Write it Like a Fairy Tale -- 005, Characterization

This is a long post but it hits several issues about how your characters behave, including a way to shape their convos and the timing within your story.  

Of course you know that all your characters have to behave differently. Olrik’s Laws describe what the differences have to be. Their actions have to relate to those of the protagonist and contrast with her actions either in kind or in result.

One blog quotes Georgette Heyer as saying she had a Mark I hero, rough and foul-tempered, and a Mark II hero, refined but manly. The blogger apologetically says it’s more complicated than that, but the point is there’s only one main male in each novel. Olrik’s Law of Contrasts says that all the other characters, including the heroine, must behave differently from the Hero. And so you can see that Heyer’s Mark I hero needs a shy and retiring heroine, according to Olrik’s Laws of Contrast. In Bath Tangle she almost fails at this because Selena has so many of the same traits as Ivo Rotherham – and you can ignore Emily Laleham because she jilts Rotherham.

But in The Unknown Ajax, Hugo Darracott is a soldier; his cousin Vincent is rather Heyer’s Mark II hero with a jealous streak; cousin Claude is an extreme dandy who faints at the sight of blood; and cousin Richmond is a young daredevil who helps smuggle liquor. They contrast with Hugo’s uncle, a man of business (but not in trade) and their grandfather, an old bully around whom they have to get if they want to live their lives. Accomplished, sensible Anthea rebels against her grandfather’s command to marry Hugo, but she is one of the first to suspect that his doltish behaviour is a hoax and one of the least surprised when he outwits a Customs officer.

In Chumash, Joseph is the main character. He’s a spoiled brat and a dreamer, but he turns out to be a good man of business. He’s sexy but he rejects a married lady’s advances and when he rises in the world, he marries a priest’s daughter.

Reuven, his oldest brother, is a study in contrast. He breaks the law of who you can have sex with by sleeping with his father’s concubine, so that the Chumash has to immediately enumerate Yaaqov’s progeny to prove to us that Reuven did not get a son on Bilhah. He’s a failure as the oldest son; he goes along with throwing Joseph into the pit and his plan to rescue the boy fails. When the family debates whether to go back to Egypt for food again, he offers his sons as hostages to Benjamin’s life – forgetting that he is not the paterfamilias with the right of life and death over his clan. At the end of the saga, his descendants have settled on the east bank of the Yarden, from which the Assyrians will eventually chase them.

Judah, in between these two in age, sleeps with the wrong woman but at least she is not married or a concubine at the time – and it’s the only way he will have descendants. He goes along with throwing Joseph into the pit but tries to convince his brothers to sell him away from the family. He fails, not because it’s a bad plan (something has to happen or Joseph will never get to Egypt, and everything depends on that), but because the Midianites beat him to it. When the family debates about Egypt, he offers himself as hostage. At the end of the saga, his descendants are two of the three that lead the Israelites into the Holy Land – but one whole branch gets cut off at Ai.

This is the Law of Three at work as well as the Law of Cascading Contrasts. It may seem overly restrictive, but remember that the Law of Three is about magic numbers, and twelve is one of the magic numbers, covering people with a unifying factor.

Notice that we have situations here that I described last time. They don’t obviously or directly relate to the main action or goal. The characters don’t participate in the same events, EXCEPT for the pit-and-sale episode. But by the time Yaaqov turns down Reuven’s offer, we kind of expect him to fail just because of his other failures, and maybe we expect it to be Judah who makes the second offer. Also remember that when it looks like they will lose Benjamin, Reuven is silent. Judah steps up to the plate and makes a successful plea that leads to the recognition scene.

The Epic Laws also say you either have two main characters, like the twins in Heyer’s False Colours, or one secondary character who is almost as important as the main one. That is Aharon’s relationship to Mosheh. Notice the contrast in their roles in the narratives in both the Regency novel and the oral tradition.

You cannot contrast one character with herself, until she has learned her lesson. And in fact, the only time I can think of a character contrasting with herself, is in Cecilia where she goes mad. If you read Little Women, you remember that when Professor Bhaer was telling Jo what was wrong with her writing, he listed types of personalities she could not portray properly because she hadn’t met any – like madmen. And in fact Alcott had experience as a hospital nurse, but not at a hospital for the insane. All her insane characters in her blood and thunder days, were drawn from other people’s accounts. Trust me: there is no way a sane person can understand an insane character well enough to write it, because the definition of insanity is a state when somebody does things no sane person can understand. The best you can hope for is to rip insane actions from the life of a real person.

Unless you have a case study to work from, therefore, your Regency novel will have to contrast the heroine who enters the narrative, with herself as she exits it into her new normal.

Also notice that probably it's only your heroine who really learns lessons in your novel; everybody else behaves the same way at the end as they do at the start. In Persuasion Elizabeth is still vain and cold at the end and Mary is still selfish and often whiny. 

And then there’s one more thing, which Olrik didn’t describe, but which you find in the Torah: contrasting narrations. Nobody ever exactly repeats something they said. When Abraham’s servant is talking to himself at the well, he says things one way. When he’s talking to Rivkah’s father, he tells the same story but not in the same words. Exodus has the episode of making the ark and putting the tablets in it; in Deuteronomy, when Mosheh retells this episode to the next generation, who are about to enter the Holy Land, he does not tell it in the same words.

One of the reasons Plato wanted to keep poets out of his Republic, was that Hesiod and Homer say conflicting things about the gods. Theogony and Iliad are records of oral traditions, one related to a Hurrian hymn and the other being a lay of the Sea Peoples, the Pelishtim/Ahiyyawa. Of course they are going to say different things about the gods. Plato lived squarely in a literate culture, he didn’t know the ancestry of the works he was talking about, and it jarred on him.

Literary critics talk about unreliable narrators in Henry James’ books, but that’s not the same thing, those people narrate in a confusing way, with incomplete utterances. I’m talking about a one-person example of a truth Olrik expresses about oral traditions in general: a given narrative in a tradition always changes slightly, whether from narrator to narrator or from generation to generation. This truth explains some of the differences between Jewish Torah and Samaritan Pentateuch, labeling both as oral traditions (as well as daughters of a previous single oral tradtion).

So when your characters tell the same story to different people, don’t copy and paste. Each audience contrasts with the other(s) in kind or in their relationship to the narrator. Think about what the narrator wants each audience to know or think. Consider the passage of time; if your novel covers many years, then later narrations should have some details missing. If the first version of the narration has X do one thing and Y do another, a version of the narrative told many years later could switch who does what. This happens even in literate environments, in memoirs written years after the events; facts in the transcript of the Mendel Beilis trial differ, sometimes wildly, from what the participants put into their memoirs ten, twenty, thirty years later. You can copy and paste, but then you have to edit to bring out, in a sense, why the narrator would repeat the story, other than to selfishly hold center stage.

It’s not lying. Everybody misremembers things at some time, forgets things, changes a story to tell how they wanted things to be instead of how things were. It’s natural.

And if you are going to have a character repeat a narration, try setting it in the second episode of a pair of derived doublets. The alterations in the narration should make it a little more vague, to go with the second episode being a “paler” version of the first.

If there's one final thing you need to learn to write Regency novels, it would be timing. Olrik observed that within an oral narrative, time flows normally, events take the usual time to play out, and people age normally. Once the Law of Closing has been carried out, all bets are off. 

The need for normal timing inside your novel is why you MUST use Dugdale’s traveler’s guide. Willoughby’s journey from London to Cleveland, which was in Lancashire near Bristol, covered over 100 miles. Even if he had “sixteen mile an hour tits”, that trip took over six hours and his horses were practically dead unless he lodged somewhere for at least a day before going back to London. The FHC only took four-hour runs to prove their horses’ mettle.

You cannot have people commuting to jobs. In fact during the Regency most crafts were still practiced in the home, although fabric factories were starting to spring up (The Unknown Ajax). The people who had jobs lived near their worksite; servants had quarters in the house and tradesmen lived over their stores. The people who lived in fine houses usually lived off their rents, their income from the Funds, or other investments and they didn’t have to commute. The heavy traffic in London resulted from long-haul shipping that fed and clothed the million Londoners and the Upper Ten Thousand; from the post and the stagecoach; from local shipping between shops and houses; from sending goods from the docks out of town; and from the Upper Ten Thousand going to their play.

But the streets of London were not then what they are now. On a modern map of London, at the north end of London Bridge, there’s a broad thoroughfare called Byward Street that takes you to the Tower of London complex. In a map from 1800 that I found online, there’s a narrow Thames Street, with a bunch of tenements or warehouses between it and the River, and then Presbyterian Wharf, which has been replaced by a much shorter Grant’s Quay Wharf. And so on. It was easier to clog the streets in 1800 London.

Outside of both the City and its environs, people did not commute because the roads were so poor. One of the reasons your stagecoach could break down, was ruts from the rains. That’s why everybody was so shocked at Frank Churchill going to London to get his hair cut; it was a sixteen mile trip over country roads, and it took him two or three hours each way to keep from laming his horses. His valet should have been able to cut his hair to his satisfaction, or his uncle’s man could have taken a stab at it. You cannot get around this in your novels. Don’t make your characters travel unless the need is extreme – or they’re going up to London and then back down at the end of some months. (The poor roads, along with poor accommodations, also account for the length of visits.)

Learn from Pride and Prejudice of the tension between operating your estate and socializing in your parish. When the girls monopolized the horses, they practically took bread out of their own mouths by cutting into their father’s income and also making it impossible to get produce from the home farm to the manor house. Only Lady Catherine de Bourgh could afford to maintain a pony phaeton for her daughter.

Remember the situation in Sense and Sensibility. For Marianne to ride the horse Willoughby wanted to give her, Mrs. Dashwood needed to build a stable for at least two horses, and a bedroom for the groom, and a tack room – and buy feed for the horses and pay wages to the groom along with paying for his food and livery (it’s called “all found”). He had to live with the family, not commute from the village. No intelligent person rides alone because horses are prone to spook. No female of ton rides alone, not even in her carriage, which often has not only Coachman on the box in front, but also a footman up behind to carry her cards to those she meets or to the butler of a house where she stops. In my hundred draft stories, only Lady Barbara Alastair Childe goes riding alone, and she does it to escape her brutal husband.

Everybody else walked.

And that took time. A good walker like Elizabeth might have been able to do three miles an hour like we can – except that she had long skirts to manage. Also, her half-boots (ankle boots) were not engineered for speed. It probably took her an hour and a quarter to get from Longbourn to Netherfield, and then remember the state of her skirts when she arrived.

Nor were girls supposed to run after a certain age. That gave a hoydenish appearance. Only emergency could justify it. This is why films of Northanger Abbey showing Katherine running in the streets of Bath, are not good for her image. If Henry’s father had caught her at it, he would never have invited her to his house.

Now think of how this affects convos. If two people just have to tell each other something, and they don’t live in the same household, or one of them is out of the house, first they have to travel to get face-to-face, that’s one of your unities from the last post. Or they have to write notes, which a groom or footman has to carry to its destination. Or they have to write letters. The recipient has to pay for that, and because the parents have all the money, they have a right and responsibility to read the letter. It could mean trouble for their daughter if it’s from a gazetted fortune hunter; it could mean trouble for their son if some girl thinks he wants to marry her.

With a parent or governess in the room at all times, girls rarely got the chance to say what they really meant either aloud or in writing. Be careful about how explicit your convos are, taking the setting into account.

Also, don’t try to get around the time it took to operate a household. There’s a series, of three videos by Dr. Julie Cox, that discusses the realities of servant life in the 1800s. The servants not only had to do the cleaning, they had to make some of their cleaning supplies, like the powder they used to shine silver. The cook needed a skivvy to clean; if enough people lived upstairs she also needed a kitchen maid to help her with the cooking, because she cooked for both upstairs and downstairs. Only in towns could she send the kitchen maid to buy bread and muffin; she might have to rely on the wife at the Home Farm to do her baking in the country. In town, you might not have a butcher in your own street, and then you had to trust your kitchen maid to get to the butcher shop and buy the right cut of meat – before somebody else bought it. Remember Mrs Price’s complaints of Rebecca and the girl under her.

Only a farm family nowadays could appreciate all the work that goes into making meals from the ground up, and the cook in a fine household also had to be an artist. Her jellies were not just jiggly colored squares; she made them in fancy shapes and added fancy decorations. A meal feasted the eyes as well as the stomach. And she had to cook, not just for that day’s meals, but also for possible guests at any time. It wasn’t polite to descend on a household without an advance letter – but remember that Mr Bennet didn’t even tell his wife about corresponding with Mr Collins until the very day of his arrival, and then hoped Mrs Bennet would set a good dinner before them. A modern wife would have brained Mr Bennet with a skillet.

On your next vacation, try living Regency style. You can find Mrs Isabella Beeton’s book online; plan some authentic meals for yourself, and try to keep house following her rules. You may even try using a chamber pot instead of a toilet, although you’ll have a toilet to empty the chamber pot into. You’ll learn pretty quickly that the number of servants a household employed was not just for show, it was for necessity, and things took as long as they took then, not how long they take now. Give your characters the time they need to get where they’re going and do what they’re doing.

Write it Like a Fairy Tale -- 004 Plotting

In Greek tragedy, there was a concept called “the unities”. The action had to take place in a single day, in a single place, covering a single incident that exposed a single issue. Tragedies were performed in association with religious observances, and their plots involved some Greek myth. That means they were based on the Greek oral tradition. And that means that they taught some lesson from out of the ancient past. Comments on Aeschylus’ The Suppliants speculate that it was part of a trilogy that reinforced the Athenian law saying orphaned girls had to marry within their families to prevent alienation of inherited property – a law also presented in Chumash (Numbers) in two narratives, one of which establishes female inheritance and the other of which requires endogamy. Numbers is part of a saga set about a thousand years before Aeschylus lived.

In the Epic Laws, the set of unities is different.

Unity of concept. A Regency novel has only one reason for its existence: the heroine meets the man she is going to marry. Regency novels differ on who he is and how they find out they are going to marry, and the heroine learns a different lesson from all the other heroines (which is why you need to read authentic Regency novels) but your readers know how the story will turn out even if it takes them a while to pick up on the real bridegroom.

Unity of plot. Your outline is a roadmap straight to your goal, getting your heroine married. You can make as many side trips as you want off that roadmap, but eventually you have to come back to the main route. And when you edit, you may have to prune some of those side trips, because they don’t help your heroine on her way.

Unity of actions and motives. In real life, people are conflicted over what to do about their motivations. Even when they know that something wastes their time, they do it anyway. This never happens in a fairy tale. Every character acts directly on their motives. This is another reason why an antagonist never can do good things in a fairy tale – why you can’t sanewash them.

Unity of actions and goals. When you obey the Law of Ascents, you telegraph how the first incident in the chain will contribute to the end of your novel. The second incident in the chain must not contradict that, still less the third, which has to come right before the denouement which, after all, is what those incidents bring about. In The Swimmer (a Burt Lancaster movie, of course), the screenwriter did not conform to John Cheever’s story; she put a rape close to the start of the movie. Burt and the director who replaced Frank Perry both knew this was crap; at that point in the movie Ned Merrill’s behavior had to be a little off kilter, not outright criminal, and they toned that incident down to just a come-on. Joan Rivers had a cameo past the midpoint of the movie. The next two incidents were a former mistress scolding Ned, and a man saying that the beloved daughters laughed at their father. When Perry told Rivers to play it sweet, Burt knew that was utterly wrong for that point in the movie and told her to play it bitter. Confused the hell out of her, but it would have jarred the audience for her sweet lady to be followed by an angry and then a bitter incident. Watch it some time. It bombed at the box office but now it’s a cult classic, aside from those two beautiful butt shots.

Also, the amount by which each action is more extreme than the last, suggests how extreme the final crisis is. Joseph’s boyhood dreams are typical fantasies of a child. The first dreams he interprets are for disgraced royal officials, so you know that there should be a third set of dreams – but for whom? It is extraordinary that Joseph should be called out of prison to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams, but it happens, and the rest of the narrative is extraordinary as well.

And everything in an oral narrative contributes to reaching the goal. Contributions need not be obvious; they may not even be direct. When you take a trip, you may know that there’s a town on the way called Greentree, but if it’s not in your direct path, you don’t care. Unless, of course, you need a detour because of a rockslide.

What’s more, as I said about Joseph’s pit, you may not know that Greentree is there. You may get to the rockslide and have to ask around about a detour, and somebody tells you to go through Greentree and how to get there.

So in one of my novels, my young lady knows winter travel is cold and unpleasant, but it’s that or fail to reach London for the Season and be present for two births in her family. When she drives into a snowstorm (the indirect contribution of excitement – will she find shelter or get lost and freeze to death?) she has to look for an inn. Snowed up there, she meets two men who later write proposals to her father, and begins to understand which of them she would prefer her father to accept for her, if she can’t attract Lord Frederick or get the Earl to leave his mistress.

So write your outline as fully as you wish, but when you examine your unities and the things involved in carrying out your goal, prune back some of your side trips, and don’t explain how things got where they are, just use them at the right time in the right way to carry out an action that delineates a character and contributes to the denouement. And don’t mention anything until you need it; that’s wasted words unless it’s are part of your Law of Ascents or derived doublet.

Now, Olrik wrote about a second kind of doublet, what his translators called the “parallel doublet”. First, such a thing arises while two narratives are being transmitted orally in the same culture. Second, it only happens because both narratives literally have the same goal. Third, you can only prove you have a parallel doublet when you have both of the original narratives somewhere, documented as separate tales.

The parallel doublet is the two narratives told sequentially as one longer narrative. The doublet tells one of them up to the point where it should achieve its goal, then it starts the second narrative and tells that up to the point where it achieves the goal. There are a couple of things that can make you suspect you have a parallel doublet.

One is a cast of thousands, one set in one narrative and a separate set in the other narrative. Oral narratives tend to have few characters; if there’s a crowd scene, the crowd has no individuals. In Qorach’s rebellion, we never learn the names of any of the 250 elders who join him. But in the tale of touring the Holy Land, there are 600,000 men who leave Egypt with Mosheh and reach Qadesh, from which they should enter the Holy Land. Then ten of the reconnaissance party, all of whose names we know, make a power play and lose. They die immediately (there’s that punishment thing again), and the original 600,000 go back into the Sinai to live out their lives for forty years. The next time the Israelites try to enter the Holy Land, they succeed, and not only is it a whole different 600,000, but also the fathers of the current princes of the tribes are not among the princes who made the fabulous offering at Sinai.

Another piece of evidence is a change in location without any obvious trip in between. The obvious trip around the Sinai for forty years argues that I have not found a parallel doublet. On the other hand, Olrik did say that any narrative can change any way the culture wants it to. When the Israelite culture decided that not only the ten liars, but also the original Exodusers, had to die and not enter the Holy Land (they whined and rebelled, so here is that punishment thing again, and besides, why should they live when Mosheh and Aharon died?), they had to give time for the birth of those who did enter the Holy Land, and that’s where the forty years in the Sinai comes from.

Or it could be simpler than that. They had the narrative about the humongous offering at the tabernacle, with the names attached. They had the narrative about arriving in the Holy Land, with a whole different set of names attached. If it only took forty-two years to get from Egypt to the Holy Land, what happened to the first princes, given that Joshua, Kalev and Otniel survived? Something pretty bad must have happened, and that generated the interim story, some time between 1628 BCE and about the 1300s BCE when the wording of Chumash crystallized. (There’s more to it than that, but you don’t care, you want me to finish telling you how to write plots.)

In a parallel doublet, one part may have a different motive from the other. Say that both parts ended up putting a new king on a throne. In one part, a bad king must be punished by removing him from the throne. (Remember, his actions were bad, and he had to be punished for them.) In the other part, grieving parents may find out their son is alive after he comes to the throne.

In one part, the hero might have one magical helper; in the other part he may have a bunch of weird friends, each of whom has to contribute. So Dorothy originally has the good witch save her from the bad witch and give her the ruby slippers, but she also collects her three weird friends. (But Wizard of Oz was never a parallel doublet.)

So if you tell your Regency novel like a fairy tale, you may want to copy a standard plot device in Austen: her heroine changes abode. She might meet her hero at her original home, but no matter what happens that might contribute to getting them hitched, it doesn’t work out. She has to move and make a whole new set of friends. And the issue might be either that she’s so comfortable at home she doesn’t want to leave, or that she is thrust among the family at her new home and the lesson she learns relates to the differences between them and her original family. Only then is she ready to marry her lover. Austen’s novels originated as written material, not oral, but remember how many genuine myths require the hero/ine to travel, like Io or Oedipus.

Read the original Regency romances. Make notes of the plot devices, and look for examples of the unities. They will not be the Greek ones; you will find chapters that cover multiple days, or their incidents drift away from the plot. But if the author leaves them hanging at the end of the novel, think about whether you feel comfortable with that book or rather dislike it. If you rather dislike it or even hate it, make sure you observe the unities when you write.

Knitting -- I mean, netting

So if you're following my Write it Like a Fairy Tale thread, you know that I'm a fan of the original Regency novels as well as Georgette Heyer. And there's some needlework that Austen refers to several times as netting -- netting a purse, netting a shawl.

What is it? Basically, you make a mesh like extremely fine fishing nets, and then you embroider over it.

https://pieceworkmagazine.com/what-is-netting/

https://pieceworkmagazine.com/nineteenth-century-embroidery-net/

Netting is a medieval art; ladies made hairnets to control all that long hair and used fillets and chin bands to anchor the net to their heads. It is also a craft used to make hammocks and fishing nets.

The only place I could find tools was a vendor I last bought crochet materials from, Lacis. They have the tools separately and in kits. They also have net with 9 or 16 holes per inch. But since they have the tools you can make your own custom mesh size. How?

The tools come with a heavy paper insert with basic instructions. Here's a PDF with more, including the information that the basic knot is called a sheet bend, sheet being the nautical term for the ropes used to control sails on tall ships and fishing craft alike. 

http://www.wedcraft.com/KnottyHeadwear9.pdf

This classic booklet has the discouraging advice to find a boy who knows how to make fishing nets and get him to make your mesh. It does, however, show several stitches the way classic books do; you have to study the pictures a long time to understand them.

https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/books/archive_005.pdf

This is probably your best resource, being lengthy and detailed. Page 145 gives detailed instructions for a classic embroidery technique called pointe de toile.

https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/books/c_lace.pdf

This is a classic resource but the instructions are sketchy because it comes from a time when you usually knew somebody who could overlook your work and set you straight. You will have to study the engravings a long time to figure out what is really going on.

https://archive.org/details/completeencyclop0000ther/page/420/mode/1up?view=theater

Judy Brittain's book, from which I learned to knit, crochet and quilt, has a section on the basics but not the embroidery. It does, however, show you how to make a net carrier for groceries, and also a hammock.

https://archive.org/details/bantamstepbystep00brit/page/191/mode/1up?view=theater

This book shows a couple of embroidery stitches. They can be used to work something like filet crochet as shown in this book.

https://archive.org/details/goodhousekeepin00guil/page/403/mode/1up?view=theater

This book has more embroidery stitches.

https://archive.org/details/readersdigestcom00colt/page/424/mode/1up?view=theater

The setup is the tricky part. You load your netting needle. You secure your foundation loop so you have even tension. And you use your net gauge, which can be a popsicle stick or knitting needle, to make sure all the openings in your mesh are the same size. The Lacis kit comes with quarter-inch gauges.

I found a tutorial on Youtube but the camera work was terrible and the instructions not too great. If you know of a good one, let us all know in the comments.

When I get some more knitting projects out of the way, I'll try this. I have some old crochet thread lying around. Probably from the last time I bought from Lacis.

Write it Like a Fairy Tale -- 003, Starting...Going

Now that you know how much to write, I can start telling you how to write using the Epic Laws. I hope you find this post easy to understand because it talks about the most basic thing in writing. How do you start your novel and how do you end it?

Well, a Regency romance starts before the main characters meet, and it ends when they agree to marry. Hardly any stand-alone romance novels of any kind do anything else.

But that doesn’t answer the question using Olrik’s principles.

When you tell it like a fairy tale, you have to obey the Law of Opening and the Law of Closing.

An oral narrative takes a slice of life and turns it into something exciting. But it slices the narrative out of people’s actual lives.

To get their attention, the narrative starts out in their comfort zone, with something natural and normal.

Aye, that’s the rub.

We don’t live in the Regency period, and we don’t know what’s natural and normal for the people in our novels, not from personal experience. Your research has to teach you that.

One of my novels starts with a young lady being met by the butler at the door of her home. Why didn’t she just use her key to get in and let him continue with whatever work he had on hands when she got home?

Because normal life among the upper classes required a butler. As the head of the household, he had the job of knowing who in the family was in and who was not. That included the family downstairs; he supervised all their work. But it included the family upstairs, because he served as gatekeeper between them and society. When you behaved normally, you could tell the butler as soon as you got in the door, that X was coming to tea because you just saw her in the Park (Hyde Park) and invited her. If he had time, the butler could tell the housekeeper or cook “there will be one extra to tea”. A really superior butler would know what cakes X particularly liked and have the cook make some. The success or failure of a tea visit or formal call rested on the butler; the success or failure of a Season rested on social visiting.

And he knew to meet Miss at the door because either she rang, or he knew when and where she had gone and what she was doing, and how long it usually took her to do that. My young lady had been on her usual morning ride in the Park, and the butler not only let her in, he had let her out and he asked where she was going so he could inform her mother or brother if they asked. A butler must tell as much of the truth as possible to his employers – even if he has to lie to people at the door to whom “the mistress is not at home”.

I didn’t go into the details of her ride. They are irrelevant to the plot. If she had gossip to report or had seen somebody at the Park who the family thought was out of Town, I would save that until she reported it. I’ll tell you how I would work that in the next post.

Now. While you draft your novel, you can stick in anything you want. But remember, you want at most 2000 words in at most seven pages per chapter. When you edit, you have to look at the outline you wrote and mark up all the things in your first draft that contribute to the plot. Strike out everything else.

Why not delete it?

You can if you’re 100% confident you won’t need it. But if you strike it out, and your subconscious gets involved, and makes you rewrite your outline, you might change your mind about some of the things you struck out. Then you still have the text available, but if you deleted it you would have to try to remember it. To get a clean draft for your next read-through, see if there’s a “hidden” feature so you won’t see what you struck out unless you think you need it or you’re ready to delete it.

Your novel has to start with the normal world of your character, and the Law of Closing says it has to end back in that normal world, no matter what happens in the meantime. It’s like Sam Gamgee seeing Frodo off to Valinor, then coming back and saying “Well, I’m home.”

In any romance novel, the Closing is a new normal – the couple gets engaged or even married.

“What happens in the meantime” comes to a peak, and then you have to tie off all the things that happened. Unless the novel comes somewhere in a saga or series, you can’t leave loose ends. Everybody who helped your heroine has to get their reward; everybody who hurt her has to get punished.

Yes they do.

Oral traditions do not sanewash people who violate the norms of the culture that transmits the narratives belonging to the tradition. The reward or the punishment is the action that endorses which characters were good and which were bad.

Oral traditions teach the right behavior for the culture, that’s another reason they get passed along. When the culture itself changes, the oral narratives change. Sometimes they dwindle to little insertions in other narratives, or they disappear altogether. When a culture has a custom it can’t find support for in its current oral tradition, that’s a sign that a narrative has disappeared. The culture might make up a new one to support the custom, but the narrative and custom won’t jibe perfectly.

It's possible that the narrative supporting the Jewish law against eating the gid ha-nasheh replaced an older narrative that had a more direct relationship to the custom, but the culture stopped “liking” parts of the old narrative. It could have come from the ancestral culture that produced both the Semitic and the Greek flood stories. That culture had a hero who had his thigh wounded. In Jewish culture, the hero became the mighty Yaaqov who used his strength to roll the stone from the well – but never did a heroic thing afterwards except wrestle with the angel. He merged with the Israelite eponymous ancestor – but it does not completely substitute for his birth name.

The Greek hero was Theseus, founder of Athens, who had a bff named Pirithous. They went out one night and got drunk, decided they were going to marry the most beautiful women in the world and vowed to help each other out. Theseus picked Helen, who was 8 at the time but already the most beautiful mortal woman. Her brothers rescued her (does this sound familiar?). So now it was his turn to help his bff. Pirithous picked Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. They went to the underworld and were told they could rest on a bench. The bench was magical and they got stuck to it. Eventually Heracles found them there. He pulled Theseus free, ripping a strip off his thigh, and Theseus limped forever after.

When Heracles tried to rescue Pirithous, all hell trembled. Pirithous did not go home.

The ancestral narrative probably also gave rise to the Sumerian story of Tammuz, lover of Inanna, who was gored in the thigh by a wild boar and died. This went straight into Babylonian literature, changing the goddess’ name to Ishtar. Tammuz became two different people in Greek myth. On the one hand, he is Adonis, Aphrodite’s lover. On the other, he is the god who stays six months in the underworld and whose return brings spring, an episode which Greek culture transferred to Persephone.

All of which goes to say that if you write it like a fairy tale, you have to write according to the norms of the culture you write about. And that brings me to another subject.

Bodice-rippers.

If you read genuine Regency novels, even Gothic ones, you find that bodice-ripping does not happen in Britain, nor in the Regency period. The kidnappings and wild journeys happen far away, like in the Americas, or long ago like in the Renaissance. Sir Charles Grandison gets close to being a bodice-ripper, but Sir Harley gets his punishment and Sir Charles rescues Harriet and eventually marries her. Regency families let their daughters read that Samuel Richardson novel, not Pamela or Clarissa. And Samuel Richardson rather belongs to the period of the macaroni merchants, not the Regency per se.

Read Georgette Heyer. When she writes of “a slip on the shoulder”, that is basically a bodice-ripping. Everybody disapproved of it; whoever did it made a reputation as a Bad Man. Society had to punish Bad Men to protect the girls who needed to be married off.

If you write a bodice-ripper, even if you set it in Britain in the Regency period, you are not writing a Regency romance worthy of the name. You have to make up your mind how far to cater to your audience, and how firmly to stand up for your genre. (Tell your publisher to put it in the Historical Novel section.)

Other than that, start your novel off with a bang. Start with an action or conversation that defines the participants, and lead into actions that give the first hints of how the story will develop. My young lady shows she is well-bred by the way she enters the house and leaves her coat and hat and things with the butler, who will have a maid check them for wear and tear and restore them to my young lady’s wardrobe. (The maid is irrelevant at this point so…) She gets the information that her mamma wishes to speak with her, so she goes to the parlour and they have a conversation. During that conversation, we learn that my young lady has a plan for her second Season, which will help her decide whether she has met the man she wants to marry. We get a first sketch of her character and her mother’s.

End your novel with love and marriage and all that, but do one thing more. Your heroine changed because of what happened in the meantime. If she doesn’t, it’s not much of a novel. Elizabeth Bennet learned that “dining with four and twenty families” left her ignorant of some characters. She might have preferred to not learn that lesson, or she might have preferred to learn it another way, but without it she could never properly support Mr Darcy as his wife. Likewise my young lady learns that the reputation she earned for prudence, with other people, cannot stand up to the scrutiny of a man she never heard of before, and it doesn’t deserve all the help he gives her.

So while you write your outline and expand it into chapters and pages, you have to think about how to open your tale, and how to close it, and what its closing means for your heroine. Make notes as you outline, about what this or that action does to your heroine, so that at the end she’s a different person, though still perfectly recognizable, since you have traveled that road with her.

And now, a word about “the unities”.

Write it Like a Fairy Tale -- 002, Mechanics

Last time I showed you that even modern fiction, like movie scripts, can use Olrik’s Laws and his discoveries about oral traditions. Scriptwriters couldn’t know the Laws unless they read Danish, for the English translation of Olrik’s book did not come out until 1992. Their scriptwriting habits had to come out of their reading experiences, and realizing that their favorite works, and the classic literature of past centuries, shared certain features. Though many of them no doubt read Grimm’s Tales, they put away such childish things, except for reading them to their kids. For two centuries nobody took those stories seriously – but they all have examples of Olrik’s principles.

This post gives you the nuts and bolts of writing and it's long because writing is a complicated business. You’ll recognize some of what I say if you ever took a class on writing. You’ll recognize some of it if you have read what some famous authors say about writing. I can help you get started; I can help you get around writer’s block; I can help you meet deadlines; I can help you write things that make good scripts.

But I can’t do the writing for you. If you want to “be a writer” you must write.

Sitting around daydreaming and fantasizing won’t get you there. No tool can read your brain waves and turn them into writing. Your fantasies might make a novel that people would read or film – but that won’t happen until you write it down. Some writers record their plots and pages, but eventually they have to turn the audio into a transcript.

What do you write? One saying is this.

WRITE THINGS YOU WOULD LIKE TO READ.

If your favorite genre is westerns, write those. If you like science fiction, write that. But what do you write when you write?

Like I said, you have ideas, fantasies, dreams. But they’re all in your head and we all forget things.

Keep a notebook. Make a note of any story that pops into your head. You have to store it somewhere, and since stuff happens on the net, use something off-grid. A small notebook with a pen in it and a rubber band to keep the pen from falling out is a classic.

But you still have to turn those ideas into something people will want to read, and for that, the advice is this.

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE.

Know what they know; know what they expect you to know. You can’t write a western without knowing the anatomy of horses and cattle or the names of weapons or the tack or harness you use with animals. You’ll screw up and people will throw your books out.

Arthur C. Clarke once said that any culture will deem the abilities of a much more advanced culture to be magic. He meant that Otzi the Ice Man would never understand computers. He did not mean what one high fantasy series did, pretend that a nuclear war would create races of beings that looked like elves and so on. Do not mix science fiction and sword-and-sorcery with such a flimsy hook. And besides, a nuclear war would wipe us all out, see the movie On the 8^th Day with Carl Sagan.

Now, remember last time I said that oral narratives always have something exciting or titillating in them. You have to figure out what will excite your audience or at least get their interest. With Regency novels, for example, it’s the Season and the Marriage Mart that draw readers. But while a western might highlight somebody who finally makes it big, a Regency novel cannot. People who make their packet in industry or commerce are not acceptable marriage partners for those who can afford a Season in London. You can’t write the same plots for more than one genre without a lot of changes. You might as well write each plot from the ground up.

Another piece of advice goes like this.

WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW.

That comes from back in the day before the Internet. Writers who didn’t live near a university library couldn’t research their subject without traveling. Writers who didn't stick with things they learned from experience or their environment, usually screwed up so bad that their books only sold among people who didn't know they screwed up. 

Even the British no longer live in the Regency environment and would have to travel to see remains of the Regency. Now, everything has changed. On my blog I posted links to a bunch of sources crucial to Regency life and culture. The Internet makes things much easier.

But you have to do the research, just like you have to write. You may think you can write Regency novels and focus on the emotion and the brilliance, skipping the homework. But you will lose the audience who love the originals, because your work will be shallow and your characters will do things that shock readers because nobody back then did that.

And you have to know people. You can try writing characters that personify various traits or concepts or ideals, but the ideals of one generation bore the grandchildren of that generation. The ideals of one culture are the crimes of another culture. Human nature, on the other hand, never changes. Write your characters as humans, and later generations might still read your books, as they do the books of Austen. It takes some living to observe enough human nature to write a book character properly. That’s why young people’s writing can be so meh or why a first novel is autobiographical – the only human they know well enough to write about is themselves.

So write – after you do your homework.

Now I’m going to get into some numbers to tell you how to take that story idea and turn it into a book. From here on out I’m going to talk about Regency novels. For other genres, you can look up recommendations online.

OUTLINE. Write up to ten sentences that outline the plot of your novel. Use this as a roadmap for getting from start to finish. If you don’t use a roadmap, you will blow any deadlines handed to you – and you might never actually finish the novel even if you don’t have a deadline, you’ll just dawdle along putting in this idea or that. OUTLINE.

EXPAND. For every sentence in your outline, list up to six steps that have to happen to make that sentence happen. It’s the route from one city to the next in your road map, and it will show you what research you need to do to write your novel. Each of those steps will become a chapter in your novel. At this stage, you start planning to use Olrik’s principles: find good places for the Law of Ascents, the Law of Final Stress, or derived doublets.

PAGES. Write up to ten sentences for each chapter, telling what happens in that chapter. Each of these sentences could generate a page in your chapter. Put tags on the pages showing where in your research material to find the facts that will make these pages live in your readers’ minds. Also tag them for which of the Epic Laws or other principles you can use so that you tell it like a fairy tale.

WRITE. Commit to writing 2000 words a day, like Stephen King does. That’s over 6 pages in Word when you double-space, which you should do because it will give you an idea how much writing fits on a page in a paperback book. In Sense and Sensibility, one of the chapters is 5 ½ pages long single-spaced. That’s what you’re writing every day that you do write – which should be every day barring special events. I don’t write on the Jewish Sabbath, for example.

But what do you do when you get writer’s block? Put that novel aside and write something else. For example, write an essay that uses the research you did. Make up a picture of part of the environment, or write about what it took to get fabric to the warehouses for ladies to buy. Look at one of the chapters you wrote, and turn it inside out or make it comic instead of tragic. Changing how you think about your work can help break up the block. And if you find you like your writing better that way, rewrite your roadmap to make it happen.

Six times ten is sixty, of course, so your novel will have sixty chapters, like some of Austen’s books do. At five pages a chapter, you get 300 pages in your novel with as much as 100,000 words. Supposedly publishers like that length for novels; you have to know if your audience will sit still for it. By drafting a chapter every day, you finish your first draft in sixty days.

Should you? I say no.

Things happen when you write. Your subconscious likes writing, and it will make you write things you didn’t plan for in your outline. When you find your characters doing or saying things you didn’t specifically plan, that’s your subconscious turning them into real people, not dolls for you to play with. TAKE ADVANTAGE OF IT. Go through your page outlines and see how things change now that real people are involved. Make the changes, including changing what Epic Laws you apply that didn’t apply to the old outline.

NO GOOD WORK IS EVER WRITTEN, IT’S EDITED.

Write one chapter. Let it sit overnight. Look at it the next day for errors, or for anything that comes out of left field compared to your outline. If your subconscious did not get involved, you might have found bad writing that your readers won’t understand. Fix it, then draft the next chapter.

You want a seamless novel; don’t leave “holes in the plot big enough to drive a Mack truck through.” If you’re writing noir, those plot holes are typical, like a line in Desert Fury where Burt Lancaster’s character tells the sheriff “you’ve got nothing Bendix wants.” Then he has a one-beat rest and his voice turns steely and he says “or have you.” Robert Rossen could have written a sequel movie about how the sheriff’s plans go off the rails because of how the movie ends. But nobody planned it that way and Lancaster did not do sequels. He didn’t even like playing Wyatt Earp ten years after Henry Fonda did Darling Clementine, but he had to meet contractual obligations, and that gave us the wonderful movie Gunfight at OK Corral.

But Desert Fury was noir, not Regency. Most genres will not tolerate plot holes, except in sagas, or series like Chronicles of Amber, and then you still have to plug the holes before the end of the series.

Keep your draft in one file instead of putting each chapter in a separate file. Most word processors will keep a word count for you. Ignore it until you finish the first draft of all the chapters. Then look at the bad news.

You wrote 160,000 words. Oh shit. Your readers won’t like that. Your publisher will sic an editor on that and you will get back your draft covered in red ink. Now what do you do?

You follow another ancient piece of advice from writing teachers.

USE ACTIVE VERBS.

Passive verbs add words to your writing without adding content. Also, they interfere with your goal of writing it like a fairy tale. I referred to the Bible a lot in my last post. In the 80,000-some words of the Chumash, maybe 0.1% (0.001) are passive verbs.

Writing that has passives in it tends to be academic or legal. You’re writing a novel, not a dissertation or a legal brief. So do this.

Look for every passive verb in your writing and ask yourself, can I say this with an active verb. 99% of the time in my writing, the answer is yes.

What’s that other 1%? When the Chumash uses passives, typically they relate to cultural norms – even laws. But the vast majority of the 613 commandments nevertheless use active verbs because commandments are about taking action. The Chumash uses passives in legal definitions like v’ki-yutan or huad or v-qudash. It uses them in Heavenly decrees like nikhrtah ha-nefesh.

You’re not writing legal definitions or Heavenly decrees. You’re writing a novel. Use active verbs.

This forces you to implement one of the Epic Laws. In oral narratives, you never learn anything about a character except through his actions and their outcome.

Go back over your outline and rewrite it so that every page shows what actions delineate your characters as well as getting you to your denouement. We’re used to novels describing things, so this is a tough job to do. But remember when you read Mysteries of Udolpho? You almost fell asleep while reading the descriptions of scenery – descriptions that had nothing to do with the plot of the novel and almost nothing to do with its mood. Don’t inflict that on your readers.

But, you are saying, I have to tell how a room looks so that my readers will understand how my characters maneuver in their environment.

No you don’t.

Re-read Genesis. The pit that the brothers put Joseph into doesn’t exist in the text until they use it. We don’t even know how that pit came to be there. How that happened is irrelevant to the plot. The conference table used to settle the Battle of Whiskey Hills in Hallelujah Trail simply shows up for Colonel Gearhart to sit behind and handle the negotiations.

Think of it another way. If somebody films your novel, they won’t do a voice-over about the landscape or architecture. They’ll just film it. The audience has no idea what role it plays in the movie until it does so – until somebody jumps a horse over that fence or leads a guest through a Gothic doorway into a drawing room. If those things don’t happen, why waste film on them – and why waste words on them in your novel? You don’t have to describe anything, you just report your characters’ actions using the things they have to hand, whether it’s things they always knew about or things they discover when it’s time for action.

Which uses another Epic Law, schematization. Your readers know nothing but what you tell them, and everything you tell them plays some role in the action of the novel – but you only tell them about objects involved in the action.

When you edit, watch for “kiss your sister” verbs. “Came”, “went”, “sat” and verbs like that are certainly active, but they don’t tell anything about the people in your novel. You could use an adverb to describe the coming and going, but that adds to your word count. Think hard, or use a thesaurus, to find a verb that has the right nuance to tell about your character. Consistently using this verb with that person underlines that it’s her nature to do things this way. Fall back on adverbs if she does that same action in a way that is unnatural for her.

And that’s how you get rid of those 60,000 words, which your publisher will tell her editor to drown in red ink.

Except for one thing that still fits under schematization.

Dialogues.

Your characters have to interact. They have to have conversations. With each other. Not interior monologues – those are for stream of consciousness writing, and you are dealing with actions, not thoughts. Supposedly when Arthur Penn was directing the Lancaster movie The Train, he wanted Lancaster to have interior monologues. That’s not how you fight Nazis and besides, if you watch a Lancaster movie carefully, you can see him compressing a whole interior monologue into a half second of action or a changing facial expression. Trapeze has examples. Lancaster tried for three days to make Penn see that his plan would drive audiences away and when Penn didn’t get it, Lancaster fired him. That’s one of those other problems I mentioned in my last post.

Conversations require that each replique start on a new line. This makes your chapters longer than those five pages. But you can’t have a society environment without conversations at meals, tea, parties, or just formal social visits. OK so some of the convos will be excessively boring because in the Regency, they expected good manners and pleasantries, not monologues (!) or hunting stories – which are boring anyway to anybody who wasn’t there at the time.

However, your convos have to keep the plot moving. You only want to record the convos that tell the reader the answer to questions they had earlier, or bring up things upon which your characters will ACT later.

You can use convos to ILLUSTRATE your characters. Remember Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice? You knew he was a fool the first time he opened his mouth. Later actions confirmed it. What’s more, he bloviated. When somebody makes long speeches, later action should show the consequences of that person boring on about their own interests to the exclusion of everybody else.

And now for something I shouldn’t have to say, but about 20 years ago, I found out in a class that I do have to say it.

WRITE CORRECT GRAMMAR.

The teacher said don’t try to use what you think is proper writing format for legal documents, write the way you talk. And mentally I shook my head. Some people can’t make themselves understood for sour apples. After he reviewed our first papers, the teacher said “I was wrong about that.”

YOU MUST HAVE AND USE A GRAMMAR BOOK.

Here are some common errors.

Starting the sentence with a participle or a gerund, it changes subject. The subject of the participle or gerund and in the main clause have to be the same. If one of them is different, name it. So the example should have said "It's a mistake when you start the sentence with a participle or a gerund, but the main clause has a different subject, if you don't specify both subjects."

Putting in the wrong place descriptive phrases or clauses. This happens in English because English has only a couple of examples of case usage. In languages with four to 18 noun cases, the case tells the reader which word the appositive refers to. In English, word order is everything. Learn the ancient practice of diagramming sentences, making the appositive hang from what it describes, and put the appositive in that position in the sentence you put into your novel.

Don’t use Google translate. I have known Google translate to be wrong and suspected that contributors put in false translations deliberately. If you don’t know the language your character speaks, don’t try to write that language,  just say what it is. Also, don’t write pidgin. That insults your characters and some of your readers. To write Regency novels, you should learn French, because most of those among the Upper Ten Thousand spoke it, men because of making the Grand Tour and ladies because of polite literature. The Internet has plenty of language learning material for French along with the French novels that the Four Mothers of the English Novel read.

KNOW YOUR BAD HABITS. Everybody has them. Mr Darcy’s was, if you remember, using too many words of four syllables. Bad writing usually has superlatives – “extremely”, “completely” (nothing is ever complete) and the like. Use them only with a character who has an extreme nature. Mine are using “just” and “even” too much, or saying “this” when I should say what “this” is. I also write what I call “they went thataway and thataway” paragraphs. I put down all the right sentences, but they are in the wrong order, and it looks self-contradictory.

By the way, just to show that I take my own advice, I will tell you that I did spell-check and readability analysis of this post: 1.3% of my sentences are passive. A sixth grader could read this, and that’s true for most classic works, including the Chumash. I have a novel which is over 800 pages long, but because I strove to use active verbs, it is readable by fifth-graders.

That’s what active verbs will get you.

Sooo history -- John Huston and Ukraine

The movie The Unforgiven is on Internet Archive free with no ads. I recommend you watch it and then come back here and prepare to get your mind blown.

Burt Lancaster and Audrey Hepburn star, and that makes this a brownface movie because Hepburn plays a Kiowa girl raised by whites. The father of the family brought her to them; he is dead, and all her life they have believed that she is white. Toward the end they get a wakeup call.

John Huston directed and he and Lancaster had a major falling out because Huston wanted the hatred against the girl made more explicit. Lancaster dug in his heels. Nine months before they started filming, Playhouse 90 did a TV broadcast of Abby Mann's play Judgment at Nuremberg. If you know anything about Lancaster's career, you probably know that he was in the movie version, but that was two years later.

So what does that have to do with anything? Watch the Playhouse 90 version free on Internet Archive (no ads). Notice the end where people tell Haywood that the Germans are getting tired of the Americans shoving it down their throat that they were all living in Germany when the Nazis started committing crimes against humanity. When somebody shoves something down your throat you puke. Lancaster was not about to let Huston shove white hatred of Native Americans down audiences' throats.

So OK, each had his own opinion about how to do the movie, so what?  Well, even if Huston made his push while Hepburn was recovering from a broken back, substantial parts of the movie would have to be reshot, blowing the schedule and costs even more. And that's also what Lancaster was fighting against.

Now go back and rewatch Unforgiven and when the Kiowa come to take their girl back, pay attention from then on. What does it mean that a Kiowa girl was raised as white?

It's cultural genocide. Did Lancaster realize that? He might have. It's not on IA yet, but in 1950 he starred as Jim Thorpe, who got into athletics at the Carlisle School for Indians in Pennsylvania, went to the Olympics, and had his medals revoked because he played baseball for living expenses once. Those medals have now been restored, but that doesn't change the fact that he was treated differently than other Olympians -- because although he was mixed race the IOC didn't view him as white.

The Carlisle school was also about cultural genocide. So were the Canadian schools for Native Americans, as well as being hotbeds of sexual abuse.

If Burt gave John Huston his way, the message of hate would have drowned out the message of cultural genocide. If Huston was right, then why have two messages in there? Why have the Kiowa try to take the girl back? I didn't get that part of the movie either -- until I had this epiphany. 

You don't sign on to use a script and then try to drown out an important issue. Only a white-eyes wouldn't understand that stealing children and erasing their cultural identity is wrong, and if it's in the script you have to honor it, not drown it out. He could have quit and forced Hecht-Hill-Lancaster to find another director at the last minute.  It happened all the time in Hollywood, such as replacing George Cukor directing Gone with the Wind. It could have been less expensive than the reshooting to pamper Huston's viewpoint -- which was objectively wrong for two reasons.

So what's the connection to Ukraine? Maybe your news outlet doesn't talk about it, but Russia is using cultural genocide by kidnapping Ukrainian kids and abusing them if they speak Ukrainian or don't hide positive feelings they have for Ukraine. They're even training them to make war on Ukraine.

It would be stupid to say that everything in the last 80 years of history, from the start of his career, is related to Burt Lancaster's work, but he continually tried to do message films and some of his messages have importance for today. This is one of them.

Write it Like a Fairy Tale -- 001, Introduction

Since my two posts about writing have been viewed by so many in such a short time, I’m going to start a new thread. I admit that the only places I’ve been published are here on my blog and on Fanfiction.net (where I got some likes), but this thread involves my observations on things that have been released to the general public.

I’m calling it Write it Like a Fairy Tale to show people how to use Olrik’s Epic Laws actively in their writing. I’ve been studying Olrik’s Principles for Oral Narrative Research almost this entire century, and it revolutionized my understanding of the Chumash, which has examples of what Olrik said everywhere – not just his Epic Laws but almost everything he said in his book. But since Olrik’s work wasn’t translated to English until 1992, hardly anybody knows about it, so its mere existence doesn’t explain the examples I found in, say, movies. Instead, it seems that scriptwriters must have been voluminous readers for most of their lives, and they picked up on the structural elements that popular narrations have in common.

If you know anything about me, you know that I am a huge fan of Burt Lancaster, and most of his best films have examples in them. Lawman is the champ; almost every bit of action in that movie has something to do with the Epic Laws, except maybe the camera focusing on that hard square jaw while Maddox’s hat hides the rest of his face as he rides into Sabbath. Lancaster was a bookworm from the age of 8, and very intelligent, and I feel sure he recognized it when a script had features similar to his favorite books. I re-watched The Killers (hurt me, hurt me), which was the first movie Lancaster did outside of his contract with Hal Wallis. Well, it was based on a Hemingway story, but three writers including John Huston and Richard Brooks had their fingers in that pie, so it ought to be a powerhouse. And what they came up with has Olrik examples.

First we have the Law of Opening. Two guys walk to a corner in a town at night, and into a diner. It’s an ordinary thing for a couple of guys to do at night. They could be looking for something to eat, but this movie is called The Killers, so we’re waiting for something bad to happen. And it does.

It turns out that we have the Law of Two to a Job. If one guy came after Swede, he would have to be very important – but Mr. Big does not do his own dirty work. So he sends two men in. Not three. Two.

When you watch through to the end, you also see a derived doublet, which is not one of the Epic Laws, it’s something else from Olrik’s work. When an incident repeats only twice, the second one is a watered-down version of the first. The killers show up at another eating establishment toward the end of the movie. This time they are after Ava Gardner, the other leg of the romantic triangle. But she takes warning when she sees the old man, Mr. Big’s spy, come in with his cane. She goes to the ladies’ and gets away. So that occurrence is watered down.

Immediately we get the Law of Clarity which says focus on the main line. To do that, the movie kills off the killers. You will never see them again.

Back to the start of the movie. Two people come in for dinner, one at a time, now that it’s past 6, and George turns them away. It takes both incidents to convince the killers that George will follow orders, so he gets to live. The short story has George turn away other customers, except one with an order to go. Not only would this waste film, it would provide more witnesses if the killers were caught, so I think Hemingway goofed on that one. Hellinger, Huston and Brooks knew better.

Swede’s right hand gets a starring role in the movie, and we see it three times. The first time, it tells us he’s dead. The second time, it clues Reardon in that Swede was a pug. The last time, it tells us why he had to stop boxing, and that leads him to a life of crime.

We see the scarf with the harp on it three times. The first is when Reardon picks it out of Swede’s belongings. The second is when Swede is in prison, remembering Kitty. The last is when Reardon gets Kitty to admit it belonged to her. Kitty is the only one who can testify about her relationship with Swede and the scarf is the key.

These are the Law of Three and the Law of Ascents. The Law of Ascents says that when an oral narrative has multiple like incidents, each one is more extreme than the last. The increasing extremity differentiates this law from the derived doublet. The last like incident comes right before some kind of denouement. Right after Swede learns he’ll never fight again, he meets Kitty, creating the crucial romantic triangle. That’s the Law of Final Stress.

Oral narratives almost never describe anything using adjectives; it’s all verbs – ACTIVE VERBS – to show us who the character is. Even in the Bible when it gives us the setting for Gan Eden, it’s all about the verbs – the four rivers run in such and such a place, for example. That’s an Epic Law. It also means you don’t get in depth with a character. You show who they are by what they do; you don’t stop and analyze what they do. If you can think of a movie with interior monologues or long comments on the characters, watch it again and make a list of any Epic Laws that turn up in it. Then look up the scriptwriter and their other films. You may find a trend.

This affected Lancaster’s movie The Train. First, he had two options for the script: an academic study of Nazi stolen art; and the memoirs of a Frenchman whose family artwork the Nazis stole. The former was not a narrative and he rejected it. The other thing he rejected was Arthur Penn’s interior monologues. (There were other problems but that’s enough for now.) He hired John Frankenheimer with the bribe of a Ferrari. (It was their third film together out of a total of five.)

Another Epic Law could be called Unity. There is no conflict between actions and motives, that’s why oral narratives don’t have to explain anything: actions speak, words don’t. This is another reason you shouldn’t find interior monologues in movies, but it’s more. In The Killers, Reardon gets almost all his information face to face. He gets two phone calls and one telegram, each taking up a fraction of a minute in an hour and three quarters movie.

There are three other laws of unity, first, the single-stranded plot. That may sound ridiculous if you’re writing noir or mysteries, but the point is that every incident has to contribute to the denouement. Second, you don’t have to point directly to the denouement with every incident; the relationship between an incident and the denouement doesn’t have to be obvious for that incident, but you have to make sure that some later incident on the path to the denouement, reminds people of the earlier incident in some way. So when Joseph has dreams as a boy, that doesn’t point directly at how things come out, but when dreams come up again, the reader remembers the prior incident. What’s more, the reader buys a clue that dreams are important to the plot – but since the denouement doesn’t happen after the second incident, the reader is prepared for a third one.

Finally, there’s contrast. There’s the hero/ine, and then there’s the villain/ess who is opposite in actions. In between them, other characters have varying amounts of the same qualities as the protagonist, and they must all perform different actions to illustrate those qualities – or they must fail at actions, after which the protagonist succeeds at those things.

Now, why did I focus on three like incidents above? Oral narratives make heavy use of what you could call “magic numbers”. Three is the most common, it is all over the Chumash, which also breaks down into sets of three. Five is associated with magic and mystery; seven is the magic number for religion (seven days of creation, not six); twelve is the magic number for people linked by a common factor (sons of Yaaqov). Ten is very common, of course. But Olrik didn’t study every culture known in his time, and so he didn’t realize that in Mesopotamia, with its inheritance from Sumeria, six is a magic number and the basis of their number system. At the start of Enuma Elish, there are six gods sitting in council. Nevertheless, in the Mayan Popul Vuh there are seven pairs of powerful beings, not six or five.

The main difference between oral narratives and screenwriting, is the fantastic event. Do you know why gossip transmits better than a news story that tells the truth? Because gossip includes titillating elements. That’s why journalism is turning into infotainment – to get attention. Oral traditions like the Chumash include fantastic elements because that’s what makes the audience stay up to listen, and it’s what makes them narrate the same stories to their grandchildren.

So there’s a tension in screenwriting between making it vraisemblable, something the audience can identify with, and yet getting their attention. And that’s why, unless it’s a documentary or educational film, you will always find fictional insertions in biographical movies. But Burt Lancaster insisted that his biopic of Martin Luther King Jr be made up of archival news footage, to tell the truth about the man, knowing that later depictions would include those fictional elements.

And there’s always tension between staying faithful to the novel, and putting it on-screen. The best-known film of War and Peace is the four-film, eight-hour version by Sergei Bondarchuk. But Tolstoy’s novel is 1000 pages long, and he bloviates at length in some places. Cut him some slack, it was his first full-length novel after years of writing short stories. But at any rate, Bondarchuk left out 99% of the lectures, and he did not film how Boris Drubetskoy recommended himself to heiress Yulia Karagina. He just shows Boris kissing thirteen-year-old Natasha in part 1, and sitting in Yulia’s box at the opera in part 2. When you read the narratives of an oral tradition, you can bet real money that the original events were highly complicated, but the Epic Laws require simplification to fit the material into the time that the audience can spare from their hard work and the sleep they need.

Hemingway’s short story The Killers is on Internet Archive as a stand-alone file. It’s only 10 pages long and ends with Nick going back to the diner. We get no explanation of what happened. The script ditches about half the pages in the story, and none of the ditched pages show examples of the Epic Laws. So the scriptwriters knew what they were doing when it came to their form of oral literature, and we are very grateful that they did.

Lawman came out 27 years after The Killers. It had a completely different writer, producer and director. The copy on Internet Archive has the sound out of sync with the action, so I’m afraid you’re stuck with the Youtube version which is free but has ads in it. You owe it to yourself to watch it and test what you know of the Epic Laws; you can also contact me in the comments and I’ll send you my writeup, which is a couple of pages long. Then pick some of your favorite movies – not actual fairy tales like Wizard of Oz or Disney. The Killers is noir; Lawman is a straight western something in the style of Clint Eastwood. Watch your movies (hurt me, hurt me) and note down examples of what I talked about above.

This ought to convince you that not only is it possible for modern writers to achieve the same things that are in the most popular literature of all time, but also it would be good for your writing to learn how to do it. Next I’m going to do a post about mechanics, and the rest of this thread will give you suggestions for using Olrik’s principles.