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.