A Letter to a Young, Middle-Aged, or Geezer Writer XVI

Every time a character sets foot into a scene you have created, he or she comes armed with two essentials, agenda and expectations.  A character who enters a scene without either is a runaway from a writing group, incompletely formed, neither to be trusted nor endured.  Like you, the character thus waiting in the wings to go on has awareness of whence he or she has just come, what happened there, and under what circumstances.

Agenda is the character's goal, the one he or she strives before our eyes and by implication to achieve.  This agenda may well be inarticulate even as the character works or perhaps lurches toward achievement of it.

Expectation relates to the character's attitude while pursuing the agenda and is thus more time sensitive.  Each time a character enters a new scene, that character brings some tangible measure of the expectation that something will happen or, if there is to be a surprise, of some planned event not happening.  Looked at functionally, each scene becomes each character's anticipation of what will happen next, working in tandem with the reader's curiosity to see in fact what does happen.  A character can, for instance, dread going home for the holidays to a family gathering only to have such dread overwritten by the intense wonder of bonding and good fellowship, a theoretical outcome to be sure, but one following another dramatic certainty I commend to your attention:  Although the reader has expectations, they should be delayed as long as possible if they are ever in fact met.  Or to put it another way, don't take the reader where the reader wants to go because once the reader gets there, the story is over.

We all of us conspire with the characters against the reader in this last sense, hopeful of keeping the reader with us by constantly yanking the rug, table cloth, bed sheet, or any other similar length of metaphoric material from under him.  We conspire against out characters by blunting or misdirecting their expectations.  A character whose fantasies and wishes are met is not going to seem worthy of our interest, not for long.  Interestingly enough, a character who seems to have everything emerges as a character who is about to experience some comeuppance.  And that comeuppance had better not be too late an arrival at the party.

There is no sense investing our characters with these tools if they are not used, which is to say it is a good idea to know what their overarching goal is.  Doesn't hurt a bit to have an idea how far they're willing to go to achieve their goal nor to see how their expectations are faring as they wait to do whatever it is you have planned for them, where ever it is you planned on having them do it.  Nice touch if you can arrange a scene in which they interpret things to mean they're on the cusp of achieving their agenda or, conversely, that they are so far away from their goal as to be rendered inchoate with frustration.

Happy campers only work in commercials; unhappy campers are always on the cusp of entering a new scene with a new story.

Expect

Every time you pick up a novel, whether it is from an old literary friend, a young writer whose face and voice have not been completely weathered yet, or a writer previously unknown, you also lift up a series of expectations.

One such expectation is that you will be seized by the collar, lifted, then transported to a landscape where everything in it and all things within its purview will dispense meaning, insight, and nuance as the syrup dispensers do at International House of Pancakes. Another expectation of this novel calls for your immediate care and concern for the individuals who populate it, the stratagems by which they will conduct their lives in pursuit of the solutions to the obstacles Reality has placed in their way, and the meanings they will extract from the problems that beset them.

Perhaps most demanding of all expectations, you expect from this novel transformative energy and insight of sufficient magnitude to change your life in ways that will cause you to feel, think, and behave with more focus.

If this were not significant enough a burden, you extend the power you afford these expectations to those you associate with love, looking for the signs of transportation and transformation you associate with novels to apply there as well. Thus in your relationship with friends, colleagues, students, lovers, animal friends, you seek and to a large measure find in them an entity you can identify as a transformative force, one you can carry with you in your own times of woe and weal.

The nature of expectations is to outweigh their consequences, to distract us in our step-by-step process by which we seek to excel at the things we do, certainly not for pride but rather for the enhanced satisfaction of pursuing selfhood as though it were a draft of our best novel or short story to date. Being thus engaged and focused, you reckon will not make dying any easier than it ought to be but will make life more a continuous feast to be shared with any who are in the vicinity.

It is arguable that expectations invariably lead to disappointment, just as the idea in one's forge of process can never be equaled by its execution. Some musicians you know of may have achieved this goal: Mozart comes to mind; so does Ravel. Gershwin? Yep. Bach? Of course. But writers? Well, read on, and write on.

Also arguable is the notion that removal of expectation makes us, somewhat the samurai of old, and the likes of the Buddhist monks more open to something more valuable even than expectations, which is to say opportunity. You admire the prospect of opportunity, at this stage in your life being at the point of having expectations of encountering them. Through work, which is another occasion for a definition: Work is the engagement of listening to the senses, hearing them, seeing them, tasting them, rearranging the furniture if they do not all fit comfortably in the room we have, which is the body we were born into and the edifice it has become. Work is living and loving. And writing about them.

Cue, Not to Be Confused with Billiards

There is a moment of excited limbo when you, as an actor, are standing somewhere in the wings, waiting to go on, the delicious process of drainage at work, removing from you all the motives and responses of the you of birth and growth, allowing you to become filled with the you of character, aware of an agenda and expectations, When you are writing fiction, this particular sense is best seen as a cup of coffee with an exponent sign hovering above it because it is often impossible to gauge just how intense and exciting this feeling of being about-to-go-on is. There are occasional moments in real life when you feel such a moment, say in that brief second before you open the door to a classroom, or when you are about to join friends, or indeed when you are about to enter a shard of time that will be all yours, without interruption, to do what you will as the whim takes you. Perhaps Sally will be there, sleeping or watching some focus of stimulation, but perhaps you will be entirely alone, ready to walk-on into an adventure.

Your most vivid memory of such about-to moments goes well back into the 60s when, for a time, you were an extra, working at CBS TV Studios on Fairfax Avenue near Beverly, not yet at the stage of being given lines to deliver, more often than not being a part of a background. You forget the actual drama of the incident because the incident was its own drama. You were an extra in a Playhouse 90 production, a ninety-minute drama in which you had a number of appearances, all of which required you to move quickly from one set to another, often through narrow, poorly lit aisle-ways. The incident began when you made a wrong turn, from which everything about you was a disconnect. You were hopelessly lost. In the rehearsals, you'd judged the amount of time you needed to get from one set to another, thereupon to become a passenger in an elevator or a group of individuals leaving a courtroom, or an individual seated at a bar, staring longingly at the splendid actress, Kim Hunter. But you were lost and the inner clock was ticking. You made what you hoped was a turn that would get you out of terra incognita and into some familiarity, but instead, you came face to face with an icon. Standing there, moodily watching the progress of the story on a monitor was the great stone face of all time, the silent film icon, Buster Keaton. "Don't worry, kid," he told you. "We all get lost once in a while." You hesitated, wanting to convey your respect and admiration. "No time for that, kid," he said. "Keep looking for your way. The cue is everything."

You have been lost more than once, sometimes in search of the cue, wondering if you would ever learn it.

Standing in the limbo before entering your scene is daunting; if you think about what you are doing, it could easily be an invitation to stage fright and that awful sense of being out there before an audience with neither cue nor clue. Watching the recent film Up in the Air, you did not at first relate to the growing feeling of discomfort when George Clooney, in character, stood before a seminar and began inviting his audience to see a backpack. The feeling of discomfort reached its acme when he paused before another-but-similar audience, his own disconnect between cues tugging at him. The way his and your careers have gone, it is unlikely that you will ever meet him as and in the context of your meeting with Buster Keaton, but seeing the film was a lovely redux of what has become a way of life and of looking at events.

Keep looking for your way.

Smile when you find it.

Are peak experiences on sale at Wal-Mart?

Just as we do in real-time life, characters must arrive at work every day with expectations.  They may brown bag it to save money, they may dress casually on Friday, but they must have some goal driving them forth, some agenda beeping away like the monitors on hospital TV dramas that intensify to suggest crisis.  The agenda is many ways defines the character.  How could we not feel a measure of sympathy and identification for the parent who wanted children to advance according to their talents?  How could we fail to experience a squeeze of identification for the hard-working immigrant who wants to bring the rest of his family along?  Doesn't our heart go out to the young artist who seeks beyond fame and recognition the achievement of special, intense skills and the empathy with which to give those skills an entire perspective?

The roommate of expectation is reversal, an intimacy college dorm mates experience well into their post graduation years.  Expectation and reversal are borrowed like shirts, sweaters and dresses.  The relationship is intimate because one follows the other, in real-time life and in story.  It is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Burns had it right with "The best laid schemes of mice and men..."  They play off one another like the old vaudevillian teams, building plot twists via response at every turn.  Felix leaves a Post-it note on the refrigerator,signing it merely with his initials.  FU.  Felix Unger.  Oscar, big blustery sort that he is, sees the FU and explodes.

Persons who manage to achieve or seem to achieve everything they want are bigger than life and more boring than life.  It is not so much schadenfreude that makes us want some pigeon to come home to poop if not roost; we have all experienced loss and disappointment that wrenched from us something we thought we had or could have.  It is what we do in consequence of the reversal that sets us apart.  Similarly, it defines our characters.

If we had truly wanted what was denied us or taken from us, we would be making plans to get it back or replace it or go after something even more intense, leaving the door open for act two finale of regaining what was lost, then paving the way for act three, discovering that the goal wasn't worth the price paid for it.  Sound familiar?

Little things mean a lot, but in story they mean everything.

How many times do we fall down the rabbit hole of going for the big, important theme and in the process missing entirely the small, suggestive details?

No matter how difficult it may be to quantify the answer, nevertheless we do tend to miss the explosive potential for story within the smaller details without which the larger seems mere hyperbole, exaggerations so grandiose that they are done in by their very size.  Take the simple example of dinner and a man rushing home to it, mindful of a habit of dinner at six o'clock most evenings.  The fact of dinner at six is already a defining detail of the man, his social class, his life horizons.  What will he do at, say, seven, when dinner is eaten?  Will he surf the channels on TV, rush off to bowling or a night of poker with the boys?  Will he read to his kids, help with washing the dishes, whisk his mate off to a movie?

Add the detail of the man being hungry and the added detail of dinner being late, to which we add the detail of the man's responses to these turns of event.  Wait, wait; we're backing this man into a corner from which he will emerge as a dreadfully insensitive cliche, a man whose expectations have led him into a trap from which he might not emerge marriage and illusions intact, subsequently bitter, insensitive, insulated by the beer-induced  negativity toward women and notions of "what they expect."

See how closely the use of the details of this character's expectations applies Post-It labels to his exterior, defining him in ways no mere adjective nor adverb could.  Such significant dimensions as the degree of intimacy between characters or the extent of devotion of one character to a belief system are the small things we tend to ignore when setting them loose in a scene to pursue their intent.

In most dramatic situations, we are where we are not because of some divine plan or the workings of Fate or Kismet but as the consequence of a number of related and unrelated previous events.  We are where we are in pursuit of a goal which we began some time back in the past.  We may be accordingly fortunate to be where we are or unfortunate to be here at this moment.  Homer knew this while in the act of composing The Iliad.  Beginning as he did with the wrath of Achilles and the play of that subplot, he was passing up on the need to began with the beauty contest where it all began, and Paris was chosen as the poster boy for the three goddesses who sought to win his favor.  Whether it is The Iliad or something more restrained, we are interested in story because it indirectly intimates to us that event in our life are not random, they are conjoined in actuality or by the tie of interrelationship.  We go to story not so much for the inevitability as for the removal of random movement.  We go also for the curiosity that surrounds our awareness of our own past movements and the wonder of what events they will bring down upon us.

The Other Shoe

other shoe dropping, the--a dramatic (emotional) payoff resulting from a previously foreshadowed clue; the literary equivalent of the aftershock following an earthquake; a degree of closure achieved from an earlier action.

The well-known trope of the other shoe dropping comes from the theoretical supposition of an individual preparing for a night's sleep in a cheap hotel or rooming house. As the individual settles down to sleep, a guest in the room one floor above is similarly preparing for sleep...removes his shoes and let's one fall to the floor with a thud. The individual of our focus is wrested from the brink of sleep by the sound above him; he waits for the second shoe, the famed "other" shoe to drop so that he can return his concentration on achieving sleep. Of course he cannot. The wait for the sound of the other shoe dropping has claimed his focus. It could well be that the guest in the upstairs room has realized the consequences of letting the first shoe drop. Out of consideration, he has resolved that the other shoe shall be set down quietly. But the expectant one cannot achieve sleep until he has heard the second shoe drop.

The other shoe dropping may be an actual physicality, such as the lodger in the upstairs room removing his shoes; it may also be an association made by one character or a realization achieved by a character. Oscar Madison, one half of Neil Simon's dramatic odd couple, is used to getting verbal suggestions and written notes from his roommate, Felix Unger, any of which serve to intensify the growing irritation Madison feels toward Unger. But as the narrator of Poe's "A Cask of Amontillado" puts it, "when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge." In this case, Felix Unger's venturing on insult is not at all intentional but is nevertheless seen by Madison as having crossed a line, of having gone too far. What is Unger's step over the line, his dropping of the other shoe? Why, leaving a note for Madison signed merely with his initials. How would you feel if you were on the receiving end of a note signed FU?

Anticipation is a cherished dramatic force, whether the drama is comedic or tragic. Simplistic as it may sound to offer the council that the reader is in a constant state of expectation, it is virtually unthinkable not to mention anticipation

Hint: At some point during the revision process, see if there are any shoes being dropped, any event that would cause irritation or consternation to visit a character, perhaps even an event that refuses to go away. Then exploit it.

Readers' Expectations

reader's first expectations, the-- reasons provided the reader by the writer of a story as well as the characters, incidents, and settings depicted within the story that will cause the reader to suspend disbelief; the primary state of the reader's mind when approaching a work of fiction.

Readers know in advance that a story is invented. On some basic level of awareness, the reader enters the transaction with the writer and the text with a conflict of interest in which he wants the text to become a rendition of reality while openly seeking any possible detail that prevents the story from appearing real. 

The invention must seem real in every detail; the characters must be plausible, their goals and plans to achieve these goals must resonate the sanity of conventional logic. Thus the reader notices anomalies, the green-eyed protagonist on page six who suddenly blinks her gray eyes on page nineteen; the subway stop in midtown Manhattan where in fact there is no such subway stop, a rifle or pistol of a particular caliber being afforded a range well beyond its real capacity, the winner of the baseball World Series of a particular year being rendered incorrectly. 

The reader does not object to the green-eyed protagonist on page six installing a pair of shaded contact lenses prior to blinking her now gray eyes on page nineteen, nor does the reader object to a wrongly placed subway stop in an alternate universe novel, possibly even thinking a subway stop at that particular location would be a good idea. Anomalies must be rendered to have a home in plausibility.

Thus the reader's first expectation is to be given sufficient dramatic, emotional, and physical information necessary to overcome the gap between actuality and projected potential. This story could be happening, this story is happening, these characters are real. The more skilled writers in our midst begin by nurturing a firm belief in their vision; if they do not have a vision, they add details in support of one, adding here, removing there until the vision clarifies. 

 They do not try to argue the characters, situations, and locales into being. Least of all do they rely on the sad old tropes: "But it really happened that way," and "But this character is based on a real person." The reader expects the writer to be right enough to dispel any doubt.

It is instructive to consider our individual lie detector, which usually becomes activated when we see attributes piled on a description of an event or quality, or when materials presented as facts cannot be attributed to reliable sources. Readers have lie detectors, but readers are fighting to believe. Their first expectation is to be able to do so.

The more convinced the writer is of the characters and circumstances in his story, the less likely he is to pile on attributes and stage directions and in fact the more likely he is to be taken at face value, right from the start.

A good place to begin engaging this reader expectation is with individuals who are in the midst of doing something that will lead to confrontation or, having already met the confrontation, started to cope with it. For convenient reference, think of Tom Sawyer's "solution" to having to white wash the fence, then set your own characters to work.

Revision.3

character--individuals in stories who want things, cause things to happen, have things happen to them, have expectations and attitudes. A character's passport into a story is issued on the basis of the things wanted and expected as well as that character's special abilities. A thorough baggage search is indicated against the possibility that the character may be passive.

Characters may be classified into four major groups, protagonist, antagonist, messenger and examples, and pivotal. Protagonists have agendas which they attempt to realize; antagonists attempt to stop protagonists from realizing their goals. These are the front-rank characters. Messenger characters bring news from other characters onto the page, while exemplary characters demonstrate to the other characters and readers conditions and circumstances that might befall front-rank characters. Pivotal characters are those whose allegiances may shift from one side or group to another because of events within the story.

Things to remember about characters during the revision process:

1. They want to act and react.
2. They do not appear in a scene in order to emote.
3. They may lie to themselves.
4. They may lie to each other.
5. They may lie to the reader. (Notable example: Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." It is no such thing.)
6. A character in a story is to a real person as dialogue is to real speech. A character acts and then thinks; a person thinks ad then acts.
7. Characters are the causal instruments by which events take place.
8. Character represents a critical mass of:
a--guilt
b--grief
c--ambition
d--doubt
e--hormones
9. Characters are defined by the ways in which they respond to and cope with obstacles.
10. Characters enter every scene with some expectation
11. Characters enter every scene having come from doing something else.
12. Even reflective characters such as Hamlet are essentially persons of action.

Questions to ask of your dramatis personae during revision:

1. Are there any duplications? Could two similar-sounding individuals be combined into one
2. Do they truly advance or complicate the story?
3. Do they earn their keep in other ways such as providing obstacles or temptations or even opportunities for the protagonist or antagonist to discuss plot issues with?
4. Do they have dimension?
5. Do they have a weak spot?
6. Might they be tempted to change loyalties?
7. Do the front-rank characters undergo change and/or an awareness of a previously unrecognized moral choice or issue?
8. Do you, the writer, beat up on the antagonists with adjectives and adverbs; do other characters treat them as though they were lepers? Any chance they have become evil for evil's sake?

A Twofer

expectations--the results each character foresees when venturing into a new scene, a guiding compass as the character is being borne along on the stream of narrative within scenes or connecting them. A character without expectations in a scene is the equivalent of the scenic backdrops found at tourist attractions, where one inserts one's head and is photographed as a comic memento.

Every character wants something; this is the passport to cross the border from joke or anecdote or vignette into the landscape of story. Accordingly, imagine the tourist character equipped with a fanny-pack right out of the L.L. Bean catalog. Along with that character's desire, rolled neatly and resting on top of history/backstory, attitude, and feelings about the other characters in the story is expectations. That character expects the next scene to be an occasion of achievement, boredom, surprise, humiliation, frustration, severe reversal, sexual opportunity, inspiration, or challenge. These will be delivered in such a way and by appropriate characters to send the story forward, leaving as emotional residue an identifiable counterpoint. Expectations are the qualities that give dimension and life to story, allowing the character to do what characters are intended to do--react. The character need not use all the tools in the fanny-pack in every scene, except for expectations and the personal sense of having been in or lived through some situation or encounter before entering the present scene. Without these two possessions, the character is sure to be turned back at the border.

willing suspension of disbelief, the--a term coined by critic-poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge to account for the inertia of skeptical disbelief a writer must overcome in a reader in order to have his narrative accepted as real. With so many books being published and so many sources apparent for short stories, readers are daring writers to be more convincing, at pain of not pursuing a story to its conclusion. Sophisticated readers have come a long way from the early days of the novel and short story; they know the characters are inventions of the author. But they also know that a skillful writer can make them forget this fact, empathize with fictional beings, root for their favorites, and experience severe distress when their favorite characters experience reversals.

The trick here is to make the reader forget that the characters on the page are inventions. One way to do this is to quickly present characters in their attempts to solve the problems and reversals of fortune with which they are afflicted. Another way to accomplish this goal is to show characters setting off on a quest, a perilous journey, or a new venture in which they will become at accelerated risk. Yet another approach is to endow the character with some physical or emotional flaw which they must struggle to overcome. Johnny Tremaine, the young, eponymous apprentice to Paul Revere, experiences an accident early on; molten silver is spilled on his hand, permanently fusing his thumb to his palm. In Tracy Chevalier’s novel, The Girl with the Pearl Ear Ring, a young peasant girl is forced to take a job as a maid when her artisan father is blinded by an exploding kiln.

Every short story and novel, regardless of how fantastic or quotidian, has to cope with this problem: Does the reader believe implicitly in the characters and situations? Step One in this remarkable alchemy from the dross of initial concept to the gold of finished work begins with the writer believing in the characters. From there, the author must portray characters behaving in ways that are feasible to them so that the reader not only does not question them and what they do but as well begins hoping none of the obstacles are too big to be overcome. Thus by indirection, the key to overcoming disbelief is vulnerability; no matter what the characters are vulnerable to--greed, love, fear, confusion, ambition--that vulnerability becomes a wedge that lifts the fence of plausibility, often just enough to allow the reader to crawl through.

Great Expectations

If you've ever been back stage waiting to go on for a play or musical, or perhaps been waiting in a green room, awaiting your turn for a TV appearance on an interview show, or if your life has been less dramatic, if you can recall waiting to be interviewed for a job you really wanted, you'll relate to the feelings of expectations and apprehension. What, for instance, if I blow my lines? Or, what if I'm not convincing enough in conveying how much I really want this job?

Your characters are like that, wanting the part, wanting the job. They have expectations. A character who walks into the paragraphs of a story without expectation is going to be chewed up, a bug meeting an oncoming windshield. A character in a scene without expectations has not been prepped.

Let's look at Fred, who's got a Zen thing going. I have no expectations, Fred says. I am not bound up in attachment to expectations. I'm in the now.

Will says I want the job at stake in this story. Of all the characters in competition for the job, I'm best qualified, have the most experience, and have a five-year plan for productivity.

Ed says I want recognition for what I've done. I want to be recognized as someone shrewd, loyal, and inventive, a team player.

Max says I'm ready for the big time, no more minor league ball for me, man. I can hit breaking stuff, have less than one error per thousand innings, and have a strong throwing arm.

All these are reasonable expectations, particularly if they are met, so the vector of story and what they will do while on stage if their expectations are met, blunted, or have some codicil attached to them. What volcanic forces will begin to seethe and roil within the character whose expectations are not met.

I should have known better, the ultimate nipping of hope, expectation, enthusiasm in the bud. I should have known better because I'm not worthy. I should have known that there were politics at play here. What we have then is the larger message, I should have known better than to expect fairness or justice.

Such rich subtext we have when some of our characters do not speak or act in consequence with their expectations. Such lovely moments of tension or suspense or drama or revelation or all of these when a character expresses his or her expectations and is told he/she cannot expect them to be met. Well, that's very nice but I was thinking we could be friends. Oh, I thought you knew, I don't date boys. I date girls. Thing is, we were thinking of bringing in someone from outside for that job.


When you are pulled into a particularly enticing jumble of dramatic events, your first expectation is that you will finish it, perhaps even finish it well, without the slightest moment of hand wringing or thoughts that this work is no magic carpet, it does not fly. When you get beyond that point, you have hopes, expectations that someone you care about will get the emotional chorus you built into the work. Then your expectations climb to the ledge of publication, perhaps even a splendid review or two, to the point where you will be invited back for at least one more work. And then you will expect--don't tell me you won't--that the published work will have some effect on the world.

We have numerous ways for coping with our expectations, ranging from rationalizations, denial, transference, delusion, despair. For every expectation there is an outcome. Are expectations like quarters fed into a casino slot? And what if we hit the jackpot?

Allowing characters to step into a scene without expectations or some relevant chore is like letting them go off to school with out-of-fashion clothing; they are sure to be met by playground bullies, greeted with jeers, sent off to consider their shortcomings where we don't have to look at them