Lists and Ticklers Et Al

A tale is but a list

The Dread of the Blank Page and Silence

There is a common experience of writers, when they face a blank page (in the old days of typewriters, pens, and quills) or a blank screen (in today’s world). For oral talesman, we could say it happens in that silence when the audience first settles down and gazes at the talesman, awaiting the first breath of his tale.

The experience is fear.

The fear paralyzes.

The blankness is unfilled, unfillable. The silence is utter and unspeakable.

The enormity of the task, this creating and expounding of the whole tale, rises up before the talesman in his heart, and it daunts him. It all seems too much to bear, to much to face, far too much to overcome. He can’t think, imagine. His creative powers falter and die.

Nothing.

Silence.

Void.

Blankness.

Defenses

What can we tell a talesman to help him to begin? What can we tell him to help him carry on a tale he has begun in the past but put down for a time?

The usual answer is to relax, breathe, focus on what happens next. Take the tale in small bites, only chew on the morsel at hand, look away from the whole feast. Get on with it and do what you can.

This that I counsel now is like that advice.

Think of the tale as but a list.

What is a tale, after all, but a list?

• A tale of an action is the list of all its subordinate actions.
• A tale that remembers a person is the list of his qualities and deeds.
• A tale of experience is the list of all those smaller effects and experiences that add up to the effect of the whole.

Outlines

If we look upon a tale in this way, we can see the connection it has to an outline, which is a way to tell a tale in its smallest, barest bits. And we can see why some talesmen find that making an outline is a good way to prepare to compose a tale’s draft.

An outline is a telling of the tale that is to the full draft what the skeleton is to the living man. It defines the extent and the underlying shape of tale and man.

An outline becomes a draft as each item in the list grows more detailed, with smaller items. Each item becomes the heading of its own list; each item on that list becomes the heading of a further list, and so on. And each item, from a word or two, grows into a phrase, complete, and then adorned and molded into a pleasing, or at least effective, shape.

Ticklers

A tickler is a special sort of list. A tickler, or tickler file, is a list where the talesman files away ideas, concepts, notions, characters, effects, that he finds intriguing enough to form the base of future tales. The items in a tickler have no connection, they come to the talesman at odd times, out of the æther if you will. But a skillful talesman can take any number of these items, or all of them at once, and sort them and link them and come up with a tale.

And a tale can be built from a single idea, when a talesman creates a tickler file formed from all the connections this idea inspires in him.

The difference between an outline and this tickler-list for a single tale, is that the talesman builds his outline in order, in sequence. ‘This, and then that,’ or ‘Because of this, then that,’ or ‘This, therefore that must have already taken place.’ But the tickler-list for the tale simple comes from a random jumble of ideas, scenes, characters, and the like, rather like a mind map. ‘This suggests that … that suggests this other … what about this? and this? and this as well?’

Out of this tickler-list the talesman makes a pile of the items; the pile has no order as yet. He then sifts and sorts and dreams, and shuffles, until the pile begets an order, and becomes an outline. Some of the items he must set aside; on second thought, they don’t fit. Later on he might see where they could and would fit, and bring them back into the outline.

Storms of the Mind

A list is much easier to tackle. The tickler-list is the easiest of all. It takes a quiet moment, a bit of easy reflection, aimless, purposeless, vague, dreamy. Ponder the basic idea of the tale, or of some part of the tale, treat it as an inkblot, and ask yourself, ‘What does this suggest?’ When some image or thought comes to you, note it in a way you will not forget — jot it down, perhaps — and relax back into the reverie.

This may be done at any odd moment, in a gap in doing some other task, especially a mechanical, repetitive task.

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, May 20, 2008)