Rich, Famous, and Beautiful -- prologue

Back in 2000, I entered the Three Day Novel contest (run by Anvil Press at the time). It took place on Labour Day weekend and the rules were as you imagine they’d be: from Saturday at 12:01 a.m. to Monday at midnight, you’re expected to churn out a novel. You weren’t exactly expected to vomit out Middlemarch; a Great Gatsby length was more the norm. I don’t remember much of the actual weekend, other than that it was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. The result wasn’t totally awful. I tried again the next year, found it much easier, but turned out a piece of crap the second time around (so we’ll pretend that one never happened).

I’m going to post my first attempt here a little bit at a time. I figure there’s no sense just letting it take up valuable hard drive space that could better be put towards pornography storage. Here it is, uncut and commercial free. As I remeber, it starts weak but gets stronger, but I'm only reading as much as I post so forgive me if it starts weak and stays that way. I haven’t changed a word since the minute I completed the contest—not even the unfortunate title. Keep that in mind.

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Rich, Famous, and Beautiful – A Tragedy

We like to think that our sad stories are unique. We convince ourselves that no one else could suffer quite so much, fall so hard. But the sobering fact is that our tragedies are all the same. The great Alistair Irving—always the great and never simply Alistair—was the first to teach me this. When I was sixteen years old, he made me read Aristotle’s Poetics. When I’d finished, he asked, ‘What have you learned?’

‘The rules of tragedy.’

‘And they are?’

‘Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete and whole and of a certain magnitude,’ I responded. He always asked what I had learned from a book so I always memorized a sentence or two that seemed important.

He smiled at me, ‘What else?’

‘What should I have learned?’ was all I could say.

‘Child, there are no rules to tragedy. It doesn't confine itself to the dimensions that we see fit to grant it. What you should learn is that there are common elements in the tragedies which we respond to strongest. All great tragedies are very similar.’

After rereading Poetics and having it dissected by the great Mr. Irving, I remember these elements, even ten years later.

The heroes and heroines of the story are of elevated status.
The plot is complete and lasts long enough to show the character’s reversal of fortune.

This reversal of fortune is often preceded by Anagnorisis—a change from ignorance to knowledge.

The tragedy causes feeling of both pity and fear in the audience, and in the end, brings about catharsis.

The great Mr. Irving was right. Aristotle was right. Just look at the tragedies that we sigh and weep over today. The deaths of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Princess Diana put nations into mourning. Diana was tabloid fodder for months, reviled for her affair with Dodi. But after her death it was as if she’d always been a saint. Goodbye, English Rose. It was a car crash that the world wept over.

John Kennedy Jr. was the inheritor of Camelot. He was a beautiful man who married a beautiful wife, and who accomplished very little. He was rich, he was pretty, and he died. And we mourned as if the king of all creation had crashed down from heaven.

For those two, it was the worst kind of fortune reversal—from life to death. We feel pity, of course, for two such invaluable members of society. And we fear, because if the rich and the regal can die in such a way, then what hope do we have?

This is my story. It will be short and to the point, as good tragedy always is. We omit things, of course, when we tell the story of our lives. We pick and choose what is important, what incidences have shaped. Understand that it is the teller who shapes the story.

My story is tragedy of the highest kind. Your heroine was borne wealthy. She became loved by many. But fortune was reversed, and if told well, her story will evoke far more than pity and fear.

In the end, your heroine's story comes to the most popular kind of tragic end: she dies.