Vulnerability For Dummies

A longtime pleasure has been your investigation of the potential for unseen connections between pairs or triads of words.  At times, unseen meanings and relations jump forth at you like little kids in border towns, selling Chiclets gum.  On other occasions, what you supposed was already apparent jostled at you like aggressive bargain hunters at a Filene's basement sale.

The former circumstances bring unalloyed joy and noticeable surge to your writing energy.  The latter tend to produce the result of the butt of your palm as it strikes your forehead.  Both responses are, you believe, integral to the process by which you set words down on notepad or computer screen when you go about composing.

The words responsible for bringing this effect out from the wings and induced to take a bow are vulnerability and risk.  You have for some time been convinced that one of the things that brings a character--your own or someone else's--to a point of interest to you is the vulnerability that character brings to the story in which he or she appears.  Vulnerability equals the risk of being hurt as the result of a venture, a position taken, of neutrality affected, of an attitude.  Vulnerability means the risk of being wrong, making the wrong choice, facing the consequences of making no choice.  Vulnerability is a woman who loves to dance, who has had her feet trod upon a few times too many by partners who are not so nimble.  Yet her love of the dance draws her onward one more time.   It is a risk she takes and in the process of taking it, she endears herself to us.

Vulnerability is openness to being hurt, disappointed, rejected, dumped; it peers over the shoulder of happiness looking for a wedge issue and as such you have seen it and you have witnessed it in those about you.  The salient point in you observation is that even when it takes up residence in a person for whom you have no special fondness or respect, you nevertheless feel a tinge of empathy, however brief.  Poor S.O.B., you think.  About to get it.  Should said poor S.O.B. get too much of it, you are in danger of experiencing schadenfreude, which has an enormous rebound from the satisfaction you felt the S.O.B. deserved to the guilt you experience wishing it upon said S.O.B.

A character who has no vulnerability is difficult to like.  The goddess mother of Achilles understood this well, and left that small part of his body vulnerable so that her son could then go forth to appear in The Iliad and, for that matter, untold legends.  A character without vulnerability is a mockery of the human condition, even insulated from hubris and pomposity; a character who is afraid to love, afraid to take risks, afraid to change his mind, afraid to speak his version of the truth, or any combination of these is someone we can readily identify with because we readers have ourselves experienced all these fears and the unnamed fears of the unknown.  Readers, serious, well-read readers, are part romantics, part cynic; they expect something to go wrong because they are past the age of having learned to read, at which point birthday cakes have been the wrong flavor, cherished pets have died or been returned to the store from which they came, promises broken.  Subsequently, first and only loves have soured, friendships have been for any number of reasons abrogated, life has proved itself to demonstrate the calculus of unfairness.  Thus a reader encountering characters for whom nothing goes wrong will soon lose interest, thinking the suspension of disbelief has been misplaced by the author or the author's editor.

You read in anticipation of something going wrong, especially in the case of individuals who believed everything was just getting good or right or happy.  You wish to see how these individuals handle things going wrong.  Even if you secretly believe Achilles was a schmuck for taking umbrage as he did at the outset of The Iliad, you gradually understand what being a schmuck was under those circumstances, when such lofty stature was reserved for men of royal or military rank, and you could get on board in The Iliad with the comfort that being a schmuck in those days meant something grand and dramatic, possibly even tragic.  Now anyone can be a schmuck and our literature is the poorer for it.  Don't worry:  someone will think ill of you when some of your work appears in print or digitally because, after all, you have quite unintentionally made yourself vulnerable by putting your feelings and visions and leaps of imagination in the public eye.

Without risk the only consequences are regret and rationalization for the failure to take the leap.  With risk there is the great cornucopia of failure waiting, and even a character with a notable resume of failures brings something to the stage, a sense of utter nobility, stubbornness, or foolish, or a delightful combination of all three.  Who could want more in a character?

Story, or Sisyphus Rocks

A good deal of attention is properly paid to the movement of a story from its engaging, often rambunctious beginning, through its point of achieving a seemingly unstoppable inertia, often thought of as the middle or act two, concluding with the place where it comes to a rest, however temporary. This coming to rest is the end because the story has landed on someone or something, run out of steam, or dramatically changed its mind. It will not start up again until someone or something gets it moving again. This movement is frequently referred to as arc or throughline. In either case, the intent is for the story to have begun at point A, then moved through a number of points to the designated spot where it stops moving for some time.

Readers, accordingly, get the sense of a story being over when it stops moving for a considerable time, author's intentions to the contrary notwithstanding.

For the sake of illustration, I propose to call the path of a story an orbit; a circular or elliptical path as opposed to arc, which is, when you stop to think of it, a segment of a circle; or indeed a throughline, which suggests movement enough but movement on a straight line, which implies that the story is of singular dimension as opposed to the more textured implications of orbit. An arc or throughline is like a doughnut in comparison to the layer cake of orbit.

A well-constructed story may be begun at any point in it orbit. Stories do not have to be chronological, although they may be if it suits the author's purpose. By way of example, The Iliad, which begins in the famed medias res or middle of things, properly begins with that great twit, Paris, being asked to judge a beauty contest in which the contestants are goddesses. Lovely story. The main contestants try their godly hands at suborning Paris with incentives for choosing her instead of her sisters. Paris is most tempted by the offered bribe of the most beautiful woman in the world, an offer from the goddess of love. He proceeds to chose the goddess of love as the most beautiful among the competing goddesses, then claims his prize. "And so you shall be rewarded," she tells him. "The only problem is, she's married."

In The Iliad, this is backstory, explaining how Paris connected with Helen in the first place, making Helen WMS, weapons of mass seduction, and causing the seven-year Trojan War. It also explains how Paris was the forerunner of G. W. Bush. All the available contemporary renditions of The Iliad begin with Achilles, storming off to his tent in a rage that had nothing to do with the Trojan War. Achilles' rage is so intense that he opts out of fighting, which could mean a complete change in the complexion of the battle. There are other places in the orbit where this epic could have begun, each adding a different kind of texture and tone to the entire story.

Another splendid example of story orbit involves another set of characters from more or less the time of The Iliad. Let's look at the myth of Sisyphus, in which Sisyphus, a mortal, has been sentenced by Zeus, king of the gods, to an eternity of pushing a huge boulder up a steep incline, where it topples over the crest, rumbles down an equally steep slope, rolling of its own inertia until it comes to rest. Having observed this behavior, Sisyphus must push the boulder into position, then repeat the process. No weekends off, no holidays, no time and a half overtime pay. Sisyphus' crime was hitting on one of Zeus lady friends. That story could be set in motion with Sisyphus hard at work, pushing the boulder up the hill. It could be initiated when he reaches the top of the hill. It could even begin with his wife trotting alongside him as he pushes, wanting to know what's with him, why he never calls, could he maybe spare a few shekels to buy some food. The story could begin with Sisyphus blowing his cool, storming into Zeus' office and refusing to push the damned boulder up that damned hill one more damned time, at which point Zeus snaps his fingers and summons over two henchmen, informing them "Okay, Sisyphus is off the rock detail. Soon as I finish the paper work, take him over to the mountain and give him the Prometheus treatment?"

"Prometheus treatment?" Sisyphys asks.

"Yeah. Some dude tried to steal the secret of fire from me so now he gets tied to a mountain side every day around lunch time. Vultures come by, rip out his liver. Prometheus gets to go home, grow a new liver, then back to the mountain side."

"Excuse me," Sisyphys says, "I gotta get back to my boulder."

Depending on where in that orbit you start, it can produce humor, pathos, existential woe, philosophical questioning, psychological humor--you name it.

Ah, I hear your first question: Suppose my story doesn't have an orbit?

Ah, indeed. Now you begin to understand why so many memorable stories do have an orbit.