Showing posts with label Symbolism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Symbolism. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Verisimilitude vs Reality Part 6 - Show Don't Tell Theme

Verisimilitude vs Reality
Part 6
Show Don't Tell Theme 

Previous parts in Verisimilitude vs Reality

Part 1
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/verisimilitude-vs-reality.html

Part 2 Master Theme Structure, The Camera, Nesting Plots and Stories
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-2-master.html

Part 3 - The Game, The Stakes, The Template
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-3-game.html

Part 4 - Story Arcs and the Fiction Delivery System
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-4-story.html

Part 5 - So What Exactly is Happiness?
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-5-so.html

Now in Part 6 we'll look at a TV Series - just one scene out of several seasons of the Netflix Original, MADAME SECRETARY.

I think the scene I'm going to analyze is from Season 2, Episode 5 or 6.

As you probably know, Madame Secretary is about a woman who comes from CIA roots, was a station chief in Europe, and with friends in high places ever rising, ends up working for the Secretary of State because a good friend becomes President and another good friend becomes Secretary of State.  Her kids have grown up associating with the President's son - Washington becomes a family business.  (Oh, and she's married to a former field operative now a Professor of Religious Philosophy and history buff.)

She uses her experience in the spy business to work out problems at the international level, and "wings-it" through complex situations, deeply disturbing career professionals in the State Department.  She becomes Secretary of State when her boss dies in a plane crash and she's next in line.

She discovers her boss, the former Secretary of State, was actually murdered, and there were unsavory money trails connected to that.

As she's investigating the murder of her boss, she solves more international problems. The whole plot-arc reminds me of SCARECROW AND MRS. KING, but instead of applying housekeeping skills to international affairs, she applies CIA spy craft skills.

The whole thing is a Mary Sue, wish-fulfillment-fantasy, superhero Mom TV Series - well produced and very entertaining.

It has a contemporary setting, and is very adroitly RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES.

Here are posts about ripping story material from the contemporary headlines:
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/08/index-to-posts-about-using-real-world.html

Even if you're sick-sick-sick of the news and politics, this is a very diverting and interested show -- transparently Hillary or not, it works very well.

One reason it works is the depiction of the HEA life.

This show is about a couple years and years into the HEA life -- their oldest kid of three is in college.

The Secretary of State job is high-pressure, fast moving, an emotional jerk-around every day.

You'd think a professor's life would be placid - but unbeknownst to the Secretary, the CIA re-recruits her husband for a spy job.  He confesses the offer to her, and they make the decision together that he will take the job.

Eventually, by this point in Season 2, he has been promoted from field operative to "Handler."  His cover job is teaching international students the history of war.

The Secretary's brother is a doctor working in a hot-zone of the Middle East, lots of shooting, lots of wounded to care for.  He's in a position like Doctors Without Borders.

This episode opens with the doctor, scruffy beard and all, doing surgery on a critical patient when two tough guys, looking like Secret Service in battle gear, burst into the tent where he's improvising through a lack of supplies.

They are there to grab him and exfiltrate him back to the USA -- because there are death threats against his sister, the Secretary.

He goes, reluctantly but cooperatively - and he's steaming mad about it.

CUT

He's getting out of a car in front of her DC house as she's arriving and walking to the stairs.  He's still steaming mad and charging at her confrontationally -- all body language, not much dialogue.

Her Secret Service detail flattens him against a car's hood.

She notices, turns and flies to the rescue, "That's my brother!"

They let him up.

Her kid comes skipping down the stairs and wraps a hug.

Escorted inside, there's the big family scene, and how upset he is being dragged back to DC.

The explanation is that he could be kidnapped and used to blackmail her into whatever the terrorists want.

The THEMATIC MESSAGE is encoded in the camera work and dialogue, or lack thereof.

We have the Secretary of State under heavy Secret Service (more than usual) guard, being accosted by a scruffy dressed, bearded man (he's a big man, too).

The Secretary of State has to TELL her Detail it is her brother!

We have Secret Service body guards who don't do their homework to be able to recognize her family, and apparently haven't been looped on the memo about the Secret Service collecting and repatriating her brother a few hours ago?

Why do they wear those little earphone thingies if not to be informed of movements among their outfit? Why weren't they hearing a report as the brother's car stopped?

We have a clear "show don't tell" scene saying the Secret Service is incompetent.

This scene is more vivid because for all the previous episodes, the matter of her predecessor being murdered has been a Plot-Arc.  That murder was a failure of his Secret Service detail.

So on the plus side, the Secret Service flattened a potential attacker -- which is their job, and they did it well.

But find that scene and check out the camera work.

The Detail guys back off INTO THE SHADOWS, the camera slides away from them -- no emphasis on their chagrin, embarrassment -- no supervisor coming up behind them to give them what-for.

The Secretary does not upbraid them for failing to recognize her brother, does not yank out her phone and scorch the ear of the supervisor who didn't inform her detail that her brother was approaching.

Watch that scene carefully and really think about what's NOT there!

What theme do you think it illustrates symbolically.

The absences bespeak some of the themes of this show, the envelop theme about competence in Washington - at the helm of the most deadly government in the world.

Put this brother-arrives-steaming-mad scene in the context of the previous episode where Air Force One is "hacked" and the President, Vice President and Speaker of the House are not available to sit the Oval Office chair.  Madame Secretary gets sworn in as temporary President while they struggle to find out what happened to the President's plane.

Consider all the episodes where Madame Secretary pulls off strategic maneuvers and oddball decisions making everything come out fine when all the professional Washingtonians fail.

It's a Mary Sue.

She's the competent one - everyone else except her husband are fumbling idiots.  But because they are on the scene, the ship of state is on an even keel.

They have three pretty normal children (despite their oddball upbringing), and a very solid marriage.  They communicate.  They co-parent with grace and competence.

They both enjoyed being CIA field operatives, solving problems on the fly, going adventurous places, depending on knowledge and their backup teams working smoothly.

They bring matured skills to the jobs of Washington top-drawer decision makers.

They are in the Happily Ever After -- it is right there in front of the public's eye in one of Netflix's most popular dramas.

And her brother is steaming mad, despises her politics and career choices, and she uses information he provides while they are fishing to destroy a Terrorist (who also smuggles medicine).

Is your Happily Ever After being in a position where you are the most competent person around?  Most of the time, you can get powerful people to make reasonable decisions, but not always.

In a town where even the Secret Service bodyguard details are incompetent, how can anything get done right?

THEME: Incompetence can safely be ignored.

You don't think that's what the "That's my brother," scene says?

What isn't there speaks volumes.

How would you rewrite that episode's script if the theme was, "The USA Secret Service body guards are better than the reputation of Israel's Mossad."

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Index To Theme-Symbolism Integration

Index To Theme-Symbolism Integration

Here are the posts about the advanced topic of integrating two separate kinds of thinking, cogitation about "theme" which we discuss in many posts, and "Symbolism" which is even more abstract and daunting to writers.


Here is a post on Communicating In Symbols
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/communicating-in-symbols.html

Many other posts on Theme integrate with Symbolism

Theme-Symbolism Integration Part 1 - You Can't Fight City Hall (or can you?)
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/12/theme-symbolism-integration-part-1-you.html

Theme-Symbolism Integration Part 2 - Why Do We Cry At Weddings - Part 1
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/08/theme-symbolism-integration-part-2-why.html

Theme-Symbolism Integration Part 3 - Why Do We Cry At Weddings - Part 2 is
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/08/theme-symbolism-integration-part-3-why.html

Theme-Symbolism Integration Part 4 - How To Use Candles As Symbolism
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/01/theme-symbolism-integration-part-4-how.html

Theme-Symbolism Integration Part 5 - How To Create Using SHOW DON'T TELL
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/01/theme-symbolism-integration-part-5-how.html

Theme-Symbolism Integration Part 6 - Expository Lump dissolver
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2018/02/theme-symbolism-integration-part-6.html
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Theme-Plot Integration Part 17 - Crafting an Ending

Theme-Plot Integration
Part 17
Crafting an Ending
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Previous parts of Theme-Plot Integration listed here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/05/index-to-theme-plot-integration.html

We've explored finding the correct "opening" or beginning moment.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/06/finding-story-opening-part-1-action-vs.html

And we've defined the "ending" as the resolution of the conflict that begins on Page One.

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

Middles are tricky, and we have not discussed them much yet, but you can't nail a MIDDLE without knowing (at least subconsciously) where and when the ENDING comes.

The middle is the turning point, where whatever is at stake, what the Main Characters stand to lose if they act boldly and aggressively, becomes more important.  The stakes are raised, everyone ante's up into the pot, and the final stare-down begins.  Is it a bluff?  Or can your main character deliver?

Stakes exist in both plot and story.

I use the word "plot" to mean the sequence of physical events, deeds, and decisions that change the situation.

I use the word "story" to mean how the main character reacts to the events, what is learned, and how the main character changes (arcs) because of the Events of the Plot.

Story is internal to the characters, while Plot is external.

Different writing textbooks use these words differently, and identify the moving components of a work of fiction with different terms.  But every one I've seen so far, and all the working professional writers I've learned from and taught with, all identify the same moving parts -- by whatever vocabulary.

So Theme is what you have to say with this piece of fiction -- it is what you are revealing to your reader about reality, something that you can see but maybe your reader can recognize without actually understanding it.

A good Theme comes clear near or at the very end of the novel, where the reader stares at the page overwhelmed with a new understanding, a vision of reality that has never come into focus for that reader before.

Plot is what the Characters do, Story is why they do it, and both are derived from Theme -- both plot and story say the same thing but in different ways.

The ENDING is where both plot and story finally "speak" or "chime" in harmony, saying the same thing on different octaves.

For a Romance, you have to keep writing until you get to the Happily Ever After springboard into the future you will not delineate.

When the reader and the Characters understand the Conflict (begun on page one) is now resolved, over, gone, never to return, and the goal is achieved and recorded in the Akashic Record forever, you stop writing.

The trick in crafting an ENDING is to get all these elements to converge into one moment in time.

This is usually done with symbolism

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/01/theme-symbolism-integration-part-4-how.html

The final explosion of pure, raw emotion that makes your reader laugh, cry, and shout for joy all at once - then memorize your byline and look for everything else you've written - is achieved through the confluence of symbolism.

It is a silent language that triggers deep, unconscious responses.

But the same object or image does not trigger the same responses in everyong.

Thus your human and your alien characters might react very differently to the same visual symbol.

The meaning of a symbol lies deep in the culture, and each culture on Earth has its own language of symbols.  We all have a lot in common because we're all human -- but don't expect your aliens to have the same common symbols with humans.

A lot of the meaning of symbols is rooted in sexuality, as is most of the human cultural values and ideas of how humans can live together, depend on each other for survival, and still be independent individuals.

The main conflict in being human is just that -- the personal sense of individuality vs. the absolute necessity to blend into the Group.

The trick to getting both plot and story to END in the same visual event or symbol is The Character Arc -- the story ends when the Character learns his lesson, absorbs the core of the Theme and changes his/her behavior.

The challenge that roared into his life on Page One comes around again, and the opportunity to make the same mistake over again appears in a different (but recognizable) guise.  The END is where that Character has changed because of the Events to a point where he/she will pass up that opportunity, and behave in a different way.

The new behavior SHOWS without TELLING that the Character has changed, has arced, and now understands the Theme.

Recently we looked at current trends in fiction in terms of choosing a Character Arc Direction.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/05/trends-and-counter-trends-part-1.html

One way to create an Alien Romance situation is to bring two characters together on Page One -- one arcing in one direction and the other arcing in another direction.  In other words, each of the two characters who will Conflict to generate the plot has a different definition of Good, and a different vision of his own Ideal Self toward which he/she is striving.

The ending then becomes the point where one or both of these Characters changes their mind.

How do you make it plausible to a reader that a character has changed their mind?  Really changed, on some fundamental thematic issue.  For example, how do you convince a skeptical Character that the Happily Ever After can be theirs -- all they have to do is change their mind?

What would you change your mind for?

What would convince you that you are wrong?

That is, of course, always the question you must ask yourself whenever you firmly believe something.  If there is no evidence that could be presented to you that would make you change your opinion on something, then your belief is a non-falsifiable hypothesis.

This mental/emotional dynamic is what the Paranormal Romance depends on -- if you sidestep into a Fantasy universe where Magic is Real but you firmly believe that Magic is Nonsense, what happens when you see Magic used?

The sensation of having to change your mind, to change some fundamental constant of your personal universe (such as God Exists or God Does Not Exist, or Humans Are Basically Good, or Humans Are Basically Evil and must be controlled) is intriguing to the Fantasy fan, and repugnant to the Reality fan.

Some people love roller-coasters, some don't.

In Depiction Part 30,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/06/depiction-part-30-depicting-royalty.html
we noted:

------quote---------
During a lifetime, we change.

We looked at a research article about how people are different as they become older -- fundamental personality and attitudes differ.  Character traits such as reliability can change drastically with age.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/06/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html

So as you grow and mature as a writer, so too your audience (and editors) grow and change.  What matters to you changes.

But how do you change?  From what to what?  In what direction?  And why is it that there's always an exception to every rule?

Here's another bit of research that may give you a clue to what makes the difference between "the masses" or "the peasants" and "royalty" or "the rulers."

http://www.corespirit.com/new-discovery-shows-dont-listen-facts/

This article says only a small percentage of people alter their "first impressions" according to new hard-fact data, while most humans form opinions to "blend in" with their friends, associates or Group identity.

-------end quote----------

Unless all your characters die at The End, you leave the reader with the impression or expectation that the Characters will continue to change after absorbing the change necessary to survive this novel's Events.

If you are writing science fiction romance, you might need to craft a Series of novels about the same Characters.

In that case, you'd have to map out (consciously or subconsciously) the sequence of changes your characters will undergo.

If you are writing for TV or Video Production, you must expect many writers to be crafting stories featuring your characters.  To do screenwriting for a series, you have to map out these Character Arc changes consciously so they can be verbalized in creative story conferences and meetings.

But if you are writing a novel of your own, you don't have to know so much consciously -- so you are free to let the Characters run and just watch what they do.


Still, you need a Theme to drive the Plot to an Ending.

Look at the real world around you, study humans around the globe and through hisstory, and you will never lack for a Theme.  Just ask yourself, "What is the truth?  What would change my mind?"

Note the article
http://www.corespirit.com/new-discovery-shows-dont-listen-facts/

makes it clear how small a percentage of humans change their minds to accomodate new facts.

Writers are very likely to be among that small percentage -- especially science fiction writers!  And the truth as I see it is that Romance writers also bring a lot of flexibility to their craft.

Readers can pick up the knack of re-assessing fundamental assumptions from reading widely in these genres  -- and about 10% of the readers will bring that knack to bear on their real lives.

Take, for example, the notion of "What is Government?"  What is government for and why do we even bother?  Do humans need government?  Or does government need humans?

If humans do not need governing, then why do tribes keep re-inventing (around the globe and throughout pre-history to history) Chieftains, Bosses, Leaders?  Chimps and Bonobos exhibit tribal organization and pecking order -- and humans are primates, so we do it too.

Where "government" fails (e.g. the Inner Cities) then "Gangs" rule. Or some other organization structured under a "strong man" or leader or boss.

This social organization is vividly depicted in Marshall Ryan Maresca's world called Maradaine.


https://www.amazon.com/Intrigue-Maradaine-Constabulary-Marshall-Maresca-ebook/dp/B01BK0SQEK/

The sociology behind the worldbuilding Maresca shows without telling is absolutely fabulous -- it is thematic core material used properly.

The overwhelming force of Culture to define the scope of the Character's choices is pure Art at its best.  This is a world where Magic is real, but has a very realistic cost.  Morality is likewise real, and has a vast cost.  No one Character's story begins and ends with him or her.  Everyone has ancestors and is where they are because of what ancestors did (or did not do).

Interesting, these characters don't think a lot about how their Ancestor's deeds defined their reality -- or conversely what they can do to redefine the possibilities for their children's futures.

I love Maresca's work, and highly recommend it.  It will make you think.

Jean Johnson's First Salik War novels give the long-ago, far away, historical underpinnings of what will happen in the novels set later on the timeline.

https://www.amazon.com/Jean-Johnson/e/B001JSEGXY/



The Blockade shows us how the vast Evil got penned up onto their own planets.  Prophecy (yes, a sort of time-travel, astral travel premise makes these novels work well), shows that this Evil will escape and eventually destroy itself.

The plot, conflict, and character arc dynamic behind all these novels pivots on the themes that question what humans need government for, and why we keep re-inventing government in various forms (from Aristocracy to Democracy and everything in between).

We yearn to be governed, or do the governing, but keep overthrowing government because (at least for humans) "absolute power corrupts absolutely."

So Jean Johnson is exploring what sort of humans could work in governing without making everyone want to overthrow them.  She introduces telepathy and various ESP functions to Earth's humans -- and even humans elsewhere in the galaxy.  And she peoples her galaxy with a wide variety of non-humans with a loose association.  The non-humans all seem to crave government, too, but so far I'm not clear why that is.

The thematic assumption in both Maresca's Fantasy and Johnson's Science Fiction seems to be that government is necessary.

We all know how Ayn Rand founded a career laying out an epistemology questioning those fundamental assumptions.

To create fiction about something as fundamental, pervasive yet invisible as "government" takes real genius.

One of the Theme-Plot Integration tricks is to take the nebulous, non-verbal concepts we call Theme and state them clearly in a this vs that format.

We love simplification, especially of the diffiult and complex.  The simplification of a complex matter makes us feel as if we understand something way above our intelligence level - it makes us feel powerful when someone smart explains what they understand in a way that gives us the illusion that we understand it just as well as they do.

So finding your Theme is one part of the writing process -- and may in fact be the easiest part.  Simplifying what you know on a non-verbal level so that it can be stated in a very simplified way in words and symbols is a different part of the novel crafting process.

THEME: What is government?

CHARACTER: Government Rules - humans must be ruled or they will misbehave.  Government is the power above.

CHARACTER: Government Serves - civilization requires clean water, sewers, sewage treatment, electric power, garbage removal, recycling, paved streets, street lighting.  Government is the foundation below the feet of free humans.

CONFLICT: I Rule vs. Don't You Dare

PLOT: Revolution

ENDING: A Throne Toppled - exultation and triumph

SEQUEL: so what kind of government will this revolution revolve to the top of the heap?  Who Rules Now?  Somebody's got to rule, right?

In modern Science Fiction Romance, we have only to hark back to Orwell's 1984.

In our prevailing reality, we already have concrete examples of Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things - the evaporation of privacy, and a rising necessity to identify each individual human and track their deeds microscopically.

So the vision of Skynet popularized in the Terminator movies is no longer "far future fantasy" but actually a possibility.  We will build it to defend ourselves from ourselves!

We might build it to "serve" -- but will that prevent it from "ruling?"

Would an Artificial Intelligence like Skynet be able to "change its mind?"

Would the people about to throw the switch and light up such a neural network be the sort (the 15% or so) to change their minds when presented with new facts?

And given the state of "fact" acquisition today, will we create a Skynet to determine and decree what the "facts" are?

Where there is government, some humans (probably 5-15%) will be criminals. Depending on the form of the government, it is probably a different 5-15% that will be deemed criminals.

A lot of (great) Romances have been written about falling in love with the bad boy from the other side of the tracks (i.e. the Alien!).  And in many of them, marrying a 'good girl' tames the 'bad boy.'   We saw the science indicating that, with age, with time and experience, human personality does change.

What makes a person change like that?  Does government and law hammer humans into the 'correct' shape?  Or is it Love that conquers All?  Maybe a good theme would be, "Patriotism Conquers All?"

Love of Country could substitute for love of another human?

 If humans must have government, then humans must have criminals.  What does a stable civilization do with criminals?

Obviously, jail does not "work" to change minds.  I would theorize that the few who do get out to become law abiding citizens probably got jailed wrongfully, or maybe just made a very poor decision or a stupid mistake rather than intentionally violating a law because it is a law or because it just does not pertain to them.

So if jail does not change criminals into good citizens - what would?

What system would your Aliens use?

The ancient Biblically prescribed method is to sprinkle the miscreants among a large population of very well behaved people.

As noted in the article
http://www.corespirit.com/new-discovery-shows-dont-listen-facts/

Most people don't make up their own minds -- and thus can't actually change their mind on any topic.  Most people just absorb the prevailing opinion of their Group in order to validate their membership (and thus safety) in the Group.

If that is an innate trait of all humans (except that pesky 15%), then thinly scattering miscreants among a well behaved population will eliminate most criminal behavior.  Miscreants will absorb and practice the prevailing culture.

But there is always the hard-core miscreant, the really annoying ones who think for themselves and have consciously and deliberately chosen to oppose civilization (or at least "that" civilization, if not the "other" one).

So the alternative to jail, to just drown the criminal in polite society, would still leave a percentage of ill-behaved people running loose.

Many great novels have been structured on the Adopted Child -- making the main character someone who grew up on foster homes, or was adopted and didn't know it.  Great themes can be crafted around the idea of the Adopted Criminal -- who changes their own mind with age.

Putting those two scientific experiments together, you can generate a wide variety of themes, characters and plots.

"Going Native" is always a great theme.  Acculturating the non-human into an Earth society, then taking that alien back to his home planet to see how much he's changed, gives you the background against which to tell a very steamy Romance story.

Imagine if non-human criminals were sent to Earth to be rehabilitated by this method of living in a well behaved society.  Or maybe, vice versa, and human criminals were sent to another planet to live in well behaved families.

There is more to be said on this topic.  As you watch the world develop around you, keep in mind one of the oldest sayings: "My mind is made up; don't confuse me with facts."

So always remember most people don't make up their own minds but absorb opinions from the ambient culture -- therefore they can't change their own minds for themselves.  Since they don't know why they think what they think, they can't imagine what fact could come along and falsify their opinion, forcing them to find a new opinion.

Could you write the story of a Character who has no opinion?

Live Long and Prosper,
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Depiction Part 26 - Depicting Humanity by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Depiction
Part 26
Depicting Humanity
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg 

Previous parts of the Depiction series are listed here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/04/index-to-depiction-series-by-jacqueline.html

Well, now we're turning into Spring (Northern Earth Hemisphere) and the world is pretty much in a lot of trouble.  It's a mess.

So, how do writers of Alien Romance "depict" such a multi-leveled mess?

One of my favorite pastimes is to "explain" human behavior (individual behavior and mass behavior) to non-humans.

I've noticed something on TV News lately -- after the shift to interviewers asking only "leading questions" (never any real questions, only telling the interviewee what to say next), we now have almost every person "interviewed" as a talking head using a tone of voice that is either whining or condescending.

What do we mean by "whining" -- well, it's that tone of voice that projects "pleading" to understand what I'm saying.  It has an underlying texture of "complaint" to it, a whine for you to change your mind.  This is what a child does when parents say, "No."  They come back with, "But, you don't get it!"

What do we mean by condescending?  It's that tone you now hear on almost all voice-overs for commercials that are "telling" (not showing or arguing) you why you need to buy this product or service.  It's the way a parent talks to a child who just isn't old enough to understand complicated things.

So TV voices are using tones (in American English) that are either child-to-dense-minded-parent, or adult-to-incapable-child.

It has been a long time since I've heard the tune or underlying voice song behind words that indicates adult to adult communication.

I heard adult-to-adult in a short clip from some Trump Administration folks talking to the media, then it was gone.

The stark contrast between adult-to-adult tones and child-to-adult whining and adult-to-child "sweet-kind-condescension" just blows you away if you notice it.

So listen for it in the daily news clips you run across.  It is not in the words, but in the melody behind the words.  The tones are most easily spotted when the song does not match the words, the information behind conveyed.

There is an "announcer" song -- which has in it a flaw I've spotted where a word is emphasized by a pause afterward, wholly inappropriate for the grammatical flow of the sentence.

If you tune out the words and just listen to that underlying song you will notice how the song is chosen to affect the emotional response to the words.  The words require one sort of response, but the tone is urging (pleading for) another emotional response, usually an inappropriate one.

This analysis of how people talk, rather than of what they say, is one thing you'd have to explain in depth and in detail to a Vulcan, or any other non-human.  Suppose you are introducing an Alien, a First Contact Situation, to this world we are suffering through today.  What would you say to this Alien, and what TONE OF VOICE (song behind the words) would you use?

There is a rule in public speaking that I've seen disobeyed consistently, and then gradually expunged from our TV Voices (talking heads).  That rule is, "Never Uptalk."

Uptalk is a song where assertions are inflected with an upward tone, as if asking a question when finishing a declarative sentence.  It is common in Southern USA dialects, and if you move from North to South, you will pick it up without noticing.

Uptalk is passive-aggressive -- since you aren't actually saying something is so, but rather asking, you can't be countered.  You take the weaker position in the exchange, and as the weaker you can't be attacked or the other person is a bully.  Passive-aggressive.

How do you explain Uptalk to an Alien?

By tone of voice and facial expressions, humans convey vast amounts of information separately from the denotation of words.  If the three channels of communication carry conflicting messages, we often conclude the human is lying.  If the channels carry the same, harmonious, information, we believe the information is true, or at least the person is honest.

How do we tell if an Alien is lying?

More interesting -- how does an Alien tell if we are lying?  And how do you explain to an Alien that since all the humans know this person is lying, it is OK -- everyone knows what he "really means."

By matching the words, tone of voice, and body language (whether the smile reaches the eyes, and other tiny signals), we figure out what we think about what is being said.

Thinking requires concentrated effort.  Generally speaking, people are too busy exhausting themselves on daily tasks, chores, and life-or-death-decisions (like how to pay for health care).  Just staying even takes all our strength.

So living in today's world, we may pause to figure out what a news item means, or which news anchors are lying, or what interviews are 'canned' (rigged, scripted).  It's hard work trying to sort out which of the 3 streams of information you get from television (words, tone, body language) is the true one, and which are the lies.

So once a human has figured our what "the truth" is, they paste a label on that truth and try very hard not to revisit that decision because all subsequent decisions will have to be changed, too.

Most people want to be honest with themselves (at least), even politicians, but don't especially value being completely honest with all other people.  We select who to be "honest with" -- and that is a kind of intimacy called "being close."

Politicians do that.  They hold one, personal and private position, sometimes sharing it with other elected politicians of similar rank, and a totally different position publicly, a position crafted to get votes.

Thus if there is a "hack" of a private communication (such as an email) which reveals the private position, and how it differs from the public position, the public often stands aghast.  Then things settle down, and the public slaps a label on the individual whose private position was revealed.  The problem is just that one person, not all politicians.  And you tell the difference by the labels.

In fact, the whole commercial industry is based on labeling -- a type of labeling called "branding."

If you want to buy a GM car, you want it to have a GM label on it somewhere.  If you want Dole pineapple, you want to see the Dole logo.

Why do you want certain brands of an item, but not other brands?

Shortcut thinking.  Radio, TV, Magazine, media advertising methods use that "tone of voice" plastered over words that do not match to engrave on your mind that this Brand is better than that Brand.  And it might actually be better.  You never know until you try it, yet when you try it, your preconceived notions may color your tasting experience.

Labels matter when they are shared among humans.  Labels, short-cut-thinking, accepting the opinion of others who "know better" is learned in childhood.  At some point you are expected to mature, to shed the thought habits of childhood, and "think for yourself."  But thinking is hard work, so after you've thought, you do not want to re-think.  So you slap a label on your conclusion and move on with the business of survival.

Explain that mental shortcut I'm calling "Labeling" to the Alien you are falling in love with.  Can you understand his explanation of how his people use shortcut thinking, labeling, whining, condescension and Uptalk?  Do they even have an equivalent?

As an example of an emotionally charged yet completely abstract (i.e. thematic) element in Depicting Humanity, consider political science, philosophy, and history.

Modern record keeping is allowing us to revisit and rethink Labels invented about a hundred years ago, more or less.  Printing has allowed even minor works to be preserved.  Historians study these records, as do journalists, and often exhume Labels invented to cover certain cultural Idea Bundles that were "sold" to whole communities in the past.

Explaining individual behavior to Aliens is easy compared to explaining our mass movements, shifting cultural norms, and vicious arguments over what the facts were, and what those facts have now become.

Yes, as part of the labeling shortcuts human cognition uses, we change the "values" of the facts as time progresses.

Labels used in short-cut thinking are like the X, Y, W, symbols used in algebra -- they stand-for-something rather than be that something.  So we can manipulate labels the way we manipulate terms in algebra -- it is abstract thinking, and the kind of Aliens you could plausibly use in a Science Fiction Romance would very likely use this type of thinking.

Assemble a group of Ideas under a Label, (say X, for example) then juxtapose that group of ideas to a different group (say Y, for example).  Then try to find a relationship between them that holds through time -- perhaps requiring the invention of another Label or Symbol called W.

For humans, I expect this systematic explanation of human belief systems is impossible.  Humans as a group, (it seems to me) will fight any process that threatens to reveal the truth about their behavior.  We love and admire irrationality as a method of tricking our most dire foes.

Thus, definitions of Labels used historically change -- I expect in a 20 year cycle, and an 80 year cycle.

Academics, today, are struggling to redefine and clarify the Label "Fascist" -- I've seen at least 5 mutually exclusive definitions bandied about on social media, often with legitimate academic credentials attached.

Since these definitions usually come in cold text only, there is no tone of voice or body language to analyze, just words.

We have equally shapeless, whipped cream type Labels being shouted about - Liberal, Conservative, Religions, Atheist, etc.  (e.g. Zuckerberg suddenly came out with the statement that he now sees Religion as important last year, and some instantly speculated he's planning to run for public office.)

Journalists and Academics (often with identical credentials) are trying to Group the beliefs and tenets under sharply contrasting Labels, so they can call them X, Y, W and manipulate them before your eyes.

You can't make this stuff up, but maybe you can explain it to a visiting Alien just discovering humanity.  If you can get this point across, you may hit the best seller list because people will talk  (shout, argue, get red in the face, and cry inconsolably) about your novel.

You hit an emotional core response when you rip Labels apart and re-arrange what those labels stand for.  Imagine the disruption when a packaged food your family relies on is under botulism recall!  Now imagine if a Label you are absolutely sure of is "recalled" and re-formulated.  Explain to your Alien Character just how disruptive his people arriving on this planet will be to our nice, neat, reliable labeling system.

As an example, or perhaps inspiration in how to go about writing an explanation of human short-cut thinking and what happens to us when our short-cuts are disrupted, read this article all the way through.

You already know the information in this article -- Donald Trump is a Populist.  But there are dozens of definitions of Populist going around, some from serious academics, all mutually exclusive.  Historically, the Label Fascist is being redefined, reorganizing a Group of behaviors some of which were evident in Italy, and some not.

Don't worry about deciding which Label is accurate and applies to whom.  Read carefully with an eye to explaining to your Alien Character how humans use (and abuse) Labeling as a cognitive process.

This is a difficult exercise.  I warn you, the article will make you fume and stomp, maybe shout and snap at anyone who talks to you for the next day.

While you read, remember that "right-wing" means the opposite in Europe than it does in the USA, and it means something entirely different in the Middle East (explain THAT to your Alien).  I have no idea what "right-wing" might mean in China but I'm betting the meaning does not resemble anything I've ever heard of.

The point of this exercise is to gain the kind of perspective on humanity that Gene Roddenberry had when he invented "Number One" (the emotionless female) and Spock (the half-human Alien), then combined the two Characters.

Roddenberry was fascinated by "emotion" -- actually explored it from another angle in a failed pilot he made where a human being was from a culture where the worst invective was to Label something Inconvenient.

Because he was interested in how humans were affected by Emotion, he created a Character who "had no emotions" (we know he walked that back later, due to the exigencies of commercialized fiction).

That's what you can do with this exercise.  Create an Alien who has NO LABELS -- who does not understand the cognitive shortcut we use when we apply Labels (or Branding).

If you can succeed in reading this (explosive) article without blowing your top, you may be able to create such a Character who will haunt readers for generations.

http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/1/3/14154300/fascist-populist-trump-democracy

Donald Trump isn’t a fascist
A leading expert on 1930s-era politics explains that Trump is a right-wing populist, not a fascist — and the distinction matters.
Updated by Sheri Berman  Jan 3, 2017, 1:00pm EST

Of course, an expert must know what they're talking about.  Would your Alien assume she did?

Pay particular attention to the article section:
Four key characteristics of fascism (not in evidence in Trumpism)

Note the contrast with Liberalism.  Maybe you thought you were a Conservative?

All of these labels are tossed about in this article as if they are "real" -- as if everyone agrees on the definitions.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Note also that the "four characteristics" are treated independent variables.  There is no thematic connection among them (as would be required in a novel).

If you have one of the four variables, that does not mean that you have the other three.  The other three are not generated by the one -- not consequential.

What if your Alien's psychology could not encompass a notion of thinking beings functioning in such cognitive chaos?

Explain how humans can believe contradictory things.

Given that humans do believe contradictory things, why should the Galactic Community accept humans as intelligent?

You might also want to explain to your Alien Character how Fascism, as defined by this article (or maybe some other articles about it) differs from government by Aristocracy.

How is a Dictator different from a King?

A King controls life or death over individual citizens, is the chief justice of the supreme court, is the speaker of the house, and the president pro-tem of the senate, as well as the superior to every corporation's CEO.  In fact, a King is CEO of all the businesses in his Land.  The King owns all the Land and grants tenancy to Dukes etc.  The King can revoke tenancy of anyone at any time (if he can get away with it politically).

So how do Fascists differ from Kings?

We write a lot about historical times when Kings ruled, and we have projected the Aristocratic model of government into Fantasy, and even Galactic Civilizations.

We also use the constitutional monarchy model in Galactic Civilization - is that Fascist?

Suppose your Alien objects to your explanation, "But the role of government is to protect the individual from government!"

Do you answer with the ancient wisdom of humanity that without the strong hand of government, humans would eat each other alive?  Humans misbehave if nobody tells them what to do.

So read
http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/1/3/14154300/fascist-populist-trump-democracy

if it's still available - or if not, Google fascism and see what you find as a definition, then explain it to your Alien.

In that explanation you come up with, you will find your Alien Romance Theme -- and you will find what barrier Love must Conquer to forge your human/Alien couple.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Theme-Worldbuilding Integration Part 16 - Scientific Evidence For Happily Ever After

Theme-Worldbuilding Integration
Part 16
Scientific Evidence For Happily Ever After
 

Previous parts of Theme-Worldbuilding Integration are indexed here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/04/index-to-theme-worldbuilding.html

We have discussed, under Theme-Symbolism Integration, why it is that we cry at weddings.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/08/theme-symbolism-integration-part-3-why.html

That entry has links to the two previous parts of that series on symbolism.

There is, at such turning points, a moment when our view of Life, The Universe, And Everything cracks open and a shaft of metaphorical "light" from beyond shifts the light-shadow pattern we think is reality.  We see potential futures and yearn either not to see such hopeful views or to live with that vision constantly.

Each person, at a wedding or other turning point in life -- birth of a baby, death of a grandparent, college graduation -- reacts differently to the vistas of potential open before them.

And even one given individual may react to the same kind of Event (wedding, birth, graduation, funeral) differently at different times in life.  Individuals change in response to experiences.

There is a commercial for a memory-enhancing product that declares, categorically, that YOU ARE YOUR MEMORIES.

Personally, I do not see that as true in any way.  You are YOU before you've had any experiences, and you are the same person after you've forgotten about a particular event, but chosen to cherish and memorialize other Events.  A lot of what you remember is consciously selected, but most of it is not.

Take post-traumatic-stress disorder, for example, much in the news with our discussion of war and allowing returning soldiers to purchase firearms -- and other attempts at crafting a "filter" to determine who is (or is not) allowed to carry (concealed or otherwise.)

In post-traumatic-stress disorder, often a memory recirculates with the impact of reliving an event over and over.  This produces all sorts of nervous system malfunctions -- depression, anxiety, etc. etc. This sometimes occurs in the bystanders, parents, spouses, and co-workers of those people killed at a mass shooting or some sort of Terrorist driven Event.  The impact of losing a child to random violence can produce the same recurring flood of memory/emotion as being in an army combat unit overwhelmed by enemies.

Does that memory make you "who you are?"  Can you ever go back to who you were before that Event disrupted your nervous system?

Are you just your physical nervous system and physiical brain?

Or are "you" a physical body plus something else?

Yes, of course, your Identity (that makes you distinct from all other humans) is entwined with the things you do, the consequences that splash back on you, the actions and reactions of Others, and all the "accidents" that intrude into your life.

We ordinarily think of our "self" as a blended combination of all that, plus profession, current job, who you're married to or live with or have as an "Ex" whose presence in your life disrupts your plans and constrains your freedom.

What you think a "Self" is -- where it comes from and why it exists, how it is shaped or crafted by Events -- influences whether you consider a Happily Ever After condition possible (for you, or for anyone).

The concept "Soul Mate" is all tied up with that theory of Identity.

Pick a theory of Identity for your "World" that you are "Building" to cradle and showcase your "Story" and you narrow the range of options for each subsequent choice you make as you build the world around your story.

A primary question relevant to whether your story ends in Happily Ever After or Happily For Now, or misery-forever, is "What Makes People Different From Each Other?"

Or perhaps your world is built on the most common assumption extant today, that humans actually are all alike, and the differences just blemishes to be polished off so a society can function smoothly, like a machine.

Over centuries, different theories have been experimented with about how a society should handle sexuality.  There's "males have all the rights" cave man style.  There's "smart women seduce the strongest male" so offspring will be fed and protected.  There's "women own everything and rule men" matriarchy arrangements we have seen described among African tribes.  These variatiions have more to do with survival than with happiness.

Happiness is an add-on item.

One theory is that power makes humans happy, and only one person can have all the power so only one can be happy.  Usually, our novels, stories, and cautionary tales describe how miserable someonoe with "all the power" is bound to be.

Is happiness caused by oppressing everyone and making them serve you? (the harem theory).

Is "stability" (the same thing your grandparents had) the ideal model for "happiness?"

Younger people crave "novelty" for its own sake, but is endless novelty the key to happiness?

These are THEME questions -- answer them and further narrow the options for more of your world's dimensions.

Keep in mind how subjective our view of the world actually is.


Each of your Characters can live in a world where the answers to those questions of Identity and the nature of Happiness are different from all the others.  This is the best way to generate Conflict any reader can understand both internal and external conflicts -- thus also plots.

Many great Romance novels have been constructed around the "arranged marriage" -- either via resisting the arrangement or reluctantly going along with it, then falling in love with the Other Party despite one's better sense.

Today's world scorns societies that rely on "arranged marriage" -- often viewing such things as misogenistic since it is the woman who usually is bartered like a possession.

But maybe there's more to be said for the "arranged marriage" -- perhaps we have just lost the technique for matching couples?  Online Dating services operate as (or cast the allure of) Marriage Brokers.

There has been some success (also spectacular failures) with using math and science to match people in marriage.  New research that has serfaced at time.com in June (of course) of 2016 indicates that an arranged marriage between two who expect to work hard at changing themselves (rather than changing the Other) actually does lead to "Happily Ever After."

One of the key ingredients in making Marriage 'work' happily, the article points out, is how we choose to edit our memories and cherish certain aspects of Events over others.

Or possibly, these choices are made subconsciously and are a product of inherent traits of Personality -- you can choose which to include in the world you are building to write your story.

http://time.com/4366236/relationship-secrets-research/

This article is well worth reading in its entirety.

Here is the summary from near the end and there's more after this bit. Read this whole article, and the book it is about!

----------quote------
Sum Up

Here’s what Jonah had to say about how to make a relationship last:

Similarity doesn’t matter: Matching music playlists don’t predict happy marriages. Sorry. Focus on emotions.
Arguing is good: Negative communication beats no communication every time.
Know it’s going to take work: The healthy way to get to “Romeo and Juliet” is to think “arranged marriage.”
Have grit: Devotion. Loyalty. That’s grit. And it predicts success at the office and at home.
“Glorify the struggle”: It’s all about the story you tell. Did the conflict lead to a happy ending? Hint: it better.
Love is a challenge. But life is a greater challenge. We’d like a sure-thing that guarantees happiness and takes away all the pain. But that’s fiction.

If you’ll excuse a superhero analogy, you need to stop trying to be Superman. He’s invulnerable. But nobody is invulnerable. Bad things happen to all of us. We cannot avoid pain.

You’d be better off trying to be Wolverine. He isn’t invulnerable. But he can recover from almost any injury. You can’t live a life free from conflict but you can learn to cope with the hard times until the good times return.

And what helps you cope with the problems of life better than anything? And makes you successful and happy? “Our closest relationships determine how we respond to the toughest times in life.” Here’s Jonah:
---------end quote------

The article discusses a book titled A BOOK ABOUT LOVE and has some video clips of the author of that book.

https://www.amazon.com/Book-About-Love-Jonah-Lehrer/dp/1476761396/

The description of this book on Amazon says:

--------quote--------
Weaving together scientific studies from clinical psychologists, longitudinal studies of health and happiness, historical accounts and literary depictions, child-rearing manuals, and the language of online dating sites, Jonah Lehrer’s A Book About Love plumbs the most mysterious, most formative, most important impulse governing our lives.
--------end quote---------

And is particularly skeptical of "online dating" sites -- which make great plot-points but perhaps in "life" have not yet perfected an "algorithm."  In science fiction romance novels, you can simply postulate that some new genius hacker had naiiled that algorithm and is running a dating site that really matches soul-mates.

As of June, 2016, that would be science fiction romance -- arranged marriage using a science that is too absurd to exist, or perhaps is just dreamed of.  Lots of plots can be turned on the idea that an imaginary online dating site is defrauding subscribers.

How "science" is regarded in your built world will determine a lot of the plot and conflict, but the decision is a THEMATIC one.  Is "science" infallible?  Is a "science denier" certifiably crazy and not qualified to buy a gun? Is "science" always wrong?  Or is the pursuit of real scientific answers to "personality" and "life choices" blasphemy?

Perhaps in your world, Online Dating Site Fraud has become a political issue in a major Governor or Presidential campaign?  Government must control the internet and scrub out all false and fraudulent information -- make sure the wrong people don't get hold of the ability to, say, "3-D Print" an AR-15.

Guns and Romance mix very well, as we've seen in the film FACE OFF.



That image is an Icon, and you can create such images on purpose to symbolize your World, and the core beliefs of your Characters.  Here are some more previous posts on symbolism, icons, guns and romance:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2007/06/mr-ed-and-writing-great-american-novel.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/04/theme-plot-character-worldbuilding_14.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/big-love-sci-fi-part-viii-unconditional.html

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

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Theme-Symbolism Integration Part 5 - How To Create Using SHOW DON'T TELL

Theme-Symbolism Integration
 Part 5
How To Create Using SHOW DON'T TELL
by
 Jacqueline Lichtenberg  

Here is the article, published August 2015, that we'll discuss today.  It contains the clue to solving a fiction writer's income problem.

http://www.redstate.com/2015/08/26/donald-trump-takes-page-history/

Here are the previous posts on use of theme.  Keep all these points on THEME in mind while reading about the comparison of Trump and Reagan in that redstate.com article.  (yes, it's a far right website, but this particular article reveals a truth writers need to absorb and use to crack the income problem.)

Foundation Posts on Use of Theme:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/communicating-in-symbols.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/05/theme-element-giving-and-receiving.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/08/how-to-use-theme-in-writing-romance.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-4.html
-- on structuring nested Themes into a novel.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
-- defining the terminology I use in these posts to distinguish plot from story and why they are indistinguishable.

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

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-you-can-do-in-novel-that-you-cant.html
-- compares use of Theme in a movie with the use in a Novel.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/01/theme-symbolism-integration-part-4-how.html
-- explains something arcane about how to create a symbol to explain a truly Alien Civilization to modern Human readers.

Remember, I pointed out that fiction writers in general do not even make minimum wage if you consider the hours spent vs the income over the years.  You need to get up to where they are making blockbuster movies from your books to have a decent wage, and when that happens at the end of your  career, they tax your income as if you always made that amount and always will.

They cancelled the provision in the tax code that writers always depended on to allow them to recoup the losses on time invested.

It was called Income Averaging, and allowed you to pay taxes on your average income over the previous 5 years, not on the "windfall" that comes through when your publisher suddenly decides (probably because of a writer's organization audit) to pay what they've owed you for 10 years.

As a result, fiction writers are trapped in pauper status virtually forever.

To smooth out income and make up the difference, most fiction writers do something else to earn a living.

One way out of the trap is to write non-fiction as a "work-for-hire" which earns you current income as wages, not royalties.

Here is where I discuss that:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/01/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html

Here is the point that redstate.com article makes that applies to fiction writing, and how to create using SHOW DON'T TELL.  It also ILLUSTRATES (shows without telling) exactly why fiction writers must master this technique.

-----------quote-----------
Someone else had a talent for doing this. Ronald Reagan. (heads up, if you accuse me of saying Trump is another Reagan I swear by the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress that I will ban you)

From Hedrick Smith’s epic and under-appreciated 1987 book The Power Game: How Washington Works.
http://www.amazon.com/Power-Game-How-Washington-Works-ebook/dp/B009QJMU1S/
This is the set up. CBS News’ Lesley Stahl was convinced that Ronald Reagan is an empty suit. A nincompoop. Someone who was skating along on imagery and who was pretty shallow and inconsequential. So during the 1984 campaign they took advantage of Reagan’s visit to a flag factory to use that as a metaphor for just how bad Reagan was. This is some of the text from the television report (what follows are jpgs via Google Books because I don’t have access to my library right now).

---------------end quote----------

Here are the png images included in that article excerpted from Google Books.  I recommend you look up this book on Google Books or Kindle or whatever.  It was a best seller for a reason.  You can make your fortune using your fiction skills to write books like this one.  Here are the 3 excerpts the article writer chose to include, without the comments interpolated between.  I recommend you read the actual article on redstate.com (nevermind, just read it.  It won't kill you to read it.)

----------excerpts from Google Books----------------










-----------end excerpts----------------

-------QUOTE from redstate.com article-------------

The reason Stahl had to rely on those visuals for her hit piece was because Reagan and his staff carefully stage managed the visual aspect of all of his appearances. They knew, as Scott Adams says up top, that the visual is about 10 : 1 in impact when compared to the verbal. No matter what Reagan said, the imagery was going to be what the television viewer remembered.

This is what people are failing to understand about Trump. The political class thinks he is a buffoon (a buffoon who could buy and sell his critics by the truckload, mind you) because he refuses to play by the traditional rules. As Leon pointed out, he is operating so far outside the political experience of the rest of the field that no one is even sure how to attack or criticize him. The media can criticize Trump for tossing this Ramos character but to do it they have to show the video. Once they show the video, no one hears what they say because Trump dominates the imagery and the conversation.

The way Trump handled Ramos should be the way all of our candidates handle the mindless gotcha questions like those that characterized the first GOP debate.

-----------END QUOTE-------------

I remember reading The Power Game: How Washington Works, full of "Aha!" moments.

This one, however, did not surface in my mind until I saw this article flick by me on Flipboard.com where I collect items on various topics of interest to fiction writers:
https://flipboard.com/@jacquelinelhmqg

So here's the point.  Mastering SHOW DON'T TELL, mastering what screenwriters call "story in pictures" -- mastering the non-verbal arts -- is the real key to communication.

SAVE THE CAT!
http://www.amazon.com/Save-Cat-%C2%AE-Strikes-Back-ebook/dp/B004QT6Z0A/
will save your butt as a writer.

I can't emphasize that enough. It's a series on screenwriting but it is the key to novel writing, for exactly the reasons sited in this redstate.com article.

Words,  vocabulary, spelling and grammar, lexicon, all of that matters.  It matters vitally.  It makes all the difference.  But "difference" from what?

The difference from confusion, mixed messages, which vitiate the effect of your Conflict and Resolution.

The visuals you select, all of them without exception, must precisely and exactly illustrate and depict your theme -- the theme and the images must say the same thing, or you get the effect described in The Power Game: How Washington Works, and the effect Donald Trump produced evicting a reporter from his press conference.

People, readers, accept and believe the images and ignore the denotation of the words.

First comes the visuals.  They penetrate the mind, connect to the autonomic nervous system, elevate and activate and communicate with the animal brain.  After that point, the only words that are "heard" are the ones that agree with, expound upon, and adorn the image.

Yes, words are mere decoration wrapped around visuals.

There are animals with far superior vision to humans, but most of them are predators with fairly small brains and one focus, hunting.

Humans are multi-purpose creatures, flexible -- which is why we survived the last Ice Age and can survive the coming Global Warming whatever the reasons for the shift in conditions.  (we can, but will we? -- that's the question fiction writers play with: "Will we?"  "Will we?" is all about politics.)

So what do our multi-purpose eyes and brains glean from images?

What element of a novel does the basic-animal-brain extract from a wall of type, an impenetrable page of fiction in words?

There's a linkage, a series of synapses, that young people either develop -- or not -- at a certain age when they can learn languages and reading.

Pretty much by age 7 or so, the ability to create these synapses begins to wane -- and it's fairly gone by age 10.

With vast effort, such things can be learned later, but the effort is vast so the reward has to be obvious.

Watching someone staring at pages in a book, (or an e-reader) for hours and snarling at interruptions does not convey the magnitude of the reward.

What happens when you read print?

You interpret.

The brain cells involved in grasping the words hand off the "meaning" extracted from the black squiggles on the page to other parts of the brain.  The synapse we're talking about here is the hand-off of language to images.

When people who love to read fiction immerse in a book, they SEE the images, smell the smells, feel the velvet tingles -- senses engage.

Words translate into the activation of other senses.  It isn't strong as if you were actually seeing the image.  It's a bit "removed" so it is easier to read about something ugly or repellent, and still feel as you would if you had actually seen it -- just not so strong you have to run vomit.

VISUALS ARE VITAL

Using the words that tickle the visual cortex for the reader is what a writer does for a living.

Symbolism is all about visuals.

If a word becomes a symbol, then it is stylized -- you use a special font to register a trademarked word.  You can't trademark a lexicon word, but you can trademark the image of a word.

The IMAGE triggers the associations to the company or product, but the lexicon word does not.

That is the nature of humans.  Writers are artists who know how to use that nature.

The images you choose to evoke with your words are the "symbolism" component of your romance story and your romance plot.

What the symbols mean and why you need them in your novel is called the "Theme" component of your work of art.

You don't TELL the theme; you SHOW the theme in symbolic images.  If you tell the theme and say THIS IS WHAT I MEAN! but the images say something different, the images will be believed and the words ignored.

The symbolism is more compelling than any word, just as with the Reagan/Trump comparison in this article from redstate.com.

Donald Trump is a businessman, a graduate of a premier business school.  I'm fairly sure they don't teach the art of fiction writing to such Business Majors.

But they do teach THE ART OF THE DEAL.  That's the famous book Donald Trump wrote that you should read to learn how to write dialogue scenes.

Here it is in Kindle.
http://www.amazon.com/Trump-Art-Deal-Donald-J-ebook/dp/B000SEGE6M/

Donald Trump's book is as popular and informative as The Power Game: How Washington Works.

Put the two together, you have a Romance Novel of gigantic proportions - sex and politics, power and fame.

Dealing, negotiating, is an art.

You don't get what you deserve.  You get what you negotiate.

Everyone knows this truth, but few think about it consciously or articulate it.  It is stored in memory as the dejected posture of the loser walking away from a meeting, being fired from a cushy job, or being rejected by a lover.  

Therefore, you as a fiction writer can use negotiating in scene structure.  And you the non-fiction writer can use negotiating in speech writing.

Speech writing is akin to writing a sex scene.  Think about that.  Listen to some famous speeches and graph the emotional peaks and valleys, overlay that graph on a graph of a famous sex scene and see how they match exactly.  It's called wooing an audience for a reason.

If you are writing a dialogue scene, the Characters are negotiating -- i.e. they are at war, they are in Conflict, they are at cross-purposes, they are communicating in words, but they will each be understanding what is really happening via imagery-symbols.

They call that, in theatrical stage writing, "business."

"Business" is actions that have nothing to do with what is being said, but everything to do with what is meant.

An old fashioned example of "Business" is how famous, sexy actors and actresses added sexual innuendo and power-talk to dull dialogue scenes by lighting a cigarette then mashing it out on the floor, punctuating the end of the scene.  Today, they play with their smartphones.

Negotiations turn on actions, and the visual impact of actions within the cultural context of the Characters.

When Trump just quietly nodded to his Security guy to remove the fractious reporter, that was a visual symbol of power.  It was an actor using "Business" to convey meaning without words.  It was the entire theme of his campaign in one tiny movement of his head - power, greatness, decisiveness.  When he immediately announced he'd be bringing that reporter back to get his turn at asking questions, and then did that with great aplomb, he used show-don't-tell to illustrate the theme of reasonableness and compassion.  At the end of the exchange, when the reporter admitted that Donald Trump was correct in one assertion, Trump praised that reporter for his honesty and invited him to lunch.

Most observers agree, it was not scripted but spontaneous on Trump's part.  But screenwriters recognized the underlying "scene structure" template, and all viewers saw (visually) Trump in the role of the Main Character, even maybe the Hero or possibly the Villain depending on what other visuals they had absorbed.  Trump knew what to do and how to "play" that scene just as Reagan did -- because he'd played that scene many times before.  That's why he did it so smoothly.

There was another such scene that deserves consideration as you learn how to create using show don't tell.  It is the famous one when a shoe was thrown at President Bush during a press conference in Iraq in 2008.

To the USA audience, it was a stupid act of aggression of no meaning except to illustrate the boorishness of the uncivilized people.  To the Iraqi audience to whom turning the sole of a shoe toward someone is an unforgivable insult, Bush's reaction showed them that the USA culture is stupid and weak, without moral fiber.

Both audiences saw the same IMAGE -- each extracted a different THEME.

You can do that between a human from Earth and an Alien from Elsewhere if you create the Alien civilization using theme-symbolism integration to the point where you can show-don't-tell the meaning on a non-verbal level.

Your Alien may "play the scene" out of practiced habit, and your human can totally miss the point, causing the human to take actions that cause the Alien a lot of trouble at home.

Here is another neuroscience article from August 2015 to consider.  We know how images affect people, but we don't know all the mechanism behind that.  So when creating your alien species, mull over some of the research like this:

http://www.deepstuff.org/brainbow-reveals-surprising-data-about-visual-connections-in-brain/

Theme-symbolism integration is the secret to getting a reader of a page of text to burst out laughing or melt down sobbing.  It's just words -- but the meaning blossoms into parts of the brain that have no words.  That's the most powerful part of the brain, the real decision making part.  Most of the time, words just "rationalize" the decision the "gut" has already made.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Theme-Symbolism Integration Part 4 How To Use Candles As Symbolism by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Theme-Symbolism Integration
Part 4
 How To Use Candles As Symbolism
by
 Jacqueline Lichtenberg 

The previous parts of the Theme-Symbolism Integration series are:

Foundation Posts on Use of Theme:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/communicating-in-symbols.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/05/theme-element-giving-and-receiving.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/08/how-to-use-theme-in-writing-romance.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-4.html -- on structuring nested Themes into a novel.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html  -- defining the terminology I use in these posts to distinguish plot from story and why they are indistinguishable.

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

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-you-can-do-in-novel-that-you-cant.html  -- compares use of Theme in a movie with the use in a Novel.

The posts with "Integration" in the title are advanced posts about blending two, three, and four of these components into such a seamless whole that no reader will ever be able to see the seams -- but writers can and do see those seams.

Previous parts in this Theme-Symbolism Integration series are:

PART 1 of integrating Symbolism with Theme is You Can't Fight City Hall -- about the romance inherent in Politics and Power (or Power Politics)
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/12/theme-symbolism-integration-part-1-you.html

PART 2 Why Do We Cry At Weddings?
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/08/theme-symbolism-integration-part-2-why.html

PART 3 Why Do We Cry At Weddings - part 2
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/08/theme-symbolism-integration-part-3-why.html

Part 1 of this series ended with:

------QUOTE----------
The most passionate Romance is all about the Powerless vs. the Powerful.  The winner is always the Strong Character with a vividly defined set of values, sense of right and wrong, and unbending pursuit of the ethical and moral path.  Find your epoch in the cycle of Pluto, then find the symbols in that epoch to bespeak your theme.
---------END QUOTE---------

This is Part 4 on the candle as a symbol.  By examining how and why a Candle is a symbol, what it is a symbol of, and why it is used to evoke tears (as in Why We Cry At Weddings), and other emotions, we may learn how to invent the symbols of a truly non-human civilization that modern human readers can comprehend on a non-verbal level.

The objective is to create symbols modern humans react to, and even recognize, but see as non-human.

So we need to look at the symbols that evoke emotional responses for us to find where those symbols have their roots in the objective, true-for-non-human-civilizations too, reality.

The nature of objective reality -- and even the issue of whether there is such a thing at all -- is the the "warp" of the fabric of the Theme.  The "woof" might be the existence of the Soul -- woven into theme at "right angles" to the "warp" of objectivity.

Weave these component elements into a fabric in such a way that your reader only sees the pattern or picture on the fabric, not the individual threads.

That is the difference between reading and writing -- a reader sees the pattern, a writer works with individual spools of multi-colored thread and a loom to weave them on.

That reader/writer difference in perspective may also be the difference between the Living Creature view of "reality" vs. that of the Creator of that Reality -- (again the existence of a Creator is a Thematic thread the writer uses, that the reader does not see.)

The reader sees Karma working out in Poetic Justice, but the writer created that effect from the axioms and postulates, "warp and woof" of the worldbuilding.  The reader sees the picture; the writer works with colored threads.

When a Romance Novel fails with a reader, what the reader is seeing is incoherence in the warp/woof blending of those threads.  The reader sees "broken threads" (e.g. in reality, there is no such thing as an HEA, and in this worldbuilding there is an HEA but it comes out of nowhere for no reason.)

The reader sees a philosophical premise (the HEA), but nothing to indicate how this invented World differs from their everyday Reality in such a way that this invented World must necessarily permit an HEA .

To read, and convince, such readers, writers work hard with the "warp and woof" of the cloth of their theme.

Suspension of disbelief pivots on Theme as the foundation of story and the foundation of plot.

Story and Plot must be cut from the cloth made by the threads of Theme, and sewn together into a garment that fits the reader.  

So let's study the Candle as a symbol,  and how, as a Romance Writer, you can learn to use that symbol and fabricate others from the warp-and-woof from which The Candle Symbolism is created.

It is, in the odd way that all symbols demonstrate, about the Power of the Powerless, which is a subject that makes up into  large sets of fabulous Themes.

In Parts 2 and 3, we talked about Crying at Weddings.

Note how "light" pervades the imagery of Weddings.  Imagery is the alphabet of symbolism.

And of course, candles are often part of wedding ceremonies.

Never forget that traditionally "wedding" meant a female becoming the possession of a male, with the male having the power of life and death over that female.  "Keep them barefoot and pregnant," was not just a saying.  It happened, and still happens some places today.  It is a situation that generates huge, complex Themes about the Power of the Powerless.

Little by little, in leaps and bounds, the definition of "wedding" is changing as fast as the definition of "marriage."  That change is changing the definition of Romance, both in real life and in fiction.

What we are looking for here is the level of abstraction at which no change is happening at all.  If we find that level, we find "reality" (whatever that is).

We don't put candles on a Wedding Cake (though sometimes we put them beside the cake)

 


 -- but we do put them on Birthday Cakes.
 
We all know what a candle is, and how to light them.

All your readers know that mastering FIRE was a huge dividing line in the development of the human animal into a civilized beast.
We also know the oil lamp - Aladdin's Lamp and all its ilk - was the only source of night time illumination for thousands of years, toxic smoke and all.

Olive Oil is a favorite for burning.  Various forms of tallow, all kinds of smokey, stinky stuff has been burned for the sake of light at night.  Today we do the burning way off somewhere at a Power Plant, and bring the power to our homes to make various things glow for us.  But in essence, nothing has changed.

Is electricity fundamentally different from Fire?

Is candle-wax fundamentally different from Olive Oil?

Is oxidation different from electricity?  What if all Power Plants used nothing but Solar or Wind (or wave or geothermal) power?  Would that make the electricity we use to make things glow different from the light of a candle?

If we don't use oxidation for light, does that fundamentally (thematically) change the symbolism of a Light?  What has Fire to do with the symbolism?

We are surrounded by fire in so many forms.  Stoves burn Natural Gas (some are electric; some solar).

We make a fire in the fireplace for Winter Holidays -- mostly no longer used to warm the house, but a symbol of the Winter Solstice festivals.

Some fireplaces have been converted to natural gas, and had fake ceramic logs inserted to look like wood.  It's too much work to clean out wood-ash once a year.  Besides, wood makes toxic fumes, shortens your life, right?

Some houses have natural gas heaters hidden away in the attic or basement.

Other than smokers, people can go for months without lighting a candle or an actual open fire.

If your stove is electric, and your clothes dryer is electric, and your water heater is electric, when do you ever LIGHT a fire (with a match?).

Who has lit a fire with flint-and-steel or rubbing two sticks together since Scouting days?

How common is open flame in your life?

Among your readers, fire is reduced to a mere symbol, relegated to special occasions, right?  But the discovery and mastery of fire is the, single, outstanding progenitor of human civilization (maybe including The Wheel?)  Using Fire to make Wheels turn was a biggie, too.  How did that go for your Aliens on their native planet?

Do you see the parallel between Theme-Symbol Integration and Fire-Wheel-Integration?

The less common the underlying progenitor of a civilized process is, the more penetrating the encounter with its symbol.

The sight of a candle flame can yank a modern human's heart strings like almost nothing else.

Some people meditate using a candle flame.

Staring at the flame to clear and silence the chatter in your mind is one of the beginner's exercises in meditation.



As far as I know, there is no currently existing culture that dates back to the taming of fire, or even to the invention of putting a wick into oil to make light.  The Oil Lamp pre-existed Middle Eastern civilizations - Assyrian, Egyptian, Babylonian -- and they're all long gone.

Here's a quote on the earliest oil lamps:
http://www.historyoflamps.com/lamp-history/history-of-oil-lamps/

----------QUOTE-----------
After human race first tamed the fire and started to use it as a light source, a need appeared for a smaller, controllable flame - a more sophisticated solution, if you will. First such solution was an oil lamp some 70.000 B.C. Early humans used shells, hollow rocks or any nonflammable material as a container and in it some moss soaked in animal fat which they would ignite and it would burn with a flame.
--------END QUOTE------------

70,000 years ago?  

It was a practical device for extending the work day at a time when getting the project done was always and ever a life-or-death proposition.  Also, of course, fire deterred predators.

Some recent research indicates cooking food makes nutrients more accessible to human digestion, so that could have helped the R&D geniuses 70,000 years ago (yes, they were the Bill Gates' of their day) figure out how to make, contain, and use fire.

Along in there somewhere, the fearsome thing (I'm sure some wildfires were started inadvertently, and stories told about that terrifying high-tech marvel the smartphone - uh, I mean Fire) became a SYMBOL.

What would flame have first been a symbol of?

That could matter to a modern Romance writer leaping into writing fantasy or science fiction romance stories because aliens on other planets -- think major love-interest -- could belong to a culture where FIRE is a symbol of something very different from what all our modern Earth cultures think.

To create a connection on a romantic level between a human and a non-human, raw-basic-symbol systems can evoke even more intense emotion than we ordinarily experience in daily life.

So think about the simple, basic FLAME.

Think in the abstract about symbols.  We extract the essence of a material thing and make a symbol out of the outline.

The symbol, the mere suggestion, reminds us of the real thing.
The symbol evokes a series of associated emotions, usually at a semantic level above words, a level where music and scent light up brain cells and recreate an experience.

From that first use of fire as symbol -- maybe a bit after the 70,000 year ago mark -- meanings associated with that symbol would have been changed, added to, morphed into, re-interpreted, and re-associated with different emotions.

But it is all rooted in the routine, daily, boring, encounter with the reality.  That Reality recedes as technology distances people from it -- then it becomes a symbol, a selective recreation of reality.

For example, maybe people started holding weddings at night around a fire because all day long everyone was in a headlong dash to get life-or-death stuff like sowing and reaping done.

When was the last time you shouldered the harness of a plow blade and pulled it through stubborn sod?  What does a plow blade symbolize to you?  Blisters on your shoulder?  Oxen pooping in your barn?  The smell of sweaty horse?  No, you go to the rental place and lease a gas-powered plow for a Sunday afternoon to make your garden this year.

Yet the symbolism of beating swords into plow blades still "works."  How many sharp-edged swords do you own?  (Not stage-steel, but real fighting weapons with blood on them?)

Life was hard, and mostly people died young.  Life was hard in the daytime, and people could relax and do "human" things only at night.  Have you ever been so far away from the glow of city lights that you literally could not see your hand in front of your face?  Have you ever tried to walk in a forest in a night so dark you had to put your hands out and grope?  That is the world where the light of a single candle pierced the nerves and gained eternal meaning -- meaning true even in today's street-lamp world.

So fire-light became a symbol of romance, or at the very least license for wonton sex.

To this day, the "candle-light-dinner" is a symbol of courtship, even if we have to remember to turn the overhead lights out so you can see the candle light.

The candle -- or oil/wick/flame -- has become a symbol of both Life and Death.

We light candles (or sparklers) on birthday cakes to count our years, or dodge that issue:

 

We light a candle to commemorate death -- the candle light vigil ceremony on the site of a murder or tragedy has been pushed back into prominence even as religious observance wanes.
  Making these candles is a whole modern industry.  You can find these vigil candles on Amazon -- and not all who use them or attend memorial vigils are in any way religious or what is termed God-Fearing.  Neither warp nor woof of the fabric of their philosophy contains a God-is-real thread.  But they "do" vigil candles right alongside devout worshipers of diverse God-concepts.



So which is the Candle a symbol of, Life or Death?  Sex, Romance, Happiness, Bereavement, Mourning, Calming Meditation, Wedding, or what?

Perhaps the candle is a symbol of wisdom?

.


It is said (tall tale) that President Lincoln gained his education by reading books by the light of a log-cabin's fireplace.  Have you ever read a book by the light of a fireplace?  Or a candle?

It takes me 7 or 8 candles burning at once to see well enough to read a nice, clean font from a modern book on super-white paper.

I can, however read well by a fancy 1800's style oil lamp with a fancy woven wick and carefully crafted chimney to keep the fire burning brightly, never mind toxic carbon emissions.

 So an oil lamp is to me a symbol of the serene happiness attained by reading in bed at night -- yes, I've done that.

Some people have memories of camping out in tents lit by such an open-flame lamp (though today's children mostly use solar-charged electric lamps).

Sometimes, those camp-out-at-night memories are great happy memories, so the open-flame light (or electric camp lantern) evokes happiness.

  Sometimes the camping memories evoke spooky ghost-story marathons long past a child's bed time, lending the groggy tiredness to the spooky-pleasure (because it's fake-spooky).

Now we're getting somewhere.  Consider the inventors of the oil lamp 70,000 years ago didn't even have a nice, modern tent for shelter.  We recreate our origins and surround ourselves with those ancient things -- the out-doors, the night sky, open flame, spooky stories -- and regard them as SYMBOLS.

What was real, everyday, common, can't-escape-it, reality 70,000 years ago is reduced to mere symbol today.  What was alarming and threatening is titillating today.

Today, we use those symbols to evoke what was once the reality of existence -- being spooked was being really scared death was immanent.

Ghost stories by candle light.

Today, at Halloween, we see symbolic ghosts made out of thin plastic sheeting hung from trees in people's yards.

What is a ghost?  Well, no two traditions agree on that, but generally it is a remnant of some part of a human being.  We term that non-material part we imagine we have our Soul.

Romance writers can gain verisimilitude by paying attention to the Candle as a Symbol, analyzing it, projecting it into the cultures of aliens.  The symbolism may never be referred to in your novel, but it will be the firm foundation of your worldbuilding, and that firmness will be evident to your readers even if they can't point to what is causing them to feel that way.

Invent the 70,000 year ago culture of your Aliens before coupling your invented Alien to an everyday, modern human.

Romance stories that rivet a reader's attention generally contain a core element of a Soul Mate mechanism, even when the words Soul Mate, or even just Soul, are never used by narrator or in dialogue.  The element is in the worldbuilding even if the worldbuilding contains a Theme thread that says, "In this universe, God is not real" and there's no such thing as "Soul."

Whether you, the writer and the reader, see God as the single organizing principle of Life, The Universe, and Everything, or not, somehow being "In Love" activates some component within a human being's perceptions that the human never knew was there before.

Some of your readers only imagine what they would be like if such a component was activated inside them.  Some yearn for it.  Some fear and flee from it.  Some don't believe it ever happens to anyone.  And some have experienced it, only to have disaster part them from their spouse, and now they are hoping it will happen again.

Neuro-scientists are zeroing in on the brain structures and activity associated with all these complex human experiences.

The thesis they are pursuing is that the brain and its functions completely account for everything humans experience, do, decide, believe (yes, even your Politics is just a genetic property of your brain -- you have no choice!), and theorize.

Many readers of Science Fiction Romance are keenly aware of this brain research.

So Romance writers have to worldbuild some theory of Soul into every story-universe, or the characters won't seem real.

What do I mean by "world-build?"

What the characters believe about their world is not the same as what their world REALLY is, what it's laws-and-rules are.

In fact, many great science fiction novels pivot on the characters discovering things are not what they believe them to be.  Think about the film, The Matrix.

Or think about the novel THE FLICKER MEN that I talked about in this post:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/09/reviews-19-by-jacqueline-lichtenberg.html

Remember, I pointed out THE FLICKER MEN is not a Romance, but Science Fiction Romance writers need to read it anyway?  This is the reason you must absorb what is going on in novels like The Flicker Men.

The Flicker Men pivots on a worldbuilding concept woven of recent discoveries in particle physics and mathematics, and is a valid extrapolation from that new science, which creates the plot.  The story is woven from cognitive dissonance, and utter consternation, culture shock, psychological disorientation, and the struggle to overcome that paralysis and deal with the harsh realities that have been revealed.  That harsh reality is that some people have Souls -- and some do not.  Time is not what you think it is.

In contemporary romance, you can find great novels about deeply religious characters discovering God is a myth created for political purposes by con-artists -- and characters who are absolutely convinced there's no such thing as God or the Soul discovering the chilling (spooky) tangible reality that God is Real, and "my Soul knows it."

Romance deals with exactly that kind of cognitive dissonance discovery -- when you Fall In Love, you discover your own Soul, and the conversation your Soul is having with Another Soul.

If you are convinced Souls don't exist, then you may mistake Love for Lust --- or vice-versa.  And therein lies a Plot.

What your Soul knows and what you know are not always the same thing -- and therein lies the kind of Conflict that writers weave Nested Themes for long series of long novels around.

This quandary is all about our cherished theoretical notion of reality vs. the actual function of immutable reality around us.

Some people move through life smoothly, and others encounter vast difficulties.  Bring a pair formed of each type of person into conflict, take up the issue of whether "Life Is Good" or "Life Sucks" and you're off and running with long series of THEMES driving an ever-changing matrix of conflicts.  Add deranging astonishment of an awakening Soul discovering another Soul to Love, and the pages sizzle.

When you are handling an abstract theme -- such as "Souls are Real But God Is Fictional" or "God is Real and only Some People Have Souls" -- you handle these boring abstractions with symbolism.

You never state the theme in words, not narrative, exposition or dialogue.

You "show don't tell" by using symbols.

So you bring in a candle as a symbol -- but what is it a symbol OF?  How do you use the Candle as a symbol that your reader will understand?

You understand candles, flames and the chemistry of oxidation.

Just as a map is a piece of paper with a two dimensional drawing (OK, Google Street View is handy, but think of the simple navigation map), a candle is not what it symbolizes any more than a map shows a street you can drive on.

Any symbol abstracts certain functional components and leaves out all the rest of reality, just as today we seek to have an open flame for the Holidays without the toxic smoke and shovel loads of ash.  Is fire still an effective symbol without fumes and ash?

There is almost no experience of a human being that is not "symbolized by" a candle.

It's life, death, joy, sadness, Solstice, anniversaries, security and threat.  The whole gamut of human experience is tied symbolically to "Light dispelling Darkness."

Remember, the Bible starts with LET THERE BE LIGHT.

It is said, when things look bleak because humans are holding a war, destroying things, hating each other, etc. that the light of a single candle dispels the darkness, mental, emotional, and actual Darkness.

The same about Good and Evil: the light of a candle overcomes Evil.  The candle flame repels wild animals, stops sneak-thieves, etc.  A single act of random kindness is like that candle flame -- and can redirect the path of a human being.

Another proverb about the candle-symbol is that a lit candle can light other candles and not be diminished by giving away it's light.

Think about that very hard.  What can you give and still have?

In Judaism, every Friday at sundown, candles are lit.  In some traditions, oil is used instead of candles -- olive oil with a floating wick, older than the high-tech invention of the candle.

Look at this picture:



What is she doing?

She is gathering the light of the candles to her eyes, then saying a Blessing, and after that she will cast the light she gathered back onto the candles in the official act of kindling the light.  The candles are not "lit" until after the Blessing is said -- and that moment of Lighting officially begins the Sabbath, during which time fire is not kindled.

It is said that the Sabbath candles of the Matriarchs of Judaism lit the tent for the whole week.  Does that mean physical light?  Or does it mean the metaphorical "light" by which we "see" right from wrong?  The nature of that metaphorical Light is a thread of the warp-and-woof of your Thematic Fabric.  It is by that Light that your reader discerns the Poetic Justice visited upon your Characters.

In Judaism, the "day" begins at sundown.  "And it was evening and it was morning the First Day."

Evening comes first.

The Day is the first unit of Time.  The Soul enters manifestation through the dimension of Time.

The Sabbath day ends in a series of symbolic actions.

Fire is kindled once more, a blessing said over wine, incense and fire, and then the fire is extinguished by dipping the candle flame into the wine, marking the division of Time when it is again not only permitted but required to kindle fire.

Thus the candle and its flame are used to mark an interval of time that repeats at set intervals.  By marking that singular Day, all the rest of the Days of the Week are thereby defined.

The Soul enters through the dimension of Time, and the Soul then participates in marking and counting Time, dividing Time.

Those who practice Evil also use candles to symbolize their powers.

So what is it about a candle that contains all of these abstract Thematic Elements, from Good to Evil and from Joy to Sorrow?

What exactly is a candle?

Let's view a candle as a mechanism for supporting the Flame.

Flame is pretty much the same thing no matter what is burning (oxidizing).  Flame is a zone of incandescence where a chemical reaction is taking place, combining oxygen with (whatever) and producing Light as a byproduct.

The chemical reaction has to be "sparked" -- that is, something HOT has to be touched to the substance that will burn.

How hot depends on the substance that will burn.  Each substance has it's own temperature where it will start to combine with the oxygen in the air to produce something else (ash, CO2 and water, whatever).  Some candles smoke, others not-so-much.  Smoke is not a property of the flame, but of the substances reacting.

How relevant to the symbolism is the substance the candle is made of?

Another common use of Flame as Symbol is in the Hanukkah Celebration, which commemorates the victory of the Maccabees and the re-dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem.

This dates from the Exodus from Egypt, when God Commanded that a tent be built called the Mishkan or tent of meeting, where Moses would meet with God and bring instruction to the Jewish people.

One feature required for this operation was a Lamp that was to be built hammered from one piece of gold by an inspired artisan.

Here's an excerpt from
http://www.chabad.org/holidays/chanukah/article_cdo/aid/102911/jewish/What-Is-Hanukkah.htm

As the story goes:

-----------QUOTE-------------

Chanukah -- the eight-day festival of light that begins on the eve of the 25th of the Jewish month of Kislev -- celebrates the triumph of light over darkness, of purity over adulteration, of spirituality over materiality.

More than twenty-one centuries ago, the Holy Land was ruled by the Seleucids (Syrian-Greeks), who sought to forcefully Hellenize the people of Israel. Against all odds, a small band of faithful Jews defeated one of the mightiest armies on earth, drove the Greeks from the land, reclaimed the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and rededicated it to the service of G-d.

When they sought to light the Temple's menorah (the seven branched candelabrum), they found only a single cruse of olive oil that had escaped contamination by the Greeks; miraculously, the one-day supply burned for eight days, until new oil could be prepared under conditions of ritual purity.

To commemorate and publicize these miracles, the sages instituted the festival of Chanukah. At the heart of the festival is the nightly menorah (candelabrum) lighting: a single flame on the first night, two on the second evening, and so on till the eighth night of Chanukah, when all eight lights are kindled.

-----------END QUOTE-----------

So, we have candles used as an anniversary celebration SYMBOLIZING the Olive Oil Lamp that the High Priest lit in the Temple (which practice persisted for centuries from the 40 years in the Desert wanderings).  Ever been in the Sinai desert?  It's DARK.

The Shape of that Temple Lamp is described in the Bible, but even so there are various opinions on how it was shaped.  Here are some.


From the Temple Institute website

And other Rabbinic traditions specify straight branches like this Hanukkah Menorah:


Note the different shapes for the branches holding up the flames on

a) the design prescribed for use in the Temple by the High Priest

















b) the design seen on  carvings (Roman etc)

And note how the Hanukkah Menorah has 8 branches, not the 7 of the Temple version -- commemorating the 8 days that 1 day's worth of olive oil burned.

Note how even today old, traditional Hanukkah menorah designs are used, but how artists have embellished, re-designed, and re-imagined the Hanukkah Menorah.

And the Menorah has become a subject of freehand, creative art by and for kids, and for adults:











On a side note: The word Hanukkah or Chanukah is used to designate the process of dedicating the Temple, which included cleaning up the mess left by the invaders, repairing, and then purifying (spiritual cleansing), as well as making the oils and incense and other consumables according to the detailed instructions.

So today, when we buy a new house or move into an apartment, we hold a Chanukat Habayit -- a house-warming -- party.

Hebrew is a language which is not cognate to English, so it "works" grammatically in a different way. The exact same "word" appears in different forms and has different meanings -- but all the meanings are related even if they're not related in English.

The word generally used for Education is Chinuch.  It's the same word as the Holiday Chanukah, in a different grammatical form.  In Ancient Hebrew, Education is Dedication - like the Temple is dedicated, like the Holiday of Hanukkah commemorates.  A housewarming party for the mind/spirit/soul of a child.

If you ponder that conceptual linguistic relationship for a while, you may see how today's modern argument over "Common Core" educational standards can be resolved.  We think of education as something one person does to another -- as an adult "teaching" a child, basically by force and over the child's vigorous objection, for their own good.

What the child learns is the adult's choice, not the child's.  Yes, there are schools that try to break out of that box, and perhaps that movement will grow. Today we don't punish the child for misbehaving; we reward them with time "in the corner" with educational toys and optional activities.

But for the moment, think conceptually about transforming the subject of the Common Core discussion from parents vs. government to the ignition of a child's Soul into an enthusiastic dedication to Light.  Remember, the candle symbol is embraced by those who do not accept the concept of A Creator.

Redefining Education could make a great cultural theme-thread for the fabric of your Romance novel worldbuilding.   Your aliens might require Earth to re-define "Education."

Think about the child's Body -- and the child's Soul.

Here is the post I did which has a link to 6 other posts I did on the Soul-Time-Hypothesis:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/cycles-and-seasons-margaret-carter.html

Remember, the Soul enters manifestation through the dimension of Time.

The principle being practiced in Orthodox Chinuch today, by some groups, uses the principle of how a Soul takes possession of a Body through Time to help that Soul become dedicated to Life and Light.

The theory is that the Soul makes its first connection to its Body at conception (maybe before) (a moment in Time), and gradually, in stages through Birth (a Time) and at lines of demarcation throughout childhood -- (3 years is when Chinuch begins, 12 or 13 is when the Soul becomes fully responsible for its own body, and there are stages between), becomes more and more manifest, more in control of the Body, more dominant in the ebb and flow of the animal processes within the Body.

The Soul manifests through the dimension of Time through the medium of the Body.

Leveraging that principle, Chinuch gradually turns over responsibility, one thing at a time, to the child, as they gain dedication.

So what has that to do with the Candle as Symbol, and how to discover and invent symbols for an Alien Civilization?

If we look at a candle, we see two distinct parts -- the candle-shaft of wax & wick (or pot of oil & wick) -- and the flame.

Let's look at the candle shaft, or oil&wick part.  Maybe that's the real symbol.

In the actual instructions in the Bible, the Lamp to be lit in the Temple by the High Priest is described in meticulous detail.  It is to be made by hammering a single block of gold into this specified shape, and the shape is to be adorned with various "decorative" devices.

Since we know that no detail mentioned in the Bible is just filler, we know that the "decorations" may be decorative, adorning with beauty, but there is undoubtedly more to it than that.

The formula for making the oil is described in microscopic detail, and those who did the work trained apprentices in exactly how to do this oil preparation -- far more detail passed down orally than is written.  Much of that detail may be lost now.

After years of intense study, The Temple Institute has been recreating the implements used in the Temple Building itself.



This image and the quote below is from the Temple Institute website:
https://www.templeinstitute.org/history-holy-temple-menorah-1.htm
------QUOTE-----------
The menorah weighs one-half ton. It contains forty five kilograms of twenty four karat gold. Its estimated value is approximately three million dollars. The construction of the menorah was made possible through the generosity of Vadim Rabinovitch, a leader of the Jewish community of Ukraine.
--------END QUOTE---------

Note: THE UKRAINE.

It is amazing, impressive, and a powerful symbol even though it is not being kindled.  Without any flame, it is a symbol.

All by itself, without flame, the Lamp is a powerful symbol, and a potentially functional device, a physical reality.

So, perhaps the lamp or candle-holder for the flame and what is burned to make the flame (candle wax or oil) matters somehow in both symbol and actuality?

But it seems to be the focus is on either the Flame itself, or perhaps on the Light it sheds.

All kinds of things burn -- forest fires burn trees, shrubs and houses.  Oil wells can burn oil and gas before we can capture it and make it burn where we want it to.

Volcanoes and lightening set fires everywhere.  The Earth is always on fire somewhere.

Magnesium burns under water.

There's flame everywhere.  But a LAMP (or candle holder) contains, tames, directs, controls the Flame, bends Fire to our Will.

So the lamp or candle-shaft as container of the fire is a symbol, all by itself, of bending Nature to our Will.

Or, if we Identify with the Flame itself, the lamp or candle is a symbol of bending us to the constraints of material reality.

Is a candle a symbol of the thing that burns, or of the burning?

Or both?

Let's look at the symbol again.

We  generally favor pictures of lit candles.  If you go into a lamp store, they usually display most of the lamps or fixtures lit so you can see how beautiful they are.

The whole POINT of the Flame-Container image as a symbol is that it HOLDS LIGHT and SHEDS LIGHT.

The container contains something dangerous and puts it to use in our world, at our behest.

Does it symbolize POWER?

Note we began this exploration with the idea of the Power of the Powerless.

Does the candle symbolize the power we have over life?

No.  We use it to symbolize death, bereavement, sadness, and situations we have no power over.

Does the candle symbolize the powerlessness of humans in the face of life and nature?

No.  We use it to symbolize birthdays, romance, a warm Yule log at Year's Turning.

Does it symbolize Danger?

Well, we've used FIRE to signal from mountain top to mountain top -- both enemy-coming and triumph-assured signals have been done with fire and smoke.

So what DOES a "candle" taken as a whole, wax/oil, wick, flame, symbolize that it spans all these emotions?

Symbols generally bespeak that which can not be spoken, that which is not believable but is known to be true fact -- what is called "a higher truth."

Symbols communicate Higher Truth.

So let's ponder the underlying concept of all Romance, particularly Paranormal and Science Fiction Romance.

That is the elusive and maddeningly implausible concept of the Soul Mate.

To dedicate yourself to a life's search for your Soul Mate, you have to accept there is such a thing as Soul.  To fabricate Theme, you can postulate all sorts of different origins and natures for Souls.  Your Aliens may have Souls that differ in substance, structure and function both in actuality and in their mythology from that of humans.

But to do "Soul Mate" stories at all, to deal in the concepts related to Fate and even Luck, you have to postulate that the Soul is Real.

If the Soul is real, then it has to have some sort of relationship to the Body.

So to worldbuild for a Paranormal or Science Fiction romance story, we have to postulate a structure for the Human Being. (see why I said you have to read The Flicker Men?)

If our Humans (and maybe Aliens, too) are structured with a 1)Soul,
2))a Connector, and
3)a Body,

then the CANDLE is the perfect symbol for the entire Human Being -- or Sentient Being.

1)The Flame symbolizes the Soul,
2)the Wick symbolizes the connector
3)the wax/oil symbolizes the Body
And that jives perfectly with the Kabbalistic concept of what a human being is.

In the symbolic candle, we (the human) supply the spark, the flame is ignited, the wax/oil is CONVERTED (not destroyed, changed) and appears CONSUMED through TIME.

In the real human being, God supplies the spark, the Soul is ignited by the male-female Spiritual Interaction that parallels the creation of a zygote (the candle) by physical interaction, and through time, the Soul consumes the body just as the flame consumes the candle.

We grow old, wear down, and die just like a candle.

Sometimes we "gutter" and go out before our time.

The Soul is connected to the body through that "thread" -- the silver cord that has been reported during out-of-body experiences.

Our Souls take incarnation for the purpose of consuming a body through Time, converting the physical material into something spiritual.

As I noted, the Candle is a symbol of great power.  It makes no sense that this symbol has survived to this day, and is embraced and used by those who aspire to Good, and those who admire Evil, is used at occasions of Joy and Sadness as well as Commemoration and Spiritual Practices.

There is only one thing in this world I can think of that possesses all that and needs a symbol that represents such diversity of meaning.  That one thing is the Human Being.

We are Good and Evil, Joy and Sadness, a Light to the World and the Bringer of Darkness.

If you find a Soul Mate among Aliens in the Galaxy, those Aliens will likewise exhibit that kind of flexibility of spirit and purpose.

If Symbols convey a higher-truth, it is possible we can open First Contact without war just by establishing that we use the symbol of the Candle (or oil) Lamp.

The Lamp may be just as important as the Flame.

The way we put Candles into a Lamp designed for oil is an interesting variation.  Themes can be spun from that addition.

So, is it the Light that is the point of the candle, or is it the Lamp that contains the Candle.

If you are a Candle, then what contains you?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com