Since my two posts about writing have been viewed by so many in such a short time, I’m going to start a new thread. I admit that the only places I’ve been published are here on my blog and on Fanfiction.net (where I got some likes), but this thread involves my observations on things that have been released to the general public.
I’m calling it Write it Like a Fairy Tale to show people how to use Olrik’s Epic Laws actively in their writing. I’ve been studying Olrik’s Principles for Oral Narrative Research almost this entire century, and it revolutionized my understanding of the Chumash, which has examples of what Olrik said everywhere – not just his Epic Laws but almost everything he said in his book. But since Olrik’s work wasn’t translated to English until 1992, hardly anybody knows about it, so its mere existence doesn’t explain the examples I found in, say, movies. Instead, it seems that scriptwriters must have been voluminous readers for most of their lives, and they picked up on the structural elements that popular narrations have in common.
If you know anything about me, you know that I am a huge fan of Burt Lancaster, and most of his best films have examples in them. Lawman is the champ; almost every bit of action in that movie has something to do with the Epic Laws, except maybe the camera focusing on that hard square jaw while Maddox’s hat hides the rest of his face as he rides into Sabbath. Lancaster was a bookworm from the age of 8, and very intelligent, and I feel sure he recognized it when a script had features similar to his favorite books. I re-watched The Killers (hurt me, hurt me), which was the first movie Lancaster did outside of his contract with Hal Wallis. Well, it was based on a Hemingway story, but three writers including John Huston and Richard Brooks had their fingers in that pie, so it ought to be a powerhouse. And what they came up with has Olrik examples.
First we have the Law of Opening. Two guys walk to a corner in a town at night, and into a diner. It’s an ordinary thing for a couple of guys to do at night. They could be looking for something to eat, but this movie is called The Killers, so we’re waiting for something bad to happen. And it does.
It turns out that we have the Law of Two to a Job. If one guy came after Swede, he would have to be very important – but Mr. Big does not do his own dirty work. So he sends two men in. Not three. Two.
When you watch through to the end, you also see a derived doublet, which is not one of the Epic Laws, it’s something else from Olrik’s work. When an incident repeats only twice, the second one is a watered-down version of the first. The killers show up at another eating establishment toward the end of the movie. This time they are after Ava Gardner, the other leg of the romantic triangle. But she takes warning when she sees the old man, Mr. Big’s spy, come in with his cane. She goes to the ladies’ and gets away. So that occurrence is watered down.
Immediately we get the Law of Clarity which says focus on the main line. To do that, the movie kills off the killers. You will never see them again.
Back to the start of the movie. Two people come in for dinner, one at a time, now that it’s past 6, and George turns them away. It takes both incidents to convince the killers that George will follow orders, so he gets to live. The short story has George turn away other customers, except one with an order to go. Not only would this waste film, it would provide more witnesses if the killers were caught, so I think Hemingway goofed on that one. Hellinger, Huston and Brooks knew better.
Swede’s right hand gets a starring role in the movie, and we see it three times. The first time, it tells us he’s dead. The second time, it clues Reardon in that Swede was a pug. The last time, it tells us why he had to stop boxing, and that leads him to a life of crime.
We see the scarf with the harp on it three times. The first is when Reardon picks it out of Swede’s belongings. The second is when Swede is in prison, remembering Kitty. The last is when Reardon gets Kitty to admit it belonged to her. Kitty is the only one who can testify about her relationship with Swede and the scarf is the key.
These are the Law of Three and the Law of Ascents. The Law of Ascents says that when an oral narrative has multiple like incidents, each one is more extreme than the last. The increasing extremity differentiates this law from the derived doublet. The last like incident comes right before some kind of denouement. Right after Swede learns he’ll never fight again, he meets Kitty, creating the crucial romantic triangle. That’s the Law of Final Stress.
Oral narratives almost never describe anything using adjectives; it’s all verbs – ACTIVE VERBS – to show us who the character is. Even in the Bible when it gives us the setting for Gan Eden, it’s all about the verbs – the four rivers run in such and such a place, for example. That’s an Epic Law. It also means you don’t get in depth with a character. You show who they are by what they do; you don’t stop and analyze what they do. If you can think of a movie with interior monologues or long comments on the characters, watch it again and make a list of any Epic Laws that turn up in it. Then look up the scriptwriter and their other films. You may find a trend.
This affected Lancaster’s movie The Train. First, he had two options for the script: an academic study of Nazi stolen art; and the memoirs of a Frenchman whose family artwork the Nazis stole. The former was not a narrative and he rejected it. The other thing he rejected was Arthur Penn’s interior monologues. (There were other problems but that’s enough for now.) He hired John Frankenheimer with the bribe of a Ferrari. (It was their third film together out of a total of five.)
Another Epic Law could be called Unity. There is no conflict between actions and motives, that’s why oral narratives don’t have to explain anything: actions speak, words don’t. This is another reason you shouldn’t find interior monologues in movies, but it’s more. In The Killers, Reardon gets almost all his information face to face. He gets two phone calls and one telegram, each taking up a fraction of a minute in an hour and three quarters movie.
There are three other laws of unity, first, the single-stranded plot. That may sound ridiculous if you’re writing noir or mysteries, but the point is that every incident has to contribute to the denouement. Second, you don’t have to point directly to the denouement with every incident; the relationship between an incident and the denouement doesn’t have to be obvious for that incident, but you have to make sure that some later incident on the path to the denouement, reminds people of the earlier incident in some way. So when Joseph has dreams as a boy, that doesn’t point directly at how things come out, but when dreams come up again, the reader remembers the prior incident. What’s more, the reader buys a clue that dreams are important to the plot – but since the denouement doesn’t happen after the second incident, the reader is prepared for a third one.
Finally, there’s contrast. There’s the hero/ine, and then there’s the villain/ess who is opposite in actions. In between them, other characters have varying amounts of the same qualities as the protagonist, and they must all perform different actions to illustrate those qualities – or they must fail at actions, after which the protagonist succeeds at those things.
Now, why did I focus on three like incidents above? Oral narratives make heavy use of what you could call “magic numbers”. Three is the most common, it is all over the Chumash, which also breaks down into sets of three. Five is associated with magic and mystery; seven is the magic number for religion (seven days of creation, not six); twelve is the magic number for people linked by a common factor (sons of Yaaqov). Ten is very common, of course. But Olrik didn’t study every culture known in his time, and so he didn’t realize that in Mesopotamia, with its inheritance from Sumeria, six is a magic number and the basis of their number system. At the start of Enuma Elish, there are six gods sitting in council. Nevertheless, in the Mayan Popul Vuh there are seven pairs of powerful beings, not six or five.
The main difference between oral narratives and screenwriting, is the fantastic event. Do you know why gossip transmits better than a news story that tells the truth? Because gossip includes titillating elements. That’s why journalism is turning into infotainment – to get attention. Oral traditions like the Chumash include fantastic elements because that’s what makes the audience stay up to listen, and it’s what makes them narrate the same stories to their grandchildren.
So there’s a tension in screenwriting between making it vraisemblable, something the audience can identify with, and yet getting their attention. And that’s why, unless it’s a documentary or educational film, you will always find fictional insertions in biographical movies. But Burt Lancaster insisted that his biopic of Martin Luther King Jr be made up of archival news footage, to tell the truth about the man, knowing that later depictions would include those fictional elements.
And there’s always tension between staying faithful to the novel, and putting it on-screen. The best-known film of War and Peace is the four-film, eight-hour version by Sergei Bondarchuk. But Tolstoy’s novel is 1000 pages long, and he bloviates at length in some places. Cut him some slack, it was his first full-length novel after years of writing short stories. But at any rate, Bondarchuk left out 99% of the lectures, and he did not film how Boris Drubetskoy recommended himself to heiress Yulia Karagina. He just shows Boris kissing thirteen-year-old Natasha in part 1, and sitting in Yulia’s box at the opera in part 2. When you read the narratives of an oral tradition, you can bet real money that the original events were highly complicated, but the Epic Laws require simplification to fit the material into the time that the audience can spare from their hard work and the sleep they need.
Hemingway’s short story The Killers is on Internet Archive as a stand-alone file. It’s only 10 pages long and ends with Nick going back to the diner. We get no explanation of what happened. The script ditches about half the pages in the story, and none of the ditched pages show examples of the Epic Laws. So the scriptwriters knew what they were doing when it came to their form of oral literature, and we are very grateful that they did.
Lawman came out 27 years after The Killers. It had a completely different writer, producer and director. The copy on Internet Archive has the sound out of sync with the action, so I’m afraid you’re stuck with the Youtube version which is free but has ads in it. You owe it to yourself to watch it and test what you know of the Epic Laws; you can also contact me in the comments and I’ll send you my writeup, which is a couple of pages long. Then pick some of your favorite movies – not actual fairy tales like Wizard of Oz or Disney. The Killers is noir; Lawman is a straight western something in the style of Clint Eastwood. Watch your movies (hurt me, hurt me) and note down examples of what I talked about above.
This ought to convince you that not only is it possible for modern writers to achieve the same things that are in the most popular literature of all time, but also it would be good for your writing to learn how to do it. Next I’m going to do a post about mechanics, and the rest of this thread will give you suggestions for using Olrik’s principles.
