Part One.
First, though, it is probably necessary to explain who Elinor Glyn was, and why we should care about her opinion. Elinor Glyn was a hack. She was a very successful hack, and she made a lot of money, and there were people—not critics with taste, but ordinary readers—who would have said she was one of the leading novelists of the age. Most serious critics would say her novels were bosh, but she was a storyteller who knew how to reach her audience in the most effective way, and that is a skill worth having. She also wrote scenarios for the movies in the days when movies had become big business but had not yet learned to talk.
Glyn lost no opportunity to turn words into cash, and since books about how to write stories and scenarios were themselves a big genre in the 1920s, it was natural that one of them should be by Elinor Glyn, who had a recognized name that would sell the book even if it were otherwise rubbish. The Elinor Glyn System of Writing, which came out in 1923, is not rubbish. It shows signs of being flung together hastily, but it is full of sound advice on how to make a story work.
In the section on scenario writing, Glyn gives us Nineteen Hackneyed Themes to Be Avoided, and that brings us to our writing exercise. Glyn herself tells us that “a clever writer is often able to take an impossible theme and do wonderful things with it,” but if you are reading a book about how to write stories and scenarios, you are probably not clever enough yet.
Nevertheless, we propose to be that clever writer. Our exercise is to take each of those nineteen hackneyed themes and imagine how it could be made into a good story. For each of them, Dr. Boli will make a suggestion of his own, and then readers who feel motivated are invited to leave their own suggested treatments in the comments. This will take more than one session, since Dr. Boli is not willing to assume the liability of dumping so many tired clichés on his readers at once. For today, we’ll start with the first two.
1. The stolen child, kidnapped by gypsies usually, and finally restored to its parents by means of a locket, birthmark, or some equally foolish means.
This situation has always been absurd and silly, but our own age does have a taste for stories of adopted children who learn that they are adopted and go off to find their “real” parents. That suggests an inversion of the trope, in which the adopted child has always kept one memento of her “real” parents, and finally, by means of that memento, succeeds in finding those parents. But the parents are indifferent, unsympathetic, hopeless wrecks who gave up their daughter because they had no interest in the self-sacrifice that inevitably attends rearing a child. Much could be made of the comic awfulness of the couple. In the end our protagonist tosses her long-held memento in the garbage can. When she is asked whether she found her real parents, she emphatically answers yes, and shows a photograph of the parents who adopted and raised and loved her.
2. The child who prevents the parents from separating, or reunites them after a separation. These plays are generally called, “A Little Child Shall Lead Them.”
Glyn’s advice has not prevented platoons of writers from charging into the field relying on this same situation in the century since her time. It still strikes people, all evidence to the contrary, as a fresh idea. Perhaps the child, seeing some selfish advantage in the separation, is doing everything possible to drive the parents apart, but his schemes cause such chaos that the parents are drawn together by the necessity of self-preservation if nothing else. In the end, it is the child who has to revise his expectations: very much against his will, he has brought his parents back together. As we’ll see in a future installment, this plot might run foul of Glyn’s hackneyed situation number 9, and since running foul of her suggestions is the point of the exercise, we don’t care a bit.
Since we used up a good deal of our readers’ patience with the introductory paragraphs, we’ll stop with only two hackneyed themes for the moment and give the readers a chance to think about them. How could each of these situations be used as the basis of a good story? If you have ideas, the comments box is waiting for you. Or, alternatively, you could take your idea, write your good story, publish it, and then direct us to it.
Continues in Part Two.