Showing posts with label New York Times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New York Times. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Depiction Part 9 - Depicting A Hero by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Depiction Part 9
Depicting A Hero
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

The previous parts of the Depiction Series are:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/09/depiction-part-1-depicting-power-in.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/09/depiction-part-2-conflict-and-resolution.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/09/depiction-part-3-internal-conflict-by.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/12/depiction-part-4-depicting-power-in.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/01/depiction-part-5-depicting-dynastic.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/02/depiction-part-6-depicting-money-and.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/02/depiction-part-7-using-media-to-advance.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/02/depiction-part-8-which-comes-first.html

Last week we discussed novel series that depict the Hero, and how the "backstory" of a Heroic Character illustrates the theme. 

But how do you draw a Hero? 

A depiction is not the real thing - not a photo or 3-D large-as-life image.

A depiction is like a Japanese Brush Painting -- a few suggestive lines that cause the beholder to fill in the blanks and "see" a real thing.  That vision often seems more real than reality to the beholder.

That's what writers do with characters -- provide a few strategically chosen details to "depict" a reality that the reader will flesh out, making the vision their own. 

So how do you depict a Hero -- how did the authors of the books reviewed last week achieve that dimension of heroism? 

And why does it work Mass Market miracles when you do capture Heroism?

Here is a New York Times opinion blog entry calling the Hero an American Myth. 

Myth makes the best fiction, so that could be why it's such a popular trope.

But perhaps there's more to it than that.  As I suggested last week, it is the un-askable questions that generate the most powerful themes.

So let's take a look at "The Hero" (an Ancient Greek concept - the offspring of god and human, often by rape) from a different point of view.

This point of view seems to be based in politics, specifically American politics which is like no other in the world.  If you're not familiar with Republican vs. Democrat and the two-party system where what a Party stands for morphs and changes and veers in different directions through the decades, this article may make no sense to you.

Here's the article's URL
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/evolution-and-the-american-myth-of-the-individual/


----------QUOTE-----------
At least part of the schism between Republicans and Democrats is based in differing conceptions of the role of the individual. We find these differences expressed in the frequent heated arguments about crucial issues like health care and immigration. In a broad sense, Democrats, particularly the more liberal among them, are more likely to embrace the communal nature of individual lives and to strive for policies that emphasize that understanding. Republicans, especially libertarians and Tea Party members on the ideological fringe, however, often trace their ideas about freedom and liberty back to Enlightenment thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, who argued that the individual is the true measure of human value, and each of us is naturally entitled to act in our own best interests free of interference by others. Self-described libertarians generally also pride themselves on their high valuation of logic and reasoning over emotion.

    The basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the selfish and self-serving individual.

Philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel have emphasized that human beings are essentially social creatures, that the idea of an isolated individual is a misleading abstraction. So it is not just ironic but instructive that modern evolutionary research, anthropology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience have come down on the side of the philosophers who have argued that the basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the selfish, self-serving individual. Contrary to libertarian and Tea Party rhetoric, evolution has made us a powerfully social species, so much so that the essential precondition of human survival is and always has been the individual plus his or her relationships with others.
-----------END QUOTE--------------------------

Personally, I take issue with that description of "Republican vs Democrat" -- at least in 2014, those aren't the principles dominating either side.

But reality is irrelevant to learning how to construct fiction.  Reality is relevant only in deciding what content to put into the fiction you write, and how to lead your reader from what they already know/assume to what your Characters know/assume about their alien worlds.

Learning the concept "conflict" is relevant to learning how to construct fiction.

And this article also illustrates why delineating a clear 'conflict' (a this vs that) is also the essence of good non-fiction writing.

This is a well written article, well organized. It would be an A paper in most courses on non-fiction writing, and maybe in some others.

The author of this NYT opinion article factored the prevailing mixed-mess of stances in American politics into two neat (artificial) extremes in order to make the point that Individualism is based on a myth.

Personally, I'm not convinced, but it is a well presented and well argued point worth studying.

However, last week we did discuss three different novel series with three different approaches, all of which illustrate the murky pea-soup of a mixed-mess Philosophy this 21st Century Culture suffers from.

My thesis last week was that this mixed-mess is modern philosophical ideas mixed with left over, contradictory bits and pieces of former prevailing Philosophies -- Aristotle and back through Persia and Egypt (maybe China), and Plato/Aristotle forward through Bacon's "scientific method" and onward to today. 

A simple, coherent, all-pieces-match Philosophy probably hasn't prevailed in all of human history, so it's not like anything has changed.

But people do continue to try to raise their children in isolation from "alien influences" -- trying to distill and convey a world view that is utterly coherent.

As far as I can see, to date, the more isolated children are from the melted-pot-of-ideas, the more incoherent their internal philosophy becomes.  But that could just be my opinion -- what if I'm wrong about that? 

The writer of this article has tried to distill his boyhood into a couple of sentences -- thus establishing camaraderie with the reader. 

He says:

---------QUOTE-----------
When I was a boy I was taught that the Old Testament is about our relationship with God and the New Testament is about our responsibilities to one another. I now know this division of biblical wisdom is too simple. I have also learned that in the eyes of many conservative Americans today, religion and evolution do not mix. You either accept what the Bible tells us or what Charles Darwin wrote, but not both.
------------END QUOTE-----------

Well, no way on Earth could anyone ever get the impression that I'm "Conservative."  I'm a disruptive force wherever I go.

But no way can I be termed a Liberal (by the American Definition -- in some other countries the term might fit).  I'm definitely not "Progressive" either because net-net the Progressive agenda is to force change by passive-aggressive psychological trickery (such as never articulating what the actual goal of the actions is.)   

And as I see it, personally, Darwin and the Biblical Account are identical, not in conflict at all.  Science and Religion aren't two separate things, and not mutually exclusive. 

That could be where I've got leftover bits and pieces of alien Philosophy stuck somewhere in my operating system, or maybe not.

As I pointed out last week, writers who know, internalize and then consciously forget the history of philosophy have a better chance of hitting the wide, Mass Market Paperback stride. 

This article isolates some of the broad rivers of thought that flow into our world from our past, gives you the names of writers to study, and some of their often cited works.  A broad education in these key works will give a writer the chance to understand the readership better than the readers understand themselves.

The job of the writer is to depict, to select out the salient bits of the reader's real-world, then express the reader's opinion using all the tools of Art, tools the reader may not have Talent or Training to handle.

One of the ways writers express the reader's opinion is by depicting the Hero, the Individual who (during his Story) resolves the conflict between his personal Needs and his social needs and obligations.

Each Character, according to the theme you embed in the Character's "backstory," must come to a unique resolution of that self-other conflict.

I've discussed that self-other conflict line in terms of Astrology and in terms of Tarot, (here are the index posts to those series)

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_23.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html

The Astrology Just For Writers series illustrates how to depict fresh, unique angles on the self-other conflict while making what you write conform to the Mass Market and Hollywood dictum "the same but different." 

Say it better than the reader can say it -- and you will be quoted.

This New York Times opinion piece gives a good clue to how you can articulate what your readers only suspect, fear, even just accept.

The USA is wrestling with the self/other dichotomy these historical philosophers articulated for their readers.

Philosophers don't invent these Ideas -- they formulate, organize and communicate the suspicions of their teachers, contemporaries, and the ancestors of those contemporaries. 

Philosophers formulate the connections between the leftover bits and pieces of alien philosophies embedded in their own societies.

They use what appears to be non-fiction as their format, but employ as much imagination as a fiction writer. 

In fact, I would say all fiction writers are philosophers of their time.  The more schooled in the history of philosophy a fiction writer is, the more likely they are to articulate the current culture's issues. 

Some of these issues we wrestle with today are identical to those depicted in the oldest known writings such as the Bible, and perhaps some fragments even older than that.

The problem of "we need a leader" all the way to the problem of "Who Am I and Does It Matter?"  Are we a Group if we don't have a Leader?  How do you get to be Leader (Katherine Kurtz's Deryni Series is all about Who Will Be King). 

If you look at an Astrological Natal Chart (the practice and concept of which dates back long before the Bible), you see that every human being born on Earth (bets are off for those born elsewhere), has an Ascendent and Descendent.

The Ascendent is the point on the Eastern Horizon where the Sun will rise (or has risen) at the day of birth in the place of birth. 

The Descendant is the point on the Western Horizon where the Sun will set or has set that day in that place. 

The Ascendent represents the Self -- mentioned in that New York Times Article.

The Descendent represents the Other (Spouse, Family, Town, County, State, Country, General Public -- "other" in the intimate sense of Soul Mate and in the generic sense of anyone who's not-me.)

In Astrology, there are 12 "Houses" in the Zodiac (calculated various ways in various systems).  They take the circle and divide it into pie-wedges.

Each wedge has an opposite wedge of the same size.

Events that happen (transits, progressions, etc) in one of the wedges often manifest in the opposite wedge as a reflection of the Event.

In other words, from oldest times, human psychology has been depicted as symmetric -- what is inside a person appears OUTside that person. 

Which end of that reflection does a person "control?" 

Some religions say you only control yourself, and most of that may be an illusion God allows you.

Others (such as Science when it is believed in like a Religion) say you only control what is outside of you and you are driven to hammer your environment into a convenient shape, subdue Nature to your Will.

Some say all of these conflicts are artificial (man-made) and we are free to opt-out of Conflict. 

Your Hero, your Main Character, your Viewpoint Character, the Character whose story you are telling, is the Character who resolves some piece of one or another (or all three) of the conflicts over what a single person controls and how to adjust to the existence of things you do not control. 

The "Hero" is "larger than life" -- a child of a god and a human -- an individual with the Power of Creation imperfectly manifested.  To write the story of a Hero, you need a Conflict that is likewise Larger Than Life -- larger than your reader is likely to confront in reality.

The conflict over whether a human being is an Individual or a Member of Society is easily depicted in the form of the Romance.  The Footloose Bachelor meets his Soul Mate and bonds himself into a Happily Ever After resolution of the Individual vs Society conflict. 

You may want to read a short blog entry related to the issue of how implausible the HEA is thought to be today.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/01/if-hea-is-implausible-how-come-it.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, March 03, 2015

Reviews 12 - The Heroic Point of View in Mass Market by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Reviews 12
The Heroic Point of View in Mass Market
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Does Fiction reflect "reality" -- or inflect "reality?" 

Does imbibing violent videogames make people do real violence?  Or just incline them to be vulnerable to that impulse? 

Does the statement of a Leader cause people to act as a Mob, with individuals surrendering their personal morality to a mob mentality? 

Are human beings ruled only by their emotional state, which is caused by external forces they can't resist, and thus must be forced into civilized social behavior, by persuasion, profit, or force of arms? 

What is a human being?  What makes us human?  How do we function inside ourselves as individuals?  How do we function when we form Groups -- do we surrender individuality in order to become socialized? 

The essence of story is conflict, and these questions bore down into a Conflict that can support a Mass Market Paperback sized audience -- and perhaps, even, a Feature Film size audience.

There are classic questions we've all heard and think we know our answers to, and then there are questions we can't ask because we lack the conceptual framework to pose them.  The second variety is the fodder of science fiction.

One such unthinkable question is whether there really is a link between cause and effect when it comes to things like videogames and violence, or Leadership and social order.  Do we really need leaders at all?  What for?  Why do we need them? 

What makes a Leader (a Hero of a novel is generally a Leader type even if not starting out in a Leadership Role) different from other people?  Nothing?  Everything?  What makes a King?  What makes a Champion (such as a Police Officer putting his life on the line to protect society?)

What causes one person to become a member of a herded group like "society" and another to become a Criminal or a Leader?  Is there a difference between Criminal Mentality and Leadership?  What of Revolutionary Leaders?  Are they just Criminals?  Does Humanity need Criminals?

Pick an answer (one single answer) to any one of those questions, and make it the theme of a world you build from scratch to illustrate that answer in the form of a statement. 

For example -- there is no link between cause and effect that can't be broken or altered by a) human Will, b) God's Will, c) random chance (Luck), d) some non-material Potency from Another Dimension. 

The link between cause and effect was established by Frances Bacon to be the foundation of operational, practical, useful "science."  That notion of such a link is traceable back to the Hellenistic philosophers, Plato, Aristotle.



Suppose Bacon had never existed.  Would some other human have come up with these Ideas?  Would the Idea have been conceptualized but never popularized?  Would it have been kept as a "Secret" by some secret magical society that wanted power over people? 

Suppose Plato and Aristotle had never existed?  Suppose various fragments of their Ideas had been propounded by say, a Chinese Philosopher -- or maybe someone born and raised in Tahiti or Madagascar? 

Rewrite the history of philosophy and you rewrite human history.

The history of philosophy and how refuted and discarded ideas leave their traces on modern society (just as malware removed by a security program leaves traces in your Windows Register) is a study that all writers, fiction or non-fiction, need to understand.

Just as a Windows computer will stutter, crash, and malfunction because of Register issues, so will human societies that are running a Philosophy with fragments of alien Philosophy stuck in the operating system.

Human individuals, likewise, have life-issues because of conflicting fragments of opposed Philosophies (and Religion is Philosophy by my definition).  You see it in (non-clinical) depression, road rage, divorce rate, job boredom, and general dissatisfaction with life in general.  Mass Market Paperback sized audiences can easily relate to a Hero who is fighting an inconsistency inside himself that he sees reflected in his world.

For example, your Hero might set out to fix an injustice in Society, never intending to become Vice President of the USA (seeing becoming President as a disaster not advancement), but because of moderate success at fixing the world, find himself the only candidate with enough support to get elected.

That's the Situation Gini Koch is dealing with in her Alien Series that I've recommended to you so many times.  The latest are UNIVERSAL ALIEN and ALIEN SEPARATION which is due out in May 2015. 



The series is Mass Market original, and is composed of a vast array of thematic elements (you need a vast array to support long series of long books) that are vastly popular with general readerships.  There are Gaming elements driving the plot in a subtle way.  There is the hottest human/alien Romance I've seen in action Science Fiction recently. There are Alien physiological quirks, and worm-hole-dwelling people and animals from another dimension -- whose works appear to be Magic.  But most of all there are two Heroic Characters each with a separate story, and each sharing a part of a story -- hence marriage is not "the end" but the beginning of the plot which drives all the stories.

And their kid is a complication.

The thematic work behind these characters and their stories is seamless and appears effortless -- which tells me how hard the writer and editors worked on these novels.  There are a lot of themes, and a lot of these philosophical questions about "reality" each represented by a Character with a Story. 

And here in Universal Alien, we have the introduction of Alternate Universes and doppelgangers for the Main Characters.  This novel illustrates how a Character would be different in a different world where the left-over fragments of Philosophy clogging their minds were different.  The "person" is the same; yet the differences are stark and well drawn.

This novel is worth studying in depth as you attempt to build a world around your own pet un-askable Question, the Idea you can't grasp because of some left-over fragments of a previous Philosophy. 

If you understand where these fragments came from, you can construct Science Fiction Romance worlds which reveal underlying fallacies in our modern world. 

That's what science fiction does best -- ask the questions that are literally unthinkable in the audience's society.  If you don't understand the links between left-over fragments, you will not be able to frame the question clearly.  However, your understanding of origins and connections among Ideas does not have to be conscious to be effective on the scale demanded for Mass Market Distribution.

Here's a novel that demonstrates a way of depicting the Heroic individual as a Champion. 



Jesse James Dawson is a "champion" who extricates humans from Possession by demons (creatures from another dimension; possibly theological or maybe not).  He has his own complex backstory and current life, with wife, kids and a stake in the ordinary world.  But a demon has sort-of befriended him, and bedevils him in his own back yard (over chess).  This demon "uses" him in the version of the Great Game played by Devil and Demons, and all their political factions with various destabilizing the human world type goals.

This is an action-novel with magical battles and bloody ones, too.  The Characters take damage, and they hurt both physically and emotionally.  The action gets "personal." 

Jesse James Dawson is a good example of a Hero beset by a situation where the only way out is to do what he simply can not do (not will not; can not).

That's the classic definition of a Conflict.

"I must do what I can not do."  and/or "I can't do what I must do because I have to do what I can't do." 

Take a Character with a "backstory" growing up that leaves bits and pieces of incompatible Philosophy (example: raised by a Fire&Brimstone Preacher, runaway to a life of Prostitution; now wants to marry a Soul Mate), and give that character a problem that can't be solved without expunging the last bits of the repudiated Philosophy that the Character has no clue reside in subconscious and dictate behavior.

Read these novels to extract the underlying framework of the novel, then create your own Theme and insert it into the framework -- watch how everything morphs.  That's not "a formula" -- but it produces a "line" or imprint of books that readers can rely on to deliver the same punch.

That's the definition of "Mass Market" -- or as Hollywood puts it, "The Same But Different."  The writer has to deliver the same, familiar, punch at the end, but use material that's entirely different. 

Science Fiction does that with Themes that pose the Unthinkable Question and postulate an even more Unthinkable Answer.  There are thousands of answers to any of those questions, and millions of such questions.  There is nothing even remotely similar about Mass Market novels -- yet they are all identical.

Readers pay a lot for books, or get smelly copies second hand, or borrow from the library, or wait for it to come up free on Kindle -- so readers want to be certain before they start reading that the punch they are paying for will be delivered.  But they also don't want the, "I've read this book before," feeling.

Writers achieve that Mass Market appeal from their understanding (conscious or unconscious) of Philosophy and/or Religion and/or Science -- a "take" on the way the world works. 

Philosophy can be defined just as Plato's thought-structure,

But as I mentioned above, the way I use the word Philosophy, as pertaining to the eternal questions and our subjective answers.  Who am I?  Why am I here? What do I want to do about that?  Do I have a Soul?  (Jesse James Dawson is fighting the "Devil" for possession of Souls given away by signing a contract in Blood) - if I have a Soul, what do I need it for? 

"Silly" Fantasy novels -- or HEA Romances nobody believes are realistic, but they are! -- ask that sort of Question, and pose usable answers that might work only for a given Individual.

I did that with my first Award Winning novel, Unto Zeor, Forever.  The questions the Main Character (Digen Farris) wrestles with, runs away from, turns and confronts, are hard questions he eventually articulates.  The answers he settles on are useful only to him -- in his unique position.



Unto Zeor, Forever is in Audiobook (at Audible.com ) and new paperback (old Hardcover, a couple old Mass Market Paperbacks) and e-book.  Some bloggers have sited this novel as one of the original Science Fiction Romance novels -- prior to its first publication, SFR was not saleable in Mass Market. 

Having written a book of this sort, based on the unthinkable Questions, I recognize that process when I see it in other novels, and I recognize how difficult these novels are to write.  I can tell when a novel has nailed it.  I can see how you can learn from reading these as I learned from older novels.

The typical Mass Market Paperback hero or heroine (in Romance Novels, Action Romance, Erotic Romance, or Paranormal Romance etc) simply does not have time to ask and answer such questions during the novel.

Character is rooted in the questions and answers your Heroic character asked and found operational answers to during their childhood.  The Conflict is constructed from the Character's unconscious assumptions that the Character has in common with your target readership.

By revealing the "backstory" of a character, the writer is making a thematic statement (thus the character back-stories must illustrate the overall theme of the Work).  The most fundamental thematic statement is made about the Nature vs. Nurture controversy.

If the theme is that all humans are simply the product of forces external to their personality and character, that you are a helpless victim of your Nature and/or Nurture, then the backstory of the Main Character reveals how his/her origins are now shaping the character's present predicament and choices.

Generally speaking, the Heroic Main Character has a backstory at complete odds ( in conflict with ) their present predicament.

"Story" is generally defined as the point in a character's life when his/her Life changes or pivots to a new direction.  (Astrologers: Saturn and Pluto transits signify such events, thus the time-span the novel plot covers is determined by which transit is focusing the energies).

I'm using the definition of Story and Plot that I've been using in all these writing craft posts.  The Story is the sequence of changes the Main Character's personality undergoes because of Events; the Plot is the sequence of Events that impact the Character and trigger personality changes.

Thus Story and Plot are mirror images of each other, and each is shaped from the Thematic Statement the work is making. 

Here is an example of The Great Game in 4 novels set in the Contemporary world -- spanning the Middle East and involving Russia, China, and all the Muslim countries.  I enjoyed these novels because they are so very well constructed, and very well written.  They have a couple of pivotal Love Stories but the Main Character does not reshape his world view or alter his course of action because of the influence of his Soul Mate -- at least not in the early novels.  It seems like he's going to have to clean out some decayed Assumptions about Life and his Identity once he understands he's encountered his Soul Mate.  If this writer, Dan Mayland, doesn't do it -- maybe you will.

These are in Kindle, audiobook, and paper and agented by a man who used to be my agent -- which could be why I enjoyed them.

http://www.amazon.com/Colonels-Mistake-Mark-Sava-Novel-ebook/dp/B006ZNA0RE/

http://www.amazon.com/Leveling-Mark-Sava-Novel-Book-ebook/dp/B00A27761M/

http://www.amazon.com/Hire-Mark-Sava-Novel-Book-ebook/dp/B00DOKCKQU/

http://www.amazon.com/Death-Mark-Sava-Novel-Book-ebook/dp/B00N2ZXB74/

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com