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Monthly Archives: November 2012

Making Tension Tense

30 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by gwendolynedward in Writing Tips and News

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From Writer Unboxed:

Making Tension Tense

What really makes tension tense?

The modern reader’s expectation of tension—a story that stands above the crowd—can seem to the aspiring writer sometimes unbearably high. And yet it’s always been true that storytelling is about tension. The reader has always longed to be transported physically to another dimension through sheer adrenaline.

So let’s talk about what makes tension tense.

Omission

The oldest trick in the book.

Hemingway wrote so beautifully of this in his memoir of Paris in the 1920s, A Moveable Feast.

Knowing—as we do—that curiosity is the single most powerful reader motivation out there, we can pretty easily guess that giving the reader a devastating question and then withholding the answer fuels reader curiosity like nothing else.

This is why I read so much vintage mystery. Those things are absolutely chocked to the eyeballs with questions to which the answers are adroitly yet firmly withheld until the final pages. Thriller and romance, the other two biggest-selling modern genres, do the same.

Addicting stuff.

So we writers focus upon our scenes set in concrete details and our forward motion, we eliminate all internal dialog, and we minimalize internal monologue and exposition as much as humanly possible.

Through these simple techniques, we keep the reader’s curiosity piqued yet unsatisfied, page after page, for literally hundreds of pages—until the very. . .last. . .moment. . .

When we limit ourselves in this way to anchor the reader in scenes, it creates—inside the reader—enormous contrast between the stress of not-knowing, or “push,” and the joy of realization, or “pull.”

Two opposite poles, extreme contrast between them, and the reader caught inextricably in the middle, with nowhere to go except forward: this Push/Pull Rhythm moves the story out of the book and into the reader’s body, which is where all story rightfully belongs.

We never tell the reader what’s happening beneath the surface unless it makes that surface only more fascinating. Subtext is for the reader to discover.

Their ultimate delight.

“Does this skirt make my butt huge?”

“It’s fine.” She ran her hands over her own bony hips with a satisfied smile.

Now, what’s missing from this snippet of scene?

Why, the explanation, of course. What are these two characters thinking? What’s going on inside their heads? The reader doesn’t want the writer to tell them. Through simple dialog, action, and description the reader is drawn irrevocably into the scene—into the conflict between these two characters and the subtext obviously leading them forward toward ultimate disaster.

She raised her eyebrows and gave a sour laugh. “I like your tie.”

“So do I,” he said quietly, smoothing it.

What’s happening between these characters? The reader doesn’t want the writer to explain. Once they know that, they stop reading.

The reader wants to follow these characters through the ensuing pages, venturing deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole to find out for themself why these characters are at odds in such a peculiar manner and what they’re going to do about it.

“You’ve got no proof! Either show me your warrant, or I’ll be obliged to call my lawyer.”
The Chief-Inspector smiled. “You’re free to go.”

The man stopped and stared, and after a long moment the color drained from his face.

Why is he free to go? Why is the Chief-Inspector smiling about it? And why does unexpected freedom make the color leave the man’s face?

Will he leave, or has this surprise created such tension between the characters that he’ll be unable to tear himself away, until he learns—and the reader learns with him—what’s behind this smile that must be a mask, this generosity the man believes (or knows) he has not earned?

Questions, questions, questions!

The reader must keep reading in order to learn the answers.

But, then, what about the opposite end of the spectrum of tension technique?

Fleeting Exposure

Sometimes a succinct, focused line of exposition or internal monologue is appropriate—so long as it makes the reader’s internal tension worse:

He gave an odd gesture Maigret had never seen a French businessman make before.

Alleyn didn’t want Troy to know.

In a flash, Miss Marple understood.

All of these brief, fleeting moments of insight beneath the surface of the scenes depend upon the reader having read previous scenes in these novels.

However, the insights don’t show the author’s hand. Instead, the author depends upon the reader to have learned these characters so well that a single line exposes the great significance underlying the actual text—that essential subtext.

Maigret, wonderful creation of the impossibly-productive Belgian author Georges Simenon, is a Parisian Chief-Inspector with a long and spectacular history of solving unsolvable crimes. There is pretty much nothing Maigret has never seen a French businessman do.

Therefore, the reader concludes from the exposition, either this is not a French businessman (as he must, logically, have lead Maigret or at least the reader to believe) or this is a French businessman with some bizarre twist to his personality, making him ever more intriguing and his fate ever more inexplicable.

This reader conclusion pulls the reader further in and makes them even more a part of the story.

But which answer is it? That push fuels the reader’s curiosity!

Alleyn is also a Detective Chief-Inspector, this one a charmer invented by the New Zealand author Ngiao Marsh to forge a brilliant reputation for solving crime for London’s Scotland Yard. Agatha Troy, the reader already knows from earlier in this novel, is Alleyn’s wife, the one person in the world from whom he withholds nothing.

The reader realizes, therefore, that this must be an impossible situation for Alleyn. And so the reader turns the pages quickly, reading with greater and greater anxiety, in order to discover what the charming and unflappable Alleyn will do about this, how he will behave when all other avenues are closed to him and he is trapped in an untenable situation in which he has no other way to behave.

Again, this realization pulls the reader in. Now they have even more investment in discovering what happens in this particular story.

And the fact that they don’t know yet gives them that push of extra tension.

Reader investment!

Miss Marple, of course, is not a Chief-Inspector in any country or even an Inspector at all. She is a ridiculously sharp-witted elderly village woman upon whom nothing is ever lost.

And when the reader learns that Miss Marple finally understands the secret of the mystery, reader investment in the story goes through the ceiling—now they, too, feel an uncontrollable urge to understand, armed as they are with the author’s promise that Miss Marple knows and the assumption that she’ll eventually share that flash of illumination.

Unfortunately, Miss Marple’s creator, the inimitable Agatha Christie, can take another third of the novel to get around to Miss Marple sharing, and in the meantime the reader turns the pages so fast they’re practically tearing them out of the book.

Learning that someone the reader trusts knows a secret is a fabulous pull. They know! the reader thinks. That means I will too!

And Christie’s tantalizing spinning-out toward the moment of sharing gives the reader an enormous push straight forward, deep into those oh, so-secretive pages.

Full-on reader addiction!

Which brings us to the beginnings of stories and the reason so many first lines are exposition or internal monologue, even in stories by authors thoroughly fluent in the techniques of creating tension through scenes.

Because that’s the one place in which the writer must lasso the reader’s curiosity without relying upon knowledge of previous scenes.

This is also why we can get away with hooks in which the reader has no idea on earth what’s going on.

Readers love to be mystified!

Truly, we don’t want to write stories about which the reader says, “Oh, I see. I get it. All is explained.”

We want to write stories that make the reader sit bolt upright with their hair on end and shriek uncontrollably, “I can’t stand how good this is!”

 

Secrets of Story Structure – Interview with Hollywood Writer Eric Luke

25 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by gwendolynedward in Writing Tips and News

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From Mythic Scribes:

Writer and director Eric Luke has worked on films for Paramount, Disney, and Fox TV.  He’s the writer of the science-fiction cult classic Explorers, which starred Ethan Hawke and the late River Phoenix. 

I recently chatted with Eric about story development and narrative structure, as well as his latest project, the self-aware audiobook Interference.

How did you get into screenwriting?

I’ve wanted to make movies ever since I can remember.  I picked up the family wind-up 16mm camera, started shooting, and very quickly found out I’d need a narrative to keep people interested.  The first scripts were more like verbal storyboards, and I’ve always tried to hang onto that: just enough description to get an image into the reader’s head, then onto the next and the next: a really fast read.  M. Night Shyamalan talks about the Sixth Sense script where he rethought the format: sentence fragments to keep the pace as fast, as visual as possible.

When I graduated from UCLA film school, the only way into the industry without a really slick, really expensive reel was to write a spec script and pitch it, and that’s when I seriously started hitting the keyboard every day: as a way to be able to make the movies that were in my head.

Where did the idea for Explorers come from?

I was driving home from a frustrating job editing Special Effects in North Hollywood, literally looked up at the moon and was hit by the idea.  When I was kid the first NASA moon shots were happening and everybody’s imagination was captured.  I used to sit in an empty garbage can and pretend with my brother and sisters that we were launching it into space.

So the idea was to recapture that childhood feeling when anything was possible, when your imagination was more real than the world around you.  It was about trying to bring that particular childhood dream to life, make it come true in the real world, and the reel world of course.

Once you had the idea, what steps did you take to develop it into a story?

I ran it through a series of science fiction requirements: what would it take for kids to actually launch themselves into space?  Couldn’t be propulsion or they’d be flattened; they’d need protection from that harsh, airless environment: the cosmic rays, the temperatures, etc.  A lot of the character and plot points came from addressing those problems, and then developing them into something entertaining.  The three kids were based on friends I had at that age, and the particular ones who had the skills to actually build a spaceship.

It’s pretty rare for a screenplay to make it into production, let alone become a beloved cult classic like Explorers.  How did this happen?

It almost DIDN’T happen.  My original agent rejected it, I went to another agency, they sent it out and all the studios didn’t get it.  Then a producer responded, I did a rewrite, it got sent out to particular executives and one at Paramount really liked it.  It got picked up and I was put on a studio contract, something pretty much unheard of now.  Then it was passed on by a whole list of directors until Joe Dante signed on.  It was a tortuous route but it all led to production.

It was a strange film in the end, too.  It wasn’t a hit initially, but I’ve met many people over the years who remember it fondly as one of their childhood favorites.  It hasn’t evaporated from the public consciousness, which has been really gratifying.

Explorers: Ethan Hawke, River Phoenix, and Jason Presson.

 

For people my age, Explorers was one of those films that every kid was talking about.  And even today, it still holds up really well.  Is it true that you had a cameo in it?

It’s true.  We needed a teacher who was a complete jerk and somehow I got cast.  Hmm.

How important is structure to telling a great story?

In some ways structure  is the most important part of any narrative.  And the dance between instinct and structure.  Planning a narrative you find yourself shifting back and forth between inspiration (a great idea for a scene) and structure (how does this fit in?).  It’s a constant struggle between right and left brain, isn’t it?

In your experience, is there any specific structure that lends itself really well to telling a story?

It’s different for every story.  If it’s a big canvas like INTERFERENCE, you want a mosaic structure: several independent, intersecting story lines.  If the plot involves memory, do you want parallel timelines running?  If it’s a smaller, more intimate story, you probably want one point of view, but do you want to cut outside that to an omniscient narrator?  Will you lose focus by doing that?  You constantly question your original concept of the structure to make sure you’re not stagnating, that the reader will be surprised not only by the plot, but by how it’s revealed.

You said that there’s a tension between inspiration and structure.  Can you elaborate on that?

I go through a period when the “big idea” first pops into my head where I try not come up with a structure at all.  If I consciously keep things loose, like pinning index cards randomly to a bulletin board, you give yourself the freedom to fully explore the whole concept, take it to places it might not have gone otherwise.

There’s lots of great software out there to capture ideas in this stage.  My favorite is Scrivener, because it helps you move to the next stage:  as you look at all the ideas, you feel the structure emerging, to involve as many of your favorite ideas, scenes, dialogue, etc, as possible.  And the ones that don’t fit start to become obvious.  Sometimes you have to get rid of your favorites because they’ll actually weaken the story.

Then once you’ve got the structure, it can actually suggest more scenes to illustrate missing parts of the plot.  That’s where the balance comes in: it tips back and forth. Great scene: necessary plot point: back again.

How is structuring a novel different from structuring a film?

Writing a novel is a luxury.  You get to craft moments, passages, play with the actual language.  A novel is the finished product; you’re writing the actual word that the reader will see, perceive, adopt, and hopefully transform into an image or emotion.  A screenplay is a blueprint for the final product: the film. You’re writing for the studio, the director, the actor, trying to get them to imagine the movie in your head.  It’s all about economy, shorthand.  How can I get this image, this cinematic moment, into the reader’s head in the shortest amount of time, create a film experience for them through reading?  Lots of short, choppy sentences.  Lots of visual images.  No poetic passages.  Maybe a few.  Very few.  Like.  That.

Film structure is very strict and sometimes confining.  It has to work like a well-oiled machine because it’s so brief and fast.  The three act structure (four acts if you’re James Cameron) is sometimes obvious, and clunky at its worst, because you have so little time; one scene has to lead directly to the next at a rapid clip, with little or no time to stop and explore.  With a novel you feel the same highs and lows, the general act structure, but again, you have the luxury of exploring how you get there.  A character can literally sit and think about what’s going on, make a decision, and it can be one of the most dramatic scenes in the book.  That rarely happens in film because it’s an almost purely visual medium.  The ability to write interior drama makes all the difference, even affecting big structural changes.

What is INTERFERENCE?   

INTERFERENCE is an audiobook about an audiobook… that kills.  (to be said in deepest, raspiest voice possible.)

It’s “meta horror” because it’s self-aware, self-referential: you’re listening to the same thing that the characters are listening to.  I was able to incorporate all sorts of audio production that plays with the levels of reality.   When the Voice of the Narrator, the Unknown Evil at the heart of the horror concept, talks to the characters, it’s addressing you too at points.  When the characters hear bursts of static that become a trigger for mayhem, you hear that static in your own ear buds.  The effect is very creepy and I think keeps the listener off-balance.  It works well on the page, but it’s really meant to be downloaded and listened to as an audiobook, just as the characters are doing. Response has been great; the download numbers keep climbing.

How did the idea for this project come to you?

I got the idea from listening to the self-recorded audiobooks at Podiobooks.com.  The authors are almost always impassioned, completely devoted to their creative vision, published or not.  I realized that during the many hours you spend listening to an audiobook, you develop an intense, personal connection with the narrator.  On some level it reminds you of being read to as a child, before you could read by yourself.  Well, what if the narrator was in some way exploiting this?  What if this Voice was aware of your life, and was trying to manipulate you through the narrative?  The concept grew from there, and the idea to record it as a self-recorded audiobook: the exact thing that’s inspiring fear in the narrative.

What were some of the challenges of structuring this particular story?

It needed scope.  It’s about four characters and the effect that the central horror conceit, the Voice of the Narrator, is having on their lives in different ways: seduction, blackmail, threat, emotional bullying.  So the mosaic novel structure was the best way to go.

George R R Martin does this extremely well, of course.  You see the whole plot through many different lenses, points of view, so you simultaneously get intimate character development and become involved in solving the puzzle of what’s going on because each character is only aware of their piece of the story.  It draws you in.  The danger is that you’re thrown off balance by skipping between four or five narratives, but you also get to write chapters that lead up to cliff-hangers that don’t get resolved until you cut back to that character again.  It’s a great way to propel the plot.

How can someone listen to INTERFERENCE?

INTERFERENCE is available free on iTunes here.

For more info, including future projects, my website is Quillhammer.com

Finally, do you have any practical tips for a writer who is having a hard time working out the structure of his story?  Is there any sort of system or method that you would recommend?

I’ve tried a lot of the approaches that are out there, including Dramatica, and finally realized I was always coming back to Scrivener.  It’s not so much a story system as the perfect organizational Inbox.  It catches all your loose ideas and then helps you organize them, mine the structure, with complete flexibility.

I think each story creates its own approach, but one of the most important phases is that initial time when ideas are just going off in your head like fireworks.  Anything you can do to enable that is most important.  And anything you’re doing that limits it is the worst thing you can do to a story.

Keep your mind open as long as you can before you decide on a structure. That way you’re sure you’ve explored just how good it can be.  You might pick a direction and miss a whole better story.  Keep stepping away from it and looking at the big picture.  Then have a cup of coffee, put in your earbuds and go for a walk.  That’s the best method I’ve come up with.

How to Write Story Through Character

21 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by gwendolynedward in Writing Tips and News

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from Stavros Halvatzis:

What comes first, character or story? Does story lay the character, or character lay the story? This perennial chicken-or-the-egg question has many supporters on either side of the fence, or, road, if you prefer. Despite the levity implicit in the metaphor, however, the topic has serious implications for the way we approach writing a novel or screenplay.

A Character’s Story

One of the dangers facing an inexperienced writer writing what he considers to be a thrilling action-packed story is that he may loose sight of character motivation. One big event slams into another, and before he knows it, he’s written a story which uses characters like puppets in the hands of a novice puppeteer – their movement is trite, abrupt, and artificial.

So how do we avoid this without sacrificing pace and excitement in the stories we tell, or, without weighing down our thinking with reams of character traits and back-story? The simplest and most unobtrusive way to do so, I’ve found, is to take the central thought/philosophy/emotion of a character and keep it foremost in mind when writing her scenes.

Scarab II

In my forthcoming science-fiction novel, Scarab II, the protagonist, Jack Wheeler is drawn into a rerun of the cataclysmic events that unfolded in the North West Province of South Africa some five years previously. In Scarab I, Jack is swept along by events, forced to react to rather than to initiate action. But in the follow-up novel, Jack has a better understanding of what lies in store. He is also haunted by what occurred in the past and driven by one overpowering question: can he do anything to prevent the suffering and mayhem that is standard fare in the world today?

This question, born out of a troubled conscience and the knowledge that he may indeed have the power to intervene, motivates most of his underlying thoughts and actions. Understanding this essential aspect of Jack’s character has allowed me to write scenes that are powerfully motivated – an important part of fleshing out an inner journey that explains and fuels the outer one.

In Summary

Identifying the essential preoccupation of each character, and keeping this foremost in mind as you chart the outer journey, allows you to write scenes that are inwardly motivated and stay on track.

Call for Abstracts: Seeking Lovecraftian Researchers

17 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by gwendolynedward in Writing Tips and News

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From NecronomiCon Providence:

Seeking new Lovecraft-related research for NecronomiCon Providence, 2013

The Lovecraft Arts and Sciences Council, Inc. (the organizer of NecronomiCon Providence) is seeking submissions of academic works that explore all aspects of the works and life of famed weird fiction writer, H.P. Lovecraft, including the influence of history, architecture, science (anthropology, biology, geology, etc), and popular culture (movies, theater, etc), on his works.

We particularly hope to foster exploration of Lovecraft as a rationalist who created an elaborate cosmic mythology, and how this mythology was influenced by, and has come to influence, numerous other authors and artists before and since. However, all submissions that contribute to a greater understanding of Lovecraft and associated authors and artists of “weird tales” (science fiction, fantasy, horror, etc) are encouraged.

For this component of the Convention, we are particularly interested in soliciting novel work from young or new academics. If selected, presenters should be prepared to deliver a twenty minute oral presentation summarizing their thesis, and are invited to submit a brief MS for possible inclusion in a proceedings publication.

Selected talks will be presented together as part of a mini-conference within the overall convention framework of NecronomiCon Providence, August 23-25, 2013. Interested scholars, whether faculty, graduate, undergraduate, or independent, should send a 250-300 word abstract, preferably in .doc or .pdf format, to keeper@necronomicon-providence.com by May 23, 2013 for consideration.

For more information on our convention, to learn more about the themes to be explored, and to sign up for email updates, please visit our website: necronomicon-providence.com

NB: In addition to these talks, NecronomiCon Providence will also feature numerous traditional panels and presentations given by many of the top names in the Lovecraftian community.

The Human Beneath the Hero

16 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by gwendolynedward in Writing Tips and News

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from Mythic Scribes:

A common trait of beginner fiction is that its protagonists are all – to use the technical term – “total badasses.” They have no appreciable sense of fear, pain, apprehension, or doubt. They take multiple drastic wounds without slowing down, are threatened with all manner of terrible fates without flinching, and always seem to know the right thing to do.

When we are young, we might mistake the lack of obvious signs of these emotions for the lack of the emotions themselves – few of us possess enough discipline at an early age to conceal fear and pain, and thus have trouble understanding the concept. As we grow older, though, we realize that other people feel these things as well – even the ones who rarely show it.

To Fear Is Human…

These emotions – fear, pain, doubt – are part of the human condition. If your hero is impervious to them, it is harder to understand them and harder to imagine ourselves as them. The vast majority of readers experience these emotions on a regular basis just going about our daily, boring lives. We cannot bridge the gulf from being terrified by the possibility of missing the bus in the morning to facing down hordes of orcs with nary a twitch of the eyebrow.

… to Persevere, Divine

The lack of these emotions doesn’t make someone strong, it makes them inhuman. Take Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator from Terminator II – he’s a robot, and has none of our squishy human weaknesses. He’s fun to root for, but we do not empathize with him because he isn’t like us. He’s not really a character – he’s a spectacle.

Characters who display weakness at appropriate times are easier to relate to. Characters who triumph over them are easy to admire. An excellent example is the character of Ellen Ripley in the movie Aliens. The heroine is obviously terrified most of the time, but goes on anyway. She needs to fight on through that terror in order to save a small aquatic amphibian. She never really manages to conquer her fear – we see it break through over and over and over, right up to the end of the movie. Ripley, though, never lets it get the better of her. She deals with it and keeps running, fighting, and punching giant aliens in the face with a robot suit.

Pain Hurts

In addition to lack of emotion, the seeming inability to feel pain is a hallmark of the juvenile fantasy and science fiction hero. Putting aside the fact that an endless stream of absurd action movies has trivialized injuries that in reality are life-threatening, half the time our flesh robot of a hero doesn’t even seem to notice his wounds. Even long after the action is over, when every bodily process that normally helps us ignore pain (adrenaline, focus, etc) has worn off, the guy with several holes punched in him pays them no mind.

Show Us A Better Version of Ourselves

My friends, let your characters feel pain. Let them fear and doubt and hesitate. Then show us how they overcome these things through struggle and focus and discipline. Not only will they seem more human, but they’ll seem more like heroes. They will be people we look up to and wish to emulate, because we know that underneath the strength and the courage lies a human being who is frail and frightened – just like us.

Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America: Authors Guild Statement on Penguin-Random House Merger Posted by Victoria Strauss for Writer Beware

12 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by gwendolynedward in Writing Tips and News

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The following statement was sent by the Authors Guild to its members on Sunday. The Guild labels the proposed merger between Penguin and Random House (which would create the world’s largest publisher) “unsettling,” and urges “close scrutiny from antitrust officials at the Justice Department or the FTC.”

————————————-
Here’s our storm-delayed member alert on last Monday’s unsettling announcement that Random House and Penguin, the two largest trade book publishers in the U.S., are merging.

Although Random House has said that the combination would control 25% of the book market, that appears to significantly understate things. The companies’ share of the U.S. trade book market for fiction and narrative non-fiction likely exceeds 35%. Their share in certain submarkets is no doubt even higher. The merger merits close scrutiny from antitrust officials at the Justice Department or the FTC.

While the companies discuss the cost savings from this merger through consolidating warehousing and other operations, those potential efficiencies for such large publishers are probably minor. Economies of scale only go so far. The business logic of creating Penguin Random House would appear to have much more to do with the ongoing restructuring of the book industry. Barnes & Noble is now the sole brick-and-mortar giant; Amazon’s hold on online bookselling is more solid than ever.

“Survival of the largest appears to be the message here,” said Scott Turow, Authors Guild president. “Penguin Random House, our first mega-publisher, would have additional negotiating leverage with the bookselling giants, but that leverage would come at a high cost for the literary market and therefore for readers. There are already far too few publishers willing to invest in nonfiction authors, who may require years to research and write histories, biographies, and other works, and in novelists, who may need the help of a substantial publisher to effectively market their books to readers.”

We’ll keep you updated on developments in this matter.

The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of the Genre

07 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by gwendolynedward in Writing Tips and News

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from Open Letters Monthly:

If a balloon floats into the atmospheric realm known as Oblivion, then it follows that anyone grasping hold of that balloon’s ribbon will float into Oblivion, too. Which brings us to the fairy tale—that happy helium-filled thing—and all the academics dangling thereupon.

In the most recent of his oeuvre’s sixty-plus books, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre, Jack Zipes—a former professor and Director of the Center for German and European Studies at the University of Minnesota—contends the genre has sufficient ballast to remain culturally relevant. But then up, up he goes: carried ever higher even as he argues that his feet are on the ground.

But let’s start from the beginning. (Or, actually, an approximation of the beginning. As Zipes declares several times, it’s impossible to define folklore’s origins. So here we are unable to resist: our story begins a while ago, back then, once upon a time.)

“Fairy tales, like our own lives, were born out of conflict,” Zipes writes. The stories “confront the injustices and contradictions of so-called real worlds.” As such, their function was–and, as Zipes would have it, still is–to engender solidarity and hope among disenfranchised classes, and spread awareness of social inequality. In the tales, peasant women want to marry princes and peasant men want to be them; straw is spun into gold and domestic pets develop the ability to speak and help their owners toward financial prosperity; evil kings and queens (and step-parents) are punished and the proletariat triumph. “The magic of the tales,” we learn, “can be equated to the wish-fulfillment and utopian projections of the people.”

This last quote comes from Zipes’s first book, Breaking the Magic Spell, published in 1979; while his more recent work is less prone to lengthy denunciations of capitalist commodity production, he has continued for the last three decades to approach fairy tales from a populist perspective–he could likely be considered the genre’s Howard Zinn. As he notes here and now in 2012, “During the past forty years…I have endeavored to demonstrate that the historical evolution of storytelling reflects struggles of human beings worldwide to adapt to their changing natural and social environments.” A noble aim, but one sometimes difficult to discern, as his prose tends to be dipped deeply into the obfuscating murk of academic jargon, where three syllables are always better than one.

As an oral form, fairy tales have been around for millennia; it wasn’t until the 17th century that they were written down for the first time. Somewhat more recently, Zipes laments, they’ve been commercialized into TV and films and, with each new incarnation, the fairy tale’s ability to depict social struggles has diminished. Likewise, the fairy tale’s narrative edge has been continually dulled; whereas folklore was once rife with inventive murders, unwanted pregnancies, and the occasional cannibalistic feast, the various media have redacted, airbrushed, and photoshopped much of this content away. Which means, basically, the stories are less fun. It was Disney, Zipes says, that did the most damage, kidnapping the fairy tale and malnourishing it until it was nearly dead, editing out any edifying material in favor of listless princesses and happy endings. And although Zipes really seems to believe that some relatively obscure feminist artists might restore the genre’s vibrancy, the next evolutionary step in his timeline of folklore is, inevitably, extinction. (Although, if one pays any attention at all to mainstream culture, one can see that the genre is actually fairly resurgent.)

It’s never, of course, a good thing to let the masses become too hopeful. Inevitably they will start wanting things. So, Zipes claims, the aristocracy appropriated fairy tales, thereby squelching folklore’s revolutionary soul. Especially in the 1600s, when the stories began appearing widely in print, the upper classes seized control of the genre. “Who could read?” Zipes asks. “Who controlled the printing and the distribution of texts? Once the folk tale began to be interpreted and transmitted through literary texts its original ideology and narrative perspective were diminished, lost, or replaced. There was a switch in class emphasis to either the aristocratic or the bourgeois.”

In his account of “Beauty and the Beast” that appears in Breaking the Magic Spell, Zipes demonstrates pretty persuasively how the folk tale was subverted. The story, he explains, is rooted in ancient fertility ceremonies wherein virgins were sacrificed to please dragon- and serpent-gods; in exchange, those gods were trusted to then help the community. Similar motifs appeared in innumerable folk tales until 1740, when Madame Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve, a courtesan and salon-goer, penned “Beauty and the Beast” and rendered moot all other variations on this theme. Her story, Zipes says, “Totally transform[s] the original meanings of the folk-tale motifs and seek[s] to legitimize the aristocratic standard.”

The plot and its disentanglement: There was a rich merchant who lived on a rue. He had three daughters, two of whom were spoiled brats who lazed about the house, and also Belle, who was relatively sweet. When the merchant’s fortune was one day lost, his children remained unwilling to work for a living. One day, while walking through the forest, the merchant lost his way. He found shelter, though, in a conveniently situated castle. On his way out the following morning, the merchant tried to take with him a rose from the castle’s garden. Unfortunately, it turned out this rose was the prized possession of the castle’s owner, The Beast, who demanded that the merchant pay for the flower with his life or one of his daughters’. Belle agreed to live in the castle—she insisted on it—to save her father. In literature’s most sympathetic depiction of Stockholm Syndrome, she eventually grew to love The Beast. She consented to marry him, and suddenly he was transformed into a prince. Her sisters, meanwhile, were turned into statues and placed in front of Belle’s new palace.

“So,” Zipes writes, “the good fairy now intercedes and rewards Belle because she has preferred virtue above either wit or beauty while her sisters are to be punished because of their pride…Surely this was a warning to all those bourgeois upstarts who forgot their place in society and could not control their ambition.” By hijacking a story archetype and using it to demonstrate that one should know one’s place in the world and stay there, Villeneuve deprived the fairy tale of its emancipatory spirit.

Zipes admits this example is an extreme one. Nevertheless, he notes that many fairy tales as they exist in print today still heavily bear the markings of their first chroniclers: Joseph and Wilhelm Grimm, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, Carlo Collodi. As these individuals sometimes had an untoward social or political agenda, their influence, he argues, wasn’t always harmless.

Grimm Bros., Inc.

In the introduction to his translation of The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (1987), Zipes summarizes how the Grimms altered the many folk tales they collected, essentially recreating the stories in their own images. The brothers’ major publication was Kinder- und Hausmarchen (Children’s and Household Tales), which first appeared in 1812, and which they continued to revise, sometimes radically, until the seventh edition in 1857. In all, they had collected 211 tales, including “Rapunzel,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Cinderella,” “Little Snow-White” and “Rumpelstiltskin.”

According to lore, the Grimms traveled the countryside gathering tales from peasants. In actuality, they invited storytellers—most of them educated young women from the middle- and upper-classes—into their home, and there, between 1807 and 1812, recorded what they heard. Also they collected stories from other literary texts. Then they set about creating an ideal type for the fairy tale that happened to reflect their personal upbringing and preferences. Raised as devout Christians, they “added numerous Christian expressions and references” into their texts. Jacob, the elder brother, was a chaste, fastidious man who remained a bachelor his entire life; among his changes was to eliminate almost all erotic content from the tales. Wilhelm, who eventually married and had three children, revised several editions of the tales to “make the contents of the tales more acceptable to a children’s audience.” Also, they’re implicated in molding the tales to support Germany’s somewhat rigid patriarchal hierarchy, diminishing the heroines until they were little more than quivering, meek young ladies waiting for their handsome saviors to come and rescue them from their towers, step-parents, and/or poverty.

Zipes recounts all this plainly. Although in his work he is usually venomous in apportioning accusations of sexism (as, to be fair, are several scholars of folklore), he seems to accept the Grimms’ patriarchal attitude as a necessary wart on the genre’s history—fair or not as the Grimms’ treatment of women may have been, without the Children’s and Household Tales these stories would have been completely lost. Still, it is exactly this thread—sexism—that seems to have been most vigorously taken up by future interpreters, and one might briefly wonder if this would have been the case had the Grimms not been so liberal with their social conservatism.

Disney, Inc.

If the fairy tale is dead, then so too would be the academic discipline that is its faithful parasite. So it’s fun watching Zipes pretend fairy tales are still valid, while simultaneously demonstrating that they’ve already choked on their own poisoned apple.

Sprinkled throughout his books are grievances against Walt Disney and his films, which coalesce in his chapter “Breaking the Disney Spell” from Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale (1994).

Here Zipes charges Disney with wrongfully and egotistically erasing from public consciousness the names Grimm, Andersen, Collodi, and Perrault, as if he, Disney, were the tales’ true creator (and as if this erasure was Disney’s ultimate intent). Moreover, like Madame Villeneuve and her rendition of “Beauty and the Beast,” Zipes claims Disney neutered the genre’s ability to bring about social consciousness. “It would not be an exaggeration,” he says, “to assert that Disney was a radical filmmaker who changed our way of viewing fairy tales, and that his revolutionary technical means capitalized on an American innovation and utopianism to reinforce the social and political status quo.”

In recounting Disney’s rise, Zipes’s logic becomes desperate and over-intellectualized. “Animation is trickery,” he says, “for still images are made to seem as if they move…as long as one controls the images…one can reign supreme.” Although his reasoning might be just a small tad bit of a stretch, it underscores how deeply he loathes Disney’s folkloric incarnations, and this loathing makes his prose (for once) come alive.

Like the Grimms, Disney fingerprinted the fairy tales that he sought to tell, “project[ing] the enjoyable fairy tale of his own life through his own images.” Growing up, Disney was relatively poor, endured an overbearing father, and was thwarted in his love life. He encountered professional disappointment – when he left home at age eighteen, no one would hire him as an artist; following some popular early films, he faced bankruptcy after getting hoodwinked on distribution deals. Characters he’d created had essentially been stolen by producers, and he was denied any profit. He vowed thenceforth to retain complete control on all his productions. As his studio began to thrive, he demanded no-compete contracts from his business partners and deprived his animators and writers any credit from the films they worked on. It’s not so tough to see Disney’s life as a transformation from the prototypical peasant into the prototypical evil stepmother.

Zipes believes Disney’s entire career was a willful effort to diffuse his autobiography through his fairy tale films, and uses Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as an example for how this was achieved:

To a certain extent, Disney…had been keeping ‘evil’ connivers and competitors from the entrance to the Disney studios throughout the 1920s. Therefore, it is not by chance that Disney’s next major experiment would be a banished princess, loved by a charming prince, who would triumph over deceit and regain the rights to her castle. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was to bring together all the personal strings of Disney’s own story with the destinies of desperate Americans, who sought hope and solidarity in their fight for survival during the Depression of the 1930s.

The reader may have a hard time making the connection between Disney “keeping ‘evil’ connivers” away from his studios and the inevitability of his making a film about a banished princess. But that’s why this particular chapter is so readable. Illogic, in this case, produces something resembling art.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, or “Little Snow-White,” is the story of a narcissistic mother’s jealousy. A beautiful queen wishes for a daughter “as white as snow,” and soon gives birth to one. Yet when the girl grows up she becomes more beautiful than her mother. So, naturally, the queen wants her killed. When the hunter she enlists for the job proves too soft-hearted, the queen herself tries to murder Snow White—who is now residing in a forest with seven dwarfs—first by tying her bodice so tightly she nearly suffocates, then by poisoning her. Snow White succumbs to the poison and appears to have died. An evidently necrophilic prince happens by and falls in love with the princess, and demands that her body remain preserved. Nobody seems to have any problem with this. Eventually Snow White wakes up and marries the prince. The queen dies.

To illustrate Disney’s manipulations, Zipes gives a point-by-point description of the differences between the Snow White tale as conceived by the Grimms and by Disney: In the Grimms’ version, Snow White is the queen’s biological daughter, whereas in Disney’s the queen is her stepmother; the Grimms’ Snow White doesn’t do chores, yet on film she works as something like a maid in the castle; the prince plays a negligible role in the Grimms’ plot (Snow White wakes up at random, the prince absent from the scene), but Disney’s prince is devoted to Snow White from the outset and his kiss is required to rouse her; the dwarfs are anonymous in the Grimms’ telling, while Disney’s dwarfs are differentiated and become integral characters that the viewer can’t help but be charmed by; finally, Disney omits the original ending, in which the dwarfs force the queen to dance in red hot cast-iron shoes until she dies.

Zipes has two main criticisms concerning Disney’s editorializing. First, he chastises Disney because his characters are ‘stereotypes’ (even though the Grimm’s characters are called “the queen,” “the king,” “the first dwarf,” “the second dwarf,” and so on). Second, and with greater urgency, he nails Disney for blatant and rampant sexism. Snow White, he notes, isn’t exactly the prototype of a Strong Female Lead; she more or less hangs out worthlessly in a hut, trusting the dwarfs to keep her safe and hoping for her prince to save her. The film’s trademark song is “Someday My Prince Will Come.” The prince – and, Zipes asserts by Freudian extension, Disney himself – “takes all the credit as champion of the disenfranchised.”

That sexism was already manifest in the Grimms’ version is something Zipes is now evidently very willing to ignore. At times Zipes makes it seem as if Disney invented sexism, and that his ultimate goal was not to produce really stunningly beautiful movies, entertain audiences, or even to profit off them, but to declaw the genre of whatever revolutionary spirit it might once have had and to enact the subservience of women.

If I like a Disney movie, does it mean I’ve been manipulated? If I’m seduced by its artistry, am I then socially irresponsible? Am I unable to watch a Disney film in anything but a drool-mouthed, glaze-eyed stupor, as my nachos heat up in the microwave? Will I perpetuate the patriarchy if I like Snow White? As one reads Zipes’s arguments, it’s easy to feel one’s been somehow duped into enjoying Disney films despite their egregious shortcomings. But turn those arguments around, and they lose their potency, become somewhat ridiculous.

Now, Inc.

Zipes spends much of The Irresistible Fairy Tale pointing out the hidden gems in the fairy tale’s history and present—the ignored fabulists and movements that better embodied the revolutionary spirit of fable-telling. It’s a sort of People’s History of folklore. He shows that some fairy tales do indeed treat women fairly (most of these, until recently, untranslated), champions forgotten fair-minded folklorists like Giuseppe Pitre and Laura Gonzenbach, and finds salvation in contemporary feminist takes on tales by artists such as Kiki Smith, Cindy Sherman, and Paula Rego. Put together, this is a bit as if a German soldier were to admire the few flowers left behind in the earth the Russians have torched, as food supplies dwindle and winter looms.

But in another part of society—one that rarely comes into contact with museums and other similarly marble cultural institutions—the fairy tale continues to thrive in various iterations that folklore scholars completely ignore. The examples are obvious and probably not very enlightening, maybe because the dissemination of fairy tales has never been a nuanced enterprise. For starters I’d invite Zipes to turn on his radio. An entire fabulist world, replete with kings and queens descended from traditional folklore, and recounted by, and for, a disgruntled and disenfranchised proletariat, has emerged through hip-hop. Certainly this genre of music “reflects struggles of human beings…to adapt to their changing natural and social environments.”

Beyond the fleeting references – i.e. Slick Rick’s invocation of “Mirror mirror on the wall” from “La Di Da Di” (which is, of course, later included in Snoop Dogg’s “Lodi Dodi”) etc. – several songs and albums adhere explicitly to specific fairy tale narratives, tropes, and themes. Outkast’s “Da Art of Storytellin’ (Part 1)” follows pretty closely the arc of a “Little Red Riding Hood” story; Nas’s “One Mic” sticks to the “Aladdin” narrative, exemplified by the rise into wealth from poverty with help from a magic object (in this case, yes, a microphone).  Let’s not linger too long here. But I do want to make the very broad point that if fairy tales can be instruments to arouse social consciousness, I have to believe that no one is making better use of them in this context than hip-hop artists.

Clearly this is a superficial analysis. About, in fact, as superficial as it could possibly be. But that’s the thing: this connection is unexplored. It seems that if Zipes and others want folklore studies to remain relevant, then they should study the influence of folklore on relevant cultural entities. (Is de-legitimizing hip-hop as a folkloric medium any different than the 18th century aristocracy de-legitimizing the fairy tale itself?)

All due respect to Smith, Sherman, and Rego; their work certainly uses fairy tales to express injustice, and can be exciting in its newness—but always in a museum-ish sort of way. If, as Zipes asserts, the fairy tale was, and can still be, a means to engage the collective imagination and confront unpleasant social realities, then it seems following the genre’s incarnations into libraries and art galleries is a down-the-rabbit-hole endeavor, and an expert’s time might be better spent observing media with which people are more actively engaged.

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