Thrills, Chills and Romance

Thrills, Chills and Romance

This blog entry by Nancy Holzner, I found on a twitter post Retweet by Nancy Holzner.

On a #scifichat on twitter I got into convo about "what is genre" (which I think is changing) so this is relevant to a blog I have to write on genre definitions (thought I was done with that, but there's more to say).

So on http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com I'll probably discuss this post. Meanwhile read it, read Holzner's novels (good reads all) and really think about what's actually happening here.

I suspect those discussing "genre" are not exactly phrasing the questions in a way that can produce answers that writers (inside the writer's own mind) can use to sort their creative material into forms that fit marketing channels.

So at some time soon, I'll have to revisit the "what is science fiction" topic which we all thought was totally finished decades ago.

Science Fiction is "what I like to read" -- and that is the only definition SF fans ever agreed on!

But that's not a definition writers, editors, publishers or producers can use to generate what you like.

If you're trying to write a commercially existing genre, or trying to invent a totally new one -- and be a "market maker" -- some original thinking is in order for 2011.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Save the Cat!®

http://www.blakesnyder.com/2010/11/19/kristan-higgins-on-the-spark-of-the-divine/

Save the Cat!® Kristan Higgins is a USA Today bestselling author and two-time winner of the Romance Writers of America RITA Award… the Oscar® of the romance industry. She is the author of six romantic comedies, is under contract for three more, and has been called “one of the most honest and creative voices in contemporary romance.”

This is a blog to follow, but this Guest Blogger is someone to pay attention to.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Can you outgrow YA category fiction?

http://enduringromance.blogspot.com/2010/11/jacqueline-lichtenberg-on-ya-category.html is a guest post I did for Kimberan who has her first novel, Sugar Rush out now, with more to come.

KimberAn comments regularly on the posts I do at aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com mostly on fiction craft.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Kelly: Why ‘The Flintstones’ is evil (and happy birthday) - thestar.com

Kelly: Why ‘The Flintstones’ is evil (and happy birthday) - thestar.com

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/867804--kelly-why-the-flintstones-is-evil

I found this via twitter.

TheLiveFeed James Hibberd

Why Flintstones was evil http://bit.ly/97Yd49

ATTENTION WRITERS - here's how to sell a TV Series if you can understand what this article means.

This article is a very elegant, BRIEF, analysis with bullet points of the formula for THE FLINTSTONES episodes and the effect that formula may have had on a generation at a susceptible age. OK, it comes wrapped in opinion, but if you unwrap it, you'll find what you need to build your own cultural icon.

There are a lot of comments to think about, too. The whole issue of the cause-effect relationship between fiction and "real life" has not been completely defined and described yet. Here's your chance to show-don't-tell what that relationship is to you, and what it means to your generation.

HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT: Create a set of 8 bullet points illustrating the philosophical issues your show tackles in each episode. Note that 7th-minute formula "beat" -- lay out your show's BEATS.

This article discusses the FLINTSTONES that was a TV cartoon -- today's market is for animated webcast cartoons cut into smaller segments. Create one using this breakdown of FLINTSTONES.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Behind the Scenes: Backlist Ebooks

WordPlay » Blog Archive » Behind the Scenes: Backlist Ebooks

That is a link to a blog entry explaining a group that C. J. Cherryh pointed me to on facebook.

Writers with out of print backlist titles can get a publisher to do the ebook (as I've done with Wildside Press for Molt Brother and City of a Million Legends) -- or they can put the ebook version on Kindle or smashwords or several other places and get a larger percentage as I've done with Dushau, Farfetch, Outreach and the two Daniel R. Kerns titles in omnibus HERO AND BORDER DISPUTE.

I've been invited to write a blog entry for http://madgeniusclub.blogspot.com/ and I'll talk a little about the ebook revolution and this group.

This is all about the business of writing.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Writer Beware® Blogs!: Assertions and Statistics

Writer Beware® Blogs!: Assertions and Statistics Is a WRITERS BEWARE blog post by Victoria Strauss (look up her credentials and be boggled follow her on twitter at http://twitter.com/victoriastrauss )

This and the linked blog posts within it should be read and carefully absorbed by anyone who doesn't know the publishing industry from the inside and wishes to become a "published" author.

Keep in mind "publishers" really are "investors" just like "producers" who make films, and the writer is the stock they invest in.

There Are No Rules - How One Author Is Using Scribd to Find Readers

And another method of e-publishing I haven't paid any attention to is scribd.com which I really don't understand yet.

Is there anyone here who reads or buys from scribd.com?

There Are No Rules - How One Author Is Using Scribd to Find Readers

Girl Gone Wylde - Jacqueline Lichtenberg on What Exactly is Editing

Girl Gone Wylde - Jacqueline Lichtenberg on What Exactly is Editing

Is a blog entry mentioning my 7 part series on WHAT EXACTLY IS EDITING which culminates in how to decide if you are an editor or a writer (not as obvious as it sounds).

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iii.html

7.15.10: A Medley of eBook News : Sacramento Book Review

7.15.10: A Medley of eBook News : Sacramento Book Review That's a blog about the massive shift toward e-books coincident with launch of Kindle and competitive readers. You have to keep up with the technology to keep up with the field of publishing.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com (current Kindle and fictionwise novels)

alien romances: Presidential Politics Alien Style

alien romances: Presidential Politics Alien Style

That's an older post that goes with the two recent posts I've done on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com on the way a writer's imagination can fail and what to do about it.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/where-expert-romance-writers-fail.html
and
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/failure-of-imagination-part-ii-society.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Happy Hunting Ground for Eclectic Readers

I'm seeing a trend in the world at large, using social networking.

I've been talking about that a lot on http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com but here's a new twist or wrinkle.

goodreads.com gathers readers who talk to each other about good books - and they form Groups specializing in various genres.

Authors participate as well, talking not just to their own readers but readers of other authors and other genres. But more than that, they listen to readers. They're readers themselves or likely wouldn't spend much time on goodreads.com

There are several social networks specializing in book readers, including Amazon's own communities. This is happening worldwide - readers uniting, leaving traditional publishers somewhat bewildered.

The online fan fiction networks are likewise growing. See fanfiction.net but prepare to be mind-boggled. These are writers in training building the followings that publishers are beginning to require as a pre-requisite to reading a manuscript.

Out of this fermenting stew of readers and writers is rising a body of work that is breaking new ground and I think changing the publishing landscape.

I found these 2 Lists on Amazon with a real grab-bag of different titles, and even see a couple I want to review.

Breakout Books by Independently-Published Authors

And

Rise of the Indie Author | Standout Self-Published Novels

These are authors who are accessible, participate in goodreads.com and really listen to readers. Read their novels and tell them what you would want to see next - and you may find they are more responsive than anyone working in mass market.

In fact, some of these authors are working in mass market -- and are responsive to readers anyway.

Expand your horizons.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

What You Can Do In A Novel That You Can't Do In A Movie

The explanation in the post below of the inside under-structure of THEME and how to create the thematic structure of a novel to support different novel lengths first appeared at:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-you-can-do-in-novel-that-you-cant.html

And it came right before the previous post here on Editing Circle:
http://editingcircle.blogspot.com/2010/05/how-to-learn-to-use-theme-as-art.html
which was originally posted on aliendjinnromances as well

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-learn-to-use-theme-as-art.html

These two posts on theme should be studied together.

Writing teachers, and professionals who read a beginner's manuscript, will always center in on the beginner's failure to frame the conflict, failure to start the story in the right place, failure to plot through to the natural ending, failure to choose the correct main point of view or protagonist, failure in worldbuilding, failure in information-feed (telling not showing; telling at the wrong time in the story), failure to develop characters (very seldom mentioning failure to develop Relationship unless it's a Romance), and failure to use dialogue correctly. If the teacher can't figure out what's wrong, they'll center on spelling, punctuation and grammar, paragraph structure and page layout.

I have taught many writing workshops in tandem with many very famous writers, and many editors who really know what they're doing. I've never seen anyone explain to a beginner why any or all of the above failures happen or what to do to train the imagination away from stampeding the writer into those failures.

The explanation and cure is very simple. The list of failures above is not a list of failures. It's one (and only one) total failure.

THEME STRUCTURE

And with that, the theme-art integration issue.

Once those two are mastered, it becomes very easy, inevitable, that a natural progression to theme-character integration, theme-plot integration, theme-story integration, and theme-dialogue integration will just happen inside the writer's subconscious. Given all that smooth integration, one quick lesson in scene structure,

http://editingcircle.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure.html

and another in stringing scenes together (avoiding walking characters through intermediate activities that don't advance the plot -- I just read a mass market paperback I'm not going to review because it had that flaw all the way through, but I haven't yet written a post on detecting that flaw in your first draft), and if you have those skills, then plot-story integration just falls into place.

If you can write a literate sentence and structure a lean plot with vivid characters learning life's thematic lessons, you will start to sell, and the marketplace will teach you everything else.

There is no "right way" to write, no secret method that all professionals use to accomplish all this complicated abstract stuff all at the same time.

But there is a way to train your subconscious to do it for you, and that way works for most people, just as driving instruction works for most people (at least in terms of controlling an automobile, if not in terms of choosing where to go and what to do when you get there).

The ugly truth is that a lot of people are just born knowing and doing these fancy, abstract sounding things inside their minds. They have talent. The rest of us have to suffer through training and practice.

See KimberAn's comment on How To Learn Theme As Art
http://editingcircle.blogspot.com/2010/05/how-to-learn-to-use-theme-as-art.html

She's just noticed the results of this training. Note the date on my original posting - 2008. KimberAn has been working through my writing lessons for more than 2 years, and is reaping rewards as her subconscious has become trained to sort a story out into components before synthesizing it into commercial format and presenting it to her as a writing job.

She had about 85% of this craft down pat before she started reading my posts, but as individual, separate things. Now she's discovered that somewhere back there she made a major breakthrough into the realm of the commercial fiction craft, and her subconscious is synthesizing and sorting for her. This will eliminate a lot of rewriting!

Now study what helped her.

-------------------

Novels, especially long ones, can draw a reader into complexities, depths, abstractions, theory of life, the universe, and everything -- with a variegated texture impossible to duplicate in a motion picture. Novels can argue for and against several propositions at the same time. Films -- because of the nature of how the human brain assimilates information -- simply can't do that.

In addition, today's viewers are conditioned to bits that can be sandwiched between commercials. Many young people who do not read printed text at all prefer to spend their entertainment hours watching short videos on YouTube or comic/animation websites, stories broken into webisodes.

At theaters, the management offers popcorn refills you can go get in the middle of the movie.

People can't sit still for more than an hour these days. And most 20-somethings are so conditioned to the 40 minute class or TV show that they see nothing wrong with their disability. They think it's normal to be unable to sit still for three hours. They think it an unusual imposition, an irrational demand, to pay attention to one thing and one thing only for three hours. (hence many workplaces now allow texting and surfing while at the work-desk)

And the same is true of reading novels. Though some fantasy genres are able to sell very thick novels (about 600 printed pages), most books have become shorter. And if they're not shorter, they are more "thinly" plotted, structured like movies.

People live their lives and imbibe their fiction in sound-bytes and 5-minute YouTube videos. To understand, comprehend, and grok a really complex theme, the reader must be able to remember what happened on page 20 by the time they get to page 620. Modern life does not foster this ability.

Books on how to write novels don't even explain how to construct a long, long novel that isn't over-written, fat, wandering, shapeless and boring with a sag in the middle.

So I was delighted when a student writer asked me (and then reminded me) to explain the structure of very long novels, with emphasis on how to structure a novel for 3 viewpoint characters, even if they're all protagonists.

It's really very simple to do, but infernally difficult to explain.

In order to understand how to craft such a long novel that doesn't sag in the middle or peter out at the end, you have to have a firm grasp of the basics of structure that I've discussed previously.

Protagonist, antagonist, conflict, beginning, middle, end, and THEME.

And the most important structural component in a long piece is THEME.

A short story (under 7,500 words) can have one theme, and only ONE. It must be something very clear, starkly simple, mostly concrete -- something you can say in 3 to 10 words. "Life is Just A Bowl Of Cherries" -- "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished" -- a bumper sticker.

A novelette (to 17,500 words) can have a DOMINANT THEME and 1 SUB-THEME (and only one).

A novella (17,500 to 40,000) can have a DOMINANT THEME and 2 SUB-THEMES (only 2).

A NOVEL (40,000 words and up) (up to any length) can (but doesn't have to have) a DOMINANT THEME and UP TO 3 SUB-THEMES and no more than 3.

I did not make this up. I learned it in the Famous Writer's Course (a correspondence course on how to write fiction which I completed in the 1970's).

I've been a professional reviewer since the 1980's and a paid reviewer for The Monthly Aspectarian since 1993. I've read a lot of books in addition to the books I read just because I want to. I have NEVER seen this above paradigm of thematic relationships successfully violated.

If you want to see how it works in practice, read the early draft of my Sime~Gen Novel, UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER which is titled SIME SURGEON and posted for free reading at
http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/rimonslibrary/surgeon/SURGEON1.html Then read UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER (which had a HC edition and a paperback edition so you might find a copy somewhere).

The difference is the thematic structure paradigm strictly enforced, rigidly applied -- because my editor at Doubleday insisted or no publication. Her favorite mantra "It isn't clear" -- comes from how she searches for that thematic structure and the inner relationships between the sub-themes. But she, like most writers, does that subconsciously.

Marion Zimmer Bradley was a seat-of-the-pants writer who let her subconscious work out of conscious sight. Don't ask a centipede how it walks! If you don't naturally think in terms of THEME on first draft, don't try to "learn" how.

It is not a thing that can be learned. However, if you do work thematically naturally, but are untrained in how to do it -- you can learn to perfect your performance. (Remember: Writing Is A Performing Art).

It doesn't matter how you get to the final, finished product -- only that you do get there. So if you must write a very long novel and don't work with theme in your outline stage -- you will just have to rewrite.

A 2 hour movie uses up the material that would fit somewhere between a short story and a novelette. At the very most about 20,000 words of narrative text makes a 110 page film script.

A long running TV series like the 20 years of GUNSMOKE would be a series of novels. A miniseries like THE WHEELERS, can be a series of big fat novels shrunk to the small screen.

So if you're structuring a novel that you hope one day will become a motion picture, try to stay with one, single, monotone, theme.

If you can't construct a novel that will come out to about 40,000 to 80,000 words with one single dominant and clear theme -- then you really won't be able to do the longer forms.

If you attempt the longer form without the primary skills, you will end up with furious, emergency rewrites to order from an editor who has no idea what you really meant -- because you didn't make it clear.

If you write using THEME to structure your work, you will be able (with practice) to write and sell a second or at most 3rd draft of a 160,000 word novel.

If your subconscious is well trained in doing this thematic work, you may be able to do that without actually knowing that you're doing it. Then only minor rewriting will be necessary.

Whether you do it consciously or unconsciously, your finished product must fit this paradigm in order to succeed as a story. If it doesn't fit -- you might sell it; you might get it through editorial with minor hassles; you might even excite a lot of readers. But you won't find your novel still on the shelves years later, and you won't have a drawer full of respectable reviews that you are proud of.

In order for bloggers to talk about your book -- they need to have an idea of what your book says. And what your book says is your THEME.

If you can't find the themes of the novels you read, you need to practice until you can. Some people learn by example, so here's an example from my blog last week.

Michelle West's THE HIDDEN CITY -- is a tour de force of thematic clarity and complexity.

As should be the case, the title is the theme. This novel is about the hiddenness of entire communities.

The novel follows two points of view until well into the story where the universe has been clearly laid out -- then bits of other points of view are woven cleanly into the text.

There are 2 major point of view characters, protagonists both. But they have a conflict between them -- that resides HIDDEN within each. Their relationship gradually reveals what is hidden inside them as they gather other people about themselves -- each of which has something hidden inside that they must learn about. The reader learns what is hidden, and some of it is revealed to the character who is hiding it -- but not to the other character.

These are not "secrets" -- these are things that exist but the character is not aware of their own subconscious issues until events and relationships reveal them later in the book. They can then become "secrets" -- a thing which is known but deliberately withheld.

The setting is a city built over the remains of an ancient ruin -- which only the protagonists know how to enter. Below their normal reality lies a HIDDEN CITY.

So the physical setting explicates the psychological theme.

Then the antagonists as they are introduced through offstage action (hidden from view at first) turn out to be something very different from what they appear to be on the surface.

When the protags and antags finally come to a gigantic confrontation, much is revealed -- only to lead to more questions about what may yet be hidden from view.

One point of view character is a magic-user -- and the "hidden" and also "secret" nature of magical power is thematically discussed through her.

So the setting is HIDDEN, the characters have inner traits hidden from themselves, they hide things from each other, and the final action is triggered by lessons in impersonating those above or beneath your station in life and thus finding things within yourself that have been hidden from your consciousness.

Everything in the novel relates to that theme of HIDDEN.

HIDDEN is the DOMINANT THEME and it pervades everything in the novel, every description (even the various places they live).

There are 3 sub-themes. A sub-theme is another statement about the broader, more abstract or philosophical Dominant Theme.

The dominant theme DOMINATES the other 3. These are not 4 separate statements about the nature of reality. You can't find a set of 4 themes to write a novel about by randomly choosing philosophical statements from a book of quotations, your personal cardfile of story ideas, or just by picking a thought that occurs to you as "neat!"

These are an AXIOM and 3 POSTULATES derived from that axiom and proved by it. Think Boolean Algebra. Think Tetragrammaton. PROVED by it -- shown not told. Dramatized truths.

One of the sub-themes in THE HIDDEN CITY is virginity. One character is a sexual virgin and a virgin in the sense that she's never killed a human being. Another character is neither kind of virgin -- BUT is a virgin in the sense that she has never had a family that cared about her.

The process of losing virginity is the process of REVEALING the adult hidden within the child. It was there all the time; you just weren't aware of it.

Two of the characters are so traumatized that they don't speak aloud -- so they invent a secret language of gestures. That serves a vital plot point at the ending. Nothing that is established is there just to explicate the theme -- everything must figure in the plot or it gets cut. Ruthlessly cut. (save it for the website) This very long novel is actually sparsely written -- there is not one word that should be cut. There is no decoration. Nothing is there simply because it's interesting. Every word is functional.

One of the characters makes a living (and gets embroiled in all this trouble) by exhuming archaeological treasures from the city beneath the city, treasures the antagonists are after for magical reasons. Reasons of POWER.

They are all abandoned by family, bereft, orphans all in different ways. Alone, they forge bonds of family among themselves and become a community in search of safety in the shadows.

The Dominant Theme pervades, but each sub-theme illuminates or discusses the dominant theme.

So we have
1. HIDDEN COMMUNITIES
a) virginity hides the adult
b) archeology reveals the past
c) languages conceal and reveal magical power

And it's all done in show don't tell.

That's why I spent all of last week's blog entry raving about this book. I had picked up and discarded 3 huge novels and was feeling as though nothing good was being published this month -- and then I found this and couldn't put it down.

If you can't tell what a book is about by the bottom of page 1, it is not going to be a good book. I know. I've read a lot of books, turning pages and hoping.

What the story is about is the THEME. In a film, you should know within 2 minutes what the film is about -- and by the 5th minute (page 5 of the script) the theme will be stated, even if obliquely.

The first theme you introduce in a novel and lay out in dramatized detail is your DOMINANT THEME. Don't touch the sub-themes until chapter 2 or even chapter 5. Make sure your dominant theme is clear before you start discussing it.

If a reader doesn't want to read a book about your dominant theme's philosophy, you don't WANT them paying money for your book because they'll only go on amazon and write a scathing review dissing your book! Don't sucker the reader. Respect the reader. Tell them what you're talking about right on page one (but not in so many words).

Take the first line of Marion Zimmer Bradley's first version THE SWORD OF ALDONES. We were outstripping the night. The whole novel is about running away from metaphorical "darkness" -- evil, power let loose, subconscious guilts for letting power loose. The key confrontation that turns Regis Hastur's hair white is at NIGHT.

Take the opening image from her runner up for the Hugo, THE HASTUR GIFT. The riding party crests a ridge and looks down on the valley of Thendara -- the Comyn Tower across the town from the Terranan Tower at the space port. The book's main conflict is Magic vs. Technology and the THEME is the far reaching consequences of the knowledge of both (i.e. LOOKING DOWN -- seeing the pattern from above). Those who know must lead, even where none follow.

So, how do you take an idea that's been throbbing in your mind for years and turn it into a large novel that has this structure?

First you practice writing the single 75,000 word novel until you can do it in your sleep -- protagonist, antagonist, conflict, beginning, middle, end, THEME.

The large novel with 3 protagonists is just 3 of these novels, and it's not quite 3 times as long because you don't have to repeat the background.

Each of the sub-themes is the story of ONE protagonist - antagonist pair.

And they are bound together by the dominant theme, which is the one thing you really want to say about "life, the universe, and everything" -- with this novel. Each protagonist's story explicates and illuminates that one dominant theme.

So you have a "Star" and 3 "Co-Stars" or Supporting Actors. The co-stars must have lives, backstories, personal quirks and "buttons," internal conflicts and enemies which show-don't-tell the arguments for and against the thesis that forms the Dominant Theme.

A long, complex novel is an argument about the topic -- showing all sides of the issue, from different points of view. And eventually, the writer must "end" the novel with a conclusion to the argument -- but with a long novel where all sides of the issue have been thoroughly illustrated and discussed, the ending can be equivocal from the reader's point of view -- but the characters must come to a conclusion they intend to live with. In a sequel, that conclusion can be blasted to pieces -- but for the reader to be satisfied with the novel, the main characters must find some kind of peace on the main issue.

Take Classic Star Trek. It's classic because it's structured exactly this way with a Dominant Theme "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and two prominent sub-themes "Logic demands curiosity" and "Emotional health demands security".

Kirk - "Follow me!" (into the unknown for the sheer fun of it)
Spock - "Unknown, Captain" (therefore something to be pursued, solved, discovered)
McCoy - "I don't want my molecules scrambled - " (exploration isn't worth the risk)

Kirk, Spock and McCoy are 3 protagonists. Scotty, Uhura, Chekov, etc are SUPPORTING characters.

Now "who" are Kirk, Spock and McCoy? I learned from Gene Roddenberry while interviewing him for Star Trek Lives! that he always saw Kirk, Spock and McCoy as 3 parts of himself.

In other words, the 3 added up to ONE PERSON -- one whole, fully dimensional person.

So how do you write a novel with 3 protagonists so that the 3 themes are all sub-themes of the same dominant theme?

You start with ONE character -- one fully dimensional, whole, complete personality. Then you factor that personality into 3 parts.

Roddenberry used to say that Kirk, Spock and McCoy were himself in different moods.

So try that. Take one character you fully understand and plunge him/her into different moods. Or give them different backgrounds, upbringing, advantages and disadvantages - the same basic person actualized and realized by different challenges. Or in different incarnations.

The trick here is to do the exact opposite of what a reader does.

The READER sees 3 different characters and plunges into the story to find out how they RELATE to each other -- how they are parts of a whole.

The WRITER does the opposite. The writer sees 1 single whole character and plunges into the story to discover how that character manifests as 2 or 3 people.

Remember the protagonist and antagonist are reflections of each other. They are bound together into conflict by a single theme.

So each of the 3 protagonists has a theme (sub-theme to the whole novel) and a personal antagonist bound in a conflict which must be resolved by the end of the novel.

The first conflict to be introduced must be the last conflict to be resolved. See Marion Zimmer Bradley's CATCH TRAP. I watched her struggle with that ending word by word, event by event. It taught me how that structure must go, and how to take an imagined story and craft it into the structure. It means changing things that to you, as a writer, are so real that you scream, "No, that's not the way it HAPPENED!" But that's what it takes to craft a great novel which is a work of art, a work of a Performing Art.

In a work of art, every single element is a "reflection" of other elements.

You take one whole thing and display it in different versions, different lighting, different moods, different circumstances. To "perform" a long novel, the one thing you take (your raw material, your clay or paint or sounds) is your Dominant Theme.

Theme works this way in music too. Study how musical chords are constructed. Long novels are constructed just exactly that way -- around a group of themes that are related philosophically like the notes in a chord played in a key.

Ever heard of "keynote" -- and by extension "keynote address?" Think of your long novel as a convention and your dominant theme as the keynote address. Or the typical ending of a speech, "On that note, let me present to you -- "

Themes get their unity by starting out as one thing -- and then being factored into a series of related things. Poetry works the same way as a long novel -- no matter how long or short the poem, all the parts are about that one single idea, concept, notion.

It is that underlying unity of theme -- the ultimate pervasiveness of the dominant theme -- that gives your built universe verisimilitude -- that makes it seem real, possible, plausible enough for people to walk into it with you.

And in a longer work, what keeps the reader picking the book up every night rather than watching TV, is the precise relationship between the Dominant Theme and the Sub-themes -- how they argue the point of whether the thematic statement is true or not -- how the sub-themes prove the point (not whether they prove the dominant theme's point, because they must prove it, but HOW it happens!).

That's where the kind of suspense comes from that lasts after the book is put down -- and a longer work has to be constructed to be put down. Everyone has to pee sometime!

The reader wants to know HOW these characters will come to understand the truth of the dominant theme, while being reassured that they will come to that understanding. If the characters don't come to understand it - the reader will be disappointed. Failing to produce that understanding is the writer's cop-out, not a surprising "twist."

Having stated your dominant theme at the opening, drawn a clear picture, then introduced the sub-themes to argue, challenge and ultimately illuminate and support the dominant theme, you must (at the resolution of the conflict; as near the climax as possible) make it clear that the characters finally understand that Grand Truth represented by the dominant theme.

And you're taking a big chance when you do this. Half the readership will disagree with your idea of Grand Truth, Transcendental Truth, Self-Evident Truth. And they won't want to read your book because it's drivel.

The trick is to make your drivel so crystal clear, your statement of the nature of reality so penetrating and powerful, that it will be fun for your detractors to read so they can argue against your point.

In order to get people arguing against your point, you must MAKE YOUR POINT -- clearly. And that means you must use this thematic structure.

Once you get them arguing, though, your name will be all over the bloggosphere and amazon won't be able to keep your novel in stock.

You have to goose people into arguing the truth which is your Dominant Theme's statement.

I've given you two examples, THE HIDDEN CITY and STAR TREK. OK, let's do an exercise because you have to practice this to get it. But as I said, it's really easy to do if you've learned all the previous techniques we've discussed and have explored enough different philosophies to have something to say.

So let's create a dominant theme and 3 sub-themes.

Try this one:

THE GAVEL FALLS

a) Deadlines
b) Decisions
c) Ceremony, Formality

Take that and create 3 or 4 characters to illustrate the arguments.

a) Deadlines -- the character is a college student whose HS teachers always gave him extensions when he missed the deadline for an assignment. Now he's editor of the college newspaper (brilliant guy - think Barak Obama with time-management issues). It doesn't come out on time. The students impeach him.

b) Decisions: The College Dean advisor to the Newspaper must decide what to do about this kid who doesn't beleive in deadlines but is a brilliant newspaper editor.

c) Graduation -- The Valedictorian who wins his/her position over the Newspaper Editor. Maybe this is the Student Body President -- or a Football Star. The Newspaper Editor doesn't get his diploma at the graduation but the character who understands formality and ceremony does - and lands a great job, too.

OK, that was a quick, off the cuff exercise. If I were really going to write this theme set, it wouldn't be a college campus story.

Here's what to do to teach yourself to do this.

1) do this much of an outline (a, b, c, above) for 5 different stories, different settings, that could be titled THE GAVEL FALLS. Extend a, b, and c to be complete thematic statements such as -- "deadlines are for dodos" -- "decisions should always be hedged, CYA" -- "Ceremony doesn't count" Use your own variants -- push your imagination to find off-the-wall statements about these subjects.

2) create 5 more theme-sets and run the same exercise for each of the 5.

You can quit as soon as it becomes so easy, it's boring.

The drill is the point here, not "learning" but "practice." The better you condition your subconscious to think in theme-sets like this, the easier it will be when you sit down to write a long novel. Your subconscious will do all this work for you before telling you that you have an idea for a long novel.

Just remember a long novel is not a movie. To make it into one, a screenwriter will choose one of the sub-themes, make it dominant, then change it to be a statement the chosen audience for the movie will either agree with or violently disagree with. This could become the inverse of your own personal philosophy of life. (note what happened to Ursula LeGuin when Earthsea was made into a TV miniseries). When the theme changes, the characters change characteristics.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

http://www.slantedconcept.com

How To Learn To Use Theme As Art

How To Learn To Use Theme As Art was originally posted here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/how-to-learn-to-use-theme-as-art.html 

Believe it or not, the way to learn to use theme as art is to practice meticulous worldbuilding.

What is meticulous worldbuilding? It doesn't necessarily have to be done consciously. You can program your subconscious to create universes around your characters, to wrap the background around the character in such a way that it makes logical sense that this character would do this thing at this time in the character's life -- and that the blowback from the action it would cause the character to learn an important lesson and change because of it.

But how do you do that? How do you train your subconscious to create universes that "work" in fiction, worlds that are "meticulously" built?

Beginners and amateurs (and outsiders from the writing profession) believe that whatever is going on in their own imaginations constitutes a story, a novel, a movie. They believe what they dream, imagine, wish, hope for, or dread is Art and is an "idea for a story."

Nothing could be farther from the truth -- and still be exactly, precisely, meticulously true at the same time!

When an untrained beginner "has an idea" -- they get fired up with the conviction that this idea is unique, and that its value commercially lies in its uniqueness, and that they therefore must take the advice of lawyers and authors of great properties like Superman and protect themselves from people who want to "steal their idea."

This fallacy leads them swiftly down a blind alley. Some go looking for a ghost writer or co-author -- a writer with writer's skills to "turn this idea into a money maker."

All professionals have been approached by (and mystified by) people who say, "I have this great commercial idea, but I just need someone to write it. I'll give you half the money!"

And all professionals are beset by people who have written a story, novel, script, whatever, and "I just want you to rewrite it; you know, give it a little polish." Or suggestions that they will use to polish it.

The amateur possessed by An Idea seeks a very specific emotional payoff. Nothing a professional writer can do to their material will produce that payoff. That's why there are so many unsuccessful collaborations or ghost-writer contracts. That's why professionals don't want to touch an amateur's idea -- doing so leads into a quagmire of the very internal, very personal, unique-to-the-idea-generator, emotional search for satisfaction.

That imagined satisfaction would come, the amateur believes, from "seeing my story in print." Or on stage or in film.

Hence the huge market for self-publishing. There is a small percentage of books which ought to be self-published -- but it is not a huge market. Predators have enlarged that market because amateurs will pay to see their book in print. What the amateur hasn't grasped is that nobody wants to read their story. The devastation they experience is usually not handled well.

The big gaping difference between the amateur and the professional writer is not whether you make actual money off your words, but rather whether you understand the mechanism inside you that produces IDEAS.

Do you know what an "idea" is, where it comes from, and what to do with it once you have it?

Amateurs believe their ideas are unique and therefore sellable.

Professionals know that among their ideas are a few really valuable ones that can be monetized because the idea is NOT UNIQUE.

If it's personal, it's not sellable but rather "self-indulgent."

A professionally saleable idea is universal. It is a perfect reticulation of an archetype (one archetype per story; not half a dozen of them at once). It can't be given away to another writer to write because everyone already has it. And therefore it can't be stolen.

Hollywood is full of stories about writers who had been circulating a script on a given topic or background - an idea - and when a movie comes out using that idea, the amateur sues the producer or company for plagiarism. As I said - some amateurs don't handle rejection well because they don't understand the concept of An Idea plus the concept of Monetizing An Idea.

The thing which makes an idea worth money to a publisher or producer is that the seeds of it already reside within the audience, and probably every writer on earth, past, present, and future. It will be recognized as "mine" by a vast number of people.

The amateur "has an idea" and it is "mine." And therefore, they believe, proprietary stock in trade.

The amateur who writes such an idea up into a novel or script produces what Marion Zimmer Bradley referred to as a "self-indulgent story." It's a story about themselves, not about humanity.

The amateur is trying to write about his/her own personal experience of the world, of people. The amateur produces what became labeled in Star Trek fanzines as the "Mary Sue" story -- where the main character is an avatar of the author. When the author is not conscious of that mechanism, the resulting story is even worse.

The amateur who is unaware is enthusiastically and ritualistically indulging him/herself telling their own personal story -- without grounding in the archetype.

The professional (even one who has never sold) is not telling their own personal story -- but is telling YOUR STORY, the audience's story, the world's story, a readership or viewership's story -- a constituency's story.

The process of telling someone else's story is not clinical, intellectually distanced, calculated, deliberate.

The professional does something different from what the amateur does only in that moment after the self-indulgent personal story has burst into consciousness.

The professional takes the personal story that erupts from the subconscious and traces it back to its roots in the archetype that runs that professional's own personality.

For more on archetypes and your personality and your personal life and how you fit into the set of patterns common to all humanity -- psychology, timed-patterns of life's challenges, and the "lessons" life hurls at you personally -- see Astrology and the Tarot.

Many of the blazing, world-wide instant classics are actually stories which are visible in the writer's natal chart -- but not in their lives. Karmic stories from past lives, perhaps, or unrealized potential.

If you don't like that esoteric approach, read a lot (hundreds) of biographies and autobiographies, learn sociology, psychology, anthropology, archeology, etc etc. Actually, it's a good idea to have a solid grounding in all these anyway, but Tarot and Astrology do provide shortcuts and for some people clarification. For others, they are nonsense.

The point is that somewhere inside the amateur and the professional writer lies something totally personal, absolutely unique, the purest definition of Identity, which is at the same time also completely universal, utterly common, the purest definition of Society.

Astrology depicts this graphically in the opposition of the 1st House by the 7th House.

So, at the interface between the very, VERY personal -- and the infinite, the divine, the root commonality of all humanity -- Art is born.

At this innermost sanctum of your being, you grok or perceive the core pattern of existence, a core that you share with many other human beings, none of whom are anything like you.

Your recognition of what you have in common with others who are less articulate than you are is your stock in trade, the Art you can monetize commercially.

Yet your recognition has no value without that twist, turn, flip, color, depth, variation on the themes that is uniquely you.

Each human being is likewise unique.

One of the myriad things we have in common, and thus can learn from Art, is how each of us is unique and yet the same.

That's why Hollywood insists that scripts be "fresh and edgy -- totally original" and at the same time "exactly like some big, huge blockbuster success." Huge blockbuster successes are huge because they are rooted in an archetype, something Blake Snyder terms "Primal."

What we all find comfortably familiar is uniqueness.

The Art of storytelling lies in showing (without telling) the reader/viewer how the uniqueness of a character traces back down into the subconscious, deep, deep, abstract, theoretically, ineffably, to that divine spot in Creation where we are all the same.

The Artist (in any medium) connects the celebration of our uniqueness to the safety of our sameness.

That act of showing without telling the nature of the connection between the unique and the archetype is the one skill the professional has -- that the amateur doesn't (yet).

Depicting the connection can be learned -- maybe even taught.

SEEING that connection can not be learned or taught. It is the Art that is born within. It is the core skill of the magician -- perceiving the True Name of a Thing and thus gaining power over that thing.

It is a Gift.

Because of that universal fact, we have the burgeoning field of the Adult Fantasy novel -- thick novels filled with elaborate worldbuilding and characters who are born with magic, and others who are not. It's a juvenile premise -- some have Talent denied to others. But it's juvenile because it's primal, an archetype. Like all archetypes, it's both true and false at the same time. The Archetype exists above the level of reality where true and false first divide (see my books on The Tarot -- The Not So Minor Arcana.)

So the Artist's job is to connect the celebration of our uniqueness (the part the amateur writer gets very well indeed) to the more abstract security and safety of our sameness - the safety in numbers, the safety in protections of Law and Privilege and Riches, the safety of joining a gang, marrying a strong man.

The juxtaposition of Celebration and Safety -- exuberance and relaxation -- the simultaneous experience of these two opposites is exactly analogous to orgasm.

That's why the end of a book is called a climax.

The ability to find that connection is a Gift, a Talent -- a Vision. The connection itself is not yours. You don't own it. You don't have a proprietary interest in it. You can't sell it. The only thing that is yours, that you can sell, is your way of describing that connection.

We haven't discussed this aspect of writing before because the method relies on gaining a solid grasp of what Art is, where it comes from, and how to practice it, either commercially or as "fine art." Commercial fiction is one thing -- Creative Writing is another, more akin to "fine art" than to reaching a huge, artistically illiterate audience.

Previously, we've discussed the thematic sub-structure of various sized stories and how using that thematic backbone lets you paint on a much larger canvas, using more point of view characters.

All these different writing skills we've been discussing previously are actually not a hundred different, separate skills to be mastered only separately. They are actually just one single, unified thing.

Once you have:

1) read about one of these skills (Worldbuilding, Description, Dialogue, Action, Suspense, Exposition (yes, you need exposition, just not in lumps), Pacing, Dramatizing, Characterization, Motivation, Conflict, Resolution, Climax, etc etc)

2)read some more novels, dissecting out how different authors use these individual skills, then tried writing bits and pieces of something exercising that skill

3)then (and only then) you must start to practice integrating them.

Here we're talking about Art-Theme Integration, probably the easiest cross-term to master yet the hardest to describe.

With each and every individual writing skill, you work on it separately, master it separately (producing your million words for the garbage can because a finished Work needs all the skills simultaneously, but you must produce work which uses ONLY ONE skill at a time in order to train your subconscious), then integrate each separate skill with each and every previously mastered skill. Yep. Actually learn to walk and chew gum; pat your tummy and rub your head; whirl a plate on a stick and juggle four balls.

It's a program you put yourself through systematically. Writing is a performing art and you train to do it just exactly the way a ballet dancer trains for the Met. Ballet teachers don't let you go en pointe on day one of your training. Writing teachers don't let you start your magnum opus on day one of the class.

Like any performing art, writing takes training -- much more training than skill or even talent.

The more systematically you work on it -- the faster your subconscious will start to comply. Remember subconscious can not be taught, but it can be trained. It has the intelligence of a dog. You need kindness, consistency, and positive reinforcement not punishment to alter a behavior.

Well, all this is very nice -- very theoretical, very pie-in-the-sky, and very inspiring.

But HOW DO YOU DO IT??

What do you do with your mind to find that vision inside you which SEES the ART with which the universe is put together?

Very simple. You live in the real world. Daily. You pay attention to the real world around you.

That's how you train your subconscious to do fictional worldbuilding. It's the same training a graphic artist goes through. There's a trick to using your eyes to see what is there and how it would look in 2 dimensions that would suggest the 3rd dimension.

If your readers are going to believe the world you build -- it has to be congruent with the world they live in even though it lacks a dimension or more. So you need to learn a trick.

People (you included) live in their own subjective realities -- some components dictated by social sanction, some by personal needs, some by family needs, etc. but all very subjective.

Remember that THEME is a statement that your work of Art makes -- theme is what you have to say about that connection between the infinitely personal and the ineffably universal.

But if you simply write what you have worked out about that connection, you end up with (likely a better selling) a non-fiction work on a topic using a thesis, not a story about a character illustrating a theme.

The THEME is what you have to say. Once you have had "an idea" then traced it back to its roots in the ineffable which resides inside you, found how it connects to everyone else in the world, you are standing there in your mind looking at this discovery, screaming WOW!!!

Now you are seized with an irresistible urge to run back and TELL EVERYONE about this incredible discovery.

NOW I UNDERSTAND!!!! THIS IS IT. THIS IS THE KEY TO THE UNIVERSE! IF EVERYONE KNEW THIS THERE WOULDN'T BE ANY MORE WAR!!!!!!!!!!

That urge to TELL EVERYONE is your theme trying to be born out of your Art.

What are you going to SAY????? To whom? Who would have a chance of understanding this abstract, intangible, free floating feeling of a concept?

If you run out your front door and start babbling to the garbage truck driver -- what will happen?

In my first award winning novel, UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER,
(free chapters at http://www.simegen.com/writers/simegen/ and choose from menu on the left)
there's a quotation I wrote as part of the thematic statement of the novel. This was my second published novel and I did attempt more skills than I had. So I used a "device" to nail the theme -- quotations from a hypothetical work. One of them does, I believe, hold true in the real world.

"You can not give Wisdom as a Gift."

You can't tell someone a fact and transfer your wisdom into their heads.

And if you manage to couch the fact in Art and weave a novel around it -- the readers won't gain the wisdom you injected into it.

Marion Zimmer Bradley quoted this quote: The book the reader reads is not the book the writer wrote.

And that's OK. The reader shouldn't be reading YOUR book. That's what professionals understand that amateurs don't.

Make that credo your touchstone. The book the reader reads is not the book the writer wrote.
You can't go into that astral plane space in your head and bring back wisdom and inject it into the heads of your readers.

All you can do is assure them that there is a connection between their personal individuality and something larger that all humanity shares -- maybe with other species on other planets, too.

Yeah, I know -- that doesn't help at all when you're burning up to TELL THEM EVERYTHING.

So you must take this inner Artistic vision and turn it into 1 to 4 clean, clear, related, statements. This will be the theme, and maybe as many as 3 sub-themes that form the backbone of your work.

Everything in the work will either be derived from the theme or you will have to go through on second draft and select one of the themes from the pea-soup you wrote and then delete everything that doesn't explicate that theme. It's work. It's what you do for a living. Delete.

It's a process. It takes practice to do it with precision.

Now, how do you tell if you've arrived at a thematic statement derived from your artistic vision that actually does reside within most all humanity? Or at least your audience?

You can get lost in your imagination. You need to do a reality check both before you dive into your mind to find the connection between your view of reality and everyone else's view of reality -- and after you've returned with your theme burning holes in your mind.

There are a lot of things writers do on a day to day basis that fosters the subconscious' ability to identify these "universal themes" and to particularize or individualize the universality into something unique that is not the writer's own self.

A lot of writers just wander over to the mall, sit on a bench and people-watch. Actors do that too.

Some go to movies and watch the audience at least as much as they watch the movie.

Some join clubs, do volunteer work, work for the Red Cross disaster services, volunteer for political campaigns. Well, everyone does something like that -- but writers spend their time while doing these things OBSERVING.

That's the key word. OBSERVING. Just like a graphic artist. Just like any performing artist.

Performing Arts usually require 2 opposite skills. First there's the writer who creates the script -- then the actors who perform it. The choreographer who designs the dance -- the dancers who perform it.

Writers find their "script" or choreography or sheet music on the astral plane, in that space inside where the individual connects to the ineffable. The UNIVERSE is already written -- it's your script. Once you've been given your script, you must perform it.

By training your ability to OBSERVE -- like a detective, or a professional athelete, or a river boat pilot, an actor, a musician learning a song by hearing it -- honing your ability to observe until you could happily trust your life to it, you train your subconscious to see the patterns beneath reality.

You will know you have a viable commercial property when you find a self-indulgent, personally inspired IDEA connected to an Archetype which you have seen expressed in your outer-reality in several ways recently. When that happens, it means the universal consciousness is engaged in the issue and ready to listen to what you have to say on the subject. When you have a MATCH between the archetype you have discovered and the subject a lot of people are engaged in, you have a commercial property.

And you can talk about that idea, rave about it to everyone, try your best to 'GIVE IT AWAY' and you won't be able to.

It's commerical value can't be stolen from you, plagiarized, etc -- because it arises from the Art which is uniquely your own. No matter how you shout about it -- no other writer will be able to write your book.

Of course, after you've put all the words down -- yeah, people can steal your words, so they have to be protected by copyright every which way you can think of.

That's the business of writing.

But the professional knows that ideas are cheap, plentiful, but can't be stolen.

Nobody is interested in your personal ideas except you. What is personal to you is personal to you -- boring to anyone else.

Read some biographies and you'll see. What is interesting about a unique person is how they are actually just like you and me.

Isn't that what people are searching for in a Presidential Candidate? Someone they can relate to who understands what life is like for them?

So how do you pull this off? How do you train yourself to see, at one and the same instant, both the intensely personal and the unifying ineffable?

Watch television. You never know what you'll see after you've spent some years training your OBSERVATIONAL SKILLS.

Here's an example. Very personal.

I recently watched a few clips of the Summer Olympic games in China. And I've seen many news clips of Chinese government meetings, stock trading floors, etc. And there were a number of clips I saw of Chinese rescue officials working after a big earthquake.

I SAW at that time, the visible evidence of the underlying social sanctions of the Ancient and Modern Chinese culture -- which I know from archeology and anthropology go back thousands of years.

China is a culture where the individual is secondary, the family, the town, the group is primary. The family name is given first -- the personal name second -- and they don't put a comma between to show they've been reversed in order.

The value of the individual is how they FIT IN - how they are THE SAME. People who work in an assembly plant wear uniforms. They move the same. They gather at the same hour before work to do Tai Chi or some exercises -- all in UNISON.

This never astonished me or attracted my attention before the 2008 political conventions were broadcast.

Of course, China is like that. We all know that. What's to notice?

Many times, I've heard interviews with business people in the new China where it is possible for private individuals to establish businesses. Over and over, I've heard native Chinese who were educated in America point out that China doesn't INNOVATE -- but they're real real good at copying.

With the heating up of the 2008 political campaigns, I had occasion to stare at the US Natal Chart -- we have an Aquarius MC with an Aquarius Moon right on the MC. Our business in the world, our reason for existence is to be DIFFERENT. To Innovate. To Need Freedom! To be individuals first. We have a Cancer (home; mother; apple pie; nurturing; business incubators) on the 2nd House -- our main value is the FAMILY. But the family supports the individual -- not the other way around.

When I saw the conventions in the USA, (a lot of it I watched on C-SPAN so I saw things the networks neglected to broadcast because it's boring) I observed something I had seen before but not observed.

There were thousands of people in the auditorium (for both conventions - same image), and they were all dressed alike, but no two were wearing the same thing. Each day and evening had its "uniform." (casual; dress casual; office casual; semi-formal; formal) But G-d forbid two women would buy their dresses in the same store!

Well, no -- there were some delegations that had adopted hats, scarves, jackets to distinguish their state. DISTINGUISH their individuality. But even the people who were "in uniform" -- were all differently dressed in some other way. Balloons on their heads, stovepipe Dr. Seuss hat, etc. And their body language was distinctive, too.

A similar gathering of Chinese who were intent on the formal installation of a political figure to an office would have been really dressed alike. They would sit in their seats, feet on the floor, eyes front, and cheer in unison in all the right places. In China, ceremony is ceremony.

The USA delegations (both parties) during many of the speeches (except the main ones network broadcast, but even then!!!) milled about their seats, talked to people privately, totally self-absorbed in their conversations, came and went -- whole sections were empty at times -- stopped once in a while to applaud a speaker, and a few actually listened. But each adopted an individual seated posture.

Even during the major speeches, TV interviewers nabbed celebrities for an aside conversation while the other celebrity was speaking!

Both conventions' speakers were speaking to a milling throng of individuals, not an audience.

There I am paralyzed by this VISION -- what would a Chinese citizen who had never seen anything American in their life THINK of America to see this?

I know what I think of China to see the way they behave.

I have seen political conventions, and other huge gatherings of Americans on TV before, and the audiences looked normal to me, un-remarkable, practically invisible. Everyone is like that everywhere I go -- so what's to notice?

Suddenly - everything is to notice! That's what observation is.

My extremely negative reaction to Chinese public behavior must be mirrored in the average Chinese person's reaction to American public behavior.

I would assume the images of the convention delegates' behavior broadcast world wide by at least CNN, if not many other networks, must be telling the Chinese that Americans don't take government seriously, that these American people know they have no sayso in how this election comes out, all decisions are made in the back room just like in China, the people have no power, and that they really don't care who becomes President of the USA anyway. All Americans care about is themselves as individuals.

Most of all, those images of our public behavior have to mean to the Chinese that we have no strength, no substance, no guts, and will be easily beaten.

OK, you may disagree with "what" I saw and how I've expressed it here. That's actually good. It means you have a VISION and therefore are an ARTIST and will eventually find a THEME to turn into a novel.

My point is that from the ambient "reality" I have extracted a contrast-compare essay subject, two cultures alien to one another.

Take that attribute, individuality vs. the collective, and worldbuild a galactic civilization, find characters who are in conflict because of the differing philosophies -- and you have something which can communicate to all the people who have seen these TV images I've described (millions).

Translated into thematic language, you would have Individuality Poisons Society. Or maybe The Individual Must Reign Supreme. Only through the group can prosperity be safe. Humanity's progress depends on the individual secure in personal freedom.

Apply to that some specific individualities, connect the individuals to the archetypes, cut, trim and hone a theme from all that, and you are ready to plot a novel.

Well, you are ready if you've studied enough philosophy to understand the long history of the argument and conflict between the individual and the collective (1st House/ 7th House in Astrology -- which lies athwart the perennial conflict of 10th House, 4th House -- career and home).

You don't study philosophy etc to find out what you think. You need it to know what your readership thinks so you can talk to them in a language they understand.

There is an old adage that you have no doubt seen in almost every book on writing you've read: Write What You Know.

You can't do that if you don't know anything.

It doesn't mean use your own profession, home, family, neighbors, school, education or job as what you write about.

You know this cliche: "I've forgotten more about XYZ than you will ever know!"

What does that mean? Think about it. It means this elder has reached the point of being an ARTIST in his field -- working mostly from the subconscious and thus producing results far superior to those produced by a neo who has to think about everything.

What "you know" -- is what you've forgotten.

And that's what you should write about -- that's where your Art can define THEMES for you.

In order to have forgotten something -- you must first learn it.

So the business of being a commercial writer is the business of learning something about everything. There is no field that isn't professional training for a writer.

That's nice because writer-types generally have an eclectic and far-ranging curiosity about everything but don't tend to stick with a subject long enough to become professional in it, at least not unless it involves the use of words.

Once you have a firm grasp of how the world works, and how it looks and seems to others, you can build fictional worlds that seem realistic to others. To accomplish that, you will have to use Theme as your main Artistic Medium.

So if you're a professional writer, you have an excuse to self-indulgently become a dilettante!

But that only works if you then use what you've forgotten to produce deathless prose!

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.slantedconcept.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/ 

More posts on Worldbuilding
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/01/worldbuilding-for-science-fiction.html

TV Show White Collar Fanfic And Show Don't Tell

 The following is re-posted from the Alien Romances blog where I post on Tuesdays, often on writing craft.

This post has a homework component - and you may post your work as a comment on this writing workshop blog.

This post on converting EXPOSITION into SHOW DON'T TELL actually goes together with my post on how to extract an outline from a finished work to create a query letter.

http://editingcircle.blogspot.com/2010/03/ok-send-me-2-page-synopsis.html

The rule is -- if it's in exposition, it does not go into the synopsis or outline. 

The principle is -- if you find you must put something into the synopsis that appears in the Work as exposition, then you must go back to the Work and convert the exposition to SHOW rather than TELL.  Once that's done (which can require cutting something else) then you can put the tidbit into the synopsis.

Rarely have I seen a useful explanation of how to convert exposition to SHOW, so here below is an example of how that process works in practice. 


--------
Previously, we have looked at 7 Pursuits to engage in that will help you teach yourself to write.  Those posts are:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/7-pursuits-to-teach-yourself-writing.html

and

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/7-pursuits-to-teach-yourself-writing_27.html
One very fruitful exercise in teaching yourself to write is writing fan fiction about your favorite TV show or movie characters.

So now we're going to use the USA Networks TV show White Collar for a lesson (an arduous lesson) in SHOW DON'T TELL.  I'm going to try to show-not-tell how to show-not-tell, then explain what I did and give you a chance to do the drill.   

You don't need to have watched White Collar to grasp the elements in this drill, but it might help to browse the website for White Collar.

http://www.usanetwork.com/series/whitecollar/  (the website comes on with audio-commercials)

Writing is a performing art, as I've told you I was taught, and as such it is a vocation, a calling, more than a profession.  Writing is a lifestyle.

Writers do it even when reading.  Can't help it.  If you're a writer, you are constantly and incessantly rewriting everything you read, or even TV shows you watch -- even great TV shows like White Collar. Yes, Watching TV is work for a writer.  I watch about 6 hours of fiction a week. 

So a friend of mine pointed me to a bit of fanfic she had written based on White Collar.  She's a seasoned professional writer who can't write without plot, pacing, style, structure, and conflict that resolves.  Like all writers, she rewrites TV shows as she watches them, then continues to write the show's story-arc, fixing little things here and there. 

Like me, she watches White Collar with an eye on the pickle Neal finds himself in.

That situational pickle is why I like the show.  I liked Remington Steele, Quantum Leap and It Takes A Thief for the same reason - the pickle inherent in the situation. 

Most TV series, especially anthology series, don't address the inherent pickle.

That pickle is called the "springboard" and is a vehicle to get you into the story, not something that they intend to resolve. 

Quantum Leap is a good example.  Only occasional episodes addressed the physics of the problem that got Dr. Sam Beckett stuck leaping from one time to another or how to get him out of that pickle.  The point of the show was "solving problems" in people's lives by taking over their life from inside their own body. 

But the only thing that interested me was the pickle and the solution, not the problems of the people he visited. 

Time Travel Romance routinely does this too.  The mechanism of the time travel leap is more fascinating to me than the Romance unless the writer can make them one and the same -- the novel A Knight In Shining Armor now out on Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/Knight-Shining-Armor-ebook/dp/B000FC0QO8/rereadablebooksr/
is an example of making the Romance more prominent than the time-travel mechanism. 

So, in the TV Show White Collar, the Romance and the pickle are intertwined perfectly.  You've got to solve the pickle to solve the Romance.  You've got to solve the Romance to solve the pickle. 

Neal agrees to work for the F.B.I. helping catch white collar criminals (his colleagues and rivals) in order to get out of jail so that he can find and maybe rescue his lover, the one serious relationship in his life. 

At the point of this story, Neal has just seen his soul mate killed in an explosion and has nothing left.  The F.B.I. has him on a leash (an ankle tracking device).  Meanwhile, he's become good friends with the only cop ever to catch him.  The cop keeps tempting him to go straight. And any romance reader can see Neal's  wide-open to a new lover, but not emotionally settled enough yet.  

So my friend the writer starts plotting, and out comes a (brilliant) solution to Neal's pickle. 

It's 2AM after a hard day writing for pay, and she's jumping up and down with this fabulous idea.  Got to write it or she won't sleep a wink, nevermind write the next piece in a way that can earn her pay.  The mind writes what the mind writes. 

So she wades in to solve Neal's pickle in a real quick fanfic.  She's tired and wants to get right to her idea.  This piece is aimed only at those who watch this show's episodes over and over and probably write fanfic about it themselves.  They know the material, they don't need an introduction just a quick sketch of her particular variation on Neal's character, and then into the story she wants to write.

So she perpetrates the biggest no-no in the writing craft, right up front of her story where it really matters, she starts off with tell rather than show, cramming in some foreshadowing that doesn't belong in the opening, then dashes off the story itself and posts it.  As an afterthought, she points me to the first chapter of the story (which already has rave reviews being posted), "Look what I wrote.  What do you think?"  And of course she's referring to her solution to the pickle.   

And what do I do? 

I rewrite her opening tell into show and send it to her.

I had a grand old time writing fanfic to my friend's fanfic.  Then I realized I'd done a writing lesson I could use to show you what I've been talking about when I say "show don't tell" -- my friend does not need this lesson and knows that I know that.  She was not offended when I showed her my scene, and even agreed to let me use it for you.

Here's the URL for the story she posted - it has 7 chapters you can find in the dropdown at the upper right:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5885164/1/Grace_In_The_Confidence_of_Others

Here's the opening paragraphs as she wrote them. Read them, study, and rewrite them as SHOW rather than TELL before reading what I did. 

------------

Summary – When Neal is playing a con, pulling a heist or creating a forgery, he has all the confidence in the world. But when these tools are not an option the only thing he has to save himself and the lives of others is something he's not too sure of at all, his own self worth.

Grace in the con fidence of others

Chapter 1/7

By Ultracape

They hung in almost every office, were tacked on nearly all the peg boards and some having been enthusiastically signed with a flourish by the grinning artist were framed and brought home and displayed in places of honor. There were few in the F.B.I.'s White Collar Crime Division who had not yet felt graced with a Neal Caffery original sketch.

It was the easiest con he'd every pulled, even if it was totally unintentional, and nothing to be proud of. As far as Neal was concerned if they were foolish enough to think his creations were any good he'd brag about his talent and play along. Then maybe he would not be the first one people looked to when something went missing in the office. Maybe he could get through a day feeling like his honest work meant something.

Even when he put his life on the line, something that happened with increasing frequency it seemed, it was not his word people trusted, it was his tracking anklet and the ever present threat of prison for the slightest infraction of what he felt were arbitrary and inconvenient rules, just begging to be broken for a good or even not so good cause.

The thing was, while it was rare for Neal to find any task difficult, when he did face difficulty, he did not have the experience to work it through. Fitting in, being accepted; playing by the rules eluded him, frustrated him and turned every day into a struggle to achieve what seemed to come so easily to others.

Gaining people's respect and trust in a persona for a con, for a heist, for the space of no more than a few weeks, was easy, especially for a man of Neal's brilliance. But earning the trust of others with nothing to show for his life but a list of alleged crimes, one conviction and a prison term was a greater challenge than he'd ever faced.

None but Neal's handler, partner and friend, F.B.I. Special Agent Peter Burke, could see through the armor of his fashionable suits, his charming veneer, his eagerness to be helpful, his know it all (because he did) attitude and his wit and puppy dog eyes to the troubled, childlike soul, the person who thought of himself as worth less than his doodles.

Now, just months since his girlfriend, Kate, had been killed, Neal's self-confidence was at an all time low. As far as Neal was concerned, the murder of his lady love, had been the final blow showing him that no matter what he did, what he accomplished, he was worth nothing, just some tool to be used by whoever needed his considerable criminal talents.

If trading his life for a hostage was needed it was no problem, and good riddance if said trade ended in his death. Thievery and coercion were against the law except if some mysterious uber-leader wanted to maneuver Neal into steeling something that supposedly didn't exist from a foreign government. But once Neal accomplished the deed, blowing him up was a convenient way to get rid of his inconvenient presence. And just for fun, pining a crime on him to cover up someone else's misdeeds was no big deal. As far as everyone was concerned, Neal deserved to be in prison, or dead.

Fine, he got the message. He was free as long as they could use him and his choices were prison or death and Neal did not want to go back to prison. Maybe this early morning meeting with Peter would lead to a means to an end. His experience as a consultant for the F.B.I. showed him how easy it was to step in front of a bullet even when he wasn't trying.

Having arrived early, Neal took out his small sketch pad he always kept with him to occupy his time. As usual, his thoughts drifted off to Kate and flashes of their life together, always ending with the explosion that took her from him. It was just that burst of brightness, this time from the sun angling its rays against a building and reflecting suddenly onto his face that he became aware he was staring out at the clear day, the tall glass monoliths sparkling in the morning light. He was halfway done before he even realized he was sketching the cityscape, somehow, even in black and white, capturing the brilliance of sparkling buildings, giving them a vitality unseen by passersby. His back to the door, Neal was so focused on his work that he did not notice the two men, one carrying a file, who walked into the room until one of them gasped.

"Oh my G-d, Peter!"

------------

OK, to do a good job rewriting this opening, you should read the whole story, all 7 Chapters, but I had read only this first chapter to the end before I couldn't resist creating a SHOW out of this TELL opening. 

For the purposes of this drill, just reading that first chapter should be enough. 

I'm going to show you here an illustration of a simple fact I learned from Marion Zimmer Bradley. Writing is a craft.  It can be trained into you like driving, tennis, pottery.  The training consists of drill-drill-drill, and that's about it.  Talent of course helps, but is neither a necessary or sufficient condition to doing what I'm going to show you. 

This is an exercise in "put in the data and grind the crank."  It is a mechanical exercise devoid of artistic dimensions.  It is an exercise in walking and chewing gum.  It is an exercise in doing a lot of writing craft techniques simultaneously, and cross-integrating each with the other. 

This scene appeared in my mind, WHOLE and complete, produced by the training my subconscious has endured over the years.  Writing it down only took a few minutes.  I did not think about this.  I didn't laboriously figure it out.  My subconscious produced the scene in a flash-photo and I knew it was the SHOW that corresponds to the TELL in this story opening just twisted into my own characters. 

I watch this TV show, and I have inside my own head, a Neal & Peter set that doesn't resemble those my friend writes about here.  So in writing the scene down, I distorted her characters, and deleted points she had inserted as foreshadowing of the subsequent events that I hadn't read about yet. 

For her to attach my opening scene to her story would mean the entire thing would have to be rewritten, after rewriting my opening to correct the characters to be her own characters.  The foreshadowing I deleted would have to be moved to later.  And then the pacing and plot and everything else would have to be adjusted.

Had she stopped to create an opening scene instead of the long "tell" opening, it would have been an entirely different scene than the one I concocted.

This will be the case with anything you come up with to cast that TELL opening into a SHOW opening.  Your Neal (whether you've watched the show or not) is not my Neal or Ultracape's Neal. 

That's what makes fanfic so much fun!  You can have your cake and eat it too!  You can have dozens, even hundreds, of versions of the same character in various versions of a pickle, and watch the problem get worked out in thousands of ways. 

If you have no idea how to transform her TELL into a SHOW, here's a clue.  You need to create a SCENE in which almost all the information in her TELL is illustrated by visuals, by things, by actions, and by acting business.

To show not tell, you need to create a scene, so your piece must have a scene's STRUCTURE. 

If you don't know the rules for creating a scene, first read:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure.html

And it's sequel post:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html

Yes, "show don't tell" means "construct a scene that conveys this without saying this."

Scene Structure mastery cures Expository Lumps. 

Ultracape's opening "TELL" is mostly exposition. 

If you don't know what an Expository Lump is, or have been excoriated by your beta readers for expository lumps (or told your writing is boring), read these posts first:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/source-of-expository-lump.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/sexy-information-feed.html

And this one focusing on Michelle West's novel THE HIDDEN CITY as an example of information feed. 

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/for-my-review-column-httpwww.html

I call what Ultracape did for the opening "information feed" - and she chose telling the information as exposition and narrative instead of showing it with a full fleshed scene. 

She did that because it's easier and faster.  You will find that you do it often, too, and on rewrite you are faced with the problem of how to fix it.  Sometimes a scene is the solution, so this exercise may help you meet a looming deadline one day. 

WRITE YOUR OWN SCENE NOW.

OK, now here's what I did with it.  Read what I did, then we'll go through it again, identifying the craft skills for various items in this scene.  Then you can rewrite what you did, if you think it's warranted.  You can post your results as a comment on this blog to get feedback. 

------------
GRACE IN THE CON FIDENCE OF OTHERS
(opening rewrite by Jacqueline Lichtenberg)

The motor pool sedan lumbered over the broken field. 

Neal Caffrey sat beside his handler, Peter Burke, who wrestled the car up next to a row of identical ones and parked it precisely in line.   Neal clutched a plain brown wrapped package in his lap and noted the hint of a smirk on Peter's otherwise friendly face.

Peter got out, pocketing the keys and leaned on the open door.  He surveyed the immense bon fire smoking downwind of the parked cars.  On the other side of the fire, a small fire truck and four geared up firemen supervised the flames.  On this side, four guys in F.B.I. jackets watched, hands in their pockets.

Peter looked back at Neal, eyebrows raised. "Well?  You going to pay off this bet, or not?" 

I'm not a welcher.  Never have been.  Even Peter knows that.  I thought.

Neal got out, slammed his door, and tucked the package under his arm.  "What now?" The bon fire of counterfeit currency blazed merrily. 

"Follow me."

Peter led the way up to the group of F.B.I. guys, hitched his suit jacket back and shoved his hands in his pockets, starting to talk before Neal got close enough to hear against the wind. 

As he approached, Neal's artist's eye took a snapshot of the tableau. 

In one instant, the group opened and swallowed Peter, becoming a group of five F.B.I. guys, one of which didn't wear a labeled jacket. But five F.B.I. guys, solid and unbreakable. 

Odd man out, Neal joined the group, very aware that it was still five guys and him, not six guys.

"...sure thing," one of them was saying.  "But I have to see what's in the package first."

"No problem," replied Peter, and gestured casually to Neal to unwrap the package in his arm.

Neal held the bottom of the package and ripped the taped shut top open.

"Oil paintings, on canvass," said Peter. "They'll burn easily.  All forgeries, we don't ever want to get back into circulation, if you know what I mean." 

One of the guys plucked a rolled canvass out of the package and held it open.  He whistled.  "You sure this isn't the real thing?" 

Neal interjected, "They're not."

The guy asked, "How do you know?" And he scrutinized Neal, as if checking his face against memorized wanted photos. 

"I painted them."

All four guys riveted eyes on Neal. 

"So," Peter broke in, "can we feed your fire?" 

"Go ahead." The guy handed Neal back the rolled painting. 

Peter gestured to Neal and the moment of paying off his bet with Peter came upon him like a cold shower. He'd been stupid to open his mouth and volunteer to burn these himself.  He had been so sure he'd been right about Dorothy Putnam's double timing her S.E.C. boss on those CDO's.  But she'd been lily white, and Peter had won the bet.

Neal walked up to the fire, gaining the alert attention of both firemen at the left and right of the pile of burning currency. 

A gust of wind drove the flames and smoke away from Neal, and he took that moment to hurl the first painting onto the fire. 

I can make more. he thought grimly as he flung each painting onto the leaping flames.  So why does this hurt? 

The brown wrapper followed the canvasses, flapping in the wind.

Neal turned to face the welded together group of five F.B.I. guys and paced the distance back to them. 

He could have just let me burn them in my fireplace. He made it back to the car certain he'd shown no hint of the pain he didn't let himself feel. 

By the time they arrived at the office, Neal's back had relaxed enough for him to stride freely down the corridor, even though fully aware of each of his freehand sketches displayed on the walls. 

They hung in almost every office, were tacked on nearly all the peg boards and some having been enthusiastically signed with a flourish by the grinning artist were framed and brought home and displayed in places of honor.

He realized he'd been doing a lot more of those sketches since the murder of his lady love.  There were few in the F.B.I.'s White Collar Crime Division who had not been captured in a Neal Caffery original sketch.

Why do they keep them? The scene of the morning returned full force, Peter melding seamlessly into the group of four F.B.I. guys, and himself apart.  He tried to shake it off.  They don't see me as just some tool to be used by whoever needs my unique skills!

But Neal knew that as far as those four guys were concerned, he deserved to be in prison, or dead, if they could only remember the right wanted poster.

But I've decided to do whatever it takes to stay out of prison, and I can do whatever I decide to do. Right?

Peter's phone rang. As he slipped it from his pocket, he said, "Neal, wait for me in my office, okay? I'll be right back."  And he took off down the hall, phone to his ear. 

Neal sighed and watched him go.  See?  What did I tell you? he told himself silently.  I'm just a convenience, a crime solving appliance.

He slipped into Peter's office and took out his small sketch pad he he carried for waiting-room-moments. 

As usual, his thoughts drifted off to Kate and flashes of their life together, always ending with the explosion that took her from him.

But this time, it was just a burst of brightness from the sun angling its rays against a building and reflecting suddenly onto his face, not an orange and angry black explosion.

He became aware he was staring out at the clear day, the tall glass monoliths sparkling in the morning light. His hand was sketching the cityscape, a simple pencil sketch capturing the brilliance of sparkling buildings, giving them a vitality unseen by passersby.

His back to the door, Neal was so focused on his work that he did not notice the two men, one carrying a file, who walked into the room until one of them leaned over his shoulder and gasped.

"Oh my G-d, Peter!"
-------------

And from there it's as Ultracape wrote it, presenting Neal with an opportunity to wriggle out of his pickle. 

This is an exercise in SHOW DON'T TELL.

In narrative or screenwriting, you must create VISUAL IMAGES out of intangibles, just as commercial writers have to make you want to buy a perfume or a particular brand of toothpaste. 

Things that have to be illustrated are emotions, attitudes, moods, character, relationship, background, backstory without exposition. 

So let's go through what I wrote again, looking for how I did that.  Then you can go through what you did, and see if you can think of a better way to do what you did. 

So here's my scene again with comments in CAPS. 

---------

The motorpool sedan lumbered over the broken field.  (OPENING IMAGE - A ROUGH JOURNEY NEARING AN END)

Neal Caffrey sat beside his handler, Peter Burke, who wrestled the car up next to a row of identical ones and parked it precisely in line.  
(CHARACTERIZATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP (BESIDE) AND OF PETER (NEAT, CAREFUL, ORGANIZED, RULE-CONSCIOUS).  SETTING AND BACKSTORY INDICATED - IDENTICAL CARS - FORESHADOWS THEY ARE FBI - FORESHADOWS THE IMAGE OF 4 MEN TOGETHER)

Neal clutched a plain brown wrapped package in his lap
MYSTERY, A QUESTION IS PLANTED, WHAT'S IN THE PACKAGE, WHY CLUTCHED? CHARACTERIZATION, CLUTCHING - NOT LIKE NEAL TO HANG ON. RELUCTANT TO CHANGE.

ALSO NOTE USE OF SYMBOLISM THROUGHOUT -- IF YOU HAVEN'T STUDIED THE USE OF SYMBOLISM SEE THIS POST
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/communicating-in-symbols.html
and noted the hint of a smirk on Peter's otherwise friendly face.
CHARACTERIZATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP - WHAT NEAL NOTICES; OF PETER'S PERSONALITY; AND FORESHADOWS TO THOSE WHO WATCH THE SHOW THAT SOMETHING REALLY INTERESTING IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN AND NEAL ISN'T HAPPY ABOUT THAT.

Peter got out, pocketing the keys and leaned on the open door. 
BACKSTORY SYMBOLIZED WITH TYPICAL COP STANCE BEHIND OPEN CAR DOOR, CHARACTERIZES PETER IN METICULOUS POCKETING OF KEYS, ALSO SHOWS WITHOUT TELLING THAT NEAL HAS NO WAY OUT OF THIS SCENE EXCEPT FORWARD -- ONLY WE ALL KNOW HE CAN HOTWIRE THE CAR IN 15 SECONDS.  BUT IF HE DID, WHAT WOULD THAT DO TO THE RELATIONSHIP.  SO HE'S TRAPPED. 

He surveyed the immense bon fire smoking downwind of the parked cars.
VISUAL IMAGE THAT BEGINS TO REVEAL WHERE THEY ARE AND WHAT'S HAPPENING.  IT'S ALSO A VISUAL HOOK INTO THE SCENE. 

 On the other side of the fire, a small fire truck and four geared up firemen supervised the flames. 
SHOWS WITHOUT TELLING THAT THIS BON FIRE IS LEGIT, ON PURPOSE.

On this side, four guys in F.B.I. jackets watched, hands in their pockets.
TYPICAL GUY STANCE WHEN COMMUNING WITH BUDDIES, NON-THREATENING BODY LANGUAGE, YET STRONG, INDIVIDUAL AND SELF-CONFIDENT BODY LANGUAGE. ALSO JACKETS SHOW DON'T TELL THAT THIS IS AN FBI OP.

Peter looked back at Neal, eyebrows raised. "Well?  You going to pay off this bet, or not?"

AHA, DOWN TO BRASS TACKS OF THE SCENE.  PAY OFF WHAT?

NOTICE THAT SHOWING WITHOUT TELLING IS ROOTED IN PROMPTING THE READER/VIEWER TO ASK QUESTIONS BEFORE YOU PROVIDE ANSWERS.  THAT'S INFORMATION FEED TECHNIQUE, AND THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF STORYTELLING.

I'm not a welcher.  Never have been.  Even Peter knows that.  I thought.

NEAL'S SELF-IMAGE IS SHOWN BY HIS PRIDE IN KEEPING HIS WORD.  RELATIONSHIP IS SHOWN IN THAT NEAL KNOWS PETER KNOWS NEAL'S CHARACTER IS STRONG. THEN DOUBT CREEPS IN - THE BAREST HINT WITH "I THOUGHT".  ULTRACAPE TOLD US NEAL'S SELF-IMAGE WAS CRUMBLING UNDER THE REALITY OF HIS LOSS OF HIS SOUL-MATE, AND HERE WE SEE WITH OUR OWN EYES THE FRISSON OF THE FIRST CRACKS IN NEAL'S SELF-IMAGE SHOWING UP IN HIS SOLID RELATIONSHIP WITH PETER.


Neal got out, slammed his door, and tucked the package under his arm.  "What now?" The bon fire of counterfeit currency blazed merrily.

ACTION MOVES THE PLOT OF THIS SCENE ALONG.  AND A TAG-LINE OF TELL REVEALS WHAT WE HAVE BEEN LOOKING AT, AND MOST READERS NO DOUBT SUSPECTED, A CONTROLLED DISPOSAL OF COUNTERFEIT CURRENCY -- NEAL'S BIGGEST SKILL IS COUNTERFEITING CURRENCY OR ARTWORK.  IT'S HIS LIFE, THE PRODUCT OF ALL HIS EFFORTS TO LIVE WELL, GOING UP IN SMOKE UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE AUTHORITIES.  IT IS DEFEAT IN IMAGES.

"WHAT NOW?" IS THE CORE OF THE DILEMMA ULTRACAPE SKETCHES IN THE OPENING TELL.  NEAL IS AT A SYMBOLIC CROSSROADS IN HIS LIFE, NOTHING LEFT BEHIND, NOTHING VISIBLE AHEAD, FAILURE AT EVERYTHING, NOTHING TO PEG HIS SELF-ESTEEM ON ANY MORE. HE HIMSELF IS GOING UP IN SMOKE.  

"Follow me."

AGAIN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THEM IS SHOWN.

AN ALTERNATIVE WAY TO DEPICT THIS BIT OF THE SCENE IS TO HAVE NEAL HEAVE HIMSELF OUT OF THE CAR, STALK AGGRESSIVELY ACROSS THE FIELD, AND HURL HIS PACKAGE INTO THE FLAMES WITHOUT ASKING PERMISSION, TURN AND BELLIGERANTLY YELL AT PETER, "SATISFIED?" -- THAT WOULD CHANGE THE CHARACTERIZATION, THE RELATIONSHIP, AND THE GIST OF THE STORY.

Peter led the way up to the group of F.B.I. guys, hitched his suit jacket back and shoved his hands in his pockets, starting to talk before Neal got close enough to hear against the wind. 

SHOW'S WITHOUT TELLING PETER'S A MEMBER OF THE FRATERNITY, ACCEPTED.  ALL ULTRACAPE'S EXPOSITION ABOUT ACCEPTANCE IS WRAPPED UP IN THIS AND SUBSQUENT IMAGES, SHOWN IN IMAGES NOT TOLD IN WORDS. 

As he approached, Neal's artist's eye took a snapshot of the tableau.

THIS STORY IS ABOUT NEAL'S ARTISTIC ABILITY, SO HERE THAT IS SHOWN WITHOUT TELLING, SHOWN WITH ACTION AND DESCRIPTION. 

NOW COMES SOME DESCRIPTION TO ILLUSTRATE THE EMOTIONAL CONTENT OF THE IMAGE NEAL CAPTURES WITH HIS ARTIST'S EYE.

In one instant, the group opened and swallowed Peter, becoming a group of five F.B.I. guys, one of which didn't wear a labeled jacket. But five F.B.I. guys, solid and unbreakable. 

Odd man out, Neal joined the group, very aware that it was still five guys and him, not six guys.

AGAIN NEAL'S UNCHARACTERISTIC SENSE OF ALIENATION SURFACES, AND IT SURFACES IN THE IMAGE OF THE FIVE GUYS AND HIM -- IT IS THE ARTIST IN HIM THAT IS ABLE TO EXPRESS EMOTION THAT HE OTHERWISE COULD NOT FACE VERBALLY. 

"...sure thing," one of them was saying.  "But I have to see what's in the package first."

"No problem," replied Peter, and gestured casually to Neal to unwrap the package in his arm.

AGAIN, WHO'S BOSS AND WHO'S OUTSIDER ILLUSTRATED, AND WE NOW MOVE TO REVEAL WHAT WAS CONCEALED IN THE SECOND PARAGRAPH OF THIS SCENE, CLUTCHING A BROWN PAPER WRAPPED PACKAGE. 

Neal held the bottom of the package and ripped the taped shut top open.

"Oil paintings, on canvass," said Peter. "They'll burn easily.  All forgeries, we don't ever want to get back into circulation, if you know what I mean." 

One of the guys plucked a rolled canvass out of the package and held it open.  He whistled.  "You sure this isn't the real thing?" 

FORESHADOWING THAT THIS ENTIRE THING IS ABOUT NEAL'S ART - AND ALSO HIGHLIGHTING THE SELF-ESTEEM ISSUE AT THE CORE OF THE STORY. 

Neal interjected, "They're not."

WORD INTERJECTED ILLUSTRATES NEAL IS THE OUTSIDER HERE.  AN INSIDER WOULD ADD OR ANSWER. HE'S NOT EVEN BEING ADDRESSED AND MUST INTERJECT.

The guy asked, "How do you know?" And he scrutinized Neal, as if checking his face against memorized wanted photos. 

AGAIN REJECTION.  SURELY BY NOW EVERYONE IN THE FBI KNOWS NEAL'S FACE. BUT NO, HERE'S A CREW THAT DOESN'T RECOGNIZE HIM.  NEAL IS FORCED TO SAY:

"I painted them."

BY LEAVING OUT LONG DESCRIPTION OF THE STRANGLED TONE OF VOICE NEAL IS USING HERE, THE GRATING SOUND OF IT ON HIS OWN EARS, THE BARE WORDS CARRY THE SUBTEXT AND LET EACH READER INTERPRET HOW THE LINE IS DELIVERED FOR THEMSELVES, THUS MAKING THIS SCENE THEIR OWN. 

All four guys riveted eyes on Neal. 

NOW HE'S GOT THEIR ATTENTION - DOES HE REALLY WANT IT.  BUT AGAIN, HE'S ODD MAN OUT.

"So," Peter broke in, "can we feed your fire?" 

ILLUSTRATES THEIR RELATIONSHIP - PETER SAVING NEAL FROM EMBARRASSMENT AT THE HANDS OF PETER'S COLLEAGUES.  PETER, MEMBER OF THE FRATERNITY; NEAL, OUTSIDER.

"Go ahead." The guy handed Neal back the rolled painting. 

STAGE BUSINESS HERE AN ACTOR COULD MAKE A LOT OUT OF. LET THE READER READ IT. 

Peter gestured to Neal and the moment of paying off his bet with Peter came upon him like a cold shower. He'd been stupid to open his mouth and volunteer to burn these himself.  He had been so sure he'd been right about Dorothy Putnam's double timing her S.E.C. boss on those CDO's.  But she'd been lily white, and Peter had won the bet.

HERE NEAL'S INNER DIALOGUE IS REVEALED WITH SOME NARRATIVE, AND THE OFFHAND REFERENCE TO AN EVENT NOT MENTIONED IN ULTRACAPE'S OPENING IS INSERTED TO SHOW DON'T TELL THAT NEAL IS NOT ONLY AT THE NADIR OF HIS LIFE, BUT INSULT TO INJURY HE'D LEAD THE FBI IN THE WRONG DIRECTION ON THEIR LAST CASE -- ON THE TV SHOW THERE IS NO DOROTHY PUTNAM OR SEC SCANDAL OR CDO BUSINESS.  I JUST MADE THAT UP FOR A BET NEAL HAD JUST LOST. 

Neal walked up to the fire, gaining the alert attention of both firemen at the left and right of the pile of burning currency. 

A gust of wind drove the flames and smoke away from Neal, and he took that moment to hurl the first painting onto the fire. 

SYMBOLIC OF WHERE HE IS IN LIFE, HURLING HIS PAST INTO THE FIRE BECAUSE IT'S ALL A WORTHLESS SHAM. 

I can make more. he thought grimly as he flung each painting onto the leaping flames.  So why does this hurt? 

AS MOST MEN, NEAL FEELS HIS FEELINGS BUT HAS NO CLUE (AND DOESN'T WANT TO HAVE) WHERE THEY COME FROM OR WHY HE FEELS.  HE KNOWS HE CAN "MAKE MORE" -- REBUILD HIS LIFE -- BUT ON MORE SHAM, MORE CONS, A FALSE AND FAKE LIFE WORTH NOTHING BUT BURNING IN A BLEAK, OPEN FIELD UNDER THE WATCHFUL EYES OF THE AUTHORITIES. 

The brown wrapper followed the canvasses, flapping in the wind.

REALLY NOTHING LEFT, NOT EVEN THE WRAPPER.

WHAT HE HAD CLUTCHED TO HIMSELF, HE HAS NOW THROWN AWAY.  THIS IS THE BACKSTORY OF THE WHOLE TV SERIES UP TO "NOW" WHEN ULTRACAPE SOLVES THE PROBLEM EVER SO NEATLY. 

Neal turned to face the welded together group of five F.B.I. guys and paced the distance back to them. 

OK, BRAVELY FACE THE FUTURE. 

He could have just let me burn them in my fireplace.

AGAIN THE MORPHING RELATIONSHIP, THE UNCERTAINTY THAT HE EVEN UNDERSTANDS PETER.

He made it back to the car certain he'd shown no hint of the pain he didn't let himself feel. 

THIS INVITES FANFIC READERS TO RE-WATCH ALL THE SHOWS FOR HINTS OF NEAL'S INNER LIFE SHOWING THROUGH WHEN HE THINKS IT DOESN'T.  ALSO AGAIN, ANOTHER SHOW DON'T TELL OF HOW THE FACE HE TURNS TO THE OUTER WORLD IS A CONSTRUCT, NOT WHAT HE KNOWS AS HIS TRUE SELF.  HE DOESN'T LET HIMSELF FEEL HIS OWN PAIN, SO IT WON'T SHOW, BECAUSE - WHAT? IF IT DID SHOW WHAT WOULD HAPPEN? REJECTION? AGAIN, THE POINTS OF CHARACTERIZATION ULTRACAPE HIGHLIGHTED ARE SHOWN, NOT TOLD.  BUT IT'S JUST A LITTLE DIFFERENT THAN HER NEAL WOULD DO IT. 

By the time they arrived at the office, Neal's back had relaxed enough for him to stride freely down the corridor, even though fully aware of each of his freehand sketches displayed on the walls. 

HERE WE JOIN THE NARRATIVE ULTRACAPE WROTE WITH A DIFFERENT SEGUE.  HER OPENING "THEY HUNG IN ALMOST EVERY OFFICE" IS REALLY COOL, AND I WAS VERY SORRY TO LOSE IT.  SO I PUT IT IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH, AFTER REVEALING WHAT "THEY" ARE -- BETTER THAN SCRAPPING IT TOTALLY. 

They hung in almost every office, were tacked on nearly all the peg boards and some having been enthusiastically signed with a flourish by the grinning artist were framed and brought home and displayed in places of honor.

He realized he'd been doing a lot more of those sketches since the murder of his lady love.  There were few in the F.B.I.'s White Collar Crime Division who had not been captured in a Neal Caffery original sketch.

Why do they keep them? The scene of the morning returned full force, Peter melding seamlessly into the group of four F.B.I. guys, and himself apart.  He tried to shake it off.  They don't see me as just some tool to be used by whoever needs my unique skills!

But Neal knew that as far as those four guys were concerned, he deserved to be in prison, or dead, if they could only remember the right wanted poster.

But I've decided to do whatever it takes to stay out of prison, and I can do whatever I decide to do. Right?

Peter's phone rang. As he slipped it from his pocket, he said, "Neal, wait for me in my office, okay? I'll be right back."  And he took off down the hall, phone to his ear. 

Neal sighed and watched him go.  See?  What did I tell you? he told himself silently.  I'm just a convenience, a crime solving appliance.

BLENDING INTO ULTRACAPE'S FIRST SCENE, BRINGING A SHOW DON'T TELL IMAGE INTO THE APPROACH TO THE OFFICE, CREATING AN EXIT FOR PETER SO HE CAN RE-ENTER WITH THE GUEST AND NEW OFFER.

He slipped into Peter's office and took out his small sketch pad he he carried for waiting-room-moments. 

As usual, his thoughts drifted off to Kate and flashes of their life together, always ending with the explosion that took her from him.

But this time, it was just a burst of brightness from the sun angling its rays against a building and reflecting suddenly onto his face, not an orange and angry black explosion.

He became aware he was staring out at the clear day, the tall glass monoliths sparkling in the morning light. His hand was sketching the cityscape, a simple pencil sketch capturing the brilliance of sparkling buildings, giving them a vitality unseen by passersby.

His back to the door, Neal was so focused on his work that he did not notice the two men, one carrying a file, who walked into the room until one of them leaned over his shoulder and gasped.

"Oh my G-d, Peter!"

AS PETER BRINGS HIS GUEST AND SUGGESTION INTO NEAL'S LIFE, WITH THAT BURNING PAINTINGS SCENE TACKED ONTO THE OPENING, WE HAVE A REVERSAL OR SWITCH, A BIG TURNABOUT IN THE RELATIONSHIP.

IN MY OPENING SCENE, NEAL IS FEELING -- NOT THINKING -- THAT PETER HAS REALLY ABANDONED HIM, THAT PETER IS BEING CRUEL ON PURPOSE IN SOME WAY, AND NEAL ISN'T SURE HE DOESN'T DESERVE IT.  NEAL IS JUST IN GRIEVING MODE, TOTALLY LOST, AND FEELING ABANDONED BY PETER, HIS LAST FRIEND.  BUT HERE, ALL OF A SUDDEN, IT'S REVERSED, AND PETER IS PROVIDING A SOLUTION THAT TAKES INTO ACCOUNT WHAT ART REALLY MEANS TO NEAL, A MEANING NEAL HIMSELF HAS NO CLUE (YET) EXISTS.

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Now, go over the scene you constructed, identify the techniques you did use, and make sure you've used all of the ones I've noted above.

Make your scene says what you want it to say, and with the characterization spin that you prefer -- but make it clear and vivid what your spin actually is.

This is a drill in SHOW DON'T TELL which is designed to prompt you to carry the dynamic evolution of a new icon for modern Romance into the future. It's all about Relationship shown but not told. 

For more on the Romance iconization, see:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/turning-action-into-romance.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com