What is a Talesman?

An overview of the act of telling and hearing

A Talesman tells tales. A Talesman is a storyteller.

Once upon a time, the Talesman told his tales orally. He sang them, chanted them, spoke them aloud, acted them out, in front of his audience. The audience could see him and he could see them. And if the Talesman knew his business, he could tell when his audience was caught up in the tale, and when they were bored; when they were uncomfortable, when they were disgusted, laughing, scared, dry-mouthed.

They join in a dance, the Talesmen and his audience. The audience feeds upon his tale, and he feeds upon their reactions. They enjoy the tale, and he enjoys their enjoyment, or perhaps he delights as much in his mastery over their enjoyment.

He tells the tale to work upon his audience a certain effect. By their reactions he understands whether he is achieving his desired effect. If so, he gives them more of the same; if not, then he adjusts his tale either in its content or in the way he tells it.

The closest we have to that primal dance now in the commercial world, is the modern filmmaker and his audience. He at least can see the reactions though usually it is too late for him to make any adjustments. (Upon the stage the actors make adjustments too, but they are not the principal talemen of their art.)

“Telling” implies those to whom the tales are told. So we find a triangle consisting of the tale, the teller, and those to whom the tale is told.

Between the teller and the audience lies the tale. When the tale is told in writing, the teller and the audience remain, to a large extent, unknown to each other. But the audience knows a lot more about the teller than the teller knows about his audience. A reader stops in a bookstore, or surfs to a web page. Right there in front of him is everything the teller has chosen to put down. What is given is revealing; so is what is withheld.

In contrast, the teller writes down his tale, and leaves it where someone might find it. He hopes someone will pick it up, read it, and enjoy it. But what does he know about that person?

• The person can read
• The person is interested in reading what he finds on the pages

That much to begin with.

He knows something else, or can assume it, of the person who reads on. The person who doesn’t finish the first sentence, didn’t like what he read there. And the person who doesn’t finish the first page, didn’t like what he read there. And the person who doesn’t like the first chapter…

There is a process any navigator goes through. Along the way toward his destination, he will check to see if he is still headed in the right direction. In this way he becomes part of a self-correcting process.

Something like that happens with any reader and the book, article, web page he reads. The reader is constantly checking with himself, asking himself “Do I like this? Is this worth spending any more of my time on this?” If the answer is no, he will probably stop reading. Or maybe he will make himself a bargain: “If it doesn’t get better soon, then I’ll stop.”

I think, though, the process is a little more complex. What I described above is what is most likely going on during the beginning of the read. When a reader first picks up something to read, he doesn’t know much about it. But he’s curious enough to give it a chance. In the first sentence, page, chapter, he asks himself those questions: “Do I like this? Is it worth reading on?” But if he does like these first chunks, he has his answers — preliminary answers. “Yes, this is good, I like it, this is worth my time.”

For the talesman, this is important. It means:

What he says in the beginning of his tale determines who will be reading the middle of the tale.

And, likewise:

What he says in the middle of his tale determines who will be reading the end of the tale.

The beginning of any story should be nearly its strongest, best material. It should grab the reader by the throat — and not let go. Many have taught this. But with the notion of the “self-correcting audience” in mind, we can add the following to that advice:

• The beginning of any tale should be something that the reader who likes the end of the tale should also like.
• The middle of any tale should be something that the reader who likes the beginning of the tale should also like.
• The end of any tale should be something that the reader who likes the middle of the tale should also like.

What happens is: if the reader likes the beginning, he will go on to the middle. To turn that thought around: if the reader doesn’t like the beginning, he won’t go on to the middle. And if the reader likes the middle, he’ll go on to the end; or, if he doesn’t like the middle, he won’t go on to the end.

With each step of the tale, the talesman is weeding out his audience. And therefore, the talesman, though he never sets eyes on the face of a reader, knows that the reader who is reading the middle of the tale, liked the beginning of the tale. And the reader who is reading the end of the tale, liked the beginning and the middle of the tale.

(Composed on keyboard 21 May 2007; reworked and posted Monday 31 March 2008)

Skein of Words

Is there such a thing as ‘natural storytelling’?

Out of the Past

Over the last half year or so, I have been writing in an older and more traditional style of storytelling. I chose this in part to reject the contemporary rules of writing, most of all the wrong-headed ‘show don’t tell,’ but I also wanted to study, through what I wrote, the methods of past masters.

Their way of writing was the only way two centuries ago, in the 1800s and 1900s. And today it feels to me more comfortable both to write and read. It feels so comfortable, in fact, that I want to call it more ‘natural’ somehow.

But is this style truly ‘natural,’ or is it just that I grew up on it in reading fairy tales and older books? Maybe I learned it then and this return now is only a step back to my roots.

What after all would ‘natural storytelling’ be like, if there were such a thing? It must, I think, flow from two sources.

1. The way man’s mind works
2. The inborn properties and traits of the medium in which the tale is to be told

Man’s Mind

A tale to start with was a recreation of a remembered experience. Tales have since then grown to include imagined experiences of imagined men, and to seem to take place concurrently ‘before our eyes’ as they happen or even in the future, but all the same they have clung to the model of memory in how they are shaped. Even the experimental talesmanship rejects or leaves behind this model of memory, and so can be said to spring from it. Thus, any ‘natural’ story style would reflect this way of thinking.

The nature of man’s mind is a tale for another day, and far beyond my ken. But this must be the foundation and bedrock of all talesmanship in all media as told by and to men.

Media

A tale told by written words must differ in whatever ‘natural’ expression it has from one told by spoken words; both must differ from tales told in performance with words (drama) and without (mime). All these must differ from tales told in written words and pictures (comics) and moving pictures with sound and without (movies). And so on with the other media in which tales are told.

The natural way of words is to use the words to create the illusion of a smooth flow of events. The natural way of movies is to use moving pictures to create the illusion of a smooth flow of events.

This ‘smooth flow’ might spring from the way man’s mind works. Or it might just help the illusion of remembered events. Or it might be an artifice of pseudo-logical connections. My guess is that it’s a bit of all three, and that the reason it works to help talespinning is that our minds developed to find connections in the events of our lives; in memory these connections are not solely observed and deduced, they have become ‘law;’ because our minds and memories work this way, tales that employ these and other devices create a better illusion, feel more compelling, and seem more ‘natural.’

Written Words

Here I will note some of the ways I think written tales can create the illusion of a smooth flow of events.

The connections of the written word are formed by several rhetorical tricks that intuitive, self-taught talesmen learn by noting what feels good and ‘right’ in the tales they hear, and by then aping these tricks in the tales they tell, and watching how the audience takes them.

Conjunctive words do this: words like ‘and,’ ‘then,’ and so on. Words that state logical or causal connections also do it: words like ‘thus,’ ‘therefore,’ and ‘and so.’ Reference words can do it too: words like ‘that’ and ‘this’ in phrases such as these:

That was the last he heard of the matter, and so he forgot about it.

This was only the first time she would wear the blue dress; later it got to her signature.

All segues and transitions work this way. So do repeated words, which work like reference words:

‘I wanted the green one.’

‘But it isn’t the green one you got; the green one was already taken; it’s the yellow one that’s left, and it’s the yellow one you’ll be taking.’

Words that refer to time and temporal relations between events work this way too, and are often part of transitions. Attributions for dialogue also smooth passages that are mostly talk: compare,

‘I won’t do it.’
‘You’d better.’
‘Well, all right.’

to

‘I won’t do it,’ Thom said.
‘You’d better,’ Joe answered.
‘Well,’ Thom said, ‘all right.’

These words and phrases make of a tale a net or skein of words that join all the parts and scenes together.

But (to note the other side) there can be an excitement to tales that drop these connecting words and phrases. The fact that such a style foregoes what makes the ‘natural’ style smooth makes this style a bit jagged, and it compels its readers to guess at, make up, and supply their own connections. This asks the reader to be a more active participant in the tale. It also feels more ‘raw’ and thus, perhaps, closer to an actual experience, rather than one mediated by a talesman and told to us.

(Composed with pen on paper Sunday 30 March 2008)

The Tale that Tells Itself

Comparing interactive fiction and tales old-style

Interactive Tales

Interactive fiction is a tale that starts off like a traditional tale, but when it reaches a turning point or a point of choice in the story, it offers the reader the power to choose what should happen. Usually the reader must pick from a short list of options. The reader’s choice then lets him read on from that choice through a passage told like a traditional tale, until the next turning point or point of choice comes up. The reader then gets to choose the path again, and this process continues until a final end is reached.

Is this really a ‘tale’? How does it compare to traditional tales?

First we must note the present limitations of the form of interactive fiction. Any interactive fiction created by a man must have severe limitations, because every choice point increases the amount the ‘writer’ must write. If each choice list is limited to the minimal 2 choices, then every choice point doubles the amount of prose that will follow it. This means that 10 choice points, with each choice list containing only 2 options, will lead to 1,024 endings the writer must write! (2 to the 10th power = 1024)

Needless to say, a tale with only 10 turning points is rather slim, unless these turning points be limited to only the major turning points, in which case the ‘interactivity’ of the tale is rather weak. And a mere two choices at each point seems too few. And yet even so, look at how many endings the writer must come up with! If each ending is only one page long, he must write more than a thousand pages just for the end of what for the reader will become a 40-page story. What these writers often do, of course, is to lead different options to an early close, or have different choices come to the same end, but these alternatives are also weak; it means the reader might end up with a story that is only 14 pages long one time, 20 pages another, and 40 a third. Forty pages is slender, but 14 is downright scant. And when different choices lead to the same ending, written exactly the same way, it seems to undermine the very nature of the interactive world. Sometimes this might be the point (the ineluctability of Fate, and the real limits on our apparent power to affect the outcome of our lives), but most of us bourgeois readers will just look on it as a bit of a cheat.

These limits can be overcome with the ‘tale that writes itself’ which is interactive fiction not ‘written’ by a man, but where the man only provides the setup: the first act, or the ‘givens’ of the tale, are written out: what the setting is, who the hero and main characters are, and what the first intimation of the problem is. From this point on, the tale will be ‘written’ by an artificial intelligence (AI) that can offer the reader (who will become also a co-writer) many choices at many points, and generate prose that tells what are the consequences of the choice, and what the next choice is. The short menu of possible choices can even be replaced by a question, ‘What will he do next?’ or ‘What happens now?’ to which the reader types in whatever he pleases, and the AI takes it from there.

The day when AI is powerful enough to create such a multifarious story are not so far in the future that we can dismiss it as science-fantasy.

Tales Told By Talesmen

By contrast, the traditional tale treats the audience as passive recipient. In the start of it all, the tale was ‘true’ in some way, so of course it had already all taken place, and no choice over the events was even possible. The tale had been written backwards from its end by reality and the memory of the talesmen; he told you the tale of the victorious battle after victory had been won, and he arranged the events of what he told with that victory in mind, choosing to highlight those events that seemed to him to have contributed most to the ending. The audience was invited to lean back, and be guided through the highlights of the tale, and the talesman tried to entertain his audience by his art.

This is a very different view of what the audience is and what it wants from the tale.

Games

Today, the most advanced interactive fiction comes to us in the form of video games. The reader or ‘player’ is invited to become the hero of the conflict, to solve the puzzle, to fight the battles, to gain the victory for himself. He is not merely getting choices, he is actively participating, and the AI is responding according to the rules the game designers have set forth as to what is possible and likely. The player’s own skills help decide the outcome of each step, and the interactivity is a constant flow or mesh between player and AI. In multiplayer games, the many players increase the ‘noise’ or randomness of the outcomes, and add to the illusion of reality.

There is some question as to whether we ought to call video games ‘tales’ at all.

Video games seem more like animated movies than tales told by words.

My Take

It seems to me that interactive tales told with words alone will not go far, and come to be as the result of experiments to see how far AI can be pushed, but that they will remain curios only, and never achieve widespread popularity. Instead, AI might come to tell traditional tales by itself under the guidance of the tale-designer who sets forth the setting, the circumstances, and the characters involved in the tale. The ‘reader’ would then choose what genre of tale he wished, and he might get even a choice of the setting, the circumstances, and the hero from a menu. The AI would then spin a tale for him, much as talesmen today write genre fiction from formulas. (For example, the reader might tell the AI, ‘I want a tale of the Shadow, set it in San Francisco Chinatown, and let the villain be Wu-Ting,’ or else, ‘I want Sherlock Holmes to battle wits with Professor Moriarity in Edinburgh on the eve of the Great War.’ The AI would spin the tale from there. These characters and settings would have to be known by the AI, as well as what sort of things they do, of course.)

Interactive video games are already far beyond traditional animation in the realism with which they can paint the imagined worlds, so it seems that these games pose a real rivalry with movies and television as entertainment. I think that the traditionally-told movie and television tales will still appeal to many, for certain types of tales or types of moods; the two will coexist.

Traditional tales, to the extent that they can become interactive, seem less likely; giving the reader an infinite series of choices (such as are offered to the video game player) will have him work almost as hard as if he wrote the tale himself. It would in the end come to no difference, and those of this bent will end up as talesmen themselves. Indeed, to judge by the sheer abundance of novels and stories being written today, it seems this has already begun to happen.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, March 29, 2008)

I Me

How leaving commercial publishing changed what I write

In the middle of last year I made up my mind to leave the commercial traditional publishing world behind. This has led me to change what I write. Here’s how.

To start, I must say I was not at the time much in the commercial traditional publishing world. I had sold and published two fantasy novels, years back (actually they were the first parts of one novel, whose end has never been published). Since then I wrote a few more books that were not published, and went on writing other tales that I could never bring myself to finish.

In the meantime I watched what was happening in publishing from afar, and none of it looked healthy or good. And the copyfight began, and the publishing houses were merged and taken over by larger multimedia conglomerates, and the idea of ‘intellectual property’ arose, and the corporations and money-class of financiers moved closer to their goal of dissolving all national governments as viable entities and ruling the world as an interlocking series of corporate masters, with the other 99% of us humans serving as serfs or slaves.

Before the Soviet Union failed, I visited there. I came back by way of Scandinavia. Even after a mere three weeks as a tourist, I felt a great relief in setting foot in Finland and Sweden. It was as though a weight were off my shoulders and I felt free to breathe again.

I feel the same way whenever I move from the world of proprietary, closed software to Gnu and Linux and other free and open computer applications.

I feel the same way whenever I move from those tales now locked up in perpetual copyright, owned not by writers but by corporations, to works in the public domain or under Creative Commons.

I made up my mind to join this movement.

This is why I release all my works under a Creative Commons Share-Alice license. This license gives anyone the go-ahead to adapt, republish, distribute, rework, edit, or translate the tales I tell, so long as they allow others the same freedom with the results.

Oddly, I feel a similar freedom to breathe now that I don’t work with an eye to selling my works to those corporations.

When I wrote with commercial publishing in mind, I strove to keep my tales conventional. I read accounts on how to tell tales the way editors want, and what editors are looking for, and the taboos of modern fiction writing such as ‘show don’t tell.’

Now I write as I please. I work with tales that appeal to me, and I tell them in ways I myself prefer. This has driven me into an odd corner. I have looked to stress my own quirks, and not suppress them.

It has good points and bad.

Among the good, are that I enjoy more what I am doing. My work enriches the world of tales more than if I only aimed at repeating what others said with variations. I used to dislike advertising my tales; this smacked of ‘sales’ and I blushed even to attempt it. But now I can give my works away and this makes all the difference in the world. Now I say, ‘Here’s a story I wrote, you might like it, feel free to try it if you wish.’ Since there is no payment or penalty involved on the reader’s part, this to me feels more like sharing than huckstering. And because the tales I tell reflect me with all my quirks, they approach more what and who I am, and thus have more of an identity.

Among the bad are weaknesses in the tales, that I should stress. The good I need not stress any more than I have already; all I can add to any young talesmen and would-be writers out there is, If you love your freedom, there is no other way to do it.

When I wrote with the fear of Editorial Orthodoxy ever upon me, I felt a keen awareness each time I strayed near the borders of What Was Not Done. Then I had to question myself and argue, I had to justify each such ‘error.’ And I worked to make those passages sound so wonderful in every phrase, that, I prayed, the Editorial High Priests would sigh and let the transgression go by.

This left the work stronger, and better.

I was also aware, even when I kept well within the bounds of What Was To Be Done, of One who would Judge the tale. Be he Agent or Editor, some Professional would squint at my lines, and grumble, and must be satisfied. This gave me a consciousness of an Other whose tastes simply must be met, and this made me see my own lines with other eyes. Even though I had only the vaguest notion of what would please that Other, it still made me redact my words, and go over them again, and catch phrases that were weak, and consider passages that were not strong enough, and I think in many ways the tales got better, and better-told.

Now I don’t have that any more. I have as yet no clear sense of the Audience of Readers, either. I don’t even know if any of my tales, though I spread them widely over all the Earth with more copies than even the largest corporate publishing behemoth would, will even be read.

And thus I am inclined to let things go before, perhaps, they are wholly ripe. I will declare a tale finished complete & done with fewer drafts and less polish. It will be more individual, it may be more enthusiastic, but in some ways it will not be as rounded or as accessible as it would have been had I told it with an eye to please that Professional Other of the Publishing Church.

Therefore I say this too to you, O would-be writer and young talesman: Beware also of your self.

(Composed with pen on paper and on keyboard Friday 28 March 2008)

Alone Again

The lone wolf is a different animal from the bison in his great herds

In ‘The Trackless Wild’ on 2008.02.24, I wrote about the Lone Gunman, the talesman of today who writes outside the traditional publishing markets. But in my usual pedantic way I felt I had to define terms, explore history (of which I was mainly guessing and theorizing) and along the way I never said in good terms what I really wanted to say.

Here, then, I’ll try a second time.

What I want to do is contrast my own reactions and approach to tale-telling when I was working to sell my books in the commercial marketplace, and today as an outside agent.

A Chain of Walls

The world of commercial publishing places several walls between the talesman and his readers. The first wall is of agents, for few publishers today can afford the time to read all the writers who hope to have their tales published. So the publishers won’t look at a manuscript unless it has been passed on to them by someone they can trust. In a few cases, this can be an author they publish. If a popular author reads a tale by a newcomer and likes it, he might pass it on to his publisher and say, ‘take a look at this.’ The editors at the publisher will read the manuscript as a favor to the popular author.

Writers don’t have a lot of time to read the manuscripts of newcomers either, so this happens rarely. Most of the time the new writer has to interest an agent in looking over his sample, then if the sample is good enough, the completed manuscript. But agents are also swamped for time; time is the great limiting factor here, the true choke-point.

So the first wall the would-be writer faces is the agent. He must get an agent’s approval to pass this wall.

(There has lately arisen a bank of small publishers, most of whom specialize in a certain kind of writing, and these small publishers will read unagented manuscripts. They are more and more the face of commercial publishing to new writers, but they are not what we the reading public usually think of when we think of publishers. The world of publishing used to be all small houses even at the large publishing centers of the world, but in America over the past generation corporate mergers and acquisitions have winnowed the field of big New York publishers to half a dozen or so big-time players with corporate connections to ‘big sister’ media such as radio, television, and film.)

The second wall the writer faces is the publisher. The publisher has an editorial board, and a number of readers, who are paid very little for all the work they do. Publishing still persists in having a sort of glamour for those youths of a literary bent, who love words and study the language and literature in university. Publishing pays them, therefore, both in salary and in glamour and, I suppose, in dreams, for every dewy-eyed novice in the publishing house dreams of discovering a new voice, a new genius, a new contributor to world literature. Because he is getting payment in these three coinages, the actual cash money the reader gets is small, and the amount of work he is called on to do is great. He is expected to take manuscripts home with him and work nights and week-ends too. But there are, again, only 168 hours in a week.

Within this publishing ‘wall’ are a few smaller walls. The manuscript of the total stranger to the publisher will find itself first with a reader. If the reader likes the manuscript he will pass it along with a recommendation to an editor. But if the editor finds the manuscript is poor, he will be unhappy with his reader. ‘Why did you make me waste my time on this?’ he will ask. So we find a bias in the reader in favor of rejection. This bias, though it may be subtle, we will find at all the small walls in the publishing house.

If an editor does like the manuscript his reader has passed on to him, he must then decide if he likes it enough. The decision here starts to move away from the intrinsic qualities of the tale, and into considerations of profit and loss. Any given publisher can only put out to market so many titles a year. Each title eats the firm’s time and money. Each title represents a calculated bet at the great casino of the world of bookselling. Thus, the editors want to place those bets that stand the best chance of paying off. They want to offer booksellers a list of titles each month that will sell the best, and bring profits to the house over time. These are complicated decisions.

I will offer only a brief sketch of some of these considerations. What has been selling well this season or year, stands a good chance of selling well next season or year. But tastes do change so we must be careful to seek out any sign a phase is coming to an end. If we offer all our titles to suit what has just sold, we will be at great risk if the public taste does change, so we want to offer a bit of a range, a line-up if you will. In this case we might only have one spot in out list for a particular flavor of tale, and we must choose the one that offers us the best chance of selling big. We have to take into account our authors as well. We have some authors whose books we sold in the past. If one of them has a new manuscript, we will prefer it over a newcomer’s, because each of our established author’s titles helps to sell the others. Booksellers are familiar with this author’s name, and will gravitate toward it. Any author who has had a big seller or won awards for his past works will have quite a plus to put on the jacket to encourage sales. But at the same time, we always need to look out for a rising star, who might well turn out to be our established, big-selling, award-winning author of tomorrow.

The third wall the talesman’s work will face is the book-seller. A few great chains dominate book stores in North America, but there is also a wide web of independents. These stores have buyers who will meet with the sales representatives of the publishers to decide which books to stock on their shelves. Here for the first time space becomes a consideration along with time. A store has only so many linear feet of shelves, and can display only so many titles.

Along with the wall of book-sellers comes the wall of libraries. The public library system has become a great force in the success or failure of many kinds of books today. The library is like the book-seller in that the reader will go to the library as he will go to the book store, to find a title to read. The library is unlike the book-seller in that it has more things to consider than simply if a title will prove popular. A library’s ‘mission’ is different from the for-profit book store.

The next wall the title must pass through is a parallel wall to these others. It is the wall of notoriety. There are reviewers in the major newspapers and magazines that appeal to book-readers, and there are reviewers online. There are book clubs, and there is word of mouth. These all can encourage a particular title to pass through the choke-points of the major walls along the way. I’ve already mentioned how a published author can encourage his editor to read an unagented manuscript. Favorable critical reviews encourage book-sellers to stock a title, or stock it in more depth, or put it on the shelf face-out rather than spine-out, or add it to a special display of greater prominence. Favorable critical reviews encourage publishers to devote more marketing resources to a title, and to buy stands in book stores, and to pay for the author to go on the road to promote the title.

The Bison Who are Apes

The result of all these walls is to make it hard for a new author to see his tale published and for sale in the local book store. He must see that his manuscript makes it past each of these high walls. Each wall winnows the field of all the titles that seek to surpass it. A thousand manuscripts are offered to the agent, who will agree to recommend a score; five of the score might be published and one of the five makes it onto the book store shelf. Though many are offered, few are chosen.

This forces the talesman who wants to earn his bread as an author to consider his tale in two ways. He must think of it as a tale, that he wants to write, that he enjoys writing, that he would want to read, that is good, or even great. But he must also think of it as he imagines the gatekeepers at the walls will think of it. He finds himself thus in a position of juggling his own tastes with what he imagines are commercial considerations.

How does the young writer find out what these commercial considerations are? He reads books on how to write; he attends conferences; he goes to book signings and tries to chat up the author du jour; he looks at the shelves of his local bookstore to see what is selling; he ‘plays the sedulous ape,’ as Stevenson put it, to the big name authors whose tales his most resembles.

The result of this process is a kind of self-censorship. It is an apprenticeship not in telling tales, but in producing fiction that resembles the conventional fiction that is selling now, and has sold in the recent past.

This is not of needs a bad thing. Part of what the young writer learns deals very much with the basic laws of talesmanship. The agents, editors, and booksellers are more in touch with what ‘works’ in tales of any given genre than many novice authors and even the reading public themselves. It is easy for a new talesman to get carried away into the land of his own quirks and tastes; if he writes for his own ears alone, the question arises whether anyone else will hear him, or like what they hear him say.

Part of the apprenticeship, though, leads new writers to write tales that are like what has already been written. A sameness, a blandness, may result.

The gatekeepers are not perfect, they are mortal men after all. The proof that they are not perfect can be seen in the fact that, even 30 years after the industry moved largely to concentrate on producing mostly big blockbuster books, publishers still pay huge advances for titles that flop, and best sellers come out of nowhere and surprise the editors.

The Lone Wolf

In contrast to all this, a new paradigm of publishing has arisen. It is the descendent of vanity publishing, and it is called epublishing, self-publishing, print-on-demand, and it uses the Internet and other modern technologies to get a tale around all the big walls of commercial publishing.

The effect of this other world of publishing is very different on the young author.

He can put away his Writer’s Digest how-to books. He can put away his Literary Marketplace. He can write what he wants — whatever he wants.

In the commercial (traditional) world of publishing, the best hope of the young writer is to be compared to a famous name. To write like best-selling authors, and to make books that are like theirs. In the world of the lone wolf, the best hope of the young writer is to be make his own name stand out. To make books that are completely different from those of the best-selling authors.

In the lone wolf world, the young writer has to mine his oddness and his quirks, even accentuate them. The lone wolf world will grow huge in number (indeed it has already done so: cf. how many books http://www.lulu.com offers each year) because it lacks the choke points of the walls of traditional commercial publishing. Nothing gets winnowed out of the lone wolf world. Every single manuscript that gets finished (and a large number that never get finished) is offered, put out on the Internet. The reviewers of the traditional commercial book world disdain these titles; they haven’t enough time to review the ‘acceptable’ titles put out by the major publishers, and certainly don’t have time to swim the oceans of the lone wolf world.

In the traditional world of commercial publishing, a title stands out if it repeats a popular success of the past, but does it better somehow — maybe with a twist or wrinkle, maybe with a deeper emotional power, maybe with a greater facility of words. But in the lone wolf world, a title can only stand out if it blazes new territory, and is nothing like the popular successes of the traditional commercial world.

Choices

This offers the young would-be writer two roads and he must choose one or the other; they are so unlike that it’s hard to see how one could follow both at once. The traditional commercial world offers the chance of great fame and fortune; if your work makes it through the Great Winnowing, it will stand out as one of a small (well, huge, but much smaller than the oceans of titles in the lone wolf world) number of titles on offer. Traditional publishers will pay the young writer an advance on his royalties; this is part of the wager the publishing house places with each title. And for the gratification of the peacock of the young writer, a ‘real’ book that can be bought at the local book store will hardly be surpassed even by the rarest of rare commercial success in the lone wolf world.

Authors can make more money in the lone wolf world. In the world of epublishing, authors’ royalties as a percentage of sales is much higher. Total sales though are lower, and advances are exceedingly rare. And there remains a stigma on titles that appear only through the lone wolf world. Most readers will not consider such titles as ‘real books.’

The lone wolf world is also a great Unknown. it remains in its infancy, and there is no sure way to tell how it will grow, and what are the paths to ‘success’ one may find in it.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday 27 March 2008)

The Scene That Must Be in a Tale

What we want, what we need, what we must have in a tale’s end

La Scène à Faire

The great French drama critique of the XIX century Francisque Sarcey was well known for one theory above all, what he called ‘la scène à faire’ which Archer the American critic translated as the ‘Obligatory Scene.’ Alas, M. Sarcey nowhere explained fully what he meant by this term. But we can guess, and it may be that in guessing we will learn more than if we but heard all of what M. Sarcey thought of his term.

It is in the first place no doubt related to what Chekhov is said to have written:

If you introduce a loaded pistol in Act I of your play, you had better fire that pistol before the final curtain.

I paraphrase the great playwright, for I have heard the saying in several forms. One prominent form has it that the pistol of Act I must then be fired in Act III, the final act, but I think it could also be fired in an intervening act just as well.

Our Minds as We Watch or Read

Let’s poke into what Chekhov said. If we the audience see a loaded pistol in the first part of a play, we expect to see the pistol fired at some later point.

Why would this be so?

The start of a tale (most of all of a tale put in the form of a play or movie, both of which need to condense the tale into a single evening) sets forth the hero, his problem, and how he hopes to solve it. It also puts us the audience in a certain frame of mind — that is, the start of the tale will leave us expecting to be entertained in a certain way (within the bounds of the kind of tale we take it for), and hoping for one outcome while fearing another.

This tradition is based upon the way our minds relate to tales. It may be artificial and we may have to learn it, or it might be basic to the way man’s mind must work, or it might be basic to the way the Universe must work — I won’t argue for one or the other here, because I don’t have any idea. (If it is wholly artifice, then there may be a different way to construct a tale entirely. This is something for the more adventurous, or experimental, of talesmen to explore.)

With this in mind, we can look for audiences to learn, without even knowing that they have learned, some conventions that come as logical outcomes to this rule. We the audience will learn these conventions in two ways:

1. Without thinking, we will learn it as a pattern in all the tales we’ve heard so far, and come to expect the pattern to be repeated in all the tales we’ve yet to hear.
2. We will feel a greater pleasure when we hear a tale that obeys this rule; when we hear a tale that breaks the rule, we will feel a sharper disappointment.

The rule can be broken in two ways. If we take Chekhov’s pistol, we see how:

1. The pistol, shown us in a flourish in Act I, cleaned, loaded, cocked, and put upon the mantle in center stage, is never picked up again or fired.
2. No pistol is shown to us in Act I (or II). Then in the moments before the final curtain, a pistol is produced and fired — without warning.

The second of these ‘unlawful acts’ is known generally as the deus ex machina — this is when suddenly, out of nowhere, some person, entity or device appears and solves all the tale’s problems. We feel cheated when the tale ends like this, which is why even the hint of the deus ex machina is taboo. ‘Well,’ we feel, ‘if this happened now, it could have happened in the beginning or any point on the way, so why did we have to waste all this time on this stupid story?’

What We Look For

It is the first ‘unlawful act’ that gives rise to the notion of the Obligatory Scene. When we hear a tale, we are aware of conventions the tale will follow, because we have heard many other tales, we know what a ‘tale’ consists of, and we look for this tale to follow the pattern, conform to the conventions, and ‘obey the rules’ that we have come, however unconsciously, to expect. Among these conventions, I think two in particular concern us here:

1. A genre is a tale tole in its own conventions, which are more narrow than those that rule over tales in general
2. The solution of the tale’s problem is implicit in the way the problem has been shown to us.

As to no. 1 above, when we see the scientist in his home garage try to invent a time machine, if we think we hear a satirical tale, we look for him to fail. But if we think we hear a tale of science fiction or fantasy, we look for him to succeed, and move through time.

As to no. 2 above, when we see the tale present some person or object (such as the pistol) in a way that suggests we pay heed and remember it, then we will look to see it figure prominently in the hero’s success or failure. (In the specific case of the pistol, it is not something that was generally taken out and flourished in the bourgeois polite society M. Chekhov depicted in his plays, and so the mere presence of the gun would have been unusual, and memorable.)

These two sets of expectations — those that come from a genre, and those that come from the manner and the timing of the way the tale’s elements are set before us — have a strong effect over what we look for through the rest of the tale.

They both create, by way of these our expectations, ‘scènes à faire’ — those Scenes That Must Be in the Tale.

(Composed with pen on paper Wednesday 26 March 2008)

Memories, Hopes, Dreams, Wishes, Desires

What we find in tales is not life, nor even a representation of life.

Francisque Sarcey, the great French drama critic of the XIX century, had this to say about art:

All the arts of imitation are representations of life. All have for their purpose the placing of nature before our eyes. What other object has painting that that of portraying for us either scenes from life or places which serve as a setting for it? And does not sculpture strive to render for us the images of living creatures, now single and now joined in groups. We may say with equal truth of all the arts that they are representations of life; in other words, copies from nature.

Tous les arts d’imitation sont des représentations de la vie humaine. Tous ont pour but de nous mettre la nature sous les yeux. Est-ce que la peinture a un autre objet que de nous figurer soit des scènes de la vie humaine, soit des lieux où elle s’encadre? Et la sculpture ne s’efforce-t-elle pas de nous rendre des images de créatures vivantes, tantôt isolées et tantôt réunies en groupe. De tous ces arts, on pourrait dire tout aussi justement qu’ils sont des représentations do la vie humaine, en d’autres termes des copies de la nature.

(From Quarante ans de théâtre: feuilletons p. 125. The English translation is from Brander Matthews’ translation, A Theory of the Theater p.20)

This is surprising, since already the Impressionists had begun to paint not ‘copies from nature’ but refigurements of what they saw, and put on canvas a bit of what they felt of what they saw.

We have learned in the West a bit more about the psychology of human perception since Sarcey wrote those words some 130 years ago. (In India they knew all this some 3,000 years ago.) We know that what we think we ‘see’ is no more than an excitation of some cells at the end of our optic nerves, from which the chemical messengers in our brain cells store the impressions. And we know that what we ‘remember’ is no more than an impression of those impressions. The impressions seem to be there, locked away for as long as we live, maybe, but what we can dredge up from them readily is only a sketch or approximation of those impressions.

What then could art be, but an attempt to capture those impressions? An impression of those impressions itself, rendered through the rough means of the medium itself.

Art is more or less abstract, and only music is more abstract than words.

It is true that Sarcey wrote of the ‘arts of imitation’ which include painting and sculpture and, for him, the theater. But a play is a tale as much as it is an imitation of life: it is an enactment of a tale, in fact, and a representation not of life but of a story. At its bottom a play is a tale much as the first tales told around the camp fire. Then one talesman would have voiced his different characters with different voices, and added on the voice of his own narrative; in a play the narrative is acted out, and different actors play the various parts. But the direct lineage to the theater from plain tales is clear.

Tales, then, are far removed from ‘la vie humaine’ and are more like memories, and memories are notorious for their inexactitude. In short, to paraphrase Mark Twain, every memoir is a lie; and every work of fiction is a lie atop a lie.

This distinction is not an idle one. We talesmen must bear it in mind, for if we can say that our tales are not copied from life but rather from memories, hopes, dreams, wishes, desires, then we can see how this plays into our strategies of toying with and exploiting the memories, hopes, dreams, wishes and desires of our audience.

And if we in the audience allow the tales we hear to be but drafts of memories, hopes, dreams, wishes and desires, then we will have a good basis on which to judge a tale and how well it works for us, and we will have a good guide to lead us to those tales, and those types of tales, that will best serve to satisfy us in our own memories, hopes, dreams, wishes and desires.

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, March 25, 2008)

High and Low

What kind of tales do you want to read? Who do you want to read your tales?

How Sarcey Defined a Play

Francisque Sarcey was the great drama critic in Paris from 1860-1899. In those years he promised many times to write a volume comprising all his theories of playmaking. He never got round to it, but he did write an essay on the topic.

In this essay, alas, he did not write about one of his most famous ideas, that of the scène à faire (or ‘Obligatory Scene’ as Archer translated it). But he did define a play: to Sarcey, the business of a play —

is to represent life to a crowd

(My translations here are from Brander Matthews. Sarcey’s original line is: ‘Il s’agit de représenter la vie humaine devant une foule.’
— Quarante Ans de Théâtre Vol 1, p. 129)

— and he spent much of the first part of his essay insisting on the ‘crowd’ or audience, and writing on the effect the crowd had on the play.

The Low

For Sarcey, a play is not a play without its audience, and the audience must be more than one soul. He insists on this point so strongly that even when he admits that a play acted out for an audience of one is, in truth, a ‘play,’ he has to torment his words and logic and say that this one viewer, be he King or a lowly theater janitor, stands in for and represents the necessary crowd.

Why did Sarcey feel he had to go so far? He says he does so,

because from this simple fact we can derive all the laws of the theater without a single exception.

(‘parce qu’il est en effet le point de départ, parce que de ce simple fait nous allons tirer, sans en excepter une, toutes les lois du théâtre.’
— Quarante Ans de Théâtre Vol 1, pp. 128–129)

But I think it was because he wanted to speak of the commercial theater of his day, and had much to say about the crowd’s effect upon the actors and upon its own members. But when he came to consider ‘the Theater’ in the abstract, he felt he must start with definitions to answer ‘What is a play?’ — though indeed he didn’t need to do so, and the conflict drove him to absurd stands such as the following:

The king represents the absent audience; he is the crowd all by himself. And likewise the famous solitary spectator at the Odéon in the old days—the one whom Lireux provided with a foot-warmer,—he was the representative of the absent multitude. This legendary spectator was not only a spectator, he was the public. He included in his own person the twelve hundred truants who should have occupied the vacant seats above him. They had delegated their powers to him; it was they who applauded with his hands and who bore witness of their boredom when he opened his mouth to yawn.

(‘Ce roi figure le public absent; il est la foule à lui tout seul. Et de même le fameux spectateur l’Odéon des anciens jours, celui auquel Lireux faisait apporter sa chaufferette, il était le représentant de la multitude absente. Ce spectateur légendaire n’était point un spectateur, il était le public. Il ramassait en sa personne les douze cents infidèles qui auraient dû occuper les places vides autour de lui. Ils lui avaient délégué leurs pouvoirs; c’était eux qui applaudissaient par ses mains, qui témoignaient de leur ennui quand il ouvrait la bouche pour bâiller.’
— Quarante Ans de Théâtre Vol 1, pp. 128)

But when I read these words, I am struck by Sarcey’s bourgeois bent. He ever insisted on a popular theater, as though popularity set the Seal of Quality upon a play, and as though popular success were the one great goal to which all plays and playwrights must aspire.

The High

A very different point of view would be to take the opposite approach and break the crowd up into its individual members, and say that

A play is a representation of life acted out before an audience of individuals sitting together.

From this we could talk of how the performances and the logical development of the play works upon each man’s heart and mind.

But the result of such a definition is to bend to the inherent quality of the piece in its words, its progress, and the gestures and readings of its players. This looks for the Seal of Quality some place other than mere popularity.

Two Camps of Tales, and of Talesmen

All this speaks of a distinction between a Popular tale and a tale of Quality. Between the tales told for the crowd in the camp and marketplace, and those tales that are told for the few, the rare, the men of high taste.

Sarcey, the bourgeois critic who insisted he spoke for the average, paying theater-goer, set his foot firmly in the Popular camp. He wrote of popular plays and judged how the crowd would like them. And many of his critics and rivals would rather have plays that appealed to the few; to them gross popularity was more a sign of vulgarity and shallowness than of depth and refinement.

It helps you, as talesman and audience both, to know in what camp you mean to make your home. We don’t always have to choose, but in the main and for most of the hours we do so choose, and we tent to stick to our home camp through most of our telling and our reading.

I stand with the Low Tales of Popularity.

So you must take what I say here with that thought in mind. If you would write, or read, the High Tales of Refinement, then you must be skeptical of all I say, and ask yourself often, ‘How does this or that apply not to the Low Tales but to the High? Does it say anything at all of the High Tale?’

(Note: Sarcey’s Quarante Ans de Théâtre can be found online in the original at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k550157/f416.table )

(Composed with pen on paper Monday, March 24, 2008)

The Well Made Play

How one man tried to catalog what makes tales work, and how his work was lost.

The Flower of Europe

The culture of Europe reached its peak in the end of the 19th century. Paris was its cultural center where the theater reigned supreme. Bourgeois life in its first flowering of the Modern World made a glittering, beautiful trap.

Sarcey

Francisque Sarcey was a playwright (once only), teacher, and most famously a drama critic for some newspapers of fueilletons for over 40 years, from 1860 to the century’s end.

He loved the theater and claimed no special intellectual gift; he said he represented the average bourgeois theater-goer, ‘the one who pays.’ But he had a clear intellect and common sense, and the optimism of his age. Over the thousands of reviews he wrote, Sarcey helped to mark out and popularize the notion of the ‘well-made play’ or pièce bien faite — the idea of the play as a bit of magic (or clock-making) that worked in certain predictable and sure ways on its audience.

His favorites among dramatists were Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou.

One thing we must note before we go on: this was a small world and its tastes fell into a small sphere. The readers of magazines and newspapers who flocked to the theater were bourgeois Parisians who shared values, tastes, dreams and aspirations of Modern Society. And the fact that a play is viewed in public, en masse, means that it must appeal to men and women, young and old, rich and poor, all at the same moments. This further served to make the popular trends in theater uniform, even as popular movies today seem to repeat the same situations again and again. There was, for example, a preference for comedy and the happy ending, the heroes were themselves bourgeois, the family figured prominently, and the goals included social acceptance and advancement, wealth, and keeping up appearances even when the wealth was lacking. Clever twists and turns of the plot were lauded over depth of character, and as Sarcey proclaimed himself no more nor less than an average bourgeois himself, we cannot look for any other point of view from him.

All the same, he was a genius in his way.

End of the Age

History turned, and the great Belle Époque came to an end. In the second decade of the 20th century, Europe destroyed itself; there followed the end of empires and the loss of wealth from colonies, and one more round of suicidal destruction two decades later. The happy, smug theater Sarcey loved began to fail even before the first World War; young intellectuals scorned the bourgeois life that they had been born into, and moved beyond the clockwork plays of their grandparents. In the meantime movies began to draw off the masses of viewers.

Sarcey, because he wrote for ephemeral press, and because the type of theater he championed, fell wholly out of favor, was at first disdained, then parodied and ridiculed (notably by George Bernard Shaw), and at last forgotten.

His best reviews were bound in Quarante Ans du Theâtre in 1902, shortly after his death. He also wrote a Theory of the Theater, which was translated into English with comments by noted American critic Brander Matthews.

Hope Against Hope

I have long looked on Sarcey’s model as a sort of Lost Ark of the Covenant of talesmanship, that might make me a great talesman if I could but fathom all his clues, recipes, and instructions. It is a vain hope, I’m sure.

William Gillette wrote on this general notion in his Introduction to How to Write a Play, a collection of letters written by the great French playwrights of that glittering age edited by Brander Matthews:

There are no workable rules for play-writing to be found here—nor, indeed, any particular light of any kind on the subject, so the letters may be approacht with a mind arranged for enjoyment. I would be sorry indeed for the trying-to-be dramatist who flew to this volume for consolation and guidance. I’m sorry for him any way, but this additional catastrophe would accelerate my sympathy, making it fast and furious. Any one sufficiently inexperienced to consult books in order to find out how to write a play will certainly undergo a severe touch of confusion in this case, for four of the letter-writers confess quite frankly that they do not know—two of these thereupon proceeding to tell us, thus forcibly illustrating their first statement. One author exclaims, “Have instinct!”—another, “Have genius!” Where these two necessaries are to be obtained is not revealed. Equally discouraging is the Dumas declaration that “Some from birth know how to write a play and the others do not and never will.” That would have killed off a lot of us—if we had seen it in time.

(Composed with pen on paper Sunday, March 23, 2008)

Too Long Too Soon Too Much

Sometimes in tales more than enough turns out to be just the right amount

Moderation — or Not

‘Moderation in all things,’ the wise man says, and all in all the word works well to rule our lives, our health, and our art. But sometimes this is not so. Sometimes excess makes a stronger imprint on the audience.

We the audience always want more of the parts we like, and less of the parts we don’t like. Until, that is, you give them to us. Then we find there’s too much of the good part, and the tale strikes us as bland or dull, without much interest.

We the audience are children. We know what we want but we don’t know what’s good for us.

The wise talesman takes risks with his audience. Sometimes that means going too far.

Scratch the Itch

Think of an itch you feel in the body — let it be an actual itch, or a thirst, or hunger, or sexual desire. This ‘itch’ annoys you. If you scratch the itch you will feel pleasure. The longer you wait to scratch the itch, the more the annoyance will grow. It will grow because you feel it through more hours. It will also grow (or seem to grow) in intensity. And when you scratch the itch after this delay, you feel more pleasure than you feel when you scratch the itch right away.

This is the nub of the ploy at hand.

In order to please the audience more, the talesman must pain them more, and longer.

We can carry the analogy further. If we want more relief when we scratch, we shall delay doing so, which extends the duration of the annoyance of the itch. We must suffer through more hours. But when we scratch, the pleasure comes at once. But the more we scratch, the less pleasure we take in it. So we find the long itch and short scratch will please us the most. This means more of what we don’t like, and less of what we do like — and it is the opposite of what children would expect.

Children gorge themselves on sweets when they are not yet even hungry.

In a tale, this means that what the audience needs is more of the parts they don’t like, then less of the parts they like.

Too Long

In the financial world, the laws of compound interest say that the longer you keep your wealth untouched in interest-yielding accounts, the more it will grow, and not in a straight line but an exponential curve. Something like that holds true in tales.

The longer we feel we live with a character, the greater the bond we feel to him. We feel more in tune with his goals, we feel a greater sense that he and we are one, we feel we know and like him more. And the longer we endure with him his struggle, the more we feel we need for him to come out on top, and the more deeply we feel his struggle matters to us, to him, and to his world. These feelings go beyond what any words can give us and come only from the time we spend in the tale with him.

An easy way out is trivial. It is worth nothing in a tale. But what is hard and long grows to an ‘epic scale’ and seems ‘larger than life itself.’

This means, for example, that when we follow a detective through a mystery for 2 hours in a movie, or 400 pages in a book, we will feel the mystery matters more, the crimes have greater urgency to be solved, and we will feel greater pleasure when the detective solves the riddles and the criminal gets justice, than if the movie ran only 1 hour, or the book but 150 pages.

This is true, even when much of the time or pages are filled with relatively trivial events.

Take the 2 hour movie and the 400 page book, and edit them down to 1 hour, or 150 pages. It will be the same detective, the same mysterious crime, the same suspects, the same solution. All the highlights will remain; only the relatively trivial events will be pruned back. By some views, the result will be tighter and more gripping. But we the audience will feel fewer thrills and less involvement in the ending. We will feel that a lesser crime has been solved, that the whole affair added up, somehow, to less.

This is so, because (in part) we have spent the added hour in the theater, and the added hours in our reading chair. In part, then, this effect grows on us as a result of how much real time we spend in following the tale.

Time and Tricks

It also grows as a result of the story-time the talesman tricks us into believing has gone by. This is one of the great tricks in the talesman’s toolbox: the means by which he fools us into feeling more time has passed than did pass by our clocks.

The time the audience spends in the theater or the reading chair can be measured by the clock. This is an objective measure. But the time we feel we spend is subjective, and the talesman can fool us into believing it lasts longer.

When we fall into a good tale, it casts a spell on us, and we drift into a kind of trance. Time stretches in that state. A year can pass in ten seconds, a second can pass in ten minutes.

In written tales, a short paragraph:

Two years passed. Two years, and we were no closer to our goal. All the sweat and pain of those two years seemed wasted, it went for nothing. The goal seemed as far off as it had at the onset.

Then, one day…

— will give the reader the impression of much of that story-time, without the need to dwell on all the details over 50 pages. This and other like tricks will never give us readers the full sense of pain or the full bond we would have felt, if we had gone through all those details — but almost. These tricks represent a sort of compromise between robbing the audience of too much of our time, and giving us the full treatment so that our pleasure at the end will be greatest.

Too Soon

Sometimes (and maybe all the time) the fact that scratching the itch feels better when it is brief, means that the ending of a tale’s struggle should come on us unawares. That it should come ‘too soon.’ That it should almost come as a surprise.

Pain, pain, pain, pain … relief! Ah!
The End.

Therefore the end of any conflict in a tale, be it a small skirmish along the way, or the great War that gives the tale its shape, should be swift, sudden, and short.

Too Much

Along with these thoughts on the immoderation of Art, we must add ‘too much.’ Small conflicts and neutral tones that differ little from one another, make for bland tales when the general audience sees them. (This is not true for all audiences. Tastes differ from one group to the next.)

Conflict comes from two forces who oppose each other. The stronger each force, and the more diametrically and directly they oppose each other, the stronger the conflict will be.

Earth tones are comforting and bland. They do not tempt us or repulse us. They do not fight much against one another, being all close to neutral. Primary colors are bright and they attract and repulse and clash with one another.

There are ‘earth tones’ in man’s urges and aims and feelings and in his world as well. There are primary colors there too.

Pulp tales and penny dreadfuls and pornography, comic books, and fairy tales, all deal in primary colors.

Refined palates eschew and disdain primary colors; they prefer the subtleties of earth tones and quiet inner wars. To these audiences primary colors are ‘too much’ and in clashing they create a conflict that is too strong or ‘melodramatic.’ These audiences include most of the critics of art who determine what tales are worthy of official praise and condemnation, and so such subtle tales are held up as the ‘best tales.’

But to the general audience, this ‘too much’ is just what they want — until it goes too far even for them, and becomes ‘maudlin, grotesque, melodramatic, comic-book.’

Whether they need it — and how much of these desires should be catered to — are matters each talesman must determine for himself.

(Composed with pen on paper Saturday, March 22, 2008)

Art and Cash

The role of the artist today is all about the money

Where We Came From

Over the past 3 days I wrote about how Traditional Society, which man developed over millions of years since before he was what we call man, gave way to a Transitional Society which has been spawning the Modern Society over the past four centuries. Traditional Society formed around kin groups in local areas, and was based on personal relationships. When men created agriculture, these small clans joined (usually along language groups and within a broad geographic region) under a King who served as an over-chief and took taxes to feed his soldiers to guard the kingdom. The King’s palaces drew artisans and gave rise to the first cities. In time the city-men, living by commerce measured in cash money, overthrew and killed the Kings and their landed nobles who were descendants of the King’s war captains.

Thus the Modern World began to grow. It has not yet taken over all of Earth’ some parts of the world are still Traditional Societies, and some parts are still Transitional.

The Artist in the World

In those nations which have become most Modern, men are judged and defined by what they do to make money, and by how much money they make.

This has made a great change for the artists.

In Traditional Society, there were no artists. That is to say, no man defined himself as an artist of any sort — not sculptor nor poet or painter nor talesman. They defined themselves then by their relations — by their parents and grandparents, siblings, children, and extended families. They took part in their clan and household duties of day to day living. The art they made was but a hobby, a bit of adornment to enhance the practical work of their lives.

In Transitional Society, men began to define and judge themselves by classes of the labor they performed: farmers, peasants, warriors, hunters, priests, nobles. Art still was made among the farmers and other peasants as before, for these men lived in social groups much like their traditional ways. But for the first time High Art began to be made by men who called themselves Artists. These artisans worked under the patronage of Kings, priests and other nobles and high officials, and were dependent on these wealthy members of the ruling class for their livelihood.

In Modern Society the artist is a tradesman who freelances or works for hire. The Kings and nobles have been replaced in part by the wealthiest of the ruling money-class acting much like the noble patrons who went before them. But mostly the artist of today works for the true inheritors of the ranks of landed nobles, the ones who run the modern world: the corporations.

Myths of Art Today

Many artists today don’t understand this. They think that the corporations that publish and distribute their art works are mere middle-men. The artists think they are really working for their fans who buy tickets, music, books and the like. But this is not so.

Copyright is often registered in the name of the artist, and the artist looks on this as proof that under the law he owns his art, which makes him superior to the publisher. But this too is not so.

Copyright was created for, and at the behest of, publishers. From time to time in the long history of change in copyright law, as its term has been extended again and yet again, as the punishment for its violation has been made more and more extreme, as it has passed from civil code to criminal code, artists have come forth to speak on behalf of the new extensions of the law. This has given the impression that copyright is a law for the benefit of the artist. But this is not so.

The Artist Today

There are more artists in Modern Society than in Transitional Society. That is, more men are able to earn their bread from their art alone. Almost all of these men are hirelings who work in advertising, and company art departments, and directly for publishing corporations; or else they have formed their own corporations that work on assignment from these larger companies. This is not the sort of life kids think of when they dream of being ‘artists’ as they are growing up. The creativity of these artists is confined (like the talent and skills of all corporate hirelings) to making clever new ways to increase the company’s income — and no more.

What kids (and most adults) think of when they consider the ‘artist’ is a man whose work springs from deep in his heart, that expresses some urge within him, some vision all his own that he longs to share with his fellow men. This is what we think lies at the root of the artist’s soul. Note that ‘money’ does not belong here, and indeed the common view of the ‘artist’ is of a man who scorns money in his search for self-expression, beauty, and truth. And that nothing in our common notion of the artist is fulfilled in the job in the company art department.

There are artists of this idealized kind in Modern Society. There are many of them. The great mass of them, though, do not make their living from their art, but in other ways. Some teach their art, others find jobs as critics of art. Some work in museums or galleries. For many, their art is but a sideline. For many it is but a hobby.

A rare few find fame and fortune and their life stories inspire kids to dream of being artists themselves. This is what they think it is to live as an artist (not to work as one, but to live as one) and in this dream, money does indeed play a starring role. Great wealth is the dream of all of us in Modern Society, for money is the measure of a man today. Wisdom, virtue, excellence in any field — we value them only insofar as they might make us rich. But our day dreams and fantasies all turn on being rich (and famous) and not around being wise, honest, just, or skilled.

And so thoroughly have we come to believe in this ethic of the money-class, that talesmen will write, over and over, that they need copyright laws because they would not, could not write if they were not assured they would be paid. And some seek for copyright to be eternal, not thinking that this would be of benefit only to the publishers; for these artists, it is not enough that their grandchildren should be paid for what their grandparents wrote, but their great-great-great grandchildren should get the money too.

How far we have fallen.

(Composed with pen on paper Thursday-Friday, 20-21 March 2008)

Are We Mutants?

Is the Modern Society fit to live in?

Three Stages of the World

So far we have seen three stages the world of men has passed through.

First was Traditional Society; in this stage men lived together in small groups related by kinship, and had a local point of view. This stage includes all the time of the men-who-came-before modern man. It includes, as far as we can tell, the apes who came before the first of the men-who-came-before modern man, since we find the same social order in the other apes.

The second stage was a Transition to the modern world; in this stage most men lived together still ins mall groups related by blood, but they were ruled by overlords, those who came to be called Kings. The Kings took taxes from the small clans and promised to protect their lands, and most men now thought in terms of the broader territories of the King’s realm. The Kings used their greater wealth to support their armies and also to build palaces, around which true towns and cities grew; these were where larger groups of men lived together who were not related even distantly by blood. Religion likewise grew into hierarchies and larger organizations; a state religion would be endorsed by the King with a High Priest, elaborate temples, under-priests, all supported by the taxes levied on lesser men. This stage was mostly traditional, since almost all men lived yet in the small clans, because many farmers had to work to support their own lives and also pay the taxes that upheld one soldier or priest.

The third stage is Modern Society; in this stage men live as individual consumers and hirelings and bosses of the dominant class. So far the family remains one of the parts of society, but the Corporation or Collective, Consumerism, mass-Religion, and the State undermine the family from all sides. So now the family has mostly shrunk to its basic core: today the family exists, where the Modern Society is most pronounced, only to raise children to young adulthood. Many marriages do not last even long enough to see their children reach nubility; many children are raised by single parents; many children are raised at institution by agencies of the State.

What Next?

I do not think the transitional stage has ended.

I do not think we know as yet what the Modern World will look like once the money-class reduces the local and national governments to merely ceremonial roles, and the interwoven groups of Corporations rule the world openly.

I do not believe the Modern Society to come will be the final stage in the world. Others will no doubt come after it.

Traditional Society grew ‘organically’ if you will. It developed over hundreds of thousands of years, and likely millions of years. It grew by trial and error, blindly, under no master plan or any plan at all. The way each traditional social group is made up is never rigid, it is always fluid, it shifts with the relative strength, will, and wits of its living men.

As a result it seems safe to say that Traditional Society on the whole came to represent the ‘true nature’ of man, if only because those Traditional Societies that tried something ‘un-natural’ failed to survive.

Modern Society began to emerge from the transitional societies only 2,500 years ago, mostly in China as the three great Kingdoms warred with one another, made alliances with the lesser kingdoms, and spawned various Theories of social organization in search of one that would bestow a competitive advantage in warfare. One of the three Kingdoms at last, after centuries of war and rivalry, united most of China and the new Empire came to be.

Most of the world remained Traditional and transitional. Much of the world to this day is Traditional, and in other parts it is transitional. Some states take on the outer mask of Modern Society, but under the mask they remain transitional, and their ‘elected Presidents’ are but Kings with a new title wearing business suits.

Modern Society did not grow out of the trials of many generations of men. To all practical ends, Modern Society as we know it today began less than twenty generations ago. (Only in China is this not true; the layers of government officials in China can trace their start back 100 generations to the founding of the empire of Qin.) Outside China, modern society rests upon new and unproven systems and Theories. In most cases those Theories have been confused with national character, the accidents of history, or the uneven distribution of natural resources, and these chance coincidences have been offered as ‘proof’ that one Theory or another is ‘better’ than the others. (Would for example a Capitalist, money-class, rule-of-law United States of America be as powerful today if its lands were more like Australia?)

Questions

So the first question we must ask ourselves, when we look at the world today and try to forge a path ahead, is this: If traditional society shaped itself to suit the nature of man, then how can the new forms of Modern Society suit the nature of man? They can not.

Are we no longer men?

Are we mutants now?

(Composed with pen on paper Thursday, March 20, 2008)

The Way We Live Now

The birth and growth of modern society

Spread of Modernity

The men who made modern society were the burghers, the bourgeoisie, the merchants, the townsmen, the money-class. When these men killed their kings and emperors and landed noblemen and disowned their priests, they cut off the heads of what remained of traditional society. From that blood the modern world was born.

Traditional society was left to the wild lands, what used to be called the ‘undeveloped world’ but is now called the ‘developing world’ by those whose evident aim is to kill the last traditional societies even in foreign lands these people never visit. Also, traditional society was left at the bottom of the new social order, outside the cities. In the rustic hamlet, the wild, the small town, and the farmers, the last peasants still cling to their traditional life. But this too is threatened; for some reason the money-class seeks to destroy all traditional society everywhere it finds it.

‘For some reason…’ I believe this is not wholly deliberate. Modern society is a sort of virus that blindly seeks growth and expansion at all costs. Where it meets traditional society it must by its own nature infect that traditional society with its own virus, the virus of modern life.

Out of this process a few modern societies come to take over the world, and create the modern world. It is not yet wholly here, but its rise has been steady and has seemed unstoppable.

The Virus like Machine

This is the mechanism to the infection.

Modern society, by overthrowing the established rungs of the ladder of traditional society, struck off the roof above all our heads. Thenceforth all men were king. The stairway to Heaven was (in theory at least, and by common belief) open to all, and each tread was marked with material goods and stacks of money. To climb it, you only had to make and sell more goods, amass more property, and win more money. To make more goods, you need more raw materials, and this means you must venture farther afield away from your City — and into the farm-lands and hunting-grounds and wilderness of traditional society — to get the raw materials. You must set up mining operations, logging operations. To man these operations you must offer enough cash money to lure young workers from their farms and traditional ways of life; these workers then become the core of modern society in the middle of their old traditional society.

The City also swells with growing numbers of mouths to feed, so you can climb the ladder by getting and selling more food. To do this you must introduce ‘modern methods’ to the peasant farmers and get them to grow more crops; again the inducement is cash money and the things money can buy. You must also make the farmers into merchants of the money-class, and this creates another core of modern society in the middle of the old one.

And to sell more of your goods you must expand your market and bring competition to new areas, which include the traditional society. The men in the traditional society do not need your goods, but you have made the goods desirable in order to sell better in the City. The peasants are no better men than the rest of us, and they too will desire these goods, once their desirability is made clear to them.

Finally, the merchant class uses bargaining and contracts to grow their endeavors. It doesn’t know the language of traditional society because it doesn’t share their values except the very basic, fundamental values all men must share as they are men. Therefore the money-class seeks to transform traditional society from the top down so as to be able to deal with it politically as well as economically. The mining operations, the market for goods, the purchase of grain, must all be made sure, and safe from the predation of the local chieftain or tyrant or petty king. ‘The rule of law’ is the rule of Property, a system the money-class depends on in the modern world, a vital feature of modern society, and the merchants seek at all costs to foist this ‘rule of law’ upon all the traditional societies with which they deal. But the very notion of Law as a code written down and adhered to even when it defies justice or fairness, is antithetical to the basis of traditional society, as we have seen.

Culture in Modern Life

The money-class began as the tradesmen and craftsmen who supplied the King and his court with luxury goods and needful things made with greater quality than the peasant could afford. Bread is what the peasant eats, but Kings must dine on cake. A peasant gives his love a flower from the field or a pebble from the stream, but a King gives gemstones in rare settings to his wives and whores.

At some point the money-class who made and sold these luxuries to the King felt secure enough in peace that they saw less need for the captains and noble warriors who fought to defend the realm. They also felt strong enough in numbers, that they saw (or thought they saw) that they were themselves the economy, and the King and landed nobles and priests were drags on the growth of the economy when they were not outright leeches upon it. So the merchants rebelled and cut off the Kings’ heads.

Now the money-class had the reins on the economy (which was now based wholly upon money) and the State. Culture would come last to their grip. Indeed it has not wholly come to them even today, even in the most ‘advanced’ or ‘developed’ nations.

The idea of the Nation is itself traditional, an outgrowth of the clan, a sort of super-clan.

The family and bonds of kinship has resisted utter annihilation by the money-class, which prefers that all relations be based on trade and commerce and money.

Religion with its ghosts and demons still rises from time to time, and cries out for a return to the older, traditional ways.

It is ironic that (in America and the United Kingdom at least) the main groups who clamor for the return of traditional values of family, church, and modesty at the same time champion the rights of the money-class. Have they no eyes to see that it is capitalism and the money-class (of which they are themselves members) that have done the most to destroy those traditional values, and that money and tradition are mutual foes?

‘ism’ This and That

Politically — having overthrown the kinds and priests who ruled what was left of traditional society — the burghers needed some new system of rule. Because they were revolutionaries and anti-traditionalists, the burghers were not content to let their political establishment grow out of the native soil of the citizens. People in general tend to be conservative and like to go back, after an upheaval, to some semblance of the old ways. So the burghers wanted Theory to supplant natural growth. They sought to Construct, Build, Plan, and Erect in place of nurturing what could rise up organically on its own.

So we see all the theories of Social Contract, Rights of Man, Capitalism, Socialism, Corporatism, Fascism, Communism, Republicanism, Democracy, Racism, Liberalism, and Utopianism, that never were needed before, but now came to win men’s hearts with an almost religious fervor.

We take these things for granted now in the modern world. But they were unheard-of once upon a time, and not very long ago in terms of the lift and growth of Mankind.

The idea that governance needed a Theory from which to refashion it, came first (as far as I can tell) about 2,500 years ago, in the developments in Greece in Europe and China in Asia. The idea was given a new start and great blossoming in the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, and it has roared on to new heights since then. It shows no sign of halting. New Theories, and new versions of old Theories, and hybrids of Theories old and new, are raised all the time.

Counter Wave

Meanwhile a counter-revolution has risen, a cry to bring back traditional society. This takes two broad forms. The first grows out of religion, and seeks to bring back the priests and the church to power, either complete power and a full retracement to traditional society (or new form of it), or some balance or sharing of power, with the priests given power to block or restrain some of the efforts of members of the money-class.

The second cry against the modern world was born out of Environmentalism (itself as you see yet one more ‘ism’ to join the pack) and idealizes the traditional forms of economy — the small clan-like commune, agriculture, and much of the outer trappings of traditional peasant society — as both a rejection of modern society’s Consumerism and Materialism and an attempt to build a more sustainable way of life before war, pollution, and resource exhaustion combine to form the next great global Die-Off.

(Composed with pen on paper Wednesday, March 19, 2008)

Once We Lived This Way

Traditional society described

Foreword

This begins a series of pieces that will end by looking at the current state of copyright from a historical point of view. The whole argument is a long one, so I have broken it into these posts.

Questions

Once upon a time, men lived in traditional society. Many men today still live in traditional society. But when the bourgeoisie of Europe took power from their kings and landed nobles in a series of violent revolutions beginning more than 300 years ago, they began to root out and destroy the last remnants of traditional society wherever they could find it. Capitalism, socialism, communism, and fascism: these are the different forms the money-class has proposed to replace traditional society.

They have all proved ruinous in one way or another.

The question then arises, if man developed traditional society over millions of years to suit his life, and modern society in all its forms is a radical break with traditional society, how can it suit man’s life? Has man changed as much as his society? Are we all now a mutant form of man? Or is modern society doomed to fail?

The First World

Traditional society forms itself out of families and clans, not individuals. These clans are bound by kinship extending back no more than a generation or two, and they dwell in a small area of land. They have dwelt in this land for generations. Each child as it grows up never thinks he will ever live anywhere else. The members of the clan have long memories, and they know their land well with all its beasts and plants. They know its weather and its seasons, and they pass down tales that mark the worst of times and how their fathers coped with those crises.

Traditional society has its laws and its justice, and these are not set in rigid, written law-codes that must be obeyed and enforced even when the result of doing so outrages all the living members’ sense of fairness and right. Personality plays a large part of rule and law, because everyone in the clan knows everyone else, and everyone is related to everyone else. Anonymity is impossible.

Traditional society has its religion and superstition and these form a part of its laws and government. The rules the priests ascribe to the spirits have as much legal force as the laws the elders make. Much of the law system springs from the taboos and demands of the spirit world. These dictates of ghosts, demons, and gods are not written down and are understood as broad and general decrees, which are then interpreted by the holy men and women. The ghosts do not speak from eternity but their whims and tempers change in time, as often, maybe, as the weather.

Traditional society lives with Nature in its area, but it is almost as prone to damage and undermine that natural system as we are in modern societies. The old fathers of the past and of today’s traditional societies are yet men, and all men may err from time to time. There are differences, though, between how traditional societies could destroy their habitat and haw modern societies can. First there are fewer men to the square kilometer in traditional society. Second their tools are less powerful, and thus each man can do less damage by himself. Third the traditional society has no sense of human rights, and this means no one man can flout the opinions of his fellow clansmen and hide behind a legal argument that it is his right to poison streams or wells. Fourth there is personal property and local spheres of influence over parts of the land in traditional society, but there is no ‘property’ as we know it in modern society. The land the clan holds and works and guards against other rival clans is held by the clan as a whole, and not by any individual members of the clan. So the leaders of the clan decide what should be done with the land, and as we noted, the leaders can decide what they want, inside only the loose web of their traditions of law and the dictates of ghosts, demons, and gods.

Traditional society has a different sense of time than modern society does. Time for traditional societies does not march on in a line, as we think it does, but instead wheels in a series of loops and circles large and small. The end of all the circles comes back to their beginning. ‘Progress’ is unknown. Man’s life and god’s life are unchanging in the same way that Nature is unchanging. The sin ruses, brightens, wanes and sets, and then it rises once more. Dry seasons follow wet seasons and wet seasons follow dry seasons. There is no thought that the sun will just grow brighter and brighter forever until all the world’s afire. There is no thought that the rains will fall harder and more often until all the world’s aflood. (Contrast that with the bland assertions of political and economic leaders in the modern world that ‘growth’ can continue in exponential curves … forever.) Man in traditional society knows many changes and constant change, but he trusts that the end of all the changes will come back to the beginning. For every rise there is a fall, for every birth there is a death. The way men live today, as the clansman sees it, is the same way men lived a hundred generations ago. This is the sense of time you find in fairy tales — an eternal present with only ‘local’ past and futures that sit atop an unchanging base. (In truth this sense of time is wrong: had traditional societies never changed, the modern world would never have been born. But this sense of time unchanging gives man in traditional society a certain security. ‘All things must pass and go back to whence they came’ is a sentiment that soothes the pain of crises. Man in modern society, beset with constant and escalating change, feels anxious lest he be left behind, and he feels that these changes take place and he has no control over them, no way to shape them or slow them down, let alone stop them.)

In traditional society, the individual man has relations with his kinsmen (in the varying degrees of kinship) and with his friends and fellows (fellow hunters, fellow elders, fellow miners). But he has no relationship to the State as we know it in modern society. (The State, in face, does not exist as something separate from the will of the clan.) He is thus never alone, never separate. He has almost no privacy. He has small choice over his destiny. He knows he is a part of his family, his kin, the wider clan. He has a place there and he can’t even think of what his life might be like if he were ever to lose that place. To be sent in exile and cut off from the clan is about the same thing as to die.

Rise of the City

The first change to threaten traditional society was the creation of the City. The City could come to be only when agriculture gave rise to an abundance of food that could be grown by a small number of men in the community, and that could be relied upon from year to year. The warriors who guarded the territory no longer had to fish or hunt or grow food for themselves, and the warriors became captains and kings, and the kings became emperors. The great kings took vast amounts of grain to feed the men to build their palaces, and more grain they gave to metal workers and poets and whores and cooks and armorers and boot-makers and dressmakers and barbers. So cities grew up around the palaces, with tilled fields around the cities, and mountains, grazing range, and forests around the tillage.

Most of the society stayed traditional, but there were tears in the traditional fabric. Young men and girls ran away from home to seek a better life in the City. City life itself put a higher store in men’s trade and commerce than in kinship. The growth of cities where only fields and rivers once had looked up to the sky, broke the old notion of circles in unchanging time. A town became a city, a city grew to a metropolis, a king conquered rival kings and made himself an emperor. Or the king was himself conquered and fell, and his people were enslaved; they lost their king to a foreign overlord, and they did not go back to the life they had before they got the king.

Rise of the Burghers

The bourgeoisie was born out of the city. They were themselves craftsmen and related to one another on a cash basis, as money was the measure of commerce. Trade was their way of life and all things they measured by the amount of money the things would fetch. Masters took apprentices, merchants hired employees. Men and women were bought and sold. Poor fathers who in traditional society might have been forced to expose their infants to death in the wild when there lacked enough food to support the family and the infants, now sold their children to rich merchants to live in slavery or learn a trade, one day maybe (if they should prove sharp or ambitious or cunning or unscrupulous enough to manage it) to gain their own freedom and wealth enough to buy slaves and employees of their own.

The City was born soon after the neolithic revolution in agriculture, some ten or twelve thousand years ago. The rise of kingdoms and empires grew slowly after that. In many ways the society remained traditional, but abundant food, money, and the specialization of trades that followed, pushed society down a new path: the path to the modern world.

(Composed with pen on paper Tuesday, March 18, 2008)

Green Light

Who says when your tale is done? Where can you find someone to help decide?

Yesterday in ‘Part the Head and Hands’ I wrote

In talesmanship, the editor who says at last, ‘It’s done’ should not be the one who does the rewrite, makes the cuts and smoothes them, recasts the order of scenes, renames the characters, or writes the new scenes.

Of course it’s the talesman himself who does the work. And up to the moment the talesman sends the tale out — to his agent or an editor, say — it’s the talesman himself who has the last word on whether it’s good enough. But up till then who says?

Ateliers, Editors, Bullpens

The way that is most like the film world (where the editor works under the director who passes judgment and guides what should be done) is to go back to the atelier system of Alexandre Dumas père. This was a criticism of Dumas in his lifetime, and Dumas himself denied that he worked in quite this way. But the rumor was that Dumas had a series of collaborators (some of whom he did acknowledge as co-authors) and scribes (this he denied). Dumas gave the outline, the others researched the history and wrote the first draft; Dumas rewrote, polished, signed his name and sent it to press.

In some instances a like plan was used in pulps and commercial series: the editor gives the outline or OKs the writer’s plan, the editor may even come up with the idea. The writer cranks out a draft, and the editor gives it the green light or asks for more work. In this case the writer signs his name and the editor leaves his off; or else a house name is used for writer, and the bullpen of word smiths get no credit.

Lone Guns

Most of us writer talesmen work alone. We write on spec, though some of us get a green light for an idea or outline from our editors. We write a draft, revise it, polish it, and when we feel it’s done we send it in. Our editors ask for changes, and the tale is done as the talesman and editor negotiate.

For most of the time the talesman works alone as a lone gun. He does the work and he says when it’s good enough.

He must do the work unless he uses the atelier plan or hires a ghost-writer. But even when he does all the work, he can get advice whether it’s good enough.

For this he has to find a partner, a critic, a judge.

This judge will have to earn the talesman’s trust. A good judge will have a sense of story, of word-craft, of subject or genre, and taste. He will also have to give a lot of time to read partial drafts over and over, until the tale is done.

Some talesmen use their husband or wife as judge. Some use fellow members of writers groups, and serve as one another’s judges.

To Find a Judge

I don’t know how to find a judge. Here are a few thoughts to start with.

Simpatico. Your judge must share your taste but also complement it. His likes must be close enough to your likes so that you do not write what you hate, else not only will you be unhappy with your job, but you will lose your inner sense of story. You’ll need to ignore what you think sounds good, and then how will you feel your way through your tale?

Shrewd. Your judge must know what is good and bad in talesmanship. He must have a sense of story and pace, of character, and of the rhythm and sound of each line.

Fan. Your judge must be a fan of your genre or class of tale, and he must have a sense of what works and does not work in the field. This means he should know both the genre’s history and its current makeup.

Prompt. Your judge must be friend enough, or in some other way devoted enough to your work that he will read what you’ve done and tell you what he thinks of it, in good time.

Articulate. It isn’t enough that your judge shares your likes, has good taste, and knows your genre. He has to be able to tell you just what he feels about what you give him, and know the reasons why. Many of us can say, ‘I like this,’ or ‘This doesn’t quite do it.’ Fewer are those who can go on to say just why the work strikes them in this way. It can happen all too often that the reason why we think we like or dislike a tale, won’t be the real reason, and often enough we can’t point out the specific reasons why — it’s just a ‘feeling’ we have.

Useful. One of the chief snares a talesman can fall in when he hears another man’s tale is to judge it as though he himself were writing it. His advice then boils down to ‘If I were writing this, here is what I would do.’ But this may not be what the tale’s own author would do. The best judge will tell you, as best he can, how to get the tale to be the way you want. (This ties in with being simpatico and having a good sense of the talesman’s personal taste and aim.)

Work

Sometimes, when you have published several tales, you will find good judges among your fans. A good agent or editor may also serve, though these professions are both too busy to give their members any time to spare. Finding your judge is hard. But it is worthwhile to most writers.

(Composed with pen on paper Monday, March 17, 2008)