Tales from Heroic Ages

Great Conflicts breed great tales, and most of the best are tragic

Tragedy and Revolution

The fifth to the eighth centuries have been called Europe’s heroic age, in memory, perhaps, of the heroic age the classical Greeks looked back to when Jason, Theseus, and Hercules lived. In Europe’s heroic age the old order of the Roman Empire crumbled. This has been linked to a change in climate, and there is evidence of a volcanic eruption that darkened the sky and led to several years without summer. Crops failed, starvation came on, and whole peoples grew desperate. Desperate, they left their homes and sought warmer and richer lands. Out of the higher lands and the steppes of Asia the Huns and other peoples moved west, seeking some place where they could survive. But those lands were already full of peoples who also suffered. The clashes led to epic battles. These were not wars such as we have known, where armies go out to battle. These were wars of whole peoples, more like the invasion the Americas by Europeans, or on a much smaller scale the invasion of Palestine by European and Russian and American Jews.

Such movements had taken place in the past as well, but now the Romans had brought Mediterranean technology and a long period of peace and commerce, which led to much higher population. The carnage must have gone beyond anything we can imagine. Not so terrible in its way as today’s air wars of terror — they lacked the total destruction of today’s bombardments and high explosives. But the fighting was hand to hand and face to face, tribe against village, and as full of blood and rape as any war could be. And it went on for centuries. Whole civilizations fell. Burgundy, once famed for its wealth and high culture on the Empire’s north-eastern edge, fell and never rose again. Other cultures changed — they had to change, from top to base. The old order had grown in times of peace and plenty to mete out laws on the Roman model, to trade with other rich lands within the Empire’s sphere. Now under the constant of war’s millstone, a new social order had to arise, one fit for an age of war.

The elders and law-makers and merchants could no longer rule. The towns that clung to the old rules were ground under foot. The only groups that survived cast aside their elders and their societies based upon family and blood. They gave power to whoever could protect them, to the war chief and his band of warriors who fought as fiercely as their enemies, and took in turn what they pleased from the people they led. They had no pity or mercy, and they made the brutal choices as to who should live and who should die.

Thus was born in after time the Age of Chivalry which would arise in centuries to come out of the cradle of this Heroic Age, and the great Kings and Queens of the European monarchies traced their lines and the basis of their rule back to these bloody-handed pitiless killers.

The Heroic Age is also called the Age of Migrations and the early Middle Ages as well as the Dark Ages.

The Rise of New Rulers

The Heroic Age left us little art; the endless warfare and death gave those peoples few breaths to take up song. But a few stories have reached us. The tales are tragic, and a few heroic sagas such as the cycles of King Arthur and the Emperor Charlemagne, whose rise marked the end of this period. But those grim times gave grim tales, and death and ruin ended most of them. Victories were brief, and succeeded by destruction utter and long.

Some of the best of these tales have tragic elements, that interest me because the base of the tragedy springs from the social change that the old kingdoms and cities had to bear in order to survive. The hub of the conflict lies in a choice between kin and alliances, between duties owed to family and those owed to war-chief.

The war-chief demands obedience that is absolute and unthinking. Military commanders have always felt more at ease trusting on their men to obey blindly when they face likely death, rather than on their love and loyalty. Fathers in the patriarchal orders have always preferred to rule by love but needed to know that in the end they could make commands that are unreasonable and unexplained and yet are obeyed by force and sheer authority.

Love and Duty, Self and State

One of the great and lasting founts of conflict in tales lies between personal desires and the demands of the state (or tribe or city, or family or country, or race or nation, or political party or corporation). Where the individual does what he wants, whatever he wants, and all he wants, there the community will suffer; it may even fall to bits. But where the individual acts only and in all ways for the good of the community and never thinks of his own desires, the people lose their souls. And where the individual is made to obey the dictates of the community and forced to break his every personal wish and bent, the people lose their hope and the community loses it soul. There is no easy mark to set the perfect balance. Each of us must set it where we will or can, and each community must say where it thinks the mark should lie. The community naturally wants its members to set the mark nearer the side of order; each member in his youth wants to set it nearer to liberty, but in his age he identifies with the community more and values order over liberty. Liberty is a young man’s dream, as he seeks to make the community shift to make space for his desires. Order is an old man’s comfort, as he seeks to keep the community the same so as to preserve the space he has already made for himself. By the time a man is old, he has already shaped the community to suit himself (in a small way), and he has shaped himself to suit the community (in a big way).

When societies change in revolution, defeat, or war, the tailorings of old men are torn apart, and young men’s dreams will change to dreams of a new order — which may as yet lie hid in the darkness of time to come. Conflict rises everywhere and there is no peace and no easy answer. And the old ways die — they must die — they are killed. Those who cling to the old ways are destroyed. But some who live on in the grim wreckage of the aftermath remember the old happy times, and they sing their tragic songs of the ways that now seem to have been doomed from the start.

In every man’s heart there is the conflict among his desires. In every community there is the conflict among men. But when the communities themselves are in conflict that will end with the death of the community and the birth of some new order from the ashes, then all these conflicts can add to one another, and make for the basis of strong tales such as are long remembered.

(Composed with pen on paper Friday, February 29, 2008)

When Passive Voice is Preferred

When and why passive voice may be chosen

The Voice that was Lost

Passive voice is generally condemned by those who teach writing these days. It is called stodgy, long-winded, and hard to understand. It is also derided as the natural tongue of bureaucrats with something to hide or an impulse to be seen as more important than they really are. But there are times when passive voice can be used to good effect, and when a line or passage may be hurt by active voice.

When the Result is to be Stressed

These thoughts were brought on by the following paragraph, which was written by Musharraf Ali Farooqi in his 2007 translation of Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami’s Hamzanama or The Adventures of Amir Hamza:

“On either side of the rivulets that streamed through the garden were arrayed herons, cranes, ruddy geese, teals, and snipes in groups of two. The branches and boughs of the taller trees were wrapped in silk tissue sacks — white and golden and green. At ever step octagonal terraces of marble, alabaster, and veined jet met the eye. Before every terrace were basins filled with rose water, essence of musk, and keora water. In the middle of the basins were jets d’eau and fountains, with their golden and silver spouts mounted with nightingales, ringdoves, and turtledoves carved out of gems. The spray jetting out from between their feathers and wings was a most ravishing sight, which soothed the eyes and gladdened the heart.”

What can be noted in this passage is the absence of actors, the slaves and servants by whom all these wonders are arranged, presented, and put together for the delight of the rulers. Normally the active voice is preferred because the actors are important, and so are placed first in the sentence:

Actor(1) Does(2) Something(3)

Where a given element is placed in a line, whether at (1) or (2) or (3) is understood to mark its importance. What is placed at (1) is taken to be most important, more than what is heard at (3), and what is buried at (2) is understood to be given the lowest rank of the three.

Our first rule of passive voice, then is easily grasped:

One. Where the actor is insignificant, passive voice may be preferred.

This rule is exemplified in the passage taken from The Adventures of Amir Hamza. The servants and slaves are considered so unimportant that their very names and titles have been stricken from the record, lost forever in the fogs of time. The wonders and riches are held to be most important.

The trash of words needed to complete the sentence structure can be seen as dull bits, spoken in casual tones, and used as timing devices, so that pauses and breathes may be taken in between the loudly-voiced, stressed words in which the wonders are named.

Done by Whom?

Mysteries can also be helped by use of the passive voice. In mysteries, the actor is considered important, but is identity must at times be withheld:

At 7:10 in the evening on the night of July 8, three shots were fired in Abingdon Furriers. The police were summoned and the body of Josiah Abingdon was found on his office floor, dead.

The mystery would be given away if the above were put in active voice: it would mean the murderer’s name would be included in the opening sentence. The identity of who called the police, and of who found the body, may be offered later on as important to the tale and the mystery’s solution, or they may be dropped entirely as insignificant bystanders.

The passage could be retold and ‘three shots rang out’ given in place of ‘were fired’ so that the first sentence could be made to fit the ‘no passive voice’ edict. But maybe the shots would then be seen as actors, oddly enough, in and of themselves, as in —

Three bullets tore through the air and plunged deep into Josiah Abingdon

— which can be given for an active, dramatic, ‘punchy’ opening, but which can also be seen as not merely odd but wrong: emphasis placed upon the bullets here, is emphasis misplaced, and the bullets are given too great an importance for the part played.

The second rule of passive voice, then, may be stated as:

Two. Where the actors’ identities are to be withheld, passive voice may be preferred.

Variety May Also be Invoked

Variety in talesmanship, as in all arts, is rightly esteemed as the spice through which a tale is enriched and enlivened.

By this it can be seen that prose filled with nothing but active lines may be considered wearisome. The third rule of passive voice may be stated as:

Three. Passive voice may be used when relief is sought from too many active lines.

Weakness Can be Implied in Characters

The desires and urges of a weak or passive character are better not expressed by forthright, active lines. Here the actor is not deemed as insignificant; he might even be held out to be the tale’s hero. But his nature has been formed such that he is approached by his desires, and taken by his urges, and they can’t be said to be taken up and used by him. In this way such characters may be subtly and effectively distinguished from their more active fellows.

So the fourth rule of passive voice may be stated:

Four. When a weak or passive character’s desires and mindset are told in the passive voice, his nature can be given through the structure of the lines itself, and passive voice may be chosen as the best way to do this.

Hidden by the Fog

Passive voice is scorned most of all by those by whom vagueness in language is considered a great crime. But sometimes vagueness is the very thing desired in a line or a passage. Sometimes bold and direct statements are not called for or wanted.

The fifth rule of passive voice may be given as:

Five. Passive voice may be preferred when vagueness or obscurity is desired in a line or passage.

Wanted, Done, or Thought by All

The last best use of passive voice is found in those lines where the actors are not only unknown, but unknowable. General classes of men are included in this kind of line, as in

“Passive voice is considered weak when compared to active voice.”

Or in somewhat more concrete terms the line may be recast:

“Passive voice is condemned by those who teach writing as weaker and less effective than active voice.”

Here the names of those teachers are omitted, they are cast as members of a general class of writing teachers or are not even named as a class. The opinion is let to hang about in the air as though held by all. Another example:

It was widely known that an attack was planned; in fact it was the main thing that was feared.

In this line it can be seen how this ‘general’ actor can be compared closely to the actor deemed insignificant. What is considered important here is the plan for attack, and the fear engendered by the threat of that attack. But unlike the insignificant actor, the general actor could hardly be named even if doing so were considered desirable.

The line could be recast as

Everybody knew an attack was planned; it was the main thing they feared.

— but too much stress could be said to be placed on ‘everybody’ and too little on the fear and the attack. In the passive voice version, when those who feel the fear are not named, their dread is seen by the audience as a more palpable thing, as if the knowledge, the expectation, and the fear of the attack were being done to the ‘everybody’ who held them, like unseen toxins breathed in with the air.

The sixth rule of passive voice can be stated as

Six. When a general class of men, or all men, are considered, their opinions may best be given in the passive voice.

It May be Used Sometimes

Passive voice has been stigmatized as a great taboo, a form of phrasing never to be used. But here six kinds of lines have been shown where passive voice by be used to good effect, and may indeed be preferred to the active voice. Readers are not always confused by passive voice, and lines are not always ‘fogged’ when they are told in the passive voice. Sometimes lines in the passive voice can be easily understood.

And yet active voice can and should be used in most lines and in most writing and tales. It may even be said that active voice is to be generally preferred, and taken by the talesman as his default or normal way of phrasing. Then the passive voice is held in reserve, to be drawn out and used only now and then, when called for by the specific context and circumstances on hand.

(Composed with pen on paper Thursday, February 28, 2008)

Heart Hand and Head

The three schools of talesmanship

There are three schools of tales, three ways a talesman can see the world, and the tales he tells will fall in one of these schools. He can appeal to our wishes and emotions or in a word our hearts. He can appeal to our sense of the way we think things are in practice, or in a word our hands. He can appeal to our wit, or our heads.

These are the three schools of talesmanship.

Hearts

The tales that call to our hearts are like our dreams. They are full of wishes granted us. They tell of the world not as we think it is but as we think it ought to be, as we wish it could be, as we dream that it was in past times, or that is is in faroff lands, or that it will be in times to come. This is myth, Romance, adventure, pornography, idealism, heroism, legend.

We like to hear such tales because we like to dream that we live in that world, that our dreams have come ture and that this world of dreams is our ‘real’ world. We enjoy all those wishies coming true. It is a relief from the toil and misery of our daily life, in which none of our wishes seem to come true.

These tales appeal most to those of us who dream the most. We who look at their lives and rather than picking up their tools and getting on with it, ask ‘Wouldn’t it be great if only…’ and ‘Why can’t life be more like…’

Hands

The tales that call to our hands or our practical sense of the world look at the way we think things really are. They seek to describe, in details finer than the ones we normally see the world, the way people act in the world. These tales speak of life as we think it ‘really is’ and stress the ‘truth.’ They are often modeled closely upon real events and experiences. They seek to plumb the deep parts of the souls of their characters.

These tales appeal to men of the world who look down on wishes and dreams and mere time-wasters. We who come to full grip with our world and our lives tend to like these tales best. For the time of these tales, we see with sharper eyes events and the souls of men.

This is Realism, Naturalism, ‘true sagas,’ true stories, romans à clef, and ‘gritty tales.’

Heads

The tales that call to our heads teach us lessons about the world. On their face they may look like Romance or they may look like Realism, but by the tale’s end the talesman wants us to understand that the tale has proved or demonstrated some basic rule or law or principle about ourselves or our world. These are Allegories, Lessons, Prophecies, Lore, and Fables with Morals.

Tales of the Heart and Hand we enjoy in and of themselves, and we believe in what the tales relate while we live under their spell. A world swims into view and we dive inside it and live there for a time. It may be a world of wonders, or it may be our own world seen more sharply. But tales of the Head, on the other hand, we look on from afar, not in and of themselves, but as a puzzle or model. The people and deeds in these tales are not what counts, what counts is what the people and deeds mean — what they signify.

We like tales of the Head in the first place for the work they give to our wit in trying to unriddle them and see the rules and principles behind the masks of charactes and events. And we like these tales in the second place for the wisdom this unriddling imparts to us. Tales of the Head teach us not only the lessons and morals at hand. They also teach us a way of looking at the world around us, and of seeing the people and events we live with as if they too were principles made flesh. Thus the tales of the Head are the favorite type of tales told by the teachers of Religion, who would have us see real flesh and lood as nothing but examples of piety or sin.

In the Marketplace

In the great bulk of talesmanship today, the marketplace of amusment, tales of the Heart and the Hand fill almost all the stalls. Tales of the Head are out of favor even in the classroom, and mostly used in the teaching of Religion or in political debate.

Some kinds of tales fit better to the Heart, some kinds fit the Hand better. And so there are kidns of tales that will please us more if they are one and not the other.

At a broad stroke I would say that since the middle of the 19th century (in the West at least, but not all of the West) all the tales we call today as ‘genre,’ are at bottom tales of the Heart, and all the tales we call ‘literature’ or ‘literary fiction’ or ‘mainstream fiction’ are tales of the Hand. The French Realists took the critical prize from the Romantics, and they have only rarely given any part of it back.

I think this is the way it had to be. Once men began to look at Nature as a mechanism we cuold describe explain and predict by numbers alone, we had less patience for nymphs and angels and ghosts and the supernatural. And the end of this is that today, even the tales of the Heart must give a nod to the Hand and paint themselves with ‘realistic’ touches both of practical life and of the psychology of their character.

Some genres almost lost Romance altogether, and as a result all but killed themselves. For example take what is called ‘hard science-fiction’ which turned into a curious specimen of tales that told in real terms what never was. So these talesmen killed the dreams of those who liked to read science fiction, and left paltry, pallid, weak and even boring tales that were read by dwindling readerships.

When we take up a tale, we should know which of these three schools it falls into, and we will be disappointed if it falls into another. The talesman who tricks us in this way plays a dangerous game, and is not likely to win our love.

(Composed with pen on paper Wednesday, February 27, 2008)

Reverses and Twists

Two ways to surprise us

Thrills and Sameness

A bit of a tale pleases us or not. We can only hope the talesman pleases us with the first words from his mouth (or pen). But if he then gives us those same words over again, they please us less. He gives us the same words again. They thrill us less. He gives us the same words again. They thrill us less. He gives us the same words and we leave the tale behind.

We crave variation. We demand progress in the tale, a move to the middle then a march on to the end.

But a steady march turns into a pattern that bears its own sameness, and we can see that too. And then we find it bores us, this left-right, left-right, left-right steady march on to the end. We can see the end come near. We know when it will come and we know what it will look like.

We want some surprises along the way.

Here are two kinds.

Surprise One: the Reverse

The first kind of surprise is the ‘reversal of fortune.’ Here we simply go back on our tracks. Say things have gone well for the hero, and he moves closer to his goal. Then things should turn against him and push him back from the goal. Now all goes ill for him, so next things turn out well for him.

This simple alternation, step ahead then step back, comes out of the main delight that tales hold for us. A tale enchants us mainly through suspense, which is our balance between hope for one end and fear lest another end come to pass. The step ahead lifts our hope, then the step back feeds our fear, then a step ahead lifts our hope once more.

This pattern also rests upon one of the most basic laws of sensation: that nothing we sense is absolute but all is relative, and that one is raised when it comes near to its opposite. A light thing seems whiter next to a dark thing, and something sour seems more sour right after we taste something sweet. So our hope seems to us higher because it follows the fear we just felt, and the fear that comes on hope’s heels then feels deeper.

But this pattern is simple, and once we know the trick, we can look for these reverses. When things look bleak for the hero, we know things will now turn better. We know it without even knowing just how they will turn better. And when all looks good for the hero, we know bad news is right ahead.

Surprise Two: the Twist

Because the reversal of fortune is too easy to see in advance, the smart talesman will toss in some spicy twists into the stew of his tale as well.

Think of a reversal as part of a walk down a straight line. You never step off the line, but you take two steps forward then one back. Then three steps forward and two back. You may not know whether any one step will take you forward or back. But you know the odds rise that you will step back after a few steps forward, and the more steps back you take, the more you can count on the next step going forward. And you know that whether your foot falls forward or back, it will always land on the line.

Then it lands off the line. That’s the twist.

A twist by its nature is unforeseen. This is the secret to its surprise for us.

A boy likes a girl and woos her. She seems to like him, too — then she doesn’t — then she does. The couple come closer together, then fall farther apart. Back and forth. Then the boy meets another girl and he likes her too. He thinks he likes her better than the first girl. He wonders why he thought he ever liked the first girl.

So we see the reverses followed by a twist. But let’s tell that another way:

A boy likes a girl and woos her. She seems to like him, too — then she doesn’t — then she does. The couple come closer together, then fall farther apart. Back and forth. Then the boy eats a pickle and ketchup sandwich. He thinks it’s the tastiest sandwich he ever ate. He begins to search for the recipe to the perfect pickle-and-ketchup sandwich.

Here we see a pitfall in twists. A non-sequitur is a twist, too: a twist we don’t always like. A twist that breaks the ‘rules’ that govern our contract with the talesman.

A twist must be unforeseen but not unforeseeable. And as far as the twist might take our foot off the line, in the end we must find our way back to the line in time for the end. Because the end of the line is where the talesman promised he would take us. These two traits hold the art of a good twist, along with knowing how many twists a tale will bear.

Too many twists will spoil a tale.

A tale that is all twists will be a jumble of non-sequiturs, and not a tale at all.

I don’t know how many twists any one tale can bear. This is something the talesman must sense as he feels his way through the hearts of his audience. Some out there will like twists more than others. They tolerate more twists and more outlandish twists. Some kinds of tales are made for audiences that like twists better, and some kinds of tales suit audiences that can little bear twists.

In general, the longer a kind of tale has been in vogue, the more twists it can bear. Put in terms of the audience, the better an audience knows any one kind of tale, and the more such tales they hear, the more they like the twists.

This is indeed a hallmark in the evolution of a genre. It begins with simple, straightforward tales. As more such tales are told, and heard by the same audience, the talesmen must add more twists, and more, until the whole tale is a twist on the genre from start to end. At this point the audience has spent all their delight in this kind of tale; the last such tales are so far from satisfying the original needs that made the genre popular in the first place, that they have come to look like the final stages in Picasso’s famous series of etchings from representational to wholly abstract. At some point along the way, a member of the audience can no longer see the two pretty girls in the abstracted composition. From then on he can only take pleasure in the abstraction and not in the rearranged reference to the girls. In the end no girls remain.

When a genre spends itself in this way, we stop reading it. Then it dies. Later, if we still feel the need that this genre filled, it may return. But only after our memories have faded, and the genre can start once more with plain, straightforward tales. An age will have in the mean time lapsed, though, and the reborn genre won’t go back to the same shape as its former start.

(Composed with pen on paper Tuesday, February 26, 2008)

Tell a Tale in Layers

Smooth over the tough parts later

This is a trick to get past a tale’s first draft. I think it is one of the first ways tales were told, so it’s nothing new.

A Big Fat Lie

Did you ever hear the same old tale told by the same guy, several times over months or even years? It happens at yearly get-togethers or reunions of all kind.

The first time you hear it, the tale is short enough, but it is amusing in some way. It gets a charge out of its audience. And the guy who tells it also gets a charge out of it. He likes to go back in his mind and live out the event in the retelling. Or he likes the way the tale hits his audience with gasps or shudders or laughs or tears. Or he likes both. So the next time you meet, when the topic comes up, the guy tells the tale again.

He tells it different this time.

Some parts are a bit shorter but a lot of them are longer and the tale as a whole takes more time to tell. There are new details that he tells you. The effects and descriptions are longer. Most of all he tells the key scenes in more detail.

You could say he has learned how to tell the tale better. Or you could say he has remembered more of what happened. Or you could just call him a bigger liar this time.

Over the years you hear the same tale ten, twelve times. In the end it takes its place in the legends of this guy’s life. And the tale when he tells it for the last time is a far cry from what it was when he told it for the first time.

Lore and Lies

Some tales don’t belong to one man but they take their place in the tribe or clan or town or group. Different people tell the tale. They hear it first when they’re children, and when they’re old they tell it to their grandchildren.

These tales change too. Some parts get dropped. Some get smoothed over. Some are built up. Some parts get added from nowhere. Some are made up by the new generations of talesmen. Some are added from other tales. And some parts are split off and grow into separate tales of their own.

Each tale like this (all tales, really) has its one point, or two or three, rarely more than that, that form the heart and soul of the tale. These are the scenes or events that we think of first when we think of the tale. Around these scenes we remember, or construct, the other scenes.

These are called ‘motifs’ by those who study folk tales from around the world, and they have counted hundreds of them.

These scenes are what I called the big scenes or heart-scenes when I wrote about the structure of tales.

Young Arthur draws the Sword out of the Stone. This is the main scene of the youth of King Arthur. This is what we all think of first when we think on King Arthur’s youth. It’s because he draws the Sword from the Stone that Arthur is known as the next King of Britain (though some contest his title and he must fight them). And Arthur had to draw the sword from the stone, though he was his father’s son (because his birth was strange, and his youth obscure). So the tale of Arthur’s birth gets constructed and recalled around this one scene.

Telling and Re-Telling

The way these tales, personal and tribal, grow over time comes straight from the fact that they are told over and over again. Each time the tale is told it changes. It usually gets to be less like the truth it was born from, and a better tale in its own right. The way the tale comes to be told reflects less the original truth and more the reason why the tale is remembered and retold. A humorous tale gets changed to wring more laughs from the audience. As times and tastes change, the tale must shift around to get the same laughs.

The Writer & the Raconteur

The way most writers tell their tales is a lot like the way the raconteur relates his anecdotes: over and over again. The raconteur has his audience tells him, by the way they take the tale, how to make the tale better gain its effect. The writer may have his readers to test his tales on, or he may have only himself.

I mentioned the Snowflake Method of writing a novel. The Snowflake Method is a way to do a lot of work ahead of the first draft, so that you can steam through the first draft with no dead ends, no false starts, and go through it fast. It is said to produce a first draft that’s close to the final draft: a pass of copyediting should give the writer a salable, publishable manuscript.

In the Snowflake method, you tell the tale in one sentence, then a paragraph, then a page, then five pages or ten or twelve. You put all the scenes into a spreadsheet which you use as the outline of the tale. In the spreadsheet you can see all the scenes at once and how they relate to one another, and you can shift them around, drop some and add others, till you reach the point where you know just how the tale should go and what makes it work.

Treatments and Drafts

I like the idea of the Snowflake Method. But I find that first draft hard to write all the same. There are always some scenes that are hard to tell. So I propose you try a treatment or a series of treatments as the last stage before what you call your first full draft.

A treatment in movies is a way to tell the story without dialogue. Dialogue is the toughest part of a script, because each line of dialogue has to carry so much weight and yet sound wholly natural. Reading dialogue also can get in the way of seeing the underlying story and if it works or not.

When you write a novel as a treatment, aim to write fast and cover a lot of ground at each sitting, but don’t skip too many details. You need to cover the scenes in enough depth so that you see the characters and what they do clearly — so that later when you develop the scene in more detail you won’t find the characters saying and doing things you don’t expect, and that turn the scene in a new direction.

An example:

He wanted to go out that night. The apartment felt cramped and stifling, and he didn’t enjoy the thought of spending the whole evening alone with her, trapped in that place. But she’d been waiting all afternoon for him to come home, and she wanted a quiet evening alone with him. She didn’t see why he had to go out on the town all the time. Couldn’t he stay home just this once? Besides, it cost too much to go out. But he got mad when she said that. It made him think on how much money they owed, and how was he ever going to pay it back? They got into a fine argument over it. He kicked over a chair — maybe he only tripped on it but maybe he did it on purpose. She took it that way and started to cry. He almost held her but he steeled himself not to fall for that gag again. So he went out like he’d wanted, but he went out by himself and left her there, distraught, alone, and wondering where they were going to end up, and whether or not she ought to leave him for good this time.

I didn’t put in much physical action, but I covered the dynamics of their two positions through the scene. Note that you can give all the points of view in the treatment, but when you come to doing the scene with more details, you’ll probably restrict yourself to one point of view and have to imply the others through external details. This is harder to do, which is one reason why this treatment is simpler and faster to write.

Another example:

When the King’s guard caught him, they put him in chains and took away his strength and his amulets. He had no way out then. The King told him he would let him go only if he answered seven riddles. The first riddle was easy, but they got harder, really hard. He solved them all up to the last, but the last riddle he couldn’t solve, and the time was almost up. The King’s daughter sent him a clue by her maid, and he solved the last riddle, much to the King’s anger. The King had never known anyone to solve his greatest riddle.

Here the hard part of the scene lies in concocting the riddles themselves. What are those riddles, and what are their answers? The last riddle must be so hard that no reader will solve it before you tell him the answer. Even the King’s daughter’s clue shouldn’t give it away to the reader. Now this kind of thing could take a week or more to get right. Do you put aside writing the tale for a week to hunt down and make up a bunch of riddles? Just tell it in light detail, glide over the riddles themselves, and go on. Work on the riddles in after hours, or come at them again the next time round.

In this way the treatment is a ‘kind of’ first draft. You can develop some scenes more fully than others. Put down the details as they come to you, but try to keep going quickly through the tale, for this sense of pace will make the telling more thrilling.

Then write another treatment. This is like telling the tale over again, and you can build up the big scenes some more. This time when you come to the argument scene or the riddle scene, you know just what is going to happen, and add a few details.

These treatments let you get at the tale in layers. Some scenes may come to you first time out in near full detail, and others you just sketch in. Next time through you develop the sketched scenes a bit more, on this layer. Layer after layer you build it up to a fine polish. But because these first treatments are so much shorter than the novel will end up — a fourth or a third as long — you can write them faster and you never get mired in any tough scene or troubling detail, you just sketch it in with less detail, to be added later. The treatments to come will be longer, as you add details. But they’ll still be quick to write, because you’ll only have to copyedit the fuller scenes.

(Composed with pen on paper Monday, February 25, 2008)

The Trackless Wild

What it means to write alone today

Money and Art

In ‘The Well-Known Author and the Crank’ I looked at the writer who can’t get his tales published for money, and at how his means of self-publishing have changed in the past few years. So now a writer can put out his tales, at no cost to himself, where millions can find and read them.

This crank, or ‘Zack’ as I name him, never wrote for fame or fortune. He wrote because he had to, for his own ears. On the far end of the scape the commercial writer, the well-known author, or ‘Andrew’ as I name him, wrote on the whole for fame and fortune, or else he found a style and type of tale that he liked as much as his editors and readers did.

Now, few of us run to either far end of this scale. Most of us have some Andrew in us and some Zack in us as well. We want to tell the tales that please us, and we’d sure like to earn our bread at the same time, and we want praise and fame as well.

In one way, these are the talesmen who get hurt the most by the mills of today’s publishing industry. Their tales don’t sell enough to free them from having to work other jobs. Some of their tales and some don’t, and they find it pains them when a tale doesn’t sell. Some of them find early success and they can’t build it up, as today’s publishing corporations demand. Or they find their tales get caught in the thresher of diminishing returns, where a second book is only printed in the same number that the first book sold; the second book sells a percentage of its print run, and the third book is printed in the same number that the second book sold — a smaller number than the first — and so on down toward zero. Other talesmen write without selling for years and don’t know what else to do but try another tale, read books on how to sell, go to conferences and workshops, and beat their heads against a brick wall.

Those who fall closer to Andrew’s end of the scale can only go on in this way, and work and try and hope that some day they’ll break into the tenth of the scale of well-known authors who support themselves on tales alone. Or they settle into being known in a small part of the field, they take jobs teaching writing, and carry on with lesser hopes. Or they run out of patience and give up telling tales, maybe not all at once and maybe never in so many words. But the time they give to their writing shrinks from year to year, and the interval between ‘The End’ grows longer and longer until they find they’ve been working on one tale for 30 years, and they’ll go on tinkering with it and adding to it now and then, with false hope, and without admitting that it has turned into a hobby.

These writers can’t give their works away. If they did, then they’d fear it means their works are worthless. And it would take value from the works that they had sold and yet hoped to sell. And they’d fear that publishers would give up on them if they turned to self-publishing, which the industry as a whole scorns as ‘vanity press’ and unreadable trash, and proof of the lack of talent in a writer.

The Free World and the Paid Have Different Problems

But the writers who run more to Zack’s end of the scale find that being read (or just being able to be read) tempts them more than the fear of not selling. They will turn more and more to the free and open trade of talesmen.

These writers then face 2 problems:

1. They are unknown
2. Their work is unknown

(These are not problems for the true Zack, who doesn’t care if he’s known or not, or if his work goes unread.)

The pack of free tales put forth on the internet is already huge, and it grows each day. So-called ‘pirated’ texts, samizdat editions of commercial books offered for free against the many copyright laws, are also out there in great numbers.

The first problem this talesmen faces is getting his name to stand out enough so that people will want to read his tales at all. This is a question of marketing and I won’t go into any more on it here.

The second problem is that his work, the tales themselves, do not stand out. This is a problem of talesmanship.

The way to stand out in commercial fiction is to write like other writers who have sold. But the way to stand out in free fiction is to write unlike all the writers who have sold.

The first problems a would-be Andrew faces are all bound up with the gate-keepers of the world of professional publishing. Agents, editors, book sellers, reviewers, all choose to take or reject authors as business decisions. To them each ‘Yes I’ll pitch your tale,’ means ‘I think your tale will make money.’ The way they make up their minds about this is, they put a tale side by side with the tales that have sold in the past. A tale that is more like a big seller seems more likely to sell well on its own. But a tale that is far from the big sellers is a risk and nought but a risk. Rich companies with fat profit margins and loads of cash to burn can afford to take risks. Lean companies with thin margins and down-sized staff have to hope to put out a big seller with every title they offer. They have to build up the odds that each title they put out has the greatest likelihood of being a big seller. This applies to agents, editors, and book sellers. And there are few rich, fat companies with money to burn in the book business today. So if a writer wants his work to sell, he has to make it run as close as he can to what has sold in the past, and then tell the tale so well it will be bought.

This notion turns upside down in the free world. In the free world, the tales that echo the commercial hits only offer readers more of the same but with lower quality or some flaw, for if the quality were higher, it would have sold commercially; and right now the commercial publishing world is where all of us but the true Zacks would go as our first choice.

Here is where the ‘talesman’s voice’ comes to the fore. You have to seek out the part of your soul that runs away from the pack. You have to feed that part and let it grow until it takes over your tales. This is what will make your tales stand out like no others. This is what will make your name stand for something that no other writer’s name can match.

(Composed with pen on paper Sunday, February 24, 2008)

The Well-Known Author and the Crank

The Well-Known Author and the Crank

Who will take to the new means of publishing

In ‘the Commuter and the Misfit’ I told of two men who took different paths in life. Andrew liked people and lived a life like most of the men he knew. Zack didn’t like people at all, so he lit out into the wild where there are no roads. I tried to show how these two men are unlike in almost every way. Neither is perfectly happy, but on the whole Andrew is happy and Zack is a miserable soul. We can take these two men as models and see that there’s a bit of Andrew and Zack in each of us. Every craft will have its Andrew-path and its Zack-path as well. So let’s look at those two paths for talesmen today.

The Well-Known Author

Andrew the talesman, like Zack the talesman, has always loved to read and to watch and hear all manner of tales in their many forms, such as movies, comics, TV, radio, stage plays, and so on. Out of this love, Andrew began to tell tales of his own, as did Zack — and there the likeness ends.

Andrew studied tale-making in school. He joined other writers to share and help one another in their work. He sent his stories to magazines and got a few published. At last he wrote a novel, a tale that would fill a whole book all on its own. Andrew sent the novel manuscript to publishers, and after a couple of years he found one who would publish it. With a book deal at hand, Andrew got an agent who worked out the terms of the contract with the publisher.

The novel was published and sold well enough. It was no best seller, but it earned back Andrew’s advance and got some praise from critics. Andrew went on writing short stories, and he wrote some more novels in the years. Each book sold more copies than the one before it. In time, Andrew grew to be well known as an author. He had fans and a half dozen or so books in print at any time. He wrote no great number of stories an novels, but he kept at it and turned out a few stories and one novel every year or so through his career. He had to do this, indeed, for he had a family and mortgage to uphold.

Andrew was not the best known writer in his land, but he had won his way to a place very few writers can reach: he paid for his life with his tales, and wrote what he pleased.

This is a great success for a writer today.

The Crank of Yesterday

Andrew’s tale has not changed much over the last century. The way authors earned their bread in 1900 was much the same as they did it in 2000. the change along the way was a creep or crawl with a hop here and there. But Zack’s tale today is very different from what it was a hundred years ago.

A hundred years ago, Zack wrote his tales on paper, with a pen. He sent them off to magazines and publishers. Once in a while he got a reply that said the tale was not accepted. Most of the time he heard nothing. He went on writing all the same. It was a kind of frenzy, a madness that drove him to it.

Zack always liked tales, and he read mountains of them. He liked tales of men a lot more than he liked the men themselves. The first tales Zack put down on paper dripped with scorn for the well known authors of his day. He meant to show them all he could do it better. Later on he wrote all his tales with no thought of other folks at all. He wrote them for his own ears. They came out of the deep, dark places in Zack’s troubled heart, and they mirrored that darkness in a way that, far from easing his pain, only made it worse. The more he wrote down his weird odd visions, the weirder and odder they grew. Many of them had no start or end. Some had a start but no end. He wrote them at all lengths too, for he did not know nor care for the standard size of tales that were published. He wrote tales that were half a page long, mere fragments, really. He wrote tales that were too long for magazines but too short to fin in books all to themselves, and he wrote tales that filled thousands and thousands of pages and could only have been published as if they were encyclopedias.

Once, early in his career (if you could call it a career) Zack got a letter from an editor. The letter said that the editor might want to publish the tale Zack had sent him, if only Zack would make a few changes to it. A list of suggested changes came with the letter. Zack didn’t finish reading the list. He wouldn’t change a word of his for any editor’s fool concern for popular or critical taste. By then Zack had gone on to other tales anyway, and they were what inspired him now; as far as Zack felt, once he dropped or ended a tale he never took it up again.

Later Zack stopped even sending his manuscripts to any publishers. He made up his mind to publish his tales himself. He found a local printer who gave him a price on the job. Zack saved his wages from his job (of course his job had nothing at all to do with writing) and after a year he had enough to print a thin volume of some of his shorter works. He paid for a hundred copies. The book stores would not carry the book, of course — not when the owners read what was in it. And so the hundred copies in their boxes sat in Zack’s closet.

Zack went on to pay for more tales to be printed, a few dozen copies each — whatever number was cheapest. He never earned enough money at his job to do this often. The volumes lay fresh and still smelling of ink and glue in their boxes in Zack’s small apartment. No one ever read them. The local libraries would not take them even as gifts.

Zack died and no one knew his name but for a few, local men who thought Zack was a crank. At his death his books were taken out by Zack’s landlord and sent to the dump with the rest of Zack’s things, for (of course) Zack had no kin to claim his worthless estate.

And whether what was written in the few books and the boxes stacked with manuscripts was the work of genius or madness, who on earth could tell?

The Crank Today

Though the tale of Andrew’s career has but crept and crawled and hopped over the last century, the tale of Zack’s career has leapt forward in a few great bounds. First came the rise of the pulps that published millions of words a year of genre stuff. Then came cheap paperbacks, that also only helped the Zacks whose tales fell close by some known genre. But a later change helped even the crankiest of crank writers when the small press bloomed. And now the internet has come.

And the internet changes everything.

It is now open to Zack to publish his tales himself, and pay nothing to do so. I mean zero, not one cent. He can log on to a computer in his local library for free. He can use the computer to open a free account on line at Google docs or Zoho or one of a number of such web apps that let Zack write and save his tales online, for free. Once Zack has done with any tale, he can publish it online for free as well. He can even publish his tales as he writes them, day by day in a blog hosted online for free.

Where can he publish long tales online for free? He has his choice here as well. He can send them out to ebook newsgroups on usenet. He can attach the files to his blog. He can publish them at Amazon for their Kindle device. He can publish them at http://www.lulu.com in both pdf ebooks and as books that lulu.com will print out, copy by copy for anyone who wants to buy them.

All free for Zack.

Once published in these ways, Zack’s tales can be read by millions in almost every land on Earth — far more than the number of people who could have found Andrew’s books and stories in 1900, and more than the number of people who can find and purchase Andrew’s books today.

Sell or Give Away?

Zack now faces two paths as far as how he offers his tales. He can ask to be paid, or he can send them out for free.

Zack can sell his tales at amazon, lulu.com, or other print-on-demand publishers, and never offer any tale or part of a tale for free. In this way he will be better off than he would have been a hundred years ago, since he won’t have to pay his printer, and these online book stores will put his books up for sale. The sops of 1900, like the shops today, have only so many shelves to fill with physical books, and must pick with care which ones they offer. Online stores hold on their servers the files of thousands or even millions of times as many.

But Zack doesn’t need to sell his tales to eat. He works at other jobs, and he doesn’t write for money or for fame. Zack got neither money nor fame in 1900, and yet he went on writing then. He will go on writing today though his tales win him neither money nor fame.

And Zack hates to sell his books. it’s not the money he minds, it’s not that his books may have sold that he hates. He hates the selling in and of itself, and what it asks of him. He flinches at the mere thought of begging some man to please spend some cash to read Zack’s book. Zack hates the man and loathes the act of begging that man. He never wrote the tale to please others, he never sought their praise. Zack is more at ease when he gives his tales away for free, or offers them for sale with the unsaid words, ‘Buy it, or go fuck yourself.’

This, I think, is a part of Zack’s soul. Andrew may find joy in going on the road to pitch and hawk his books. He likes people after all, he writes tales he wants people to like to read, he enjoys public readings and book signings and talking to people about his tales. Zack loathes all of that. He could not bar to do it unless it were forced on him — and it is not.

So Zack, the ‘real’ Zack, the ‘pure’ Zack, may put out his books online for sale where the booksellers won’t offer books unless they are for sale, but Zack will also send the tales out free of charge in all the ways he can.

Here Zack still sticks to his ‘take it or leave it’ frame of mind. ‘This is my new tale,’ he might say to you, if he cared to say anything at all. ‘It’s the greatest thing I ever made. Read it if you want. I don’t care if you won’t. If you read it and you don’t like it, don’t ask for your money back — I didn’t ask you for any — and don’t come and whine to me about it. If you don’t like this then your taste is worse than I thought, and I never thought much of your taste in the first place.’

Oddly, paradoxically, because Zack gives his tales away, he now finds he can market them with ease. He would once have cringed to say ‘Here’s my new tale’ — just that alone would to him have smacked of selling, of pleading with others to deign to consider his work, of begging them and abasing himself. But if h gives the tale for free, all that is changed. ‘It is the servant who takes money; it is the master pays.’ But when the thing is given away and no money changes hands, then there is no servant and no master, only free men, equals.

Zack the Carver

I can show you the change between selling his tales and giving them away will make for Zack, when I tell you of the Zack who carves instead of telling tales. Alone in the wood, always on the move, going nowhere, Zack the carver halts now and then and chops at a tree trunk with his axe. He carves things out of the wood — a face, a beast, a shape unseen anywhere but in Zack’s own mind. He carves it and moves on. If it should chance that some other man come across one of these carvings in the wood, he is free to look on it for as long as he wants, to like it or hate it. None of that means a bit to Zack, who carved out of his own need, with no thought of any other man.

State of the World

I doubt if there are many Zacks. There must be far more Andrews. And most all of us will fall somewhere in between. We have some Andrew in us and some Zack as well. But I do think there are more of us on Zack’s side than on Andrew’s, in this sense, that we’d like to tell some tales, but the tales we tell wouldn’t sell. A hundred years ago, those many didn’t go far; they hadn’t enough of Zack in them to carry on. They told odd tales to their friends or children, they scribbled the odd verse or snatch of prose, and left it at that.

Today those many can go much farther when they use the internet. They already have, they already are, and they will go much farther in days to come, because the little praise they get will feed the Andrew in their hearts, and the Andrew will egg on the Zack at his side.

(Composed with pen on paper Saturday 23 February 2008)

The Smell of Sorcery (and how to get it)

Without that smell, fantasy tales fall short

The Fields We Know

We live in a rational world. We live in secular times. Reason won out in Europe four centuries ago and it had been gaining strength for hundreds of years before then. In ancient Greece and later Rome, reason and the secular also won the upper hand. In India the ancient Vedas were told by scientists, and in China reason won the field after centuries of war, and the great Empire was born. Man has been waking from the long nightmare of unreason and religion for over two score centuries.

This is now our home and the fields we know: reason, the mundane, the practical life lived under skies free of mad gods.

This is true today even though almost none of us can ken the wonders we use each day. We hold up a palm-size bit of plastic and metal to our ear and we speak to someone half a world away and hear their answers. This marvel and wonder no better than one in a hundred, or a thousand, wholly understands. But yet we trust at least that the cell phone is a thing made by men and that it works by natural law, that there is no god or demon sprite that makes it work, no hex or spell that must needs wake up and fetch us the voice from so far away.

Reason is our home, and magic is a foreign land.

News From Nowhere

The foreign land where magic breathes is one I call ‘Eartherea.’ All magic lands are part of that wide realm, that shows up here and there about the Earth and has been dreamt of by so many talesmen and madmen and prophets and priests, and most of all by us when we were young.

In times and lands where the priests rule and the gods are seen by living eyes, the talesmen know the smell of magic all too well. So when they tell their tales of Eartherea, they fill the tales with magic’s smell. It fills the tales, so that there is no line that marks the ‘real’ from wonder.

But we who tell such tales today go as strangers and aliens o the marches of Eartherea. Our audience too knows that land only by hearsay. Their hearts are anchored in this secular world of ours — the true world, the ‘real’ world, or Earth. And so if we want to give our audience the full taste of Eartherea, we must give them tales that reek the true tang of magic.

Three Above All

Where shall we find this tang of magic? We must seek it in three places, and if we can’t find it in all three, the magic tale will miss and fall short and prove that it is false.

First (and more than all else) the talesman himself must breathe magic. He must reek of it in his body and his breath like an old unwashed man who eats too much cheese onion and garlic pie. His very hair should stink of it. His clothes should smell of little else. If only the talesman can show this knack of breathing magic in his words, then he may fill the most common tale that seems to take place here and now on Earth with the foul taint of sorcery and the unknown, the marvelous, the wonderful, the forbidden and the mad. Here we find what is called ‘magic realism’ and all good pornography. If only the talesman smell strong enough of magic, it may prove enough in and of itself to turn a tale into a wondrous glimpse into dreamland.

The next place where we should smell magic is in the hearts and minds of the actors in the tale. They must with all their hearts know that wonders can at any time come true. Some of them may doubt this, some may scoff: they will be wrong, they will be shown to be wrong, and what is more, they will know beneath their bluster that they are wrong.

This means that the souls inside the story will come at their lives and their work and the stones in the ground they live on in a way that we do not. We on Earth trust that stones are ruled by natural laws, and will at all times act in the same way under the same set of conditions. But in Eartherea stones are living things, or they are touched by living wills, and the way a stone will behave may depend on the mood of the folk around it as much as temperature and pressure and physical tools. Look at a house cross-eyed, and that house might fall apart; smile on a bit of wood and your chisel will carve it more true. This is what the characters in the tale must believe.

The third place that must scent of magic in a tale of the fantastic is the world of the tale. It is not always enough that the talesman believes in magic, or that the characters in the tale believe in it. For we in our smug world of reason and practicality may look on such a tale as the story of madmen, told by one who’s mad himself. We must see and be shown that the magic of this tale is ‘real.’ The stone and wood and mountains and sky must all of them stink of magic, of wonders, of the strange.

Eartherea is like the land of dreams. She holds the sheerest pleasure and the most frightful pain. She is not rational, she is fickle, changeable, whimsical, beguiling, sullen, shifty, and emotional. Wishes and rules there trump reason and the laws of nature at almost every turn. The only time that natural law seems to work in Eartherea is when she seeks to lull some poor hapless wight into the snare of trusting that fire must be hot, that streams flow down hill, that fish do not fly. As soon as the character starts to trust in natural law and acts upon that trust, that is the moment when the fire burns cold, the stream flows up the hill, and the fish fly out of the nets far away.

Getting the Knack

You talesman who would tell of Eartherea, must first learn how that dream-land operates. To know how it operates, you must know how the folk who live their lives in it must think and act. And to know how those folk think and act, you must yourself believe.

Therefore each of us talesmen who would quarry tales from the mines of Eartherea must let grow in our own hearts a way of seeing the world ‘as if’ magic were true (though we know it does not!) and the laws of nature only seem to work, for now, on sufferance from the forces and odd beings that are not to be seen, not to be found, but fill the air around us. We must first learn magic’s smell, and then learn how to take it in and breathe it out ourselves.

It ought to be simple enough. We all knew the trick once upon a time. When we were little and looked with eyes that were big, we smelled of magic all the time.

(Composed with pen on paper Friday, February 22, 2008)

The Commuter and the Misfit

Path and no-Path

Andrew

Andrew graduated from a good school as a popular, well-liked man. He got a job with a good firm in the city. He wed his sweetheart and they have three children now. In the years since he was hired by the firm, Andrew has been promoted three times. He’s no big shot yet, no vice-president even, but he has won a solid foothold on the middle rungs of management. He brings home good pay.

Every day Andrew gets up at the same time. He showers and shaves and puts on a nice dark suit and tie that are much like the suits and ties that all the managers at the firm wear. Andrew would never call this a uniform, but in his heart he does look on it as one, for when he straightens his tie and dons his jacket in the mirror, a sort of job-self comes over him, that differs from the Andrew who loves his wife and plays with his kids.

Andrew lives in a small town outside the city, on a quiet street. The houses on his street look much the same and bear only small differences from one another. The houses on the next street over, and the street past that, are much the same. This gives Andrew a warm feeling when he leaves home for work and comes back home again. It’s a solid, steady town and Andrew knows he belongs there because his house his car his wife and his kinds, and himself even, all match his neighbors. This is his town.

Andrew drives to work each day. He takes the freeway with all the others heading in to work in the city. The freeway traffic is thick and slow. Andrew talks about this with the guys at work. They share horror tales of traffic snarls and jams and the morons and maniacs who should never have been granted a license to drive. He also shares tips with the guys on other routes to the firm. There are five or six good ways to get to work and back. The freeway of course is the best and fastest, when the traffic is not too bad.

Andrew likes to bitch about the commute, and there are times he finds the job and even his good friends at work a bit too much. There’s nothing wrong with the folks at work or the firm, of course. But Andrew has been there almost ten years now, and he can see himself still there twenty years from now, and there are moments when it all strikes him as the same and more of the same, and there’s a small voice far in the back of his head that asks, ‘Is this all there is?’ And that small voice can remember the days when Andrew was young, not yet out of school, when he dreamed of his life and the adventure of his career. Somehow this doesn’t feel like his dreams. But everything he hoped to find is here for him. So it’s not that it’s the wrong firm or the wrong job or that there’s anything at all that’s wrong about it.

And yet the sameness of it all wears down on him at times, and when that small voice cries out it’s enough to break his heart.

There are even some moments when Andrew wonders what his life might have been had he chosen a different path. If he had quit school early, say.. If he had worked at different trades. If he had loved other girls. If he had lived in the city, or if he had moved out past the suburbs.

Andrew likes to think on this for it soothes his heart’s ache. He likes to think that whatever he chose, he would have made a go of it. He has always been well-liked, he has always been happy. So in the end Andrew sets aside these small day dreams and takes up is life again — the true life, the real life, the solid life of a good citizen and proud member of his community.

Andrew with all his complaints and daydreams shudders inside himself when he thinks of the life that Zack leads. Andrew would never in his life want to trade places with Zack.

Zack

Zack is a misfit and he’s always been one. He never much got along with anybody ever in his life. Sometimes he went out of his way to talk different, dress different, even walk different from those around him. Folks who thought alike and spoke and dressed alike got on Zack’s nerves. They annoyed him and he scorned them.

Zack was never handsome like Andrew. Zack was never well-liked. And it’s hard to say if Zack lives apart from people because he wasn’t good looking or well-liked, or if it was because Zack dressed and spoke different that folks thought he looked odd and even ugly, and didn’t care for him. Either way, whichever came first, both were true of him: he didn’t like people and they didn’t like him.

Zack quit school early. School is where the leaders of the group try to beat out of their young all the traits that make them stand out or act odd. School is where they mold all the Andrews of the world, who grow up to be leaders of their communities and in their turn support and guide their schools to beat out of the next batch of kids all the traits that make them stand out or act odd. This is what they mean by human life, after all.

Zack hated it. He hated his teachers and he hated the other students, the ones who fit in and did well and were thought to be good looking and well-liked. He despised them and he envied them all at once.

Zack lit out of town before he was even fully grown. He quit school, left home, got out of town. He went as far away from folks as he could get. Now he lives out in the wild.

There aren’t any freeways in the wild. There are no roads or paths or tracks. There’s no way to tell which is the right way to go. When night settles over the wild it brings with it a great deep darkness. When day breaks the sun blazes with bright fire that can be hard to take. The heat scorches in summer and in winter ice coats the land like an iron weight.

Zack doesn’t life in a cabin. A cabin seems too much like a house to him, a home like all the places they live in back in Andrew’s town. Zack puts up a little shelter where he beds down for the night. He kicks it down when day comes, and makes his campfire out of it. He doesn’t even want to give himself the chance to use it again or to stick around.

By now Zack has gone so far out of town that he’s lost his bearings and he can’t tell you which way leads back there where he came from. So even this guide that once he followed, the guide that led him away from the place where he was born, is lost. Now he just wanders with no real aim.

But I guess he has a sort of aim, if you care to call it one. When you don’t like folks, you try not to be one of them yourself. This is part of what drove Zack out of town and in a sense it’s pushing him to this day. He was always unhappy, either sad or mad. It’s a part of his soul and it has put down roots deep in him. So the more unlike other men he gets, the more unlike them he tries to become.

Zack’s feet are the most mis-shapen part of him. His shoes are ones he made himself and they may be ungainly and ugly but they’re strong. All the same they’re no match for the stones and stumps and vines and thorns of the wild. Zack’s feet have been blistered and cut and torn and swollen, in those years of beating out a way forward where no other feet have walked before.

Zack doesn’t think like other folks now. His thoughts are all a jumble. The words don’t link up right, they don’t make the kind of sense we all agree is the sense you have to make because it sounds like what everybody else is saying. That isn’t the way Zack talks or thinks at all. Sometimes he doesn’t even think with words but only pictures, or raw scraps of senses like a streak of heat, a dash of thirst, a sudden itch or the sense that he’s been bitten or stung by some bug that’s never there.

You can call Zack crazy, I guess we all would. We pity him or fear him back in town. A few of us, part misfits themselves, dream fine romantic dreams of Zack out there on his own in the wild. But they’d never go out there themselves. They’re not crazy after all.

Andrew and Zack were born the same year. But Zack looks old now while Andrew still looks young.

Zack’s isn’t a savage life. Savages have their communities and their fellowship, they follow their rules and are good looking and well-liked. The kind of life Zack leads isn’t even an animal kind of life. You could only call it by what it isn’t. It isn’t any kind of a human life. It isn’t a life fit for men to live as men.

But I wonder if you can say Andrew’s life is either.

Us

As in life, so in tales. Almost all the talesmen take after Andrew. A rare few take after Zack. We choose in our hearts to be like Andrew or Zack each time we start a tale. As time goes on we fall into a way of our own. It may lead us on after Andrew or after Zack.

And if it comes down to just happiness alone, then we’d all want to be like Andrew. There’s no doubt but Andrew is a happy man by any way of judging it, and Zack is a sad tormented soul.

If it comes down to just happiness alone.

(Composed with pen on paper Thursday, February 21, 2008)

Talesmen Inside Tales

Only the best will do

I’m reading The Innkeeper’s Song by Peter S. Beagle. Mr Beagle chose to tell this tale from many points of view, as though we heard testimony on various parts of the tale from different witnesses and actors; after the Prologue, Mr Beagle pretends he himself exists no more as far as the tale goes. More, within these bits of tales the witnesses tell how other characters told them tales. This gives us three kinds of talesmen a tale can have, with more or less authority.

3 Kinds of Talesmen

At the top there is Mr Beagle himself, the Author of the tale with his name on the cover and title page. He is the true talesman but he takes on the masks of several characters to hide behind. After the Prologue, each chapter is the tale of a different character, all in first person using ‘I,’ and most in past tense, though one character uses present tense for what he tells us took place in the same past time as the things the others tell of.

These chapter-by-chapter talesmen or witnesses make up the second kind of talesman in The Innkeeper’s Song. They know less than Beagle, only what they have seen and done, and only so far as they can fathom it. They speak in what Mr Beagle claims is their true voices (put into modern English).

Third are the characters who tell the witnesses tales within the scenes the witnesses tell us. These last talesman are least, and can claim the least authority: on the whole Mr Beagle has his witnesses tell us the truth (as far as they know it) but the characters who tell tales inside the tales the witnesses tell are not to be trusted. Mr Beagle lets us know that these folk will hold back bits of the truth, and lie, and try to trick their audience when it suits them.

Talesmen Good and Bad

Wilkie Collins used this same trick in The Moonstone. There too each part is told (but said to be written down and not told aloud as Mr Beagle would have it) by a different character who speaks to what he has seen and done, in light of his own ken.

The talesmen-witnesses in Mr Collins’ tale are good talesmen and bad. The bad talesmen show one trait that makes them bad talesmen above all: they put too much of themselves into what they tell, and they thrust their own faces in between us and the things they tell. This fault the talesmen-witnesses in Mr Beagle’s tale also have.

Both Mr Beagle and Mr Collins would no doubt excuse and defend this, and claim that these talesmen are not talesmen only, but also characters in the whole tale, and that when they tell too much of themselves they show us their hearts. So it is a kind of characterization, Mr Beagle and Mr Collins might claim. All the same the talesmen-witnesses are bad talesmen.

Think if you will if Count Tolstoy had begun a chapter of War and Peace in this way:

Ugh — I ate too much dinner last night, and slept hardly at all. My bowels were loose, and my thoughts turned on that peasant girl I saw two days ago by the stream. With shame I confess I thought on her with lust. Oh my God, what can a weak sinner do to save himself from evil? — Anyway, at the time of which I write, Prince Andrei was worried…

This would help scholars of the great writer, no doubt, learn more about him. But that version of War and Peace would never have made Tolstoy’s name known throughout Europe.

A Simple Rule

What can we can we take away from these tales is a simple rule:

If a talesman will pretend that a character tells his tale, the talesman should make sure that that character is just as good a talesman as the talesman is himself.

Better than the talesman of course no character can be through whom the talesman speaks. But it might be that when he takes on a mask, the talesman gains inspiration he might have lacked if he spoke as himself. All the better, then.

But he should make damn sure that his character-talesmen shall not tell us bad tales, unless the talesman himself seeks to tell bad tales. If that is in truth his goal, he may as well tell bad tales in his own voice, they will be less tiresome and more entertaining in that case. At least Tolstoy’s asides (or Mr Beagle’s if he made such remarks in his own voice) would tell us something true, or at least more true, about a living man in real life one time upon this Earth; and that would tell us more about who the talesman is, and why he chose this tale to tell us, and how he came to tell it in this way.

(Composed with pen on paper Wednesday 20 February 2008)

Where Tales Turn 3: the End

The big scenes in the End

Home & Destination

When a man sets out on a journey, he knows the ground he leaves. It is his home and well-trodden ground. But he can’t know the end of his journey until he comes to it; each journey has its own end; no man can know beforehand the place where he will end.

As the journey, so the tale. When we think on the big scenes the tale at its base must give us, we can see the Start with clear eyes. Each tale starts at the same place, with an audience that knows nothing of what is to come, and with a hero who knows it no better. We can then say that something must turn the hero onto a new road, and we call it the First Encounter. We can say, too, that something must keep the hero from giving up and turning back, and that he must have some aim in mind, and we call this the Start of the Middle. We know from past tales we love, that we want some high point near the road’s end, where it seems the worst will come and the best is farthest from the hero’s grasp, and we call this the End of the Middle.

But what comes after that?

Short Tales are not Long

The End of a long tale differs from the End of a short tale. A short tale might have an End of one sentence or two:

But then the hero won free and was safe.
And the rest of his days were happy.
The End.

Or briefer still:

And that was the end of him.
The End.

A short tale has the most strength when it ends abruptly. But a long tale may have chapters yet to tell, with a big scene or two, and a flat string of scenes between them, before it reaches ‘the End.’

Half-Scene: End of the Fight

The End of the Middle may not fill a full scene. It may come in the midst of a scene: there may be no gap between the moment the hero has all but failed, and the moment he manages to free himself, push back the doom that hangs over him, and win to some safe place to lick his wounds.

In this case we have a problem more for the critic than the talesman. The critic must choose whether to say the scene is the End of the Middle or the Start of the End, or whether to say the End of the Middle and the Start of the End are but half scenes. But the talesman only has to tell his tale, and he doesn’t care what to call it, but only to work his audience to his utmost.

The Healing: the Start of the End

The Healing is a scene that tells us what the hero does just after he escapes the doom that almost spelled his end and the end of all our hopes in the End of the Middle. This is often a scene of meditation and stillness more than outer action. The hero must think things over and make up his mind how to strike again. He must also steel his heart to face once more what all but finished him in the End of the Middle. In this scene the hero grows and changes for the last time in this tale. He can’t be the same man who went into the End of the Middle, or else it would come out the same way. He knows better now than to try that once more. Something must have shifted in his heart and he has won more wisdom than he had. In this way we can say that the Lesson or Moral in the tale rests within this one scene, for what the hero here gains, or knows that he has gained or had all along, is the one needful thing to win his heart’s desire. But often a good talesman will hide what the hero learns here, and leave it to his audience to say what was the one needful thing that marked the hero from what he was before to what he is now.

There are reasons to hide the Lesson. First for reasons of policy. For if the talesman tells the audience just how the hero grows here, he will give away the End of the End and kill all his suspense. Second for reasons of pace, for the audience knows the End of the End lies not far off now, and they itch to get to it. Third for reasons of taste, for a good audience hates all sermons in their tales.

The End Glimpsed and Guessed at Last

The final big scene wraps up the main tension of the tale. It kills once and for all either our hopes or our fears. It does so with finality. We know both from what happens in this scene and from the way the talesman tells it, that there will be no more chances after this. The hero has won all or he has lost it, and that’s that.

This scene may hold outer action, but it will not reach a higher pitch than the End of the Middle. It will not match the pitch of the End of the Middle. There is a sense in which a good talesman will at the Healing or Start of the End, let his audience know what the End of the End will be. Indeed a good audience has already guessed it, for they know they have to to with a tale and not real life. And in the well-shaped tale, the End of the Middle mirrors the End of the End. They are opposite in the sense that the End of the Middle forms a false End of the End, and the End of the End rights that lie, and gives us the tale’s true end. The one who seems to win all at the End of the Middle will surely lose all at the End of the End. The one who seems to lose all at the End of the Middle will surely win all at the End of the End.

In a well-shaped tale this must be true. Think: if the End of the Middle and the End of the End are much the same, then where has the tale taken us in the meantime? It could have ended at the End of the Middle. It should have ended there.

The End of the Middle strains our hopes and fears to the utmost. When it is done, we will be able to guess at the End of the End.

But our suspense is not quite done.

Confirmation and Detail

What’s left to our suspense is the confirmation of our guess or expectation. This is a strong force in us in the audience. We can work ourselves in agony to be told what we already know. We ‘know’ it — we’re ‘sure’ of it — but we still need to be told so that our last doubt, that gnaws and tugs at us, can be killed. This is what the End of the End does, and when we find our guess confirmed we feel a great satisfaction. But when the talesman gives the lie to our guess, we feel more cheated than pleased at his cleverness.

There’s another way suspense lingers through the end. For though we in the audience may be sure (or almost sure) of the End of the End on the whole, there may yet be some small details we can’t tell for sure. We may know the hero will go on to win his heart’s desire, because he all but lost it in the End of the Middle — but what about his dog, or his old teacher, or his faithful friend, what will become of them? Will his happiness be complete, or will some small loss temper it? And just what will the hero do when he has his heart’s desire? These are the small matters that the End of the End tells us, so that it holds some surprises for us after all.

The Last Untold Scenes

A tale has many untold scenes. There are scenes that take place before ‘Once upon a time’ just as there are scenes the talesman skips over along the way, for he can’t tell all, and wisely holds some back, even to some scenes we wish he had told us. And then there may be one last scene left untold, that comes after The End.

In a short tale, the End will be brief — abrupt — jagged. It leaves us, in a sense, to make the last scene up ourselves, and makes us picture to ourselves what goes on in the moments (or hours, or years) after The End.

This last untold scene may also trail a long tale. The wise talesman, like a good guest, knows to leave before his audience (or his host) has had too much. With the human heart, though, the hardest point to reach and stop at is the point of ‘enough.’ And with an audience, the talesman has to work on many hearts at once. He can’t reach ‘enough’ with each and every one. But to go past ‘enough’ will take us into ‘too much’ and that will spoil all. Thus the wise talesman is wary, and make sure to give us rather ‘not enough,’ though he will come as close as he dares and his skill allows to the magical, mythical point of ‘enough.’

The trick here lies in the use off the last untold scene. When the talesman hints at but does not spell out the last scene of the tale, he leaves it to his audience to go on and make it up in their own hearts. Thus each one of the audience will carry on the tale and the untold scene to his own point of ‘enough’ whereupon he will let the tale go with a sigh.

(Composed with pen on paper Tuesday 19 February 2008)

Where Tales Turn 2: the Middle

This wilderness has two logical mileposts. You may need more.

Three Acts

Aristotle split a play (and by extension all tales) in three. Though a play may have one act, five acts or more, and a movie may have eight or ten sequences, and a short-short story no more than fifty words, these divisions are technical at heart and not logical, not necessary. So what then are the logical parts of the tale? Let’s start at the smallest number and work our way up to see.

One Part. We could say a tale has but one part, that is — itself. This is logically true. But it gets us nowhere; we can’t do anything more once we say this. So this is true, but of no use.

Two Parts. We could say a tale has two parts. These would be the Start and the End. But to leap from Start straight to End makes for a weak tale at best, one so weak I don’t know if we could call it a tale at all. Think of:

Once there was a poor man.
Then he was rich.
The end.

Here we can’t even tell it in this way:

Once there was a poor man.
He got a lot of money.
Then he was rich.
The end.

— because the phrase ‘he got a lot of money’ is not the Start, nor is it the End. This is the middle and in truth, don’t we love the middle most of all? In this tale the hero has a problem of want, which is a thing we all face at some point in our lives. He ends in plenty. But because we in the audience have all shared in want, it’s just the ‘how he got plenty’ that interests us. More, we can say that we are glad to see the hero have plenty only as far as we have shared his pain of want, his fight to get more, and the ups and downs of ‘how he got plenty.’ The quick leap from want to plenty does nothing for us, we feel cheated or we feel nothing at all. A moment has passed for us while we heard it told, we blink once or twice, we go on with our lives and we forget this ‘tale’ right off. It has had no weight for us without the ‘how he got plenty’ of the middle, it has no lesson, no thrill, no plain or joy.

Three Parts. This is what Aristotle thought, that a tale has its three parts and three (logical) parts only: the Start, the Middle, & the End. So we can have our tale as told the second time, with Want (the start), How he got more (the middle) and Plenty (the end.).

This makes a true tale, one that satisfies us. The ‘how he got plenty’ can be stretched as long as the talesman please, it can have false ends and it can turn the hero round so he seems almost back where he started. All the same these many scenes and sequences and chapters and thousands of words can be summed up: ‘He got a lot of money.’

Four Parts. Now we have three logical parts, and they are all we need to make a tale. But let’s look at four parts and see if they might not make the tale better. How could we tell it in four?

Once there was a poor man.
He tried to get rich and failed.
At last he got a lot of money.
Then he was rich.
The end.

This version of the tale has two parts for its middle. There is a fight that ends in loss, then a second fight that succeeds. It’s true the added turn of the loss gives the fight more weight, and helps us share the hero’s end in Plenty. We feel closer to him now. We may even feel he earns his wealth more when we see how he fought and failed on the way.

The tale is better, but speaking logically can we say that there are four parts? Or should we say the Middle here covers two sentences?

We might look at this ‘four part’ tale as two tales joined as one:

Once there was a poor man.
He tried to get rich and failed.
He was still poor.
The end.

Once there was a poor man.
He got a lot of money.
Then he was rich.
The end.

Logically speaking, then, we can always boil a four-part tale down to three, or a series of simpler three-part tales. And so we find for five- and eight- and twelve-part tales. We could also split the Start in two, the flat scenes of the hero’s state before the First Encounter, and then the First Encounter itself.

So I’ll join Aristotle and say a tale has but three logical parts. Let’s look at the main turns of the Middle.

The Two Turns of the Middle

The Middle has two big scenes: the Start of the Middle and the End of the Middle. Now we could look at the Middle as a tale in itself. Since it has its Start and its End, why can’t it have its Middle? It must in truth have its flat, that scene or string of scenes that lay the ground for and build up our hope and fear for the scene at the End of the Middle. But this doesn’t need any heart-scenes — in a short tale a flat will do. So we are left with only those logical two big scenes in the Middle.

The Start of the Middle

I have seen a few ways to say what goes on at the Start of the Middle. My old teacher, Frank Daniel, studied the great dramatists and dramatic theorists of the 19th century in Europe, most of all the French. He said that a tale comes out of a predicament that must be resolved. For Frank, the Start of the Middle (or First Curtain in a three-act play) is the scene where the predicament is fixed. From that scene on, we know the hero can’t ignore or escape the predicament, and he can’t walk away, whether he chose the predicament in the first place or it sprang on him unawares, like a trap.

(Frank also taught that the Start had to lay all the ground for the audience to understand the terms of the predicament and what resolving the predicament would mean, and what it would look like.)

Another way to look at the Start of the Middle comes from another of my teachers, Bob Miller. He said that the Start of the Middle is the scene where the hero ‘takes on’ the Problem (which is the same thing Frank called the Predicament) so that he can’t or won’t let it go until it’s resolved.

I like both these ways of looking at the Start of the Middle, but I tend to think of it in other terms. I do agree with Frank that the Predicament must be established, and with Bob that the hero at this point takes on the Problem, willy-nilly as it may be. But I like to see the Start of the Middle more in terms of the structure of the logical whole of the tale:

The Start of the Middle is the scene that looks forward to and heralds the End of the End of the tale.

When I say the Start of the Middle ‘looks forward to and heralds’ the end, I mean much what Frank meant when he said that this scene must conclude the act of laying all the ground for the Predicament. The scene ‘looks forward’ to the end in that it tells us what the goal is, what the Predicament or Problem is. In the case of our hero in want, his poverty is his Problem, and the Start of the Middle might be when he vows to become rich, or it might be a scene where he dreams of being rich with such an ache that he can’t help but go out looking for riches from then on. And the scene ‘heralds’ the end in that it lets us clearly know what the end will look like or feel like when we reach it.

This does not mean it predicts the end. The end may still be win or it may be lose. But we will know what winning and losing will look like when they come.

This point is at the heart of the Start of the Middle and it is shared among all three descriptions given here: when the audience hears the big scene that is the Start of the Middle, they know what kind of tale they are about to hear, they know the ground on which the tale will walk. And they know two ends that may come of it when the talesman wraps it up. One end the audience hopes will come true. One end the audience fears lest it come to pass.

The balance of this hope and this fear is where the talesman plays his audience, and the turns we feel from hope to despair are what at base we love in tales, and why we want to hear them.

The End of the Middle

The other big scene the Middle needs is the End of the Middle (or Second Curtain in a three-act play). this is not the End of the End — it does not wrap up the tale or even seem to do so. It does teeter on the brink of what might be the End of the End, though, and this brink is what the audience fears might be the end — the worst of all possible ways the tale might end up.

The End of the Middle lies one step away from what might be the End of the End. And yet, something is lacking. There is one thread not yet tied off. There is one more step that must be taken, and this step is not a sure one in fact, that step will not be taken, it will be another step in its place, and the step we do take will lead us into the End with its subordinate parts.

Take up our poor man once more. What do we hope, what do we fear for him? We hope that he finds plenty, and fear lest he die in want.

(Or we might turn this tale on its head if we let the audience understand that the one way he might win wealth would come at the price of his child’s life. Does he love wealth more, or the child? In this case we might hope he loves his child more and fear lest he take the path to wealth. But this way of looking at tales brings in aspects of the hero and his Want where it might not be the same as his Need — and that is another tale for another day.)

If we hope he wins wealth, then the End of the Middle might come when his last try at wealth is about to fail. It has failed — or at least it seems that it has. The man is about to give up all hope. He has lost hope — or at least it almost seems so. And yet, and yet…

And yet something is amiss. The last try has not yet utterly failed. The man has not lost all his hope. He can still make one last effort within the try — maybe not to win all, but at least to save something for later, to stave off the final defeat, that defeat from which there can be no coming back. Or there may be something he has for the moment lost track of. This may be something he knows and has forgotten, or some skill he has, or some object he has not yet used, or has not used in the right way. Or it may be a friend or ally who can come to his aid. Or it may be some weakness or whim or fluke in the nature of what defeats the man (his foe, or the forces that block his path), and the weakness, whim or fluke turns back whatever it is that works against the man’s hopes and leaves him not quite defeated, not quite unable to rise once more.

In short what comes right after the End of the Middle is still unfinished, and there is just the slightest cause for us to hope that all is not yet told. Or it might be that the final upturn, what J.R.R. Tolkien called the ‘eucatastrophe’ in fairy tales, that brings of a sudden the final victory, ‘victory snatched from the jaws of defeat.’

In the words of John Carter of Barsoom, ‘I still live.’

Wilderness

The Middle of long tales, such as novels and epics and sagas, has been called a wilderness, a vast wasteland, and the part of the tale that gives the talesman fits to cross. In long tales, a simple series of flat scenes that lay the grounds for the End of the Middle scene would go on too long for us to bear. We would itch and stir and yawn and wonder what’s for dinner long before the talesman brought us to the End of the Middle.

So for long tales we will need some heart-scenes in between the Start of the Middle and the End of the Middle. These are not logical parts to the tale, and so they can’t be logically foreseen and told of beforehand. This is part of what makes the long Middle such a chore to tell. But that’s another tale for another day.

(Composed with pen on paper Monday 18 February 2008)