A Beauty So Rare

Just finished best selling author Tamera Alexander's latest release, A BEAUTY SO RARE, her second Belmont Estate novel (476 pages). What a wonderful read—historically accurate, romantically inclined, international intrigue, scientific discoveries ... and the struggle of post-bellum Nashville.

The book lives up to its name.

I had the opportunity to work with Tamera a number of times early in the story's development -- character arcs, metaphors, and plot. So, I knew the story pretty well, at least in broad strokes. But reading her masterful writing is a joy unto itself. And knowing what's going to happen is like reading the story a second time because I could concentrate more on how she pulls off the suspense, the secrets, the beats, the bumps, and the resolution.

One of the great things about historical fiction are the real-to-life characters authors like Tamera weave into the fictional tapestry. In A BEAUTY SO RARE she involves the following real life people, and maintains their identities: Adelicia Cheatham and her Belmont Estate  (perhaps the richest woman in America at the time), The European House of Habsburg, Luther Burbank (botanist who invented the Russet potato), Gregor Mendel (father of genetics), Dorothea Dix (American activist for the indigent insane), the work of Joseph Mozier, and others. There are some great YouTube videos about the mansion and Tamera's inspiration for the story via her website link above.

A funny "secret" about the books creation and publication is how Tamera wanted to write about a woman who was smart, generous, took initiative, had nerves of steel, but wasn't so pretty...she was plain to put it mildly. Her beauty was hidden beneath the surface. The story is how that blossoms into real beauty of character such that a handsome Archduke of European royalty who has moved to Nashville to escape the arrangement of his life, falls in love with her.  Tamera uses multiple and rich metaphors including the Selenicereus grandiflorus (The Queen of the Night that blossoms only once a year at midnight - see video below).

So when the publisher showed Tamera the cover (above), Tamera had a fit. She didn't picture the protagonist, Eleanor Braddock as anything like the beautiful model and never wearing anything so pretty as a huge, beautiful PINK dress. But the publisher was insistent on using the cover, which is a doctored photo of a shoot of a real model and a real greenhouse. What to do? So I suggested Tamera put Eleanor in a situation where she was given a dress that she had to wear and it was big and pink ...and she hated it, just like the author. And that's just what Tamera did with excellence, both at the beginning and (LOL!) at the end of the story. It was a wonderful surprise for me and perfectly demonstrated Eleanor's arc. In fact, on the back of the book...sort of a way around the beautiful cover, Tamera wrote this, and the publisher's used it:

"PINK is not what Eleanor Braddock ordered, but maybe it would soften the tempered steel of a woman who came through a war—and still had one to fight. Plain, practical Eleanor Braddock knows she will never marry, but..."

Great job, Tamera. I loved it all.

stan

The Scientific Method Story Structure

Successful Story Structure has a few rules. One is that the major beats and turning points  align themselves with some Natural Law order of the human condition or experience.

In other posts and in The Moral Premise book I discuss a number of these structures, including:

• Traditional 3 Acts (Field)
• Traditional 13-18 Beats (Hauge, Snyder, Williams)
• 12 Steps of the Hero's Journey (Campbell, Vogler)
• The 12 Steps of A.A.
• The 5 or 7 Stages of Grief
• Four Acts - Four Archetypes (Schechter)
• Alison Fisher's 5-Act Purchase Funnel

And there's another, which I've known about for years but only one time discussed in the footnote to a blog on Stories and Premises in Medieval Art. And, that is The Scientific Method. 

Although you can find the Scientific Method explained in various number of steps (from 4 to 7, and I use 4 in the link above) I like the version illustrated on the right. 

Think of the process steps as Six Acts and the "moments" or "beats" between the acts as turning points. The acts may be sequences of different lengths, and the beats between the acts (the white triangle arrows) are turing points. This would produce an 11 beat structure, here alongside the traditional 3/4 Act structure with the vertical spacing indicating duration. The Moment of Grace is the scene/beat/triangle connecting 2A and 2B (Sequences 3 and 4).

Notice that this VERY similar to the Traditional 13 beats, where the only beats not represented are the Final Climax and the Denouement.

I cannot provide an example of a film that reflects this structure, but since it reflects how humanity discovers and validates natural laws, I suspect it would work for a particular type of story and thus connect at a subliminal level. If any of you have examples you'd like to suggest, please use the com box.

Thanks and good writing.

Didactic Message Films Always Fail

I have spent a good deal of time trying to persuade storytellers that message films, with a didactic base will always failed at the box office. The subject matter doesn't matter. Failure is inevitable unless you've managed to target your project (and budget it) to the niche audience that agrees with the film

There are examples every year.

Today I read this story about the Broadway Musical "The Great Immensity," which was clearly a government indoctrination effort produced by climate change supporters.

What must be considered if you're going to connect with a wide audience is to use a conflict of values that is UNIVERSALLY accepted by the wide audience. This is so simple to understand. Follow natural law, not man-made ideology. The audience isn't dumb. And in the case of "global warming" relabeled "climate change" (when it was discovered that the globe is not warming...)  somewhere around 30% of the public believe it's at some level true, and far less than that think it's a priority. That's not a universal value.  [I next expect a musical promoting Kale Cakes in school cafeteria's programs instead of Brownies, to fight obesity.]

The law within the moral premise framework is to match motivational values with NATURAL LAW consequences of actioning out those values. You cannot manipulate Natural Law and win. I don't care if you're a fundamentalist Christian who wants to wave the Bible in your audience's face, or a liberal environmentalist. There may be truth in both messages, but unless the audience agrees with you,  you're going to lose big, folks.

Anyhow, to prove my point, once again, here are some selected quotes form the reviews:

The curtain has come down on Climate Change 

The Musical and reviews of the taxpayer-funded play about global warming are downright icy.

By Perry Chiaramonte - 9/20/14 - Fox News 

The play, which is actually entitled "The Great Immensity," and was produced by Brooklyn-based theater company The Civilians, Inc. with a $700,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, ended its run early amid a storm of criticism from reviewers and lawmakers alike. It opened a year late, reached just five percent of its anticipated audience and likely fell short of its ambitious goal of informing a new generation about the perceived dangers of man-caused climate change. 

Plus, it apparently wasn't very good. 

“Despite fine performances, the musical mystery tour is an uneasy mix of fact and credulity-stretching fiction. It’s neither flora nor fauna,” New York Daily News reviewer Joe Dziemianowicz wrote in a review at the time. “[The] songs — whether about a doomed passenger pigeon or storm-wrecked towns — feel shoehorned in and not, pardon the pun, organic.” 

The play, which featured songs and video exploring Americans’ relationships to the environment, opened in New York in April with a three-week run before going on a national tour that was supposed to attract 75,000 patrons. But it stalled after a single production in Kansas City, falling short of the lofty goals outlined in a grant proposal. 

It was envisioned as a chance to create "an experience that would be part investigative journalism and part inventive theater,” help the public "better appreciate how science studies the Earth’s biosphere” and increase “public awareness, knowledge and engagement with science-related societal issues.” 

According to a plot description on the theater company’s website, "The Great Immensity" focuses on a woman named Phyllis as she tries to track down a friend who disappeared while filming an assignment for a nature show on a tropical island. During her search, she also uncovers a devious plot surrounding an international climate summit in Auckland, New Zealand. 

The description touts the play as “a thrilling and timely production” with “a highly theatrical look into one of the most vital questions of our time: How can we change ourselves and our society in time to solve the enormous environmental challenges that confront us?” 

..... 

"Even the best adventurers can wander off course, and the Civilians do so on a global scale in The Great Immensity,” read a review from Time Out New York. “The inventive troupe’s latest effort is all over the map… It’s not easy preaching green.”

Screenwriting: “124 Pages Of Begging For Money & Attention”

James Schamus

“While we ask for respect as artists,” Schamus (IMBD) said, “we really don’t know what we mean by art.” 

Screenwriters who have finished a screenplay have not written a work of art, but rather have finished...
 “124 pages of begging for money and attention.”

Interesting article on Dateline. 

stan

Beauty Will Save the World

Dostoyevsky

One of the discoveries that came to light during my research for The Moral Premise, and which to this day continues to be true, is that a true and consistently applied moral premise is at the heart of all successful stories. (Where "truth" is coincidence with Natural Law, and "success" relates to audience acceptance on a broad scale, e.g. box office). 

If a movie has a slew of A-list actors attached, with a big budget and strong marketing but the moral premise is false, the movie will bomb, or come in less than expected. At the same time, having a true and consistently applied moral premise does not guarantee success, because there is the Natural Law of craft and marketing. But success cannot come without that central idea that binds the talent to the heart and makes it all work as one.

A properly applied moral premise elevates the otherwise diverse collection of talent and money to secure a story as a work of art that reminds us and encourages us to embrace all that is good, true, and beautiful in life. 

 I thought of all that again when today as I read an essay by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn titled "Beauty Will Save the World" which is his reflection of Dostoyevsky's enigmatic phrase. The entire essay is here but here is the part that reflects what I've been trying to say about the moral premise's importance.

Dostoyevsky once let drop the enigmatic phrase: “Beauty will save the world.” What does this mean? For a long time it used to seem to me that this was a mere phrase. Just how could such a thing be possible? When had it ever happened in the bloodthirsty course of history that beauty had saved anyone from anything? Beauty had provided embellishment certainly, given uplift—but whom had it ever saved? 

However, there is a special quality in the essence of beauty, a special quality in the status of art: the conviction carried by a genuine work of art is absolutely indisputable and tames even the strongly opposed heart. One can construct a political speech, an assertive journalistic polemic, a program for organizing society, a philosophical system, so that in appearance it is smooth, well structured, and yet it is built upon a mistake, a lie; and the hidden element, the distortion, will not immediately become visible. And a speech, or a journalistic essay, or a program in rebuttal, or a different philosophical structure can be counterposed to the first—and it will seem just as well constructed and as smooth, and everything will seem to fit. And therefore one has faith in them—yet one has no faith. 

It is vain to affirm that which the heart does not confirm.

Exploring this a bit further I came upon this explanation of Dostoyevsky's novel The Idiot at A Heedful Idiot blog by French priest Fidor, who quotes Pope Benedict XVI Address to Artists, about the importance of beauty, which I think describes profoundly why stories, as art, told truthfully, will save the world:

If we acknowledge that beauty touches us intimately, that it wounds us, that it opens our eyes, then we rediscover the joy of seeing, of being able to grasp the profound meaning of our existence, the Mystery of which we are part; from this Mystery we can draw fullness, happiness, the passion to engage with it every day.”

That's what successful movies are to me, they give their audiences the joy of seeing what is good, true and beautiful about humanity and creation once again. We leave the theater of a great film story with a firmer grasp on the profound meaning of our existence and mystery of which we are apart. And that understanding draws us closer to fullness, happiness and the passion to engage life joyously everyday.

Meanwhile allow me to recommend my friend Gregory Wolfe's book Beauty Will Save the World on the intersection of this concept and the demise of the modern culture.