Opening Your Tale

or, How I Like to Start Mine

Evolutions

With any art or craft, the techniques used in the first instances tend to be utilitarian. All efforts go into creating something that is useful for the intended purpose. But in later stages, once usefulness is assured and the basics of the craft are mastered, more conscious attention goes toward ornament and refinement. The artist aims more at beauty and surprising embellishments. Eventually, if the culture declines, we find arts and crafts that display shocking idiosyncrasies and attempts at novelty and strangeness even though the craftsmen lack master of their craft’s basics.

I think that in much of the world today (in Europe, North America, parts of South America, Japan and parts of Asia), we have stumbled into this stage of decline for talesmanship. Writers have for so long ignored the basics of talesmanship that they seem not to know how to do it right. It’s so bad now that it seems that storytelling is a lost art, for most respectable critics (at least in America) seem unable to be able to judge the storytelling a tale displays, and this indicates that the basic knowledge has been lost and is no longer being taught.

But maybe I’m just too ignorant to be able to judge the refinements of modern literature.

And this is not to claim any special knowledge or mastery on my part; as far as I’m concerned I’m as ignorant as anybody and more so than most veterans. So regard this as little more than a groping after rediscovering what was once well known, but never by me.

Around the Fire

The first step in recreating lost wisdom, it seems to me, lies in recreating the circumstances out of which the wisdom was first born, and trying to forget everything we think we know, except for this original image.

For the first talesmen, I think of them as sitting by the fire in the dark. There are no artificial lights, and every man woman and child has had to work hard from sunup to survive and make ready for the next day. Some children and oldsters may be dozing, but the adults and young adults are still awake when dark closes in around the small fire. Handiwork that can be done in the flickering light carries on by those who can do it. The others entertain one another by singing, playing drums and other musical instruments as they might have, and telling jokes and tales.

So when I start my own tales, I try to keep this image in mind. I’m among the others and there’s a lull, and I think to tell a little tale.

Where do I start?

Who What Where

“This is a story about X__, who was a Y__ who lived in Z__.”

The first part of any tale is the setup where the talesman introduces his cast and their location, and tells the audience what problems the heroes of his tale are facing. The opening of the tale comes before the problem part and merely sets the stage:

• Who the story is about
• What the hero is (this is a part of who he is, but can be distinct enough to deserve its own section — in general by who I mean the individual character of the hero, and by what he is I mean his role or place in society, including to what society he belongs)
• Where the story takes place (including when it takes place)

Once the audience knows these three things, the talesman can introduce the problem his hero faces. The tale in its basics invites the audience to face the problem alongside the hero and see it to its end. The Opening in general is a sort of “settling in” where the audience finds out the character-skin they are going to be assuming in facing the upcoming problem.

Naming the Hero

I like to make the hero the subject of the opening sentence. This is the quickest way of letting the audience comprehend the nature of the skin they are going to assume.

The more common way that I see current talesmen opening their tales however is to begin with the immediate, sensory where the hero finds himself in. This has the benefit of treating the tale as a dream and the audience as dreamers who, like in many dreams, first experience their surroundings and later, as a function of those surroundings, adopt their new identity:

The sunlight was warm although a cool breeze filtered through the yellow-green ferns overhead…

By dissociating the experience from the character (as yet unnamed and undefined), the talesman in this way forces his audience to experience first, and then he will allow them to “discover” who they are in experiencing it:

Hendricks shook his head and pulled his hat lower over his eyes. The brightness in the valley was disconcerting, even tiring.

I have nothing against this way of opening a tale. I prefer the more straightforward “who first” approach mostly because I can’t imagine our talesman by the fire opening his tale in this way. Instead he would open his tale in a less-dreamlike, more rational way:

Hendricks was a chartered accountant from Somerset who’d gotten lost on a vacation in Brazil…

Note that there are three terms we can use for our hero in this opening sentence:

1. By his name
   (“Hendricks got lost on vacation in Brazil.”)
2. By his title
   (“A chartered accountant got lost on vacation in Brazil.”)
3. By epithet

“By epithet” takes more explaining than the first two because the notion of epithet is itself a very old, primitive part of storytelling that is little-used today. Most of us know it mainly from Homer whose Iliad and Odyssey employ epithets for most of the major characters. You can also find it in folk- and fairy-tales. A more recent example of this you can find in Dan Simmons’ The Terror which (after a prologue) opens with:

He was the man who had eaten his shoe.

The value of epithet is that it strikes at the heart of the character and hints at his role in the tale to come. But if we take Homer as our examplar, we have to note two other details that will distinguish Homer’s tales from most of the ones we’ll be telling:

1. Homer’s audience already were familiar with the tale of the fall of Troy and Odysseus’s return
2. Homer usually attached his epithets to the character’s name

As a result of (1) Homer could easily say, “the beauty who caused the fall of Troy,” and he could count on his audience knowing he meant shell-born Helen of Sparta, Menelaus’s wife. And when he sang “long-suffering Odysseus,” he made it clear to everyone twice over the character he meant.

It’s uncommon that we would have occasion to refer to our characters by epithet. I’ve never done it. But it does intrigue me and I’d like to play with it in future.

(First posted Sunday, January 13, 2008)