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.

Sooo history -- John Huston and Ukraine

The movie The Unforgiven is on Internet Archive free with no ads. I recommend you watch it and then come back here and prepare to get your mind blown.

Burt Lancaster and Audrey Hepburn star, and that makes this a brownface movie because Hepburn plays a Kiowa girl raised by whites. The father of the family brought her to them; he is dead, and all her life they have believed that she is white. Toward the end they get a wakeup call.

John Huston directed and he and Lancaster had a major falling out because Huston wanted the hatred against the girl made more explicit. Lancaster dug in his heels. Nine months before they started filming, Playhouse 90 did a TV broadcast of Abby Mann's play Judgment at Nuremberg. If you know anything about Lancaster's career, you probably know that he was in the movie version, but that was two years later.

So what does that have to do with anything? Watch the Playhouse 90 version free on Internet Archive (no ads). Notice the end where people tell Haywood that the Germans are getting tired of the Americans shoving it down their throat that they were all living in Germany when the Nazis started committing crimes against humanity. When somebody shoves something down your throat you puke. Lancaster was not about to let Huston shove white hatred of Native Americans down audiences' throats.

So OK, each had his own opinion about how to do the movie, so what?  Well, even if Huston made his push while Hepburn was recovering from a broken back, substantial parts of the movie would have to be reshot, blowing the schedule and costs even more. And that's also what Lancaster was fighting against.

Now go back and rewatch Unforgiven and when the Kiowa come to take their girl back, pay attention from then on. What does it mean that a Kiowa girl was raised as white?

It's cultural genocide. Did Lancaster realize that? He might have. It's not on IA yet, but in 1950 he starred as Jim Thorpe, who got into athletics at the Carlisle School for Indians in Pennsylvania, went to the Olympics, and had his medals revoked because he played baseball for living expenses once. Those medals have now been restored, but that doesn't change the fact that he was treated differently than other Olympians -- because although he was mixed race the IOC didn't view him as white.

The Carlisle school was also about cultural genocide. So were the Canadian schools for Native Americans, as well as being hotbeds of sexual abuse.

If Burt gave John Huston his way, the message of hate would have drowned out the message of cultural genocide. If Huston was right, then why have two messages in there? Why have the Kiowa try to take the girl back? I didn't get that part of the movie either -- until I had this epiphany. 

You don't sign on to use a script and then try to drown out an important issue. Only a white-eyes wouldn't understand that stealing children and erasing their cultural identity is wrong, and if it's in the script you have to honor it, not drown it out. He could have quit and forced Hecht-Hill-Lancaster to find another director at the last minute.  It happened all the time in Hollywood, such as replacing George Cukor directing Gone with the Wind. It could have been less expensive than the reshooting to pamper Huston's viewpoint -- which was objectively wrong for two reasons.

So what's the connection to Ukraine? Maybe your news outlet doesn't talk about it, but Russia is using cultural genocide by kidnapping Ukrainian kids and abusing them if they speak Ukrainian or don't hide positive feelings they have for Ukraine. They're even training them to make war on Ukraine.

It would be stupid to say that everything in the last 80 years of history, from the start of his career, is related to Burt Lancaster's work, but he continually tried to do message films and some of his messages have importance for today. This is one of them.

Write it Like a Fairy Tale -- 001, Introduction

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.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- Segue from Olrik to Polti: FOR WRITERS

Georges Polti wrote a book in 1868, giving a list of 36 dramatic situations or plots. You can see it free at Internet Archive.

https://archive.org/details/thirtysixdramati00polt

He gives examples of the situations. He drew many of them from Greek tragedy, but he also included literature up to and including Dostoevsky. To cover important literature that did not perfectly fit his broad categories, Polti gives subcategories. 

This book illustrates a couple of points.

There are no “original ideas”. Writers may produce novel presentations, and movies may take advantage of new technology with the same goal, but the situations they present are limited to these 36. Test it for yourself with a random selection of 36 books. Then do it with some of the top-selling books this century. Let us know what you find.

Second, Polti’s examples come from literature going back thousands of years, including the Tanakh, the roots of which go back at least to 5000 BCE, before the Semites and Indo-Europeans or Indo-Iranians differentiated out of the parent culture that produced the flood stories in all three traditions. As such, at least some of these situations existed in oral traditions – necessarily oral because this goes back before the origin of writing. The situations that get us interested in a book or movie or manga, are the same ones that got our ancestors interested enough in a story to pass it down, some of them for thousands of years. These are the truly shared concepts of the human mind. Compare them to the oral tradition of your own culture.

Polti has references to historical events as examples of the situations. This reinforces Olrik’s statement that orally transmitted narratives originate as realistic descriptions of cultural or historical events. Polti refers to written material in every case, but identifies another facet of the link between oral and written material.

I forget how I came across Polti, but I used it in a novel and wrote about it as an appendix to a series of possible posts about how to use Olrik's principles to write Regency romances. It reinforces that modern literature, including film which I keep saying is oral literature, relates to our most ancient favorites told around campfires as long as humans have told stories. If you're interested in the details, let me know.

I'm just saying -- FELLOW WRITERS

So I thought I would try out some modern Regency fiction, and it's possible to borrow some at Internet Archive. Well.

I have bad memories of the only Harlequin novel I read back in the Stone Age, and the one I read on Internet Archive is the same thing. Literally. All the modern attitudes, with just some famous names from Austen stuck in.

I know some of you don't mind that. 

If you're like me, that's not good enough. You can find all of Austen, Edgeworth, Radcliffe, and Ferrier on Internet Archive, along with Mary Brunton and the "memoirs" of Perdita and courtesan Harriot Wilson. You owe it to yourself to read them. Georgette Heyer's novels won't hurt; they were written in the 20th century, but Heyer grew up in the pre-war milieu and understood her foremothers-in-writing better than we can now.

You can also find the sermons of Blair and Porteus, which you can use for your clergy, as well as the famous Fordyce's Sermons to Young Women, both volumes.

And of course Byron, Mrs. Hemans, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, and Scott's Marmion and Lady of the Lake -- and Thomson and Cowper, so often referred to in Austen. Mrs. Hemans was a wife and mother to five sons. Her poetry used similar subjects to Byron's, was expressed almost as passionately, was more approved and popular for longer, well into the Victorian period, and influenced women poets for decades. She wrote "The boy stood on the burning deck," a favorite declamation for over a century, and coined the phrase "the stately homes of England" paraphrased by Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant.

Did you know that Frankenstein was published in the Regency period? And a novel by Byron's friend Polidori, the first Vampire novel ever?

And you can find most of the Northanger novels:

Clermont 1: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_clermont-a-tale-in-fou_roche-regina-maria_1798_1

2: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_clermont-a-tale-in-fou_roche-regina-maria_1798_2

3: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_clermont-a-tale-in-fou_roche-regina-maria_1798_3

4: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_clermont-a-tale-in-fou_roche-regina-maria_1798_4

The Mysterious Warning 1: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-mysterious-warning-_parsons-mrs-eliza_1796_1

2: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-mysterious-warning-_parsons-mrs-eliza_1796_2

3: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-mysterious-warning-_parsons-mrs-eliza_1796_3

4: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-mysterious-warning-_parsons-mrs-eliza_1796_4

The Castle of Wolfenbach: https://archive.org/details/the-castle-of-wolfenbach-eliza-parsons

The Necromancer, volume 1: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-necromancer-or-the-_kahlert-karl-friedrich_1794_1

2: https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-necromancer-or-the-_kahlert-karl-friedrich_1794_2/page/n1/mode/2up

The Orphan of the Rhine: https://archive.org/details/theorphanoftherhine/page/n1/mode/2up

The Midnight Bell: https://archive.org/details/midnightbell0000lath

(You can't download this one, you'll have to borrow it.)

The seventh novel, Horrid Mysteries, is not available online complete, except one place where you can find it with a web search. Or try Valancourt Press, they offer it for sale.

Get out your favorite Austen books, go on Internet Archive, and search for their titles or authors. Eliza Parsons was a voluminous writer, having children to support. Reading more contemporary novels will make your Regency writing better -- if you think carefully about the differences between the authors' and characters' lives and how we live now, then do the research to fill in the gaps so your readers also understand.

I just discovered one of the best resources ever, The New British Traveller, by James Dugdale. First printed about 1789, it was reprinted in the early 1800s as a number of pamphlets. The unsold ones were bound together, with an added preface and introduction, in 1819. If you want realistic portrayals of the shires in your writing, you must download this from Internet Archive and study it.

Volume 1: https://archive.org/details/newbritishtravel01dugd

Volume 2: https://archive.org/details/newbritishtravel02dugduoft

Volume 3: https://archive.org/details/newbritishtravel03dugduoft

Volume 4: https://archive.org/details/newbritishtravel04dugduoft

Along with the 1816 edition of Debrett's peerage, volume 1 being England and volume 2 being Scotland and Ireland.

Volume 1: https://archive.org/details/debrettspeerage07debrgoog/page/n7/mode/2up

Volume 2: https://archive.org/details/debrettspeerage04debrgoog/page/n5/mode/2up

and an 1819 edition of the baronetage, knightage and companionage

https://archive.org/details/debrettsbaroneta14unse

So that if you plan to include real people in your writing, you can at least name their county and seat correctly, let alone give the pedigree and whatever other information you need for your story.

You can also find floor plans for Regency buildings online. The novel I read talked of lobbies in inns. In the Regency period, even the Royal York Hotel in Bath did not have a lobby. The doorman let you in to a hall large enough for a sedan chair, which would have protected customers and their guests on rainy days. You went to the concierge's desk and explained your business, and were seen up to your rooms where your luggage, sent ahead in a separate coach, had already been bestowed and was unpacking at the hands of your man or maid. There were breakfast rooms and coffee rooms and dining rooms. But at an inn, you went through the door into the taproom, where the landlord and landlady took care of you. 

Then there are the attitudes. When a woman vowed to love, honour and obey, everybody expected her to obey -- whatever it was she meant by love and honour. The only cash she had, her husband put into her hands. The only financing she got, was to have her modiste and other vendors send their bills to her husband. Many girls and some women had no idea of the cost of things, for this was pretty much how things worked before they married, only their fathers instead of their husbands overlooked the bills and paid them -- and then gave a thundering scold if they were too high. 

A man had all rights over his wife. It was not until the reign of Queen Victoria that a woman could even have custody of her children, and then it arose from a court case where the wife could prove abuse. Richard Sheridan's granddaughter Caroline Norton became a woman's rights advocate.

Read up on her life, and also that of Catherine Tylney-Long, the mega-heiress whose husband only wanted her money. He bankrupted her, got a royal appointment to make himself immune to arrest for debt, but eventually fled Britain. He remained a "man of honour" to the end of his life, despite despoiling his wife, physically abusing her, and giving her a venereal disease.

Most Regency marriages fell between these two extremes -- but it was a matter of degree, not of kind. 

It was a different world. Your audience deserves to see the real world of the Regency if you're going to set your novel in the Regency period.

I'm just saying...

DIY -- mice

I put this on the DIY thread because it's intended to help you keep mice out or, if you have them, do something other than have an exterminator bring poisons into your house.

But you will kill mice using my plan. If you had the plague I had, live traps mean almost daily trips to take the mice away from your house. Where they can get into somebody else's house.

Preventative measures.

PUT ALL FOOD IN STURDY CONTAINERS WITH TIGHT-FITTING LIDS. Mice chew through cardboard in case there's something edible inside. They also chew through plastic re-sealable bags and duck tape. This means re-packaging things as soon as you get back from the grocery store or take delivery on specialty products. When you repackage spices and herbs, cut off the label that says what it is and put it in the container so you don't get cayenne when you want paprika or cloves. Oddly enough, while I have had mice chew into flour bags, they have ignored sugar and mylar bags. DON'T COUNT ON THAT. There are plenty of BPA-free heavy plastic storage sets that will help with this, aside from the typical kitchen canister sets. I bought a 24-piece set and could use a few more pieces, except see the next paragraph.

BUY STORAGE UNITS WITH NO AIR GAPS. I mean it. NONE. Mice can get through holes the size of a dime. Rebrilliant has stackable storage on wheels, with tightly fitting doors. You can easily move them to a closet once filled. They come flattened and take about 2 minutes to assemble, requiring no tools but occasionally a hefty slap with your hand. You can also take the lid off to put in and take out large things. You must make sure the lid is properly seated when you put it back on. I have 11 of these, filled with freeze-dried veggies, jerky, baking supplies, herbs and spices, medicinals, dried fruit, snacks and shelf-safe things like unopened condiments.

UNTIL YOU HAVE THE RIGHT STORAGE, use your refrigerator as a stop-gap, in two ways. One, of course, is that mice can't get inside it. The other is to put things on top of it. I keep flour inside my refrigerator so I have a couple of spare bags handy at a time, but I put party-size chips, goldfish and pretzels on top, including after I have opened the bag and used a clothes-pin to keep the food fresh.

COLLAPSE ALL CARDBOARD BOXES AND PUT OUT WITH THE TRASH. This includes boxes in which project items were shipped to you. I'm a serious knitter and I had to sacrifice some leftover yarn (and if you read my knitting thread you KNOW there's no such thing as useless leftovers) because mice nested in the boxes.

GET RID OF STYROFOAM. Mice will chew it into soft little pellets for nesting. Your town may have collection days for safe disposal. They are literally always on a day I can't get to them so once or twice a year I send styrofoam out with Got Junk. I also know which of my vendors tend to use styrofoam and limit how much I buy from them.

Now to deal with the infestation.

CLEAN UP. Any time you see the evidence of mice, clean that area. Wash it down with kitchen grade vinegar (5%, not the 10% sold at garden stores for weed control) or buy some Dr. Bronner's Castile Soap in peppermint scent. Wash with that. Also put about a quarter cup in a spray bottle, fill with water, and spray carpets and floors. Mice hate the smell. They also hate cinnamon, but if you have a bad infestation you'll put cinnamon in so many places, the house will look unclean. Try Humphrey's Handmade or Adam's cinnamon scent castile soap, or use the recipe on Dr. Bronner's site for adding cinnamon scent to their unscented soap. You will never waste castile soap, you can use it for almost everything. I have a post about that.

BUY TRAPS. Do not buy glue traps, I have known mice to work their way out of them. See above about live traps. Buy snap traps. Place them where you see mice debris, such as nesting preparations. After a couple of days, bait and set them. Keep traps in stock. Even if you get rid of mice one year, they will return a few years later.

Put traps on top of every place where you clean away nesting materials. 

Put them everywhere you find mouse "debris" whether it's hair or not. 

If you see mice skitter across the floor, don't go after them with a broom: watch where they go and put a trap there. 

Set a trap in the doorway and close the door to a room so the mouse can't get into or out of the room without going over the trap.

Lay a line of traps across an entry with no doors, or use your storage to block most of it and then lay up to 8 traps across the rest. Face half of them each way. I used this to control mouse access to my kitchen; it was extremely successful.

If you booby-trap a wall, line up three traps with the bait side against the wall. The mouse might get past the outside traps but the center one will work.

If mice get into a closet, put two traps on the inside of the door, one facing each way. Also watch for them to chew alternative entrances and booby-trap those. Once you catch them, clear everything out of the closet and wash it down with castile soap, then set new booby-traps in case the mice are not getting into the closet from inside your house. 

REARRANGE YOUR HOUSE. Mice can climb, and they will climb on top of something and then jump to where they think they will find food. Do not leave paths from floor to cabinet tops or buffets. For example, I tore apart my kitchen for remodeling and let a tension rod rest on the floor, leaning against a chair. The mice climbed the rod, and leapt from the chair onto boxes they wanted to explore. They also climbed up into a closet and chewed through the plastic of bags of comfrey and chickweed leaves and used the leaves for bedding. Wash down the legs of furniture with the scented castile soap.

SEE IF THERE ARE GAPS YOU CAN SEAL. You'll need a professional for this and that's why it's last: this is not DIY and it will cost you. If mice can get to plumbing, they will get into your house. If there's a gap around your dryer vent, mice can get into your house. 

That said, some mice seem to be tougher than others. Most of the mice in my traps are gray house mice; they seem to be pretty naive. The smaller brown field mice are more wary of traps and their size makes it easier for them to find hidy holes.

If you're asking yourself why I didn't recommend getting a cat -- well, there are people who should never have the care of animals. There are also people who have enough work and expenses caring for kids or the elderly; a cat also needs care and attention. There are allergies; a young relative of mine loves cats but allergy shots did not help her. Cats are not mouse-catching machines; you do not buy them until the mice are gone and then just send them to a shelter or abandon them. They have feelings -- feelings of loss and abandonment and depression. So unless you can make a commitment to the physical and emotional well-being of a cat, don't get one because you have mice.

I know this sounds like a war, but it is. I live in the northeast and my chances of hantavirus are not large -- but they are not zero. Also, it's mice not deer that carry the ticks that spread Lyme disease. Mice leave a definite funk in the air and I have a sensitivity to odors. I also had bronchitis the other year due to mold in the kitchen (causing the renovation) and it took nine months to get over. If mice can get in, mold can get in; so can mildew. Both can be hazardous to your health. This is a war you have to win if at all possible.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- turn it over and over

I was today years old when I learned that there was a Yiddish Arthurian tradition at the end of the 1700s, during Rebbe Schneur Zalman of Lyady's life.

The paper on it is here with an English translation.

https://www.pdx.edu/judaic-studies/sites/judaicstudies.web.wdt.pdx.edu/files/2021-03/OehmeArthuriana30.2.pdf

The book referenced is on Internet Archive (natch)

Belehrung der Jüdisch-Teutschen Red- und Schreibart 

Eyn Shon Meyse starts on page 251 (Adobe page), page 157 of the print edition, in side by side Yiddish and German.

I was writing about something quite different and my brain jumped sideways and I followed it with a google search. Always follow where your brain leaps to.

The Internet is like a box of chocolates....