To Hear is not To Read

How do we compose oral tales?

What Was Will Be Again

In ‘Tales of Future Past’ I gave the reasons why I think oral storytelling will come back to dominate tales. Radio will surpass television, audiobooks will be more popular than printed books.

But how do you compose for speech?

Radio

Radio tales still exist in recordings available on disk and online. If you want to write with radio in mind, all you need to do is listen to the old recordings and learn from those that strike you as the best.

Radio is a sort of drama played for the ears alone. A cast take different roles, dialogue predominates, exposition hides within dialogue. Music and sound effects round out the soundscape, with the possible addition of a Chorus in the form of a Host or Narrator who is usually confined to the general Introduction and Envoi or summing-up of the tale.

Audiobooks

Audiobooks have so far been readings from tales composed to be read. At most the current audiobooks are ‘composed for the medium’ when they are abridged; some abridgments call for additional words to cover what has been left out, and this is written with the audiobook in mind. For the rest, the audiobook is a printed text’s poor cousin.

Books today are composed to be read. Rare is the author who considers how his prose will sound if read aloud. Since almost all of his readers will read the text, and not hear it read out, this is the proper strategy of today’s author. It would be foolish of him, and bad for his talesmanship, if he were to compose with an alternate medium in mind.

Oral storytelling of tales still has a foothold in children’s books, especially those books aimed at the youngest children who don’t yet know how to read, and are learning. These books are meant to be read out loud by parents to their children. But because the books have the additional aim of teaching the child to read, children’s books are not wholly composed to be heard. They include pictures for the child to look at, and lay the page out so as to help the child pick out the words and connect them to the pictures. Words are chosen not only for their sound, but also for how easily the child will be able to spot them on the page; vocabularies are confined to what the child should learn to read and write. So children’s books are a step towards oral tales, but in the end, since they are meant, even they, to be seen on a page or screen, they don’t give us a good line on what oral storytelling should be. And of course, children’s books are meant for children and not the rest of us.

The True Oral Tale

There remains an oral tradition, that descends from the first talesmen more than 100,000 years ago, for us to learn from. Various ethnographic and folklore scholars have recorded oral tales from many cultures, and these should be studied. They are most valuable when they are least aware of tales written to be read, and innocent of the whole reading realm.

For the rest, we can start with a few basic observations.

Structure in an Oral Tale

The first thing to notice is that the paragraph has no meaning in an oral tale. The paragraph is a fairly recent invention; the medieval European manuscripts and first books printed in Europe had no paragraphs. Paragraphs were created to help the reader navigate through the sea of letters and words.

A paragraph in its ideal form should still have some meaning in oral tales. The paragraph that represents a complete subsection of the tale’s argument or progress still makes sense. But often enough the paragraph today exists simply for its original intended purpose, to guide the reader’s eye across the page and substitute in visual layout for the otherwise necessary words to make transitions and links.

Time is crucial to an oral tale, and absent from a tale to be read. The print-author can’t know how fast his readers will take in the text; some may skim, some may feast over every word and phrase. But the oral talesman has absolute control over the relative pace of his tale. (It is possible with digitally-recorded oral tales to play them back at different speeds, and compensate for the shift in pitch; so long as the playback speed is constant throughout, however, the relative pace will remain as it was first recorded.)

Thus we can say that the pauses that the oral talesman takes will stand in for such printed devices as the paragraph or the skipped-line ‘thought break.’

The chapter may or may not exist in the long oral tale. Most oral tales have been short stories, tales that could be told in no more than an hour or so. Longer epics and linked story cycles have existed, though, and were meant to be recited or told over a series of nights or story-sessions.

Since in the ‘future past’ we are imagining, there may well be such things as audiobooks or other recordings of the telling of oral tales, we have to ask whether it is better to break long audiobooks into separate, smaller files, which would serve as chapters, or to include chapter markers inside the one long file to serve as navigation guides, or to leave the tale as one long, unmarked reading.

Best to me seems the collection of smaller files. Worst of all would be the one long reading, though this could find its place under a device or software that would remember whatever place the reader/listener last got to — for example, audiotape players will stop reeling the tape across the playback heads and hold that position until the next time playback begins.

These smaller files (or chapters within a longer file) I think will take a different shape than most of today’s printed chapters. One of the aims of an author of printed text, when he designs his chapter breaks, is exactly not to give his readers a break or pause from reading. Though a chapter break may appear to offer the reader a spot at which he may put the book down, in fact the author designs the break so that the reader will find it hard to put the book down there, and will want to read on. ‘Just one more chapter,’ is what the author of a page-turner hopes all his readers will chant.

Instead of this, in the world of oral tales, each chapter should have its own complete action. It should complete some phase of the talesman’s argument or the progress of the tale’s journey.

I will have much more to say about all this, once I figure it out.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, May 7, 2008)

On the Grand Scale

How do we make our tales feel big?

Milestones

Some tales feel major. They have an epic feel. When we finish hearing or reading or watching them, we feel as if we’ve been through a war, as if we have undergone great changes in our life, as if nothing will be the same. They act like milestones in the lives of us the audience.

These tales give me the greatest feeling of pleasure from tales.

So it’s not surprising that from time to time the question comes to me, How do I make my tales work like that? What’s the trick?

What follows is not at all definitive. It isn’t even complete. This is only as far as I’ve gotten so far in answering that question.

Big is Big

These epic tales can cover large vistas of time or space. They can also cover a large vista of the inner life of a character, but it seems to me in this case (which I haven’t explored very much) the talesman is best advised to follow the models of spans of time and space — in other words, to use the same techniques.

Big in space means that the tale tells of events that happen over a large geographic (or cosmic) area. But what is ‘large’ here? It means well beyond the common ken. That is just a way of adapting scale to scale. If you look at a tale from an urban point of view, we would then cover the space of the whole city, from its outer edges to its inner core. Most of the folk who dwell in a city are only able to move in a small part of the whole. They restrict themselves to a few local neighborhoods (most of the time) and are pent up within a certain class or ethnic group within the city. A big tale of the city would take a hero, set up for us his usual milieu, and then watch him leave that milieu, while never leaving the city proper, and visit other neighborhoods, quarters, ghettos, barrios, maybe from the poorest to the richest, from beggars to the princes of the city. But a tale about a nation would take the hero from his city, which he has almost never left before, and send him out into other cities, other climes within the nation, and so on. And a tale about space would seem small if it covered only from the Earth to the Moon, even though that space, measured in kilometers, is greater than a trip around the world. So a big tale about space must take its hero into vaster scales of travel and experience.

Big in time means years, decades — centuries. Here the physical arena can be limited to what the hero commonly knows, but the bigness is a question of the changing of days, months, years, and decades. We could call it a big tale if it told of a farmer who never left his own home fields, but we watched him from the time his parents met to his birth, his childhood, his making of his own family in adulthood, his dealings with his children, with his grandchildren, and the aftermath of his death at a great age. Once again the scale is relative; the tale of a man’s whole life could be but a part of a saga that spans generations of a family or the cosmic scale of civilizations and worlds as in E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s Lensman cycle.

Soft and Loud, Humble and Proud

Along with these journeys, a big tale will use the like of volume in a symphonic work to take us readers ‘out there and beyond.’ Such a tale may begin with what seems a simple (deceptively simple) and calm, quiet scene, a trivial bit of business that will end by having vast consequences. It is then the talesman’s task to keep it in his audience’s mind both the mighty oak and the tiny acorn from which it grew. In a like way, when the vast consequences reach the peak of their frenzy, the big tale will often not end abruptly but will show the aftermath, in descending shudders, until it reaches again what seems a simple and calm, quiet scene to end — but we the audience will still hear the echoes of the tumult that has been reached.

Likewise, those ‘quiet’ moments will have their counterpart in scenes that we could call ‘humble’ and which will be struck against other scenes that we could call ‘proud.’ This is like to the contrasts we saw in the big tale of the city: we will watch the hero as a poor man and a mighty; or watch him go among the poor as well as among the mighty. Scenes of poverty will contrast with the pomp and ceremony of the ruling class.

Scale of Tone and Other Techniques

This brings the big tale closer to the Romantic notion that contrast lies at the heart of an artist’s technique, and the starker the contrast the better. These scenes of contrast need not abut each other, but the talesman must keep the grand in the reader’s mind when he shows them the tiny, and vice-versa.

Arc of Character Has its Own Scale

The changes the main characters go through should also be more than the changes most men endure. By this I mean not only in their outer circumstances but also in their hearts. They will be very different men at the peak of the tale than they were at its start, and at the tale’s end they will be very different men than they were at its peak.

Space and Time are Not Within the Page Alone

There is another type of ‘space’ and ‘time’ for these big tales, for normally they take up many pages of text, and many minutes of screen time, relating, and reading. The same tale can seem ‘bigger’ when it takes up more time to get through; I suspect this is mainly because we the audience go through more changes while we take in the tale, and yet that can’t be the whole of it, for we will sit through a long play or movie whilst our lives sit in abeyance, apart from whatever wheels of consideration still turn deep in our hearts relating to the problems as yet unresolved in our lives. We can’t really do anything about those problems, but we can consider them, even if we are not openly aware of doing so, and in relating our problems and our lives to what we hear of in the tale, we can shift our attitude towards them. A simple example would be that the big tale, in showing us the grand scale of its events, may make our problems seem smaller, less critical, and more manageable by contrast.

The End is Not the Beginning

Whatever the measure of the tale’s bigness, where it ends is distant from its start. Sometimes these big tales take a complete circle only to underscore how far the end is from the start, paradoxically: we are taken back to the ground of origin only to see more clearly what changes have taken place. So for example J. R. R. Tolkien takes both his hobbits back home after their journeys in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings only for them and us to see the Shire in a very different light.

This is a common technique used in these big tales.

Big Tales Have Tales Inside Them

One technique used is to have tales that take up a part of the big tale, that might serve as tales themselves. The best example I can give is that of the physical journey, though it must also apply to movement through time and a hero’s inner life.

In The Lord of the Rings Tolkien gives us a journey which is broken into many different smaller journeys. At each stage of the journey, we the audience know only that the heroes mean to go to a certain destination, and neither we nor they know what they will do after that, or whither they might go next. This has the effect on us, as we look back over the tale, of seeing it as composed of several smaller tales.

After preparatory matter in the Shire, Frodo Baggins and his companions Sam, Pippin, and Merry set out for Tookland, still within the general land where hobbits live, but seen as ‘strange’ and somewhat foreign to the hobbits of the Shire proper. From there they mean to travel farther.

Just getting to Tookland is an adventure in itself. From there they will go to Bree to meet Gandalf, they hope — this is another great journey. At Bree they learn that Gandalf has been delayed, and they agree to let Strider lead them on to Rivendell. The journey to Rivendell is the longest leg yet, and fraught with yet graver peril. At Rivendell they find Gandalf at last, and a Council is held, at which it is decided that Frodo must take the Ring to Mt. Doom in Mordor. They set out along the way but cannot cross the mountains as they wished, and must go under the mountains through the mines of Moria, which gives a great change in the tone of the journey (such changes of tone also help to vary the journey and mark off separate segments of the tale). From Moria they enter Lothlorien, a great contrast in place and inhabitants. After this there is a short journey down river, and the company parts ways.

Parting into two companies allows Tolkien to take us on the next segment, divided into two: one party goes to rescue Pippin and Merry from their captors, while Frodo and Sam wander the wastes on the East side of the river with the new goal of finding a door into Mordor — after which they don’t quite know what they will do.

When Pippin and Merry are free of their captors, this segment splits again: we follow the two hobbits among the Ents in Fangorn Forest, and the others into Rohan and battle. These two sides come together again at the White Tower, only to divide again, now in three: Pippin goes with Gandalf to Gondor, Merry rides with the knights of Rohan, and Strider and his companions take another and darker road to Gondor. These three come together again for the battle of Gondor.

When Gondor is delivered, for a time, Strider Gandalf and the others march to assault Mordor. This makes a new leg to this now-united braid of segments, and is set against Frodo and Sam, who have entered Mordor and now must cross its dread terrain to Mount Doom.

When the menace is overcome, there is a celebration and healing in Gondor, a coronation, and the beginning of the journey back to the Shire, forming a last segment of the journey. But at the Shire the hobbits find all not well, and they must rally their fellows and free the Shire. They do so, but the Shire has changed forever, even as the hobbit-travelers themselves have. We have come back to the beginning only to remark on how much everything has changed.

One other note on how this grand journey has been split into smaller parts, is that each leg of the journey ends with a time of rest. This follows the traditional cycle of all journeys, each stage ending with a rest at which we are told of other activities beside movement. So at Tookland the hobbits take a bath and get dressed, and make new plans; at Bree there is ale-drinking, and a dance, and new considerations; at Rivendell there is peace, healing, and the council; Lothlorien serves as a sort of rest-stop after the dread of Moria; the coronation of the King at Gondor is the rest-stop of the journey Out, to be followed by the journey Back Again.

Only the Start

This is only the surface of this topic. I hope I will learn more about it and be able to add that knowledge here later.

(Composed on keyboard Friday, April 25, 2008)

Small Things Make a World

If all the little things in a tale point the same way, the end is irresistible

Big and Small

A tale has its big parts and its small parts. The big parts are the parts that we include when we tell the tale in summary. The smaller the summary, the bigger the parts that remain in the summary. In truth the word ‘summary’ is wrong: there are no ‘summaries’ of tales. There are only the tales told in more or less detail, in longer or shorter versions. So to talk of the big and the small again, we can say that the longer the version of the tale, the smaller the parts that the talesman will tell.

Another way to look at this is to say that the small parts support the big parts. Say we tell of a journey. The setting-forth and the ending-up are the biggest parts of all:

He left home and reached Athens ten years later.

Along the way, the journey has a few large stages. These are big parts but not so big as the setting-forth or ending-up:

He left home and arrived in Crete for the summer. From Crete he sailed to Santoria, where he stayed a year. He sailed to Sparta where he was a prisoner for three years. He was freed at last and made his way by foot to Corinth. At Corinth he found his brother and helped him win a lawsuit to regain his inheritance. Bidding farewell to his brother, he took sail around the isles and came to Athens, ten years from the day he set forth.

Each of these larger parts (the time spent in Crete, in Santoria, in Sparta; his wanderings across Laconia, the legal process in Corinth, sailing to Athens) has its own smaller stages.

Big Moves

The big parts of the tale determine the overall direction of it: up or down, to a more happy or more unfortunate state. Because these parts are so big, we the audience can see them plainly, and by these parts we classify the tale: tragedy, comedy, science-fiction, and so on. The talesman wants to move us through these parts, but because we take notice of them, we can resist them when they try to tug us here or there. More, since these parts are so large, they tend to be common to many tales. By this I mean every journey will have its setting-forth and its ending-up, and every love tale will have its first encounter, and final embrace or farewell.

We know pretty plainly, for example, whether a romantic tale intends to move toward a happy or sad end. In part these ends are already set by the genre and the state of commercial publishing and tale-telling; for the rest we can get a pretty good idea of which way the talesman means to take us, from his general tone and the way he characterizes his lovers.

Small Touches

On the other hand, the smallest parts of the tale seem to bear only on the next-largest parts, to which they belong. Details about the traveler’s stay at an inn on Crete will bear mainly on his adventures upon that island; less so, and but indirectly, upon whether he will reach his end goal at Athens. Because of this apparent limitation, the smallest parts will not seem to us audience to deal with the end goal, and because we won’t be looking at them in this light, these smallest parts can hold a subtle but powerful sway on us.

By way of example, take the overall tone of the tale, and whether we the audience will expect a happy ending or a sad one. We can, we judge, see where the talesman seeks to take us, and then we resist this movement, or expecting the event, feel little moved when it comes.

But we don’t often take the smallest parts as signposts to the overall tone of the tale, because a longer tale will have its ups and downs along the way. These smallest parts can, if they are all of a piece, influence us to look for a happy end or a sad, and we won’t be aware of this influence.

There is also the general attitude of the talesman, which is most powerfully shown in these smallest touches. A commercial talesman, mindful of the desires and needs of his audience, may feel compelled to give them a happy ending that reaffirms what they want to believe about themselves and their world. But say he does not really like his audience or their world; maybe his true feelings are quite different from what he feels he must say. Then along the way, in these smallest parts, he can weave his counter-tones, his criticism and satire.

It is vital that these small touches obey two rules:

1. They must be consistent and of a piece
2. They must be plausible in the context of the surface and subject of the tale

The touches must all tend in the same way, be consistent and of a piece, or else they will tend to cancel one another out, and leave us the audience to be moved by only the big parts of the tale

The touches must be plausible in the surface of the tale, or else we the audience will start to notice them in and of themselves; then the small touches will not be subtle, and we will see the talesman’s aim, and feel free to reject it — in any case, any surprise the talesman means to wield by way of these small touches will be lost.

Two Examples

These thoughts (incomplete as they are) came to me through the memory of two works. Once long ago I read one of the Icelandic sagas (it may have been Njal’s Saga but I really don’t recall) and found in the translator’s introduction an observation that the characters in the saga are always in the midst of doing something else when the big turns of the tale come there way. The tale tells of when a man is killed as part of a larger vendetta, a feud between families. He is making charcoal, or cutting wood, or shearing his sheep, at the time he is killed. The translator, I think, meant that the saga-man had a keen eye to the daily work of life when he told these details. But for the talesman-sagaman, what was ‘big’ in the scene was the attack and the fact that this man was killed; this is what takes the tale on to its next stage, the reaction to the man’s death and seeking of vengeance for the killing. The fact of what he was doing at the time of his death need not be told at all. But it was.

The other example lies in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Here it is more a tonal or rhetorical manner Tolkien had. In sum he was one of the most pessimistic talesmen I have ever read; in every paragraph when Tolkien tells of something, anything, good, he must right away add something that undercuts it. Some paragraphs go on this way like a saw-blade, up and down. And they always end with a down. To give a made-up example of this:

So they ate a good meal after many days of hunger. But the cold wind blew, and it seemed the night held more danger than before.

This overall, constant, pessimism, with every observation taking on its ‘but’ of doubt, peril, or doom, builds over the tale as a whole a sense of grave doubt. We must expect a happy ending in a fairy tale of this sort, and yet, and yet … how can things end up well when all along the way every silver lining has its cloud?

(Composed on keyboard Friday, April 18, 2008)

Tales from Heroic Ages

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

Tragedy and Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

The Rise of New Rulers

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

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

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

Love and Duty, Self and State

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

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

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

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