Another look at another opening: the Game is Afoot
Bardelys watched the clouds pass by. So dark, and so little rain had fallen! The musk melons were swelling, and the eggplants were dark and big, but (innocent that he was) he couldn’t tell if they were ripe or not. ‘Not yet, not yet,’ he said, ‘at least I don’t think they are ready as yet.’
Meanwhile the compost heap that he had freshened with new grass clippings, had come to life with the liquor-like, intoxicating aroma of the fungi; steam arose from it when he shifted it, and it was hot enough so that even on a summer afternoon he could feel the waves of it baking him.
He shook more clippings on the pile, and turned them with the sodden leaf-pads buried in the muck. It was not, he reflected, a textbook compost heap, and he didn’t know just what he should do to fix it, other than blending in more greens. Well, he would see, he would see about it. He didn’t look to use it before next spring anyway, a good nine months or so. It should decompose nicely enough in that time.
That left the decomposition of his own tales. He had enjoyed toying with the start to The Juniper Tree the day before, but he had, he thought, taken the wrong tack with it. He had looked at it with blank eyes (as blank as the talesman’s own eyes could be). This had led him to be more accepting, maybe, than he should have been.
Now he proposed turning it around… he would make a Game of it, and look at each opening of his with a simple question:
“What’s wrong with it?”
He would try to find fault, without needing to repair, for unconstructive criticism was the easiest thing in the world.
Today he took up the start of a recent tale, and one he had not done more than two drafts on: it was an adaptation of Sir Thomas Malory’s tale of the Knight of Two Swords or Balain.
This tale he had opened with the most blatant kind of Narrator that could be, in an Introduction of the Talesman. After that the tale itself began with a second Introduction.
So there was a pattern growing, for this was the second tale he had taken up, and both had had the sin of the Double Start.
That was troubling. It told Bardelys that he had trouble deciding and (if truth be told) he knew this was a fault of his, and moreover, he knew that in some ways it was a talesman’s primary job, to decide what to tell and what to leave out. That and the arrangement of the parts he kept in, would amount to what Bardelys reckoned must be 90% of the talesman’s job.
Be that as it may. Black mark #1. On to the second beginning, the beginning proper to the tale:
When Arthur, Uther Pendragon's son, drew the Sword out of the Stone, only a few barons and knights would follow him. Most defied him, and bade him prove his claims upon their lands by force. And for years England and the Isles were rent by war.
Two men did more than all the rest to win those wars for Arthur and secure his father's throne. One was Merlyn the Sorcerer, and he is famed throughout the world and will never be forgotten. The other was the Northumberland knight Balyn the Wild, who by strength of arms caused the death of twelve rebel kings upon a single day.
Balyn was never a knight of the Round Table. He fought and died before Arthur wedded Gueniver, before the mighty Gawain, Arthur's sister's-son, was knighted, and before Lancelot of the Lake became a man. And Balyn's name is all but unknown now.
And yet it ought not to be so, for Balyn not only won Arthur his throne, but he also doomed the Fellowship of the Table to ruin and to death.
Here is how it happened.
Following Malory, Bardelys had begun with a sort of summary of Balyn’s tale. Malory filled his tale with foreboding and constant reminders of Balyn’s unhappy end, never giving any reason why he should be so accurst. This, plus the endless round of battles, had impressed Bardelys so much that he had taken up the tale to adapt. He wanted to show some reason why Balyn should end as he had ended, and he wanted also to tie up some threads that Sir Thomas had left unlaced. These seemed to Bardelys to be implicit in the tale, and he had wondered how Sir Thomas’s source material had dealt with it, but he was unable to find the ‘Frenshe texte’ that told of this part of the cycle (it was in the Vulgate Cycle of romans either the original Vulgate Cycle or the second telling of it, and Bardelys did not like his chances of handling several hundred pages of medieval French).
So his opening had contrasted Balyn with Merlyn on the one hand, for Sir Thomas had stressed how important was Balyn’s help in winning the crown of England for Arthur, as important as Merlyn himself. And on the other hand he had contrasted Balyn with Gawain and Lancelot, who were the main hero-knights of the old tales. And yet Balyn was ‘unknown’ to most laymen today.
And finally, Bardelys had wished to contrast Balyn’s great contribution for evil as well as good. For it was Balyn who struck the ‘Dolorous Stroke’ and doomed the Fisher King, and Arthur’s Camelot, to ruin.
(Bardelys suspected that the monks who had composed the Vulgate Cycle big and small, had chosen Balyn as an example of a pagan knight, a knight unblessed by chivalry, wherefore his nickname ‘le Savage’ savage or wild. This also appealed to Bardelys, for it marked Balyn as even more of an outsider, and a man who fought, and only fought, often without understanding, and whose passion and headlong battling would doom himself and those he loved to great pain.)
So, ‘What is wrong with this opening?’ Bardelys played the game, and yet only with half a heart. The problem with this opening was that it was so logical and plain: that left little room about making it better. The exposition was handled in simple, straightforward manner, and was brief enough.
The only part that stood out in Bardelys’ mind was the last line:
Here is how it happened.
Could Bardelys drop this line altogether? He had hoped when he wrote it that this line would hurl the reader on to the next part (what Bardelys supposed must be called the third start of the tale). But maybe leaving it out would be stronger. Then it would (certainly) be briefer, and it would end on a sort of cliff with:
And yet it ought not to be so, for Balyn not only won Arthur his throne, but he also doomed the Fellowship of the Table to ruin and to death.
If this were left as the end, then the start of this line should be cleaned up. Maybe it would be stronger as two separate lines:
And yet it ought not to be so. For Balyn not only won Arthur his throne, but he also doomed the Fellowship of the Table to ruin and to death.
Maybe the answer was to work back earlier into the prior paragraph. The root of ‘And yet it ought not…’ lay in the prior paragraph, a way to tie them together. Bardelys looked back and took the two paragraphs together:
Balyn was never a knight of the Round Table. He fought and died before Arthur wedded Gueniver, before the mighty Gawain, Arthur's sister's-son, was knighted, and before Lancelot of the Lake became a man. And Balyn's name is all but unknown now.
And yet it ought not to be so, for Balyn not only won Arthur his throne, but he also doomed the Fellowship of the Table to ruin and to death.
What if he simplified that prior paragraph:
Balyn was never a knight of the Round Table. He fought and died before Arthur wedded Gueniver, and Balyn's name is almost unknown now.
And yet it ought not to be so. For Balyn not only won Arthur his throne, but he also doomed the Fellowship of the Table to ruin and to death.
Better on the whole, he thought, but still it could be stronger.
The problem here, he was all too well aware, lay in over-cooking the lines. The raw rush of enthusiasm lay in the first draft, and a man could only make that first try as good as he was a talesman. Obvious flaws could be fixed, those things that stood out to him as clear and wrong; but to take the ‘good enough’ and make it ‘great’ was another matter. One that may indeed lie beyond his prowess, until he had become a much better talesman.
(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, August 5, 2008)
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