 5th generation).
When the social glue fails, there's blood in the streets (literally) and starvation at home. Foreign countries see an opportunity to seize the disintegrated region for its raw materials and labor resources. Conquest is the result of social disintegration. Starvation. Poverty beyond belief.
So "society" a nebulous, almost indefinable thing (try explaining "social networks" to someone who's not online!) has a use and a purpose, as well as a structure!
So where does society come from? How do we stabilize large groups?
2) That question brings us to the HISTORY OF THE MEDIA IN ALL ITS GLORY.
When society disintegrates, there is no education of the young except in how to scavenge enough to eat today, and build a fire for tonight.
Our vertical integration of generations is what stabilizes society. Lore. Campfire morality tales. Cave paintings. Faith. History. And maybe above all technology, and the science that goes behind it. Technology gave us flint knives and which berries are edible. Today it gives us e-books, a new medium, and "social networks" which are currently "destabilizing" society while they form a totally new platform for stabilization.
But all this change takes time if it's not to be destructive. For a serious tutorial on the hows and whys of that time-requirement, read
C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner Series
Yeah, read SF about a non-human society to understand what humans create and use for "society."
Vertical integration of the generations is why the resistance to change built into the human brain during aging is GOOD. The job of youth is to innovate. The job of age is to discard innovations that are destructive to the stability of society -- because without society we're back to every-man-for-himself-and-devil-take-the-hindmost.
So it isn't improvement or progress toward a better world that elders resist. But they do resist.
They resist INSTABILITY caused by running experiments in change in society at large when such changes really need to start on the lab bench, and proceed to the pilot plant and field testing before being released. But youth is "impatient" with methodical testing. It's the nature of youth, and that's not bad unless it is not restrained by age. Not STOPPED, mind you, but RESTRAINED (slowed).
What the elders understand that youth does not is just what is at stake in their madcap pursuit of "progress" in all directions except stability.
If society disintegrates to hand-to-mouth again, and if two generations don't get book-learning educations, continuity is lost and society disintegrates even further. With climate change threatening famine, sword-rattling threatening mass destruction, and free-travel mixing up the genes of viruses and bacteria, bedbugs making a come-back because of hotels not changing sheets every night, and bedbugs being a prime vector for bubonic plague which is mutating and making a comeback, -- those who have lived long enough to learn to see "4 moves ahead" in the chess game of life want to avoid any innocent looking first move that could lead to destabilization in a 4th move.
Elders can see that we can't afford to be off-balance taking a step forward just when we must face one of those major threats (threats that youth discounts as something that will never happen because youth is immortal).
We stand on the shoulders of giants.
What we have today is the result of vertical integration of the generations - the elders teaching the youth, and restraining youth until they get some sense.
OK, this resistance to change analysis is very simplistic, and you can easily argue against my thesis here, but just wait a few minutes and think about these points as a skeletal outline in the subject of serialization as the future of the fiction delivery system.
So "the media" started around campfires in caves, then minstrels roving the countryside singing for their supper (advertising business model), and continues unbroken to Radio, TV, CNN, satellite feeds, and RSS feeds. (do subscribe to this blog; you won't regret it, and if you don't know how to subscribe to a blog, click one of the SUBSCRIBE icons to the right. Try GOOGLE and it'll lead you to the Google Reader setup.)
Ponder Margaret Carter's post on the business model of the e-book again.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/business-model-of-e-publishing.html
And consider this treasure of a post titled Traditional v self-publishing: a false comparison by Alasdair White (who isn't the famous musician Alasdair White, but rather the famous business management consultant Alasdair White). I met him on LinkedIn where he answered a question on publishing with the following totally brilliant analysis:
http://pm-solutions.com/infosys/blog/?p=32
Note that "e-publishing" is synonymous in some people's minds with "self-publishing" which couldn't be farther from the truth. But the e-publishing industry has grown up from scratch in about 10 years or so. Nobody knows what e-publishing IS, least of all the e-publishers, except that it's a big change. Just as TV started by copying the business model of Radio, e-publishing started copying publishing, and has now diverged markedly.
After reading Alasdair's analysis, I pointed him to Margaret Carter's post on the business model discussion among Romance Writers of America members and he wrote me back with the following illuminating insight which I'm quoting with permission:
----------------FROM ALASDAIR WHITE------------------
Alasdair White has sent you a message.
Date: 8/31/2009
I read through the post you link below and it seems to me that there are still some fundamental misconceptions as to the relationship between author and publisher (no matter what form the publisher takes). The author, publisher, bookseller and reader form a value chain (in business terms). The author invests their time in the creation of a manuscript. The publisher invests their skills (and adds value) to the manuscript and turns it into a saleable product. The bookseller invests in facilities and stock and takes the product and sells it, The reader invests in buying the product and 'consumes' it.
Each part of the value chain is investing time, skill, and/or money in their part of the activities of the value chain. Each is taking a 'risk' with their investment. Each receives a reward for risk taken once the value chain is completed. Except when the author is commissioned by a publisher (who then effective buys the time and skills of the author who then has no investment in the product) there is no valid reason for an author to assume that they have any relationship with a publisher other than that of supplier.
Normally, if a product is supplied to another part of a value chain, then the supplier is recompensed at a fixed value - but very few authors simply want to be paid a fixed price for their manuscript - they want to garner the rewards of the sales (hence the royalty system). Thus, in exchange for a greater potential reward, they risk their short-term recompense.
BUT, and this really irritates me, authors then want an advance against the royalties - so they are now expecting the publisher to become a bank and to lend them money- which is possibly OK (although poor business management) because the publisher could set up the contract in a way that the author has to repay the advance proportionately if the sales fail to reach a certain break-even level. But can anyone name an author who would accept that?
No, the author wants an advance (fixed amount payment) AND a royalty and consider those publishers that don't pay advances as exploiting the authors and trying to avoid the risk. Now that is pure unadulterated greed speaking - but I bet the same complainers are criticizing those bankers who were paid bonuses in the good times but don't have to repay them in the bad - but it is the same argument.
If authors are paid an advance, then they should receive no royalty whatsoever until the sales reach a break even point which is determined by advance+in-house investment in bringing the manuscript to print+production costs (designers, printers etc)+marketing spend+lost opportunity cost (return that could have been generated had the money not been used as it was). This would, on an average novel push the break even sales to around 3000-5000 copies - which, for most novels is fantasy.
The fact that e-publishing does not have the printing costs (usually less than 30% of the final production cost) means only that producing an e-publication is marginally less costly than doing it as a hard-copy. And authors who feel hard done by need to take a crash course in the economics of publishing.
Even with our parsed down operating model it still costs a lot to link the first part of the value chain with the last part and authors need to consider whether they wish to take a risk of greater rewards (royalties only) or to be paid for their work at a fixed price. Personally (as both an author and a publisher), I feel that the combined advance+royalties model is unworkable and essentially unfair as it penalizes the publisher. If authors want the greatest return then they simply have to be willing to share in the risk.
Alasdair
http://pm-solutions.com/infosys/blog/?p=32
----------------------END QUOTE FROM ALASDAIR WHITE--------------
What has this to do with "Can Serials Work Via e-publishing?"
Well, that question is actually a complex question. First you must understand what publishing is/was. Then get a good grasp of the Web 2.0 model of cyberspace -- and anticipate where Web 4.0 will take us.
Alasdair is teaching us some things about "Media" as an industry that writers don't generally internalize. He's showing us "what" we as writers are actually doing. And his posts reveal a world totally different from what any creative artist would envision as the delivery mechanism for their art to their end-consumer.
Understanding the infrastructure of the fiction delivery system, and the meaning to "society" of the madcap pace of CHANGE in that delivery system over the last few decades, we can turn our attention to the really difficult part of this Question: What exactly is serialization?
In the history of the MEDIA, when did the SERIAL arise?
I honestly don't know.
But I think the origin of the Serial relates to my post on the Medium Is The Message:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/medium-is-message_19.html
Fiction has always been a for-profit endeavor by the fiction creator. The shaman was supported by the tribe in exchange for Wisdom conveyed in a form they could understand and use. The Minstrel brought news and got fed for it. In the Middle Ages, Church copyists copied older documents and were supported by charity gifts to the church, and by their scribe function. Think about it in terms of a business model - the fiction-delivery-system and the news-delivery-system.
The printing press, of course, is the evolutionary step in "The Media" which is comparable to the leap into electronic distribution.
But this one, Web 2.0, social networking, and gaming (interactivity between the consumer and the story), is much bigger even than the printing press or even "motion pictures."
If words are to be distributed FOR PROFIT, they have to go down a delivery system that has a pre-determined size, shape, delivery point and most especially that "value chain" that Alasdair White tutored us in.
The delivery system is the "business" and the words are just the commodity being purveyed by the business.
This is something new writers trying to "sell" their work have a very hard time grasping. They think of editors as "gatekeepers" who favor one person over another rather than African hunters spearing fast-moving antelope in a jungle to supply meat to a Packer shipping to South America.
I wrote a lengthy reply to a Question on a LinkedIn Group I'm on (LinkEds & Writers). I'm going to insert that Answer here because most of you won't be able to access it inside the Social Network and INSIDE a "Group" within that Social Network. Most readers can skip this insert. I'm mostly just sending the new writers to absorb Alasdair White's post on publishing as a business.
-----------FROM Q&A on LINKEDIN.COM LINKEDS&WRITERS----------
Q: I just distilled and posted an email I got from a very disgruntled young writer. It's a rant about the industry - what would you advise this writer?
Here's the transcribed email
http://ontext.com/2009/08/beginning-writer-bitches-publishing-industry/
A: (by Jacqueline Lichtenberg - there are well over 30 Answers so far -- I'm editing mine down)
I have encountered this "beginning writer's rant" that has echoed down the ages.
Beginner Commercial Artists are both right and wrong because they don't understand what they are doing or what the "industry" does or should do, but they do understand that what the industry is doing is wrong somehow, inadequate or philosophically askew.
I'm in a discussion with another LinkedIn member who answered a question on self-publishing with a marvelous analysis of the business models of publishing of all sorts.
His name is Alasdair White (but he isn't the famous Scottish musician).
I saw his answer to a question on LinkedIn and urged him to post it on a blog where anyone could get at it so I could point people at it. I mentioned it on twitter and made White a new fan out of a publisher.
The blog entry is here:
http://pm-solutions.com/infosys/blog/?p=32
Then I linked to White's post in a blog I will post on Tuesday Sept. 1, 2009. I'm a writer and co-blog with other writers on the craft and the industry, with a lot of beginning writers among our readers. My day to post is Tuesday.
I told Alasdair White that I would post a link to his blog, and pointed him to a post on the co-blog about an argument among Romance Writers of America members regarding the status of e-publishing.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/business-model-of-e-publishing.html
Alasdair kindly read that entry by my co-blogger Margaret Carter, and emailed me a lengthy and brilliant answer which I am going to ask if I can insert into my blog with a link to his. But I found this question first.
I think this discussion and analysis of publishing as a business from the management point of view that Alasdair brings to it (and his exemplary articulateness) is just the vision that new authors in the "rant" stage need the most.
Armed with this view of art as commodity, and understanding publishing (or video or TV or other media) as a business that must be managed, a new writer in the throes of The Rant may be able to found his own publishing business and serve his own target audience, or perhaps become the dominant player in the entire Entertainment Delivery System.
I am convinced our Fiction Delivery System is massively out of kilter and about to break. I think it should break. We are entering a new era and need an entirely new Fiction Delivery System.
However, the principles Alasdair so succinctly gives us in plain layman's language, will prevail. Nobody who attempts to create the new Fiction Delivery System can succeed without a full grasp of this picture.
Alasdair gives us the view from outside that artists need to make the leap from Art to Commercial Art.
-----------------END QUOTE FROM Q&A-------------
So again, what has this to do with where Serialization came from and where it's going?
We have serialization because the STORY we want to send down that value-chain delivery system channel is larger than the channel, so we have to break it into pieces (just as an email or web-page is broken to be sent across the internet then reassembled).
A cave dweller's campfire only lasts so long, and dawn's chores come too soon. Stories had to be SHORT -- or serialized.
Dickens serialized his novels in newspapers, same reason. Reach more people, don't try their patience with long involved exposition, leave them wanting MORE, serialize the story.
Magazines, especially genre ones like Action, Mystery and Science Fiction, relied on the Serialized Novel to bait readers into subscribing (back when a magazine cost 25 cents and that was a lot of money).
Radio brought the radio serial, and soap opera serialization which became the story-arc I've discussed here at length along with story structure and how to create and place climaxes, though I didn't address the issue of how to structure climaxes to allow a novel to be serializable. (yes, there is a craft technique for that, too.)
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/amber-benson-tara-on-buffy-vampire.html
Radio serials like The Lone Ranger and Superman translated directly to early TV. Yes, though made in anthology format, The Lone Ranger (also running as a comic strip in newspapers), actually had a story arc, the story of the man who was the lone survivor of a Ranger compliment ambushed by the Cavendish band. The Lone Ranger had a story-arc mission -- nail Cavendish. He wore the mask so Cavendish would not know he was a survivor of that battle, and would drop the mask only after Cavendish was dead.
And of course, don't forget Dr. Who just because it was only in England all those years before we imported the TV show.
And early film resorted to the Serial installments (Buck Rogers etc) to get people into the theater to see the A and B pictures even if they really weren't that interested -- and that loyal audience then made superstars out of actors like Ginger Rogers, Cary Grant, Bing Crosby. The weekly serial installment was the value-added along with a few cartoons.
So serials exist because the delivery mechanism is too narrow for the entire story as one piece, and as bait to get an audience for some other product.
The "delivery mechanism size" issue includes the problem of the audience's attention span.
Cave men couldn't sit by the fire for 6 hours every night. Today's audience won't sit in a theater for 4 or 5 hours to watch 2 movies, 2 serial installments, and 4 cartoons (an afternoon like that used to cost $0.50 -- $0.25 if you were under 12).
So today's theaters offer 2 hours and COMMERCIALS. But films are more and more often becoming series if not actual serials!
Meanwhile, we have a trend I've been documenting in my review columns for the beginning of 2010, reviewing many many books which are parts of long series or beginnings of new series.
http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2010/
Series and serials have one thing in common -- cliffhanger climaxes. It's only the placement of the climaxes and story-arc shape that differs. But they both accomplish one thing. They break a story into short chunks that can fit into the commercially driven business of delivery and parse into that "value chain" that White is tutoring us in.
Although the e-book and blog-posting format doesn't limit the size of posts (except for the technical issue of how long it takes to download which is largely solved), the person who reads the e-media limits the practical length by simply not having the attention span, or the actual time to read, or possibly the interest. (Yes, I know, this post is way too long and very boring, but it's a complicated question!)
The generation raised on Sesame Street has been conditioned to the commercial-break sound-byte length installments.
So though the actual e-medium can carry 6 or even 10 hours of reading in one download, the longer the piece the smaller the audience.
One thing all writers agree on. The objective is to reach a larger audience, the bigger the better. That's why microblogging like Twitter is burgeoning and the quality of a tweeter is measured by the number of followers, and their followers rather than the information density of the tweets put out.
The children of the Sesame Street generation and their children now, are jittery nervous wrecks compared to readers of the Elizabethan era.
The expository lump was regarded as richness in the Elizabethan era, and practiced as an artform (really! I studied it as an artform in High School where it was revered!) Today the expository lump is anathema.
So serialization leaves you with the problem of "What Has Gone Before." The e-serial can solve this with a hyperlink! But most readers won't follow the link.
Which leaves writers with this problem I indicated in my first point.
1) My answer is related to the difference between Knowledge and Wisdom
Can you tell me what that difference is and why it's related to the issue of whether serials can work via E-publishing?
Let's try this easy thumbnail, micro-blog size definition.
Knowledge is facts; Wisdom connects facts into a pattern.
That's wholly inadequate, but let's run with it.
I've talked a lot about pattern recognition on this blog, because it's a basic component of art. Here's one of my posts which is about the key question any Romance has to answer, "What Does She See In Him?"
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html
Notice how I keep tossing in links here to other blog posts? To answer the question Can Serials Work Via E-Publishing?, I have to arrange those little but convoluted points I've made in previous blogs into a pattern you can recognize.
What have I been talking about here since I launched into my 20 posts on The Tarot?
See: http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2007/12/10-pentacles-cake-comes-out-of-oven.html
and follow the links back to Ace of Swords.
The overall objective of my many posts here is to figure out why the Romance genre in general, and maybe the SFR and PNR sub-genres too, are so scorned.
This question, Can Serials Work via E-publishing holds a clue to the answer if you can see the pattern behind these 4 points I'm highlighting.
The solution to a problem lies in the formulation of the problem. How you ask the question determines the answer. You can't solve an algebra problem unless you can state it properly.
KFZuzulo has given us an opening statement that could lead to the solution.
20 years ago, Romance genre publishing shunned the sequel, the series, and the story arc. Each novel had to be self-contained, (have very little if any sex), and end with an HEA.
Each story would have to start with the couple meeting, and end with them deciding to settle down together.
That's a tiny slice out of a story-arc of life, and it's the slice where more than likely Neptune is messing both of the characters up with some transit or another.
Usually, the Romance Novel would cover a time-span of weeks, months at most -- some maybe a year so you could do two Thanksgiving Dinner scenes.
The couple would meet, forget the rest of the world exists, and settle down to live HEA. The background, setting, world news situation, career goals, supporting cast, and everything else was incidental and often not well done. The Historicals, Regencies, etc broke through that mold and gave us richly researched detail from the real world history, showing that the typical Romance reader was educated and curious, and could enjoy learning useless trivia just for fun.
But the main story was still largely without conflict, without combat to the death, without a town or corporation or enterprise that was more important to the couple than their relationship. And most especially without challenging the premise: Love Conquers All.
The general reader would see the Romance as too easy, too comic-book, too facile. Too obvious.
In the old fashioned comic book (not the graphic novel mind you!) the characters would CHANGE the instant they hit epiphany, saw the light, understood who the villain really was, and would act without hesitation or introspection -- and all this would happen within a ridiculously short time frame.
For a real person to undergo serious spiritual enlightenment, character change at a basic level, major maturation, takes TIME. Years, not months. Decades not years. The bigger the lesson, the longer it takes to go from the mental insight to actual behavior.
The Romance often turns on an issue of the commitment-shy, on previously burned lover who just can't be sure this isn't a rerun of that failure.
Other plots use various reasons why one lover can't give her/ himself completely to another person, and use that instead of real conflict. (that's an internal conflict, not enough to turn a plot)
Romance has always explored the deepest psychological urges, wishes, aspirations, and vast issues of self-image, self-esteem -- massive psychological issues.
But 20 years ago, the genre required an author to invent new characters for each book, and resolve that character's deepest (hardest) psychological issues in 400 pages (or less).
These novels would span a few days, weeks, months, and chronicle personality changes that in reality take years, decades, or several lifetimes of karmic progress.
And the characters would walk away from these life-long problems scott free into HEA, as if they would never have that problem again.
This compressed time-frame and abbreviated page-count created a story that most people just couldn't decode. It would seem that the characters were cardboard puppets manipulated by the authors through unrealistic gyrations.
Today that's all changed. (well, not in all branches of the field).
Today though, the Fantasy field has produced the super-sized long novel sometimes spanning decades and generations. Some characters are hundreds of years old already (I do love Vampire novels).
The SFR can span decades of a character's life.
Women in Romances are expected to have a career, hobbies, interests, and an eclectic education. Some women are corporate bosses, and still have Romance in their souls.
Both women and men can be deeply involved in the issues of their world. That means that the internal conflicts that take a lifetime to work through can be REFLECTED in the external world the writer builds, and those conflicts can be tackled and partially resolved externally, or even symbolically, and thus the resolution and character-arc can seem far more realistic to readers (because that's how life actually works as explained in my Tarot posts).
Which means there can be, and usually has to be, a sequel or three.
With more room, the writer can tell you a much more realistic story about the stages of maturation and soul growth any human must go through in order to cement a love relationship that has a chance to last HEA.
Which brings us to the ultimate point.
KNOWLEDGE of what happened to a couple can be conveyed in one of these old fashioned Romance novels. The reader can add the details and stages of development by imagining it all on a more realistic time-frame. The novel only has to convey the KNOWLEDGE of what happened and who it happened to.
But if a reader is not already in the context of the Romance field, ready to imagine the years and years of character arc that are not detailed in the story, and picks up one of these old-style abbreviated novels, and absorbs the KNOWLEDGE of what happened the story makes no sense. And they discard the whole genre because of the "shallowness" of the characters.
The Romance author has given KNOWLEDGE (facts, actions, feelings as facts) but no WISDOM.
The reader outside the context of Romance can't see the PATTERN. They can't see there is a Wisdom to be acquired.
The main theme of the Romance Genre is LOVE CONQUERS ALL.
"Love Conquers All" is WISDOM, not knowledge.
I can tell someone that love conquers all with a straight face and they'll just laugh and shrug it off as inappropriate hyperbole.
They get the FACT that I said it. They have the KNOWLEDGE of what it means. But the WISDOM escapes them totally because they can't see the pattern made by scattered bits of knowledge that I have but they don't.
You can't convey the meaning of Love Conquers All, or the realistic-ness of it, in 400 pages. That's too small a chunk to contain wisdom, though it can contain knowledge.
Artists (and as Alma Hill taught me; Writing Is A Performing Art) reveal those patterns that people with scattered bits of knowledge can't see.
What art is for is to convey WISDOM, not facts.
To convey Wisdom vertically down the generations, binding society together and stabilizing it so the children can grow up secure in self-knowledge is the mission of the Artist.
The old Romance Genre was constrained to eschew Art and thus could only suggest a sketch of the Wisdom that Love Conquers All. To enjoy reading that old genre, you pretty much had to engulf the Wisdom that love conquers all before you started reading.
The new Romance Genre has had the shackles taken off by competition from e-publishing, just as women threw off the shackles of second-class citizenship in the 1970's. That was nearly 40 years ago. 2 X 20 years ago. We're HALFWAY through the 4 generations needed to make this change.
The new Romance Genre may lead us through the second half of this transition because of the advent of (#4 of my points) TECHNOLOGY.
Web 2.0, interactivity, RSS feeds, blogs, all these tools of distribution and publicity, are a new delivery system constrained by the audience to the short-take and the sound-byte. The YouTube video says it all in 90 seconds or less. Usually much less.
Structure the story into SCENES as I described in
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html
The Love Conquers All romance novel SERIES or SERIALIZATION is uniquely suited to convey this intangible, unbelievable but vital bit of wisdom to younger generations because now you can tell your whole story, raise understanding of the rich complexity of identity and relationship, and then connect your data points into a pattern your artist's eye sees.
That pattern seen by the artist, encoded into fiction, and conveyed to the non-artist is Wisdom. And that Wisdom is the "Value" you contribute to Alasdair White's "Value Chain."
So with online technology you can tell a story that spans a long enough time-frame that the psychological changes your characters undergo seem realistic, convincing, maybe inevitable. You can do that by serializing Flash Gordon style -- or maybe invent an entirely new style.
With the 6 tricks of scene structure, you can block your scenes and connect them into neat chapters that will each start with a powerful narrative hook and end with a cliff hanger fraught with questions about what will happen next. Somebody please remind me to do a Part 3 to the scene structure series covering serialization.
With serialization giving you enough space to develop the details of step-wise psychological change, you can tell a Romance to anti-Romance readers and make them believe every word.
It's all about enough space to tell the story, and as our ancestor storytellers have taught us, the way to get more space is to serialize and serialization turns knowledge of isolated facts into the rich tapestry of wisdom.
Love Conquers All as knowledge is worthless. As wisdom, it is priceless.
You can deliver that payload of wisdom, even or maybe especially, in the e-published serialization, whether it's self-published, or in a newsletter or e-zine, or by a volume e-publisher or a big trade publisher. But whatever method you adopt, Aladair White's wisdom about the "Value-Chain" has to be applied.
That Value Chain concept is an Ancient Wisdom we all need to grasp.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://twitter.com/jlichtenberg
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