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.