Humans 10, Horses 0

beating a dead horse--pursuing a conversation, line of inquiry, or agenda that has been overcome by events; a character endlessly blaming himself or others for the consequences of some previous act or decision; taking a had-I-but-known trope to an even greater extreme of recrimination; not merely crying but sobbing over spilled milk.

The worst example of animal abuse or beating dead horses comes when a character flails self on the breast, bemoaning some missed opportunity or some previous seduction that seemed like a good idea at the time. Even the rule of three--three repetitions--can be one or two kicks too many. Try a scene in which a character recalls such a time. Or try a scene in which another character chastises the beater of horses of record with "You're not still blaming yourself for that, are you?"

Cutting material is an art of its very own, and difficult to learn, but one good place to start is with the kicked horse. Another way to approach this matter is to ask during the revision period how much the reader needs to be reminded. Remember as well the number of persons who called you out for having Denise blink her green eyes on page 41 when those same eyes were a reassuring coffee brown on page 28. Readers do note anomalies, even if they are deliberate ones set into place by such authors as Mario Vargas Llosa in his romp, Aunt Julia and the Script Writer.

Framed

frame-tale format--a narrative or series of separate stories built about an incident, an historical moment, or theme; a single or multiple narrative constructed with recognition of an earlier work; a staging or formulating device for the presentation of a group of stories within a single story. Thus Tales of Scheherazade, or The Thousand and One Nights, a series of stories told by a young woman to a misanthropic Persian king who had the habit of marrying a new wife every day while beheading yesterday's candidate. Thus also The Decameron, in which a group of young nobles, moved to the country to escape the ravages of The Black Death plague, told stories to amuse themselves. From his awareness of these and other frame tales comes Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, stories of individuals on a religious pilgrimage. Off in another part of the world comes the frame tale of the so-called Rashomon Stories, where a single event is replayed to reflect the point of view of the participants, illustrating, as Chaucer did in The Canterbury Tales, a significant view of the human condition from various vantage points on the social scale, a view which has remained constant over the Milena.

In more modern times, the frame tale has become ubiquitous; it appears in such forms as James Joyce's Ulysses, studiously framed on The Odyssey, Clint McCown's short story collection, The Member-Guest, dealing with a weekend golf tournament in a down-at-the-heels country club in the Midwest; and Pam Huston's achingly hilarious collection, Cowboys Are My Weakness, which is a variation on the theme of women being drawn to men who are more drawn to a particular lifestyle than to a particular relationship. Not to forget the memorable cattle-drive theme of the motion picture Red River, which was framed on the seagoing Mutiny on the Bounty, and showing yet another variation on The Odyssey with the Coen Brothers' film, Brother, Where Art Thou? Katherine Ann Porter's 1962 novel, The Ship of Fools, is framed on a 1494 narrative The Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant; links of Porter's novel could also be argued to link to Hieronymous Bosch's painting, The Ship of Fools, which Bosch admitted to have come from the Brant narrative. It is a likely and lively comparison to argue the connection between Porter's Ship of Fools and The Decameron and certainly The Canterbury Tales.

The frame-tale format adds another layer of thematic connective tissue between the newer version and the original, the two versions becoming linked in the reader's mind--if the reader is aware of the source. This observation leads to the further observation that the more recent version of a framed tale must stand on its own dramatic merits, as though the reader had no previous knowledge of the original. The motion picture, Shakespeare in Love, had a richer level of significance for those familiar with Twelfth Night and the conditions of the English theater in which the roles of women characters were performed by young boys. Thus the reader familiar with Shakespeare would know that the character of Viola in Twelfth Night was performed by a boy, leading to the conceit in Shakespeare in Love of a young woman masquerading as a boy in order to win the role of a woman in a play, "causing" Shakespeare to "see" the inspiration for Twelfth Night. The play within a play or the story within a story has to stand on its own, to appeal to and transform an audience. The product of the framed tale cannot rely on the fact of its point of origin. Ulysses had to stand on its own, a reputation disputed by many critics and readers.

The doors of imagination fly open to admit possibe entrants for future frame-tale circumstances. What thoughts were dancing in the mind of Ray Bradbury when he got down to work positing the concept of a tattooed man in a circus, a tattooed man whose very tattoos came to life, each demanding its own story? What thoughts later danced in the mind of Mario Vargas Llosa, whose Aunt Julia and the Script Writer becomes another excellent example of exciting ways to tell stories within a larger story?

"They're staying away in crowds." Sam Goldwyn

zeitgeist--literally spirit of the time, a physical, emotional, and historical sense of a time and place; a personality ironed on to the t-shirt of setting. A writer's job--among others--is to convey through dramatization the feel of a particular place at a particular time, among a particular group of people. Characters, whether directly or not, reflect the zeitgeist of their setting, whether at a family reunion, a school reunion, an application for a job, or the angst of delivering parents to a senior living facility. Some zeitgeists are gay, ebullient, filled with optimism; others reflect uncertainty or a the-sky-is-falling terror of things unseen and the uncertainty of the future. Every story has a zeitgeist, but it does not have to be expressed directly, rather being allowed to refract through the behavior of the characters. Hint: at some point during the construction of a story, pinpoint the spirit of the time in which the story was set, then use that awareness as a pole star to guide the spoken and unspoken behavior of major characters.


third person narration--a story told from the point of view of a character rendered variously by the character's name and the pronoun he or the pronoun she. "Mary wanted for today what she'd come to want every day--a day without stress." "Jack Jones waited patiently for the sun to sink below the horizon before making up his mind. He knew his history of daytime decisions had been remarkably poor." Third person point of view shares popularity with the first person or I-centered narration, its choice being idiosyncratic, often reflecting the writer's unthinking preference. One of the technical problems associated with third person narration is the need for the narrator to be on stage in every scene in order to lend plausibility to the sense of awareness or knowledge being filtered through that character. There are quick fixes for this problem; the character overhears other individuals talking about an incident that occurred off stage, or the character discovers a letter, journal entry, blog post, or newspaper article discussing the off-stage material.

As in all narration modes except the authorial intervention approach, the material being ingested and commented upon must appear to come from the character, reflecting the character's experiences, prejudices, social standing, self-image, and agenda. The narrative will also reflect the observing character's vocabulary and any relevant mental or physical deviations from the norm.

A splendid example of numerous third person narratives being linked in one tale is Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone. One example demonstrating the amusing consequences that may ensue when third person narration appears to have lost control is found in Mario Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Script Writer. David Lodge's estimable Deaf Sentences reflects the difficulties of a protagonist who is suffering among other things the increasing loss of his hearing.

Arguments critical and academic abound about which point of view "seems" of "feels" the most intimate; the goal of any point of view is to cause the reader to forget the presence of the author and invest in the realness of the character.


unreliable narrator--a story-freighting character whose dramatic account seems at first reasonable, interesting, even fair-minded, only to slowly emerge as biased, flawed, possibly to the point of nursing a grudge or hidden agenda. The main questions for the reader are: Whom do we trust? and Why? The main questions for the writer are: What purpose does the unreliability serve? Can and should the narrator's unreliability be extended over a greater arc before the reader "gets" the concept? Has the author gone too far? In the final analysis, is any narrator completely reliable?

The danger with any too-unreliable narrator rests with the reader's sense of belief. While not strictly speaking a narrator, the characters of Dogberry in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, and Mrs. Malaprop in Sheridan's The Rivals were used to create the comic effect of what a character said being blunders that produced contrary or absurd meanings. Archie Bunker often shot himself in the metaphoric foot, comically undermining his bigotry with a malapropism, In a less comedic sense, an unreliable narrator may not reflect malice so much as pragmatism in the event of Becky Sharp in Thackeray's Vanity Fair. The unreliable narrator may be revealed at length as the antagonist, to be rooted against in growing fear that the antagonist will best the goals of the protagonist.

In real life and fiction, readers and audiences will, through their choices of relative reliability in narrators, reveal facets of their own personality and belief system. Spot quiz. Rank the following news commentators in terms of reliability: Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Anderson Cooper, Tom Brokaw, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Michelle Malkin. On the other hand, when we hear the likes of Yogi Berra say, "It's not the heat, it's the humility," our next best hope is that he goes on to say something else.

Characters with Intent

Whether or not you're working from outline or the sense of being so immersed in your story that your characters are talking to you, sending you sensory messages about where they want to be and what they want to be doing, there is a moment between the ending of the last scene and the beginning of the next when you might with good reason stumble.

The moment of stumble may arrive when the new scene begins, not with a dramatic sweep of intensity but rather a confused moment or two when the characters seem dazed, as though having eaten a too large meal, suffered through a boring lecture, or worse, entered the wrong story (See Mario Vargas Llosa's remarkable Aunt Julia and the Script Writer.)

To prevent this beginning-of-the-scene stumble, you need some preparation. A simple laundry list will do it, a list for each character:

1. What is the character just coming from--what had he/she just done?

2. What is the character doing right now?

3. What is the character's immediate goal? (What does he/she want right now?)

I am particularly reminded of my mentor the actor telling me her experience on opening night when a fellow actor, appearing in his first Broadway play and having been lackluster in rehearsals, seemed not to be waiting in the wings for his cue to go on, then was reported to have been seen out in the alleyway, chinning himself on a fire escape. At length the actor appeared, sweaty and breathless from his exertions, gasping for breath as he delivered his first lines. Thus did Marlon Brando "prepare" himself for his portrayal of a character who was nervous and excited. Here was a character who felt his nervous excitement, then behaved accordingly.

The character moves into the scene with at least the subtext of having recently been doing something else, possibly not wanting to be here.

The character is here with intent in place.

Some of us may have our characters scoot about like the bump cars in an amusement zone, exchanging meaningless dialogue, more or less warming themselves up for the essential movements and behavior of the scene; others in our midst may have made a story board or, as I do, rely on a few scribbled notes on a three-by-five index card. All these and other similar roads lead to the payoff of fully informed characters starting in fully engaged presence.

It might illustrate the point for our writing self to stop for a moment before we enter a new scene--any new scene--in our world of reality, then take note of what we are bringing to it in terms of past history, attitude, agenda, hoped-for action, perhaps even a sense of what we will do after that.