‘One Day’

How do we begin a tale? Let’s say we start with ‘Once upon a time,’ and go on to – what then?

Usually in the most simple form of tale (such as I write, being a naif myself) we go on to the ‘status quo ante’ or how things are before things start happening, or in other words, what was it like before the story got under way?

In the notions of Frank Daniel, this ideally will occupy the opening sequence to a screenplay and movie. ‘Here is our hero, here is his world,’ comes before, ‘One day it all changed.’

Our focus in this post is on those two little words: one day.

The easiest way to look at the matter is by way of verb tense. What goes after ‘Once upon a time’ and ‘one day’ will be in the past imperfect tense, because it was going on for a long time, seemingly forever, until ‘one day’ everything changed. What comes after ‘one day’ is in the simple past tense.

An example:

Once upon a time there was a princess who was the loveliest princess in the land. Every morning she would go play with her golden ball.

One day the ball rolled out of the castle grounds into the marsh at the edge of the wood.

Now when I read this sort of opening, I experience a kind of a little jolt or bump when it comes to those two words, one day. They mark a leap out of one sort of telling mode into another. And it strikes me as too rough, or too obvious, somehow, but then … how do I get around it?

How do I drop ‘one day’ from the text?

Here is one way, the way I remember Hansel and Gretel begins in the Brothers Grimm:

Once upon a time there was a poor woodcutter and his wife and two children, and the names of the children were Hansel, or little Hans, and Gretel. They were very poor, and never had enough to eat, and things got no better for them as time went on.

‘We can’t go on like this,’ said the Mother to the Father. ‘You must get rid of the children, or we will all starve.’

‘That’s very true,’ said the Father, ‘but every time I look at the little darlings my heart won’t let me be cruel to them.’

‘All well and good,’ said the Mother. ‘And yet you’ll have to do it.’

What the couple didn’t know was that Gretel lay awake in the straw alongside her brother, and she heard every word. And when she heard those cruel words, the blood in her ran cold, and she shivered.

‘Sister, why do you shiver so?’ asked Hansel, waking.

‘Oh, brother,’ she answered with a whisper, ‘I’ve just heard the most horrible things!’

Here the jump into dialogue gets us past the one day without having to say it. (On the other hand, we could also frame the conversation between Mother and Father as an argument of long standing, and part of the status quo ante and follow it with a ‘one day, the Father could bear his wife’s nagging no longer, and took the children out into the woods with him.’)

So there are ways to slip past the one day.

But do we really want to?

Though one day jolts us when we read it, it serves its purpose well simply because it is so obvious. ‘Hey readers! That was prologue, now the real story is about to begin!’ Doesn’t it help us readers to see those two little words, the way it helps us to see a street sign or a label on a package?

I don’t know the answer, and find myself torn. But it’s good to think about this sort of thing, and make up your own mind.

(Composed on keyboard 26 March 2009)

The Outline

I know you hate to outline. Do it all the same.

Dream, Story, Performance

In ‘How Dull Can You Get’ a couple of days ago, I wrote about the 3 stages of composing a tale. They are:

1. Dream the setting, characters, events.
2. Structure the events into a tale.
3. Perform the structure into a finished tale for us in the audience to hear and love.

The second stage, where you structure the events and shape the characters’ squarish pegs into the roundish holes of the narrative, is where you actually coin the tale or story. The story is complete in the structure stage; what you add in the performance is the wit, the polish, and the effects of your style. In a word, you heighten the tale’s effectiveness. But the tale already exists in the outline you create when you have done with structuring the tale.

‘But I Hate to Outline!’

This is what many of us talesmen say. It’s true, I hate to outline. I think most writers do. And I expect that most of us just skim over the outline phase. Some of us, like Diana Wynne-Jones, have the barest sort of outline imaginable: she writes that she only has three scenes in her outline, which she keeps in her head: the start, the end, and one standout scene in the middle. When Ms Wynne-Jones composes her first draft, then, she sets down her starting scene, then ‘works her way’ toward the goal of that middle scene, from which she proceeds to work her way toward the end scene.

She says she ends up with a mess of a first draft, which she then works over and over to set into a coherent tale.

Other writers will do with even less of an outline than Ms Wynne-Jones. Leigh Douglass Brackett just made it up as she went along. She also ended up with many tales she had to abandon, reaching insolvable points in the story, or deciding the tale had nowhere to go at all.

Making the outline does render the act of performing the first draft less exciting, suspenseful, or surprising. The first draft sinks into more of a mechanical filling-in of details left out of the outline.

But. But. But…

If You Can’t Make an Outline, You Don’t Know Your Story

Leigh Douglass Brackett ended up often enough finding out she had no tale at all. Diana Wynne-Jones ended up with a first draft that needed an outline of its own for her to learn what story it was she had told.

Simply put: the outline is your story.

Pyramid or Less Than Useful

There are of course different sorts of outlines. The least-formed is a simple list:

• This happened at the start
• Then this happened
• Then that happened
• Meanwhile this other happened
• Then this thing happened
• Because of all this, that happened
• Finally, the end happened

This is not right. It is better than no notion at all of your tale, and it is better than the bare minimum of Ms Wynne-Jones. But it doesn’t help you to understand what story it is that you are telling.

So you really are aiming at a hierarchical, or pyramidal or top-down outline. Or a series of outlines à la the ‘Snowflake Method’ in which you summarize your tale in one sentence, then in a paragraph, then in five paragraphs, then in five pages.

You must understand what is at the heart of your tale if you are to make up your mind which scenes to include and which scenes to leave out.

In the Beginning, All Was Calm

The hero was calm

His town was calm

The people around him were as they always were

Then Something Happened that got the Hero in a Box

This happened

The hero ignored it

It got worse

The hero tried to get the town to take care of it

No good; the hero knew he was in trouble and would have to take care of it himself

The Struggle Began Badly

The hero tried something

It failed

Things got even worse

The hero tried something else

… And so on. Here I show only two levels, comparable to a summary of each sequence, and the main events within that sequence. Of course a fully ordered outline will have one Master Line that tells the whole tale, then each Act will have its line, each Sequence within the Acts will have its line, each main event will have its line, and each minor event within each main event will have its line. There may be even lower-levels than that.

The talesman who masters this sort of an outline can tell you his tale in a single line, the Master Line, easily and off the top of his head. Ask him to elaborate, and he can give you the tale in a handful of sentences, one for each act.

Thus he knows precisely what is the tale he tells.

And thus he is capable of performing that tale, rather than another tale entirely while he imagines he is telling you the tale he claims he is.

Yes, outlines are hard, and not very gratifying to most of us. They are rather like the work the painter must undergo to prepare his canvas, his brushes, his pigments, along with all his preparatory sketches. Task-work, toil, drudgery. But if the painter neglects this (as unhappily many 20th century artists did) then his masterpieces will fall to pieces in a few years.

Do it right if you want to build a tale that can last.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, June 26, 2008)

Tale Sex: Where Words Have an Edge

The abstraction of words enhances suggestion and lets the talesman deal more easily with unpalatable subjects.

Sensuous

Tales that treat of the erotic, whether erotica or pornography, belong to the third kind of tale — the ‘Sense Tale’ or tale of experience. As such, the more dramatic media such as the theater, movies, or video, have a strong advantage over tales that are told with words alone. Word-tales do have an edge, however, when the talesman can appeal to the imagination of his audience, or where his subject matter is so disagreeable to his audience that if he were to depict it directly on stage or screen, many of his audience would reject it; and he might want to get them to stick around in the hope that they might become enlightened.

Wink-wink and Fill in the Blank

Whenever a tale is told in the more-concrete arts of drama, choices are made on every level; the characters are embodied by actors who have certain specific characteristics; they are guided to perform in a certain specific manner; they are dressed in a specific way and play out their scenes on specific sets dressed in specific ways. Because these choices are made, the audience experiences the tale with a heightened sense of reality (and the advancement of the technical background of the dramatic arts has, thus far, sought ever more realistic ways to present their tales). But the audience is also denied all the other possible choices that might have been made. The characters, played by these actors, can only look like these actors, and can’t look like other people. Once the costumes have been put on, the audience is forbidden from seeing the characters wearing different garb. The look of the sets must be what is given us; we can’t see them in any other way.

When on the other hand the tale is told in words, the abstract nature of words allows each of us in the audience to ‘flesh out’ the characters and settings in our own way, each to our own taste, and as specifically as we wish and are able. We can ‘fill in the blanks’ which the abstract words by their nature must leave behind (and of which a master talesman will make full use).

This is of course a matter of media: in whatever media the master talesman works, he will seek to heighten its strengths and lessen its weaknesses. But it has particular advantages in tales of erotica (at least in the unhappy Christian lands), because audiences that are guilty over sexual pleasure, and ashamed that they are sexual animals at all, will shy away from the full expression of their sexuality, while at the same time feeling an irresistible attraction for it, which we are given as part of being what we are.

Let us take that part of the ‘line you must not cross’ that involves how extreme are the acts we will invoke, and consider it from the ghetto side of the street, as though we were good working pornographers. We must deal with the limits of taste and our audience’s forbearance, knowing all the while that some in our audience will be ready for more, others will be more chaste and tentative. If we worked with a dramatic medium, we would have to choose just how graphic we want to be, and just how far we lead our performers in their dance. But as talesmen working in words alone, we can hint at and imply and suggest, and in so doing lead our audience to the brink, and then encourage them to partake and slake their thirsts, each in his own manner and to his own taste.

This principle applies to all kinds of tales, of course, and is best seen when we the audience go from a book we love to its dramatic or filmed adaptation, and see that the actors who play the characters don’t look the way we pictured them when we read the book, and the setting seems also different.

Dis-Tasteful Things

Sometimes the subject matter of our tale by its very nature goes beyond what our audience will willingly swallow. Presenting this in the more-concrete terms of drama or video, will push our audience right up against it so forcefully that they may well push right back again, and stop watching, or leave the theater. This is their right, and yet the talesman may have most of all wished to reach this very part of his audience, in order to show them that the thing that repulses them is not so terrible after all, and that those who indulge in it are not monsters but only human after all. And this goal is lost when the audience refuses to continue.

Again the abstract nature of words comes to the good talesman’s aid, and by ‘squinting’ his narrative eyes, as it were, and implying more, and telling less, he may so work about the edges of the unhappy subject matter that he just might hold on to the audience that otherwise would reject it.

Consider Mary Renault’s novels of ancient Greece for an example. She has no qualms or special repugnance for male homosexuality, and was convinced that it (or at least a bisexuality that preferred homosexual love for its intellectual companionship and conviviality) was pronounced in the period. Miss Renault wrote for a general audience, many of whom were strongly opposed to homosexuality both on moral and aesthetic grounds. To many of us men, the sight of two men passionately kissing onscreen is enough to make us squirm, even when we profess no moral or intellectual objection to the act (and that’s just the kissing part). Miss Renault, working in words, was able to work around this in such a way that her novels became big international best-sellers.

(Of course Miss Renault was not writing pornography, and in novels such as The Last of the Wine she may have had as one of her main goals to advance tolerance for male homosexuality. I don’t know if that was the case, but even so, her main goal was not the sexual arousal of her audience, and so for her, consideration of the general audience and its dislikes was important.)

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, April 13, 2008)

Tale Sex: The Line You Must Not Cross

Erotica wants to lead talesmen on beyond where they ought to go, because they want to go there

Antisex

A long time ago, there were a bunch of crazy Jews. There were several of these crazies in different bunches, all lamenting the sorry state of Israel and blaming it on the wickedness of the Israelites, and foretelling that soon enough God was going to come and lay waste to His chosen people. Now one of these bunches went on to create a crazy cult that dominated all Europe for a thousand years. It dominates America now, because the Europeans in their Age of Explorations and Conquests, betook with them this crazy cult they call Christianity.

Now one of the hallmarks of Christianity is a hatred and repugnance for the human body, life on Earth, and most of all sex.

Jews can embrace sex, although there have been plenty of bunches of crazy Jews over the centuries that loathe sex. Muslims can also embrace sex, although there have been a few bunches of crazy Muslims over the centuries that loathe sex.

Christians loathe sex, and about the best that can be said of them is that there have been a rare few bunches of crazy Christians who embrace sex; also, that Christians over the past 500 years or so have been the biggest hypocrites of any cults going. I suppose this has saved them from going extinct (so far).

I am, as you probably guessed, a bit of an anti-cleric.

I see a difference, also, between a cult that prefers the ascetic, and one that hates the world and the human body and its pleasures, including sex. An ascetic cult like Hinduism, can say that abstaining from worldly pleasures is better than indulging in them, without saying that indulging in worldly pleasures is evil, which is what the Christians have said. It seems that in Hindu over the centuries a model of living developed in which men and women lived in the world, married, enjoyed food and drink and each other’s bodies, raised families, and then, in the declining years of their lives, withdrew from the world and all its delights, meditated, and sought oneness with whatever lay beyond. Under this model, no stigma attached to the part of life that enjoyed the world, and the withdrawal from life was not mandated — only admired.

The Sorry End

The cultural Puritanism of Christianity leaves me unsure whether erotica (which are tales whose main effect is the sexual arousal of their audience) is a lesser, weaker, or ‘degraded’ form of tales. Under the Christian regimes that have oppressed Europeans and their daughter-states, the happy sweet joys of sex have been condemned, forbidden, outlawed. This has created a great deal of tension, since something we all like and want is also taboo, and its enjoyment has been attended with various forms of cruel punishment. Erotic art of all forms, including erotic tales, has lurked at the margins, usually outside the law, clandestine, shameful, something to enjoy and then regret.

Erotica, then, has been unable (until quite recently — the past two generations only when it was freed, and only haltingly at that) to join in the common culture of tales. A tale could not be frankly erotic, even in some small passages; if it was so, it was forbidden, and condemned to a small, secret, illegal ghetto, where only works of pornography and erotica could exist. Either a tale ‘abstained’ from sex or it must, then, wallow in it wholly.

The sorry end of this trend is that a divide has sprung up between tales for the general audience, and tales that deal with sex. Over the past two generations this has begun to break down, but that is not very much time as cultural changes go, and the recent rise of the Christian fascists in an increasingly fascistic America has led to attempts to undo the latter advances in freedom, and push sex back into its outlaw underground.

Raunch and Titillation

When I look back over the pulp magazines of the 1930s through 1950s, I see a lot of titillation, what we could call ‘chaste erotica.’ There will be scantily-clad, even naked, damsels on the covers and interior illustrations, drawn abstractly, or in a ‘cheesecake’ style of coy hints and winks. In the same way the tales would hint at sex, and even ‘outrageous’ sexual practices, but never quite come to terms with it.

By contrast, once censorship in America was overturned in the courts (to all practical purposes), erotica quickly advanced to outright, honest, raunch: explicit and graphic portrayals in works that were pornography (art, and tales, that are mainly created with the intention of arousing their audience).

The Battle or the Slide

In between chaste denial of sex, and the open honest wallowing in it, there comes a period of great conflict. Talesmen (and their brother-artists of other media) would fight to deal with sex in slightly more honest, more open, and more central ways in their tales. Censors would confiscate books and magazines and throw a few ‘pornographers’ in jail. The public, meanwhile, was torn. Many enjoyed the new freedom, and didn’t see that they were hurting anyone; many enjoyed and felt guilt for it; many enjoyed and proclaimed boldly that sex was not only nothing to be ashamed of, it was something to celebrate. Many others feared, loathed, and were horrified at the new freedom, and did everything they could to oppose it.

Over the course of this battle (or slide into iniquity, as the crazy unhypocritical Christians would call it), talesmen had a lot of fun dealing with the legal limits of the time, and seeing how far they could push the censors. This required a great deal of wit, subtlety, and artistry. The suggestive became the byword of the time. It is often said that art flourishes when it exists under restraints that chafe it. This certainly applied to the time of the battle.

But once the battle was won, though the law had changed, the culture had hardly done so. The result was that pornographic tales still were penned within their (now-legal) ghetto, and ‘serious’ works of art and ‘popular mainstream’ tales could at best play the old sly wink-wink games they had before. Which proved unsatisfying artistically and commercially: those in the audience who wanted sex games could get them, ‘the real thing’ and honestly portrayed, in the low-class hack works of the porn ghetto; these folks found mainstream works that hinted and did not ‘deliver’ to be unsatisfying; at the same time, those members of the audience who still feared and hated sex, considered mainstream works that went too far ‘beyond the line’ to be ‘trash.’ At first there was some critical acclaim for ‘bold and daring’ talesmen who pushed their tales over the line, and courted prosecution; once sex was legal, there was less of the ‘bold and daring’ flag to claim, and less critical acclaim.

The Murky, Shifting Line

So here we are today. We talesman can play with sex, a little, but there is always that line that, dare we cross it, will condemn our tales to the porn ghetto, and exclude us from the mainstream. And finding where this line lies is no easy matter.

The line exists, as far as I can see, in three ways:

1. The frankness with which certain acts are portrayed
2. The nature of those acts
3. The prevalence of the passages and scenes that portray those acts

The Frankness. In telling of a spade, just how close will the talesman come to using the word ‘spade’?

The Nature. There is a range of sexual acts that today’s society considers ‘normal’ and ‘healthy.’ (What acts we include in this range has been changing for 40 years.) Where we include a particular act as it is shown in a tale also depends on whether the talesman tells us the act is performed as part of a ‘loving relationship’ with respect on both (all) sides, or whether it is purely recreational, or done out of hate.

The Prevalence. Out of a 400-page novel, how many pages are given over to sex scenes? How many pages do those scenes last? How central is sex to the subject matter of the tale? Does the tale deal with much else besides sex, and if so, is the other matter subordinate to the sex, or is the sex subordinate to the other matter?

Each of us must pick and choose his way, guided by the examples of other (and mainly the most popular) works in our genre.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, April 12, 2008)

More Than It Seems

How objects are charged with emotional power

What I am about to describe is a technique that has its proper place in drama — in mime, dance, the theater, and movies. It was a hallmark of the theater in the 1900s, and D. W. Griffith brought it into film. It is very powerful when used well — which is to say, subtly — because it compresses a range of emotions and associations into a single, wordless moment.

I am unsure how strong it is in tales told in words, where the talesman uses words anyway.

Associations in the Mind

The technique depends upon a trick of man’s mind. This is the trick: when we experience some strong emotions, we tend to associate the emotions and the event with the objects involved with them.

An example would be books. Many ardent readers, when asked if they would ever see books dying, to be replaced by ebooks, say Never — that they just couldn’t see themselves ‘curling up’ with a computer screen the way they do with books. Here these readers have in the past read many compelling tales in books, and have come to associate the pleasures those tales afforded them with the physical objects, the books, that contained the codes and symbols that carried the tales to them.

Another example lies in the strange twists of sexual fetishes. Freud found that some of his ‘deviant’ clients had been spanked when they were boys, just on the verge of puberty, by their pretty young governesses; these boys came to associate the stirrings of lust they felt for their governesses with the rather intimate act of spanking, and when they grew of age, would ask their wives or whores to spank them; indeed, some of them were unable to achieve satisfaction without the spanking.

Ancient tribes would carve figures to represent their gods and spirits; they would later come to believe the gods and spirits dwelt in those figures. In the Greek Orthodox Christian sects, the painted representations of saints are thought to contain some part of the saint, and to be holy in and of themselves.

A beloved father wears a certain cap daily for the last 20 years of his life; after his death the children and widow can’t look at the cap without thinking of the dead man, and keep it on its peg on the wall in the entry to the house. Whenever they pass it they feel a twinge of loss for the dead, and a bit of the complex of emotions they felt for him.

Another kind of association comes in the form of gifts. Here we associate the gift with the giver. This is very common in the form of love tokens.

Another association can be with pieces of things. A brick from the fallen Berlin Wall becomes treasured as a memento, and brings back memories of the long division of that city. Someone close to us gives us a present; here the object has no association with the giver other than that he gave it to us; all the same we feel a bit towards the object as we feel towards the giver. For instance, some gifts are ugly and impractical; we never would have chosen them for ourselves; we never would keep them — other than for the fact that some close kinsman or loved one gave the things to us, and to discard the things would somehow betray disrespect toward those who gave them to us.

Associations on Stage

This is exactly the same mechanism in the drama. It probably began when a playwright depicted in his play a similar kind of event — say, the dead father’s cap. This proved very effective; there were many in the audience who could sympathize with the situation, and many who had experienced like associations in their own lives. From this point, the technique was repeated, varied, and explored in its many possible representations.

Here we can see how powerful such a ‘charged object’ can be on stage (and in movies). The scene depicts the parlor and entry of the family house; there on the peg on the wall by the door hangs the cap, symbol of the father who has died. It may stand in as a reminder of the good times that are gone; it may stand in as a representation of the tyranny of the monstrous old man, whose laws and whims still rule even from the grave. It may stand in as one thing for the son, another for the widow, a third thing for the daughter, yet another for the business partner when he comes to pay his respects.

When the son, forever oppressed by his old man in life, finally tears down the cap from the wall and stamps upon it, the audience feels a shock of horror — or liberation — that runs beyond anything that a speech from the son could ever give them. The action is concrete, external, wordless, in short it is dramatic. It is also efficient because everything that the father might have been is compressed into that cap on the wall. In the middle of a speech, one of the actors can go near the door and look up at the cap — it is all we need, we know what is on the character’s mind, no matter what the words are in the speech.

Associations on the Page

So the trick of ‘charging’ an object on stage is very powerful, but how well does it work in a tale told by words, orally or on the page? In all word-tales, everything is symbolized: words are symbols that the audience must decode to understand what the matter is. The object must be told in words, so the act of tearing down the father’s cap cannot go wordlessly, as it can in life, on the stage, or on film. It is all the same efficient. But on the other hand word-tales can so easily dip into the mind of any character and tell what his feelings are even when he himself might not wholly understand them.

Associations by Fetish

Magical tales, tales of Eartherea, may use the charged object in literal ways. The cap on the wall need not stand in for the father when he is dead: it can hold his ghost, it can speak with his voice, it can issue his commands from the beyond.

This is not the same, and lacks the power of associations that we’ve covered here so far. In this case the object is something else — neither the father nor a representation of him. The totem or ikon ceases to have symbolic power when the god or spirit or saint truly does speak through it. When the kerchief given by the moralizing mother starts to choke the young man whenever he says something she would not approve of, we are dealing with something else altogether than if he merely felt that he was choking, ashamed of what he spoke when he sees himself in the mirror and notices the kerchief wrapped around his throat.

How to Charge a Thing

The trick of charging an object in this way for the audience is just the same as it is charged in life for the persons involved. The audience must see the father wearing the cap before he dies and is absent from the stage. We must see the mother give the kerchief. At the same time, the tale is a compression of life, and a play can’t go on for a year of preliminaries during which we happen also to see the father with the cap on his head, and slowly and subliminally make the connection between the two.

The briefest way to do this, is to have the characters openly acknowledge the association. The father can be dead before the curtain first rises; the family might be coming home from the funeral, and the widow with great care smoothes the cap and places it on the peg on the wall, and some words pass among the mourners about the dead man as they stand below the wall and look up at the cap; the widow might recall the day the man got the cap, and some anecdote about how much stock he put in it, how much he loved that cap. This is a rather clumsy way to do it, but it will now, with a few more subtle reminders, leave the audience seeing the cap as the dead man.

Taking a bit more time, is to have some scenes to establish the connection dramatically, on stage. We must see the father alive, cap on head. Maybe the widow-to-be would give him a new hat, which he refuses; she mocks the battered old cap, but he defends it mightily, and wears it indoors in defiance. In another case, the lover gives his girl a little toy, worthless in itself, on the night that is their happiest together, after which he goes away to war. The girl, alone, unloved, untouched, tempted by her feelings for other men, will brush her hair and make herself up at her dressing table, where the little toy hangs beside the mirror, a perpetual reminder — and reproach, if she is making up to go out with another man. Here, to charge the thing, we must see the man give the girl the toy, and it must be underlined by a couple of references; maybe we see her place it by the mirror, and see him draw her into his embrace through the mirror, with the toy hanging there prominently (a technique possible only in film). After this we might see her reading a letter from him while she sits at the dressing table, and she touches the toy, thinking of him.

Reminders such as these will help to reassert the connection even while it plays out: the effect grows as it is used.

In word-tales, all these scenes have to be described, and the feelings described as well, and the association of feelings noted in the characters. It can be done, but I doubt if it gives us as great an edge as it does in dramatic tales.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, April 10, 2008)

The Root of a Good Tale

The one essential thing

Two Tales

I’ve been reading The Adventures of Amir Hamza in a new translation of a XIX version. I like this very, very much. It’s a lot of fun to read, has a great style, characters, and is teaching me about talespinning. It also shows me a kind of fantasy that is not our modern kind, and has seeded me with ideas on how to approach magic and one device in the tale I’m now telling. The greatest insights this tale has given me (beside a vision of oral storytelling much advanced) is the first full picture of the ‘trickster’ character as embodied in Amar Ayyar, Hamza’s subtle, sneaky, foster brother.

I’ve also been reading H. Rider Haggard’s Benita a rather cloying Victorian tale of Eartherean South Africa. I don’t find it much fun to read, don’t much like its style, find its characters weak, and don’t see much about talespinning that is new to me.

Now, Benita I have in a http://www.gutenberg.org edition, and so I can keep it as long as I want. The Adventures of Amir Hamza on the other hand is a copy borrowed from the library; I renewed it as many times as I can, and it is now overdue. Every day I have it is precious.

All the same, two days ago I picked up Benita rather than The Adventures of Amir Hamza. I did the same yesterday.

Why?

The One Thing

There is something about Benita. I want to know what happened. It isn’t that I care much about the characters in this case. I also have precious few doubts as to whether the ending will be happy or sad. Haggard was a commercial writer, and he has peppered his tale with prophecies (from the stock ‘wise elder of a primitive race’) that tell me the ending will not be unhappy. There is, all the same, one bit of information about the ending Haggard denies us, and that is the fate of Richard Seymour, last seen collapsing on the shore after swimming for miles from a wreck at sea. Benita, you see, loves this man, and all accept that he is dead. But Haggard didn’t show us that Seymour has died, not definitely. Benita has gone quite far away from civilization, to an ancient ruin where, her father believes, Portuguese missionaries buried great amounts of gold some centuries before. And she lives there with her father and his partner in great peril.

So I assume that:

• Seymour is alive
• Seymour will come to rescue Benita
• Seymour and Benita will survive and make it back to ‘civilization’
• Seymour and Benita will get to keep some small amount of the gold

I can’t see just when Richard Seymour will appear; my best guess is that he will appear (with some equivalent of the cavalry) just at the second curtain, when things look darkest. I had thought he would appear among the attacking Matabele, and would have made his second entrance already; this proved false. And though I’m reasonably certain, I don’t know for sure.

And I need to know for sure.

The Adventures of Amir Hamza has not hooked me in this way. I enjoy much more each anecdote and adventure along the way, and the way in which these bits are told. But on the whole I don’t see any doubt as to the ending, no questions linger — I don’t really have any interest in the ending. It’s an odd thing: I care more for the journey than for the destination.

And it is this difference that drew me back to Benita even though there was no time deadline for reading that tale at all, and a lapsed deadline for the tales of the great Amir.

What Happened? is the root of what makes a good tale.

The Question and its Answer

What Happened? is a question. It is a question the audience will come to ask themselves. The talesman must, if he will make a good tale, compel his audience to ask themselves this question. Sometimes he may express the question in the tale itself, but this is an obvious ploy; needless as well, if he has framed his tale in the right way.

What Happened? is the question the audience should ask itself at the end of the first curtain, when the ‘predicament’ has been arranged, when all the questions of who, what, where, and when have been answered, and when the talesman has established for his audience what kind of tale they are hearing.

What Happened? is also a question about the ultimate end of the tale. It may also apply to detours and byways and segments of the whole tale, as the final goal is generally composed of several intermediate steps along the way. The Adventures of Amir Hamza has such smaller steps, as Hamza goes on various missions for his Emperor, or seeks some way to see the Emperor’s daughter despite all the armies arrayed to guard her and see no men can get to her rooms in the palace. But it is the final goal, this grand, over-arching What Happened? that the Adventures lacks.

It will of course help your tale if you have a fine power of storytelling and style, if your characters are intriguing and unforgettable, if each incident is fun to tell and to hear, if you play upon the passions of your audience in every conceivable way, if you tell them of things they have never heard before, or imagined could be.

But the one needful thing to keep them coming back to the tale, is this one question of What Happened?

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, April 9, 2008)

Make It Clear

How important it is that the audience understands what and where and who

The most thrilling aspect of the way a tale can be told, to an audience, is when the tale does not explain enough, and the audience must make guesses and assumptions about what is going on … and they prove to be correct. The talesman does this by leaving out vital bits of information. But if he leaves out just a few more bits of information, the audience won’t be able to guess and assume correctly. They will feel lost, and this is one of the least thrilling, most annoying aspects of the way a tale can be told.

By way of explanation, I’ll be using examples from movies. But the principles should hold for all forms of talesmanship.

Lost in Time and Space

This notion arose when I watched Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain recently. It is a tale of passion — obsession, really. A doctor’s beloved wife is dying from an inoperable brain tumor. He is desperate to save her and heads a research study using other primates to refine techniques to wipe out the cancer. These methods use surgery in the main, but also examine chemical methods of dissolving or killing the tumors.

The man’s wife is full of life and seems not particularly afraid of or worried about dying. She is one of those girl-characters created in an ideal mold by male talesmen who see the man as too with work to see and enjoy what life in the present moment has to offer; in total contrast, this type of girl has no ambitions or obsession with work, and is wholly in love with the sensuous moment. In this sense we can look at such tales as being not really about man and woman, but about inner traits of the human soul. The ‘work’ soul is here shown as male, the ‘play’ soul is female.

The man’s wife happens also to be a writer, or at least she is writing a historical novel set in the time of Spain’s great Empire and conquest of Central America. In this tale-within-a-tale, the Queen of Spain has heard tales of the Biblical Tree of Life hidden in Central America. The Mayans know where this Tree is, and have extracted from its bark a substance that grants immortality. The Mayans have also connected this tree with a constellation, a nebulous cloud surrounding a dying star, where the Mayans believe dead souls go to be reborn. The Spanish Queen is attacked for these views by the Chief Inquisitor, but she sends a brave conquistador and franciscan monk to New Spain to find the tree. When the conquistador has found the tree, the Queen promises that he and she will drink of its nectar and become united for all time.

The doctor’s wife dies, leaving this novel unfinished. But it just so happens that, as part of his experiments, the doctor has used a chemical derived from the bark of a mysterious Central American tree upon one of his baboon subjects; the baboon shows no sign of losing the tumor right away, but it does regain health in all other ways, and seems to have become young and strong again. But since the tumor has not changed, the doctor disregards the stunning results and goes on with other surgical tests. Too late, the word reaches him that after all the baboon’s tumor has begun to wither away.

It is left to the doctor to finish his wife’s novel. He does so much later. In fact it seems that he imbibes the bark essence himself, becomes immortal, and plants one of these mystic trees over his wife’s grave, where it flourishes and seems to him to repeat another of the Mayan beliefs, of the ‘First Father’ who sacrificed himself to the roots of this tree, and whose soul went through the fruit of the tree into a bird and thence into the sky.

An indeterminate time later, the doctor travels through space with the tree, speaking to it as if it were his wife, haunted by visions of her, seeing himself as the conquistador and his wife as the Queen. He goes to the nebula about the dying star, where he hopes to find his wife reborn.

There is an ending which tells … something more about the conquistador and blends the doctor of the far future into the conquistador’s tale, and conflates the conquistador with the Mayan First Father; this may be truth or it may be only how the doctor chose to complete his dead wife’s novel.

All three of these tales (conquistador, doctor, and cosmic voyager) are presented on film, and Hugh Jackman plays all three men, as Rachel Weisz plays Queen and doctor’s wife. The articulation of the tale mixes all three tales together, and jumps confusingly among them.

The opening (before we know where we are or what is going on) jumps between cosmic traveler and conquistador. We then have bits of the doctor’s tale. The opening seems designed to plunge us into a dream, where bits of imagination and memory drift in and out of one another. This is by intent but it leaves the audience adrift and lost for a good half hour, until we get to catch on and seem to make sense of the three tales.

This is a case where there was not enough explanation. (I’m sure Aronofsky would have hated to make a film that explained things as I suggest here.)

The opening of the tale is where explanation is the one crucial thing. ‘Make it Clear’ is the first commandment of the opening. The job of the opening is to make things clear (what must it make clear? The predicament).

Illusions of Knowledge

I must add this paraphrase of something Alfred Hitchcock is said to have once said:

The audience always has to know where they are at any moment in a movie … even when they’re wrong.

What must be Made Clear is the illusion, not the truth. So long as we the audience can feel confident that we know where who and what is going on, we will enjoy the tale. Later we can learn that what we believed was not, in fact, the truth — this is often a ploy of mystery tales, but it is also a prime motif of the French dramas of the 1900s ‘well-made play’ in which there was almost always a mystery, a family secret, which did not appear as a mystery at all; rather a prosperous family appears on stage in Act I and only in Act II do we learn that the façade of prosperity is false, and the family is in desperate need of cash (a new business enterprise to succeed, a marriage to come off) in order to stave off ruin.

Genre and Explanation

When dealing with mature genre tales, a good deal of explanation can be left out from the opening, and the audience will feel confident they know who what and where they are regardless. This is because they (think they) know the genre in its characters and setting as well as narrative forms. Experienced genre audiences will grow bored with explanations such as what is a detective and what his job is, or any other mundane basic information about the genre. As a genre matures so do its audience, with the result that tales told in it will become increasing rococo and dense, and get by on less and less explanations. The only exceptions here come when the tale tries to reverse or undermine the expected who what and where of the genre in an effort to refresh it.

Masters Get By With Less

Master talesmen know just what bits of information they must tell, and what bits they may leave out. Beginners are wise to make no such assumptions, and to include everything. Make it clear! We beginners will be tempted to follow the lead of the masters, for the reason that we as audience have found that great thrill in following tales that are incomplete, that we as audience must guess at, assume, and complete for ourselves. But until we know what we are doing — really know what we are doing — we will almost always fall short, and give our audience too little information, leaving them confused and lost at sea.

Three examples of master filmmakers who produced movies that were incomplete, even ‘defective,’ were Hitchcock, Leo McCarey, and Howard Hawks. In the last half of the 1950s they made three movies that are now thought of as masterpieces, and all are defective. Hitchcock made Vertigo McCarey made An Affair to Remember and Hawks made Rio Bravo. These are all defective, leave out tons of ‘needful’ information not just from the opening but throughout the tale, and almost make no sense if examined logically upon the evidence they provide.

But these three men were at the height of their considerable powers, they knew exactly what they were doing. And we must note that the three movies were genre movies as well. (Indeed, in the case of An Affair to Remember McCarey was remaking his 20-years earlier Love Affair.)

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, April 5, 2008)

Some Said

There are ways to make tales that the Audience will finish, in part or whole.

Where Tales Take Shape

I wrote (‘Where Tales Take Shape’) that the best way to form and articulate a tale is in your head. Dreaming and living and day-dreaming the tale, over and over, will improve the talesman’s mental skill and strength until he can command the whole tale in his mind, shifting characters, objects, events throughout the tale.

In the way of doing this, the talesman will find alternate paths the characters might choose, and alternate outcomes to conflicts. And he finds it hard to make up his mind and pick one over all the others. Of course, it is the job of the talesman (at this phase) to make up his mind. But it has happened in the past, when many talesmen told the same tales, or cycles of tales, that they sometimes disagreed over which path was best. Alternate versions of the tales appear along the way. It is interesting, in the archaeology of such tale-cycles, to read the different versions, and hold both in your mind.

I find it interesting, anyway, and so I went about seeking for some way to bring this kind of alternate version into my own tales.

Byways

This is of course the heart of interactive fiction, which I wrote (‘The Tale that Tells Itself’) would not prove appealing to readers of prose fiction, but would do well to movie-fans (at least in the form of interactive video games that take on increasingly elaborate narrative schemes).

So do I now take back what I wrote there? In a way.

The way I like to hint at alternate versions of tales does not mess with the final end of them. I only like to smear or blur byways along the way. These are alternate paths that part from the main road of the tale only briefly, and all return to the main road, so that there is no final difference in how the whole tale takes its shape. There is only a chance for each reader to choose his own byway, or (if he be a bold reader, and a talesman in his own right) to hold more than one byway in his head as equally valid — in which case the tale does interesting things (or the reader does interesting things by way of the tale) that no straightforward tale could manage.

Example of Heathcliff

To make all this a bit more clear, I give you two examples. The first involves Wuthering Heights and concerns itself with the age-old question, ‘How did Heathcliff win his fortune?’

The tale of Wuthering Heights is a love story by Emily Brontë. Heathcliff is a poor boy of unknown (and what is worse, racially-mixed) parentage raised in the rich Earnshaw household where Cathy is the spoiled, half-wild daughter. These two fall in love, but Cathy’s kin will never accept Heathcliff as a suitor, poor as he is. Cathy ends by marrying a more socially-acceptable neighbor. Heathcliff curses them, and disappears. Years later he comes back, boy no longer but a masterful man, with a fortune which he uses to gain his revenge.

The source of Heathcliff’s fortune is never explained, and has given rise to much idle speculation. The point though is simply that he is now rich, and has at his disposal the means to buy the Earnshaw estate and wreak his vengeance upon his love and those of her new family.

“Some said Heathcliff went abroad, to the Indies, and gained his fortune in the trade of sugar, rum whiskey, and slaves. Others said he took a new name and enlisted in the army, and in lands abroad won his share of loot from the conquered peoples. And some said he stayed in London, and became a prince of that city’s underworld. And yet others whispered that his wealth came from even more disreputable sources.

“However it came to be, the fact remained: Heathcliff was a wealthy man, and had enough fortune to build any sort of happy, respectable, and healthy life. But rather than that, he came back to the place where he had been spurned and abased, to make them pay.”

That is the brief form of the trick. And I think it must be brief, brief enough so that before the talesman finishes the first of his proposed byways, the reader will yet recall the ‘some said’ that frames it; going on to the second and third byways in so few words that the reader can hold them all in his head equally.

What this does (beyond giving the reader a chance to pick one as his favorite, if he cannot or will not hold them all as one) is to form a sort of Impressionistic mélange of variants. Each colors the others. They can be much alike in their purport, as in my example here. Or they can be opposite, as in my example of Mr Rochester’s wife.

Example of Mr Rochester’s Wife

Jane Eyre was written by Emily’s sister Charlotte (though I’ve no doubt all three Brontë sisters helped in the plotting and articulation of both novels). In it, young, well-bred but penniless Jane serves as governess to the bastard child of brooding, wealth Mr Rochester, and the two form bonds of affection. (Jane is more timid and demure than the wild Catherine Earnshaw.) Upon the brink of their marriage, Jane is told that Mr Rochester is not, after all, free to wed, that he has been married, and that his wife still lives. Rochester admits it, and shows Jane his wife — a raving mad thing.

Here too there is a mystery along the way that is never fully told: the tale of Rochester’s first marriage, and how his wife went mad:

“Some said that she was born of debased blood, and the seeds of madness were in her from her childhood. But others claimed that though proud and spirited, the first Mrs Rochester was of pure and noble blood, and it was Rochester’s own cruelty and abuses that drove her to become the thing Jane had been shown.”

Here the two alternate byways are very different as to what they claim, and it leaves the reader in some doubt as to a crucial point in the tale — that of Mr Rochester’s character. The reader can of course choose one over the other depending on the other passages in which Rochester has acted; she can choose one over the other depending on her hopes for Jane’s future happiness.

But I think when put in this way, the byways cannot blend, and the reader cannot wholly put one down — in the words of court proceedings, ‘you can’t unring a bell.’ The reader has read both choices, and though she may decide that Rochester was blameless and the woman tainted of old, or she may say that Rochester was at fault, she will all the same remember the alternative, and harbor some lingering doubt as to her conclusion. Best of all (at least up till the end of the main tale) is if she holds both possibilities more or less equally, as this will heighten her suspense. She will fear more for Jane lest Rochester win her back and prove the villain, she will hope more for Jane that Rochester be shown to be a good man at heart, and that he and Jane will be joined as one.

But here, Jane and her Mr Rochester do end up together. And if the reader yet holds both possibilities as to Rochester’s character, she will leave off the novel with a hint of dread as to Jane’s future chance of happiness with a man who may yet prove to be cruel and malignant.

This doubt might be the talesman’s point, which is another use to put the ‘Some Said’ trick. But it would not please the reader (not the bourgeois or the peasant reader at any rate) not, in the end, to know for sure how the ‘ever after’ will turn out.

(Composed on keyboard Friday, April 4, 2008)

Where Tales Take Shape

How to master the skill to spin your tales

The Birth of Tales

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

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

The Articulation of Tales

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

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

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

Example of Articulation

For example, let’s take a love story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mastery

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

It seems daunting when put this way.

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

It’s as easy as dreaming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, April 2, 2008)

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)

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)