The Soul-Time Hypothesis:
The Art of Time and Soul

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Save The Cat! The Last Book On Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need by Blake Snyder. (Michael Wiese Productions, 2005.)

Cinematic Storytelling by Jennifer Van Sijll. (Michael Wiese Productions, 2005.)

Screenplay by Syd Field. (Delta, Dell Trade Paperback, 2005.)

The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen by Herbert Tarr. (Avon, 1963.)

Ushpizin. Shuli Rand, screenplay; Giddi Dar, director. (DVD, 2004. Award winning film, English subtitles.)

The Gold Falcon by Katharine Kerr. (DAW Hardcover, 2006.)

The Blood Books, Volume One by Tanya Huff. (DAW, 2006.)

Roman Dusk by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. (Tor Hardcover, 2006.)

Strange Candy by Laurell K. Hamilton. (Berkley Hardcover, 2006.)

In my July, 2006 column, “View From the Grease Pit,” I mentioned the course on Kabalah from JLI, The Kabalah of Time. I learned that the soul enters manifest “reality” through the dimension of time. I’ve been puzzling over that bombshell for months and frankly I still don’t have a grip on it. However, I’ve also been studying films and delving deeply into various aspects of the discipline called screenwriting.

     Simultaneously, I’ve been reading a ton of novels, sifting out good ones for this column. If you’ve been following this column (thirteen years of archived columns at simegen.com/reviews/), you can guess how my mind will be synthesizing these notions on the search for a connection between the path of spiritual maturation of the Soul, and Time, a dimension of manifest reality.

     My original education was in physics, chemistry and math. So while puzzling at this, I’ve taken another side trip into string theory and M-theory. I’ve been doing and teaching Tarot and Astrology for over 35 years. I’m a widely published SF/F writer (simegen.com), and the core of my life is the use of art to explore the mystical dimensions. My main focus is on fiction in all its forms.

     I learned early in my career that a writer can regulate the reader’s reading speed by the way sentences are constructed and words chosen. I studied how fast readers slow down and slow readers speed up at certain places. I learned when readers skip to the end to see what happened, and how to stop them—or encourage them to do that. The novelist can control the reader’s experience of time, the narrative velocity, using screenwriting techniques. I started studying screenwriting long before I studied narrative craft, and I’ve delved into it repeatedly through the years. But after that bombshell about Soul and Time, suddenly I see whole new vistas in screenplays, i.e., movies.

I just read Save The Cat! by Blake Snyder, truly an odd book to review in an SF/F review column in a new age magazine, but ... I expect this year’s columns will discuss that tiny book in depth. It opens up a huge topic rife with esoteric implications.

     For starters, Snyder offers the most detailed and (for writers) usable “beat sheet,” complete with discussions of what belongs in each beat of a movie. A beat sheet is the “pacing”—a list of what has to be happening on screen at certain minutes in a movie, and thus on the exact page of the screenplay (one minute per page).

     Yeah, talk about trash romance formulae!

     Screenwriting is a far tighter straitjacket, a more rigidly structured paradigm. The modern screenplay is 110 pages long—exactly. OK, some movies are longer, or film run-time is shorter, but to sell a script on spec rather than on assignment, you write the 110-page structure.

     Any artist’s first response to that is to scream Balderdash! Or if true, I have to change it right now! But I’ve been a professional novelist too long to fall into that trap. I did more research and here’s what I learned.

     From Save The Cat!, I learned that this 110-page structure is no accident. It’s the Art of Time and Soul, but it took several books and novels to ram this into my head.

     From Cinematic Storytelling by Jennifer Van Sijll, I learned about the history of how audiences collaborated with Hollywood to evolve the modern screenplay.

     I learned more on that evolution rereading the new updated classic by Syd Field, Screenplay. Unless you’re a writer, you don’t need to read Screenplay. But all of you need to see a few of Syd Field’s movies (www.sydfield.com). He teaches character development using astrology.

     While reading this nonfiction, I also reread one of my all time favorite novels, The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen, a book written as contemporary humor in the early 1960s, but which today reads as a historical novel. It’s about an ordinary Jewish boy who graduates from Rabbinical school and serves in the Air Force as a Chaplain (the problem being he’s deathly afraid of flying). In the annealing furnace of the service, Chaplain Cohen endures a spurt of soul growth.

     I saw Ushpizin, an award winning comedy-drama, a foreign film in Hebrew with English subtitles. It’s about the annealing of the souls of a destitute religious Jewish couple during Succoth when guests from the husband’s past turn up. They are fugitive convicts he used to run with before he discovered God. His wife doesn’t know about that. He prays, gets charity money, gives ten percent away, and buys the most expensive etrog to plead with G-d for a son.

     Using Save The Cat!, I saw every “beat” in this film. It follows Snyder’s beat sheet. It’s a niche film for a tiny audience, structured like a blockbuster. The most shocking moment is when the butcher knife in the hand of one of the crooks comes down on his host’s etrog (a fruit like a lemon) while he still needs it to pray. That moment may have taught me to think in film “beats.” We’ll see. I’m still shuddering.

Then I read a novel that synthesized it all into one big conceptual explosion, The Gold Falcon (Silver Wyrm Cycle) by Katharine Kerr, number one in a new Deverry trilogy. I found myself staring at the table listing the reincarnations of the souls-characters in this long series of long books. It resembles my own thumb reference for the reincarnating souls of my Sime~Gen universe novels. The general feel of The Gold Falcon is comfortable as an old shoe, familiar as a family photograph. Deverry is a world to return to—to dream about and to create within.

     In this fantasy world, reincarnation is a secret for a good reason, and people are encouraged to believe that scrying, traveling interdimensional roads, shapechanging and other magical functions are just the stuff of bardic tales. The “silver wyrm” is a dragon who was, in previous novels, the human brother of a half-elf bard.

     Two of the main characters of the previous novels died in those novels, and now are reborn to become lovers and magicians who can solve current problems—as well as maybe rescue the silver wyrm from his plight—if only they can learn magic fast enough, or remember enough!

     The Gold Falcon is a rich, deep and far-ranging study of soul scouring challenges and painful growth opportunities—all of it flowing logically from experiences of the characters in previous novels. Kerr keeps you reading slowly, savoring each scene for its depths and nuances.

     In Kabalah, we learn that souls do reincarnate, just enough times to master each of the Commandments. That’s not the same as coming back because of unfinished business, as the Deverry characters have, but surely it could work out that way. I can believe the Deverry world while visiting it.

Reincarnating is one way of traveling through time. But other ways being explored by various writers are proving intensely popular for good esoteric reasons. One of my favorites is the “immortal” or very long lived, and among the most popular of these is the Vampire.

     Tanya Huff has new books in her vampire universe first introduced in The Blood Books, now reprinted in omnibus. Volume One has two of these excellent novels, Blood Trail and Blood Price. I’ve raved about these vampire detective novels in previous columns since April, 1994, and will rave about the new books as soon as I’ve read them!

Meanwhile, don’t miss Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s new St. Germain novel, Roman Dusk, set in third century Rome and richly depicted as always—peppered with rare words from the Oxford English Dictionary, and peopled with some of my favorite characters. If you had an incarnation in that time, you might recognize something familiar as an old shoe in this book. St. Germain never changes—he’s dead. He adapts, but his soul doesn’t interact with Time.

Laurell K. Hamilton has a collection of her short stories including an all new Anita Blake story done when all Hamilton knew about Anita was that she raised the dead for a living. Borrow this one from the library, but do read it.

Now here’s a point to pay attention to because we’re going to return to it in the next few columns. Storytelling, whether in novel, TV, or film, is about engaging the reader/audience in a vicarious experience. It’s not “real” life. You can’t learn a new soul-lesson from it. But sometimes some people can recall lessons learned and Commandments mastered in past lives. To do that, you have to enter the virtual world through the dimension of Time.

     Modern film makers have developed, in collaboration with the audience, a method of beating out a rhythm that has the power to captivate most people, bringing them into the story and delivering experience at a meaningful pace.

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Send books for review in this column to: Jacqueline Lichtenberg, email jl@simegen.com for instructions.

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