Letter to a Young, Middle-Aged, or Geezer Writer IX

Your enthusiasm for a project in the works rather than plot or outline is the hybrid vehicle you will ride through to the final destination.  The main source of power for this hybrid vehicle is your enthusiasm, but when that switches off or its warning lights begin to flicker, your next remarkable fuel is curiosity.  Thus my advice to you:  Beware of Sisyphean sentences in the course of which you push stolid predicates to the top of a rhetorical hill, give them a shove, then hope they achieve in their downward descent some--you guessed it--momentum.  Remember Sisyphus as a metaphor representing meaningless, mind-numbing work; keep him in mind as an exemplar of the kind of sentence you do not wish to write, not under any circumstances.

Sisyphus was sentenced to an eternity of meaningless work for defying the god Zeus--well, actually, for hitting on a mortal woman Zeus had planned an adventure or two with.  If your sentences bear the aura of fearful duty--"I've got to explain my characters' motivation"--or the taint of relying on the need to satisfy everyone in your writing group, including that one person who is so particularly critical of everything you write, these burdens will weigh your sentences and, indeed, your story, bringing it to a standstill, leaving you with the uncomfortable awareness of being alone, stranded as it were on a desert island much as the young chaps in Lord of the Flies were stranded.  And you know what happened to them.

How, I hear you asking, do I achieve this mind-freeing enthusiasm of which I speak?  I can give you the mechanism.  The specifics work for me; perhaps they'll show you how to draw upon them to develop your own, as indeed I drew from my role model, a musician name of Franz Josef Haydn, not only an articulate composer but a prolific one.  He began his working day by sorting through his library of musical scores, finding a piano work written by Karl Philip Emanuel Bach, then spending half an hour playing the score on his own piano, whereupon he turned to his own composing.  Although a fan of Haydn, particularly his piano sonatas, I am not so much a fan of KPE Bach, whose music doesn't send me off the way Haydn's does, but to be sure, Haydn's approach gets me looking.  Look for ten things you can read, recite, listen to, taste, or merely look at.  These are to be selected with the notion that they will provide energy and momentum to you because they have in the past.  I can pretty much get going on nearly anything by Maurice Ravel.  Yo-Yo Ma's renditions of the six unaccompanied cello suites by KPE's father, Johann Sebastian Bach, get me moving.  I find it difficult not to be energized by the playing of nearly anything by Bill Evans going it alone, or accompanied by the wise, verbal bass playing of Eddie Gomez.  Reading Louise Erdrich gets me moving; reading almost anything by Jim Harrison can get the ideas hopping.

It rarely takes me more than three or four things to get me going.  Sometimes I am drawn back again to the wonder and whimsy of the Krazy Kat comic strips that so enchanted me as a young person and made me wonder if I would ever be able to project such a magisterial vision as George Herriman's on the walls of my mind.

So okay, you pick among these ten things of yours and have at them.  If they don't help you to tuck into your day's writing session, I'm sorry to say you're fucked, which is a different kind of destination than the one I have in mind for both of us.  I have in mind a destination that is informed by The Three Princes of Serendip, a Persian folk tale which has come to us through a number of languages, leaving us with an uncanny sort of dramatic road map and the word serendipity.

You can, dear writer friends, follow the well-worn paths of tradition, plotting everything in advance, then arriving at your destination in mechanical fashion that promptly bites its thumbnail at any sense of realism.  You can, of course, follow the path of the three princes, arriving at your destination by happy chance, your destination coming as a complete and pleasing surprise for you, or perhaps not--perhaps not so pleasing as to seem mechanical, but pleasing enough to seem lifelike.  Besides, you've arrived at anticipated destinations before in your earlier works, you've been through the juggling, rearranging of plausibility as though it were cheap motel furniture.  That didn't make you feel as pleased at it might had you agreed to let the unthinkable come striding forward, inviting it in to accompany you on your way.

I leave it to you, dear friends:  We can cause our conclusions to have the heavy hands of event managers or we can follow those remarkable three princes who were actually from Sri Lanka and somehow, through the serendipity of translation and writers looking for destinations that will leave us with something of substance, found us.

Many, er, Happy Returns

As the mousy, anonymous narrator of Rebecca did with the fabled Manderly estate on the Cornish coast, I sometimes dream I return to Los Angeles again. Being in L.A. these days, awake or asleep, opens a complicated drop-down menu of awareness choices, alternately joyous, sad, conflicted, extensively aware of the consequences of change.

Returns of any sort at all are a chancy business; returns to a place of one's birth and youth are particularly fraught. Such returns remind you that you have left a portion of your life there, frozen in time in the manner of your image jelled in an old photo, while the rest of you, the you afterwards, has grown toward dreams of yourself in another venue, possibly even as another person.

Return invariably connotes doing something again, something experienced earlier at least once; it is taking books back to the library, giving a complement to someone who has complemented you, doing a favor for a person who has gifted you with some considerate behavior. You may return affection, travel the reverse direction of a journey undertaken earlier, reply in some manner to a tennis ball sent in your direction, or send an unacceptable meal to the kitchen whence it originated. In similar fashion, you may purchase a notice to be sent back to you after a letter you originated had been delivered to its intended receiver, and you might also send an unwanted communication back to its origin.

Going back to a place may be a part of a happy pattern such as a repeated visit to a restaurant, coffee shop, or theater, your expectations comfortable and positive at each iteration. Conversely, there are places and things for which return becomes fraught with a complexity of discomfort and a sense of disconnection.

The act of returning to a place after an absence rushes you toward this jarring sensation of disconnect. By your absence, you are out of the rhythm of the place you vacated, your psyche vibrant of the other place or places you might have spent your time. Much as you may have been loved, cherished, respected where you were before you left it, the shadow of otherness, alienness, and foreignness have been stamped on your visa, perhaps in subtle degree but not so subtle as to fool all the border guards, Some of them will spot the otherness you have accrued by your act of absence. The ever widening gyre does not stop spinning there; should you return to your new turf, someone there will note the way you have picked up the trace of an accent or some other mannerism from home.

Thomas Wolfe reminded us that You Can't Go Home Again, not without collision with consequences. But in greater truth the consequences and their traces follow you where ever you venture. A return becomes a cosmic tattoo, needled into the skin of your psyche. In the proper light, the right persons will see the patterns and bar codes; they will scan you, read you, get you, whereupon they will return such empathy and creative force as you and they are able to emit and you will both think of this condition as the beginning of love.

The return of a planet or heavenly body to a particular point in its orbit becomes a symbol for a new beginning. Sisyphus, urging his rock to the top of its hill, thinks this is the start of another effort or, perhaps, the end of an older one. When migrating birds or swarming insects or foraging herds return to a familiar place, they commemorate the click of gears in a life cycle. In days before the computer, touch applied to the return key on a typewriter sent the carriage mechanism slamming with satisfying alacrity back to a beginning position whence an entire line of keystrokes awaited their own particular fate.

Return is adventure, consequence, and discovery, waiting to happen.

For the fun of it

fun--an engulfing sense of pleasure; a condition of being transported into a zone of carefree, sensuous, and intellectual awareness by a combination of stimuli; an antidote to boredom, depression, or gloom; what writing should be for the reader and the writer.

A number of writers, enormously skilled and well progressed in the development of their talent, neither suicidal nor given to depression, emerge as serious, argumentative, perhaps even gloomy. Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates come to mind in this context as examples. Nevertheless, these writers all continue at their writing efforts because not doing so would produce a sense of disconnect with the inner landscape they strive at such effort to achieve. No matter what one may think, they are having fun while they are working.

Writing has been justly described as hard work, but the mere fact of its difficulty should not and does not preclude the results of it being fun for the writer as well as the reader. Fun, it may be argued, appears when an individual becomes interested and involved in the work at hand. Albert Camus argued that Sisyphus, given his ordained task, was nevertheless a happy man, a judgment to give us pause. How, we wonder, can an eternity of performing a meaningless task, make the performer happy? And if Sisyphus is happy, does that mean he is having fun?

The very nature of writing produces frustration in the writer, primarily because of the difficulty in translating the vision of the project into words that do it sufficient justice. In a real sense, writers (artists of any sort) are doomed to the frustration of "not getting it right," which is to say not rendering the vision adequately enough. This is fun? Well yes,it is. Like Sisyphus, you take pleasure in lending your skills to a task that appears hopeless from the get-go, leaving you in the same mind set as Samuel Beckett, who said, "Fail again, only next time fail better."

Every time we read a poem, a short story, or novel that moves us in some primal way, our exquisite response blazes across the night sky of our imagination like a fire fly, intense, brief, and gone. In its place, to extend a mixed-metaphor, we are faced with the vision of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, handed a packet of crayons, then told, "Go thou and do likewise." And yet, some of us will do just that, diving into the project to the point of losing the hopelessness of the task, seeing connections, possibilities, opportunities. The last part of that equation is fun in action. Like the fire fly, it is intense and brief. It is the writer's job to keep it from being gone.

Elmore Leonard, a writer who knows a thing or two about having fun, has shone his light into the darkness. "Only write the scenes that interest you," he has said. This dictum could well be studied alongside Camus's essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus," for its implications. There is a particular scene that you don't feel like writing. A literary agent and/or editor wants that particular scene in place before the manuscript can progress toward publication. The answer: find a way to make yourself like the scene. Do something to it and the characters within it to make the writing of it become not a chore but fun. What attitudes did Sisyphus need to allow him to take pleasure from what would seem a hopeless, eternal exercise of rote behavior? How could he, of all people, think to fail better next time? Are the Karma Yogis--work as worship--having fun? And what about that remarkable line from the Bhagavad-Gita, "To the work you are entitled, but not the fruits thereof."? Surely there is flat out fun to be had from such approaches.

Cool Hand Sisyphus

Sisyphus--a figure from Greek mythology, variously a king or prince, but in every version of the myth a devious, self-aggrandizing individual who eventually pushed the envelope too far and was condemned by Zeus to an eternity of meaningless work; a prototype for a character who is doomed to repetitive behavior; according to Albert Camus in his essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus," a happy man.

As with so many bigger-than-life characters, Sisyphus is defined more by his fate than the events leading to it. Now forged in our collective memory as a man who must push a large rock to a steep hill to its crest, whereupon it will roll down the other side, Sisyphus makes us think of the tedium of tasks we abhor, ways of avoiding the tedium, including the karma yoga approach of work,however meaningless, as worship. 

Suppose, however, that Sisyphus were an atheist. Would the karma yoga concept cause him to engage in the inevitable transformative change that is imposed on protagonists in longform fiction--change?

However his plight is seen--karmic justice done, for instance--he is an embodiment of story, as an action and as an active concept. Whatever myth you follow that led to his ultimate fate, the constant application of force to move the rock to the top of a hill, only to see it tumble, suggests story orbit, a path that may be interrupted at any point as a beginning. 

Let the rock equal the goal (which is always to keep the rock moving). Now the story may begin at any point in the circuit of Sisyphus addressing the rock or watching the rock fall or rushing to the other side of the hill to be in place when the rock comes to a halt, in order to begin pushing it to the top once more. 

Given Sisyphys' devious nature, he may be working on a plan, either to get out of this meaningless work altogether or to turn it into something with meaning. Thus the story could begin at the point where Sisyphus would ordinarily begin to push the rock up the hill, but this time he does not; he storms into Zeus office, where he quits, refuses to push the rock any longer. 

As a potential for reversal or antagonistic force, Zeus nods, then directs his underlings to assign Sisyphus to the Prometheus Treatment.

"Wait," Prometheus protests. "What's that?" Whereupon he hears the fate of Prometheus, who stole the secret of fire from Zeus and pass it along to humans. As payment for this misadventure, Prometheus is bound to a mountain side every day, in time for his liver to be an afternoon snack for a vulture. By nightfall, a new liver is regenerated, and the following day--back to the mountainside and the hungry vulture.

Hearing this tale of eternal high choler and higher cholesterol, Sisyphus quickly decides, "Excuse me. Got to get back to my rock."

Epic characters such as Sisyphus, Captain Ahab, Captain Spaulding, and Joan of Arc are resonant because of their own focus on task and because of the ways in which their behavior reminds us of other characters, those more accessible to our lives. Notable within this panoply is Luke Jackson, from Donn Pearce's novel, Cool Hand Luke, in which Jackson, after a drunken prank, is sent to a prison where his days are spent performing increasingly meaningless tasks.

Politics as Usual

politics--approaches to the use of power; systematic applications of problem solving; means by which divergent groups or individuals attend ethical, moral, and social issues; points of view regarding group and individual governance.

All characters have politics, whether they know it or not. A basic approach to determine a character's political views comes from investigating that character's family background, both in terms of the character's general political views but also from an assessment of that character's gender, the number of siblings, and when that character arrived in the family. Individuals who are adopted may have yet other political dynamics including a curiosity to learn the identities of their biological parents. Orphans or characters who have broken relations with family have yet another political as well as psychological dynamic.

For the writer, knowing the political Petri dish of the character's psyche is vital, providing information about the character's attitudes, responses, and readiness to form alliances and enmities. Of equal significance, a writer needs to consider his or her politics or lack of interest in the broader sense of politics, then investigate personal senses of awareness within family, friend groups, workplace associates, and ties with former classmates.

Of all the many influences likely to emerge in the themes of a particular writer's work, the writer's personal and broadband politics rank close to the top of the pyramid, influencing choice of characters and the types of conflicts in which those characters engage. As examples of writers whose politics or political interests seem to shine through their pages, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, John P. Marquand, and Margaret Atwood inspire close study.



quest--a major goal for any character; an intensified apprenticeship undertaken in hopes of achieving virtuoso ability; a search, study. or other organized pursuit with a goal in mind; a systematic and insistent research; an attempt to find a meaning, relic, or understanding.

Sometimes a quest is for a tangible, physical place, other times it is the means by which a point of view or personal commitment is achieved. Everyone in fiction is on a quest. Often, relationships in fiction are abrogated because of conflicting quests, thus the importance of knowing what each character in a story wants, how seriously, and to what lengths the character will go to achieve the end results of the quest. Murder? Perhaps. Betrayal of principal? Perhaps. Treason? A likely possibility.

A popular add-on to the quest being achieved or realized can be found in the irony of B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Was Charles Rider's quest in Brideshead Revisited any the less ironic? And what about the payoff of The Maltese Falcon? For a writer, knowing what a character wants is a major step toward realizing a memorable story; it is no less important for the writer to know how the character might behave having seen the quest through to completion. Would Gatsby have been truly happy with Daisy? For that matter, would Daisy have remained content to be with Gatsby? And while we're on the subject, Miss Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy each appeared at the conclusion of Pride and Prejudice to have arrived at a goal of a companionable, partnership-type marriage, but would they remain so ten years down the line?

Thus quest, the dramatic boulder of Sisyphus, poised at the peak of a hill.

Four Play

protagonist--a front-rank character in a novel or short story whose agenda propels the narrative toward conclusion, an individual whose actions provoke the actual point of conclusion. A protagonist is often the character with whom the reader most empathizes and accordingly for whom the reader roots.

Most dramatic narrative begins with someone wanting something. (Ishmael wants to get away from it all. Ahab wants to get the whale.) This desire becomes the catalyst for a series of subsequent events in which the protagonist strives for the goal, achieves it or is frustrated in his attempts, or achieves a negotiated settlement with the Fates and/or other characters. It has become a conventional standard for critical readers to ask of the protagonist, What does this person want? Depending of the length and complexity of the narrative, the goals and outcome of the protagonist's agenda are set forth in some detail. Simply put, Ahab wanted revenge on the whale, Gatsby wanted to fulfill a romantic connection with Daisy, and Huck Finn wanted to be free to live the life he chose. In all three examples, extraordinary interventions complicated the expressed agenda of the front-rank character.

It falls entirely within the realm of dramatic possibility that a protagonist may wish for nothing more passionately than to be left alone, but the vital thing for the storyteller to understand is that passivity in a front-rank character has a fatal effect on story. Thus the protagonist's wish to be left alone requires the connective tissue of being left alone in order to do some thing that has exquisite meaning for him. The protagonist must have an agenda that is strong enough to provide forward momentum in spite of and indeed because of opposition from life forces or antagonists.




Stories in which protagonists achieve their goals too easily are not good candidates for holding the reader's interest. This is not so much a matter of reader schadenfreude as it is a matter of the reader wanting to share the moments of insight, determination, and ingenuity that propel the propel the protagonist to have one more try. Given their choice, most readers could accept their protagonist fail miserably after a noble try rather than have the protagonist achieve the goal by accident.

Answers to the following questions can help the writer bring a credible and pliant protagonist forth from the drawing board:

1. Who is he/she?
2. What does he/she want?
3. What is he/she willing to do to effect the goal?
4. How does he/she handle reversal?
5. How is he/she likely to behave after having achieved the target goal?

The answers to the first question are often simple,"a young person in search of a life's occupation," or "a person looking for a mate," of "a person trying to live down a past mistake."

Useful answers to the second question could be "another chance" or the more direct "revenge," or "to set the record straight;" they could also include "justification," "fame/recognition," or "to discover the truth behind an event or individuals involved in an event."

Answers to the third question are rich in story potential: "give up something important," or "assume a new identity," or "step over some moral boundary," which could easily include "commit some previously unthinkable act."

The fourth answer provides the opportunity to demonstrate the resolve and resiliency of the character, while the fifth answer introduces the possibility of a primary ingredient in fiction, irony, which may add layers of meaning and texture to the story. In many ways, the nature of characters is best revealed when there is an abrupt reversal of fortune. A character who suddenly gains power may behave in surprising and revealing ways.

Stories--particularly novels--may have more than one protagonist, but NB, the reader should be able to tell them apart. (See Lonesome Dove, for instance.)


antagonist--a front-rank character in a novel or short story who opposes the agenda of the protagonist. Sometimes a force of nature (See Jack London's story "To Build a Fire) becomes an antagonist, working against the protagonist; similarly a condition can work against a front-rank character (See Jack Schaeffer's Monte Walsh) but more often than not such antagonistic traits reside in one or more characters, who accordingly become Messengers or Representatives (Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.) The antagonist deserves as much attention and complexity as the protagonist.


orbit--the path taken by a story as it moves about a set of characters. Just as a story has an arc instead of mere linear progression of episodes, it also moves through its dramatic universe like a satellite moving about a planet. Some story orbits, particularly those of a plot-driven nature, are circular, seemingly well-balanced between action and intent. Other story orbits are more elliptical in their paths, giving no hint where they will go next, seeming to end on a note of as ambiguous as reality often is.

Once the story is in provisional draft, the writer will have a better sense of the shape of its orbit, making it easier to enhance a particular flavor of the story. For example, the myth of Sisyphus, a mortal who made the mistake of hitting on a woman favored by the god Zeus. As punishment, Sisyphus was bound up by Zeus to an eternal sentence of performing meaningless work; he must push a large rock up a steep hill, knowing that the moment the rock reached the crest of the hill, it would tumble down the other side. When the rock finally came to rest, Sisyphus was to begin pushing it toward the summit once more. That's a pretty simple orbit. Up the hill, over the top, down the other side, and up the hill again. By approaching that orbit at almost any point, we can construct the circumstances for a different dramatic take. 1) Begin halfway up the hill. As Sisyphus pushes toward the top, his wife is trotting alongside him, complaining that he is never at home, doesn't send any money, the kids are asking questions, the neighbors are gossiping. 2) Begin with Sisyphus just short of reaching the top of the hill. People on the other side begin to sound the alarm about the impending disaster when the rock gains momentum then begins to careen down the other side. 3) Start at the bottom where, just before he is about to begin another circuit with the rock, Sisyphus is met by a group of neighbors, all of whom have signed a petition requesting him to push his large rock elsewhere. 4) Also starts at the bottom of the hill. Sisyphus has just approached the boulder, now at rest. Frustrated by the endless and meaningless natures of his task, Sisyphus rebels, storms into Zeus' office, refuses to have anything more to do with the rock. Zeus takes this in, nods his understanding, then directs two of his assistants to transfer Sisyphus to the Prometheus treatment. When Sisyphus asks about the Prometheus treatment he is about to receive, he is told that he will be tied to a mountain side every day, whereupon an eagle will rip out his liver, then eat it, giving Sisyphus the rest of the afternoon and night off, while a new liver grows for tomorrow's lunch. It does not take Sisyphus long to make his excuses before getting back to his rock.

Most stories have orbits of dramatic action that allow for a beginning at any of a number of places. The task of the writer is to chose the existing place in an orbit to produce a desired result or to extend the orbit so that another beginning will work better. The Iliad is only one example of a story that does not begin according to strict chronology; stories may begin at any point of the orbit. The ideal place is a moment where there is enough relevant action to preclude lengthy physical descriptions or extensive backstory.


power--a capacity a character frequently enjoys at the expense of others. The power may be anything from political to financial to sexual; it may also be manifest in terms of social standing, high esteem within a family or organization, or even in terms of talent/ability. It is useful to observe the power dynamic between or among the characters in any given scene; allotting equal power to characters tends to reduce dramatic tension and since life is notably unfair in the way of power distribution, why start making it so within the confines of a story?

Power is often a key element in motivating characters to rebel, escape, seek revenge, or make peremptory moves.

Reversal of power is a delicious story element; it often helps dramatize nuances and the not-so-subtle behavior patterns resident in characters who have been affected by turns of fate. One of the many joys available to a reader is to be present at a scene where a bully or tyrant, still acting under the belief of continuing power, discovers the plug has been pulled. And think how noble a character must feel to have caused a switch from being oppressed to being the one who can walk away from a dramatic reversal without having to exact revenge.

Funny You Should Ask

Irony is the stage manager in most human drama. It is the genome of crossed purposes, misinterpretation, and expressions of things other than what we intended.

It's inherent condition is being opposite our expectations, a condition that is not always recognized at the outset. As it begins to make its presence known, irony strikes us with the lightning of understanding that we are in a rigged game in which we are handed the script of a Road Runner cartoon and told we have been cast as Wile E. Coyote. The awareness of irony then settles in to stay liked unwelcome relatives at a summer rental, increasing by Sisyphean leaps and bounds because we know Wile E. Coyote cannot win. He is as much a slave to his instincts as we are to the instincts of irony.

Had Sir Isaac Newton turned his light of inquiry to the subject of irony, he might have evolved laws of behavior governing it, behavior in which irony is bound to respond, indeed does respond.

It is, he well may have observed, possible to get things right, but there is no guarantee that anyone else will see the truth of things being gotten right.

It may also be possible to get things right but at the wrong time.

It is easier to be misunderstood than to be understood.

Being misunderstood, then attempting to be understood enhances by the square root factor the continuation of being misunderstood.

It is as possible to be misunderstood by saying nothing as it is to be misunderstood by saying something.

Getting things right but not being recognized for having done so is equal in magnitude and direction to someone having gotten things wrong but having nonetheless been recognized for having got them right.

Having ultimately been observed for having got things right after having been considered wrong is equal in intensity to having been considered wrong in the first place.

Things that are wrong tend to stay wrong, things that are manifestly right but considered wrong tend to experience a regressive wrongness, requiring more energy to convince anyone that they are right.

Persons with long histories of being right about things are more suspect than persons with long histories of being wrong. Persons who are habitually wrong are funny to observe. Persons who are habitually right are threatening as indeed are persons who tend to be right about things.

Persons who are wrong about things tend to attract more followers than persons who are right about things.

Even though we like to think of ourselves as being right, we are conscious enough of being wrong that being told we are right emerges as a threat.

If irony were a tangible commodity, a large segment of commodity traders would sell irony futures as growth potentials.

Story, or Sisyphus Rocks

A good deal of attention is properly paid to the movement of a story from its engaging, often rambunctious beginning, through its point of achieving a seemingly unstoppable inertia, often thought of as the middle or act two, concluding with the place where it comes to a rest, however temporary. This coming to rest is the end because the story has landed on someone or something, run out of steam, or dramatically changed its mind. It will not start up again until someone or something gets it moving again. This movement is frequently referred to as arc or throughline. In either case, the intent is for the story to have begun at point A, then moved through a number of points to the designated spot where it stops moving for some time.

Readers, accordingly, get the sense of a story being over when it stops moving for a considerable time, author's intentions to the contrary notwithstanding.

For the sake of illustration, I propose to call the path of a story an orbit; a circular or elliptical path as opposed to arc, which is, when you stop to think of it, a segment of a circle; or indeed a throughline, which suggests movement enough but movement on a straight line, which implies that the story is of singular dimension as opposed to the more textured implications of orbit. An arc or throughline is like a doughnut in comparison to the layer cake of orbit.

A well-constructed story may be begun at any point in it orbit. Stories do not have to be chronological, although they may be if it suits the author's purpose. By way of example, The Iliad, which begins in the famed medias res or middle of things, properly begins with that great twit, Paris, being asked to judge a beauty contest in which the contestants are goddesses. Lovely story. The main contestants try their godly hands at suborning Paris with incentives for choosing her instead of her sisters. Paris is most tempted by the offered bribe of the most beautiful woman in the world, an offer from the goddess of love. He proceeds to chose the goddess of love as the most beautiful among the competing goddesses, then claims his prize. "And so you shall be rewarded," she tells him. "The only problem is, she's married."

In The Iliad, this is backstory, explaining how Paris connected with Helen in the first place, making Helen WMS, weapons of mass seduction, and causing the seven-year Trojan War. It also explains how Paris was the forerunner of G. W. Bush. All the available contemporary renditions of The Iliad begin with Achilles, storming off to his tent in a rage that had nothing to do with the Trojan War. Achilles' rage is so intense that he opts out of fighting, which could mean a complete change in the complexion of the battle. There are other places in the orbit where this epic could have begun, each adding a different kind of texture and tone to the entire story.

Another splendid example of story orbit involves another set of characters from more or less the time of The Iliad. Let's look at the myth of Sisyphus, in which Sisyphus, a mortal, has been sentenced by Zeus, king of the gods, to an eternity of pushing a huge boulder up a steep incline, where it topples over the crest, rumbles down an equally steep slope, rolling of its own inertia until it comes to rest. Having observed this behavior, Sisyphus must push the boulder into position, then repeat the process. No weekends off, no holidays, no time and a half overtime pay. Sisyphus' crime was hitting on one of Zeus lady friends. That story could be set in motion with Sisyphus hard at work, pushing the boulder up the hill. It could be initiated when he reaches the top of the hill. It could even begin with his wife trotting alongside him as he pushes, wanting to know what's with him, why he never calls, could he maybe spare a few shekels to buy some food. The story could begin with Sisyphus blowing his cool, storming into Zeus' office and refusing to push the damned boulder up that damned hill one more damned time, at which point Zeus snaps his fingers and summons over two henchmen, informing them "Okay, Sisyphus is off the rock detail. Soon as I finish the paper work, take him over to the mountain and give him the Prometheus treatment?"

"Prometheus treatment?" Sisyphys asks.

"Yeah. Some dude tried to steal the secret of fire from me so now he gets tied to a mountain side every day around lunch time. Vultures come by, rip out his liver. Prometheus gets to go home, grow a new liver, then back to the mountain side."

"Excuse me," Sisyphys says, "I gotta get back to my boulder."

Depending on where in that orbit you start, it can produce humor, pathos, existential woe, philosophical questioning, psychological humor--you name it.

Ah, I hear your first question: Suppose my story doesn't have an orbit?

Ah, indeed. Now you begin to understand why so many memorable stories do have an orbit.

Some Notes on Happy Endings

Happiness is like sleep; we expect a certain amount of each in our daily life, we become cranky, even depressed if either is withheld for too long. Being in either state contains no guarantee that the condition will endure: a dog barking, a cat jumping up on one's chest, a sudden unanticipated noise will cause a sleeping person to awaken; a refusal of any sort, a disconnected day of writing, a warning note from one's bank will cause a happy person to shift gears.

Often associated with achieving one's ambitions relating to security, romantic, and artistic adventure, happiness becomes more complex with age, often extending its protective umbrella to members of one's clan, one's friends, perhaps even one's students if students are part of the equation. Happiness ultimately becomes a potential warning for the equivalent of what has happened in recent years to New Orleans and Galveston. From so much happiness, an old, cynical warning advises, can only come tragedy. Tolstoy thought so little of happiness as a dramatic state that he lumped persons enjoying it as being all alike. You want story, he seemed to be saying, you look at the permutations within the ranks of the losers, those who were but no longer are happy. Camus, on the other hand, posited that Sisyphus, the doomed eternal rock star, was a happy man.

Happiness has many landing strips. Individuals wandering about the streets, their iPods delivering music or podcasts to their ears, seem to be on the verge of if not completely resident in a form of happiness. Runners splashing through rain-pelted streets appear happy just as bird watchers, spying an egret or heron seem happy enough. Diners in a range of restaurants often have the look of happiness through satiety of well-prepared victuals, sippers in coffee houses have the unglazed look of being at one with the universe, and Buddhist monks, caught up in prayerful chant, have the transcendent look of having moved beyond time, space, and causation. A fine artist or ceramicist has the unique pulse of happiness at the completion of a work. Before the tidal lapse into post-coital tristesse, lovers experience the pleasure of having unwrapped a glorious present. A chef, placing the garnish of parsley on a dish, has the ratification of inner warmth. Happiness arrives like an unexpected guest, with advance waves of timidity. Happiness sneaks in like a crafty burglar. Happiness comes with fanfare and hoopla. It leaves sometimes without leaving a thank-you note; it departs over the wrong tone in which one word was uttered. It nudges you in the ribs with an over-the-top reminder that you have never been this happy before nor are you likely to be again.

In some sects of Buddhism, it is seen with as much suspicion as the concept of God. Sometimes you are so happy as to realize the disparity between this moment and the entirety of your life to date. Happiness in some of its avatars is like the realization that your mate of choice is bi-polar or bi-sexual or both. You write to experience and define happiness, during the course of which you may or may not point to the happy ending as your pole star. Happiness informs what you read, whom you read, and when. If you believe you have experienced much happiness in your life to date, you may not have a sense of humor, confusing your cheerful nature with your optimism, which can and does produce laughter.

Like happiness, sleep is not always easily come by. You may ingest substances to lure it forth, may indulge yoga breathing, replay happy moments the way you reread favored poems or stories. Like happiness, sleep may come when you least expect it or do not wish it. Like happiness, sleep is an healthy alternative to boredom; each replenishes you, expands you. Coming forth from sessions of either is a steroidal entry into the day of choices, decisions, actions, behavior toward others. Telling someone you love, Sweet dreams, is urging them to experience happiness and sleep at the same time, a splendid twofer. Telling someone with whom you have issues, Sweet dreams, is attaching the rapier thrust of irony, sarcasm; the same words with one of the more malevolent intents in the tool kit.

One of the joys of sleep is the opportunity to send responsibility on a vacation. Things visualized in sleep that you allow yourself to remember become wish lists of intent. These intentions may be sought after without modification or they may serve as an index of behavior to be governed by your awareness of convention. Another joy of sleep is to use it as a vehicle to pursue stories, scenarios of your creation, journeys to be taken without the frustrating delays at airports, where baggage and happiness are rifled, often misdirected.

Like sleep, happiness has some kind of ending. Happiness with other humans and with animals has endings. Sleep allows us the opportunity to revisit some of our endings, to recall the nuances of those endings, to prise out of those nuances an index of how, at this remove, we still care.

As writers, we take a daily vote on how happy our endings will be and what efforts will be necessary to make them plausible.

Dialog Redux

Dialog is a dramatic force that resides in what is said but not intended, in what is intended but not said. It propels the Sisyphus boulder of story up the hill of expectation, where it pauses, lurches, then begins its downward tumble toward the discovery of damage. It is an attempt to communicate something, either to the person making the utterance, the person to whom it is putatively directed, or some abstraction of audience, perhaps even the gods.

Dialog is the drawings on the cave walls, exquisite evocations of something real, functional, beautiful; in some ways it is recognition and proof of our own existence because someone has uttered our name. But it is not all good news, not by any means; it is a Wagnerian opera when we were expecting Puccini, it is no when we were hoping for yes, it is a broken heart when we were expecting the kite fly of elation, it is the who? when we were hoping to be remembered.

In real life, the life from which we flee or seek to redesign whenever we sit or stand or lie down to write, there is conversation. In the alternate universe of fiction there is dialog, what we might have said had we been our characters, what we might have said had we known more clearly what we were doing. Conversation in fiction becomes a speed bump, a device that causes the story and our sense of it to lurch, jostling us out of our abandon. In fiction, dialog may be contrived to sound like conversation, but when have you seen individuals in story actually rely on such a thin veneer? Thus does conversation in fiction become a betrayal or motive or goal or self by the way it offers up proof of a recognized weakness.

The remarkably apt literary critic, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) recognizes dialog as a duality attempting to organize life, imparting to it the potential of being an agent as a specific aspect of message. This is a position I believe most writers come to accept as they grapple with the duality of dialog and their own attempts to set it into motion with action and intent. We don't have to wait for the Pinter and Miller and Stoppard of today, we can start way back in the day with, say, act one, scene two of Richard III, in which the dialog between he who wishes to become Richard and Anne, rages before us in a fiery clash of agenda and duality.

Dialog is the kindling for story; it should make us aware of the smoulder manifest when individuals--any individuals--gather to debate agenda--any agenda. To get to this place, we need to position ourselves firmly within the sphere of influence of each character who steps onto our stage. We have to become the three bag ladies waiting outside for Macbeth as well as the Rob and Laura Petrie of Macbeth. Anything less is conversation.

Existentialism in Writing

Things that didn't work out as planned. Missed connections. Rejection slips on seemingly irresistible manuscripts. Unrequited affection. Characters who'd rather appear in someone else's story. Outrageous run-ins with your spell checker. A freight train rumbling through, drowning you out at the precise moment you ask someone significant for something significant. The market being out of Mirror Pond or Blue Heron ale. The same market being out of Wolf Brand chili, thus robbing you of the chance to have Wolf Brand chili with a cold Mirror Pond. Being convinced you are in advanced stages of absent mindedness when in the same twenty-four hour period you misplace your check book, reading glasses, Moleskine notebook, credit card holder, and favored fountain pen. Finding all of these in perfectly logical places. A cat whose origin in your life remains a mystery, bringing a hunting trophy into your work area, therein to perform an autopsy. Your dog seeming to think this is funny. Being asked (volunteered by a superior ) to serve on a committee dealing with a topic in which you have no interest and containing at least one other individual you consider a crashing bore. Final episodes of favored TV series (Homicide, West Wing, The Wire). A book you're reading, falling apart around mid point. A book you're writing, falling apart anywhere. While reading something written several hundred years before you were born, the discovery of an idea you'd just reached and thought to be original. Not getting the meaning of a joke everyone about you considers side-splittingly hillarious. Thinking you're too old or too young for something (anything!). Playing in a pick-up game of baseball and being told by someone half your age, Throw it over here, sir. Pasta in a non-Italian restaurant. Your ongoing attempts to carmelize onions. Your lousy average in preparing hollandaise sauce that does not curdle. You have two pair of reading glasses, Longs Drug specials; always the one with the least scratchy lenses suffers a broken temple.

Disappointments.

The yeast of story, making story rise to fluffy brioche heights.

Disappointments, vulnerability of one or more characters, conflicting agendas, misunderstandings as a consequence of naive narrators expectations (see Middlemarch), blunted ambitions.

Being preternaturally good at something of little or no consequence to you while at the same time attempting to achieve expertise at some ability of consuming consequence to you. Being told to get a real job, to grow up, to act your age, to major in something with a practical application, to save for a rainy day, to carpe diem, to get your act together.

In his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus posited that Sisyphus was in fact a happy man.

The adagio from Mozart's Concerto for Clarinet.

A fence as an instrument to keep things from getting out while simultaneously preventing things from gaining entry.

Having existential qualms as a delivery boy for the Miami Herald when encountering signs on various Miami Beach apartments that announced Restricted Clientele.

Potential violation of federal statutes because of behavior as a temporary mailman caused by the recognition of the name Ray Bradbury on certain thick envelopes from Thrilling Wonder Stories and Planet Stories.

Having a picnic lunch with Christopher Isherwood, prepared by Hindu nuns, midway between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.

Having nightmares while a student at Ida M. Fisher Junior High School in Miami Beach, Florida, in which you would never get back to California.

Having nightmares while a student at John Burroughs Junior High School in Los Angeles about dreadful teachers.

Having qualms.

Making a choice.

Making the choice.