The Way My Mind Works

Why I write all this

The Head of an Engineer

My father is an engineer. So I can only trust that it was through him that the attitude of an engineer has somehow entered into how I look at things. The ‘attitude of an engineer’ is always wondering How. When an engineer meets a thing that works well, he has to wonder How does it do that? When he meets a thing that works poorly he wonders, How could this work better?

An engineer sees cause and effect, and he sees process. In any process, there is the Agent, the Receiver, and the Effect. The Agent works upon the Receiver in such a way that the Receiver is changed to a certain Effect. If the Agent is conscious, then the Process also holds the Agent’s Intent.

With this attitude I approach talesmanship. The Agent is the talesman, the Receiver is his audience, and the Effect is what the audience learns or how they feel when they hear the tale. The talesman wants his audience to learn a thing or feel a certain way, and that is his Intent.

Pick It Apart

This atitude has been with me a long time whenever I found a tale that particularly enchanted me — almost from the start. But at the very beginning of it all, when I was a young child, I was only content to wonder, and want more. Later my desire for more made me try my hand at telling my own tales. This was the point where I began to wonder How. And from that point on I not only studied the tales that worked well for me, but also those that disappointed me. ‘How could this tale have been told so that I’d like it better?’

In the beginning, I only wanted to please myself, to broaden and deepen the joy I took when I heard a great tale, and add my own great tales to the library of my delights. Afterward (probably in school where they made me look at tales from a wider critical point of view) I began to look at the tales in a more abstract way.

Few Surprise Themselves

There is one joy in a tale that is hard to pull off, and that is surprise. It’s all but impossible for a talesman to surprise himself. (It does happen,and is one of the rarest joys of making a tale for the first time.) This and other thoughts made me look beyond myself, and think about the audience that was not me, the audience in the abstract.

What does the audience want? What delights them even though they don’t want it? What works for them, for all audiences that ever were or will be? What works for them, those particular audiences of some times and places and moods and tastes?

I, Stewpot

The Engineer has a logical mind. His mind sees the branching of axiom to corollary in logical steps. If he knows the principle laws and he can reason, he will know most of the rest of his field; what is left is trial and error. Every conclusion he tests in the real world, sees what happens, compares it to what is law told him to look for, and if need be he then changes his theory and moves on to test some new part.

This is an area of the Engineer’s mind-set, alas or happily, that is not mine. In fact it is the memory of the Engineer that I lack.

My memory is more like a pot of ste. The bits I learn go in and sink in the bubbling broth. They never come out again but in a new shape with a new hue and flavor. Deep in the stew the bits break down and remake themselves. The lend one another color and flavor. What comes out, when I dip in my spoon, is a new blend.

This is good, where it helps me make ‘new’ tales from the stock of all the tales that I have ever heard, guessed, or told. But it is bad when I try to learn these rules that teach of talesmanship and talespinning.

There are times when a talesman needs to learn no rules. He can hear the great talesmen who go before him, and he can make his own tales like theirs. In this way the laws of talesmanship are bodied in the bits and pieces of the tales themselves, and prosper and are renewed. Thus it has been for a hundred thousand years and more, ever since the first talesman back in Africa.

But something happened some six score years back, in Europe. The avant-garde was born, and talesmen began to grow ashamed of their calling. Narrative in its broadest sense broke into two camps. The avant-garde ruled one camp, disdained talesmanship, and espoused Art in its place. Talesmanship was left to the more humble popular side, to pulp tales, children’s stories, to genre, to movies, radio, and television where wide popularity is required to support the high costs of production and distribution.

The scholars joined the Artists. They too pushed talesmanship aside as unworthy. And so today, and for some scores of years, talesmanship has not been taught in the schools of the West, it has not been held up as a goal worth seeking, and the best and most ambitious and talented would-be writers ignored it, condemned it, and neither studied nor learned it.

Today talesmanship is starved of those great minds. It is only the feebler youths, the less ambitious, or those fiercely independent of all their teachers and the leaders of arts in their societies, who uphold it. But they are only humble workers in the field. They do not lead universities and they are not the prominent critics in the most-respected journals. So talesmanship is all but unknown outside these few. And it grows haggard and lean as a result.

So Now

So now I try to teach myself talesmanship. I know I can not keep what I learn clear in my mind, so I write it down. And I publish it here in the hope that some would-be talesmen can gain from what I find, and tell tales that may delight me. Also I publish so that those of us who love a good tale can know better how to judge a good tale from a bad, and why one is strong and another weak. So that we can claim once more the honor of what talesmanship ought to be, and hold our heads as high as those who lie in the camp of Art.

(Composed with pen on paper Monday 28 January 2008)