How to See Tales

Watch all three sides all the time

What I am Getting at

You can look on an art, such as talesmanship, with an eye for the fine points, the tricks of the trade. I guess I’ll be doing that at some point in these pieces. You can also look at the thing from afar, to point out the general aspects of the whole. This is what I’ve tried to do so far, and I think this is the key to the whole thing, both for talesmen and their audience. For the best audience in the world is the one who could spin the tale as well as the talesman himself.

Where You Stand Makes for What You See

A kid likes to read tales of some kind. He reads more and more of them. He gets a sense of the sort of tale he likes, and a sense of what kinds of scenes and parts of scenes that he likes inside those tales.

This is the way most of us start out.

It’s a way to see the tales from inside out. The tales are like lands, and you find a land (or genre) you like, and go roam around in it, sight-seeing, exploring, visiting. But from the ground, deep in that land, you can only see what is right around you. You can only see so far. This cuts off a lot of the view, but the view you do have is vivid, immediate, intense. And you kind of stumble around with no good notion of where you’re bound.

Sometimes it’s good to reach high ground, a place from which you can see a far way, and map out where you’ve been and where you want to go.

The Highest Point

The highest point of all is one that lets you see the act of talespinning as a whole. And this is what I’m trying to talk about in most of these pieces.

The highest point is the one that lets you see the tale as you spin it, and the audience as they hear it, and yourself, the talesman, as you spin it.

Where you only write the tales, or make them in some way far from your audience, so you can’t tell how your audience shifts while they are hearing, reading, or watching the tale unfold, you have to look at yourself as you hear, read, or watch it. This means you judge your own response while you spin the tale, and after you finish, and go back over the tale to check what you have made.

Three Parts

There are three parts to hold in view as much as you can. There’s the point of the tale as you spin it, and there’s the whole shape of the tale, and there’s the way the audience takes it.

The point of the tale as you spin it, is that immediate moment, the thing that strikes the senses of the audience in the instant of their understanding. It’s the words, the sentence, the paragraph that they are reading now. It’s the sound and music and line of dialogue that they are hearing now. It’s the shot, the composition, the moving frame that they are seeing now. This is the most concrete aspect of the art. It makes an immediate impression on the audience.

The whole shape of the tale is made up of all the points of the tale that stream out in the wake of the present point as you spin it, and also it’s made up of all the points to come — both the points that the audience will meet, and all those possible points they might meet, whether those points live in the minds of the audience or the mind of the talesman. These points the audience see not as tactile, concrete, sensual points, but rather as a framework. They see these points in relation to one another and in relation to the present point.

‘The way the audience takes it in’ means the emotional and intellectual response of the audience. What the tale makes them feel. What it makes them think. How they understand what has gone before now in the tale, and what they guess, predict, expect, or anticipate or fear will come hereafter.

The master talesman holds all three parts of the tale in mind at all times while he spins it. It is a very hard thing to do well. We can all do it a little, now and then. And the talesman who would grow must strive ever to do it more, and more deeply, and more often, as best he can.

(Composed with pen on paper Monday, March 10, 2008)