The Character-driven Story Writ Large

Having gone through the emotion-and-thought-linked process recently of electing the character Omar, late of The Wire, to my pantheon of favorite characters, then ratifying his nomination, I turn now to another favorite, in many ways inherent in Omar, but so completely representative of what a character should be that he deserves canonization among those of us who seek to tell stories.

I speak of Wile E. Coyote, the very mention of whom conveys in a single image his landscape and his immediate goal, the androgynous Road Runner. Said Mr. Coyote is the Darwinian result of Brer Fox, Road Runner is the morph of Brer Rabbit. Wile E. Coyote's purpose, dinner, is the driving force of the relationship. Coyote's focus is and properly should be emblematic for the writer; Coyote's thoughts are always on ways to tick, trap, capture, and cook Road Runner. Nothing else matters as much, not even awareness of one of the basic laws of gravity, which speaks to the behavior of an object in motion. Coyote, when not stealthily skulking about the mesas and arroyos of his terrain, is in motion--in motion in pursuit of Road Runner. You might say he is so in motion while in pursuit that he fails to stop at boundaries you and I would heed.

Thus do the adventures of Wile E. Coyote serve as a cautionary tale for writers, particularly in regard to observing boundaries. One of our frequent visions of Wile E. Coyote is of him mid air, having overrun the boundary of a mesa, failing in the process to note the acute angle of escarpment on which he once trod. We have all, thanks to our nature of taking risks in life and in the life of our craft, taken such risk. Now we find ourself in mid flight, with nowhere to go but down. We watch the screen antics of Coyote, doomed to another fall, awaiting the thunk of reality as he strikes the ground, once again having overreached, overrun, indulged the Becketian model of failing again, now about to further indulge the Becket admonition to fail again, only this time to fail better.

Truly, Wile E. Coyote is of Becket in his inventiveness of some newer device whereby he may undertake to trap Road Runner. It is instructive to watch a few of Coyote's misadventures on YouTube; these serve to demonstrate his unflagging desire, his frequent descent (literal and figurative) into humiliation, because that is his reward for his efforts. Our reward as writers for watching him is the relief that this time the humiliation is his and not ours, the unspoken wish that we had a goal as clear-cut as his, and the unflagging determination necessary to go forth--and fail again.

Watching enough Wile E. Coyote stories will acquaint you with another lovely story element in the form of The Acme Company, that grand organization from which Wile E. Coyote is able to chose products to aid him in his quest. It would be too easy to substitute company names such as Blackwater or Boeing or their like or even various universities, thinking in the process ha ha, bureaucracy. The fact of The Acme Company as supplier of the Wile E Coyote tool kit speaks to another important aspect of setting characters loose in a landscape--rules. As conventions do in our real life, stories must have rules. The Wile E. Coyote--Road Runner Rules become clear after watching a few episodes. Wile E. Coyote must never catch nor harm Road Runner. Wile E. Coyote is invariably humiliated but always because of things he has done.

It becomes easier to watch and understand Becket after digesting Wile E. Coyote, but it also becomes easier to watch and understand Shakespeare and Johnson and Marlowe indeed even their illustrious forebear, G. Chaucer.

How many of our characters are able to compete with the cartoon landscape of Wile E. Coyote, where even the thought of them evokes their terrain and at least one other character with whom they relate emerge with such--dare I say it?--dramatic clarity?

Why Should We Care?

Sooner or later, the question must be asked--as indeed we ask it each time we turn to page two of a story or novel, each time we come to the dingbat at the end, symbolically signifying the narrative has run its course.

On some occasions we are driven by a sense of obligation or pure discipline to completing a story we have begun even though we may no longer care about the outcome. In such cases we stay on to remind ourselves we are writers, storytellers hefting the weights of our craft to keep our muscles and senses intact. Our concern then is the selfish one exerted for the writing self rather than the overall effect of the writing self wanting to extend a condition in which characters come to life, exhibit foibles and complexity, strike out a Lewis and Clark did to explore uncharted territory.

There is a simple answer to the question: Why should the reader care? The answer is because the writer cares. The hitch or loophole in this logic is that not all readers, even the most patient, dedicated ones, will respond to all stories in which the writer clearly cares. Accordingly, risk is a resident factor, throbbing like a sun heading west in a summer afternoon. Beyond the mere risk of a reader not relating to our work is the more sophisticated risk that the reader will appreciate the manner and presentation of the story, which is to say its style and dress, but not the personality of one or more of the characters, much less the situation or problem the character faces. Because we have spent some time learning the scales, those pesky-but-necessary manipulations of conflict, tension, confrontation, need for choice, perhaps even a fuse burning or a clock ticking to emphasize the added demands of Time, we know not to be too long in descriptions of weather, background, or personal traits until we have made the reader curious to know what the weather was like, where the landscape is, does the character have a defect or particular talent. We also have mastered the basic philosophy behind all story: Don't take the reader where the reader wants to go. If it is a mystery novel, you need to withhold the identity of the murderer for about two hundred fifty manuscript pages. If it is a romance, same number of pages before your main lead gets to consummate with the significant other of choice. You could have an earlier moment of passion that was on the point of consummation but last minute complications intervened. Because. Because when they go where we want them to, the story is over...or it changes to another story.

Every genre has its promise which, in one way or another, you observe, giving the reader first a set of expectations, then the payoff. Your basic strategy under the heading of not taking the reader where the reader wants to go is to withhold. You actually make the reader care by the very art with which you suggest promise but withhold result.

Through the implicit and explicit use of risk, you can cause the reader to care in a number of ways, some quite physical in th sense of wondering what the characters look like or how they will behave in a particular situation. No fair holding back, either; you've got to get your characters in risky situations beyond your own sense of how to extricate them. Only then will your concern, your worry shine through. A character, placed at accelerated risk is the key element. Risk of what? That's your call. How is the risk accelerated? By showing the character in response or in a notable lack of response. You want to write your character into such problems that when you say, And then what? you are experiencing the attendant anxieties.

Of course you can play the commercial route, the formula route, the so-called plot-driven story route, the gimmicky plot of the excellent likes of Harlan Coben, but the other way, the so-called literary story and the goals of literary story carry with them the same problems artists in other fields have. You need to love the work more than anything else. The work is the job. Joe Wambaugh is poetic in his love for the job as it relates to being a cop you can catch the sadness in his voice that he is not a cop, but then he truly becomes rhapsodic when he talks about being on the cusp of writing and being a cop and how the writing won. He is a sweet, kind man, and his energy comes from being torn between wanting these two things.

Yes, it is possible to be two things or three things or even that lovely word, a polymath. I have known at least four polymaths in my life. Bill Saroyan wanted to be a playwright then an artist, then a shortstory writer. He was not a nice man. Henry Miller was a nice man although he tended to get aggressive at the thought that the wine might run out before he did. He wanted to paint more than he wanted to write, but it took him a long time to come to terms with which road to take. Barnaby Conrad is a painter, a carver, and then a writer who was also a piano player and a bull fighter. Digby Wolfe couldn't contain himself as an actor so he became a comedian as well, and then a writer and then a teacher, but when he talks about drawing and painting, you can hear the catch in his throat. Shaw, whom I most certainly didn't know, wanted to be a novelist. Henry James wanted to be a dramatist. Where this goes is that the thing or things you want to be takes its/their share of the things in your life you might also want to do. You might also get a shot at the more conventional things, do quite nicely at them, but there is resident risk always waiting with an idea, a vision, a sound, a curiosity.

Need I say than that the key to making them--the readers--care is by the intensity of your own caring for the people and situations you create, then bring forth.

Why should we care? We should care because you make us care, each in his or her own way about your imaginary playmates, rendered with such empathy and love as to make them emerge as real and cause us to want to protect them as they move forth into the landscape of your creation. A young girl such as Lyra Belacqua, living in an imaginary, fantasy world, even though it is called Oxford, is more real to me than Holden Caulfield, who is in another kind of imaginary fantasy world called New York. The characters in Joe Orton's stunning play, Entertaining Mr. Sloan, are types I've not encountered in real life, but the effect and payoff of that play break my heart with its honesty and awful sense of what love can do to and for a person.

We care because we are wrenched by some part of the chemistry and neural paths and heart that is our constitution. When we experience a pang of love that is out of our conventional wisdom of love, we are frightened at what this attraction means to us and what it might do to the conventional side of our life. We care because we write about convention to expose the chemistry of the para-conventional. We care because we are transported by the very audacity of what some characters want and how they comport themselves. There are many admirable examples of character in the TV series-as-novel, The Wire, but if Id have to select one who takes me well beyond myself and into landscapes of pure wonder, it is the character Omar, who makes his living by robbing drug dealers. One character, an attorney, calls him completely amoral. Omar is not the slightest bit defensive or apologetic. "I carry a shot gun, you carry a briefcase. We each be robbers." This be Omar.



We care because we have merged in that special way we have for merging with our friends, our lovers, our students, and indeed, with writers who have lived well before our times. It is a place of empathy. It is a hole or passageway or portal from one universe to another, a place much like the bench where Lyra Belacqua sits in her Oxford to hold hands with Will Parry, two individuals from different dimensions meeting under a cloud of caring.

Take Your Inner Creep for an Occasional Dairy Queen

In story, action is character, which is to say that a character is best described and in fact most remembered by what he or she does or, appropriately, does not do at a particular time. More than adjectives, metaphor, or even synecdoche, movement and attitude reenforce our perception of an individual. Even memorable Bartelby is defined--and often misread--by the aggressiveness of his refusal to contribute to a stifling landscape, making him arguably the first American Buddhist.

Every genre has its keynote character types, wound about the armature of good guys and bad guys.

Protagonist is he or she who causes things to happen, fuel sources that drive story. Antagonists are merely hims and hers who oppose the protagonist on some agenda relating to the instant story. They are not bad guys or creeps per se, they are bad or creepy according to which if any star in the moral heaven is his or her pole star.

The protagonist is no better on the moral Richter Scale, thus both types, protagonist and antagonist are hybrid vehicles, formulated to be human as we all are, their strengths and weaknesses writ large.

Some critics will translate this humanity as a Fatal Flaw or characteristic weakness, both of which reek from the slightly Lysol reek from the halls of academe and which is more often than not overdone.

William Rawls, a major in the Baltimore Police Department in the alternate universe of The Wire, is clearly a politician on the make, clearly an antagonist to the agendas of one of the protagonists, Detective Jimmy McNulty. As episodes in the first season progressed, we even see Rawls actively trying to get enough leverage on McNulty to cost him his job. In their day to day encounters, Rawls is not by any account civil toward McNulty, making maximum use of his power to frustrate McNulty. Toward the end of the first season episodes, Narcotics Detective Shakima "Kima" Greggs, recognized by McNulty as a superb detective, is shot during the course of a sting operation that comes apart at the seams. In the hospital, after the incident, with McNulty visibly shaken by the shooting and the guarded prognosis for Kima's recovery, Rawls, with no lessening of his disrespect and distaste for McNulty, argues persuasively with McNulty that neither the operation itself or the shooting were because of McNulty's failure to perform well. In short, Rawls was showing some humanity, at once making him more human, more complex, even more of a menace.

No more than the sight of one robin makes a spring, one lateral show of kindness from Rawls makes McNulty's career any the more secure. You could easily say that the basic theme of The Wire is career path or if that is not political enough, bureaucracy. Many of the front-rank characters are protagonists, regardless of their profession, meaning some of the persons in the drug trade are protagonists, some of the persons serving in the legal profession as lawyer and judge, are corrupt and antagonistic.

Moving away completely from The Wire, we make the observation that a protagonist needs a worthy opponent, one who is human rather than evil for evil's sake, a creep because we may be as we write seeking revenges on creeps in our life. The nicer we make our creep, the creepier the creep becomes and in the bargain the more believable. In some ways, this is of a piece with readjusting our reflexes when we cross heavily trafficed streets in England. We look to the creeps and losers and YMCA hot tub Nazis as having more admirable qualities rather than less. We look to creeps and losers as having more integrity or loyalty or intelligence or sensitivity than our protagonists.

Why is this so? This is important because the goal of the story is for the protagonist to win something, however small it may be. Maybe as small as dignity or satisfaction. (See A Loss of Face by Jack London. Go ahead, see it.) A protagonist who wins in the face of significant opposition, however narrow the win, is more believable.

See Mrs. Coulter in The Golden Compass.

And to indulge in overkill, if you believe as I do that Clarice Starling was the protagonist in Silence of the Lambs, you will appreciate Dr. Hannibal Legters all the more because he likes, appreciates, and shows some kindness to Clarice.

If there is a lesson to be learned, it is: Beat up on your protagonist; ease up on your antagonist.

Edge

Edge is the line where two surfaces intersect, the cutting surface of a blade, a boundary. In a character, it is a penetrating, incisive quality. Characters, particularly lead characters, need an edge. Dorothy Gayle's edge was her desire to get back to Kansas. Samuel Spade, formerly of Archer and Spade, Investigations, had an edge as sharp as cynicism. Sir Galahad in the Arthurian legend had an edge of virtuous innocence. Lyra Belacqua has a number of edges, not the least of which is impudence

Whether the story is chicklit, YA, fantasy, or mystery, whether it is literature or genre, the story is driven by persons with edge, and so there should be about them a quality of edginess bordering on grittiness. In order to seem to be alive, characters of front rank, which is to say the protagonist or antagonist level, should be bigger than life, defined by a few select traits or qualities that add to the edge and which may be misinterpreted by other characters.

Primary characters, those who stand at the protagonist rank, are individuals who drive story by riding the vehicle of their desire or need. A protagonist is a character acting on a want of something or someone, then the causality of achieving the goal or working for it, exacerbated by the edge used in the acquisition and response.

Antagonists, who should appear at least as likable as the protagonists, possibly even more, should be edgy in their opposition to the goals and agendas of the protagonist. One of the many reasons why The Wire is such an important dramatic venture is because of the complexity of each character, protagonist and antagonist, the blur between them in terms of moral judgements we viewers make.

Remember when you used to fill paper sacks with huffs of breath to the point where they were fully extended. Then you twist the top, sealing in the breath. Then you sneak up behind someone, smash the bag between your hands to create a pop. Thus a comparison between the bag filled with your air, being a segment of story that has a loud sound that is a sudden surprise. This is what story should do. Each character is filled with breath that creates surprising pops.

A Tale of Two Sidneys

For those who write, there are two sandboxes in which to play, and a third, alternate site reserved for those who take themselves too seriously to enjoy the play of writing. I address here the sandboxes of playfulness, which are the places in which craft of story and self gain entrance into muscle memory.

There are two basic formats for story, long and short.

The long story is a series of wrappings of event about the armature of an individual who ultimately undergoes some form of change. Something happens, somebody changes. My esteemed dramatist colleague from USC, Lee Wochner, reminds me that the three-act play has now changed to two-act. Digby Wolf, inventor of and head writer for Laugh-In, now emeritus from the theater department at UNM, bound now for a gig at the University of Canberra, says nevertheless, Nevertheless, the three-act format is a good template for the longform story. Long story is a stage play, the combined sixty episodes of The Wire, or a novel, say George Pelecanos' remarkable The Turnaround. Long story is also Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which is to say a series of novels in which a character, Lyra Belacqua, has a number of things happening to her, during the course of which she changes considerably.

The short story is a series of events, usually related in scenes, in which a character is drawn farther into a self-fulfilling encounter, one in which the reader is left to actually see or guess at the outcome. The character may or may not be able to see the outcome. The principal in Tobias Wolff's remarkable Bullet in the Brain, for instance, may not be able to see what we see. It is instructive to note how far the short story has progressed from Ambrose Bierce's Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge to the Tobias Wolff.

The literary landscape is like the Earth during the azimuth of evolution of the dinosaur when Earth was struck by a huge meteorite which obliterated for most practical purposes the evolution if not the very existence of the dinosaur. Who knows what the dinosaur might have become had that collision not got in the way? Story has an azimuth, discerned by looking at its structure from the time it began creeping into the petty pace of day-to-day events, altering them, imparting a sense of connectedness and causality which has led many of us to believe in such things as Fate or the will of the gods, or the will of God (as in His Perfect Plan, and don't blame me for that gender stuff; so far as gods go, I'm pretty happy with Kali). We seem now in 2008 to be nipping at the heels of causality much in the manner of an Australia Cattle Dog, rendering it more a vignette or in some cases a string of events, episodes if you will.

The rousing question is What do you bring to it? What have you done for story lately? To paraphrase William Wordsworth, Story is too much with us, late and soon. Which is to say the evolution of story can progress only if those of us working on it can fold into its ingredients a quality I will call inevitability. This quality is present in all evolution. biological or literary. It represents the individual writer's sense of what is most needed to give the process we call story a nudge forward regardless if I as reader or critic or teacher or writer like it or not. I'm pretty impressed by the presence and beauty of the giraffe, and it makes some sense to me that the giraffe evolved to score the leaves off the topmost branches the dinosaurs couldn't reach and that its neck acts like a siphon for water, but I have no stake in the giraffe. Were it to go extinct as a species, I would, having grown up with a sense of wonderment and admiration for the creature, feel a profound regret, but not the ache of grief at the loss of more personalized things. Truth to tell, my fondness for the short story comes from years of painful practice at the so-called pulp and slick and commercial story enhanced by the realization that what I considered a story outside those confines was something a respected editor agreed with and subsequently took on. I have a visual image of hat I want a short story to be. Every time I open a closet door, that image occurs to me.

True enough, if I deconstruct that series of events many persons agree upon as being story, and do so in terms of my vision, I will find a number of elements that go back to Aristotle's Poetics. I also have come to hold similar views on what a person, a single individual among the many billions who have walked and are still abroad on the Earth, represents as an individual. I also believe that the two are the Scylla and Charybdis of storytelling, my goal being to put events between those two poles

Them: People in Fiction

Working-class Boston.

Working-class Washington, D.C., The District.

Working-class New York.

Dennis Lehane.

George Pelecanos.

Richard Price.

To extend the calculus:

Mystic River; Gone, Baby, Gone

The Night Gardener, The Turnaround

Clockers, Lush Life

Three writers who might have never met in real life but who might well as individuals each have read the other two. Now all three meet in the context of another work, the sixty-episode Balzacian novel-for-television, The Wire, set in the working class tumult of Baltimore, a city that has some similarities to the places where each of the three writers are from. The three are brought together by yet another writer, David Simon, whose visions of the facets of Baltimore came together to form this epic novel-for-television, The Wire.

Working with Ed Burns, a former Baltimore homicide cop, Simon first put together an ensemble TV series, Homicide: Life on the Streets, based on Burns's career with the Baltimore force. In an effective way, these five men have set in motion a force or, of you prefer, a form for the kinds of novel Balzac evolved into writing, indeed the kinds of novels Lehane, Price, and Pelecanos are now evolving into writing. The definitions of fictional prototypes had, I suggest, already moved beyond the hero/heroine;villain/villainess; pivotal (you know, Iago, and some of the guys in Lonesome Dove) morphing into protagonist and antagonist, which is to say he or she who causes things to happen; cohorts or characters whose loyalties may shift, and messengers, characters who actually bring messages on stage, and exemplary characters, or men and women who serve as examples of what may or may not happen to the front-rank characters. Perhaps responsible for their choice as writers for The Wire was the growing tendency of Lehane, Pelecanos, and Price in their novels to blur the lines between the types of characters, installing in them a combination of edge, heart, and desire that gave them a standing in a story they might not have had before, certainly not in some of the genre fiction I've been reminiscing about in recent posts.

Today, seated outside a 7-11 convenience store on upper State Street, I saw a character right out of The Wire and Lush Life and Clockers and The Night Gardener. She held up a sign as so many homeless or destitute people do in such places as Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, asking for help and/or money. What reached me about her was the wording: Lost my job, my home, my dignity. That got me. The dignity part. Those two words told me more about her pain than words relating to job loss or home loss. That made her an individual who stood forth from a type. Actually, looking at her, I saw that she still had some dignity left. It wasn't all gone, although it mayn't have had much of a shelf life to count on. Price, Pelecanos, and Lehane capture such facets in their characters to the point where even the ones who are doing things on the slant side of The Social Contract emerge as individuals with a semblance of authenticity, agenda, and structure.

More and more, story is coming to mean the gritty, edgy sense of awareness it takes to make any kind of headway in the structured hallways of society. In my last work session with Brian Fagan and our editing focus to what we both hope will be a similar--The Wire- type--approach to of all things the Cro-Magnon (our Ice Age forbears), Brian let slip that their average life span was mid twenties. I jumped on that. Kids four and five, barely able to walk would have been given chores related to the Foraging life, marriage/mating probably age thirteen or fourteen. First round of kids maybe fifteen or, with luck, sixteen. Consequences: A lot of fifteen, sixteen-year-old orphans. And in our discussion of such seemingly recondite matters so far as archaeological approaches to drama were concerned, we both came to the place where we recognized the need the actor undergoes when the actor becomes another person: We have to see, feel, endure the life of those individuals on the icy streets of the past to bring them to the page not with the standard bag of tricks of the archaeologist, the artifacts and of course those cave drawings, but with the occasions of hunger and homelessness and dignity.

Speaking of The Wire, remember the character Russell "Stringer" Bell, a no-nonsense enforcer for the Barksdale family drug trade. As I recall it, Bell got A's in is economics classes at Community College, had an extensive library at home and, while not adverse to ordering up some physical violence, was seen from time to time consulting Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. There was one memorable character who--spoiler here for those who don't know the story--when he was killed, left a sense of shock and loss to the characters and the viewers.

The real story is not in the plot; it is resident in the complexity of the characters and in the surprising things they have to do, whether in the Ice Age landscape, the streets of Baltimore, or Pelecanos' off-Dupont Circle Washington D.C.

Let's Hear It for the Old Couple

Thinking about Chaucer in the twenty-first century is for me more than an act of keeping alive within me a respect for a man and his works long, long dead but as well of an awareness that the reading of him revealed itself to me. I speak of the relationship between the teller and the tale, a relationship that can influence the manner in which both teller and tale are recalled long after the reading is done.

I speak admiringly of The Pardoner's Tale, which in its dark, Chaucerian way, snaps me six hundred years away, into episodes of The Wire. The Pardoner's Tale is not for everyone, indeed not for the pilgrims for whom it is intended. When the eponymous narrator begins his prologue at the urging of the host, Harry Bayley, his fellow pilgrims don't want to hear it, because of the ambiguous nature of the man:
A voice he had as small as hath a goat.
No beard had he, nor ever one should have.
As smooth it was as it were new y-shave;
I trow he were a gelding or a mare...

which is to say, his sexuality is certainly called into account and in addition because of his profession of selling religious relics of doubtful provenance and effect. The Pardoner is a fraud in many ways although to his credit, he is forthcoming to a high degree, undercutting our own tendency to regard him with the same disdain shown by his fellow travelers. At first he demonstrates for them the sales pitch he uses on prospective customers, but then, after a moment of reflection, he acknowledges that he has just given forth nothing but cynical insincerity his , further confessing "myn entente is nat but for to wynne,/ And nothynge for correccioun of synne" (My intent is merely to win [make money], and not at all for the correction of sin). Hearing his confession, offered without apology and under no duress, aren't our feelings for him more complex and positive?

Now on to that splendid Wife of Bath. Her prologue, like The Pardoner's, is a partial confession/revelation, partly a defense. Her curriculum vitae includes having had five husbands, which gives her leave to speak of the "wo that is marriage."

A good WIF was ther OF biside BATHE,
But she was somdel deef, and that was scathe.
Of clooth makyng she hadde swich an haunt,
She passed hem of Ypres and of Gaunt.
In al the parisshe wif ne was ther noon
That to the offrynge bifore hire sholde goon;
And if ther dide, certeyn so wrooth was she
That she was out of alle charitee.
Hir coverchiefs ful fyne weren of ground.
I dorste swere they weyeden ten pound
That on a Sonday weren upon hir heed.
Hir hosen weren of fyn scarlet reed,
Ful streite yteyd, and shoes ful moyste and newe.
Boold was hir face, and fair, and reed of hewe.
She was a worthy womman al hir lyve.
Housbondes at chirche dore she hadde fyve,
Withouten oother compaignye in youthe--
But therof nedeth nat to speke as nowthe.

Ah, look at the game old gal, in charge and bigger than life from the very get-go. My personal preference is for the Prologue to her tale, rather than the tale she tells of the court of King Arthur which, although revelatory of a side of her character, seems less exuberant and dimensional than the Prologue. I love it when she rips the equivalent of a girlie magazine from the hands of her present husband and instructs him to admire her--and he does. Or so she says. With all that dynamism and self-assurance she displays, there is just the right touch of ambiguity about her to make us wonder and remember.

These two characters, holding fast to our imaginations over the years represent ways to build characters we can regard as timeless and timelessly human, filled with foible, self-interest, and yet guided by a moral compass where the needle rests not on magnetic north but on the place in the psyche where the truth of self-knowledge dwells.

Such Sweet Sorrow

1. Some persons I know have the hard-wired need to finish reading everything they begin.

2. A person of at best moderate patience, I have no such compulsion to finish what may have been started with high expectations and which has devolved to outright antipathy. Such venues as the garage, under the bed, the back seat of the Camry, and one particular closet into which much of low interest is stored become the final resting places of books, magazines, and journals that did not make the final cut.

3. A person of even less patience where television is concerned, my relationship with the control deice is as fervid and intimate as the president of the United States relationship to waterboarding.

4. All of which brings forth the awareness of the genuine sense of loss, grief, and anger at separation of individuals--characters--in whom I invested while reading or watching their exploits, even though my sense of dramatic closure had been satisfied.

5. This brings forth the literary aspect of afterlife regarding characters and the rhetorical question: Which do we recall most about a narrative--the plot or the characters? I can recall individuals from stories I have not read since childhood, but I cannot always remember the plot or the issues. Forget me remembering the plot twists of Ivanhoe, for instance. Sir Wilfred could have had a nice Jewish girl, but instead chose Rowena. Prince Valiant actually had no choice; one look at Althea and he was cooked, but who remembers the plot twists. Nancy Drew solved mysteries I can no longer recount, but I can recall my barely pubescent thought that some day I would like to have a girlfriend like Nancy, the joys and complexities of sexuality an inchoate but intriguing mystery of its own.

6. How dare Martin Sheen no longer be a former President of the United States nor Jimmy Smits the current one! How dare John Spencer aka Leo McGarrity have died on the job, foreclosing his potential as vice president! How dare Richard Belzer as Detective John Munch move from Homicide: Life on the Streets to some more secure series! Add a touch of schadenfreude: Speaking of Homicide, Andre Braugher as Detective Frank Pembelton has not to date approximated anything on film or television to compete with that role. You wonder about one of your favorite characters in The Wire, Felicia Pearson, who for reasons unknown to you, was allowed to have the same name as her character, but was also given the nickname Snoop. She came up from the mean streets of Baltimore, you learn, and has made such an impression that she has been given other roles. Can she ever eclipse Snoop? How long will you remember her? Thus comes forth the complexities of a story, a series, a novel, a play coming to an end, all with characters I have watched grow from concept to hyperreality in the hands of gifted writers and actors.

7. The occasion for this abrupt sense of loss--even though I was intellectually well prepared for it--was closure for The Wire, arguably one of the finer moments of television drama, made even more interesting by the fact that nearly every character had some seriously flawed morality or agenda, that the good guys not only didn't win, they barely came out even. Yes, yes, I know; buy the DVD sets, which you will likely watch once or twice, gaining more detail because the story line and character arcs are complex. But this is like discovering an unfinished, day-old latte from Peets, abandoned on a shelf or, worse, back in my smoking days, being reduced to going through the waste basket for a useful butt.

8. John Donne felt diminished by the death of any man because he was involved in mankind and, you know, Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, and all that three in the morning Hillary stuff. (ENK would have hyphenated the three-in-the-morning because it is a compound adjective modifying stuff)I'm talking The end of any character diminishes me because I am involved in story and have a Jones for characters.

9. Bad enough The Wire is toast, I am nearly finished with Lush Life (which incidentally was written by Richard Price, one of the contributors to The Wire. What lovely writerly irony--you read on because you are pulled by the vector of the characters and their behavior, all the while aware that the number of pages is growing smaller, thinner.

10. Which gets you to the real bottom line, the denominator: You must feel for and write about your characters with the kind of intensity that will produce in you the same kind of grief when they are gone about their lives after their story is ended. It is a matter of principal with you that stories attempt to have some afterlife, some life off the page, not by any means Edenic or Paradisical but rather idedic, a vision of them as still alive. The closest thing you can come to this is your real sense of reward from teaching, the fact that you will never see a good many of them again after they have gone forth into the world. But on occasion you see something of theirs in a book or a magazine and you are aware once again of them and aware that they have moved on along their own arc.