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”.