The Choking Doberman and Other Enigmas

anticlimax--a shift away from a matter of heavy relevant consequence to something entirely trivial, producing a bumpy, undercutting effect; a comparison of something high-minded with a matter of little or no consequence; overkill on the payoff of a story (the delivery of a death sentence when a reprimand would have sufficed). When done with deliberation, the result may be amusing, even considered satiric, but when done unintentionally, not only does the reader suffer, so does the writer's reputation.

Anticlimax is a feeling of impatience forced upon readers when an author overstays or over embellishes the dramatic effect of a satisfying conclusion. Often brought about by a writer's unwillingness to allow readers to draw their own conclusions, anticlimax is brought about when the author directly or through the intervention of one or more characters, insists on explaining critical events by offering background for them or explanations. Think of anticlimax as undermining an effective conclusion or as the mounting frustration experienced when a friend intrigues us at first with the beginning of an artfully told story only to persist in embellishing it with more details than we want to hear.

However managed and emphatic his endings were, Beethoven understood the dynamics of anticlimax in his compositions. Many writers of the past whose works are still being read today--notably Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad, and Jane Austen--seem to have found the boundary between the precision of an effective, memorable ending and ornate excess, then observed that boundary, giving some critics the opportunity to note that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors made sure their readers got their money's worth.

More recent novels and short stories are increasingly likely to end on a note of ambiguity, prompting the wisdom that writers looking for a voice, a theme, and an audience are well advised to err on the side of understatement.

arena--any landscape where a scene is set and/or the context in which narrative progresses. Think of the Roman Colosseum, replete with gladiators trashing one another, with crowds braying for more, with emperors and lesser dignitaries turning thumbs down. Consider those one-sided scores where the Christians were opposed by the lions. Now think of setting as an unfriendly atmosphere or locale in which to place characters (who may not even want to be there). Recall the moving dramas you've seen whether on stage,screen, or the page. They all took place in arenas of one kind or another. Now, go you and do likewise; impart that vital measure of tension to your scenes by setting them in arenas rather than travelogue backgrounds. Think of Bobbie Ann Mason's breakout short story, "Shiloh," in which a contemporary family heads out for a picnic in the area once the scene of a bloody and extensive battle during the American Civil War.

Query: What do living rooms, court rooms, dining rooms, school rooms, police stations, bed rooms, banks, and laboratories share in common?
Answer # 1: They are all arenas.
Answer # 2: They are places where story is able to grow.
Answer # 3 They are breeding grounds for dramatic stress, tension, and character development.
Answer # 4: All of the above.


Choking Doberman, the -- an eponymous device calculated to arrest the reader's attention through the opening pages of a story and into its development. A paradigm opening concept for a plot-driven story.

A woman returns home from grocery shopping to find her pet Doberman racked by a severe choking fit. She rushes the gasping dog to a vet, who examines the dog, but sees no reason for the breathing difficulties. He decides on a tracheotomy, telling the worried owner that the procedure wasn't anything she'd want to watch, suggesting the woman go home and leave the Doberman there overnight.

When the woman arrives home, her phone is ringing. When she answers, she is surprised to hear the vet. "Get out of the house immediately! Now! Go to the neighbor's and call the police."

Who could fail to be intrigued by such an opening?

Very few, it seems, because what started as an exercise in arresting beginnings in a creative writing class ended up as a post on an Internet site that deals with debunking urban myths. This intriguing concatenation of events, classic in its allure and promise of story to come, ultimately shoots itself in the foot by the very qualities it sets in motion. After such a fine beginning, the payoff has nowhere to go but a downward spiral. It plays out with the vet having discovered two human fingers lodged in the dog's throat, a result of the Doberman having attacked an escaped killer who was attempting to hide in the house of the unlucky dog and its owner. When the police arrive, the escaped killer is found unconscious, in a state of shock, and somewhat the bloodier for wear.

The concept was so good that it gained the kind of repetition and currency momentum common to the urban myth. In much the same way that a successful movie or TV series beget imitations, the choking Doberman began appearing on urban myth Internet sites as having originated in numerous Canadian and U.S. locales. It was so successful that it even made the jump from web site to book, The Choking Doberman and Other Urban Legends. During his tenure in the Department of Theater at the University of New Mexico, Digby Wolfe frequently invoked the Doberman as a splendid example of the opening velocity needed to get a plot-driven story underway. The excellent medical thriller, House, M.D., alive and running with six seasons of TV exposure at this writing, begins each episode with the equivalent of a choking Doberman, in which an individual suddenly begins acting out the bizarre, life-threatening behavior of some unusual symptom, often placing the eponymous protagonist, Gregory House, M.D., at risk of breaking some moral code, civil law, medical ethic, or a combination of all three.

Admonition # 1: Although there is nothing artistically or morally wrong with the plot-driven story, its side effects often include a weakening sense of reality, diminished plausibility, and suspended character development

E. B. White, the New Yorker writer, children's novelist, and co-author of a legendary style guide, once wrote, "Whoever sets pen to paper writes of himself whether knowingly or not." In similar fashion, writers who attempt to fashion a compelling opening to a story, pushing at the outer limits of plausibility, write of the choking Doberman, whether they know it or not.

Admonition # 2: the choking Doberman is a plot-driven device. While effective, it is no substitute for characters the reader has been made to care for.

Hold That Thought

For the second time in just under a month, I had occasion to listen to three actors I much admire, being on one way or another interviewed. The first actor was Idris Elba, who did such a layered portrayal of the Baltimore drug underlord, Stringer Bell, in the HBO novel-as-TV-series, The Wire. Not long after, in another setting, I heard Dominic West, who portrayed a Type-A-personality Baltimore cop, Jimmy McNulty, on the same show. Just yesterday, I heard Hugh Laurie, star of the long-running TV series, House, in which he is the eponymous near-genius M.D. with a board certification in infectious disease and street cred for his diagnosis abilities. House also gobbles pain killers by the handful to alleviate chronic pain. His venue is a teaching hospital near Princeton, N.J. I don't know his cv, but I believe he is supposed to be a product of American schools.

This is important to me because all three actors, when not in character, speak with their native English accents and cadences as opposed to their character's native American English accents and cadences. A ham at heart, I am always on the lookout for an accent to grab onto, twist around a finger or two, perhaps even work into a story. The importance of language and its effects had its conscious effect on me back in the day when, watching another splendid actor, Derek Jacobi, portray the Roman Emperor Claudius, I became aware that his guards all had a deliberatly British accent but were said to be from German-speaking backgrounds, an effect that "allowed" or "caused" me to hear their dialogue as the Latin spoken at the time.

Actors have numerous ways of absorbing a regional dialect, including tapes and CDs of speech samples, living among their desired target group, consulting vocal coaches, even consulting books, and the always satisfying all-the-above choices. Actors have also the options of some of the more popular acting school techniques, including but not limited to that of Sanford Meisner, a staunch advocate of "being there," being the character while sending the real self to the principal's office or some other such exile.

Works the same for the writer; being the characters allows them to speak and be heard or, appropriately, not heard. Like an iron-on transfer for a t-shirt, being the character brings another presence to the front, often a presence at some odds from the reality of the actor. Being infused with the reality of the character allows the actor to experience the potential for the character's responses, sponteneity, and yes, even language. True enough, each actor brings his toolkit of the character's sponteneity. (I have often in recent years pondered what I, for instance, could bring to Lear, things that would nevertheless allow me to project a plausible Lear instead of a Shelly at a party doing a parody of Lear.)

At every moment in a story, the writer copes with the multifarious question of what a given character would do in such a situation, then copes with the techniques to bring that character's response to plausible life. Thus has the writer taken on all the parts in a play, making it at once more daunting a task to "be" so many characters. This multifarious quality has the blessing of distracting the writer from being herself or himself, allowing said generic writer to concentrate entirely on "being there," of "being in the moment."

The key to all of this starts with listening to the characters, listening as the particular point of view character of the moment, then responding via the instinctive response of that character, based on what the goals of the story are.

Whether it's the first draft, the tenth, or the last, the antagonist--your antagonist--is thought. The moment you start thinking is the moment your antennae are out searching for signals from other readers, literary agents, editors, the reading public, rlatives who will be horrified by your portrayal of them, various exes in your life who will see your work as an elaborate revenge fantasy.