Tell Show or Act

Oral tales ask talesmen to be performers too

Tales Then and Now

Once upon a time (in the 1800s) writers still clung to the tradition of the talesman, and did not deny that they were telling their tales. Then came movies, and the written tale fell to second place in popularity. Written tales managed to survive in the popular arts mainly by treating subjects that movies did not treat, as witness the pulp magazines. Slowly through the 1950s in the postwar era, the censors lost their stranglehold over movies, and movies came to deal with subjects more frankly. Then in the 1970s a new generation of moviemakers came on the scene, who made kids’ movies and b-movie material with adult, a-movie budgets.

In defense, the writers sought to establish a more intimate relationship between their readers and the text. The writers came to hide and mask the fact that they were telling tales, and tried with many tricks and stratagems to make the tale feel as though the reader were experiencing it at first hand, or as if in a dream.

From these efforts a new rule came on hand, Show, Don’t Tell and it now commands editors, publishers, writers, and how-to-write textbooks.

Tales Now and Then

But if, as I suspect, a new age is coming, an age in which the written word must fall even lower in esteem and use, and if the oral tale returns to a higher place (because when we read a tale we must use our eyes and hands, but when we hear a tale we need only use our ears, and are free to use our eyes and hands on other tasks while we listen), then the talesmen of tomorrow will face a new wrinkle in their approach.

When we tell a tale out loud, we must become performers. We will face today’s choice of ‘show or tell’ with a new eye, for it is one thing to splay words out on a page, and quite another to speak them, and it is one thing to scan a page with our eyes, and quite another to listen to the words one after another.

I believe that oral talesmen will need to ‘tell’ quite as much as ‘show’ — probably more ‘telling’ will come into it than ‘showing’ and tales will be more succinct. The voice of the talesman will always be there, much harder to mask than the presence of the narrator on the page. It’s possible that the talesmen of tomorrow will find new tricks and devices to ‘show not tell’ even in oral tales, tricks and devices that I know nothing of as yet. But my best guess now is that those who would ‘show not tell’ will move more toward the radio model, where the tales are acted out by several voices, perhaps accompanied by sound effects and music, and that the talesmen who tell their tales alone will bring back the narrator.

Even the lone talesman must face a new angle in his telling, however, and that is his performance. When he writes his tales in text and lays them on a page or screen, the talesman deals in words alone, and the words he chooses must tell for almost all his effects; at best he has had a shift in font to help him, setting emphasized words in italics or ALL IN CAPITALS.

But now he may (and must!) phrase his lines, he must modulate his tones, add pauses or breaths, speak loud or soft. And when it comes to dialogue, he faces the choice of speaking it out just as he speaks his narration, or trying to perform it, shifting his voice, adding accents, and so on. The talesman who becomes expert in this will have an added popularity; words will be one of his tools, but his voice will be another, and the talesman with a strong voice, what they used to call a ‘radio voice,’ will be prized beyond the master talesman whose voice is weak. Dramatic talent will be added to talesmanship and word skills.

What It Will Look Like

My best guess now is that dialogue in oral tales in the audiobooks model (and not the radio model) will use narration most, and leave dialogue for spice, as accents to the progress of the tale. These tales will be shorter in wordage than novels today. The novel length tale will be trimmed back to novella length, or the old form of a ‘cycle’ of tales will return, a series of linked novellas and shorter tales that overall will present a longer saga, though each will be complete in itself and may be heard in almost any order once the audience gains a broad familiarity in the cycle as a whole.

Dialogue-heavy tales will follow the radio model, and will share the time limits of drama: they will be short enough to be heard out from beginning to end in a single evening — at most let us say they will be four hours long, with one or more breaks along the way.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, May 8, 2008)