Sometime in the mid- to late-1970s, my third time through college (and still having no luck with traditional education of the time), I sat in my study in a rented house on Willand Pond Road and flipped through my copy of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (the centenary edition revised by Ivor H. Evans). I wasn’t looking for anything in particular except to be distracted from exceedingly boring classwork.
I found it on pg 409: “Fains I.”
“Fains I” is “a schoolchildren’s term of unknown origin exempting the first to call: ‘Fains I goal-keeping.'”
Dig a little deeper and it’s used to offer protection for someone asserting an unprovable claim.
Dig lots deeper and there’s a reference to “Hercules’ Shirt,” meaning his wearing the skin of the Nemean Lion which was impervious to all but the most powerful weapons (can you say “arms race”?)
That prompted an ~2k word story which is now, thankfully, lost to antiquity.
BTW, that deepest reference is lost except in certain modern retellings of the Hercules legend (such as Dwayne Johnson’s Hercules) in which much of Hercules’ legend is called into question.
Yeah, okay, great.
What’s this got to do with the Experiments (in Writing)?
I mention in An Experiment in Writing – Part 7: Inciting Incidents that my current #work-in-progress is Fains I and that the opening sucks.
Well, of course it does.
And it’s fixable.
I’ve spent considerable neural horsepower over the past few weeks coming up with ways to a) make it better craft-wise and b) make it a better story, period (storytelling).
Some of the solutions point to the (currently 3,425 word) story becoming a novel.
I really don’t want to write another novel right now.
Okay, okay, okay.
What I can do is use Fain’s I as an example of some of the things I bring up in the Experiments in Writing.
Which we’ll begin now, with Fain’s I’s opening paragraph (anybody remember So I gave myself an exercise (eating my own dogfood)…? That’s what we’re going to do here for the next several weeks (or however long it takes for me to decide the story’s working and publishable).
Continue reading “An Example of the Experiments – Fains I“
