Tales from Heroic Ages

Great Conflicts breed great tales, and most of the best are tragic

Tragedy and Revolution

The fifth to the eighth centuries have been called Europe’s heroic age, in memory, perhaps, of the heroic age the classical Greeks looked back to when Jason, Theseus, and Hercules lived. In Europe’s heroic age the old order of the Roman Empire crumbled. This has been linked to a change in climate, and there is evidence of a volcanic eruption that darkened the sky and led to several years without summer. Crops failed, starvation came on, and whole peoples grew desperate. Desperate, they left their homes and sought warmer and richer lands. Out of the higher lands and the steppes of Asia the Huns and other peoples moved west, seeking some place where they could survive. But those lands were already full of peoples who also suffered. The clashes led to epic battles. These were not wars such as we have known, where armies go out to battle. These were wars of whole peoples, more like the invasion the Americas by Europeans, or on a much smaller scale the invasion of Palestine by European and Russian and American Jews.

Such movements had taken place in the past as well, but now the Romans had brought Mediterranean technology and a long period of peace and commerce, which led to much higher population. The carnage must have gone beyond anything we can imagine. Not so terrible in its way as today’s air wars of terror — they lacked the total destruction of today’s bombardments and high explosives. But the fighting was hand to hand and face to face, tribe against village, and as full of blood and rape as any war could be. And it went on for centuries. Whole civilizations fell. Burgundy, once famed for its wealth and high culture on the Empire’s north-eastern edge, fell and never rose again. Other cultures changed — they had to change, from top to base. The old order had grown in times of peace and plenty to mete out laws on the Roman model, to trade with other rich lands within the Empire’s sphere. Now under the constant of war’s millstone, a new social order had to arise, one fit for an age of war.

The elders and law-makers and merchants could no longer rule. The towns that clung to the old rules were ground under foot. The only groups that survived cast aside their elders and their societies based upon family and blood. They gave power to whoever could protect them, to the war chief and his band of warriors who fought as fiercely as their enemies, and took in turn what they pleased from the people they led. They had no pity or mercy, and they made the brutal choices as to who should live and who should die.

Thus was born in after time the Age of Chivalry which would arise in centuries to come out of the cradle of this Heroic Age, and the great Kings and Queens of the European monarchies traced their lines and the basis of their rule back to these bloody-handed pitiless killers.

The Heroic Age is also called the Age of Migrations and the early Middle Ages as well as the Dark Ages.

The Rise of New Rulers

The Heroic Age left us little art; the endless warfare and death gave those peoples few breaths to take up song. But a few stories have reached us. The tales are tragic, and a few heroic sagas such as the cycles of King Arthur and the Emperor Charlemagne, whose rise marked the end of this period. But those grim times gave grim tales, and death and ruin ended most of them. Victories were brief, and succeeded by destruction utter and long.

Some of the best of these tales have tragic elements, that interest me because the base of the tragedy springs from the social change that the old kingdoms and cities had to bear in order to survive. The hub of the conflict lies in a choice between kin and alliances, between duties owed to family and those owed to war-chief.

The war-chief demands obedience that is absolute and unthinking. Military commanders have always felt more at ease trusting on their men to obey blindly when they face likely death, rather than on their love and loyalty. Fathers in the patriarchal orders have always preferred to rule by love but needed to know that in the end they could make commands that are unreasonable and unexplained and yet are obeyed by force and sheer authority.

Love and Duty, Self and State

One of the great and lasting founts of conflict in tales lies between personal desires and the demands of the state (or tribe or city, or family or country, or race or nation, or political party or corporation). Where the individual does what he wants, whatever he wants, and all he wants, there the community will suffer; it may even fall to bits. But where the individual acts only and in all ways for the good of the community and never thinks of his own desires, the people lose their souls. And where the individual is made to obey the dictates of the community and forced to break his every personal wish and bent, the people lose their hope and the community loses it soul. There is no easy mark to set the perfect balance. Each of us must set it where we will or can, and each community must say where it thinks the mark should lie. The community naturally wants its members to set the mark nearer the side of order; each member in his youth wants to set it nearer to liberty, but in his age he identifies with the community more and values order over liberty. Liberty is a young man’s dream, as he seeks to make the community shift to make space for his desires. Order is an old man’s comfort, as he seeks to keep the community the same so as to preserve the space he has already made for himself. By the time a man is old, he has already shaped the community to suit himself (in a small way), and he has shaped himself to suit the community (in a big way).

When societies change in revolution, defeat, or war, the tailorings of old men are torn apart, and young men’s dreams will change to dreams of a new order — which may as yet lie hid in the darkness of time to come. Conflict rises everywhere and there is no peace and no easy answer. And the old ways die — they must die — they are killed. Those who cling to the old ways are destroyed. But some who live on in the grim wreckage of the aftermath remember the old happy times, and they sing their tragic songs of the ways that now seem to have been doomed from the start.

In every man’s heart there is the conflict among his desires. In every community there is the conflict among men. But when the communities themselves are in conflict that will end with the death of the community and the birth of some new order from the ashes, then all these conflicts can add to one another, and make for the basis of strong tales such as are long remembered.

(Composed with pen on paper Friday, February 29, 2008)

When Passive Voice is Preferred

When and why passive voice may be chosen

The Voice that was Lost

Passive voice is generally condemned by those who teach writing these days. It is called stodgy, long-winded, and hard to understand. It is also derided as the natural tongue of bureaucrats with something to hide or an impulse to be seen as more important than they really are. But there are times when passive voice can be used to good effect, and when a line or passage may be hurt by active voice.

When the Result is to be Stressed

These thoughts were brought on by the following paragraph, which was written by Musharraf Ali Farooqi in his 2007 translation of Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami’s Hamzanama or The Adventures of Amir Hamza:

“On either side of the rivulets that streamed through the garden were arrayed herons, cranes, ruddy geese, teals, and snipes in groups of two. The branches and boughs of the taller trees were wrapped in silk tissue sacks — white and golden and green. At ever step octagonal terraces of marble, alabaster, and veined jet met the eye. Before every terrace were basins filled with rose water, essence of musk, and keora water. In the middle of the basins were jets d’eau and fountains, with their golden and silver spouts mounted with nightingales, ringdoves, and turtledoves carved out of gems. The spray jetting out from between their feathers and wings was a most ravishing sight, which soothed the eyes and gladdened the heart.”

What can be noted in this passage is the absence of actors, the slaves and servants by whom all these wonders are arranged, presented, and put together for the delight of the rulers. Normally the active voice is preferred because the actors are important, and so are placed first in the sentence:

Actor(1) Does(2) Something(3)

Where a given element is placed in a line, whether at (1) or (2) or (3) is understood to mark its importance. What is placed at (1) is taken to be most important, more than what is heard at (3), and what is buried at (2) is understood to be given the lowest rank of the three.

Our first rule of passive voice, then is easily grasped:

One. Where the actor is insignificant, passive voice may be preferred.

This rule is exemplified in the passage taken from The Adventures of Amir Hamza. The servants and slaves are considered so unimportant that their very names and titles have been stricken from the record, lost forever in the fogs of time. The wonders and riches are held to be most important.

The trash of words needed to complete the sentence structure can be seen as dull bits, spoken in casual tones, and used as timing devices, so that pauses and breathes may be taken in between the loudly-voiced, stressed words in which the wonders are named.

Done by Whom?

Mysteries can also be helped by use of the passive voice. In mysteries, the actor is considered important, but is identity must at times be withheld:

At 7:10 in the evening on the night of July 8, three shots were fired in Abingdon Furriers. The police were summoned and the body of Josiah Abingdon was found on his office floor, dead.

The mystery would be given away if the above were put in active voice: it would mean the murderer’s name would be included in the opening sentence. The identity of who called the police, and of who found the body, may be offered later on as important to the tale and the mystery’s solution, or they may be dropped entirely as insignificant bystanders.

The passage could be retold and ‘three shots rang out’ given in place of ‘were fired’ so that the first sentence could be made to fit the ‘no passive voice’ edict. But maybe the shots would then be seen as actors, oddly enough, in and of themselves, as in —

Three bullets tore through the air and plunged deep into Josiah Abingdon

— which can be given for an active, dramatic, ‘punchy’ opening, but which can also be seen as not merely odd but wrong: emphasis placed upon the bullets here, is emphasis misplaced, and the bullets are given too great an importance for the part played.

The second rule of passive voice, then, may be stated as:

Two. Where the actors’ identities are to be withheld, passive voice may be preferred.

Variety May Also be Invoked

Variety in talesmanship, as in all arts, is rightly esteemed as the spice through which a tale is enriched and enlivened.

By this it can be seen that prose filled with nothing but active lines may be considered wearisome. The third rule of passive voice may be stated as:

Three. Passive voice may be used when relief is sought from too many active lines.

Weakness Can be Implied in Characters

The desires and urges of a weak or passive character are better not expressed by forthright, active lines. Here the actor is not deemed as insignificant; he might even be held out to be the tale’s hero. But his nature has been formed such that he is approached by his desires, and taken by his urges, and they can’t be said to be taken up and used by him. In this way such characters may be subtly and effectively distinguished from their more active fellows.

So the fourth rule of passive voice may be stated:

Four. When a weak or passive character’s desires and mindset are told in the passive voice, his nature can be given through the structure of the lines itself, and passive voice may be chosen as the best way to do this.

Hidden by the Fog

Passive voice is scorned most of all by those by whom vagueness in language is considered a great crime. But sometimes vagueness is the very thing desired in a line or a passage. Sometimes bold and direct statements are not called for or wanted.

The fifth rule of passive voice may be given as:

Five. Passive voice may be preferred when vagueness or obscurity is desired in a line or passage.

Wanted, Done, or Thought by All

The last best use of passive voice is found in those lines where the actors are not only unknown, but unknowable. General classes of men are included in this kind of line, as in

“Passive voice is considered weak when compared to active voice.”

Or in somewhat more concrete terms the line may be recast:

“Passive voice is condemned by those who teach writing as weaker and less effective than active voice.”

Here the names of those teachers are omitted, they are cast as members of a general class of writing teachers or are not even named as a class. The opinion is let to hang about in the air as though held by all. Another example:

It was widely known that an attack was planned; in fact it was the main thing that was feared.

In this line it can be seen how this ‘general’ actor can be compared closely to the actor deemed insignificant. What is considered important here is the plan for attack, and the fear engendered by the threat of that attack. But unlike the insignificant actor, the general actor could hardly be named even if doing so were considered desirable.

The line could be recast as

Everybody knew an attack was planned; it was the main thing they feared.

— but too much stress could be said to be placed on ‘everybody’ and too little on the fear and the attack. In the passive voice version, when those who feel the fear are not named, their dread is seen by the audience as a more palpable thing, as if the knowledge, the expectation, and the fear of the attack were being done to the ‘everybody’ who held them, like unseen toxins breathed in with the air.

The sixth rule of passive voice can be stated as

Six. When a general class of men, or all men, are considered, their opinions may best be given in the passive voice.

It May be Used Sometimes

Passive voice has been stigmatized as a great taboo, a form of phrasing never to be used. But here six kinds of lines have been shown where passive voice by be used to good effect, and may indeed be preferred to the active voice. Readers are not always confused by passive voice, and lines are not always ‘fogged’ when they are told in the passive voice. Sometimes lines in the passive voice can be easily understood.

And yet active voice can and should be used in most lines and in most writing and tales. It may even be said that active voice is to be generally preferred, and taken by the talesman as his default or normal way of phrasing. Then the passive voice is held in reserve, to be drawn out and used only now and then, when called for by the specific context and circumstances on hand.

(Composed with pen on paper Thursday, February 28, 2008)

Heart Hand and Head

The three schools of talesmanship

There are three schools of tales, three ways a talesman can see the world, and the tales he tells will fall in one of these schools. He can appeal to our wishes and emotions or in a word our hearts. He can appeal to our sense of the way we think things are in practice, or in a word our hands. He can appeal to our wit, or our heads.

These are the three schools of talesmanship.

Hearts

The tales that call to our hearts are like our dreams. They are full of wishes granted us. They tell of the world not as we think it is but as we think it ought to be, as we wish it could be, as we dream that it was in past times, or that is is in faroff lands, or that it will be in times to come. This is myth, Romance, adventure, pornography, idealism, heroism, legend.

We like to hear such tales because we like to dream that we live in that world, that our dreams have come ture and that this world of dreams is our ‘real’ world. We enjoy all those wishies coming true. It is a relief from the toil and misery of our daily life, in which none of our wishes seem to come true.

These tales appeal most to those of us who dream the most. We who look at their lives and rather than picking up their tools and getting on with it, ask ‘Wouldn’t it be great if only…’ and ‘Why can’t life be more like…’

Hands

The tales that call to our hands or our practical sense of the world look at the way we think things really are. They seek to describe, in details finer than the ones we normally see the world, the way people act in the world. These tales speak of life as we think it ‘really is’ and stress the ‘truth.’ They are often modeled closely upon real events and experiences. They seek to plumb the deep parts of the souls of their characters.

These tales appeal to men of the world who look down on wishes and dreams and mere time-wasters. We who come to full grip with our world and our lives tend to like these tales best. For the time of these tales, we see with sharper eyes events and the souls of men.

This is Realism, Naturalism, ‘true sagas,’ true stories, romans à clef, and ‘gritty tales.’

Heads

The tales that call to our heads teach us lessons about the world. On their face they may look like Romance or they may look like Realism, but by the tale’s end the talesman wants us to understand that the tale has proved or demonstrated some basic rule or law or principle about ourselves or our world. These are Allegories, Lessons, Prophecies, Lore, and Fables with Morals.

Tales of the Heart and Hand we enjoy in and of themselves, and we believe in what the tales relate while we live under their spell. A world swims into view and we dive inside it and live there for a time. It may be a world of wonders, or it may be our own world seen more sharply. But tales of the Head, on the other hand, we look on from afar, not in and of themselves, but as a puzzle or model. The people and deeds in these tales are not what counts, what counts is what the people and deeds mean — what they signify.

We like tales of the Head in the first place for the work they give to our wit in trying to unriddle them and see the rules and principles behind the masks of charactes and events. And we like these tales in the second place for the wisdom this unriddling imparts to us. Tales of the Head teach us not only the lessons and morals at hand. They also teach us a way of looking at the world around us, and of seeing the people and events we live with as if they too were principles made flesh. Thus the tales of the Head are the favorite type of tales told by the teachers of Religion, who would have us see real flesh and lood as nothing but examples of piety or sin.

In the Marketplace

In the great bulk of talesmanship today, the marketplace of amusment, tales of the Heart and the Hand fill almost all the stalls. Tales of the Head are out of favor even in the classroom, and mostly used in the teaching of Religion or in political debate.

Some kinds of tales fit better to the Heart, some kinds fit the Hand better. And so there are kidns of tales that will please us more if they are one and not the other.

At a broad stroke I would say that since the middle of the 19th century (in the West at least, but not all of the West) all the tales we call today as ‘genre,’ are at bottom tales of the Heart, and all the tales we call ‘literature’ or ‘literary fiction’ or ‘mainstream fiction’ are tales of the Hand. The French Realists took the critical prize from the Romantics, and they have only rarely given any part of it back.

I think this is the way it had to be. Once men began to look at Nature as a mechanism we cuold describe explain and predict by numbers alone, we had less patience for nymphs and angels and ghosts and the supernatural. And the end of this is that today, even the tales of the Heart must give a nod to the Hand and paint themselves with ‘realistic’ touches both of practical life and of the psychology of their character.

Some genres almost lost Romance altogether, and as a result all but killed themselves. For example take what is called ‘hard science-fiction’ which turned into a curious specimen of tales that told in real terms what never was. So these talesmen killed the dreams of those who liked to read science fiction, and left paltry, pallid, weak and even boring tales that were read by dwindling readerships.

When we take up a tale, we should know which of these three schools it falls into, and we will be disappointed if it falls into another. The talesman who tricks us in this way plays a dangerous game, and is not likely to win our love.

(Composed with pen on paper Wednesday, February 27, 2008)

Reverses and Twists

Two ways to surprise us

Thrills and Sameness

A bit of a tale pleases us or not. We can only hope the talesman pleases us with the first words from his mouth (or pen). But if he then gives us those same words over again, they please us less. He gives us the same words again. They thrill us less. He gives us the same words again. They thrill us less. He gives us the same words and we leave the tale behind.

We crave variation. We demand progress in the tale, a move to the middle then a march on to the end.

But a steady march turns into a pattern that bears its own sameness, and we can see that too. And then we find it bores us, this left-right, left-right, left-right steady march on to the end. We can see the end come near. We know when it will come and we know what it will look like.

We want some surprises along the way.

Here are two kinds.

Surprise One: the Reverse

The first kind of surprise is the ‘reversal of fortune.’ Here we simply go back on our tracks. Say things have gone well for the hero, and he moves closer to his goal. Then things should turn against him and push him back from the goal. Now all goes ill for him, so next things turn out well for him.

This simple alternation, step ahead then step back, comes out of the main delight that tales hold for us. A tale enchants us mainly through suspense, which is our balance between hope for one end and fear lest another end come to pass. The step ahead lifts our hope, then the step back feeds our fear, then a step ahead lifts our hope once more.

This pattern also rests upon one of the most basic laws of sensation: that nothing we sense is absolute but all is relative, and that one is raised when it comes near to its opposite. A light thing seems whiter next to a dark thing, and something sour seems more sour right after we taste something sweet. So our hope seems to us higher because it follows the fear we just felt, and the fear that comes on hope’s heels then feels deeper.

But this pattern is simple, and once we know the trick, we can look for these reverses. When things look bleak for the hero, we know things will now turn better. We know it without even knowing just how they will turn better. And when all looks good for the hero, we know bad news is right ahead.

Surprise Two: the Twist

Because the reversal of fortune is too easy to see in advance, the smart talesman will toss in some spicy twists into the stew of his tale as well.

Think of a reversal as part of a walk down a straight line. You never step off the line, but you take two steps forward then one back. Then three steps forward and two back. You may not know whether any one step will take you forward or back. But you know the odds rise that you will step back after a few steps forward, and the more steps back you take, the more you can count on the next step going forward. And you know that whether your foot falls forward or back, it will always land on the line.

Then it lands off the line. That’s the twist.

A twist by its nature is unforeseen. This is the secret to its surprise for us.

A boy likes a girl and woos her. She seems to like him, too — then she doesn’t — then she does. The couple come closer together, then fall farther apart. Back and forth. Then the boy meets another girl and he likes her too. He thinks he likes her better than the first girl. He wonders why he thought he ever liked the first girl.

So we see the reverses followed by a twist. But let’s tell that another way:

A boy likes a girl and woos her. She seems to like him, too — then she doesn’t — then she does. The couple come closer together, then fall farther apart. Back and forth. Then the boy eats a pickle and ketchup sandwich. He thinks it’s the tastiest sandwich he ever ate. He begins to search for the recipe to the perfect pickle-and-ketchup sandwich.

Here we see a pitfall in twists. A non-sequitur is a twist, too: a twist we don’t always like. A twist that breaks the ‘rules’ that govern our contract with the talesman.

A twist must be unforeseen but not unforeseeable. And as far as the twist might take our foot off the line, in the end we must find our way back to the line in time for the end. Because the end of the line is where the talesman promised he would take us. These two traits hold the art of a good twist, along with knowing how many twists a tale will bear.

Too many twists will spoil a tale.

A tale that is all twists will be a jumble of non-sequiturs, and not a tale at all.

I don’t know how many twists any one tale can bear. This is something the talesman must sense as he feels his way through the hearts of his audience. Some out there will like twists more than others. They tolerate more twists and more outlandish twists. Some kinds of tales are made for audiences that like twists better, and some kinds of tales suit audiences that can little bear twists.

In general, the longer a kind of tale has been in vogue, the more twists it can bear. Put in terms of the audience, the better an audience knows any one kind of tale, and the more such tales they hear, the more they like the twists.

This is indeed a hallmark in the evolution of a genre. It begins with simple, straightforward tales. As more such tales are told, and heard by the same audience, the talesmen must add more twists, and more, until the whole tale is a twist on the genre from start to end. At this point the audience has spent all their delight in this kind of tale; the last such tales are so far from satisfying the original needs that made the genre popular in the first place, that they have come to look like the final stages in Picasso’s famous series of etchings from representational to wholly abstract. At some point along the way, a member of the audience can no longer see the two pretty girls in the abstracted composition. From then on he can only take pleasure in the abstraction and not in the rearranged reference to the girls. In the end no girls remain.

When a genre spends itself in this way, we stop reading it. Then it dies. Later, if we still feel the need that this genre filled, it may return. But only after our memories have faded, and the genre can start once more with plain, straightforward tales. An age will have in the mean time lapsed, though, and the reborn genre won’t go back to the same shape as its former start.

(Composed with pen on paper Tuesday, February 26, 2008)

Tell a Tale in Layers

Smooth over the tough parts later

This is a trick to get past a tale’s first draft. I think it is one of the first ways tales were told, so it’s nothing new.

A Big Fat Lie

Did you ever hear the same old tale told by the same guy, several times over months or even years? It happens at yearly get-togethers or reunions of all kind.

The first time you hear it, the tale is short enough, but it is amusing in some way. It gets a charge out of its audience. And the guy who tells it also gets a charge out of it. He likes to go back in his mind and live out the event in the retelling. Or he likes the way the tale hits his audience with gasps or shudders or laughs or tears. Or he likes both. So the next time you meet, when the topic comes up, the guy tells the tale again.

He tells it different this time.

Some parts are a bit shorter but a lot of them are longer and the tale as a whole takes more time to tell. There are new details that he tells you. The effects and descriptions are longer. Most of all he tells the key scenes in more detail.

You could say he has learned how to tell the tale better. Or you could say he has remembered more of what happened. Or you could just call him a bigger liar this time.

Over the years you hear the same tale ten, twelve times. In the end it takes its place in the legends of this guy’s life. And the tale when he tells it for the last time is a far cry from what it was when he told it for the first time.

Lore and Lies

Some tales don’t belong to one man but they take their place in the tribe or clan or town or group. Different people tell the tale. They hear it first when they’re children, and when they’re old they tell it to their grandchildren.

These tales change too. Some parts get dropped. Some get smoothed over. Some are built up. Some parts get added from nowhere. Some are made up by the new generations of talesmen. Some are added from other tales. And some parts are split off and grow into separate tales of their own.

Each tale like this (all tales, really) has its one point, or two or three, rarely more than that, that form the heart and soul of the tale. These are the scenes or events that we think of first when we think of the tale. Around these scenes we remember, or construct, the other scenes.

These are called ‘motifs’ by those who study folk tales from around the world, and they have counted hundreds of them.

These scenes are what I called the big scenes or heart-scenes when I wrote about the structure of tales.

Young Arthur draws the Sword out of the Stone. This is the main scene of the youth of King Arthur. This is what we all think of first when we think on King Arthur’s youth. It’s because he draws the Sword from the Stone that Arthur is known as the next King of Britain (though some contest his title and he must fight them). And Arthur had to draw the sword from the stone, though he was his father’s son (because his birth was strange, and his youth obscure). So the tale of Arthur’s birth gets constructed and recalled around this one scene.

Telling and Re-Telling

The way these tales, personal and tribal, grow over time comes straight from the fact that they are told over and over again. Each time the tale is told it changes. It usually gets to be less like the truth it was born from, and a better tale in its own right. The way the tale comes to be told reflects less the original truth and more the reason why the tale is remembered and retold. A humorous tale gets changed to wring more laughs from the audience. As times and tastes change, the tale must shift around to get the same laughs.

The Writer & the Raconteur

The way most writers tell their tales is a lot like the way the raconteur relates his anecdotes: over and over again. The raconteur has his audience tells him, by the way they take the tale, how to make the tale better gain its effect. The writer may have his readers to test his tales on, or he may have only himself.

I mentioned the Snowflake Method of writing a novel. The Snowflake Method is a way to do a lot of work ahead of the first draft, so that you can steam through the first draft with no dead ends, no false starts, and go through it fast. It is said to produce a first draft that’s close to the final draft: a pass of copyediting should give the writer a salable, publishable manuscript.

In the Snowflake method, you tell the tale in one sentence, then a paragraph, then a page, then five pages or ten or twelve. You put all the scenes into a spreadsheet which you use as the outline of the tale. In the spreadsheet you can see all the scenes at once and how they relate to one another, and you can shift them around, drop some and add others, till you reach the point where you know just how the tale should go and what makes it work.

Treatments and Drafts

I like the idea of the Snowflake Method. But I find that first draft hard to write all the same. There are always some scenes that are hard to tell. So I propose you try a treatment or a series of treatments as the last stage before what you call your first full draft.

A treatment in movies is a way to tell the story without dialogue. Dialogue is the toughest part of a script, because each line of dialogue has to carry so much weight and yet sound wholly natural. Reading dialogue also can get in the way of seeing the underlying story and if it works or not.

When you write a novel as a treatment, aim to write fast and cover a lot of ground at each sitting, but don’t skip too many details. You need to cover the scenes in enough depth so that you see the characters and what they do clearly — so that later when you develop the scene in more detail you won’t find the characters saying and doing things you don’t expect, and that turn the scene in a new direction.

An example:

He wanted to go out that night. The apartment felt cramped and stifling, and he didn’t enjoy the thought of spending the whole evening alone with her, trapped in that place. But she’d been waiting all afternoon for him to come home, and she wanted a quiet evening alone with him. She didn’t see why he had to go out on the town all the time. Couldn’t he stay home just this once? Besides, it cost too much to go out. But he got mad when she said that. It made him think on how much money they owed, and how was he ever going to pay it back? They got into a fine argument over it. He kicked over a chair — maybe he only tripped on it but maybe he did it on purpose. She took it that way and started to cry. He almost held her but he steeled himself not to fall for that gag again. So he went out like he’d wanted, but he went out by himself and left her there, distraught, alone, and wondering where they were going to end up, and whether or not she ought to leave him for good this time.

I didn’t put in much physical action, but I covered the dynamics of their two positions through the scene. Note that you can give all the points of view in the treatment, but when you come to doing the scene with more details, you’ll probably restrict yourself to one point of view and have to imply the others through external details. This is harder to do, which is one reason why this treatment is simpler and faster to write.

Another example:

When the King’s guard caught him, they put him in chains and took away his strength and his amulets. He had no way out then. The King told him he would let him go only if he answered seven riddles. The first riddle was easy, but they got harder, really hard. He solved them all up to the last, but the last riddle he couldn’t solve, and the time was almost up. The King’s daughter sent him a clue by her maid, and he solved the last riddle, much to the King’s anger. The King had never known anyone to solve his greatest riddle.

Here the hard part of the scene lies in concocting the riddles themselves. What are those riddles, and what are their answers? The last riddle must be so hard that no reader will solve it before you tell him the answer. Even the King’s daughter’s clue shouldn’t give it away to the reader. Now this kind of thing could take a week or more to get right. Do you put aside writing the tale for a week to hunt down and make up a bunch of riddles? Just tell it in light detail, glide over the riddles themselves, and go on. Work on the riddles in after hours, or come at them again the next time round.

In this way the treatment is a ‘kind of’ first draft. You can develop some scenes more fully than others. Put down the details as they come to you, but try to keep going quickly through the tale, for this sense of pace will make the telling more thrilling.

Then write another treatment. This is like telling the tale over again, and you can build up the big scenes some more. This time when you come to the argument scene or the riddle scene, you know just what is going to happen, and add a few details.

These treatments let you get at the tale in layers. Some scenes may come to you first time out in near full detail, and others you just sketch in. Next time through you develop the sketched scenes a bit more, on this layer. Layer after layer you build it up to a fine polish. But because these first treatments are so much shorter than the novel will end up — a fourth or a third as long — you can write them faster and you never get mired in any tough scene or troubling detail, you just sketch it in with less detail, to be added later. The treatments to come will be longer, as you add details. But they’ll still be quick to write, because you’ll only have to copyedit the fuller scenes.

(Composed with pen on paper Monday, February 25, 2008)

The Trackless Wild

What it means to write alone today

Money and Art

In ‘The Well-Known Author and the Crank’ I looked at the writer who can’t get his tales published for money, and at how his means of self-publishing have changed in the past few years. So now a writer can put out his tales, at no cost to himself, where millions can find and read them.

This crank, or ‘Zack’ as I name him, never wrote for fame or fortune. He wrote because he had to, for his own ears. On the far end of the scape the commercial writer, the well-known author, or ‘Andrew’ as I name him, wrote on the whole for fame and fortune, or else he found a style and type of tale that he liked as much as his editors and readers did.

Now, few of us run to either far end of this scale. Most of us have some Andrew in us and some Zack in us as well. We want to tell the tales that please us, and we’d sure like to earn our bread at the same time, and we want praise and fame as well.

In one way, these are the talesmen who get hurt the most by the mills of today’s publishing industry. Their tales don’t sell enough to free them from having to work other jobs. Some of their tales and some don’t, and they find it pains them when a tale doesn’t sell. Some of them find early success and they can’t build it up, as today’s publishing corporations demand. Or they find their tales get caught in the thresher of diminishing returns, where a second book is only printed in the same number that the first book sold; the second book sells a percentage of its print run, and the third book is printed in the same number that the second book sold — a smaller number than the first — and so on down toward zero. Other talesmen write without selling for years and don’t know what else to do but try another tale, read books on how to sell, go to conferences and workshops, and beat their heads against a brick wall.

Those who fall closer to Andrew’s end of the scale can only go on in this way, and work and try and hope that some day they’ll break into the tenth of the scale of well-known authors who support themselves on tales alone. Or they settle into being known in a small part of the field, they take jobs teaching writing, and carry on with lesser hopes. Or they run out of patience and give up telling tales, maybe not all at once and maybe never in so many words. But the time they give to their writing shrinks from year to year, and the interval between ‘The End’ grows longer and longer until they find they’ve been working on one tale for 30 years, and they’ll go on tinkering with it and adding to it now and then, with false hope, and without admitting that it has turned into a hobby.

These writers can’t give their works away. If they did, then they’d fear it means their works are worthless. And it would take value from the works that they had sold and yet hoped to sell. And they’d fear that publishers would give up on them if they turned to self-publishing, which the industry as a whole scorns as ‘vanity press’ and unreadable trash, and proof of the lack of talent in a writer.

The Free World and the Paid Have Different Problems

But the writers who run more to Zack’s end of the scale find that being read (or just being able to be read) tempts them more than the fear of not selling. They will turn more and more to the free and open trade of talesmen.

These writers then face 2 problems:

1. They are unknown
2. Their work is unknown

(These are not problems for the true Zack, who doesn’t care if he’s known or not, or if his work goes unread.)

The pack of free tales put forth on the internet is already huge, and it grows each day. So-called ‘pirated’ texts, samizdat editions of commercial books offered for free against the many copyright laws, are also out there in great numbers.

The first problem this talesmen faces is getting his name to stand out enough so that people will want to read his tales at all. This is a question of marketing and I won’t go into any more on it here.

The second problem is that his work, the tales themselves, do not stand out. This is a problem of talesmanship.

The way to stand out in commercial fiction is to write like other writers who have sold. But the way to stand out in free fiction is to write unlike all the writers who have sold.

The first problems a would-be Andrew faces are all bound up with the gate-keepers of the world of professional publishing. Agents, editors, book sellers, reviewers, all choose to take or reject authors as business decisions. To them each ‘Yes I’ll pitch your tale,’ means ‘I think your tale will make money.’ The way they make up their minds about this is, they put a tale side by side with the tales that have sold in the past. A tale that is more like a big seller seems more likely to sell well on its own. But a tale that is far from the big sellers is a risk and nought but a risk. Rich companies with fat profit margins and loads of cash to burn can afford to take risks. Lean companies with thin margins and down-sized staff have to hope to put out a big seller with every title they offer. They have to build up the odds that each title they put out has the greatest likelihood of being a big seller. This applies to agents, editors, and book sellers. And there are few rich, fat companies with money to burn in the book business today. So if a writer wants his work to sell, he has to make it run as close as he can to what has sold in the past, and then tell the tale so well it will be bought.

This notion turns upside down in the free world. In the free world, the tales that echo the commercial hits only offer readers more of the same but with lower quality or some flaw, for if the quality were higher, it would have sold commercially; and right now the commercial publishing world is where all of us but the true Zacks would go as our first choice.

Here is where the ‘talesman’s voice’ comes to the fore. You have to seek out the part of your soul that runs away from the pack. You have to feed that part and let it grow until it takes over your tales. This is what will make your tales stand out like no others. This is what will make your name stand for something that no other writer’s name can match.

(Composed with pen on paper Sunday, February 24, 2008)

The Well-Known Author and the Crank

The Well-Known Author and the Crank

Who will take to the new means of publishing

In ‘the Commuter and the Misfit’ I told of two men who took different paths in life. Andrew liked people and lived a life like most of the men he knew. Zack didn’t like people at all, so he lit out into the wild where there are no roads. I tried to show how these two men are unlike in almost every way. Neither is perfectly happy, but on the whole Andrew is happy and Zack is a miserable soul. We can take these two men as models and see that there’s a bit of Andrew and Zack in each of us. Every craft will have its Andrew-path and its Zack-path as well. So let’s look at those two paths for talesmen today.

The Well-Known Author

Andrew the talesman, like Zack the talesman, has always loved to read and to watch and hear all manner of tales in their many forms, such as movies, comics, TV, radio, stage plays, and so on. Out of this love, Andrew began to tell tales of his own, as did Zack — and there the likeness ends.

Andrew studied tale-making in school. He joined other writers to share and help one another in their work. He sent his stories to magazines and got a few published. At last he wrote a novel, a tale that would fill a whole book all on its own. Andrew sent the novel manuscript to publishers, and after a couple of years he found one who would publish it. With a book deal at hand, Andrew got an agent who worked out the terms of the contract with the publisher.

The novel was published and sold well enough. It was no best seller, but it earned back Andrew’s advance and got some praise from critics. Andrew went on writing short stories, and he wrote some more novels in the years. Each book sold more copies than the one before it. In time, Andrew grew to be well known as an author. He had fans and a half dozen or so books in print at any time. He wrote no great number of stories an novels, but he kept at it and turned out a few stories and one novel every year or so through his career. He had to do this, indeed, for he had a family and mortgage to uphold.

Andrew was not the best known writer in his land, but he had won his way to a place very few writers can reach: he paid for his life with his tales, and wrote what he pleased.

This is a great success for a writer today.

The Crank of Yesterday

Andrew’s tale has not changed much over the last century. The way authors earned their bread in 1900 was much the same as they did it in 2000. the change along the way was a creep or crawl with a hop here and there. But Zack’s tale today is very different from what it was a hundred years ago.

A hundred years ago, Zack wrote his tales on paper, with a pen. He sent them off to magazines and publishers. Once in a while he got a reply that said the tale was not accepted. Most of the time he heard nothing. He went on writing all the same. It was a kind of frenzy, a madness that drove him to it.

Zack always liked tales, and he read mountains of them. He liked tales of men a lot more than he liked the men themselves. The first tales Zack put down on paper dripped with scorn for the well known authors of his day. He meant to show them all he could do it better. Later on he wrote all his tales with no thought of other folks at all. He wrote them for his own ears. They came out of the deep, dark places in Zack’s troubled heart, and they mirrored that darkness in a way that, far from easing his pain, only made it worse. The more he wrote down his weird odd visions, the weirder and odder they grew. Many of them had no start or end. Some had a start but no end. He wrote them at all lengths too, for he did not know nor care for the standard size of tales that were published. He wrote tales that were half a page long, mere fragments, really. He wrote tales that were too long for magazines but too short to fin in books all to themselves, and he wrote tales that filled thousands and thousands of pages and could only have been published as if they were encyclopedias.

Once, early in his career (if you could call it a career) Zack got a letter from an editor. The letter said that the editor might want to publish the tale Zack had sent him, if only Zack would make a few changes to it. A list of suggested changes came with the letter. Zack didn’t finish reading the list. He wouldn’t change a word of his for any editor’s fool concern for popular or critical taste. By then Zack had gone on to other tales anyway, and they were what inspired him now; as far as Zack felt, once he dropped or ended a tale he never took it up again.

Later Zack stopped even sending his manuscripts to any publishers. He made up his mind to publish his tales himself. He found a local printer who gave him a price on the job. Zack saved his wages from his job (of course his job had nothing at all to do with writing) and after a year he had enough to print a thin volume of some of his shorter works. He paid for a hundred copies. The book stores would not carry the book, of course — not when the owners read what was in it. And so the hundred copies in their boxes sat in Zack’s closet.

Zack went on to pay for more tales to be printed, a few dozen copies each — whatever number was cheapest. He never earned enough money at his job to do this often. The volumes lay fresh and still smelling of ink and glue in their boxes in Zack’s small apartment. No one ever read them. The local libraries would not take them even as gifts.

Zack died and no one knew his name but for a few, local men who thought Zack was a crank. At his death his books were taken out by Zack’s landlord and sent to the dump with the rest of Zack’s things, for (of course) Zack had no kin to claim his worthless estate.

And whether what was written in the few books and the boxes stacked with manuscripts was the work of genius or madness, who on earth could tell?

The Crank Today

Though the tale of Andrew’s career has but crept and crawled and hopped over the last century, the tale of Zack’s career has leapt forward in a few great bounds. First came the rise of the pulps that published millions of words a year of genre stuff. Then came cheap paperbacks, that also only helped the Zacks whose tales fell close by some known genre. But a later change helped even the crankiest of crank writers when the small press bloomed. And now the internet has come.

And the internet changes everything.

It is now open to Zack to publish his tales himself, and pay nothing to do so. I mean zero, not one cent. He can log on to a computer in his local library for free. He can use the computer to open a free account on line at Google docs or Zoho or one of a number of such web apps that let Zack write and save his tales online, for free. Once Zack has done with any tale, he can publish it online for free as well. He can even publish his tales as he writes them, day by day in a blog hosted online for free.

Where can he publish long tales online for free? He has his choice here as well. He can send them out to ebook newsgroups on usenet. He can attach the files to his blog. He can publish them at Amazon for their Kindle device. He can publish them at http://www.lulu.com in both pdf ebooks and as books that lulu.com will print out, copy by copy for anyone who wants to buy them.

All free for Zack.

Once published in these ways, Zack’s tales can be read by millions in almost every land on Earth — far more than the number of people who could have found Andrew’s books and stories in 1900, and more than the number of people who can find and purchase Andrew’s books today.

Sell or Give Away?

Zack now faces two paths as far as how he offers his tales. He can ask to be paid, or he can send them out for free.

Zack can sell his tales at amazon, lulu.com, or other print-on-demand publishers, and never offer any tale or part of a tale for free. In this way he will be better off than he would have been a hundred years ago, since he won’t have to pay his printer, and these online book stores will put his books up for sale. The sops of 1900, like the shops today, have only so many shelves to fill with physical books, and must pick with care which ones they offer. Online stores hold on their servers the files of thousands or even millions of times as many.

But Zack doesn’t need to sell his tales to eat. He works at other jobs, and he doesn’t write for money or for fame. Zack got neither money nor fame in 1900, and yet he went on writing then. He will go on writing today though his tales win him neither money nor fame.

And Zack hates to sell his books. it’s not the money he minds, it’s not that his books may have sold that he hates. He hates the selling in and of itself, and what it asks of him. He flinches at the mere thought of begging some man to please spend some cash to read Zack’s book. Zack hates the man and loathes the act of begging that man. He never wrote the tale to please others, he never sought their praise. Zack is more at ease when he gives his tales away for free, or offers them for sale with the unsaid words, ‘Buy it, or go fuck yourself.’

This, I think, is a part of Zack’s soul. Andrew may find joy in going on the road to pitch and hawk his books. He likes people after all, he writes tales he wants people to like to read, he enjoys public readings and book signings and talking to people about his tales. Zack loathes all of that. He could not bar to do it unless it were forced on him — and it is not.

So Zack, the ‘real’ Zack, the ‘pure’ Zack, may put out his books online for sale where the booksellers won’t offer books unless they are for sale, but Zack will also send the tales out free of charge in all the ways he can.

Here Zack still sticks to his ‘take it or leave it’ frame of mind. ‘This is my new tale,’ he might say to you, if he cared to say anything at all. ‘It’s the greatest thing I ever made. Read it if you want. I don’t care if you won’t. If you read it and you don’t like it, don’t ask for your money back — I didn’t ask you for any — and don’t come and whine to me about it. If you don’t like this then your taste is worse than I thought, and I never thought much of your taste in the first place.’

Oddly, paradoxically, because Zack gives his tales away, he now finds he can market them with ease. He would once have cringed to say ‘Here’s my new tale’ — just that alone would to him have smacked of selling, of pleading with others to deign to consider his work, of begging them and abasing himself. But if h gives the tale for free, all that is changed. ‘It is the servant who takes money; it is the master pays.’ But when the thing is given away and no money changes hands, then there is no servant and no master, only free men, equals.

Zack the Carver

I can show you the change between selling his tales and giving them away will make for Zack, when I tell you of the Zack who carves instead of telling tales. Alone in the wood, always on the move, going nowhere, Zack the carver halts now and then and chops at a tree trunk with his axe. He carves things out of the wood — a face, a beast, a shape unseen anywhere but in Zack’s own mind. He carves it and moves on. If it should chance that some other man come across one of these carvings in the wood, he is free to look on it for as long as he wants, to like it or hate it. None of that means a bit to Zack, who carved out of his own need, with no thought of any other man.

State of the World

I doubt if there are many Zacks. There must be far more Andrews. And most all of us will fall somewhere in between. We have some Andrew in us and some Zack as well. But I do think there are more of us on Zack’s side than on Andrew’s, in this sense, that we’d like to tell some tales, but the tales we tell wouldn’t sell. A hundred years ago, those many didn’t go far; they hadn’t enough of Zack in them to carry on. They told odd tales to their friends or children, they scribbled the odd verse or snatch of prose, and left it at that.

Today those many can go much farther when they use the internet. They already have, they already are, and they will go much farther in days to come, because the little praise they get will feed the Andrew in their hearts, and the Andrew will egg on the Zack at his side.

(Composed with pen on paper Saturday 23 February 2008)

The Smell of Sorcery (and how to get it)

Without that smell, fantasy tales fall short

The Fields We Know

We live in a rational world. We live in secular times. Reason won out in Europe four centuries ago and it had been gaining strength for hundreds of years before then. In ancient Greece and later Rome, reason and the secular also won the upper hand. In India the ancient Vedas were told by scientists, and in China reason won the field after centuries of war, and the great Empire was born. Man has been waking from the long nightmare of unreason and religion for over two score centuries.

This is now our home and the fields we know: reason, the mundane, the practical life lived under skies free of mad gods.

This is true today even though almost none of us can ken the wonders we use each day. We hold up a palm-size bit of plastic and metal to our ear and we speak to someone half a world away and hear their answers. This marvel and wonder no better than one in a hundred, or a thousand, wholly understands. But yet we trust at least that the cell phone is a thing made by men and that it works by natural law, that there is no god or demon sprite that makes it work, no hex or spell that must needs wake up and fetch us the voice from so far away.

Reason is our home, and magic is a foreign land.

News From Nowhere

The foreign land where magic breathes is one I call ‘Eartherea.’ All magic lands are part of that wide realm, that shows up here and there about the Earth and has been dreamt of by so many talesmen and madmen and prophets and priests, and most of all by us when we were young.

In times and lands where the priests rule and the gods are seen by living eyes, the talesmen know the smell of magic all too well. So when they tell their tales of Eartherea, they fill the tales with magic’s smell. It fills the tales, so that there is no line that marks the ‘real’ from wonder.

But we who tell such tales today go as strangers and aliens o the marches of Eartherea. Our audience too knows that land only by hearsay. Their hearts are anchored in this secular world of ours — the true world, the ‘real’ world, or Earth. And so if we want to give our audience the full taste of Eartherea, we must give them tales that reek the true tang of magic.

Three Above All

Where shall we find this tang of magic? We must seek it in three places, and if we can’t find it in all three, the magic tale will miss and fall short and prove that it is false.

First (and more than all else) the talesman himself must breathe magic. He must reek of it in his body and his breath like an old unwashed man who eats too much cheese onion and garlic pie. His very hair should stink of it. His clothes should smell of little else. If only the talesman can show this knack of breathing magic in his words, then he may fill the most common tale that seems to take place here and now on Earth with the foul taint of sorcery and the unknown, the marvelous, the wonderful, the forbidden and the mad. Here we find what is called ‘magic realism’ and all good pornography. If only the talesman smell strong enough of magic, it may prove enough in and of itself to turn a tale into a wondrous glimpse into dreamland.

The next place where we should smell magic is in the hearts and minds of the actors in the tale. They must with all their hearts know that wonders can at any time come true. Some of them may doubt this, some may scoff: they will be wrong, they will be shown to be wrong, and what is more, they will know beneath their bluster that they are wrong.

This means that the souls inside the story will come at their lives and their work and the stones in the ground they live on in a way that we do not. We on Earth trust that stones are ruled by natural laws, and will at all times act in the same way under the same set of conditions. But in Eartherea stones are living things, or they are touched by living wills, and the way a stone will behave may depend on the mood of the folk around it as much as temperature and pressure and physical tools. Look at a house cross-eyed, and that house might fall apart; smile on a bit of wood and your chisel will carve it more true. This is what the characters in the tale must believe.

The third place that must scent of magic in a tale of the fantastic is the world of the tale. It is not always enough that the talesman believes in magic, or that the characters in the tale believe in it. For we in our smug world of reason and practicality may look on such a tale as the story of madmen, told by one who’s mad himself. We must see and be shown that the magic of this tale is ‘real.’ The stone and wood and mountains and sky must all of them stink of magic, of wonders, of the strange.

Eartherea is like the land of dreams. She holds the sheerest pleasure and the most frightful pain. She is not rational, she is fickle, changeable, whimsical, beguiling, sullen, shifty, and emotional. Wishes and rules there trump reason and the laws of nature at almost every turn. The only time that natural law seems to work in Eartherea is when she seeks to lull some poor hapless wight into the snare of trusting that fire must be hot, that streams flow down hill, that fish do not fly. As soon as the character starts to trust in natural law and acts upon that trust, that is the moment when the fire burns cold, the stream flows up the hill, and the fish fly out of the nets far away.

Getting the Knack

You talesman who would tell of Eartherea, must first learn how that dream-land operates. To know how it operates, you must know how the folk who live their lives in it must think and act. And to know how those folk think and act, you must yourself believe.

Therefore each of us talesmen who would quarry tales from the mines of Eartherea must let grow in our own hearts a way of seeing the world ‘as if’ magic were true (though we know it does not!) and the laws of nature only seem to work, for now, on sufferance from the forces and odd beings that are not to be seen, not to be found, but fill the air around us. We must first learn magic’s smell, and then learn how to take it in and breathe it out ourselves.

It ought to be simple enough. We all knew the trick once upon a time. When we were little and looked with eyes that were big, we smelled of magic all the time.

(Composed with pen on paper Friday, February 22, 2008)

The Commuter and the Misfit

Path and no-Path

Andrew

Andrew graduated from a good school as a popular, well-liked man. He got a job with a good firm in the city. He wed his sweetheart and they have three children now. In the years since he was hired by the firm, Andrew has been promoted three times. He’s no big shot yet, no vice-president even, but he has won a solid foothold on the middle rungs of management. He brings home good pay.

Every day Andrew gets up at the same time. He showers and shaves and puts on a nice dark suit and tie that are much like the suits and ties that all the managers at the firm wear. Andrew would never call this a uniform, but in his heart he does look on it as one, for when he straightens his tie and dons his jacket in the mirror, a sort of job-self comes over him, that differs from the Andrew who loves his wife and plays with his kids.

Andrew lives in a small town outside the city, on a quiet street. The houses on his street look much the same and bear only small differences from one another. The houses on the next street over, and the street past that, are much the same. This gives Andrew a warm feeling when he leaves home for work and comes back home again. It’s a solid, steady town and Andrew knows he belongs there because his house his car his wife and his kinds, and himself even, all match his neighbors. This is his town.

Andrew drives to work each day. He takes the freeway with all the others heading in to work in the city. The freeway traffic is thick and slow. Andrew talks about this with the guys at work. They share horror tales of traffic snarls and jams and the morons and maniacs who should never have been granted a license to drive. He also shares tips with the guys on other routes to the firm. There are five or six good ways to get to work and back. The freeway of course is the best and fastest, when the traffic is not too bad.

Andrew likes to bitch about the commute, and there are times he finds the job and even his good friends at work a bit too much. There’s nothing wrong with the folks at work or the firm, of course. But Andrew has been there almost ten years now, and he can see himself still there twenty years from now, and there are moments when it all strikes him as the same and more of the same, and there’s a small voice far in the back of his head that asks, ‘Is this all there is?’ And that small voice can remember the days when Andrew was young, not yet out of school, when he dreamed of his life and the adventure of his career. Somehow this doesn’t feel like his dreams. But everything he hoped to find is here for him. So it’s not that it’s the wrong firm or the wrong job or that there’s anything at all that’s wrong about it.

And yet the sameness of it all wears down on him at times, and when that small voice cries out it’s enough to break his heart.

There are even some moments when Andrew wonders what his life might have been had he chosen a different path. If he had quit school early, say.. If he had worked at different trades. If he had loved other girls. If he had lived in the city, or if he had moved out past the suburbs.

Andrew likes to think on this for it soothes his heart’s ache. He likes to think that whatever he chose, he would have made a go of it. He has always been well-liked, he has always been happy. So in the end Andrew sets aside these small day dreams and takes up is life again — the true life, the real life, the solid life of a good citizen and proud member of his community.

Andrew with all his complaints and daydreams shudders inside himself when he thinks of the life that Zack leads. Andrew would never in his life want to trade places with Zack.

Zack

Zack is a misfit and he’s always been one. He never much got along with anybody ever in his life. Sometimes he went out of his way to talk different, dress different, even walk different from those around him. Folks who thought alike and spoke and dressed alike got on Zack’s nerves. They annoyed him and he scorned them.

Zack was never handsome like Andrew. Zack was never well-liked. And it’s hard to say if Zack lives apart from people because he wasn’t good looking or well-liked, or if it was because Zack dressed and spoke different that folks thought he looked odd and even ugly, and didn’t care for him. Either way, whichever came first, both were true of him: he didn’t like people and they didn’t like him.

Zack quit school early. School is where the leaders of the group try to beat out of their young all the traits that make them stand out or act odd. School is where they mold all the Andrews of the world, who grow up to be leaders of their communities and in their turn support and guide their schools to beat out of the next batch of kids all the traits that make them stand out or act odd. This is what they mean by human life, after all.

Zack hated it. He hated his teachers and he hated the other students, the ones who fit in and did well and were thought to be good looking and well-liked. He despised them and he envied them all at once.

Zack lit out of town before he was even fully grown. He quit school, left home, got out of town. He went as far away from folks as he could get. Now he lives out in the wild.

There aren’t any freeways in the wild. There are no roads or paths or tracks. There’s no way to tell which is the right way to go. When night settles over the wild it brings with it a great deep darkness. When day breaks the sun blazes with bright fire that can be hard to take. The heat scorches in summer and in winter ice coats the land like an iron weight.

Zack doesn’t life in a cabin. A cabin seems too much like a house to him, a home like all the places they live in back in Andrew’s town. Zack puts up a little shelter where he beds down for the night. He kicks it down when day comes, and makes his campfire out of it. He doesn’t even want to give himself the chance to use it again or to stick around.

By now Zack has gone so far out of town that he’s lost his bearings and he can’t tell you which way leads back there where he came from. So even this guide that once he followed, the guide that led him away from the place where he was born, is lost. Now he just wanders with no real aim.

But I guess he has a sort of aim, if you care to call it one. When you don’t like folks, you try not to be one of them yourself. This is part of what drove Zack out of town and in a sense it’s pushing him to this day. He was always unhappy, either sad or mad. It’s a part of his soul and it has put down roots deep in him. So the more unlike other men he gets, the more unlike them he tries to become.

Zack’s feet are the most mis-shapen part of him. His shoes are ones he made himself and they may be ungainly and ugly but they’re strong. All the same they’re no match for the stones and stumps and vines and thorns of the wild. Zack’s feet have been blistered and cut and torn and swollen, in those years of beating out a way forward where no other feet have walked before.

Zack doesn’t think like other folks now. His thoughts are all a jumble. The words don’t link up right, they don’t make the kind of sense we all agree is the sense you have to make because it sounds like what everybody else is saying. That isn’t the way Zack talks or thinks at all. Sometimes he doesn’t even think with words but only pictures, or raw scraps of senses like a streak of heat, a dash of thirst, a sudden itch or the sense that he’s been bitten or stung by some bug that’s never there.

You can call Zack crazy, I guess we all would. We pity him or fear him back in town. A few of us, part misfits themselves, dream fine romantic dreams of Zack out there on his own in the wild. But they’d never go out there themselves. They’re not crazy after all.

Andrew and Zack were born the same year. But Zack looks old now while Andrew still looks young.

Zack’s isn’t a savage life. Savages have their communities and their fellowship, they follow their rules and are good looking and well-liked. The kind of life Zack leads isn’t even an animal kind of life. You could only call it by what it isn’t. It isn’t any kind of a human life. It isn’t a life fit for men to live as men.

But I wonder if you can say Andrew’s life is either.

Us

As in life, so in tales. Almost all the talesmen take after Andrew. A rare few take after Zack. We choose in our hearts to be like Andrew or Zack each time we start a tale. As time goes on we fall into a way of our own. It may lead us on after Andrew or after Zack.

And if it comes down to just happiness alone, then we’d all want to be like Andrew. There’s no doubt but Andrew is a happy man by any way of judging it, and Zack is a sad tormented soul.

If it comes down to just happiness alone.

(Composed with pen on paper Thursday, February 21, 2008)

Talesmen Inside Tales

Only the best will do

I’m reading The Innkeeper’s Song by Peter S. Beagle. Mr Beagle chose to tell this tale from many points of view, as though we heard testimony on various parts of the tale from different witnesses and actors; after the Prologue, Mr Beagle pretends he himself exists no more as far as the tale goes. More, within these bits of tales the witnesses tell how other characters told them tales. This gives us three kinds of talesmen a tale can have, with more or less authority.

3 Kinds of Talesmen

At the top there is Mr Beagle himself, the Author of the tale with his name on the cover and title page. He is the true talesman but he takes on the masks of several characters to hide behind. After the Prologue, each chapter is the tale of a different character, all in first person using ‘I,’ and most in past tense, though one character uses present tense for what he tells us took place in the same past time as the things the others tell of.

These chapter-by-chapter talesmen or witnesses make up the second kind of talesman in The Innkeeper’s Song. They know less than Beagle, only what they have seen and done, and only so far as they can fathom it. They speak in what Mr Beagle claims is their true voices (put into modern English).

Third are the characters who tell the witnesses tales within the scenes the witnesses tell us. These last talesman are least, and can claim the least authority: on the whole Mr Beagle has his witnesses tell us the truth (as far as they know it) but the characters who tell tales inside the tales the witnesses tell are not to be trusted. Mr Beagle lets us know that these folk will hold back bits of the truth, and lie, and try to trick their audience when it suits them.

Talesmen Good and Bad

Wilkie Collins used this same trick in The Moonstone. There too each part is told (but said to be written down and not told aloud as Mr Beagle would have it) by a different character who speaks to what he has seen and done, in light of his own ken.

The talesmen-witnesses in Mr Collins’ tale are good talesmen and bad. The bad talesmen show one trait that makes them bad talesmen above all: they put too much of themselves into what they tell, and they thrust their own faces in between us and the things they tell. This fault the talesmen-witnesses in Mr Beagle’s tale also have.

Both Mr Beagle and Mr Collins would no doubt excuse and defend this, and claim that these talesmen are not talesmen only, but also characters in the whole tale, and that when they tell too much of themselves they show us their hearts. So it is a kind of characterization, Mr Beagle and Mr Collins might claim. All the same the talesmen-witnesses are bad talesmen.

Think if you will if Count Tolstoy had begun a chapter of War and Peace in this way:

Ugh — I ate too much dinner last night, and slept hardly at all. My bowels were loose, and my thoughts turned on that peasant girl I saw two days ago by the stream. With shame I confess I thought on her with lust. Oh my God, what can a weak sinner do to save himself from evil? — Anyway, at the time of which I write, Prince Andrei was worried…

This would help scholars of the great writer, no doubt, learn more about him. But that version of War and Peace would never have made Tolstoy’s name known throughout Europe.

A Simple Rule

What can we can we take away from these tales is a simple rule:

If a talesman will pretend that a character tells his tale, the talesman should make sure that that character is just as good a talesman as the talesman is himself.

Better than the talesman of course no character can be through whom the talesman speaks. But it might be that when he takes on a mask, the talesman gains inspiration he might have lacked if he spoke as himself. All the better, then.

But he should make damn sure that his character-talesmen shall not tell us bad tales, unless the talesman himself seeks to tell bad tales. If that is in truth his goal, he may as well tell bad tales in his own voice, they will be less tiresome and more entertaining in that case. At least Tolstoy’s asides (or Mr Beagle’s if he made such remarks in his own voice) would tell us something true, or at least more true, about a living man in real life one time upon this Earth; and that would tell us more about who the talesman is, and why he chose this tale to tell us, and how he came to tell it in this way.

(Composed with pen on paper Wednesday 20 February 2008)

Where Tales Turn 3: the End

The big scenes in the End

Home & Destination

When a man sets out on a journey, he knows the ground he leaves. It is his home and well-trodden ground. But he can’t know the end of his journey until he comes to it; each journey has its own end; no man can know beforehand the place where he will end.

As the journey, so the tale. When we think on the big scenes the tale at its base must give us, we can see the Start with clear eyes. Each tale starts at the same place, with an audience that knows nothing of what is to come, and with a hero who knows it no better. We can then say that something must turn the hero onto a new road, and we call it the First Encounter. We can say, too, that something must keep the hero from giving up and turning back, and that he must have some aim in mind, and we call this the Start of the Middle. We know from past tales we love, that we want some high point near the road’s end, where it seems the worst will come and the best is farthest from the hero’s grasp, and we call this the End of the Middle.

But what comes after that?

Short Tales are not Long

The End of a long tale differs from the End of a short tale. A short tale might have an End of one sentence or two:

But then the hero won free and was safe.
And the rest of his days were happy.
The End.

Or briefer still:

And that was the end of him.
The End.

A short tale has the most strength when it ends abruptly. But a long tale may have chapters yet to tell, with a big scene or two, and a flat string of scenes between them, before it reaches ‘the End.’

Half-Scene: End of the Fight

The End of the Middle may not fill a full scene. It may come in the midst of a scene: there may be no gap between the moment the hero has all but failed, and the moment he manages to free himself, push back the doom that hangs over him, and win to some safe place to lick his wounds.

In this case we have a problem more for the critic than the talesman. The critic must choose whether to say the scene is the End of the Middle or the Start of the End, or whether to say the End of the Middle and the Start of the End are but half scenes. But the talesman only has to tell his tale, and he doesn’t care what to call it, but only to work his audience to his utmost.

The Healing: the Start of the End

The Healing is a scene that tells us what the hero does just after he escapes the doom that almost spelled his end and the end of all our hopes in the End of the Middle. This is often a scene of meditation and stillness more than outer action. The hero must think things over and make up his mind how to strike again. He must also steel his heart to face once more what all but finished him in the End of the Middle. In this scene the hero grows and changes for the last time in this tale. He can’t be the same man who went into the End of the Middle, or else it would come out the same way. He knows better now than to try that once more. Something must have shifted in his heart and he has won more wisdom than he had. In this way we can say that the Lesson or Moral in the tale rests within this one scene, for what the hero here gains, or knows that he has gained or had all along, is the one needful thing to win his heart’s desire. But often a good talesman will hide what the hero learns here, and leave it to his audience to say what was the one needful thing that marked the hero from what he was before to what he is now.

There are reasons to hide the Lesson. First for reasons of policy. For if the talesman tells the audience just how the hero grows here, he will give away the End of the End and kill all his suspense. Second for reasons of pace, for the audience knows the End of the End lies not far off now, and they itch to get to it. Third for reasons of taste, for a good audience hates all sermons in their tales.

The End Glimpsed and Guessed at Last

The final big scene wraps up the main tension of the tale. It kills once and for all either our hopes or our fears. It does so with finality. We know both from what happens in this scene and from the way the talesman tells it, that there will be no more chances after this. The hero has won all or he has lost it, and that’s that.

This scene may hold outer action, but it will not reach a higher pitch than the End of the Middle. It will not match the pitch of the End of the Middle. There is a sense in which a good talesman will at the Healing or Start of the End, let his audience know what the End of the End will be. Indeed a good audience has already guessed it, for they know they have to to with a tale and not real life. And in the well-shaped tale, the End of the Middle mirrors the End of the End. They are opposite in the sense that the End of the Middle forms a false End of the End, and the End of the End rights that lie, and gives us the tale’s true end. The one who seems to win all at the End of the Middle will surely lose all at the End of the End. The one who seems to lose all at the End of the Middle will surely win all at the End of the End.

In a well-shaped tale this must be true. Think: if the End of the Middle and the End of the End are much the same, then where has the tale taken us in the meantime? It could have ended at the End of the Middle. It should have ended there.

The End of the Middle strains our hopes and fears to the utmost. When it is done, we will be able to guess at the End of the End.

But our suspense is not quite done.

Confirmation and Detail

What’s left to our suspense is the confirmation of our guess or expectation. This is a strong force in us in the audience. We can work ourselves in agony to be told what we already know. We ‘know’ it — we’re ‘sure’ of it — but we still need to be told so that our last doubt, that gnaws and tugs at us, can be killed. This is what the End of the End does, and when we find our guess confirmed we feel a great satisfaction. But when the talesman gives the lie to our guess, we feel more cheated than pleased at his cleverness.

There’s another way suspense lingers through the end. For though we in the audience may be sure (or almost sure) of the End of the End on the whole, there may yet be some small details we can’t tell for sure. We may know the hero will go on to win his heart’s desire, because he all but lost it in the End of the Middle — but what about his dog, or his old teacher, or his faithful friend, what will become of them? Will his happiness be complete, or will some small loss temper it? And just what will the hero do when he has his heart’s desire? These are the small matters that the End of the End tells us, so that it holds some surprises for us after all.

The Last Untold Scenes

A tale has many untold scenes. There are scenes that take place before ‘Once upon a time’ just as there are scenes the talesman skips over along the way, for he can’t tell all, and wisely holds some back, even to some scenes we wish he had told us. And then there may be one last scene left untold, that comes after The End.

In a short tale, the End will be brief — abrupt — jagged. It leaves us, in a sense, to make the last scene up ourselves, and makes us picture to ourselves what goes on in the moments (or hours, or years) after The End.

This last untold scene may also trail a long tale. The wise talesman, like a good guest, knows to leave before his audience (or his host) has had too much. With the human heart, though, the hardest point to reach and stop at is the point of ‘enough.’ And with an audience, the talesman has to work on many hearts at once. He can’t reach ‘enough’ with each and every one. But to go past ‘enough’ will take us into ‘too much’ and that will spoil all. Thus the wise talesman is wary, and make sure to give us rather ‘not enough,’ though he will come as close as he dares and his skill allows to the magical, mythical point of ‘enough.’

The trick here lies in the use off the last untold scene. When the talesman hints at but does not spell out the last scene of the tale, he leaves it to his audience to go on and make it up in their own hearts. Thus each one of the audience will carry on the tale and the untold scene to his own point of ‘enough’ whereupon he will let the tale go with a sigh.

(Composed with pen on paper Tuesday 19 February 2008)

Where Tales Turn 2: the Middle

This wilderness has two logical mileposts. You may need more.

Three Acts

Aristotle split a play (and by extension all tales) in three. Though a play may have one act, five acts or more, and a movie may have eight or ten sequences, and a short-short story no more than fifty words, these divisions are technical at heart and not logical, not necessary. So what then are the logical parts of the tale? Let’s start at the smallest number and work our way up to see.

One Part. We could say a tale has but one part, that is — itself. This is logically true. But it gets us nowhere; we can’t do anything more once we say this. So this is true, but of no use.

Two Parts. We could say a tale has two parts. These would be the Start and the End. But to leap from Start straight to End makes for a weak tale at best, one so weak I don’t know if we could call it a tale at all. Think of:

Once there was a poor man.
Then he was rich.
The end.

Here we can’t even tell it in this way:

Once there was a poor man.
He got a lot of money.
Then he was rich.
The end.

— because the phrase ‘he got a lot of money’ is not the Start, nor is it the End. This is the middle and in truth, don’t we love the middle most of all? In this tale the hero has a problem of want, which is a thing we all face at some point in our lives. He ends in plenty. But because we in the audience have all shared in want, it’s just the ‘how he got plenty’ that interests us. More, we can say that we are glad to see the hero have plenty only as far as we have shared his pain of want, his fight to get more, and the ups and downs of ‘how he got plenty.’ The quick leap from want to plenty does nothing for us, we feel cheated or we feel nothing at all. A moment has passed for us while we heard it told, we blink once or twice, we go on with our lives and we forget this ‘tale’ right off. It has had no weight for us without the ‘how he got plenty’ of the middle, it has no lesson, no thrill, no plain or joy.

Three Parts. This is what Aristotle thought, that a tale has its three parts and three (logical) parts only: the Start, the Middle, & the End. So we can have our tale as told the second time, with Want (the start), How he got more (the middle) and Plenty (the end.).

This makes a true tale, one that satisfies us. The ‘how he got plenty’ can be stretched as long as the talesman please, it can have false ends and it can turn the hero round so he seems almost back where he started. All the same these many scenes and sequences and chapters and thousands of words can be summed up: ‘He got a lot of money.’

Four Parts. Now we have three logical parts, and they are all we need to make a tale. But let’s look at four parts and see if they might not make the tale better. How could we tell it in four?

Once there was a poor man.
He tried to get rich and failed.
At last he got a lot of money.
Then he was rich.
The end.

This version of the tale has two parts for its middle. There is a fight that ends in loss, then a second fight that succeeds. It’s true the added turn of the loss gives the fight more weight, and helps us share the hero’s end in Plenty. We feel closer to him now. We may even feel he earns his wealth more when we see how he fought and failed on the way.

The tale is better, but speaking logically can we say that there are four parts? Or should we say the Middle here covers two sentences?

We might look at this ‘four part’ tale as two tales joined as one:

Once there was a poor man.
He tried to get rich and failed.
He was still poor.
The end.

Once there was a poor man.
He got a lot of money.
Then he was rich.
The end.

Logically speaking, then, we can always boil a four-part tale down to three, or a series of simpler three-part tales. And so we find for five- and eight- and twelve-part tales. We could also split the Start in two, the flat scenes of the hero’s state before the First Encounter, and then the First Encounter itself.

So I’ll join Aristotle and say a tale has but three logical parts. Let’s look at the main turns of the Middle.

The Two Turns of the Middle

The Middle has two big scenes: the Start of the Middle and the End of the Middle. Now we could look at the Middle as a tale in itself. Since it has its Start and its End, why can’t it have its Middle? It must in truth have its flat, that scene or string of scenes that lay the ground for and build up our hope and fear for the scene at the End of the Middle. But this doesn’t need any heart-scenes — in a short tale a flat will do. So we are left with only those logical two big scenes in the Middle.

The Start of the Middle

I have seen a few ways to say what goes on at the Start of the Middle. My old teacher, Frank Daniel, studied the great dramatists and dramatic theorists of the 19th century in Europe, most of all the French. He said that a tale comes out of a predicament that must be resolved. For Frank, the Start of the Middle (or First Curtain in a three-act play) is the scene where the predicament is fixed. From that scene on, we know the hero can’t ignore or escape the predicament, and he can’t walk away, whether he chose the predicament in the first place or it sprang on him unawares, like a trap.

(Frank also taught that the Start had to lay all the ground for the audience to understand the terms of the predicament and what resolving the predicament would mean, and what it would look like.)

Another way to look at the Start of the Middle comes from another of my teachers, Bob Miller. He said that the Start of the Middle is the scene where the hero ‘takes on’ the Problem (which is the same thing Frank called the Predicament) so that he can’t or won’t let it go until it’s resolved.

I like both these ways of looking at the Start of the Middle, but I tend to think of it in other terms. I do agree with Frank that the Predicament must be established, and with Bob that the hero at this point takes on the Problem, willy-nilly as it may be. But I like to see the Start of the Middle more in terms of the structure of the logical whole of the tale:

The Start of the Middle is the scene that looks forward to and heralds the End of the End of the tale.

When I say the Start of the Middle ‘looks forward to and heralds’ the end, I mean much what Frank meant when he said that this scene must conclude the act of laying all the ground for the Predicament. The scene ‘looks forward’ to the end in that it tells us what the goal is, what the Predicament or Problem is. In the case of our hero in want, his poverty is his Problem, and the Start of the Middle might be when he vows to become rich, or it might be a scene where he dreams of being rich with such an ache that he can’t help but go out looking for riches from then on. And the scene ‘heralds’ the end in that it lets us clearly know what the end will look like or feel like when we reach it.

This does not mean it predicts the end. The end may still be win or it may be lose. But we will know what winning and losing will look like when they come.

This point is at the heart of the Start of the Middle and it is shared among all three descriptions given here: when the audience hears the big scene that is the Start of the Middle, they know what kind of tale they are about to hear, they know the ground on which the tale will walk. And they know two ends that may come of it when the talesman wraps it up. One end the audience hopes will come true. One end the audience fears lest it come to pass.

The balance of this hope and this fear is where the talesman plays his audience, and the turns we feel from hope to despair are what at base we love in tales, and why we want to hear them.

The End of the Middle

The other big scene the Middle needs is the End of the Middle (or Second Curtain in a three-act play). this is not the End of the End — it does not wrap up the tale or even seem to do so. It does teeter on the brink of what might be the End of the End, though, and this brink is what the audience fears might be the end — the worst of all possible ways the tale might end up.

The End of the Middle lies one step away from what might be the End of the End. And yet, something is lacking. There is one thread not yet tied off. There is one more step that must be taken, and this step is not a sure one in fact, that step will not be taken, it will be another step in its place, and the step we do take will lead us into the End with its subordinate parts.

Take up our poor man once more. What do we hope, what do we fear for him? We hope that he finds plenty, and fear lest he die in want.

(Or we might turn this tale on its head if we let the audience understand that the one way he might win wealth would come at the price of his child’s life. Does he love wealth more, or the child? In this case we might hope he loves his child more and fear lest he take the path to wealth. But this way of looking at tales brings in aspects of the hero and his Want where it might not be the same as his Need — and that is another tale for another day.)

If we hope he wins wealth, then the End of the Middle might come when his last try at wealth is about to fail. It has failed — or at least it seems that it has. The man is about to give up all hope. He has lost hope — or at least it almost seems so. And yet, and yet…

And yet something is amiss. The last try has not yet utterly failed. The man has not lost all his hope. He can still make one last effort within the try — maybe not to win all, but at least to save something for later, to stave off the final defeat, that defeat from which there can be no coming back. Or there may be something he has for the moment lost track of. This may be something he knows and has forgotten, or some skill he has, or some object he has not yet used, or has not used in the right way. Or it may be a friend or ally who can come to his aid. Or it may be some weakness or whim or fluke in the nature of what defeats the man (his foe, or the forces that block his path), and the weakness, whim or fluke turns back whatever it is that works against the man’s hopes and leaves him not quite defeated, not quite unable to rise once more.

In short what comes right after the End of the Middle is still unfinished, and there is just the slightest cause for us to hope that all is not yet told. Or it might be that the final upturn, what J.R.R. Tolkien called the ‘eucatastrophe’ in fairy tales, that brings of a sudden the final victory, ‘victory snatched from the jaws of defeat.’

In the words of John Carter of Barsoom, ‘I still live.’

Wilderness

The Middle of long tales, such as novels and epics and sagas, has been called a wilderness, a vast wasteland, and the part of the tale that gives the talesman fits to cross. In long tales, a simple series of flat scenes that lay the grounds for the End of the Middle scene would go on too long for us to bear. We would itch and stir and yawn and wonder what’s for dinner long before the talesman brought us to the End of the Middle.

So for long tales we will need some heart-scenes in between the Start of the Middle and the End of the Middle. These are not logical parts to the tale, and so they can’t be logically foreseen and told of beforehand. This is part of what makes the long Middle such a chore to tell. But that’s another tale for another day.

(Composed with pen on paper Monday 18 February 2008)

Where Tales Turn 1: the Beginning

The first big scene of a story

The Bent Wheel

Each tale has its big scenes and its small. The big scenes are the heart and guts of the tale, and we love the tale on the whole for what these big scenes do to us. The small scenes are the tale’s sinews bones and skin. They yoke the big scenes together in a whole shape, and they give us too the tale’s pace, and tell us things we need to know so we can enjoy the big scenes all the more without explanations. And on the whole the small scenes give the tale its sense. So we could say too that the big scenes make up the heart of the tale, but the small scenes make its head.

Small scenes vary from tale to tale, by the specifics of the tale. Bit scenes fall out in a few kinds that mark the tale’s main turns.

Think of a tale as a wheel that is bent out of true. The wheel is not a smooth circle but has flat sides and lumps. The flats are the small scenes and the wheel turns past them in a rush. Then the wheel hits the join between two flats or a lump, and thump the wheel slaps the ground and stops for a bit, before it lifts up off the bump to rush past the next flat.

Here I will consider the first big scene of a tale, where the ‘real story’ begins.

Point of Attack

The opening words of a tale don’t in the main give us a big scene. First we need to be told things, we have to meet our hero and get to know where he lived and what he did before the ‘real story’ starts.

Think of a fight between two unarmed men. They stand face to face and size each other up. They move from side to side, to see if they can get at each other’s flank. Then one rushes at the other to grab or kick or punch. That’s when the real fight starts.

The way a talesman goes at his tale is much the same. There’s always along list of things that took place before the first words out of the talesman’s mouth, and the talesman could start off with any one of them. He looks them over, sizes them up, moves about, to judge where to rush in and grab or kick or punch.

The last moments of this bit of looking-over I call the Point of Attack, and it is the part of the tale that begins with ‘Once upon a time, there was a…’ On the whole this is a state and not an event, but when we hear about states of being and they go on for very long, we itch and get bored and wonder when the story will start for real. And so the wise talesman makes this first flat part of his wheel as brief as he can, and he may turn it into a scene or two that sum up who the hero is and where he is in his life before he gets thrown into the story ‘for real.’

The Point of Attack leads us to the First Encounter, where the tale starts.

First Encounter

This is, then, the first heart-scene in the tale. After the ‘Once upon a time, there was a…’ point of attack, the First Encounter can start with ‘One day, he…’ The ‘one day’ (or its like) is a loud note to the audience. Wake up! Here comes the real story! is how we treat it. The hero in the tale of course doesn’t know that this scene will change his life. But the ‘one day, he…’ tells us that it will.

The First Encounter undoes the state of being the hero has lived in during the opening flat, the Point of Attack and before. It may or may not lead him on to many new turns. But if it does not lead him to some new thing, and to great disorder that he must deal with, then there won’t be a tale. So, even though the First Encounter doesn’t need to change the hero’s life, we in the audience know that it will. This is a big shift that parts us from the hero. From here on till the tale’s end, we will know some things and guess some others the hero can’t know, simply because we know we’re hearing a tale. The hero can’t reason out what is going to happen to him. He can guess, but his guess is weaker than ours, because we know the hero is inside a tale, but he can’t know that. (When the hero knows he’s in a tale, the tale stops working as a tale and turns into something else, a kind of literary trick or parody that goes outside the ‘true’ or classic kind of tale I mean.)

So the words ‘One day, it happened that’ will give us in the audience a thrill of delight; we know what’s coming is the story for real, and we look forward to seeing what kind of a story it will turn out to be. But to the hero, the First Encounter can be only an odd turn of events, something that bothers or annoys him, indeed. Or it might be the sort of thing that gives the hero a thrill of delight much like the one we feel. A boy who has dreamed of pirates feels such a thrill when he finds an old treasure-map, for instance.

There are as far as I can tell, two broad kinds of First Encounters:

1. where the hero chooses some new thing
2. where some new thing happens to the hero

The Choice

A man, long unsatisfied with his lot, suffers a string of losses and setbacks and even disasters (our Point of Attack). ‘One day, he makes up his mind’ to move to a new town and leave his old life behind.

This is a First Encounter the hero chooses. It tells us something about the hero’s character that he chooses this, where no one event has been enough to make him change. We could easily imagine the man carrying on doing what he had been doing, and hoping that his lot would change on its own. But no: this time the hero will change things of his own will. ‘One day, he made up his mind,’ or ‘In the end, he decided,’ will mark for us this choice. The hero here acts and this tells us we will have to do with an active hero. (Of course his choice may be wise or it may be foolish. Time & the tale will tell.)

The Trap

A man, long unsatisfied with his lot, suffers a string of losses and setbacks and even disasters (our Point of Attack). ‘One day, his neighbors (whose lives have upset as well by the man’s ill luck) decide' the man is cursed by God or Fate. They take him to the end of their lands and tell him they want no more to do with him and that he should keep on going and never come back.

This is a First Encounter the hero does not choose. It is chosen for him by his neighbors. The hero would have gone on where and as he was, but his neighbors didn’t let him. So we can see this kind of First Encounter as a sort of trap that springs on the hero and makes him react to it.

Because the hero here reacts, we mark him even so early as more of a passive type who, at this stage in his life at least, lets things happen to him more than making things happen by his choice. And just as the hero who chooses his First Encounter may choose well or ill, so too the Trap that makes the other hero’s First Encounter may be good for him or bad.

Traits of the First Encounter

Whether the hero chooses the new bent of his life or it springs itself upon him, the First Encounter will be one of these kinds of scenes:

• the hero meets someone new
• the hero starts a new career
• the hero finds some new object
• the hero learns some big news
• the hero looks at his life and past in a new way
• the hero finds he has a new skill or talent
• an accident befalls the hero

Each of these of course can take many shapes and masks. But when we look at these big scenes and turns in the tale from so far away, it makes me think of those ‘story generators’ that play out like text-adventure games. Roll the dice and they stop with one kind of First Encounter scene from the list above; then make up your mind if your hero will choose to act upon the encounter or if the encounter will force his hand even though he’d rather stay much the same.

(Composed with pen on paper Sunday, February 17, 2008)

Soar and Swoop

Choose with care the scenes you will detail

The Kite

The kite soared high above the plain. She rode the warm airs that rose off the rocks the sun baked. Back and forth she soared and watched the landscape far below. In a few moments her wings and eyes swept over miles of ground.

Then she spotted prey two miles away: a young antelope far from its herd, weak and stumbling. She turned her wings and started down. She dropped as fast as a stone. Her eyes saw nothing in the mad plunge, the land blurred as it leapt up to meet her. But she saw her prey and every hair upon the young antelope’s hide.

She struck and she killed with the sudden snap of a thunderbolt. The neck of the young antelope was broken. It had died before it lay upon the Earth.

Now the kite perched on the carcass. She stooped and tore the hide and flesh with her sharp beak. She gobbled down strips and hunks of meat. The meat settled in her craw, was crushed, slid into her guts. It was good. The flesh was tender bloody and sweet. It filled the kite’s belly.

Other kites and hunters gathered and watched but they dared not challenge her. Only the flies swarmed in beneath her, but flies were small things and the kite paid them no heed. She perched on the bloody carcass and preened. This was not a need but it pleased her to linger and flaunt her kill, her prize, before the other hunters who were helpless to feed till she was good and done.

The kite spread her great wings wide, shook them, pushed off. She flapped low across the ground until her speed lofted her up through the lower airs into the middle.

She soared to a high perch in the wind and settled there till night should fall or need rise up once more.

Heart and Sinew

As the kite soars to take in the plains of her hunt, and swoops to seize and feast upon her prey, so I judge the wise talesman should take the matter of his tale in hand, hold it at arm’s length, count which parts are best to taste and savor, and slip swiftly over the rest.

Every tale has a few scenes that make up its heart for its hearers. These are the scenes we want to hear in the fullness of telling, our every sense played upon and pleased.

There are then those other scenes that like sinew or bone hold the tasty heart-scenes in order and give the tale its overall shape. These are the scenes whose only aim is to bring us to the heart-scenes, to make sense out of the play among heart-scenes, to prepare us for the heart-scenes, and to hold us back from a headlong rush from one heart-scene to the next. So we can take stock, get back our breath, and look forward to what lies ahead, and in this forward gaze boost the fun we’ll have when we reach the next heart-scene.

In dreams the sinew-scenes drop out, for the talesman of our dreams is as well their audience, and the audience is greedy, always, like a small child that wants to eat and suck and play all the time. In dreams we leap from heart-scene to heart-scene without let or (seeming) reason.

The great joy of the audience lies in giving over the reins of the telling to the talesman. We give our dreams into his hands and we let him steer us were he will, at at what speed he will. He knows how to lash us on as well as how to rein us in, to hold us to a walk, to goad us to a gallop. Our joy lies in these two gifts the talesman holds,

1. First to imagine what we dare not
2. Second to pace the telling out in soaring sweeps of narrative and swooping scenes of full-bodied detail.

The talesman’s joy lies in these two things as well, first in daring to imagine, and second in mastering the tale and the audience at once.

The Overseer

The good talesman surveys the matter of his tale before he tells it. He holds it out and judges first what parts are best, what fair, what might be lacking, what might not be needed. He sees which scenes are heart-scenes and which are sinew-scenes. He knows he must let his audience feast upon the heart-scenes to their utmost greed. He knows the sinew-scenes need but be sketched to their smallest reach, given only these terms are met:

• that the sinew-scenes make sense in how the hero passes from one heart-scene to the next
• that the sinew-scenes prepare the ground for the next heart-scene so as to leave out all explanation from the telling of the heart-scenes
• that the sinew-scenes should last just long enough so that the audience should feel their pulse abate, their nerves ease, and their tongue take back the edge of hunger.

Overlooking the matter of his tale, the talesman goes on to oversee its telling and in this he must play Overseer both to the spinning of the tale and to the tastes of his audience. In the end it is the heart and head of the audience with which the talesman works.

Heart-Scenes

Which scenes then should the talesman choose as the heart-scenes of his tale? They are of two broad kinds:

1. Those scenes that most draw the talesman’s own eye
2. Those scenes that mark the great turns of the tale

The scenes that most draw the talesman are those he will tell best for his own delight in them. These scenes mark one talesman from another not in the craft but in the soul. And the soul of the talesman is the root of his style and what we in the audience best recall.

The scenes that mark the turns of the tale come close to universal in the Sea of Story, and deserve their own place to speak of them at length. These though in brief are the scenes that tale itself most wants to tell, that draw the tale’s own eye. And they mark one tale from another in their soul.

But I must note here the gape that may lie between the scenes the talesman best loves to tell, and those the tale most wants to be told. Where the two are yoked as one, the tale will best win the audience that loves that kind of tale. But where the two fall wide apart, the tale will lurch and limp at best, and it will be plain to the audience that the talesman is an ill match to this kind of tale, and he were best to tell another kind of tale more to his own taste.

(Composed with pen on paper Saturday 16 February 2008)

When Should Writers Write?

What you make is shaped by when and how you make it

Talesmen, Writers & Storytellers

The first talesmen were also storytellers. They shared their tales by word of mouth, straight to the ears of their audience. Later men created alphabets and writing and other means by which they could set down their tales at one time, and their audience could take it up later on.

The storyteller has only the one chance to share his tale, and that is when his audience is before him, and when they want to hear it. He must be ready to tell it, too. This means the hour depends on both. Tradition holds that tales were on the whole told at day’s end, to catch up on the news of the day, make ready for tomorrow, or while away the hours too soon to sleep and too late to venture far from the fire into the savage darkness. Tales might also be told after any meal, in the sleepy hour that attends a full belly.

The writer on the other hand can choose his own hours, even as his readers can choose theirs. This raises the questions, When is the best time for you to write? And does it make a difference?

Personal History

When I was young and not yet full grown, I did my writing at night. Sometimes I worked far after dark, almost till dawn. This is not uncommon for youths of that age, when hormones make us all but nocturnal beasts. Then I grew into manhood and I found I was most productive when I wrote first thing in the morning for a few hours. But this year I find myself writing mostly at night once more.

My first years of writing saw me writing with pen on paper. Then I got a computer and in time I composed on keyboard. But this year I have gone back to writing with pen on paper.

I did not want to pick up a pen again. Paper-making is a toxic industry to land and water and tree and the men who work in it; now that we are free to use electrons end-to-end, it makes more sense to do so, and compose on a very-low-power device such as my Dana From Alphasmart, rather than waste the paper.

But I write better when I write with a pen. I might some day try a tablet computer rather than paper, but I wonder if the saving in paper justifies the use of electrons to power a strong tablet and its active screen.

Night & Day

My purpose in posting this has less to do with materials and more to do with time. Should we write by dawn, by noon, or by night?

Those who write the first thing in the day say it boosts their production and is most conducive to long term writing habits. It’s easier to write every day when you get it out of the way first thing. And writing every day is one of the great bits of wisdom the masters give the students of the craft.

Those who write by noon may be the most anchored in the doings of the day, for they have dealt with the world already for some hours, and the bustle of the day’s work swarms round them like flies. But this hour is most prone to interruptions and distractions of all kinds, and it takes a great discipline, or some secluded writing den to hide in, to make the practice work.

And for those of us who tell of Eartherea in all her fabled and imaginary lands, the pen picked up in dead of night when the air is breathed with a billion dreams, has much to recommend it.

I know the tale I am now spinning about the boy who didn’t grow up, is better when I set it down by darkness. I can feel it is so. There’s no way to prove it, of course. But I feel sure enough of it that I will go on doing so.

So for all my fellow talesmen who walk the marches of Eartherea, I can give you these words of counsel:

• Write at dawn if you need to make it a habit
• Write at dark if you dare risk a loss of wordage for a gain in fire and enchantment
• Use a pen and draw your words upon the page if you would invite your other, deeper self to join in.

(Composed with pen on paper Thursday 14 February 2008)

Birds and Tales and the Talesmen Who Cage Them

‘If you love it
Set it free’

Pillars and Ivy Strands

The human community faces these needs for its survival: it needs shelter and food and the tools and materials with which to make shelter and food. It also needs some understanding among its members as to how to get along, so that shelters will not be torn down and food spoil, and so that the young may be born and reared in safety.

Does it need tales or song or any other form of art to survive? No. These may be vital for the community to thrive, but not to survive.

To get the raw materials, to make the tools, to build the shelters and make the dress, to grow and catch the food, to give birth, to rear the young: these are the naked rude pillars upon which the human community depends.

To adorn the shelters, to make the tools lovely to hold and use, to cut and fit the dress; to make tales to while away the idle hours or lighten the toil of working hours, to sing, to dance: these are the green strands of ivy that creep up and round the naked rude pillars and dress them and help the members of the community look up beyond the brutal moment of survival and dream of thriving.

Art becomes important when survival is assured and not before.

From these propositions we can see that those who make the tools and shelter and provide the food, are those who work and labor and in trading the fruits of their labor these men support their community. And those who spin the tales and sing the songs and dance and paint and make adornments should be men who have done their work of helping the community to survive and have an idle hour to spare.

Art is to be given, as much for the joy of giving as for the joy of seeing it received. Art is not to be paid for save in a blessing or a tip or extra favor; and maybe in no more than a smile.

Or we can say that the stuff of survival is traded for other stuff we need to live, and that art is to be traded only for other art.

The ‘professional artist’ has a place only in the community of kings and noble lords, as one of their slaves. He has no place in a free community of equals.

Freedom and Control

Systems of law such as copyright work to ensure the bondage of the professional artist. He is paid by his masters, the kings and noble lords of publishers and distributors, who are the true owners of all the professional artist makes, as they are the owners of the artist himself, so long as he will forego the independence and dignity of a man who trades with other men the stuff that is needed for life.

Systems of law such as copyright (like all systems of slavery) work to keep the tales and songs and other works of art unfree and under the control of the kings and noble lords of the publishers and distributors. They forbid the artists from giving their art in blessings, and from trading their art for other art.

The artist who works under a system of law such as copyright may control his life and his work only to the extent to which he may wheedle and please and persuade the kings and noble lords of his publishers and distributors. Theirs is the power to dictate and dispense, and his only the performance of groveling and begging them to please, if they would, to consider his wishes as well as their profit.

How to Wield the Most Control

The talesman who wields the most control of his work is the talesman who never tells his tales to any other living soul but himself.

When he publishes his tale in any way, by even so much as telling it to one other human soul, he gives his work away. From that moment on the tale is free of his control.

To publish a work in a human community is to set it free, to be repeated, to be retold, to be revised and reworked and altered.

Only the tale untold, that hides in the breast of the talesman and is known to none but him, may he control.

This fact does not depend upon any system of law, though a system of law may acknowledge it or, like systems of law such as copyright, they may deny it. It remains true all the same.

The Generous Talesman

The generous talesman is the one who gives his work away, who publishes it and frees it in that act, and knows that he frees it, and is glad to set it free. He does so for the best of reasons, for the reasons that men made tales and songs and dance and all the other arts in the first place: for the joy of giving as as much for the joy of seeing it received. And he is glad to get his payment in a blessing or a tip or extra favor, and maybe in no more than a smile.

And so he trades his art only for other art, in a human community in which all men build the naked rude pillars of survival, and all men help to grow and nurture the green strands of ivy that adorn the pillars.

Unlike the slaves that are the professional artists in the slave societies ruled by kings and noble lords, he does not treat his art as a tame bird to be caged in a dim chamber and fed scraps by other slaves, but he is glad to see his art like the wild birds who soar aloft and hide in the trees, and whose sight is rare and delightful.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, February 14, 2008)

Talesmen Who Can Soar

The art and craft of summing-up

Talesmen can tell the same story in many ways. They can be terse and brief or they can stretch it out and take all the time in the world to reach the end. The master talesman knows where he is at each point in the tale, how far from the start and how long till the end. ‘Pace’ is the relative quickness or languor with which a talesman tells his tale all in all, and each part of the tale as its own piece. The way to quicken the pace is by good use of summing-up, but this is a lost art today, as talesmen have sought to engage their audience through the intimate details of each story-moment as it passes.

Elasticity of Tales

The Iliad tells of the War waged by the Achaeans against Priam’s Troy. This war was said to have lasted through ten years of siege and battle, but it had its roots going back to the childhood of Helen, the pact of Helen’s royal suitors, the rivalry of three goddesses that came years before King Agamemnon assembled the League to win Helen back for the Spartan King. And the last of the Achaean warrior-kings, Odysseus, did not reach his home again after Troy fell for another ten years. Later it was said that one of the princes of Troy, Aeneas, voyaged after the fall of his home city around the Mediterranean Sea, visited Carthage (or the site that would become Carthage), and founded a line that would come to build the city of Rome into greatness.

And Homer’s Iliad is a long poem that must have taken several evenings to recite in full. Even so Homer did not tell of the birth of Helen or the rivalry of the goddesses, nor of the pact of the suitors, Helen’s abduction, the assembling of the fleet, the sacrifice to appease the gods of the winds, landing below Troy, or the first years of battle. Nor did he tell of the fall of Troy, its sack, or the homecoming and fates of the warriors. Instead Homer told only of a few days in the ninth year (I think) of the war, when the two champions, Hector and Akilles, fought their final battles and Hector died and was dragged about the city from the back of Akilles’ chariot.

From these crucial days the tide of the war turned, and after Hector fell, it seemed that Troy was doomed. Though Akilles himself would soon fall after Hector, and many heroes and heroines would come bravely to Troy’s defense, it proved but a delaying of the final defeat, won by the stratagem of Odysseus.

From this it can be seen that a tale can be told at many lengths from short to long.

The Intimate Moment

It is the fashion now to tell tales in terms of subjective viewpoints of one or more of the characters, and to mask as much as possible the role the ‘narrator’ or talesman plays in relaying the tale. In short the tale of today masquerades as something other than a tale: it tries to be an experience the reader can live through as though he were one of the characters, feeling and thinking along with the character.

From this goal we get the common advice that the narrator should shut up, that the talesman should ‘show not tell,’ and that he is well advised to disdain ‘head-hopping’ or the practice of detailing the viewpoint of more than one character within a single scene.

This approach gains much in creating the ‘fictive dream’ or trancelike state under which the reader loses track of himself, loses track of time, and lives but in the tale itself. This is an artistic experience that movies and television, the main rivals with the printed word for the crown of talesmanship, cannot match. So I suppose that today’s talesmen (and their publishers) have moved in this direction in self-defense, as first movies and then television have stolen away the leisure hours of potential readers.

But it loses the grace of the summing-up, and makes for very-long-told tales that can exhaust the reader as much as engross him.

Pace and Flying High

Today’s talesman seems stuck at one level, or speed, or gear. He masters the art of creating the ‘fictive dream’ by identifying his readers with one character in the tale, and proceeding with them moment by moment. This is the highest art when those moments are the crucial and pivotal moments in the progress of the tale.

But not every moment is pivotal. Homer chose to tell of but a few days out of ten years of war on Ilium. So it seems the first way a talesman can shorten his tale lies in his choice of what moments to tell.

JK Rowling’s immensely entertaining Harry Potter volumes shows us how this way of telling moment by moment can prove a snare for the talesman. Each of her volumes tells of almost an entire year of Harry’s life (though the first covers time before as well) and thus it would seem that, told with the same number of moments, the volumes should all come to much the same length. However in the uniform Scholastic US hardcover editions…

• Volume 1 comes to 309 pages
• Volume 2 comes to 352 pages
• Volume 3 comes to 448 pages
• Volume 4 comes to 734 pages
• Volume 5 comes to 896 pages
• Volume 6 comes to 672 pages
• Volume 7 comes to 784 pages

It seems that Rowling lost her mastery over pace as the tale went on. Many readers and critics have complained about this, and the later volumes entertain me much less than the first three, the tightest (or at least shortest) of the tale.

Soaring Above It All

Talesmen can also rule over pace by the use of summing-up passages. They still tell us of the moments, but they tell us tersely, in a few brief words. It is as though they flew high above the scene of the action and only told us what they could see from a great height as they soared on to the next scenes.

A summing-up passage unmasks the narrator or talesman, since the words can only come from him. One way today’s talesmen get around this violation of their ‘show don’t tell’ laws is by ‘cutting ahead’ in time, and having the summing-up appear as though the current scene’s viewpoint character were remembering the events that took place between then and the last time we saw him. The simplest form of this work-around has the talesmen do no more than move the narrator’s summing-up paragraphs a bit later, after establishing a scene and a viewpoint character.

The problem I find in some of these ‘viewpoint summing-up’ passages is that they get stuck back in the moment-by-moment mire, and end up being not so much shorter than had the tale proceeded in ‘real time.’

The great art of summing-up is bound to the narrator, the unmasked talesman who frankly tells his tale. Until the narrator is delivered back from the exile current fashions have condemned him to, the art of summing-up will not return.

How Do We Get It Back?

I suppose the best way to learn to master this art of summing-up rests in telling the same tale many times over, at different lengths. From very-short to very-long, beginning with the very-long that current fashions condemn us talesmen to, detailing the scents, sights, thoughts, and touch of the character in every moment he lives through the tale, and going on from there to shorten the tale by half, then by half again, and by half again, until we tell the tale out in no more than three paragraphs or a single page.

The other way is called by its creator the ‘Snowflake Method of Novel Writing’ — he describes this online at:

http://www.rsingermanson.com/html/the_snowflake.html

This is a form of what is called in software design ‘top-down programming’ and begins by telling the tale in one sentence, then in three sentences, three paragraphs, three pages, and so on.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, February 13, 2008)

The Two Freedoms

What every talesman ought to be free to do
and where that freedom ends

Speech & Talesmanship

I take it as a general principle of civics, that each of us should be allowed to do what he wants, to the utmost extent. The corollary of this is that none of us should act in a way that bars someone else from doing what he wants.

This involves a balance between what I do and what my neighbors do. And it has a lot of implications in the physical world, where real harm can be done and where this balance must be held as the foremost principle of justice. But the balance fades in the non-physical world of speech and the arts. Talesmanship is the place where speech and art are yoked together.

The Untouchable Arts

If we look at all art and ask ourselves, ‘Can I touch it? Can I hold it in my hand? Could I smash or destroy it?’ When we do that we find that there is a class of art that can be touched, held, and destroyed. And there is another class of art that can not be touched or held or destroyed.

You can hold a painting. You can touch it and destroy it. This is true also of every piece of art that exists as a unique physical creation, that is created upon and out of some physical object, and has no existence apart from this physical object. It is true, say, of statues and drawings.

But we can’t touch or hold a song, nor could we destroy it. This is an art whose representation and whose existence form two distinct entities. The song, if you will, is an idea, and when someone sings he he only represents it, and when someone else records that singing he creates a representation of the song that we can touch, hold, or destroy. But the thing we touch and hold and may destroy is not the song itself. It isn’t even the singing of the song. It’s only a representation of a representation of the song.

Music and tales and architecture are among the Untouchable Arts. These arts exist as ideas that come before any physical representation. The representation of these arts is no better than a sketch or approximation or version of the underlying art. And these sketches can take many forms, they can be copied and the art thereby shared, and they can be destroyed — with no harm to the art itself.

A song can be represented on paper or other medium using any one of many systems of musical notation. A tale can be written down using different alphabets, pictograms, ideograms on paper or parchment or vellum or wood or stone. The song can be sung, the tale can be voiced; these vocalizations can be recorded in many ways upon many different media.

It is a feature of all the Untouchable Arts that they have some system of notation that allows us to represent them in a basic sketch or scheme. The system of notation forms a code that embodies the essence of the artwork so that someone else who knows that code can ‘re-present’ the artwork.

The Untouchable Arts exist most of all in the minds of those who perform and present and share them. The various codes or systems of notation serve us as aids and jogs to our memories, or if you will as extensions of our minds.

To the extent that digital file formats have become infinitely extensible, it may be true now or will be in the near future that all the arts will join the camp of the Untouchable. (A painter, for example, can create not with brush and dyes on canvas or board, but through a system of digital capture using a program that encodes and decodes the painter’s gestures as strokes of color on a screen.)

The Two Freedoms in Art

Let’s go back to our rule of freedom and see how it works in the art world. But let’s speak of tales and talesmen, and let them stand in for all art and artists of the Untouchable kind.

The talesman can do what he wants. So he can tell whatever tale he chooses. But no talesman can bar another from telling whatever tale he wants. So he can’t stop another talesman from repeating the tale he himself has just told.

The Touchable Arts can’t be shared or duplicated, their works are unique and so when we deal with these works we must strike the balance of all the physical world. You are not allowed to paint over another artist’s painting without his permission, for if you do you harm his work. But the Untouchable Arts can be shared and duplicated with ease, so many singers can sing one song, each after his fashion.

Consequences

The logical result of the twin rules of freedom for artists of the Untouchable Arts are the following radical guidelines:

• if you hear it, you are free to say it
• if you see it, you are free to copy it
• if you learn it, you are free to repeat it

And this undoes all copyright, trademark, and patent monopolies in the world.

(Composed with pen on paper Tuesday 12 February 2008)

Two More Bites of Small Words

More on how the core words transcend time

1. Voyaging

There are many words that speak of journeying. And many of these words come from the means of going, and as such they all spring out of the technology of that means:

• I drove my (coach, chariot, car, SUV, lorry, Segway) to London
• I motored to London
• I flew to London
• I helicoptered to London
• I sailed to London
• I entrained for London
• I rode to London
• I hitch-hiked to London

There are other words that speak to no one kind of technology:

• I went to London
• I journeyed to London
• I voyaged to London
• I made my way to London
• I wended my way to London
• I passed on to London
• I traveled to London
• I jogged to London
• I ran to London
• I hastened to London

Some of these terms have fallen out of use in English, and so they take on a taste of the time or place when they were first coined, or when they were most in use, or at least when we in the audience have an idea they were most in use.

But the rest of the ‘tech free’ terms can be said to stand out of time and place, and are free of any reference to the technological achievement of the culture in which the tale is set.

The more basic one of these terms is, the closer it stands to the center of the core-group of English words. The most basic of all these is the original ‘to go’ which comes up as past-tense ‘went’ in the list.

A man could ‘go’ to London 1500 years ago (let us say for now that the town was then called ‘London’), or 1000 years ago, or 500 years ago. He could ‘go’ to London to see the Crystal Exhibition in the 19th century, or to see the Millennium Wheel early in the 21st. He could ‘go’ to London a thousand years from now and use whatever form of conveyance then was available to him.

2. The Far-sighted William Morris

One of the dangers you find when you use only these core words is the tale starts to seem allegorical, archetypal, mythical … and unreal. When the talesman does without the words that speak of specific places and times, he creates a tale that might happen any time and any place, and thus it might seem to happen at no-time and no-place.

Every sight is glazed over and blurred, every sense is numbed, and we feel we stand a far sight from what goes on in the tale. For example I quote a few passages from the Project Gutenberg Etext of The Well at the World’s End by William Morris (wwend10) which are not wholly without time thanks to the archaic flavor with which Morris spiced his language. All the same the characters and events seems hard to grasp for us:

Long ago there was a little land, over which ruled a regulus or kinglet, who was called King Peter, though his kingdom was but little. He had four sons whose names were Blaise, Hugh, Gregory and Ralph: of these Ralph was the youngest, whereas he was but of twenty winters and one; and Blaise was the oldest and had seen thirty winters.

Now it came to this at last, that to these young men the kingdom of their father seemed strait; and they longed to see the ways of other men, and to strive for life. For though they were king’s sons, they had but little world’s wealth; save and except good meat and drink, and enough or too much thereof; house-room of the best; friends to be merry with, and maidens to kiss, and these also as good as might be; freedom withal to come and go as they would; the heavens above them, the earth to bear them up, and the meadows and acres, the woods and fair streams, and the little hills of Upmeads, for that was the name of their country and the kingdom of King Peter.

Later the youngest son, Ralph, rides into the Wood Perilous, where he finds adventure:

Then lightly he got into the saddle and gathered the reins into his left hand, and sat peering up the trodden wood-glades, lest he should have to ride for his life suddenly. Therewith he heard voices talking roughly and a man whistling, and athwart the glade of the wood from the northwest, or thereabout, came new folk; and he saw at once that there went two men a-horseback and armed; so he drew his sword and abode them close to the want-ways. Presently they saw the shine of his war-gear, and then they came but a little nigher ere they drew rein, and sat on their horses looking toward him. Then Ralph saw that they were armed and clad as those of the company which had gone before. One of the armed men rode a horse-length after his fellow, and bore a long spear over his shoulder. But the other who rode first was girt with a sword, and had a little axe hanging about his neck, and with his right hand he seemed to be leading something, Ralph could not see what at first, as his left side was turned toward Ralph and the want-way.

Now, as Ralph looked, he saw that at the spearman’s saddle-bow was hung a man’s head, red-haired and red-bearded; for this man now drew a little nigher, and cried out to Ralph in a loud and merry voice: “Hail, knight! whither away now, that thou ridest the green-wood sword in hand?”

Ralph was just about to answer somewhat, when the first man moved a little nigher, and as he did so he turned so that Ralph could see what betid on his right hand; and lo! he was leading a woman by a rope tied about her neck (though her hands were loose), as though he were bringing a cow to market. When the man stayed his horse she came forward and stood within the slack of the rope by the horse’s head, and Ralph could see her well, that though she was not to say naked, her raiment was but scanty, for she had nought to cover her save one short and strait little coat of linen, and shoes on her feet. Yet Ralph deemed her to be of some degree, whereas he caught the gleam of gold and gems on her hands, and there was a golden chaplet on her head. She stood now by the horse’s head with her hands folded, looking on, as if what was tiding and to betide, were but a play done for her pleasure.

So when Ralph looked on her, he was silent a while; and the spearman cried out again: “Ho, young man, wilt thou speak, or art thou dumb-foundered for fear of us?”

But Ralph knit his brows, and was first red and then pale; for he was both wroth, and doubtful how to go to work; but he said:

“I ride to seek adventures; and here meseemeth is one come to hand. Or what will ye with the woman?”

Said the man who had the woman in tow: “Trouble not thine head therewith; we lead her to her due doom. As for thee, be glad that thou art not her fellow; since forsooth thou seemest not to be one of them; so go thy ways in peace.”

“No foot further will I go,” said Ralph, “till ye loose the woman and let her go; or else tell me what her worst deed is.”

The man laughed, and said: “That were a long tale to tell; and it is little like that thou shalt live to hear the ending thereof.”

This is a sad loss, that such a tale seems so far from us. The way to get past this, I feel, is to stress the sensations of the characters, most of all the main character, in such a way that the audience feels his body and all his sensations. More than this, the talesman might keep in mind that the kinds of sensation we hear tell of are not all of the same weight. What I mean by this is that Ralph here in Morriss’s tale does not sweat or piss or shit, his flesh does not itch or pinch, his head does not ache. Such senses are not only intimate but they belong as well to a class of senses that true flesh is heir to. This is commonly called ‘gritty’ by many, although when they say this, they also mean a sort of baseness or meanness or lowness in the characters — a cynical sense of life. That is not needed for what I mean.

(Composed on keyboard Monday, February 11, 2008)

More on One Note Words

Examples from ‘Mary Godolphin’

A Victorian Teacher

From 1867 to 1870 seven books were published that told well-known tales in words of one syllable. These were all said to be by ‘Mary Godolphin’ and it is said that the true author was Lucy Aiken, though Miss Aiken died in 1864. You can find out more on Miss Aiken at Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Aikin which also has links to at least five of these works at Project Gutenberg and Google Books:

• Pilgrim’s Progress at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7088
• Robinson Crusoe at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6936
• Swiss Family Robinson at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/6692
• Evenings at Home and
• Sandford and Merton can be found at Google Books if you search http://books.google.com/ for those titles.

The aim of ‘Mary Godolphin’ was to give those who wished to learn to read, both child and grown-ups alike, well-known tales in words that were easy to spell out and did not need to be split into more than one syllable:

‘It may be objected that my system involves the use of words which, though short, are difficult to understand and might be made more intelligible in polysyllabic language. But I have endeavored as far as possible to avoid hard and technical expressions, and I cannot but think that the mere fact of the brevity of the words must be a great attraction to beginners of all ages. By this method the labor of dividing and accentuating words is avoided: a difficulty which pupils who have only attained to the knowledge of monosyllables cannot conquer by independent effort.’

(Taken from the Author’s Preface to the Project Gutenberg edition of Pilgrim’s Progress in Words of One Syllable by ‘Mary Godolphin.’)

This approach made her ban even such common words as before, after, under, over, below, above, today, tomorrow and the like, which would surely take their place in any English ‘core group’ of words that would be invisible and timeless to an audience today.

All the same, we can look at these works and learn from them. So here are some bits from these you can taste to get at what I mean by the effect of talespinning and reading tales in such simple words.

Robinson Crusoe

There are too many editions of DeFoe’s tale published to be able to tell which one the ‘Words of One Syllable’ version came from. That makes it hard to give a fair comparison. More than that, the ‘Words of One Syllable’ version does a good job to make the tale a lot shorter, and so cuts out a lot. But here’s a little sample:

Original by DeFoe (from the Gutenberg etext 12623):

"Young man," says he, "you ought never to go to sea any more; you ought to take this for a plain and visible token that you are not to be a seafaring man."--"Why, Sir," said I, "will you go to sea no more?" "That is another case," said he; "it is my calling, and therefore my duty; but as you made this voyage for a trial, you see what a taste Heaven has given you of what you are to expect if you persist: perhaps this is all befallen us on your account, like Jonah in the ship of Tarshish. Pray," continues he, "what are you? and on what account did you go to sea?" Upon that I told him some of my story; at the end of which he burst out with a strange kind of passion; "What had I done," says he, "that such an unhappy wretch should come into my ship? I would not set my foot in the same ship with thee again for a thousand pounds." This indeed was, as I said, an excursion of his spirits, which were yet agitated by the sense of his loss, and was farther than he could have authority to go. However, he afterwards talked very gravely to me, exhorted me to go back to my father, and not tempt Providence to my ruin; told me I might see a visible hand of Heaven against me. "And young man," said he, "depend upon it, if you do not go back, wherever you go, you will meet with nothing but disasters and disappointments, till your father's words are fulfilled upon you."

We parted soon after; for I made him little answer, and I saw him no more: which way he went, I know not. As for me, having some money in my pocket, I travelled to London by land; and there, as well as on the road, had many struggles with myself, what course of life I should take, and whether I should go home, or go to sea.

As to going home, shame opposed the best motions that offered to my thoughts; and it immediately occurred to me how I should be laughed at among the neighbours, and should be ashamed to see, not my father and mother only, but even every body else; from whence I have since often observed, how incongruous and irrational the common temper of mankind is, especially of youth, to that reason which ought to guide them in such cases, viz. that they are not ashamed to sin, and yet are ashamed to repent; nor ashamed of the action for which they ought justly to be esteemed fools, but are ashamed of the returning, which only can make them be esteemed wise men.

Robinson Crusoe in Words of One Syllable (from the Project Gutenberg etext rbcos10):

"Young lad, you ought to go to sea no more, it is not the kind, of life for you." "Why Sir, will you go to sea no more then?" "That is not the same kind of thing; I was bred to the sea, but you were not, and came on board my ship just to find out what a life at sea was like, and you may guess what you will come to if you do not go back to your home. God will not bless you, and it may be that you have brought all this woe on us."

I spoke not a word more to him; which way he went I knew not, nor did I care to know, for I was hurt at this rude speech. Shall I go home thought I, or shall I go to sea? Shame kept me from home, and I could not make up my mind what course of life to take.

Pilgrim’s Progress

Here we stand on the firmest ground to show Bunyan’s text and the ‘One Syllable’ adaptation; I choose from the famous opening:

Pilgrim’s Progress (from the Gutenberg etext plgrm11):

As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold, I saw a man clothed with rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. I looked, and saw him open the book, and read therein; and, as he read, he wept, and trembled; and, not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying, "What shall I do?"

In this plight, therefore, he went home and refrained himself as long as he could, that his wife and children should not perceive his distress; but he could not be silent long, because that his trouble increased. Wherefore at length he brake his mind to his wife and children; and thus he began to talk to them: O my dear wife, said he, and you the children of my bowels, I, your dear friend, am in myself undone by reason of a burden that lieth hard upon me; moreover, I am for certain informed that this our city will be burned with fire from heaven; in which fearful overthrow, both myself, with thee my wife, and you my sweet babes, shall miserably come to ruin, except (the which yet I see not) some way of escape can be found, whereby we may be delivered. At this his relations were sore amazed; not for that they believed that what he had said to them was true, but because they thought that some frenzy distemper had got into his head; therefore, it drawing towards night, and they hoping that sleep might settle his brains, with all haste they got him to bed. But the night was as troublesome to him as the day; wherefore, instead of sleeping, he spent it in sighs and tears. So, when the morning was come, they would know how he did. He told them, Worse and worse: he also set to talking to them again; but they began to be hardened. They also thought to drive away his distemper by harsh and surly carriages to him; sometimes they would deride, sometimes they would chide, and sometimes they would quite neglect him. Wherefore he began to retire himself to his chamber, to pray for and pity them, and also to condole his own misery; he would also walk solitarily in the fields, sometimes reading, and sometimes praying: and thus for some days he spent his time.

Now, I saw, upon a time, when he was walking in the fields, that he was, as he was wont, reading in his book, and greatly distressed in his mind; and, as he read, he burst out, as he had done before, crying, "What shall I do to be saved?"

Pilgrim’s Progress Told in Words of One Syllable (from the Project Gutenberg etext pilos10):

As I went through the wild waste of this world, I came to a place where there was a den, and I lay down in it to sleep. While I slept I had a dream, and lo! I saw a man whose clothes were in rags and he stood with his face from his own house, with a book in his hand, and a great load on his back. I saw him read from the leaves of a book, and as he read, he wept and shook with fear; and at length he broke out with a loud cry, and said, What shall I do to save my soul?

So in this plight he went home, and as long as he could he held his peace, that his wife and babes should not see his grief. But at length he told them his mind, and thus he spoke, O my dear wife, and you my babes, I, your dear friend, am full of woe, for a load lies hard on me; and more than this, I have been told that our town will be burnt with fire, in which I, you my wife, and you my sweet babes, shall be lost, if means be not found to save us.

This sad tale struck all who heard him with awe, not that they thought what he said to them was true, but that they had fears that some weight must be on his mind; so, as night now drew near, they were in hopes that sleep might soothe his brain, and with all haste they got him to bed.

When the morn broke, they sought to know how he did? He told them, Worse and worse; and he set to talk once more in the same strain as he had done; but they took no heed of it. By and by, to drive off his fit, they spoke harsh words to him; at times they would laugh, at times they would chide, and then set him at nought. So he went to his room to pray for them, as well as to nurse his own grief. He would go, too, into the woods to read and muse, and thus for some weeks he spent his time.

Now I saw, in my dream, that one day as he took his walk in the fields with his book in his hand, he gave a groan,--for he felt as if a cloud were on his soul,--and he burst out as he was wont to do, and said, Who will save me?

The Swiss Family Robinson

There are more versions of this tale than there are of DeFoe’s tale of Crusoe. More than that, the ‘One Syllable’ version is a translation from one of the German versions. The Project Gutenberg Swiss Family Robinson is a copyrighted edition gleaned from many different texts with an eye to make as near as can be a ‘complete’ version of the tale in English. I compare the ‘One Syllable’ version to the standard Victorian edition as translated and abridged from the French Translation, by William Kingston.

The Swiss Family Robinson (from the William H. G. Kingston translation):

Amid the roar of the thundering waves I suddenly heard the cry of ‘Land! land!’, while at the same instant the ship struck with a frightful shock, which threw everyone to the deck, and seemed to threaten her immediate destruction.

Dreadful sounds betokened the breaking up of the ship, and the roaring waters poured in on all sides.

Then the voice of the captain was heard above the tumult, shouting, ‘Lower away the boats! We are lost!’

‘Lost!’ I exclaimed, and the word went like a dagger to my heart; but seeing my children’s terror renewed, I composed myself, calling out cheerfully, ‘Take courage, my boys! We are all above water yet. There is the land not far off, let us do our best to reach it. You know God helps those that help themselves!’ With that, I left them and went on deck. What was my horror when through the foam and spray I beheld the only remaining boat leave the ship, the last of the seamen spring into her and push off, regardless of my cries and entreaties that we might be allowed to share their slender chance of preserving their lives. My voice was drowned in the howling of the blast, and even had the crew wished it, the return of the boat was impossible.

Casting my eyes despairingly around, I became gradually aware that our position was by no means hopeless, inasmuch as the stern of the ship containing our cabin was jammed between two high rocks, and was partly raised from among the breakers which dashed the fore-part to pieces. As the clouds of mist and rain drove past, I could make out, through rents in the vaporous curtain, a line of rocky coast, and, rugged as it was, my heart bounded towards it as a sign of help in the hour of need.

The Swiss Family Robinson Told in Words of One Syllable (from the Project Gutenberg etext sfros10):

Just then we heard a cry of “Land! land!” felt a shock, and it was clear that we had struck on a rock, for we heard a loud cry from one of the men, “We are lost! Launch the boat; try for your lives!”

I went at once on deck, and found that all the boats had been let down, and that the last of the crew had just left the ship. I cried out for the men to come back and take us with them, but it was in vain.

I then thought that our last chance was gone. Still, as I felt the ship did not sink, I went to the stern, and found, to my joy, that she was held up by a piece of rock on each side, and made fast like a wedge. At the same time I saw some trace of land, which lay to the south, and this made me go back with some hope that we had still a faint chance.

To Sum Up

Take these three as but tastes as to the style, and if you want to look deeper, read the ‘One Syllable’ books from start to end. Set them side by side with a text of the original.

One thing I can tell just from these tastes is how the simpler one-syllable words make for simpler shapes of the sentences, and a more modern feeling. But this may be due to the fact that DeFoe and Bunyan wrote centuries before the ‘One Syllable’ texts came to be.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, February 10, 2008)

Monosyllablism and the See-Through Tongue

How to tell a tale that has no time and that all will fathom

The Past of English

Each tongue has its past. And the talesman, though the heart of his tale may go past all dress and custom and tongue of any land, still must speak in one tongue or other, and set his tale in one land with its dress and custom. Thus we find the great talesmen master both these styles of tale at the same time.

I speak English, and my tales must wear the dress of that tongue.

English has two coats, or we might say, it wears a coat over its clothes. Its clothes are Germanic and Anglo-Saxon, and its coat, thanks to the conquest of England by Duke William of Normandy, is French and Latinate. And so English has two terms for many a thing, a Germanic word and a Latinate or Romance word.

The German words (on the whole) have more consonants than vowels, begin and end with consonants, and sound ‘rough.’ There are many German words that have only one syllable, and to build new words German tongues take two of these one-note words and but them up end to end. ‘One-note’ might be a case in point, as ‘talesman.’ These words yet hold the sound of each word from which they were made, since the part-words show up whole.

The Romance words (on the whole) have more vowels than consonants, begin and end with vowels, and sound ‘smooth.’ They also have more syllables than not. Romance tongues build up new words through a root word with a prefix and a suffix, which once may have been whole words themselves, but have been shortened and sanded so they fit smoothly only the root words. ‘Pre’ in ‘prefix’ and ‘suf’ in ‘suffix’ are both prefixes.

Now another difference in these two kinds of tongues follows straight from how many syllables their words have. For a word of only one syllable will carry its main stress right there on its one back. But a word of many syllables has many backs, and the stress must be put upon only one of these backs. But if the word has too many notes, it might also take a second stress upon another of its backs.

The Romance tongues with their many many-syllabled words thus have a rhythm built into the words themselves, and they can make poetry by stringing the right words in the right order. And this poetry can be sun quite well, for the words are ‘open’ in the sense that they end with vowels, and so the notes that are to be sung can be held purely.

But the Germanic tongues with their one-syllabled words must make their rhythm ‘in between’ the words and use the sense of the words and word order to make their poetry. Singing German poetry is harder but chanting it easier, if you see what I mean.

Now the rulers of England in the first centuries of the second millennium were the sons of Duke William’s captains, good Normans out of France that spoke the old French. But the common folk were the beaten Anglo-Saxon, and they spoke their Germanic tongue. From this there came about, as will happen, a sense of class that touched on which tongue you spoke. The ruling class spoke French, the peasants and slaves spoke Anglo-Saxon. Courtesy and manners and good breeding all were French, coarseness and plainness and rudeness were Anglo-Saxon. And the Germanic-speaking Anglo-Saxons despised the French rulers with their dainty ways and courtly tongue.

Snobs Upside-Down

From these two tongues English came about, with its clothes of Anglo-Saxon and its French coat on top. Now the tale of England and France that followed Duke William’s conquest was far from simple, and some 400 years after the Conquest the English were feeling the beginnings of nationalism, and many sought to throw off the mastery of French even in the matter of how they spoke. These men turned the French snobs on their heads and said that the good old Anglo-Saxon words beat out the fancy French Romance words. This attitude reached its head, maybe, in the 19th century, when England ruled the world but France yet was the cultural heart of the West.

This is from H.W. Fowler’s The King’s English, 1908 edition, chapter I:

“Any one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.

“This general principle may be translated into practical rules in the domain of vocabulary as follows:—

“Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.”

The See-Through Tongue

Those of us who write tales of Eartherea, the land so few have gone into and come back out alive (or sane) have an added burden on our backs. For how to tell of such a place with the words we use to tie our shoes and shop and use computers? If we speak as we normally do, then the words and way we string the words will smack of the lives that we lead and not the lives we dream on. So then should we use the strange and fanciful words, the words that are out of fashion, old words of old times, and archaic forms of speech? Then how will our audience understand us? And such usage of quaint and elder terms will smack of what the French critics called ‘préciosité’ and sound too ‘precious’ for words.

The answer I think lies in that core or heart of our English tongue (of any tongue I think; but I can only be sure for English). I think there must be a group of words that for any folk or time are so common that they lose all their taste in and of themselves. And these are words that we can use in any tale, one of today or yesterday or tomorrow, one of Earth or Eartherea alike.

What do I mean by ‘taste’ then? I mean that a word like ‘hep-cat’ has a sort of ‘taste’ or ‘flavor’ that makes us see it as a word apart from other words. It belongs to one time and place, one culture, one cultural movement. To use a jazz-era term in a tale of ancient Egypt would strike the audience straight off as weird and out of place, ‘wrong.’ (Roger Zelazny had a lot of fun playing with this same clash of tastes in his Amber series of tales. Amber is the mother-world from which all other worlds were made in imitation, and the princes of Amber can walk from one world to another. So they know 20th century American jazz but in Amber they wear Elizabethan dress and fight with swords. Zelazny made this clash open and clean, he put it at the heart of his conceit, and so he pulls it off with a hell of a lot of dash.)

And by this same reason if a talesman uses an elder word or construction, say ‘methinks’ in a tale of teens text-messaging one another on their cells, it would also smack of strangeness and wrongness, and the we in the audience will only swallow it in the case that it is used with irony or a way to tell that one character or other is weird, or out of place, or loves such quaint archaisms.

But a word like ‘shoe’ or ‘the’ or ‘heart’ falls into a group of words used 700 years ago, 100 years ago, and today (and we can only think 200 years from now). These words are so basic that they are the first words we learn, and seem eternal — that is to say, they have no taste of any one land or time. Even if we think of what the Greeks would say or the Argentines or the Maori, we can hear them say ‘eat, drink, sleep’ and find no strangeness in this.

In English, most of these ‘core’ words are Anglo-Saxon, though there are as well many Romance words among them (such as ‘core’ itself, as well as ‘clear’ and ‘pure’). They also tend to be of one note or syllable.

So we who tell of Eartherea are well-minded to use these monosyllables and such two-syllabled words and ‘join-words’ in the Germanic style as much as we can, and so we may find we can tell of any age or land with a sort of tongue that, by cleaving to the heart-words alone, and using none but words that have no taste of any time or place, ends up with its own taste of no-taste, that seems as eternal as a fairy-tale. And by this we can invoke Eartherea best of all.

There is also this to say for the one-note words, that these core words are easiest to understand, and easiest to read as well.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, February 9, 2008)

Common Ground

Some things can’t be owned

(Note: the following is a very brief and rough draft dealing with how we might best manage the common environment and properties we all perfoce must share. The subject is large and would take volumes to cover in any detail. I ask only that you bear with me, and think over the rules and goals I set forth here. See if you think they make sense or not, compared to the way we handle such things today.)

‘Owning’

The notion of private property is on odd one. Today we all accept it as a given and can’t imagine a world without it. Indeed the theory of capitalism and the ‘free market’ has come to dominate the political thinking of governments around the globe ever since the Soviet Union fell in 1989.

Once upon a time, however, the notion of what could be ‘owned’ was very strictly limited. Only the members of the ruling class could be said to properly own anything at all, and they did so largely at their own expense and defense. The members of the lower classes held their own things only at the forbearance and sufferance of the ruling class, whose members might at any time ride up and grab anything a lower class man held as his own — his crops, his animals, his tools, his wife or his child. The lower classes could not even claim to own their own persons, for a member of the ruling class could grab any of them as well, and put them to slavery.

Later the rule of law came, slowly and unevenly, to prevail, and a greater number of citizens gained the right to appeal to higher authorities if something they ‘owned’ was taken, even by the strong and powerful members of the society. And yet even so, if we stood high in the clouds and looked down upon the Earth, we would see only tiny pockets of land that seemed to be ‘owned’ in any sense. There were the cities and towns where surely all the land and buildings were owned, and there were the outlying farm houses and the fields about them, plowed and cleared and sowed with crops and clearly under the sway of some man or other. But these areas were small compared to the great tracts of wilderness, the forests, plains, moors, and high ground, the rivers and lakes, the vast oceans.

What man controlled, and thereby ‘owned’ would seem to be no more than a few scattered islands strewn amid the great tracts of the wild.

The Wild

There in the wild places, any man might go. Since no man claimed it or stood to bar the way, anyone could go into a forest, cut a tree, hunt a stag, gather mushrooms.

Later the strongest of the strong, the kings and emperors whose barons and dukes commanded the warriors and armies so that they could crush all those who fought them, laid claim to all the land, at least in theory. This was not in many cases thought of as ‘ownership’ but rather only that the ruler held sway over all the men and what they could do within vast territories. These territories faded at their ends often enough, into no-man’s land.

But even within the emperor’s lands, there were rights of way. Some kings did claim to ‘own’ all the places of their realms and then they gave these lands to their loyal followers to use, but never to own. But even here there were roads and rights of way on forest paths, packed roads, and waterways, where any man could go.

Kings of Today

Today the emperor and king has fallen to the State, which is said to represent all the citizens of the land. The State has taken over claim to ‘own’ what is held in commons.

But there are some who would be kings within that land, and to own the commons.

The Commons

The ‘commons’ is land that is held by all. Once this referred to common pasturage where any man might graze his cows. But over the past centuries of the rise of capitalism these fields have been taken and claimed to be owned by the strong among us, and those men have made cause with the rulers in the State and had them defend this taking. Under the theory of capitalism and privatization, this taking is held to be in the overall interest of all, since the strong will make more productive use out of the commons they take, and this use, though it profits the strong most of all, will end up profitable to all the citizens as the general standard of wealth rises in the community.

And so now, if we stood in the clouds and looked down on the Earth, what we would see over so much of the lands, is not the tiny islands of ‘owned’ ground in the great sea of common wilderness, but instead we would behold seas of owned and developed land, with only cracks between them like dikes or levees which remain common ground. These last bits of common ground are the roads and alleys that cut between the owned plots and estates.

There are some commons that cannot every be said to be owned without recourse to the old notions of the kings and emperors who simply proclaimed they owned all, and would kill or enslave any man who trespassed upon what the monarchs claimed.

These last commons are:

• the air we all breathe
• the water on and within the ground
• the Earth below the ground itself we walk on
• all that passes inescapably among and between these elements

The Last Shreds of Commons

No man captures and controls the air above his land. The air flows across and around the globe, and every man on Earth shares in this one element. The same can be said of the element of water, as even a small lake or pond seeps into and is fed by the waters under ground, and breathes water into the air even as it drinks rain that falls from the clouds above. Men lay claim to own land, but this ownership cannot be defended to a very great depth, and somewhere far below our feet the ground softens and turns liquid and flows even like the air above and the waters in between. More, water flows through the ground we say we own, and this water connects in aquifers that cannot be shut off from the surrounding lands. And the minerals of the Earth run in seams and veins from one surface plot to another.

As for ‘what passes through’ these elements, I mean in the main the airwaves above, and the groundwater below, as well as other minerals such as oil and gas.

Takings and Eminent Domain

The legal theory of eminent domain goes something like this: for the common good of all citizens, the State may buy land ‘owned’ by individual citizens for a fair price, even though those citizens don’t want to lose their land.

It is important, in the name of justice and to prevent the outright rule of the strong that once prevailed, that these takings be as rare and as limited in scope as possible. And that they only take place for the good of all. To that end, the following conditions must be met:

1. The taking must be a last resort
2. No other good or feasible alternative way should be available that might achieve the proposed common good without recourse to this taking.
3. The land taken must go from private hands only into the hands of the community and never into other private hands
4. The land taken may be managed or run by private persons or corporations, but only under the strict and vigilant oversight of representatives of the community
5. The community must share in the revenues, if any, that these private management companies gain from operating the property.

When land is taken from any citizen, every effort must first be made to avoid it. All other alternatives must be looked into. The state must negotiate with the property owner in all good faith to see if a bargain might be struck so as to avoid the outright forced taking. The land taken must never be handed over to another citizen or private body such as a corporation. It can only go to the state, the representatives of the community who are charged with the general good.

These representatives may choose to operate and maintain the land themselves. But the duty of the state is not to run the society but rather to see that we can run our own affairs justly. We do not elect officials to run waterworks or process sewage. So it seems proper that the representatives should assign or hire private persons or companies to manage the property. There are some rules that must always obtain when this is done.

Simple Rules

The community should always be the legal owner of the land in question and as such should have complete access to all records and decisions by the private persons or companies that are awarded the duty of managing the land. The first choice of the state should be to offer these duties for auction in case anyone thinks they can make a profit in managing the resource in question. Such auctions should have four traits:

1. All bidding should be open and public knowledge
2. There should be a minimum payment in advance to the state
3. The state should share in the revenues of the management of the property, the gross revenues not the profits, and the bidding at auction for these privileges should consist of what percentage of revenues the bidding companies are willing to share with the state
4. The privileges awarded in auction are purchased only for a very limited term, at the end of which a new auction will be held upon revised terms as the representatives of the state learn how better the common good might be served

It is important that the privilege of operating a public good not be held as a private fiefdom, nor even that it be open to the suspicion that this is the case. That’s why the auction should be renewed every three years, or five — certainly fewer than ten. By the same reasoning, the terms of the auction should be reviewed by the representatives of the community when the auction comes up once more to make sure that the resource is being run in the common good, and that the operating entity is upholding the public trust.

When the auction comes up frequently in this way, it can also help the operating company review its own obligations under the terms of the auction. Maybe it bid too much and can’t operate properly under the current terms. But on the whole we should be concerned here in guarding the common good of the community and not the profits of any private company or person.

The Best Way?

I think that the best way to manage these common grounds lies in private hands under the strict oversight of representatives of the public, with all proceedings and dealing being a matter of public record freely available for any citizen to consult and read. The representatives of the state should be in the business of considering in broad terms where the best interests of the citizens lie — not in day to day operation of these properties. It is not the task of the state to operate television networks, radio networks, public sewers or roads or bridges. But the state must make sure that the day to day operation conform to the common good. This means both that the resources serve the common good, and that the citizenry as a whole enjoy the highest practical share of whatever revenues these facilities and privileges afford.

(Composed on keyboard Friday 8 February 2008)

Artist Merchant Hack

Why does anybody create?

Publishing and distributing cartels such as the RIAA and MPAA claim that a strong and harshly-enforced copyright system is needed, so that ‘artists can be paid for their work.’ And the US Constitution, in establishing copyright, cited the need

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts

as reason why that country needed copyright protection. The assumption here is that artists would not create anything unless they had some assurance of protection for their works. Now, why would an artist need protection for his work? I can see no other reason than the one the cartels offer today, so that he may be paid for his work.

The history and pre-history of mankind (and indeed all creatures, if we can say that birdsong and whale-song are a form of art) disputes this.

Copyright did not come into being before the invention of mechanical means of reproduction. Before the printing press came into wide use, manuscripts were copied all the time. It was considered well within the rights of any owner of a manuscript that he pay his scribes to copy it out; if a man borrowed a manuscript from a friend, he too thought nothing of having his scribe copy it out so that he might keep a copy in his own library.

The truth is that throughout human history up until the printing press, men wealthy enough to own books in the first place treated them just the same as today’s file-sharers treat the music in their collections.

And yet men went on writing and telling tales, and musicians went on singing and writing songs, and painters painted, and jugglers juggled, and mimers acted.

Some of them were paid for their efforts; many were not.

Without copyright, artists were paid for their art. And even without payment, artists created their art.

Now it makes sense that publishers and distributors would feel the need to be sure of future pay before they would publish a book, release a record, or produce a film or television show. Publishers and distributors are in business, after all, they aren’t artists, they buy and sell, and they must spend cash to publish release or produce their goods.

Publishers and distributors buy and sell. They are merchants by profession.

Are musicians merchants? Are talesmen? Are painters, actors, comedians, singers?

Another way to phrase this: do musicians, talesmen, painters, actors, comedians, or singers create their art solely for money?

Some do, to be sure. In the trades, these are commonly called ‘hacks’ and the term is not used in praise. Talesmen who call other talesmen ‘hacks’ do so in order to set those men apart from themselves, the true talesmen, the artists in the field.

And we find it very often that an artist says that he loves what he does so much that he would pay in order to do it, and it is a dream come true to be paid for it, and that the true painter, the true musician, the true talesman, the true artist, is one who does what he does because he must do it. He can’t help himself. The creative urge is too strong in him to be denied.

We need only look to all the fan-fiction created by amateur talesmen. These talesmen write their loving pastiches without any hope of ever being paid for their work. Often they work under the threat of legal action, fines and imprisonment if they are ever caught creating what they do. And yet they carry on, they go on writing and telling their tales.

Why?

A hundred years ago (before the invention of the phonograph) it was not uncommon for men to sing in bars. In some parts of the world (Wales, for example) this custom yet lingers. They sing without being paid for it.

Why?

If the ‘true artists’ in any of the creative fields scorn their colleagues who hate their work and are ‘only in it for the money,’ then these ‘true artists’ imply that they do what they do for some other cause. The payment of money might be one of their reasons, but they make it clear that money is not their main reason, nor their first reason, nor really, after all, even a good reason.

So why do they do it?

If we were to eliminate all the creative works done ‘only for the money’ the ‘true artists’ seem to be saying we would all be better off. In other words, ignore all the hacks and merchants in the art world, and the art is much improved.

Some of these ‘artists’ admit that, at times, they have ‘only done it for the money.’ They say this to condemn those works, to admit that those works are inferior to the works they have made out of love or inspiration, because they really wanted to make them and ‘would have paid for the privilege of making’ them.

So why do we need copyright laws?

It seems not to protect the artists or to see that they are paid. But the laws are needed to see that publishers and distributors get paid. And the history of copyright supports this view, for it has always been the publishers and distributors who are most vocal in crying out for copyright law, and extensions to copyright law, and harsher punishments for any violations of copyright law.

Maybe the law should be reconsidered in this light.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday 7 February 2008)

Victor Hugo and His Paragraph Dance

Page layout for eye and ear

Victor Hugo was a poet. He was also a politician, statesman, revolutionary, anti-imperialist, dramatist, critic, and novelist. He was the Romantic movement’s Colossus in France through the 19th century.

The way Hugo composed paragraphs was extreme. (The Romantic Movement eschewed all moderation.) He used at base two kinds of paragraphs, long ones and short ones.

The long were quite long. In the smaller sized printed volumes (octavo or duodecimo) a long paragraph might well fill up a page and spill out into the one before and the one after.

The short were quite short. One word.

Hugo made his readers feel the extremes of these two kinds of paragraphs when he smashed them next to each other. (This is how I came to see this when I was a boy and read Hugo for the first time.)

Three or half a dozen paragraphs would run up to the cliff or one or two one-line paragraphs. Or else Hugo would make a whole chapter out of one line paragraphs in rat-tat mode. (This would be all talk, it would lack attribution or any stage direction, and would be quite terse. You could take pages out of Hugo and drop them into a Black Mask hard boiled tough guy tale with no trouble at all.)

This strikes your eye when you look at it printed out, the big fat blocks of long paragraphs and the thin staircase cliffs of the short ones. A page with no white space inside its margins, a page whose white space makes up more than half its text block, a page where a big dark block of text cuts off with one or two half-line paragraphs.

This makes us want to think Hugo wrote but to be read, that he wrote with the thought his words would be set in print and seen on a page.

But when you read him, you hear a change in the sound of Hugo’s prose that goes along with this rhythm of the print. The long paragraphs toll in your head like a speech that a great orator gives you, in heat with his deep lungs. But the orator runs at last out of breath. He gasps and comes up short.

Then a pause. A breath. And the one-liner, as terse as he can give it, caps off the long speech and drives his point home.

Or the long stretch of dialogue one-line paragraphs quick, hot, that shoot at you like rain in a storm and won’t let up. Until at last he lets you go into a shelter where the calm of a long paragraph lets you ease up, take thought, unwind and get a break.

In this way the extreme of the one kind of paragraph sets up for relief when we can’t take it any more, in the other kind.

Long and long and long and long — then short.

Short. Short. Short. Short. Long and long once more, at last.

Like I said: Hugo was a poet.

(Composed with pen on paper Wednesday 6 February 2008)

Style and Voice

A skin both true and apt

Dunsany the Lord

One thing I’ve always struggled with is style. I read Lord Dunsany’s tales when I was young, and it is true (as I think Ursula K LeGuin pointed out) that all fantasy talesmen must endure a Dunsany period. To all those who work in this field, to read Dunsany is a rare and cunning trap. For the manner of his speech and choice of words is so exquisite and fair, that we all love it, and must ape it, unwittingly or helplessly. Indeed it is hard not to write like Dunsany when you are reading a lot of his work.

But there comes a time when none of us can extend or ape Dunsany, but we fail in it (for we are not, alas, Dunsany reborn) and must strike out on our own. But without this master to inform us how to spin our tales, how will we do it?

Style

Dunsany was a great stylist. Now by a writer’s ‘style’ I mean three things:

1. The manner of his speech, whether high middle or low
2. His choice of words, whether common or rare (and if rare what particular lode of rare words does he choose to mine)
3. How he puts together the parts of his tale: what sort of sentences and paragraphs he uses, how much speech and how much narration, and how he paces his tale

Voice

But by a talesman’s ‘voice’ I mean only the quality and character of the talesman himself. I do not mean any technical approach to a tale, that is whether to use first-person, third-person, objective or omniscient narrators. I mean instead something ineffable, this notion the audience forms of the talesman himself, judged only upon the evidence of his tales. This must include the tale the talesman chooses to tell, his attitude toward the persons and events of which he tells, and how near he stoops toward, or how far he stands apart from his audience.

In oral talesmanship, the talesman stands before his audience, and they form a personal relationship. He might be one of them, out with his buddies for a drink. He might be a stranger, a ‘professional’ on a stage. He might be a suspect in the investigation of a crime. He might be a company CEO delivering a presentation to his Board of Directors. In such a case the talesman can only choose from a limited number of voices. His audience won’t let him stray too far.

But in more distant forms, of which the most distant is the written word, the audience only glimpses their talesman through the medium of his tale, and he is thus freed to adopt a voice out of a much wider range.

And there is also the character of the talesman apart from his relation to his audience. Is he a happy or a glum soul? Is he full of fire or languid, or serene? Is he petty, noble, jealous, angry? These will all gleam through the chinks of his talespinning, and only the master talesman may mask such things and with any success adopt some untrue character for his telling.

Since so few of us are masters, it seems best to let our voices play out true, and not to hide them.

Style & Voice and Fantasy Tales

And I think we must say much the same for style, that if we are true to ourselves, and tell our tales honestly, the style will come in as it will. And yet for style there is another thing to ponder, and it is a great deal in telling tales of Eartherea, the half-glimpsed lands that seem so real, but are drenched with enchantment and strangeness.

This is what I mean.

We live on Earth, and our talesmen live on Earth as well, at least most of the time. And we live now, all of us. But in fantasy tales the lands and times that they tell of plant at least one foot in Eartherea, and maybe a time lost long ago, or one that never came, or another yet to be.

And if we speak of such things with the same voice we use to tell of how we went today to market, we talesmen would jar and jangle and clash with what we told, and we in the audience would not behold, or touch or hear or taste, the wonders of that land.

Put it simply: the style of a tale ought to fit its matter. The voice of the talesman ought to fit both matter and style. And all three, matter & style & voice, ought to fit together, and not fight or clash. Style and voice are but the skin that clads the flesh and bones of our tale, and the skin ought to suit the flesh and be true to it. Little good would it do a fly to have the skin of a rhinoceros.

One Way

For the talesman, one way to achieve this is to tell often and long about the same matter. The longer a talesman works within a genre, and a subgenre, and a sub-subgenre, the more he will come to settle into a way of working so that these three elements join and fit together. Rough edges will smooth, gaps will fill with the proper pieces, bonds will form. The talesman of Eartherea will also in the course of his work come to master his art, but I mean here more that he will come to know those far-off fields and times, and he will learn what does and does not suit them, both in what he thinks he glimpses from afar, and how he treats of it.

There are of course geniuses, as well as the odd ones among us who seem to have been born in the lands beyond. They seem to come to their tales by nature and with ease.

The rest of us must work at it. But the more we work, and the longer we work, the better we will master it, and claim the style and voice that best suits the edges of Eartherea in which we play.

(Composed with pen on paper Tuesday 5 February 2008)

Taste it Next Time

How to begin to take hold of yourself

Many of us seek to gain the upper hand on ourselves. We find ourselves acting in ways, and doing things we wish we wouldn’t. And yet we don’t seem able to stop it. We come to our senses after the fact and see that we have done it again. And we may not even have known we were doing it at the moment. Or we watch ourselves, helpless to stop it as we do the very thing we swore we wouldn’t.

I am going to give you here a plan to work past this block. This is something I thought up only last night (though I imagine others have dreamed of plans much the same) and I am going to try it myself and will write later on how it goes with me.

TiNT

Here’s the plan. We are going to start by gaining control over our urges, or yens, or impulses. These things act on us like an itch. The right brain/body wants to scratch the itch. It starts to do so. The left brain, where we seem to think our ‘selves’ live, gives its assent after the fact. (See my earlier post on Unfree Will.) Sometimes our left brain doesn’t even know we are scratching. So let’s say we don’t want to scratch. For whatever reason we think it’s bad to scratch. The heart of the plan, then, is the following sequence:

1. We tell ourselves firmly we won’t scratch any more. We repeat this often to ourselves.
2. We rehearse in our minds feeling an itch come on, and not scratching.
3. We remind ourselves often to look out for the first sign of an itch so we know when we are likely to want to scratch. If we can, we note what places and times the itch comes on us.
4. When the itch comes, we don’t deny it but we do delay it. We don’t tell ourselves, ‘I won’t scratch,’ but instead, ‘I won’t scratch just yet. Not right now but later.’
5. If we succeed to put off the scratch, we praise ourselves and hold it in mind.
6. If we can’t help but scratch, we put this out of our mind straight away.
7. When the itch comes back we repeat the sequence.

The word to remember here is ‘TiNT’ or Taste it Next Time. Whatever the urge may be that we wish to stop, we try only to put off the taste of it.

The Blind Eye

When we succeed in putting off the scratch (or whatever we want to stop doing) we reinforce our success. Praise and congratulate yourself. Feel good in this one small victory. Take note of it, remember it, keep track of every time you win in this way.

But if we fail, and scratch though we try to put it off, we don’t dwell on this but turn a blind eye to it. Victories count for a lot but failures don’t count at all.

What this will do, I hope, is set in our left brain (and through it our right brain/body) that what we do when we itch is — not scratch. If we dwell on our failures without reaching any greater insight into why we fail, all we do is tell ourselves that it’s hopeless and that we can’t do it. When we bear in mind all our successes, and only those successes, we tell ourselves that we surely can do it when we like.

Delay Only

When we choose merely to put off the scratch instead of banning it outright, we reassure our right brain/body, that wants to scratch, that we will let it do so in a little time, or when the next itch comes. This way our right brain/body will not put its back up push back.

This gives us more chance to succeed this one time. And every success feeds our confidence, our assurance, our hope and our belief that we can do it, that we are the masters of ourselves.

Even if you only put off scratching that itch for five minutes — one minute — a few moments — count it as a win, and feel good about it. So far so good, and next time do the same again, and maybe even longer.

Petty Victories

The other part of this plan is to begin with small habits only. We don’t try to change a deep-set habit of a lifetime in this way, not at first. But we play with this trick on little things. They may not be obnoxious, they may not be habits we feel we care much about one way or the other. They only need to be habits, things we find ourselves doing all the time.

So we try the method on these small matters, on one habit or two at a time. We focus on these and stick to it. We make it easy on ourselves. We want to get into the game and prove first of all that we can do this. So we give it a few weeks, at least two, but a full month is best. We keep at it until we have re-trained our right brain/bodies, so that our response at the moment when we feel the itch start is rather not to scratch, not yet, than to scratch.

Once we feel wholly at ease, either to scratch or not, we count the whole program for this habit as a win. But for a while I think it’s best if we keep an eye on this itch. The right brain/body can be sly at times. It can seem to yield, and sneak back later.

On and Up

Each win over one of these small habits should help grow your confidence both in the method and in yourself. When when you feel bolder, more sure of yourself, take on other habits more difficult to break. But climb the ladder slowly.

If you gain mastery over one habit a month, a year from now you will have shed a dozen habits. This is a great deal. Many of us live our whole lives and never do so much; others find help in breaking their habits but they don’t do it on their own. What is more, a year from now you will have a much higher feeling of self-esteem. And that is something no one can grant you but yourself.

Go on from there. Keep it up. So long as you find this method works, use it whenever you want to change the way you act.

(Composed with pen on paper Monday 4 February 2008)

Not All Change is Change

Character Development is something else

Character Development

Walter Mosley is a popular author of mysteries and other tales, and has written an essay on writing published as This Year You Write Your Novel in which he states his belief that all ‘novels, short stories, and plays, and most poems are about human transformation’ (p. 40). He goes on to say that it is the very essence or subject of the novel to show the ‘movement in the personality structure of the main character’ (p. 41).

By this I take it Mr Mosley means that characters change at heart, and a tale tells of how they change and what makes they change.

This is not true.

The Lost Keys

“Yesterday Joe got in his car to go to work, and could not find his keys. Joe went back inside and looked everywhere. He looked in the living room, the hall, the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen. Guess where he found them — in a glass in the kitchen sink! God only knows how they got there. Joe rushed to the car and drove to work.”

That was a story. It has a beginning, middle, and end. It has a problem and a resolution. But did Joe change at heart in the course of this tale?

No. Joe didn’t change in the sense Mr Mosley means.

Joe does change in circumstance and state, though. He is different at the tale’s end in these ways:

• He is half an hour older
• He has his keys in hand
• He goes to work in a rush.

But who would call Joe ‘transformed’ by these events?

Better Isn’t Needful

I think what Mr Mosley has done is to take what many writers, critics, and readers agree is a prime point in what makes a tale good and gone on to claim that is the needful heart of the tale, and that without it the tale is not just dull or weak, but it isn’t a tale at all.

I agree with Mr Mosley that it is better when a tale tells how its hero changes in his ‘personality structure.’ If you give me two tales both the same in all their parts, but in one the hero has a change of heart, and in the other he is the same man at the tale’s end as he was at its start, I will like the tale of the changed hero better. But both are tales — novels if they are so long, or short stories if not, or plays or poems if they are told in the right shape.

Lesson

What do we learn here? We learn that we have to see the line that sets what a tale must be, apart from what a tale ought to have. Just because we like better the tales of human development doesn’t mean that every tale must include it. Just because we like a laugh doesn’t mean every tale need be funny. Just because we like romance doesn’t mean every tale must be about love.

We have to know what we like. We also have to bear in mind what a tale is. In this way we see the things a tale doesn’t need, but that we like, as bonuses, and we can enjoy them more.

(Composed with pen on paper Saturday 2 February 2008)

Where the Libertarians Went Wrong

When good ideas go bad … in the extreme

Liberty

Liberty is good. I have always taken that as an axiom, although others have tried to ‘prove’ it by referring to higher values such as Life or God. (The argument by God goes something like this: God gave man free will so that he might choose the good and thus enjoy virtue. Men thus ought to be free to choose good or evil, and urged to choose good. The argument by Life goes something like this: The life of an individual is his highest value, and hat supports life is good, and what kills life is bad. Freedom supports life and slavery of any kind, be it physical, mental, moral, or spiritual, kills life.)

In my own case I guess I liked liberty out of a quirk in my own makeup. Although I can’t prove this, I think many philosophers reach the ‘conclusions’ for their studies based on what their own quirks were from the time they were children. I was always a rebel of a kid. I never liked being told what to do or being forced down any road. When I was a young teen, this quirk ran at its strongest in me, and it happened this was a time of rebirth in the political philosophy of Libertarianism. So I clung to it and worshiped it and came to the conclusion that liberty must be the highest civic good.

Libertarianism

In the late 1960s and early 1970s two social movements came together to underpin the modern libertarian movement. First in the late 1950s Ayn Rand published Atlas Shrugged. This was a dramatic, Romantic, and hugely popular novel that exalted the individual, and it spoke plainly of the need for the least government possible, a state needed only to guard the liberty of its individual citizens. The novel, and subsequent classes, lectures, and essays put out by Rand and her followers, foremost of them Nathaniel Branden, made for a movement that went far beyond what any novel on its own might make. It was above all strong on college campuses, where the other movement rose up to redeem Libertarianism.

This was a resistance against the Old Guard in society, on many fronts. First was resistance against the Vietnam War and the military draft the war had come to depend on. Young men didn’t like being forced at gunpoint to go around the world to die for something that had nothing to do with their lives or country. Beyond the war, the young defied the racist Old Guard to fight for equality and civil rights, and they rebelled against the moralizing Old Guard to practice freedom of sex and recreational and spiritual drugs, as well as to choose their own fashions and ways of life.

These two movements took in also those of an independent streak, the loners and outcasts who have always stood out in American society, and who had been abandoned by the old men running the Democratic and Republican parties, who between them rule America. The thinkers of the movement looked back to the Enlightenment of the 18th as well as the Anarchists of the 19th century, and sought the best way for all men in the world to be free.

In the end two camps sprang up. There were the minimalists who said that though the State was evil, some level of the State must be maintained, although it ought be the smallest size of State that would uphold order and guard the borders. There were also the anarcho-libertarians, who pointed out that the state is in fact evil, and no state has ever existed that did not seek to enlarge itself in reach and rule. Therefore any State, no matter how small, would end as Leviathan, the totalitarian State. The only path to be free was thus to abolish the State once and for all.

The error that I want to point out in Libertarianism applies as well to both these camps.

One for All or One for Himself?

All the thinkers of the libertarian movement look back to the great minds of the Enlightenment, most of all the English political philosophers.

I want to point out here, by the way, two salient features of those English philosophers: first that they were bourgeois in class and outlook, and second that they were early bourgeois thinkers who took for granted features of their societies that the full onslaught of bourgeois thought and deed would later wipe out. These thinkers also show us how their conclusions match and don’t dispute their own individual quirks, and this includes the quirks of their class.

As bourgeois these men rebelled against the God-granted right of the aristocrat to lie idle and gather rents from fields, and they praised the industrious merchant and proclaimed his right to make goods and trade them. The political-economic child of the rising middle class was capitalism, and the twins of bourgeoisie and capitalism would go on to destroy every facet of traditional thought and life. And this means also traditions that go back in us for millions of years, since long before men were men.

In short, the individual they exalted, and the groups, the collectives, the classes, they dismissed. They did not consider man as a part of a larger social whole. They thought only of the works and lives of individual men. (I can not claim for sure that this is the full thinking of these 18th-century minds. It does represent how their thoughts have been preserved in modern libertarian beliefs.)

But man is not and never has a creature capable of living or thriving as an individual. It takes two adults to create a human child, and once born that child is not for some years able to stand alone. Man has always lived in groups, and if we take our cousins the other apes and primates as a guide, we lived in groups before we became men.

Atoms Molecules & Matter

So we could call the individual the atom of mankind, and the molecule is the mother-child diatom, and the group (call it clan or tribe or village or commune or what have you) is the matter.

The libertarians think only of the atom, the one the individual. They grant him all rights, and few if any to the mother over the child or child over the mother, and none at all to the group.

I will have more to say about all this, but here we can trace the root of where the libertarians went wrong. Their ideas rest on a conception of society that does not reflect reality.

You can see the worst fruit of this mistake in libertarian attitudes toward the commons, most of all the environment.

I will write more on this another day. But for now I leave you with this horrifying outcome of the mistake. Not long ago, on the respected libertarian website http://www.lewrockwell.com I read an essay on the environment by one of the contributors, and in this essay the author defended as proper conduct a man who would dump poison in a river and kill every plant, animal, and person who lived down stream.

(Composed with pen on paper Saturday 02 February 2008)

Who Speaks?

When a talesman tells us a tale, who’s talking?

The Fourth Voice

I’ve been reading This Year You Write Your Novel, a pretty good essay on writing by Walter Mosley published by Little, Brown & Co in a frightfully-overpriced edition. Mr Mosley says something that intrigued me when he discussed narrative voice. By ‘narrative voice’ Mr Mosley means how the talesman positions his audience relative to the characters in the tale. Mr Mosley lists three kinds of narrative voice. First he writes about where the talesman pretends to be one of the characters (as in ‘I went to the store, and saw my old teacher, the one I always hated’). Here the talesman invites us to see the tale through one character’s eyes.

Second, Mr Mosley writes about third-person narrative, where the talesman pretends to know all about one of the characters (one in a scene) but not the others (in that scene), but using the third-person tense only (as in, ‘He went to the store, and saw his old teacher, the one he always hated’). Here the talesman invites us to sit on one character’s shoulder as we go through each scene.

The third kind of narrative Mr Mosley writes about is told by an omniscient narrator, where the talesman drops all pretense and admits to us openly he knows everything that happens and what every character in his tale thinks and feels. By this the talesman invites us to leap from eye to eye, heart to heart throughout all the characters just as he pleases.

But there is a fourth voice Mr Mosley mentions, only to discard it. This last voice, he writes, is one that the talesman should never use — it is his own voice.

Why not?

The Great Taboo

Mr Mosley does not explain why he considers this ‘fourth voice’ to be taboo. He says no more than this. But if we look closer at the rest of his discussion of narrative voice, we find the taboo only more riddling.

For example, Mr Mosley calls the first-person narrative the ‘most familiar’ of the four, the one people ‘naturally’ use when they tell what happened to them that day in their own lives. But when people tell their stories, don’t they use their own voices?

Going on the third-person narrative, Mr Mosley says he prefers it over first-person, because it puts a distance between the audience and the characters. Though we know what a character feels and thinks, we learn it at a remove, through an ‘even-tempered voice,’ which Mr Mosley says is good. But Mr Mosley does not tell us whose voice this is, if it is neither the character’s nor the talesman’s own.

And when he talks about the omniscient narrator, Mr Mosley calls it the ‘voice of God’ — but why can it not be the ‘voice of the talesman’?

Mr Mosley’s essay (as much as I’ve read of it) is a good one. Simple, clear, direct, and practical. I don’t want to pick on Mr Mosley here, because I think his attitude is the one most writers and writing teachers hold today. Omniscient narrators were well and good in their day (the 19th century) but are out of fashion now; first-person is good, but third-person is best. ‘Show don’t tell’ is another bit of common advice Mosley shares with everybody else who teaches writing, and this creed joins very well with the advice that we should never use our own voice. ‘Show don’t tell’ is a conscious effort on the talesman’s part to obliterate his own role in the talespinning, to reduce himself to the anonymity of the film camera, itself of no color, humor, or personality. But Mr Mosley’s advice struck me because he alone goes so far as even to consider the talesman’s own voice. The other writing teachers I’ve read fail even to mention it, as if the taboo had put it beyond the pale of thought.

A Crime

I submit that the obliteration of the narrator, and this choking of the talesman’s voice (for the two go hand-in-hand) is a great crime in talesmanship. For it cripples the talesman by not allowing him to use his own passion, his own opinions, in the telling of his tale.

I also submit that we will find more often than not that the great talesmen of the 19th century who used omniscient narration identified with those narrators themselves, and felt free to offer their own opinions on what went on in their tales.

Today this is only offered to us as a mask, a secondary tale placed on top of the main one. Where we find a narrative voice that tells us what it thinks and feels and likes and doesn’t like, we find that this is not the writer’s own self, but a pose, a mask, a conceit he adopts through which he colors the tale with an imagined talesman he places in between himself and his tale.

A Question

I don’t mean that the talesman ought to give us his views on every aspect of the tale at its every turn. This would distract us from the events themselves, remind us that ‘it’s only a story,’ and make us look too much at the talesman in himself. The puppeteer wants us to watch the puppets, not himself.

But all the same, the talesman is a man of flesh and blood, he has his thoughts, he feels things like other men, and why should he choke all this down when he picks up the speaker’s staff?

And it still remains for Mr Mosley and the others of the writing schools of today to answer the question, If it isn’t the talesman’s voice who tells the third-person narrative, whose voice is it?

(Composed with pen on paper Friday 01 February 2008)