Ordinary Tales – An Introduction and Call for Submissions

George Turner in reply to George Turner says:

Well, I’m a bit tipsy and bored, so I’ll talk a bit about writing such things.

Out of unimaginable boredom on remote ob sites, I memorized about the first 30 minutes of Fagle’s translation of the Iliad (“Rage, Goddess sing the rage of Peleus’s son, Achilles, murderous, doomed —– Yes, I am like a wind-up toy).

Years later I wrote a bunch of spoofs of Beatles’ songs in a span of a few weeks. Years after than I wrote a Battlestar Galactica spoof in Shakespearean English (still unfinished) that was already longer than Hamlet when I abandoned it because the show blew out my plot line.

But during that exercise (basically cut and paste some random Shakespeare into your favorite word processor) and re-write the words to obey rhyme and meter (I still count them out on my knuckles) I learned to speak the language a bit. It’s not remotely a foreign language, it’s just an odd and beautiful way of speaking, not really difficult to execute.

As you get better at it you pay more attention to vowels and consonants (sounds) as much as possible, even if you sit with a thesaurus in your lap and game the possibilities. If you get bested you just move on to another passage from Shakespeare, or another, and just keep on going.

After about the first week, maybe less, I consulted a book by Edwin Abbott, who wrote “Flatland” in the 1880’s and a book on Shakespeare’s English, still considered the authoritative source. A few days with Abbott (which is free online with a simple Google), and a week or so of light and very interesting reading, and your brain will be brimming with period language rules. You just start sucking up more and more interesting caveats, history, bizarre facts about things like bisyllabic words, and other nonsense that can let you talk any Harvard graduate under a table and make them rue the day they chose English as a major.

So one night many years ago, after a bad breakup, I was inspired to turn Shakespeare’s “to be or not be” soliloquy into a spoof about coffee, to amuse a Facebook friendl I started around 11:00 and stayed up till 6:00 AM or so to finish it, and the result is the jewel in the Amazon review I posted.

A few months ago (the date on the review would tell you exactly) I ran across an article about funny Amazon reviews and thought “I have that funny coffee soliloquy. I should post it somewhere.” So I downed some beers on the patio and started hammering away. I think I have about five hours in the entire rest of the act, for maybe 12 hours total.

Frankly (and obviously), large parts of the act pretty much suck. Stiff, wooden, a bit forced, or don’t quite fit or make sense, sentence by sentence. But it was filler to fluff out the soliloquy to make a review worth posting, so that at least a few people would read it. What most amazes me about the filler is that it actually sort of makes sense as a plot, and in fact probably as much as what Shakespeare went with.

As an aside, that particular Hamlet soliloquy doesn’t make a lick of sense in the play. If no one returns from “blah blah blah” who the frack was the ghost Hamlet talking to in Act I, scene I? Scholars think he probably wrote the soliloquy years prior to the rest of the play, and just stuck it in, writing an act around it so it didn’t stick out like a sore thumb, because he was enamored of the speech. That’s exactly the same way I wrote my review. One good speech that needed an outlet, and then pack it years later with filler to make it presentable in a particular context.

Another thing I will say is that such passages might take you three hours or three years, depending on if you’re on a roll or not. I look on it as a reservoir of writing, where you can draw deep or play short and trump anyone who wants to play that game. It’s a useful skill, if one that doesn’t see much use.

And in closing, most everyone here can not only write Shakespeare, they can best him. It takes a few weeks of practice, but nobody ever practices.

Take lots of Shakespeare passages, cutting and pasting them, playing games with rhyme and meter; It’s not only fun, it’s addictive. Pound out some crap. Rework it. Play with it. Save the gems. At some point you’ll see some crap at Amazon and be inspired to spend five or six hours to write an epic act even if parts of it are forced and wooden because you’re making up dialog about a coffee maker.

Basically, what I’m saying is that almost everyone who writes here is probably intimidated by Shakespeare, but I think they mistake that for his eloquence rather than his insights into the human soul (he was almost certainly a conservative). Becoming as eloquent isn’t actually that hard. It takes a few weeks or months, and you’ll throw away a lot of attempts, but I’m confident that anyone here can write some breathtaking passages.

And yes, I’m as tipsy at the end of this comment as I was at the beginning, but probably not as tipsy as I was when I wrote that entire Amazon review minus the soliloquy (maybe five hours total), which is really the only part worth reading. It’s perhaps a bit odd, but when you write something like his soliloquy are a good parody of it, you cannot not use it somewhere, even if the market is nothing but crap about coffee makers.

Another thing that interests me is that all politics aside, as writers we can dance around greatness, come up with phrases that cut to the core and live for generations, and redefine how people think, and we can make it rhyme. At times you touch it, and most times you just flail. But it is fascinating and, with the right writers, often beautiful.Report