Conclusion.
The next piece of advice is expressed with unusual definiteness, even for Elinor Glyn:
15. Do not under any circumstances build a play around a pair of baby shoes.
This sounds like the howl of a scenario editor who has built a pile three feet high of submissions titled “The Baby Shoes” and is ready to chew off her own toes if she has to read one more. We may assume that the general plot of every story had the baby shoes indicating the incipient arrival of a baby, and from there they might be divided into farces in which the conclusion that a baby is on the way is a mistake with consequences meant to be comical, and marital dramas in which the conclusion is a correct one with consequences meant to be heartwarming or tragic.
Since the meaning of the baby shoes is not specified in Glyn’s list, however, we are free to assign them any meaning we like, and we choose to assign them no meaning at all. Our story will be a psychological horror tale.
There is a single young woman, let us say a mid-level executive in some generic corporate office; we establish that she is devoted to her career and particularly dislikes children, especially the idea of having children of her own. One day she finds a pair of baby shoes on her desk. She is annoyed. She demands to know who put them there, and then tosses them in the garbage in view of everyone who works with her, many of whom seem disturbed by the gesture.
Leaving work, she drives out of the parking lot with a lead foot and is on the road before she notices the same pair of baby shoes on the passenger seat. Angrily, she throws them out the window.
When she reaches home, she opens her front door and finds the same pair of baby shoes neatly laid on the floor just inside. This time she calls the police, since someone obviously broke into her apartment. The police think it’s the stupidest call they’ve been on all week and don’t hesitate to tell her so, but they write down her story anyway, although she notices them smirking and winking at each other when they think she isn’t looking. After the police leave, she tosses the baby shoes in a Dumpster outside her building. Worn out, she heads for bed, and finds the same pair of baby shoes on her pillow.
From here the protagonist makes increasingly desperate attempts to rid herself of the baby shoes, destroying them in obviously permanent ways, but she always finds them again in some unexpected place. Meanwhile her colleagues are gently hinting that she needs some professional help, which only makes her furious: why are they gaslighting her? Only near the end is it revealed that no one else can see the baby shoes, even when she points directly at them.
16. Stories built on well-known criminal cases.
“Then where will we get stories at all?” three dozen Hollywood hacks shout in unison. But we can probably make use of what we might call the Shakespearean exception: a criminal case is a good subject if it is old enough that no one is left alive who could sue us for libel. What Bill Shakespeare did with Macbeth and Brutus we could do with Aaron Burr. We could do it several times over, because Burr offers us a wide choice of crimes. His Wikipedia article should give us enough material to keep our pens scratching for a while. We could build a whole franchise on it.
17. The poor lonesome character, usually friendless, moneyless, homeless—and, I almost said, brainless—at Christmas or Thanksgiving.
Most of these stories probably stink like the Dickens, but of course that will not discourage another generation from trying to repeat Dickens’ success. We, however, might look at the situation from a different point of view. There are many unsocial people in the world—people whose greatest joy is getting away from the crowd and settling in with a good book or binge-watching Gomer Pyle or some such thing. They dread Christmas and Thanksgiving as times when they are expected, and often required, to be cheerfully social. Our protagonist will therefore be the unsocial type, and it is his curse to have colleagues and neighbors who believe with dogmatic inflexibility that he needs cheering up. The plot then consists of their attempts to assure him a merry Christmas and his counterattempts to outwit them. But since these plays go over better with a love interest, we add a shy young woman who is carried along with the conspirators by being too shy to resist them. Eventually, having escaped the jolly Christmas revel planned for them, she and our protagonist spend a very merry Christmas Eve in a nearly deserted 24-hour diner, and—we are led to assume—live happily ever after.
18. The hard-working young man who finally gains an interest in “the business” and wins the “hand” of the employer’s daughter. The opposition in such a play generally is the foreman or a scheming partner.
If we make the hard-working young man our villain, we might blow a fresh breeze through the formula. Our young man is obsessed with getting ahead and piling up money; he works twelve-hour days six days a week and considers anyone who puts in less work a traitor to the company and to the sacred principles of capitalism. The obstructive foreman is a boss who believes that employees can accomplish their work within contractual hours, and indeed that they perform better that way. In the end, the hard-working young man is taken on as a partner by the CEO; the foreman and all the employees under his supervision leave to found a competing employee-owned corporation that rapidly becomes the market leader. The new partner receives his just punishment when he has to marry the CEO’s grasping daughter, whose passion for spending money exceeds even her new husband’s passion for accumulating it.
19. The hero having a duty to perform, generally an arrest to make, who falls in love with the evil one’s daughter, and—this is the “crool” thing—has to choose between love and duty. Why, there’s the title! “Love and Duty.” These plays are turned out by the million.
Sticking to this prohibition would cut out one episode from every season of every police procedural on television. That would be a good start; then we would have only to find a rule that got rid of the rest of the episodes, and we could call it a job well done.
But since we have taken upon ourselves to defy all these prohibitions, we can make our hero a mob assassin whose duty is to remove a certain prosecutor. The prosecutor has a beautiful daughter who—just to rub salt in the wound—is a cop. But there’s a happy ending! Both the father and the daughter are amenable to bribery. A wedding ensues, and the two families are joined in mutually beneficial corruption.
Thus we come to the end of Elinor Glyn’s list of nineteen hackneyed themes, and if we have not always succeeded in our goal of making a good story from bad cloth, at least we have had the chance to compare the hackneyed themes of a century ago with the hackneyed themes of today.
That brings us to an obvious question: if we were compiling a similar list today, which hackneyed themes would it include? Here Dr. Boli is at a disadvantage, because his knowledge of popular culture of the twenty-first century is limited. But perhaps readers may have some ideas. Which overused plots would you like to see permanently banished from novels, movies, or television? The comments are open, and rants are always welcome.