This wonderful article was sent to me by a friend and a marvelous storyteller, Robert Bela Wilhelm.
The article, “The Art of Listening,” by Henning Mankell, was published in the Dec. 10 New York Times. Mankell is a Swedish author of many books, including the Wallendar novels. He also spent 25 years in Africa, an experience central to what he writes here.
Henning Mankell
His comments on listening are striking: “In Africa listening is a guiding principle. It’s a principle that’s been lost in the constant chatter of the Western world.”
Of great interest too is his observation that western story structure is simply one possibility among many. Mankell writes: “instead of linear narrative, there is unrestrained and exuberant storytelling that skips back and forth in time and blends together past and present. Someone who may have died long ago can intervene without any fuss in a conversation between two people who are very much alive.”
Despite Mr. Berg’s caution that discussions of structure has been known to cause some Californian’s heads to explode, I suffered no ill effects (well, maybe a facial tic or two, but I’m still perfectly normal…honest!).
Actually, I credit a Californian, Syd Field, a hugely influential teacher of screenwriting, with formalizing the three act structure as we know it in movies and novels. You hear Field’s book, Screenplay, recommended at writer’s workshops and conferences. It is one of the best references I know on plot and structure. For anyone interested in writing, the “Three Act Structure” is required learning. Even to rebel against it, you need to know what it is. Here is a simple diagram:
This, of course, is a variation on Aristotle’s observation that every story has a beginning, middle, and end. In modern usage, it has become more formal than that. The length of the acts in movies and in books is not arbitrary: it’s 25%, 50%, 25% by default. These numbers are sometimes even spelled out in screenplay contracts, and they are quoted in numerous other books on writing.
In a similar way, the plot points are not just ordinary troubles: they are sometimes called, “doorways of no return.” Examples of Plot Point 1, the first doorway, are when Luke leaves with Obiwan, when Frodo agrees to carry the ring, and when Louise pulls the trigger. After a character steps through the first doorway, plot point #1, their old lives are gone, no longer an option. Plot point two is when the last battle is joined. When Frodo and Sam gaze down into Mordor, they still have an option to cut and run. That choice disappears once they continue. Once they reach the valley, their only options are victory or death.
If you know the running time and have a watch, you can spot these plot points occurring right on time in recent movies. One thing I like to do, because I love old films, is try to see when and if they occur in the classics on TCM. I watched for this recently as I viewed Lost Horizon, and sure enough, this structure was there. I’ve come to the realization before, that Syd Field was not creating something new, as much as clarifying and codifying something successful screenwriters had already been using because because it works.
Which finally brings me around to the point of this post:
I was paging through some Google search results on “three act structure” and saw one author claim it was “fundamental to storytelling.” As someone who spent 20 years in the Sacramento Storyteller’s Guild, I thought, “Wait a minute. If you want to get ‘fundamental’ you aren’t going to do it with written fiction. Fundamental storytelling means our worldwide oral tradition.
You find it in collections of folklore, the older the better: in epics and fireside tales and sacred stories from all cultures: in recordings of storytellers from library archives or recent storytelling festivals.
It also means stories we can hear at this years Tellabration, a day of storytelling that will happen around the world this year on November, 19. http://www.tellabration.org/
What I am going to do is informally browse and listen to some of my favorite folktales to see what relationship they may or may not have to the three act structure as it has evolved in our literary and cinematic arenas.
We know that every story has a beginning, middle, and end – if it doesn’t, it may be a vignette or a character portrait, but it is not a story. We also know that the progression of folklore and myth tends to be “simple” rather than “complex.” In other words, you aren’t going to find a lot of twists and reversals.
What else? That is what I am going to explore for next time.
Recently I was chatting with a group of other writers about the rule of thumb that you have to grab your audience in the first few pages or lose them. The consensus was that nowadays, you have just the first few lines. One man said, “And you have to start with action.”
I don’t believe this, and said as much here last year (http://wp.me/pYql4-4b). For me, character is primary, and I also have a penchant for mystery. Action for action’s sake usually puts me off – I need to bond with Jake and Elwood before I care about the car chase.
Yet the conversation started me thinking about the kind of books that instantly draw me in. When I got home, I pulled down some novels with openings I admire to look again at what the authors do.
One of my favorite reads of the year was Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, a stunningly original story and beautifully written as well. It includes one of the best openings I have ever read.
“When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim’s warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress. She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother. Of course, she did. This is the day of the reaping.”
In four sentences, we learn a lot about who we’re dealing with: an articulate girl who notices details, loves her sister, does not have a father or very much money, and soon has to face something ominous called “the reaping.” We meet an appealing character, two mysteries (where is her father and what is a reaping), and an instant sense of dread. The opening of this best seller proves that you don’t need action to grab a readers attention: nothing “happens” except the narrator reaches out and finds her sister is not in bed.
Another memorable book I read this year was The Cypress House by Michael Koryta. The first two sentences drew me in: “They’d been on the train for five hours before Arlen Wagner saw the first of the dead men. To that point it had been a hell of a nice ride.” Nothing “happens” except one man has a very unusual vision.
A favorite literary novel, Ariel’s Crossing, 2002, by Bradford Morrow starts like this: “Dona Francisca de Pena never believed in ghosts, and even after she became one herself she couldn’t help but have her doubts.”
Maybe its just the season, but half the stories I pulled down featured ghosts. Here is another, a favorite YA novel, Ghosts I have Been, by Richard Peck, which begins: “I tell you the world is so full of ghosts, a person wonders if there’s a soul to be found on the Other Side. Or anybody snug in a quiet grave. I’ve seen several haunts, and been one myself.”
Such a compelling hook does not happen by accident. Once at a reading, someone asked Richard Peck how many times he revised his opening pages. “Sixty or seventy times on average,” he said. Because of that focus, you can open almost any one of his more than 30 novels to find an enticing beginning. On the Wings of Heroes, an historical novel published in 2007, even begins with action, but it is not action for it’s own sake. It is action crafted to draw in an audience of middle-grade boys:
“Home base was a branch box elder tree in front of the Hisers’ house out by the curb. We could count on the Hisers not to mind when we pounded in from all directions to tag out on their tree. We plowed their sod when we skidded home, bled all over their front walk when we collided, knocked loose the latticework under their porch.”
This is admittedly a small sample of books that appeal to my taste, but they prove several points. Book openings are critical. It takes real art and sometimes sixty or seventy drafts to draw a reader into a story. At the same time, it is no more correct to say a book must start with action than to say that it can’t. There are lots of ways to pique curiosity and interest, and that is what it’s really about.
It may finally be summer. Or spring. Or whatever we’re calling it this year. A week ago it was hailing, and today it’s in the mid-80’s. By itself I would probably not notice since it’s gone back and forth from hot to cold so many times, but this week there were other changes as well
We cut down a huge liquid amber tree that was big when we moved in 25 years ago, and had grown huge over the last quarter century. None of the neighbors could agree on how tall it was, but most guesses came in at 70′ – 80′. The shade in the summer was enough of a bonus to make up for having to trim the limbs every few years, but this winter, which went on forever, it got to be too much. The sap and the birds in the bare branches did a number on my car every night for weeks and weeks and weeks, and weeks and weeks. Did I say it went on for weeks and weeks? That plus the need to replace our roof this summer made up our mind, for we always eyed this behemoth tree warily during storm season. Especially the last few years.
Now two small maple trees about 10′ high stand in the front yard, all staked and watered and fertilized. They seem hopeful and sad at the same time. Hopeful in the golden light of morning and evening, for they carry a promise for the future. Sad in the flat light of noon which seems to emphasize the bare dirt where the stumps and roots of the old tree stood. No amount of wisdom ever entirely gets your gut ready for change.
That’s nothing compared to what the guts of the graduates from the local high school are doing right now. The school is just around the corner. This morning, just after 7:00am they started to drift up the street with parents and grandparents and friends. By 11:00 it was over and all the cars were gone from the curbs. I found myself remembering my own graduation and the biker who led us into the ceremony with a psalm.
As we stood in our caps and gowns in alphabetical order, one of the “A’s” at the front of the line raised his voice and said, “Bretheren and Sisteren, I have a few words to share with you!” Now this was a large biker guy who seldom spoke; he usually just sat around and glowered. But just as they struck up Pomp and Circumstance, this guy pulled out a bible and read the 23d psalm. When all the other memories of high school have faded, that may be the one I remember. Well, maybe not, but it will be right up there.
This morning I found myself watching people returning from the ceremony. A few were laughing and joking, but in general, no one seemed especially upbeat or inspired. School officials mean well, but how can a bit of speechifying while you sit on folding chairs really commemorate what happened, or represent any useful guidance for what comes next?
Too bad the graduates cannot experience the vision quests the plains indians held for their young people. Coming of age should be a time for discerning the themes of one’s life, and the nature of one’s guiding spirits, but that is very seldom what happens these days. Or rather, we all still go on a vision quest, it just is not so well organized or safe. If we are lucky, after a few decades, we begin to get a clue. I found myself wishing the new graduates well, and wishing them a fruitful voyage into the wilderness.
It’s easy to see why I was drawn to the Ballad of Jesse James as a kid; the song paints Jesse as an American Robin Hood:
Jesse James was a lad, he killed many a man,
He robbed the Glendale train.
He stole from the rich and he gave to the poor,
He’d a hand, and a heart, and a brain.
Jesse James
Not surprisingly, singers who have covered this ballad include Woodie Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Bruce Springsteen. The song also has those elements of mystery I believe are central to stories that take up permanent residence in imagination:
Oh, Jesse had a wife who mourned for his life, Three children they were brave, But that dirty little coward, that shot Mr. Howard, Has laid Jesse James in his grave.
The notes in the book of ballads I found as a kid explained that “Howard” was the alias Jesse James used when he married, settled down, and tried to leave his life of crime behind. The dirty little coward was Robert Ford a friend of Jesse, who shot him as he straightened a picture on the wall of his home. Something in us recoils at that and wants to know how Ford could do it. We know in our bones why Dante assigned traitors to the lowest circle of Hell. I am not the only one who wonders, for the story has been dramatized several times, most recently in 2007, when Brad Pitt played Jesse in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
With Jesse James we get to witness a legend in formation, for unlike the Child ballads, this story is just over a hundred years old. We can see how imagination shapes facts the way the ocean smooths pebbles, and something in us prefers the legend – we want to know who the heroes and villains are and we want them larger than life. If you are like me, you’ll be disappointed to learn that no historical record shows the James gang ever using its loot to benefit anyone but themselves.
Jesse James, (1847-1882), and his older brother Frank, came of age during an especially bloody phase of the Civil War – the guerilla conflicts that raged across the border state of Missouri. The James brothers rode with William Quantrill, one of the most notorious guerillas; we would call him a terrorist now. Sixteen year old Jesse joined Quantrill in 1864, and supposedly took part in the Centralia massacre, where the band killed 22 unarmed Union troops then scalped and dismembered them.
After the war, Missouri freed its slaves, but forbade ex-Confederate soldiers from voting, serving on juries or even preaching from pulpits; it was a fertile ground for outlaws. The James brothers joined with Cole, John, Jim, and Bob Younger, and went on decade long spree of robberies that spread from Iowa to Texas, and from Kansas to West Virginia. John Newman Edwards, an editor of the Kansas City Times, published Jesse’s letters and presented him as a symbol of Confederate resistance to Reconstruction. The James-Younger gang was adept at publicity, often hamming it up before crowds during escapes from stagecoach and bank robberies. Because they took safes and strongboxes and did not rob passengers, Edwards’s editorials painted Jesse as Robin Hood.
Jesse James dime novel cover
The Pinkerton Detective Agency was hired in 1874 to stop the James-Younger gang, and after numerous setbacks, Allan Pinkerton took on the case as a personal vendetta. In 1875 he staged a raid on the James homestead and threw an incendiary device into the home. It exploded, killing Jesse’s half-brother, and blowing off one of his mother’s arms. This, more than any editorial, won public sympathy for Jesse James. A bill granting the James and Younger brothers complete amnesty was narrowly defeated in the Missouri legislature.
Jesse married his cousin Zee in 1874, and two of their children survived to adulthood. The downfall of the gang came in 1876, when they raided the First National Bank in Northfield, Minnesota. All of the Younger brothers were killed or captured. Only Frank and Jesse escaped.
Jesse tried to live quietly with his wife after that, in a home near St. Joseph, but he invited Charley Ford, a former gang member, to move in with the family for protection, and Charley brought in his younger brother Bob. Both Ford brothers had been in contact with the governor of Missouri about his reward for Jesse, dead or alive. One day, in 1882, as the three men were getting ready to leave for a robbery, as Jesse stopped to clean dust from a picture on the wall, Bob Ford shot him twice in the back of the head.
***
Memory, both individual and collective, is always mixed with imagination, increasingly so with the passage of time. And if ours is not an era that treats the reputation of heroes well, at least we grasp human complexity. Could Jesse James have been a loving father and a cold blooded killer and sympathetic to the poor? Of course. What was he really like? We are never going to know, and besides, if there was a simple answer, I would not still be researching the legend and listening to the song. Here is Pete Seeger’s version:
When I was six years old, my mother’s cousin, Junie, got married. The two had been lifelong friends, and for the service, I was chosen to be the ring-bearer, and my sister, the flower girl. That summer we drove from our home in upstate New York, to Kalamazoo, where Junie lived. I’m happy to say that recently, Mary and I travelled to Oregon to celebrate Junie’s 50th anniversary.
Junie’s father, the uncle who later taught me to play poker, was a renowned surgeon and they had a beautiful house with a separate guest cottage on a bluff above Lake Michigan. There were lots of adventures along the shore of the lake, like capturing a snapping turtle I recognized as such from my Pocket Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians, but one that stayed with me to the present day involved discovering a treasure trove of ballads.
The guest cottage had a box of old 78 recordings, and a book of lyrics and sheet music for a collection of American ballads. There were two I listened to again and again because they haunted me with questions I didn’t understand then, and still can’t answer now. The two were, “The Ballad of Barbara Allen,” and “The Ballad of Jessie James.”
Barbara Allen, which exists in as many as 92 versions, was first mentioned as “a little Scottish song” in 1666. It came to our shores with the first settlers and was almost certainly popular well before the first printed versions appeared in England in 1750 and in America in 1836. Barbara Allen is classified as Child Ballad 84.
In most versions, Sweet William lies on his death bed and sends his servant to fetch Barbara Allen, who reluctantly comes and says, “Young man, I think you’re dying.” He says he is dying of love for her, but she will not have him, often because he bought a round of drinks for all the girls at the tavern a week before but not for her. Sweet William dies of love for Barbara, and she dies the next day of sorrow. Out of William’s heart there grows a rose and out of Barbara’s, a briar. They grow and grow and finally form a lover’s knot above the graves.
The first thing you notice about this ballad is the lovely melody. Then the haunting and tragic lyrics. And then you realize it makes no sense.
Why is Barbara so cruel, I wondered as a kid and I wonder now. Over a drink in the tavern? Really? I mean, really? Even if, in that day and age, these kids were 14 or 15, and Barbara was a high school prima-donna, I’m not fully satisfied, and I bet you aren’t either.
And then you wonder, if William liked her so much, why did he buy drinks for all the girls except Barbara? As in, “Dude, isn’t that playing a little too hard-to-get?”
There is also the mystery of Barbara’s change of heart and her subsequent death of sorrow. I also wonder what real event or pair of star-crossed lovers might have inspired the song.
The supreme question, of course – and I chewed on this when I first heard the song at age six, is whether people really die of love? Could it happen in the past, in simpler times, before eHarmony? Especially for those like the Celts, who possess a genius for melancholy?
As a kid, I thought no. Later, as a morose teenager, (I used to read Thomas Hardy for “fun”), I would have said yes, pining away is not that hard to believe. As an adult, my response would have been, “Come on, William, get a grip.” Now, from the Buddhist perspective of the ultimate power of mind, I would say, if you really believe you can’t live without a particular person, sooner or later it will come to pass.
This or that answer is not the point – the point is the questions. I’ve recently been mulling over stories I have loved all my life, and so far I think they possess one of two qualities (or both) – one is characters I love so much they seem like a part of me, like Ratty and Mole. The other is mysteries or questions I cannot solve.
Not surprisingly, I have collected quite a few versions of “Barbara Allen,” and this, by Emmy Lou Harris, I think is the best:
“Like many children, I read to be scared witless, to be less lonely, to believe in other possibilities.” – Amy Tan
When I was young, I spent hours devouring a ten volume set of stories and poems called, Journeys Through Bookland: A New and Original Plan for Reading Applied to the World’s Best Literature for Children , 1939.
The illustrations alone could transport you to other worlds, and the world I most liked to visit was that of the Norse gods. Interesting choice for a kid, since this was a world that was destined to end badly. At Rangarok, the last battle, the forces of chaos and darkness would win the day. No doubt this mythic cycle influenced Tolkien’s Silmarillion, and just like our mortal lives or a fleeting sunset, the certainty of an ending lends these northern stories a haunting beauty. Within that canon, there is one story that fascinated me more than others and pops into mind whenever I think of the root stories of my life.
The Death of Balder:
Balder, the god of light and summer, was the second son of Odin and Frigg and beloved of mortals and gods alike. Because he was associated with truth, his mother worried when he was plagued with nightmares of his own death. Frigg travelled the nine worlds, extracting vows from humans, immortals, plants, and metals not to hurt her son. Because Balder was popular, every creature agreed – except the mistletoe, which Frigg considered too insignificant to ask. ( Oops!!!!! )
Now Loki was the trickster and the most fascinating and multi-faceted character of the lot. He wasn’t one of the ruling family of gods, though sometimes humans prayed to him and he helped. As a sower of chaos, he kept things in motion. Coyote did the same for Native Americans, but Loki was much darker and proved deadly to Balder.
Loki and Rhinemaidens, by Arthur Rackham, 1910
Balder was asking for trouble the day he stood before the gods and challenged them to throw their spears and weapons at him. “Gimme your best shot!” In a color plate in Journey’s Through Bookland, there he was, the curly-haired golden boy, strutting his stuff like a star quarter back. Ten years later, reading the Illiad in college, I would learn the word, hubris, but even without the vocabulary, I knew he was asking for trouble. I knew I was supposed to like him, but I honestly thought him a moron. You wanted to slap Balder – and Loki did worse that that.
Balder’s blind brother, Hodr wanted to join the fun, so Loki, in the shape of Thokk, a giantess, offered to help. Did I mention Loki was a shapeshifter? Loki/Thokk handed Hodr a dart made of mistletoe and guided his throw so it pierced Balder’s heart. Thokk also refused to weep at Balder’s funeral, thus preventing him from returning from Hel.
The gods caught Loki and his punishment was terrible: he was chained beneath the earth with a serpent above him dripping searing venom on his face and there he will stay until the bones of the earth are shattered at Ragnarok. Sometimes the pain is so fierce, Loki writhes in agony and the earth shakes. Without the god of light, the final battle draws near, and Fenris the Wolf, strains against the chains he will break at the start of Ragnarok.
Odin battles Fenris at Ragnarok
So why did the story fascinate me so? When I was younger and imagined myself to be wiser, I might have tried to concoct some plausible explanation, but now I agree with Heraclitus (as quoted by James Hillman) who observed that one can never plumb the depths of the soul or be certain of its shifting landscapes and cast of characters. But I am certain that one thing that keeps this story alive for me in imagination is mystery: all the questions I cannot answer.
Why was Balder such a jerk? Well over the years I sort of got a handle on this with the understanding that mythological gods are do not have well-rounded personalities. It is a function of the god of summer to die – though most often in annual cycles.
Why, in spite of my best efforts, did I secretly identify with Loki even as I feared and loathed him? I have no clear idea, except now I suspect that is a common reaction. Somehow it is necessary, and we know it in our bones.
Why such a cruel and unusual punishment for Loki? Isn’t it out of proportion to the crime? I remember I thought so as a kid.
Why did I enjoy a story and illustrations that frightened me out of my wits? That too, I think, is necessary. That’s why we like Stephen King and Mary Shelley and why I’m betting Bram Stoker will outlive Twilight. I believe well meaning people who would clean up fairy tales for children have it all wrong – life itself will sometimes be more scary than any story, and the old tales are like inoculations.
Ultimately, “The Death of Balder” just leaves me wondering – wondering about all kinds of things. About the kind of people who would tell such a story. About how they found their courage in a cosmology in which their gods were doomed to go down in defeat in the end. Wondering if they really believed that or if, like the classical Greeks, they told these as beautiful wisdom tales without thinking they were literally true?
My wondering about a story like this could go on forever, which is probably why it still lives and breathes for me all these decades later.
Once in a while, I worry that I have said everything I have to say, that I have nothing left to blog about. The mood hit yesterday, after I hit the “Publish” button, and it lasted a good 20 minutes.
Then I remembered that for the last three years or so, my battered and yellowing copy of The Tolkien Reader has been stashed in the software cabinet, along with CD’s for Office, Photo-Shop, and Quicken. I have no idea why I put it there, but that’s where it stayed because I knew where it is was and it seemed as good a place as any.
When I say yellowing, I mean the pages of this book are really yellow: it must be at least twenty-five years since I opened it, but I remembered Tolkien’s essay, “On Fairy-Stories” and had a look.
It was downright eerie to see how certain passages I had underlined decades ago are relevant to my present writing interests and concerns. For instance, those who followed this blog in February will remember a three-part series I wrote on shape-shifters. “The trouble with the real folk of Faerie is that they do not always look like what they are,” says Tolkien.
Tolkien asks what a fairy story really is and notes that it is not just a story about fairies. It is also not a story for children, a connection he dismisses as a cultural quirk. Fairy stories are, he says, “stories about…Faerie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being.”
Faerie lies beyond this world, in an intermediate realm, between the extremes of heaven and hell. Tolkien quotes the ballad of “Thomas the Rhymer (Child #37) where the Fairy Queen shows Thomas three paths. They will take the third, which winds into the unknown hills:
O see ye not yon narrow road, So thick beset wi’ thorns and briers? That is the Path of Righteousness, Though after it but few inquires.
‘And see ye not yon braid, braid road, That lies across the lily leven? That is the Path of Wickedness, Though some call it the Road to Heaven.
‘And see ye not yon bonny road That winds about the fernie brae? That is the Road to fair Elfland, Where thou and I this night maun gae.
Analogies jump to mind: the imaginal realm of Archetypal Psychology, the place of soul, between the physical world and the formless world of transcendent spirit. The astral world of Hindu cosmology, described in detail in Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, which is far more subtle than physical reality, and far more dense than the realm of spirit. I am not just being scholarly here, but trying to point to a key fact: Faerie is analogous to the place of dreams and nightmares, of angels and demons, in old and new traditions around the world. I could cite a lot more examples.
According to Tolkien, some our most primal desires lie in our fascination with tales of Faerie: the desire for “the realization, independent of the conceiving mind, of imagined wonder.” Another is “the desire of men to hold communion with other living things.” And finally, we look to “the land of the ever young” in our longing to escape death. And though we can’t pull that off in physical reality, Tolkien says that “fully realized” or “complete” fairy tales end with “imaginative satisfaction” of some of our deep desires. They give us “a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”
I’d recommend this essay, written in 1939, especially to writers of fantasy literature, but to writers in general, for Tolkien has much to say about another primal desire, the desire to be a creator of worlds – “sub-creator” is the phrase he uses.
***
And finally I will end with some unexpected good news for Tolkien fans. Today’s Sacramento Bee reported that filming of The Hobbit has started after numerous delays. This will be a two year, two film project, directed by Peter Jackson, staring Martin Freeman as Bilbo, and also featuring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellan, Cate Blanchett, and Orlando Bloom. Release of film number one is expected in late 2012. Something else to look forward to for those who love to explore the world that Tolkien created.
The First Gates 