When Harriet Beecher Stowe set out to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a fictional tale told largely from the point of view of sympathetic slaves on theKentucky plantation owned by the evil Simon Legree, her primary goal was to earn a bit of money to supplement her preacher husband’s meager salary – there were seven little Stowes to feed.  What she wrought, however, was a mass movement against slavery north of theMason-Dixon Line, and vast outrage as the south felt besieged by abolitionist pressure during the years leading to the Civil War.

 If the author had written a diatribe against slavery instead of a sympathetic portrait of a mother, the beautiful Eliza who sacrificed herself to save her little son from slavery, she would not have reached the audience she did, nor would her writing have had the same effect.  Through fiction, she touched the hearts of parents around the world.  To save all the Elizas and their little Harry’s, slavery had to be abolished.

When Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the White House he is alleged to have said, “So you’re the little lady who started this great war.” 

I doubt there are many books in history that are credited even in jest with starting a war, but once in a while a work of fiction will touch the hearts and minds – and stomachs as in the case of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle – of the readers with such force that they are inspired to action. 

Like Mrs. Stowe, many of us who write fiction do so in order to support our families.  Beyond that, I believe that we hope that in the course of delivering a story well told, we also give our readers insight into something that is corrupt or unfair or just plain wrong.   I know I do.

Quite a few years ago, while in the process of doing research for the book that became A Hard Light, I encountered a situation that I thought was just wrong.  And a plot was born.

It was shortly after the 1992 riots, AKA the Rodney King riots, andSouthern California still seethed.  Probably hoping to take advantage of the emotional, anti-cop atmosphere of that time, the lawyer for two career criminals – real bad guys – convicted many years earlier of murdering an off-duty sheriff’s deputy, managed to schedule a court hearing to re-examine the evidence that led to those convictions.  The lawyer’s argument was not that the men had not committed the crime – they had confessed – or that there was new evidence that would exonerate them, but was that because the victim had been a sworn peace officer, the accused could not get a fair trial. 

The LAPD conducted a thorough re-investigation that upheld the original case, but it didn’t matter what the detectives found, or didn’t find.  The judge, elected to the bench remember, was perhaps afraid not to set the convictions aside.  She not only exonerated the convicts on the murder charge but she also chastised the detectives for past sins of their department before she settled a few million city dollars on the poor incarcerated lads, and the pair walked free. 

Full of righteous ire, I began to write.   Among the bad guys was a judge lacking both common sense and moral courage.  I loved writing that character.

Before I had finished the first draft, one of the newly freed men was back in court.  Fresh from prison, on his way out of town he stopped at a motel in Beaumont where he kidnapped and raped the desk clerk before driving on toPhoenix where, impatient for his settlement funds, he robbed a bank.  He was still mending from the gunshot wounds he collected at the bank in lieu of cash when I attended his rape trial. 

I don’t pretend that the message I tried to deliver in that book, and its modest ramifications, reach even the kneecaps of Mrs. Stowe’s seminal work.  But the motivations – supporting my family, telling a good story and raising some awareness– are consistent with hers.     

Just so you know,  the LA judge eventually apologized.  Said she might have made a mistake.  But the atmosphere in the city had cooled considerably by then.   Too late to say,  No harm, no foul.

“Where shall we meet?” he breathed.

She fluttered her long lashes.  “Beneath the ancestral oak, my lord.”

“But when?”

She pulled her pendant timepiece from the warm bosom of her gown. “Tomorrow at 14:52 GMT, if it’s not raining.”

He squinted at the racing moon.  “Make it 14:55.” 

These digital days we take an unnatural interest in minutes and seconds, if not nano-seconds.  Natural time measured by the position of the sun was vague and variable everywhere except at the equator, and it was not just time that was foggy.  Most professions requiring accurate measurement developed their own units that had nothing to do with other systems, even in the same society.  “Give him an inch and he’ll take an ell.”

The BC/AD method of indicating the year was not widespread, even as recently as the seventeenth century.  And let’s not go into the difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendars, or when adoption of the Gregorian calendar took place.  The ancient Irish measured time from night to night, not day to day (and a man’s honour price was reckoned in cows).  Go figure, and figure is exactly what writers have to do if they’re working with the Egyptian calendar, or the Mayan.

Measurement is a problem for writers because we want to sound authentic, but we also want to communicate.  I’ve dabbled in fantasy and s.f., and I’ve published regencies and modern mysteries.  It’s hard for me to abandon precision, even when it’s anachronistic.  Maybe the worst problem is coming to terms with how long it used to take to do something.  Writers need to ask themselves how exact they have to be.

Mysteries focus on timing.  Much depends on who was where when.  I recently edited one of my earlier mysteries.  It was published in 1993, before cell phone use was the norm.  As I read it, I kept feeling impatient when my characters had to seek out landline phones, and I imagine new readers will be even more impatient.  How long does it take to get information?  The founding fathers allowed two months between a general election and the inauguration of a new President.  Now that transition could be cut to a week, even with a recount.  We tend to imagine things will go faster than they do, probably because TV and film fictions cut out the waiting time.  But there is also the opposite problem.  I have no trouble grasping relativity–I have been put on Hold.

What time of day is it?  It was probably the Benedictines who started our obsession with measuring the hours exactly, because they were supposed to wake up and chant the offices throughout the night.  Even when public clocks became common, though, most people got up when it was light enough to see and went to bed when it wasn’t.  The hardest change for the labor force in the era of industrialization was to learn to work by the clock.  Agricultural work was hard and badly paid, but people started work when the sun came out or when the cows lowed, not when a whistle blew.

In my last regency, my young heroine drove a gig from Grantham in Lincolnshire to Bristol, a trip that might take a couple of hours today by car if the traffic cooperated.  My plot allowed Lady Jean three days on the road, though I rushed her.  The next day, her brother-in-law only took about fifteen hours traveling from Bristol to London, but he didn’t stop except to change horses, and the roads were better going into London than driving through the countryside.

Lady Jean was eighteen.  How young is young?  How old is old?  The life-span of women in wealthy societies doubled in the last hundred years.  My mother died recently at 93.  Her mother died at 23.  Ancient Hebrew society counted a boy a man at thirteen and the ancient Irish at fourteen.  Both Henry V and Richard III were veterans at sixteen.  Shakespeare thought he was an old man at forty.  “That time of year thou may’st in me behold…”  On the other hand, a girl child can now be impregnated at ten.  Sometimes little girls married at that age in the Middle Ages, but most of them would not have matured until they were fourteen or fifteen (and would have waited until then to consummate the marriage).  Juliet was fourteen.  “Younger than she are happy mothers made,” but not so many then as now.  I like to think of medieval people as teenagers.  Most of them probably were, but some of our mothers are babies.

And what about size?  When I was growing up in the Middle Ages, size twelve was considered svelte though ten was prefereable.  Now girls aim to be size zero.  How big is a big man?  My husband is just under eight handspans.  I am seven, and I won’t say how many stone I weigh. 

Sheila Simonson

When I first started writing mysteries, I heard this all the time. Its not as weird as it seems—my books feature an equine veterinarian and there are many horses in the stories. My author friends all warned me that it would be fatal to kill a horse. Fatal to me as an author, that is, rather than fatal to the horse. Right. They meant, of course, that I should not write a scene in my books in which a horse dies. As I patiently pointed out, that is not “killing a horse.” They shrugged. “Just don’t do it. People will hate you.”
This principle is sort of the opposite of Camille’s “saving a cat”. Except that it doesn’t apply to a character in the story, which might be reasonable. You know, bad, nasty guy kills horse and is a shoo-in for villain. Nope, that doesn’t work. Too obvious if he is the villain; too frustrating if he’s not.
The problem with the “don’t kill any horses” theory is that it applies to the author rather than a character. And because of the nature of the stories I write, it has been convenient for me to allow a few fictional horses to bite the dust. Folks, my protagonist is an equine vet. Dealing with injured and dying horses is her stock in trade. Not to mention thrilling horseback chase scenes are sort of my trademark. Yes, some horses are going to have to die in these stories.
Remember, these aren’t real horses. No horses were harmed in the making of my books. I probably don’t have to tell you this, because most of you are authors yourselves. But you’d be surprised how many readers seem to confuse fiction with real life. And we’re back to “people will hate you if you kill a horse.”
This subject has come up more than once at book talks that I’ve done. I always answer it with my “Matisse story.” I can’t remember where I heard this story and I have no idea if its true. Apparently Matisse was working on a painting and a lady watching him commented, “That woman has one arm shorter than the other.” Matisse replied, “Lady, that’s not a woman, that’s a painting.”
So the horses that may die in my books are not horses—they are part of a story.
The truth is that I have killed quite a few horses in my books, and I haven’t gotten a huge amount of flack for it. I try to be kind about it. If I know the horse must die, I don’t describe him much. I don’t create him as a likable character and then bump him off. I’m smart enough not to stick my neck out on the chopping block like that.
But yes, in my last book, “Going, Gone” an unnamed “dark horse” does indeed buy the farm in a fairly violent scene. Mind you, the violence is not graphically described—I’ll leave the blood and gore to others. Such details, gripping as some folks find them– and yes, they do sell books– just don’t fit my stories, and the truth is, I have no interest in that sort of writing. But a nice, clean bit of violence/death is pretty much an essential part of a mystery, and thus both horses and people have died in my books. You’d think that readers would find the human deaths more objectionable, but such is not the case.
No, you can have a serial rapist or a pedophile or a kidnapper or (of course) a murderer, and no one minds at all. These plot devices are routine. But God forbid you kill a horse (I’m not even going to get into killing a cat or dog). Does anyone but me ever find this ridiculous? And has anybody else bumped an animal off in your books? Did you get a lot of grief? Perhaps I’m not the only fictional “critter killer” out there.

I’m not talking about the books we write, but the ones we’ve read. The ones we hold onto. The ones that pile up, collect dust, slip out of mind for years at a time.

And then we move, or–God forbid—clean, or wonder what should go in the yard sale, and wham! There it is. An old love found again.

I look around my office at the shelves.

The Far Lands by James Norman Hall—Suddenly I’m propped on my bed pillows on James Avenue in Minneapolis, algebra homework pushed aside. A historical fiction of the first migrations from Asia to the Hawaiian islands. Someone had left it at the high school lost and found. I read it twice that year alone.

I’ve been carrying around  Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow since I lived in that walkup around the corner from the el in Chicago. It’s one of the few old scifi books I’ve read more than once and when I pulled it out of the moving box a month ago, a paperback brown with age,  I promised myself I’d read it again. When you Google Leigh Brackett you get a long list of the movies she worked on as well as the books. She was versatile, brilliant, great.

Ginger Man. Catch-22. same apartment with its tiny back porch bedroom. The apartment where I lost my heart and my virginity to two different people.

The Doomsters by Ross Macdonald. One of those writers who, along with Christie, drew me into the genre. I’m sitting on that awful brown couch in my furnished rental near Lincoln Park, thinking I would like to write something like that someday.

Journey to A Woman, by Ann Bannon. The Well of Loneliness. Same place. A pair of black kittens climbing the drapes.

I pick up an Anne Tyler book and I’m sitting on my deck in Fairfax, California. I look up from the book and I see Mount Tamalpais.

Elmore Leonard brings back the little house in Oakland. My living room. A philodendron plant hanging a foot from my head that banged into the wall when a small earthquake hit. The same room, hit by a much bigger quake, and the yortzite  candle I had just brought home from my mother’s funeral, a month before, flew off the top of the Franklin stove and shattered.

Maybe someone just picked up one of my books and remembers a warm day at the beach, a date that ended in love, a house where she felt safe, a day when she was happy. And yes, I’m writing this on Valentine’s day.

"Art d'Ecrire", page from Diderot's Enyclopedia, 1751-1772. hand colored engraving

Lea Wait, here, and confessing. My handwriting is neither elegant nor beautiful, nor, according to many who’ve attempted to read it over the years, easy to decipher.  (Future biographers, beware!) One of my grandchildren once watched me taking notes for a book and proceeded to show me that she, too, could “scribble.” She was using a crayon…

So perhaps I am not the best candidate to climb on this particular podium. But, since I will also confess to being quite stubborn when I’m convinced about the truth of some matter, I’m going to anyway.

I believe every student in school today should not only learn to print words, but also to write them in classic, cursive script.

If you haven’t had any close contact with students in grades 3-5 recently, perhaps you’re unaware that there is an increasing generation of American young people who cannot read or write in cursive. While schools will say that they “teach cursive,” when questioned teachers will admit they do so for perhaps 15 minutes “when we can fit it in the schedule.”  (Some will openly admit they “just don’t have time anymore” and many don’t attempt to teach it at all.)

My experience, as an author who’s spoken at schools in 11 states over the past few years, and who signs books (in cursive) for young people throughout the country, is that very, very few children today are learning to write anything but perhaps their own names in cursive. Even fewer are learning to decode the mysteries of other people’s handwriting.

And this distresses me.

Not because I have fond memories of being given my very first “real ink” pen in fourth grade and going home with ink-stained fingers (just like Jo in my favorite book, Little Women) until I ‘d mastered the fountain pen.  Although I do. Not because I remember being drilled in The Palmer Method and writing pages of correctly proportioned Js and Ts and Ws. Not (really!) because I’m an old fuddy-duddy who believes the old methods are better. Although, in this case, I do.

It distresses me because, contrary to what many young people think today, keyboarding (not even typing – they don’t learn that either) can never replace a working knowledge of script.

Yes, I believe it is faster for taking notes. And more beautiful for personal letters. (Today is Valentine’s Day. Is an email from your beloved really as meaningful as a hand-written love letter or poem?) And more distinguished for a signature on a document. But, even more than that. Being able to communicate in cursive is the key to all that has gone before us. The original words and wisdom of everyone in Western culture from the parents and grandparents of students today to the philosophers and authors and scientists and historians and artists of centuries past are all written in cursive.

Because that was how they wrote.

Too often I’ve inscribed a book to a teenager and had that young person come back to me and ask, “What did you write?” At first I assumed they couldn’t read my handwriting. My handwriting was not the clearest. So I started writing very neatly. Painfully so, in my eyes. Still, I was asked to interpret – or I saw students asking their parents to read my words. The parents had no trouble doing so.

That was when I realized: the students couldn’t read script. To them, it was another language.

In another generation, will learning to read script be a lost skill, only studied by those who wish to do graduate work requiring primary research?

In Korea, in the 15th century, King Sejong realized that only male aristocrats who had the time to learn could read and write the complicated Chinese characters, Hanja, required to write Korean. As a result, most Koreans were illiterate.  The king, a very wise man far ahead of his time, called many scholars together and charged them to study both western and eastern languages, and design a new Korean language:  a written language that would be accessible to all.  It is the only time in history such a thing was done. And it was successful. Today Korea uses Hangul: an alphabet. All read and write it.

If a Korean scholar wishes to study the Korea of the past, he or she must learn the old language: Hanja. Few do.

Someday, will our primary sources be accessible only to those who learn to read that “other language:” cursive? Will such skill be a mark of an intellectual? An ability to write in cursive the mark of a high social class?

Yes, our children have many things to learn today. But surely, the art of writing is not something we should leave behind without even a discussion. Or it may be only a few years before our grandchildren will be unable to read the words of the original Declaration of Independence.

And that will be a sad day.

That meant I was never told what not to read, and I carried that freedom with me through my school years, reading whatever interested me for whatever reason, delving into science fiction, the history of France, dolphin studies, biographies of the Founding Fathers, you name it.  If it grabbed me, I grabbed it off the library shelf and carried it home curious and expectant.

I was often inattentive in class because I was thinking about my library books, wishing I could be home with them.  Each one seemed to open to a world so much larger, so much more fascinating and freeing than my cramped classroom.  Nowadays I would probably be diagnosed as in need of Ritalin.  What I needed was escape.

But not just from class.  My parents were Holocaust survivors and this dark tragedy too often set the tone for our household: angry, depressed.  Reading offered relief and distance, especially the alternate worlds of science fiction and history.  Mysteries promised something better once I discovered them: the assurance that things made sense, that evildoers were punished, and order could be restored.  It’s the balance Oscar Wilde mocks in The Importance of Being Earnest: “The good end happily, the bad unhappily.  That is what fiction means.”

I’ve published twenty-one books and a third of those have been mysteries in the Nick Hoffman series, satires set in the world of academe. My mother developed dementia before she could see me become successful and before she could read a mystery of mine, but with each one, I’ve thought of her.  I’ve thought of a woman of wide tastes and deep education, a woman who spoke several languages, who had a rough smokey laugh–and how mysteries made her happy.  Remembering all that makes me happy.

I don’t remember the first mail I ever received, but I do recall being fascinated by the concept from an early age, when a first class letter carried a purple stamp showing either Thomas Jefferson or Lady Liberty with her torch held high.

What an amazing thing! Somebody in one place sat down with a pen and paper, then folded that paper into an envelope, which somehow was magically transported to the person you wanted to reach, even clear across the country. I knew this worked because I lived in Chicago and my godparents were in Los Angeles, approximately a million miles away.

By the time the rate went up to four cents and a magenta Abe Lincoln, I was sending away for booklets and corresponding with my first pen pals.  Mostly I sent for cookbooklets, cleaning pamphlets (yes, really!), and information on growing up and liking it.  All kinds of freebies were offered on the sides of boxes and often led down a slippery slope to even more pamphlets on the stunning versatility of floor wax.  I made these requests very systematically, and to this day am baffled by a map of Alaska which arrived unrequested during this period.  Who sent it to me?  Why?

 I began extensive correspondence with a number of people in my teens, and started making carbons at some point in my twenties when I realized I was not the kind of writer who was ever going to keep a journal and that this was the closest I was likely to get to a record of my life.  I’ve never gone back through that outgoing mail and may never, but I like knowing it’s there.

Similarly,  I’ve kept most of the letters received as an adult, though for me the advent of email really spelled the end of that form of correspondence.  I can send a personal email as easily as write and print a letter, and it will be delivered the moment I push Send.  People say that email is sloppier and too casual, but that’s only true if the writer is sloppy and too casual. I also love being able to keep up with a lot of people simultaneously on Internet lists or Facebook.  I may not get anything but bills and magazines and garden catalogues when my postman comes by, but if I receive an email that I’d like to hang on to, I can push Print

I do still savor my letters from yesteryear.  I regret not holding on to the ones my mother sent almost daily while I was away in college – funny, info-filled epistles typed on her Remington manual typewriter.  Why bother?  There were so many of them, and besides, she’d be around forever.  Except that she wasn’t.

I started thinking about letters when the postal rates recently went up to 45 cents and nobody seemed to know or care exactly when it was happening.  At the same time, the Postal Service started talk of closing down facilities.  A friend on an Internet list who lives near one of the scheduled-closing hubs is very dependent on the USPS and would be seriously inconvenienced by this.  She suggested that each of us on the list send three snail mail items to the next three folks on our alphabetical address list.

Simple as can be.  It wasn’t going to solve any government financial problems, of course, or keep that hub open.  But symbolic gestures can also be fun.

And it has been.  I sent out my three letters (cards, actually) and so far have received one, which I wasn’t even expecting since this friend didn’t fit the group mailing protocol.

 In the background as I opened it, I could hear Perry Como crooning:

            Letters, we get letters

            We get stacks and stacks of letters…

]]> http://getitwriteblog.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/stacks-and-stacks-of-letters/feed/ 6 taffycannon Pile of letters 3 Cent Stamp 4 cent stamp Fun to Cook Book How to Have a Prettier Room Remington typewriter Perry Como http://getitwriteblog.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/camille-saves-a-cat/ http://getitwriteblog.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/camille-saves-a-cat/#comments Tue, 07 Feb 2012 07:01:45 +0000 cminichino http://getitwriteblog.wordpress.com/?p=664 ]]> I thought that would get your attention.

But, full disclosure, this blog is not really about cats in peril. The phrase was introduced by the late, wonderful screenwriting guru, Blake Snyder (1957-2009) in his “Save the Cat” program. (Paraphrasing) the STC moment in a book or movie is when the reader bonds with the protagonist and roots for her from then on.

The stakes can be high or low—an otherwise cold-blooded hit man takes care of his sick grandfather; an unscrupulous con artist shows mercy for a potential victim.

The moment can consist of a simple gesture. In the story based on Charlie Wright, whom we should all hate because he ran a Ponzi scheme that cheated millions, Charlie passes a small dog and, even though he’s on the run from the FBI, the Mexican mafia, and an old rival, he stops to pet the dog. We now love him.

Think about the Dexter books by Jeff Lindsay. Dexter is a serial killer. We should despise him, right? But Lindsay has made him a likeable character by giving him a STC code—he kills only other serial killers. He researches thoroughly and makes sure his victim doesn’t deserve to live; he’s doing the world a favor, saving other lives. His victims get no STC moments—we’re not supposed to like them, even when they’re played on television by the likes of John Lithgow, Jimmy Smits, and Colin Hanks.

Writers have great power to manipulate the reader into emotional connections this way, but sometimes we’re not aware of what might resonate. It might be a character’s flaw, rather than a touching gesture toward a child or pet.

One reviewer of my first series, the Periodic Table mysteries, which featured a retired physicist of a certain age and weight, said she liked Gloria because she was “a heroine with hips.” At first I thought—hey, wait, Gloria is very smart. Don’t you like that about her? But I realized that it was Gloria’s imperfection, the fact that she didn’t look like a model, that this reader identified with. For her, that was the STC moment.

Professor Sophie Knowles, my newest protagonist, has it rough. She teaches math, which is seen as “cozy” only by an enlightened few. So, I’ve given her a soft, new-age friend, a commitment to making math fun and easy for all, and a beading hobby. It seems to be working.

Dollhouse destined for LCC auction. An oreo cookie at the door gives scale.

Another protagonist, Gerry Porter (“Mix-up in Miniature” coming soon from Perseverance Press!) is a miniaturist with a ten-year-old granddaughter. They adore each other. That’s enough for a STC credential. Grandma, sweet and precocious kid, dollhouses—it’s almost overload!

I wonder if other writers deliberately set up STC moments?

Making soup is recycling what I’ve already got into something new and flavorful. I make my own stock. When I finish that meal of chicken or turkey, I put the bones in a freezer bag until I am ready to boil them into a flavorful broth, which I freeze in increments.

When I make soup I start with onions and garlic, sautéed in olive oil. Then I stir in broth and add whatever’s to hand. Look in the refrigerator, what have I got? Celery, that bit of broccoli left over from last Sunday’s dinner, some squash I picked up at the produce market, the mushrooms I’ve been meaning to use.

Those carrots have been in the crisper a bit too long. They may not look pretty, but cut up and tossed into the pot they’ll add some color. So will the tomatoes. Pinto beans, maybe some rice or potatoes.

Then I go through the spice rack and add this and that, whatever strikes my fancy – salt and pepper, of course, usually chili powder. How about some of that curry blend? Or maybe sage and bay leaf?

Let it simmer, then, until the house smells good and it’s time to ladle that soup into a bowl.

My mother asks, “How can you eat so much soup? Don’t you get tired of it?”

It’s nourishing and filling. Good for me, a good way to get in my daily veggies. When I get home from work, soup is a quick and easy dinner. I eat it for several days, then I freeze the rest.

Soup is different every time I make it. It takes on the character of what goes into the pot and the spices I add. And sometimes it tastes better the second day.

Soup is like writing. Instead of broth, vegetables and spices, I’m mixing plot, character and setting into a work of fiction, adding spices and letting it simmer.

Soup is recycling, and so is writing. Instead of recycling turkey bones into turkey broth, leftover broccoli into veggie soup, I reuse scraps of this and that in my writing.

For example, an incident that I cut from an early draft of my second Jeri Howard book, Till The Old Men Die, found its way into the fifth book, Nobody’s Child. A character from my seventh book, Witness to Evil, is the protagonist in my upcoming suspense novel What You Wish For.

My fellow Perseverance Press authors and I can start with the same three elements, and each of us will cook up a different pot of soup. My story may have a Northern California flavor informed by my own experiences, while my blogmates will add savor from their locations and lives.

So no, I never get tired of soup.

I date the beginning of human culture by the beginning of human spoken communication. I’m talking about speech that transcends snarls of anger, grunts of lust, and screams of fear. I say human culture began with sentences at least as complex as “You going to eat the rest of that leg of ibex, or what?” Conversation.

Knowing human beings as I do, I’m willing to bet my wallet that as soon as our ancestors learned to communicate with each other by speech, they started developing skills to entertain, impress, and hoodwink each other. Since truth wasn’t always up to the task (it isn’t today, so why should it have been for cave folk?), the act of embellishment was discovered, and fiction was born.

Of course story doesn’t have to be fiction. But isn’t it, usually? Ask most memoirists today, and they’ll agree that a certain amount of “editing” is involved.

So return with me now to the Primal Circle, a bunch of human beings (with some Neanderthal DNA in the mix, although polite cave folk don’t talk about how it got there) gathered together around a campfire after a hard day of hunting.

They talk:

         “Good gnus, Murray,” says the Boss, an ancient woman in her fortieth year. “How’d you manage to kill two in the same day?”

         Murray swallowed his bite of barbecued gnu, wiped his beard, took a swig of banana beer, belched, and began to spin his yarn. “Well, see, I was walking down by the Muchmuck River, talking to my friend Cedric, the African Grey parrot who knows stuff, and he told me that on the other side of the Muchmuck was a plain called the Banana Savanna, where I would find some gnus. I guess I was busy listening to Cedric, and not watching where I was going, and I tripped over a log and fell right into what passes for water in the Muchmuck river. I stood up, sputtering and listening to my parrot so-called friend laughing at me, when the log sprouted stubby arms and legs, swished a mighty tail, opened a grin full of razor-sharp stalactites and stalagmites, and slithered into the water. Well I took off with the current, going like gangbusters, but I could hear the splash of that croc getting closer and closer to my feet. If it hadn’t have been for Cedric dive-bombing the river-lizard, why—”

         “Aw baloney,” said Hugo, a burly fellow who looked like a cross between Burt Reynolds and a Rottweiler. “Not how it happened at all.”

         “Shut up, Hugo,” said several cave folk, using different combinations of words, some of which we don’t have anymore, and others I don’t dare repeat.

         “But we all crossed Muchmuck River on that log,” Hugo insisted. “There wasn’t any crocodile. And what’s more—”

         The Boss spoke. “Let Murray tell it.”

         “Why?” Hugo demanded. “I was the one who brought back the gnus, not Murray.”

         “Murray tells it better,” the Boss said. “I have spoken.”

Ever since Murray recounted the hunts each evening to his fellow cave folk, the subtleties of storytelling have been honed and practiced and have entertained and enlightened listeners and readers. Many of the rules and tools of fiction were invented by the earliest of storytellers. And one aspect of the art form remains to this day: whoever tells the best story gets the most attention.