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)