Where Tales Take Shape

How to master the skill to spin your tales

The Birth of Tales

Tales can come from many kinds of seed. It might be something that comes in a dream; something in a tale the talesman hears; a personal experience; an argument to be made into an allegory; a sound; a bit of nonsense; a challenge. Lord Dunsany once bet he could spin a tale about the mud at the bottom of the River Thames, and did so — a chilling and wonderful little piece.

But whatever its seed, the tale must take shape somehow. This is a process that I call ‘articulation.’

The Articulation of Tales

If the seed of a tale is an infant, the tale as it is articulated is the fully-grown adult. This articulation (to pursue the metaphor) has two aspects, its bones and its flesh.

The bones of the tale would be shown in an outline. The flesh of a tale is how a tale comes to be told. Georges Polti, in The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, set out to list all the possible skeletons of tales that ever were or could be. We can dispute his list, add to it, boil it down to Twenty-One or Twelve, but the point is that (if you care to look at the text — it is widely available) Polti listed famous tales that exemplified each of his Thirty-Six situations. Those example tales show just how different the flesh can be upon the same set of bones.

When I write of ‘articulation’ from here on in, I mean more particularly the bones. Maybe what I mean is something that is greater than the few words of a Polti Situation, and yet less than the full text of Hamlet.

Example of Articulation

For example, let’s take a love story.

A boy and girl grow up believing they are brother and sister. They fall in love and later find they are not related and that there is no social bar to their love. But the knowledge comes too late.

That is the Polti Situation (all but the conclusion; Polti’s Situations only state the problem or the dilemma). To begin to articulate it, the talesman must start to explore the character of the boy and girl. What sort of life do they lead? How many complications will fall in the way before the final point of ‘too late’? Will he tell mainly the boy’s side of the tale, or the girl’s side? Or will he go back and forth between them? In what order will the complications arise? Which will come to realize his feelings go beyond mere sibling affection? Will it be the boy or the girl? When will the talesman tell his audience about these realizations? Will we in the audience learn of things along with the characters, or before the characters themselves know it? (The talesman could tell us the boy is in love with the girl after the boy himself knows it, or at the moment he discovers it, or before he himself is aware of it. The girl could see that the boy is in love with her before, at the same moment, or after the boy himself learns it. And the talesman could tell us the girl knows the boy is in love with her, or will learn it, before, at the same moment she learns it, or after. When you add in these same considerations with respect to the girl falling in love with the boy, it possibilities grow to a very large number.)

Will the boy have a friend, and if so, will he have more than one, in whom he confides his secret? (Same for the girl.) Will he have another girl who loves him? Will she be jealous, shocked, helpful? Will she be an enemy to their love? What is her relationship with the girl his ‘sister’? (These all apply to the girl’s side of things as well.)

Will they part for a time? When — will it be in the time before they learn or announce their love? Or will it be after they have confronted what they have learned?

Will they tell each other of their feelings? Soon, or late, or never?

What does it mean, that they learn the full truth ‘too late’? How does this knowledge affect the boy? How does it affect the girl? Are we in the audience to look on it as a happy ending or a sad?

Mastery

Articulating a tale is rather like moving the pieces around a chess board, except with some added complications. For one thing, you must play both sides. For another, you must move all the pieces at the same time. And you can at any moment go back in the game and change your mind about any of the moves. And you know where you want the pieces to stand at the end of the game, and must somehow get them there. And the pieces also want to move themselves, and ‘resist’ landing on certain squares at certain points in the game.

It seems daunting when put this way.

And yet we all know how to do it to some extent.

It’s as easy as dreaming.

If you dream you are a talesman and can spin tales.

It becomes a sort of skill or sport. You can grow your skill or your strength in the match.

First you must train yourself in daydreaming. Daydreaming is talespinning. There is no other way to get at it that is so fluid, flexible, liquid. Some writers use index cards, one for a scene, notion, line; a stack of such cards are laid out on the floor or a board, and moved into this or that order. There are computer programs that do the same digitally. None of these aids, helpful though they may be, can match what you can do in your own mind. They are but the outer expressions of what you do in your mind, and because they are helpful aids, they lessen your strength and skill in doing the same simply within your mind. Writing also is a helpful aid, but the advent of literacy has decimated our ability to remember.

A good time to begin to train yourself in this skill is in the last hour of the night, before you go to sleep. Let the setting be dim but not wholly dark. (Sitting under the stars is enough light; indoors, if you are in a room without a light, but there is a light in the next room or down the hall.) Candles or fires are a good aid; the flickering of the yellow-amber light is greatly hypnogogic.

It is a sort of hypnotism indeed. Your present surrounding must dim and fade; the matter of your tale must grow bright and clear. You must see your tale as this kind of chess-board, your characters as the pieces. They move as they please, and yet you, rising above the board and seeing the past and future of the game, have your wishes too — the sort of twists and turns and outcomes that make, for you, a better and more entertaining or instructive tale.

Do this at night, and — as soon as you wake up in the morning — review what you decided.

One trick that is hard: to keep open choices along the way. ‘It could go this way, or he could do that, instead.’ Sometimes these options lead to widely-diverging paths; sometimes you can work it so that the paths part only briefly, and braid back together soon enough. It is precisely in this sort of parallel sets of tales, a kind of twinning or blurring of vision of the tale, that you can learn to do in your mind, that no set of index cards or other aids can manage, unless you can also do it in your head.

It can seem to be work, at times, as you gain in strength and skill. But it can be great fun too. Because you are not only the talesman here, you are as well the audience.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, April 2, 2008)