Write it Like a Fairy Tale -- 08 innovation

Georges Polti wrote a book in 1868 giving a list of 36 dramatic situations or plots to which every work of fiction, and some popular historical scenes, belong. They are the only subjects people write about. He gives examples of the situations. He drew many of them from Greek tragedy, but he also included literature up to and including Dostoevsky. To cover important literature that did not obviously fit his broad categories, Polti gives subcategories. Here is a link to his work.

https://archive.org/details/thirtysixdramati00polt

This book illustrates a couple of points.

There are no “original ideas”. Writers may produce innovative presentations, and movies may take advantage of new technology with the same goal, but the situations they present are limited to these 36. Test it for yourself with a random selection of 36 books or movies. Then do it with some of the top-selling books or top-attended movies this century. Let us know what you find.

As a corollary, you must read widely to avoid producing hackneyed writing. Everything you read before you start writing teaches you what situations people want to read about – especially in your favorite genre – and then you have to find your personal twist on them. The basis for that personal twist is your own experiences – and this is a reason why young writers produce autobiographical works. The number of people they know, on whose experiences they could draw, is limited; the ability of youth to identify with the experiences of others, is limited. But as with Burt Lancaster and screenwriters, reading widely will likely show you that the things you like best – use Olrik’s principles.

If you take this to heart, you will never earn a publisher’s contempt for your ignorance, by saying that your work is absolutely original. Publishers and editors probably haven’t read Polti, but they’ve read enough manuscripts to realize that you can’t come up with a truly new plot, and they know when that brilliant story you wrote is absolutely hackneyed. Your best defense is to read lots of books in your genre, so that you know when somebody else has used that “new and improved” plot device you think you invented.

Second, Polti’s examples come from literature going back thousands of years, including the Tanakh, the roots of which go back at least to 5000 BCE, before the Semites and Indo-Europeans or Indo-Iranians differentiated out of the parent culture that produced the flood stories in all three traditions. As such, at least some of these situations existed in oral traditions – necessarily oral because this goes back before the origin of writing. The situations that get us interested in a book or movie or manga, are the same ones that got our ancestors interested enough in a story to pass it down, some of them for thousands of years. These are the truly shared concepts of the human mind. Compare them to the oral tradition of your own culture.

Polti has references to historical events as examples of the situations. This reinforces Olrik’s statement that orally transmitted narratives originate as realistic descriptions of cultural or historical events. Polti refers to written material in every case, but identifies another facet of the link between oral and written material.

The introduction to the book says that there are also 36 emotional states, but when you study the subcategories as Polti divides them up, you can see that none of his main categories evoke only one emotion. If nothing else, the different relationships between the people involved in the situation should generate different emotions, but what they are is not clear from what Polti wrote. Since you illustrate emotion with action, and you follow the Law of Cascading Contrasts in their behavior, Olrik’s principles guarantee that people’s reactions will differ.

 I’m sure that it’s been a downer for you to have me rehash old advice and tell you that all the plots in your writing will be the same as the old plots people have been “writing” for thousands of years. I’m sure you don’t love me for telling you that your work has to conform to the standards of the culture you’re writing about, when you write a story you imagine yourself starring in. If you write yourself into that story the way you are now, not only are you not writing it like a fairy tale, you’re committing an actual fallacy of logic called Presentism, pretending that people two hundred years ago thought about things or understood them the way we do now. It’s another facet of the “Harlequin novel with a few famous names inserted” that I keep talking about. If you’re literally writing for people just like you, they may not throw your book out. But you won’t sell as many books as if you do your homework so you can truly understand how your heroine thought and behaved two centuries ago. Doing that homework will help you grow as a writer. It’s up to you how much you want to grow.

Write it Like a Fairy Tale -- 07 Language

Remember back when I said that you had to use a grammar book in your writing and you said, “But this is the Regency, they spoke differently”?

They sure did, but they also spoke differently in Shakespeare’s time, and in the 21^st century, you practically need a phrasebook to understand Shakespeare. So too in our century, Regency grammar will jar on your audience. If you really use Regency grammar. Read the Four Mothers carefully and take notes.

The biggest hurdle to face is that with verbs of motion, Regency authors do not use “have” as an auxiliary. They use “am”. “I am come to tell you…” “He was gone to Birmingham…” This derives from French, Je suis venu vous dire…   Il est parti or Il est allé … Compare Georgette Heyer’s use to the Four Mothers; I saw an instance in one of her books where she had the modern usage, not the Regency usage. This Regency usage is not passive, this is the grammar of verbs of motion 200 years ago.

Where we would say “Tea was being carried around,” they might say “Tea was carrying around.” It will help your word count to do likewise. This is how they expressed the progressive in the Regency period, it’s a variety of the imperfect tense.

Where we would say “alone”, Regency authors would say “only”: “That answer only is acceptable.” This is one of those habits of the Four Mothers you should take notes on in case you decide to use Regency diction.

In a number of works you will find muted language. One does not hate rain, one “does not love rain”. A journey may be described as “not uncomfortable”, a décor as “not unpleasant”.

British authors tend to use “amongst” and “whilst” where Americans would say “among” and “while”. Study the Four Mothers and see if you can identify the rules they went by.

Regency authors sometimes say “you was” instead of “you were,” but only in the singular.

The Four Mothers have all their main characters use proper grammar; Georgette Heyer lets some of them use bad grammar, especially young men who are slangy and older men who probably didn’t go up to university. You may, however, find “eat” and “ate” in unexpected places; I found one example in Persuasion.

For slang, go through Heyer’s works and make a list with the modern meanings. For your lower class Londoners, Bow Street Runners, and criminals, find a dictionary of thieves’ cant online. I think Heyer over-uses slang; you should probably restrict it to young men talking to each other, not older men or her Mark II hero and especially not when talking to ladies. Sir Richard Wyndham gains the respect of a thief by proving that he knows thieves’ cant, but he does not use it toward Penelope Creed.

Be careful about regional dialects. They are just as difficult to write as foreign languages. Especially in the Celtic parts of the Kingdom, some people will use words with their old Celtic meaning. So “a brave lass” does not mean she is courageous, it means she is a fine girl: braw, brav (from Welsh braf), and Irish brea all look like “courageous” but they all mean “fine”. Take Florence Castle’s advice – but the links to the recordings are broken.

https://florencecastlewritings.tumblr.com/post/633528132553588736/writing-british-accents-and-dialects

This page has links to Youtube clips.

https://www.studiocambridge.co.uk/a-brief-guide-to-british-accents-and-dialects/

Don’t try to represent the accents too closely. I served on a jury once here in the US and the minute he opened his mouth, one of the lawyers gave himself away as Irish. It was the quality of his “t” and some of his vowels that gave him away. Burt Lancaster and Michael Ironside, both of whom were Irish, had a particular strength to their “l”. You’ll never get that onto paper, any more than you can get the British difference between “a” before a double consonant and a single consonant, like “cawn’t” and “het”, the latter being very close to the Latin æ or German ä.

Especially don't use dialect without a clear geographic connection. Remember, people didn’t travel as much in the Regency as they do now, and while London might have speakers of every dialect, your heroine has to have a connection to the region that uses the one you pick to imitate. So, for example, she ought to have an estate in the west of England, if you want her footman to use that accent in London. But she probably will not hire a cockney as a footman, or be served by a cockney in a warehouse (retail store) or shop. Cockneys were denizens of the City of London, and few ladies went there because few ladies had business dealings with anybody there, plus they looked down on Cits as well as cockneys. Tradesmen dealing with the carriage class hired their own relatives, who spoke much like their customers, as much not to alienate the customers as to be able to trust employees not to steal from the shelves or the till (a very real problem up to the invention of the cash register). A man, however, might have a groom from his own estate, or hire a cockney. If you want to hear cockney speech, watch Eastenders online – and remember, a cockney “born within the sound of Bow Bells” rarely left that region.

https://archive.org/details/1-tv-vhs-rip/1+TV_VHS_RIP.avi

In general, only characters low down in the social scale, probably not wealthy and therefore stuck most of their lives where they were born, should use dialect all the time. People higher up will mostly use dialect when strongly moved and less in control of their speech patterns. People at the top of the scale will likely use dialect only in fun, and then they will use the dialect from the shire they grew up in, mimicking their estate workers.

Be very careful about Irish characters and their speech. Don’t copy the speech patterns of US movie Irish like Thomas Mitchell as Gerald O’Hara in Gone With the Wind (he could also speak with a perfect American accent). They are overdone. What I did with a character in one novel was had him use an Irish bull, an internally contradictory sentence: “Could I be asking a question and not take offense?” He meant that the person he questioned would hopefully not take offense, but there’s no pronoun for that person. However, such sentences are not restricted to the Irish; Sam Goldwyn will forever be famous for saying “A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.” Yogi Berra was famous for them: “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ee_N3g4ORLk

Likewise there are multiple Scottish accents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=styynTNHpVo

And multiple Welsh accents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_2UW8v3Q80

Never let dialect or slang take over your writing. You’re telling a story, not writing a dissertation for ’enry ’iggins (IYKYK). And judge for yourself how much of your audience will sit still for real Regency grammar, or how long they’ll keep trying to understand it before they pitch your book.

Write it Like a Fairy Tale -- 06 Loose Ends

There is one other thing you can do as a Regency novelist, and it is another Burt Lancaster lesson.

Lancaster never did sequels. He also never covered another actor’s work with remakes; Gunfight at OK Corral had a completely different script from Darling Clementine, that violated history much less – I mean, big chested big voiced Victor Mature as runty tubercular Doc Holliday? Come on. And while Paul Lukas played Ernst Janning in a TV broadcast, the movie of Judgment at Nuremberg added plot elements like, Marlene Dietrich as a German general’s wife and the girlfriend who broke up with William Shatner. Lancaster did film versions of stage plays – but not Shakespeare, with the inevitable comparisons to Olivier. He didn’t like doing too many films in the same genre; he didn’t even like doing the same take on a genre as everybody else. He was never in any of the rah rah war movies, he made anti-war movies. He never did “Great Old West” movies, he did rowdy raunchy Vera Cruz and icy cold Lawman and anti-racism Scalphunters – but Ulzana’s Raid was actually about the Vietnam War. And two things came out of them.

Burt Lancaster did bookend films. Not only were there derived doublets in some of his movies, but he did more than one movie about the same topic. I have a full list in another document, but Lawman and OK Corral are bookends; Scalphunters and Judgment at Nuremberg are anti-hate; Brute Force and Birdman of Alcatraz are anti-prison.

You can do this with your Regency novels. I have one written and another planned which refer to the treatment of blacks in British colonies. I have blurbs for about 90 other novels all told, and I am sure I can find opportunities for turning some of those into bookends. Bookending can tell your readers more about some important Regency issues by looking at them from different directions or through the eyes of different characters. It will also tell readers more about those characters because of subtext provided by their reactions.

You can include messages like Lancaster’s movies did, but if you’re going to write it like a fairy tale, the message has to be a matter of reacting to events, not giving lectures – and yet one of my plots has a Dissenting preacher lecturing on the evils of the slave trade. But Dissenting preachers did that during the Regency, so it’s part of the plot, not a detour.

And there’s one thing in oral narratives that you don’t have to worry about, but you could always include it in some of your novels. Olrik discussed the use of placenames as identifiers for culturally important events. For historical events and the inception of an important custom, an oral narrative may name a specific place (use a toponym). It may also tell the story and finish “and it is there to this very day.” The events in the narrative are well in the past; nobody alive was there at the time. But the narrator and her audience can see the location where they happened and she points to it verbally, and then the people in her audience accept what she says about the events.

This is more than just having things happen where a character or their family live. The place and event have to have a direct relationship to each other and to the plot and its denouement.

It’s more than “oh, we were visiting The Lakes and I fell in.” The Bible has no logical reason for positioning Avraham’s tent where travelers can get to the Cities of the Plain – unless the culture insists that the Cities’ overthrow is closely connected to inception of the practice of circumcision. If my young lady can see Malkin Tower in Lancashire from her chaise, the reader has a right to expect the novel to have something to do with the Pendle Witch Trials. And conversely, don’t refer to Malkin Tower unless your outline does discuss the witch trials. It’s not a head fake; it’s wording that has nothing to do with your plot, and that violates the unities and busts your word count.

Try to remember a movie that opens at a given place with a voiceover about it, and then the plot unfolds showing what happened and how it affected the characters, then goes back to the place and summarizes. That would have been too talky for Lancaster, but His Majesty O’Keefe does something like it using action. Lots of good “scenery” too, if you know what I mean.

But don’t use a toponym just to prove that you used Dugdale in your research.

Now let me go back and tie up one loose end. I talked about the heroine learning her lesson such that she is ready for her new normal. And some of you probably said, “Wait a minute. Why doesn’t her mate have to learn any lessons?” Well, you’re right. Mr Darcy learned a lesson about treating strangers with contempt. But Edward Ferrars, Colonel Brandon, George Knightley, Henry Tilney, Frederick Wentworth, and Edmund Bertram were all pretty much the same at the end of the novel as they were when first introduced to the reader. The same is true for Georgette Heyer’s Regency heroes – Philip Jettan belongs to the preceding “macaroni merchant” period. Why don’t the heroes change their natures?

Because however much a husband might talk of “my wife’s house”, or however much a gentleman might defer to a lady’s opinion, every girl was taught that she was inferior, that “women were all children of a larger growth.” And children have to learn lessons as they grow up. We don’t like to be told that in the 21^st century, and it’s one more struggle you will have with writing Regency novels. You may have to compromise by having your heroine learn something about the world, and her mate learn something about himself. But if you’re writing it like a fairy tale, you can’t have him admitting that he can’t live up to her idealizing him – because that’s not how heroes behave in fairy tales. It would be a failure. If he can fail, he’s not worthy of her. If the man who first attracts her is not worthy of her, you must have a secondary hero who can step forward and show he is truly the right mate for her. More than one Regency novel has a heroine who mistakes her own heart. That’s not the same as the hero learning a lesson.

Trying to write it like a fairy tale may sound like a lot of work. Writing is a lot of work anyway, if you try to do it right, giving respect to your genre and your audience. You’ll get two benefits from it.

You will craft your work very tightly. Nothing will happen that doesn’t support some other action; there will be no loose ends or plot holes. Michael Winner and Gerard Wilson did Lawman and then a few years later they did Scorpio, again with Lancaster. The latter movie started with somebody else’s script, and they didn’t have time or the desire to tear it apart completely and build it back up with the same craft they used on Lawman. It’s a good story but it has a patchwork quilt effect instead of an intentional design.

Your work will translate to film easily. It will have action and dialogue, but not monologues or things that need a voiceover. Movie audiences won’t be left saying “What just happened?” The action will be clear and purposeful, and you already limited it to things that carry the plot forward.

Maybe your books will start a whole new craze for Regency movies.

But even if you never get that far, writing it like a fairy tale will do a much better job, honoring our foremothers of the English novel, and giving audiences something much better to read than a Harlequin novel doped with a few famous names.