And cue the writer. "You're on, writer."

You are standing in the wings, awaiting your cue to enter.

The stage manager, a substantial, bulky presence, stands before you, clipboard in hand. He makes eye contact, nods. "You're on," he whispers.

You nod, step around him and are now on stage with other characters who appear to have been doing things. It is a bit odd to see other characters on stage, but this is a new director; rehearsals have been scanty, and in many ways, you are still not completely comfortable.

"O for a muse of fire," you begin, "that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention,

A kingdom for a stage, princes to act

And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,

Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,

Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire

Crouch for employment."

One of the actors is looking at you with mounting alarm. "What are you doing?" she whispers. "This is not fucking Henry V, and you are not the fucking chorus. And how are you going to get us out of this mess?"

More often than not, your time waiting in the wings to go on is spent near the screen of your computer or at a corner table in Peet's hunched over a lined note pad, a brimming cup of latte close to hand. You have a sense of where you--no matter which of your characters you are at the moment--are coming from, where you are going, and what your overall agenda is. Purpose is all about you, and instead of the shifting in their seats or the occasional cough from the audience, you are aware of another kind of live presence, the crackle and static of tension radiating from the story points and the vast minefields of misunderstanding between the characters. Sometimes you deliver lines that surprise you by their directness and confrontational swagger, themselves an awareness that you have somehow caught hold of the tiger's tail that is each character's individual handle.

On good days, you get pages down, the time seemingly subtracted from your day like an agent's commission removed from your royalty check, effortlessly, quickly, inevitably.

But today is not so good a day. You are out there because that is what you do. You wait in the wings of your drama for a cue, then you enter, but most of the time you enter not merely in character but in recognizable character, every word and gesture cloaked in nuance appropriate to the moment.

The more you have time to reflect on the actor's nightmare of not knowing which story or which characters today's appearance involves, the more you realize that the writer's nightmare is even more acute; the writer must not merely learn lines and interpret them to the point where they bring life to the story, the writer must learn to see and speak and write all over again with each new project because the writer's nightmare is to believe in all sincerity that it is all right to bring forth the same performance, the same device, the same thing that worked well in the last story as a part of confronting this present story. The writer knows this sort of hubris can lead to being derivative; the writer recognizes any number of derivative individuals whose works are readily accessible, even looks at the numbers with some jealousy, until the time comes to step into the wings and wait for the cue. At that moment, an enormous vulnerability opens. The writer can cringe, then attempt to charm his or her audience, then feel the sinking platform under him at the sense that no one is buying the charm, least of all his characters.

It has through practice and habit become easy to costume up and step into that limbo before being on and being exposed to the audience, completely red-handed in having nothing to deliver at the moment. But if you stop to think about it later, you will realize that the greatest humiliation of all is also part of your muscle memory; you have heard the equivalent of "What do you think you're doing out there?" from friends, writing groups, instructors, literary agents, editors, and yes, reviewer/critics, and come back this one more time, making eye contact with the stage manager, and strode forth onto the stage. "O for a muse of fire," you begin. "Or maybe not." And before you realize it, the other characters are looking at you with amazement, put off by your audacity, then beginning ever so slowly to see the possibilities and react to them.

Moving Volition

volition--a character facing a decision and making a choice; the acts performed or not performed by a character in service of an agenda; a necessary quality of determination and purpose resident in a character; the inertial guidance system of a front rank character.

Integral to any understanding of character and the subsequent empathy for or antagonism to that character, volition is the analog of the purring engine, already converting fuel to energy, ready to move forth with elan. Volition is the engine of personality for a character, the defining set of impressions that determine how the character will behave in a given situation. Will that character elect, as Melville's iconic Bartleby did, to prefer not to? Perhaps the character is more of a mindset with Shakespeare's version of Henry V, invoking his troops to follow him into battle against the French at Agincourt, "...cry 'God for Harry, England and St. George!'" Of course girl and women characters bring an equally nuanced set of volition to the text. Look at Scout,the six-year-old narrator of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, who had to make some tough choices about the small Alabama town in which she was raised. Not to forget Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. It is highly probable that her early independence and strong-willed nature led her to the rebellious affair that resulted in Pearl, a child born out of wedlock. Although the narrator appears to disapprove of her behavior, his increasing sense of admiration becomes apparent as she, subject to the humiliation and alienation inflicted on her, becomes contemplative as she develops into a more dimensional character than any other in the novel.

For the writer, learning who the character is becomes the first step in a triad of priority. Now the writer must intuit what the character wants, at which point the character is ready to leap from no or a single dimension into the realm of nuance. Will the character make that leap? Now comes volition: What is the character willing to do to accomplish the goal? With that awareness radiating within the character and suspected all along by the reader, what explosive results will come forth? With persistence and honesty, the writer is drawn into the equation with the discovery of the depths to which the character will go. Did, for instance, Melville know how far Bartleby was willing to go to make his statement? Did Melville have any sense that Bartleby's position of preferring not to do what was asked of him become the instrument of his death? Perhaps it was the added element that often attaches itself to the accelerated atoms of volition--perhaps it was surprise.

A Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Leave it to that persistently pompous but nevertheless well-meaning Samuel Taylor Coleridge to have circled the wagons around the critical concept of willing suspension of disbelief.

He did so nearly two hundred years ago in Biographia Literaria, the Gordian knot inflicted on English majors by their instructors, accepted at first by said English majors as some kind of hazing ritual, then grudgingly recognized as vast in wisdom but in great need of pruning shears. The fact that people talked and thought that way in the early 1800s boggles the modern mind, but we modernists are afforded revenge at the picture of what such contemporary ventures as rap, ska, and hip-hop would have had on them.

Willing suspension of disbelief was supposed to be the deliberate setting aside of cynicism toward any fanciful leap of imagination inherent in a work of art by the viewer/reader.

A splendid example of an author, asking the viewer to suspend disbelief and, indeed, to contribute imagination to the venture, is seen in the Prolog to Henry V, where, in the original performances, there was not only disbelief to overcome but considerable effort needed to participate because there was no scenery. None. 

You wanted moonlight, you had some kid holding a pole with a lantern at its end, and one of the characters in the play could point to it and say, “Ah, yon moon riseth.”

“O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention,” the prolog begins:

A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels, Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all, The flat unraised spirits that hath dar'd On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object. Can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? O, pardon! since a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million; And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, On your imaginary forces work. Suppose within the girdle of these walls Are now confin'd two mighty monarchies, Whose high upreared and abutting fronts The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder; Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts: Into a thousand parts divide one man, And make imaginary puissance; Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth. For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings, Carry them here and there, jumping o'er times, Turning the accomplishment of many years Into an hour-glass: for the which supply, Admit me Chorus to this history; Who, prologue-like, your humble patience pray, Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.

Thus does Mr. Big invite us to join the conspiracy against reality by thinking, when he talks of horses, “that you see them, printing their proud hoofs I’ the receiving earth…” It does not hurt that his use of imagery invites suspension of disbelief.

Fast forward four hundred plus years to radio drama. Instead of invitations from a chorus to “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts,” you get a sound-effects man, an individual who made you hear horse hooves (coconut shells) on The Lone Ranger, and the unthinkable disarray of the interior of Fibber McGee’s closet.

We have become so used to suspending artistic disbelief that the distortions of a Modigliani portrait are not only acceptable, they expand our sense of beauty. We know there is no such place as Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, but we read the work of William Faulkner with the absolute conviction that it exists and so do the families and individuals who populate it.

We are so used to suspending artistic disbelief that we criticize as implausible a work that does not allow us to suspend reflexively, to enjoy the photograph or painting or drama or story as we properly should.

In a real sense, artists of the past and present have given us a passport with which to suspend or alter time, space, and causation. We aren’t positive, but we have some basis to speculate on the intention of those early artists who incised or drew illustrations on cave walls and rocks, making their work even more of a creative shimmer.

But alas: We have also become so used to suspending disbelief that we have in rapid succession elected to office a man who is so stunningly effective in his own chaos theory that he has brought a country to the same disarray as Fibber McGee’s closet, then not only blamed us for the mess, but has authorized Halilburton to clean it up for us.

We live in a world where our suspension of disbelief has collided with the awful reality of a madness so severe that it brings to question our own sense of reality being twisted into a mobius strip.

In my early love affair with California history and the magnetic lure of things San Franciscan, I became aware of Joshua A. Norton (1819-80), a man who made a nice living for himself as a commodities dealer before losing first his business and them his mind, eventually declaring himself Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.

A frequent composer of letters of advice to Queen Victoria, Norton was regarded with affection by San Franciscans, who celebrated his eccentricities. Perhaps this is our way with this more contemporary emperor. I would think Texas more to his liking than San Francisco. Perhaps Dallas or Houston, possibly even Waco or Amarillo. But not Austin. A horse. By all means, give the man a horse. And now that I think of it, a companion, a servant or overseer. Perhaps a former vice president.

Close your eyes and think of it. The two of them, moving about Texas, rescuing Texans from—from themselves. Possibly retiring from time to time to an unused FEMA trailer, but only to sit out hot or cold spells.

Go ahead, suspend your disbelief. Close your eyes and think of it.