Any Portal in a Storm

portal--a doorway between or entryway from one landscape to another; most famously the rabbit hole into which Alice (of Wonderland fame) tumbled from the world of reality to Lewis Carroll's world of imagination and satire. A considerable subset of the fantasy genre is populated with portal stories in which characters are able to move variously from one universe to another or one time frame to another. Some famous portals are antique shops, Chinese laundries, apothecaries, and news kiosks which have a habit of offering certain inducements or products to certain characters, then disappearing when the characters, experiencing buyers' remorse, seek to return. Yet another famed portal is a park bench in Oxford, England, a site where Lyra Belacqua and her love, Will Parry, characters from the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, sit at the same time on the same day of the year, there to hold hands across the boundaries of separate worlds.

The concept of the portal is not limited to such fantasy-related concepts as alternate universes, this for the same reason that fantasy fiction is an important construct for all story tellers. In an excruciatingly real way, every novel and short story is set in an alternate universe, one that is somewhat of this present reality and equally somewhat of the author's concept of what this present reality is. Portals allow the writer a glimpse into the alternate universe, along with the challenge of fleshing it out, making it seem plausible to the characters who patrol it as well as the readers who read about it.

In any convincing story, characters stumble or are drawn into portals they has not recognized as portals; they emerge to discover themselves in a world that may not be hospitable, may in fact be outright menacing, therein to pursue their agendas according to the risks and realities of the universe in which they find themselves. Just as personal traits help define characters, details and conventions of behavior define the world in which characters awaken then attempt to function in.

Dorothy Gale has been drawn into the land of Oz through the whirl of a cyclone, Alice has stumbled into the notional and autocratic world at the other side of the rabbit hole while Philip Marlowe is drawn into the shadowy illegalities of the greater Los Angeles Basin through the portal of a scratched and battered office in an undistinguished office on the lower reaches of Hollywood Boulevard. Similarly, through the highly idiosyncratic portal of Yoknopatatha County, an imaginary venue in the state of Mississippi, we gain access to the alternate universe of the rural United States South, a regional portal through which is seen a vision of America as variegated and painfully naked truth as possible, one so specific in its nature that it becomes ironically universal.

How characters come to be in such alternate universes, how they are seen by the denizens of these universes, and how they seek either to remain or find their way out are the essential natures of story.

The Mysterious Stranger

There's always something going on in the background, babies crying, dogs barking, a dropped garden hose spraying anyone who gets in its way, serious-looking individuals on the front porch, wanting to talk about God. This is the background against which stories are set, backgrounds made plausible by their implausibility.

Story doesn't exist in a vacuum, a fact we do well to remember because sometimes, when we are too focused, we tune out the sensuous materials that ratify the authenticity and plausibility of story. In real life, things can happen in vacuums, thanks to such social advancements as gated communities, restaurants with a modicum of sound proofing, homes instead of close apartments.

Marlow was always hearing things while interviewing clients or driving to assignations, smelling things in the hallways, catching refrains of anomalous songs from across the way; these things made Chandler's prose near eternal. He may have been dead for fifty years but the scents, sounds, sights linger in the hallways and dark streets of the L.A. Basin. His elevators creak, have the faint odor of someone having been sick; his automobiles growl, wheeze, exhibit internal rumbles. More than his metaphor and wry observation, his sense of a place attaches to his stories like a limpet grabbing onto the pilings of a pier.

An observation then: adjectives and adverbs are better spent describing the senses than the qualities of action. Story is more than individuals forced to walk the plank of plot, rather it is the atmosphere in which thinkable and unthinkable things play our their fizzle of light, matches struck in the dark, giving us a brief vision of the parts not dark, not hidden, but nevertheless not fully revealed.

Shakespeare was performed in the blackness of the theater without setting, without flats or scrolls of scenery and yet the text is filled with enough suggestion that the story emerges not only with its own collisions and near misses but with the acute sense of where everyone is and what's going on in the background. Even Beckett, that stern minimalist, has his characters dress inform us of a greater absurdity that the setting suggests.

An actor can steal a scene merely by focusing attention on a point somewhere on stage or off, regarding it with apparent curiosity. An actor can steal a scene by swatting an imaginary fly or mosquito. In the best of worlds, a character can steal a scene, certainly from the other characters present but as well from the author, which brings us close to the scare atmosphere of creative potential, an atmosphere ripe with its own sounds, sights, smells.

Stories with safety nets end up defeating the writer, causing the writer to think how easy it is to rely on artifice instead of risk.
A bunch of ham actors, standing around the scene, watching the Alpha Players do their things, wondering what movement can change the entire tenor, shifting from tragedy to the comedic, letting the dog of pathos out the door and into bathos. Suddenly the atmosphere is charged with the electricity of impending storm; suddenly the story is changed from safe and predictable to risky and revelatory. Where does it come from? The characters growing bored with the same old prospects, you becoming bored with the possibility of ending in sight.

The "it" comes from that secret packet we all carry about with us, the thing we may show on occasion to strangers, knowing we'll likely never see them again; the "it" is the thing we often feel the most uncomfortable about, the thing we don't want friends to know about us or perhaps the thing we want family or friends to think we're comfortable with.

What better strangers to show it to than readers.

Who Goes First?

The first-person narrator haunts the hallways of fiction in the same manner ghosts were alleged to have wandered the battlements, bedchambers, and cellars of old castles, seeking to arrest us with tales, complaints, and sagas of unrequited injustice. Some of us are drawn naturally to the medium, thinking it frees us from our own restraints as an observer and manager of events, while others of us have found ourselves locked in a log jam of the pronoun I, which pops up with the insistence of a grade schooler wanting to show off knowledge of a right answer to a teacher's question.

Many diverse and lovely first-person novels have graced the literature, ranging from the exquisite wrench of Dickens' Great Expectations to the more recent skepticism of the Philip Marlow detective fiction of Raymond Chandler. Within this panoply is one of the more dangerous examples of how a mismanaged first-person can lead the writer to limitless agony. I speak of Huckleberry Finn, an exemplary first-person novel because of the depth and honesty of the chore it took on, and as well because of the emotional journey on which it led his creator. Huckleberry Finn also illustrates my greater point about the first-person narrative.

For most of his written work, Samuel Clemens was Mark Twain trying to be Samuel Clemens. Mark Twain was his discovered voice, his mischievous, irreverent self, champing at the bit to get at pomposity, pretension, sanctimoniousness. At the same time, he yearned for the status of his literary friends, the Howells, the Lowell, even the respect of his friend, the Rev. Joe Twitchell. In short, when Twain got into the first-person self of Huck Finn, he was writing about himself again, himself burnished by hundreds of thousands of words and of that many readers. He'd wrestled with his conscience in print before but never over so deeply as in Huck Finn, where he literally took on the issues of slavery and racial equality. The I, the first-person, was a thirteen-year-old boy, a boy that was created the way a trained actor today would create a role. Twain lived that part until he could no longer put up with it, at which point he shelved it for nearly ten years. Lucky for us but not so lucky for Twain, Huck wouldn't let go, kept pestering at Twain until he made himself heard. This time he brought in Tom Sawyer, who had grown enough to show Twain how a more regular boy would have responded to such an adventure. Tom stuck around to do some reprehensible things, particularly to Jim, the runaway slave. For a while, Huck went along with the teasing because of his admiration for Tom, and what a thesis and or deconstruction that would make--but not for now. For now, the first-person drew Twain into an unintended honesty that was transformative.

The detail about Twain and Huck here is to emphasize the point that the author has to create a character no less extensive in the first-person point of view than in any other, say third or multiple, or even the omniscient. The author has to know or discover the intent of the narrator, then portray it through emotion being evoked in the reader. In the calculus of drama, emotion evoked leads to action; action is the spine of the story.

How does one "prepare" for the first-person point of view? One way is to create a biography of the character, including a map of that character's senses: does she profess vegetarianism for instance, or does she secretly love and want Fred, and if so what are her chances of having her love reciprocated, and if they are in her estimation next to nothing, what does she do as Plan B?

Or to put it another way, the I is not you, but you become the I.

Another way for us to prepare for carrying the story is to ask why this character wants to tell her or his version of the events. We had no such problem with No Country for Old Men because the author decided he was the one to tell it, whereupon he did so by his stunning command and vision of the people involved and how they felt and how they were driven by what they did.

Yet another way to help us see those who would relate their versions is to pick a favored poem. In some ways, I'm a sonnet man, so I'll use as examples two of my favorites, the Shakespeare, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" and the Wordsworthian trope, "The world is too much with us, late and soon." Both are readily available on Google. Recite one of these as each of your characters would using that practical exercise to help you "get" the tone and attitude of each.

I is a fine medium--provided you know who I is and who I is not.