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.