Off the clock

It is a truth universally recognized that a thick novel, filled with arcane information about whales, will put off potential readers, Nevertheless, Herman Melville’s epic novel, Moby-Dick, by no means a brisk seller at the time of its publication, has found its way to most of the informed lists of Most Magisterial American Novels.

Many last-comers, myself included, have not only found it penetrable, they have—because of its vast ensemble cast of memorable characters, the things these individuals say to one another, and the things they do—found Moby-Dick to be a rewarding, even transformative experience. Others still find the metaphor, symbolism, and validation in the epic struggle between Man and the forces of Nature, as represented by the great white whale.

Given the pressures and distractions of contemporary life, any 600-page novel is bound to seem daunting, even when it comes with a pedigree. We still approach such a work with suspicion, metaphorically kicking the tires as many of us find ourselves drawn into a world every bit as foreign—but no less fascinating or symbolic—as Moby-Dick.

The locale of which I write now is Dempsey, a fictional high-rise public housing project in northern New Jersey, close on to Jersey City and, of course, through the Holland Tunnel to New York.

As Ishmael, the protagonist of Moby-Dick tells us early in the first page, when he finds himself moody and depressed, “I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.” Ronald Dunham, a 19-year-old black man with a raging, undiagnosed stomach ulcer, recently of the Dempsey projects, and Rocco Klein, a 40-ish homicide detective who is looking desperately ahead to an early retirement, have no such ready escape valves as does Ishmael. They are both caught in the web of life, its expectations and potentials, in and about Dempsey. They are also the dual protagonists of Richard Price’s muscular, insightful 1992 novel, Clockers.

Ronald Dunham, known throughout as Strike, is a street lieutenant for a Falstaffian drug dealer named Rodney, who in his turn reports to Champ. From his own observations, Strike has calculated the working life of someone in his position is about six months before a deadly combination of violence and the colliding world of overlapping law-enforcement agencies converge on him. As Rodney is quick to point out to Strike, poor, uneducated blacks have two choices, crime or being on the street, “hustlin’. It ain’t criminal, man, it just survival. But you clean, strong young man, and if you play your cards right, someday you be working on the inside…” Rodney’s message is to save enough to buy one’s way out of the street and the hustle, which also means not using the product one sells.

Strike “had driven aimlessly through the deserted streets of downtown Dempsey for a while before deciding to make the rounds of his safes. He didn’t need to visit his money—he knew within a hundred dollars how much he had stashed across town—but he wanted to reassure himself that he had the means if not the resolve to make a new life for himself….Seven thousand here, fifteen thousand in the other two safes, equals a lot of miles and a lot of time away from all this business.”

Strike has, in effect, another role model, his older brother, Victor, who is desperately working three low-pay jobs to support himself, his girlfriend, and their infant son. Caught between these two polar extremes, Strike makes in excess of $2000 a week. Rodney is pressuring Strike to move off the streets and “indoors,” a step upward in a managerial sense. Rodney has also revealed to Strike that the one thing apparently blocking his progress is another young man whom Rodney suspects of cheating him and stealing from him.

When Rodney solicitously asks Strike if he has a gun, Strike begins to understand the “politics” of advancement. For a long time, it becomes difficult to separate his own anguish from Macbeth’s prior to concluding that he should kill King Malcolm.

When the other lieutenant Rodney suspects of double-dealing is found dead, assassination style, and Strike’s brother, Victor, confesses to the shooting, Strike’s ulcer goes on a rampage. Only vanilla Yoo-Hoo will afford him any comfort.

Homicide detective Rocco Klein becomes morally convinced Victor was not the shooter, his own role in the expanding complexion undergoing achingly similar angst to Strike.

As the complexity and anguish of moral choice grate against Strike and Klein, involving each in wrenching, humorous situations in which each shows remarkable resilience in the face of humiliation, the comparison to the characters and their plights in Moby-Dick emerge. Strike and Klein are each involved in a gritty, dark existential trap from which we learn details from their working lives as we learned details from the crew of Capt. Ahab’s ship, The Pequod. We learn, for instance, that a homicide cop should either wear a tie clip or tiepin to a crime scene, lest his tie get soiled when he bends to examine the corpse. We learn how cocaine is stepped on or diluted (and with what) in order to make it bring in more money. We learn an uneasy connection between drug dealers, their sales reps, and multi-level merchandising programs. We learn the mysteries of haircut designs, and without being made elbow-nudge aware of it, we are a privy to an authentic street language of the cop, the seller, and the user.

Readers of Clockers familiar with the past HBO series, The Wire, will recognize characters, situations, and instances, undoubtedly helping explain why Price was hired on as a staff writer for The Wire.

Clockers is not easy going because of the life styles and circumstances it unearths. It may take a bottle or two of Yoo-Hoo to provide a protective coating. The unresolved aspect of the frequent comparison of it to Moby-Dick opens the door for a range of thought. There is little doubt that the lifestyles in each novel are authentic, slices of the pie of humanity. The characters in each are memorable men and women, trying their best to eke out a meaningful and satisfying life. There are notable failures in each narrative and notable successes. There are notable examinations of ethical behavior, morality, and surprise in each.

Clockers is surely a rich, thorough investigation of social strata, of deeds and consequences, where such concepts as heroes, villains, and even role models fall away and the human condition remains.

###

Dear Instructor, Thank you for letting us see your course proposal

The Wire is a sixty-segment novel-for-television, set in contemporary Baltimore, where it follows the lives and interactions of an ensemble cast. Noted for its gritty, well-written scenes and its characters, all of whom are memorable in their edgy plausibility, it takes on social issues such as drugs, education, corruption, and the politics of survival in such professions as government, law enforcement, working conditions, and journalism. Scarcely a week elapses when you do not think about it in some way, even if it is the unfortunate one in which you wonder if many of the excellent black actors who appeared in it will ever again have such opportunities to display their talents.

You are thinking about it now because you are preparing for a meeting next week in which you are to present a list of courses you believe should be offered as a part of a curriculum for students whose goal it is to become a writer. On that list, you are asked to indicate which you wish to teach (as opposed to courses you would teach if you got stuck with the assignment). You had long ago decided you are no longer interested in teaching courses that do not interest you, thus were you to get stuck teaching a particular course, such as one of those you'd been politically maneuvered into, you would turn the course into something that would excite you to spend time with.

What a splendid course there is in viewing, discussing, examining issues and themes residing within The Wire. Because of its length, you'd either have to break the course down into two parts, The Wire I and The Wire II, that is unless you picked a handful of characters and scenes for examination, as you had already reasoned you would have to do with another course that will appear on your list. That course is one you would call The Canterbury Tales, your introduction relating the Chaucer work to the frame-tale narrative before you moved along to "The Knight's Tale," "The Miller's Tale," "The Pardoner's Tale," and "Sir Thopas' Tale," ending with the remarkable "The Wife of Bath,"demonstrating the various levels of social position, the relationship between the ranks, and the attitudes of each.

As you are working on this proposal, thoughts of The Wire never far from your mind, you happen to be reading Clockers, the imposing novel by one of the major writers on The Wire, Richard Price. As you write about The Canterbury Tales, you cannot help thinking about the parallel stories of the two majors in Clockers, Strike, a young black drug lieutenant to a drug captain, and Rocco Klein, a homicide investigator, and the way the ensemble casts of Clockers and The Wire are in so many ways counterparts of The Canterbury Tales.

Your reasoning takes you on this particular vector: It would be more a political reality for you to expect to have a course on The Canterbury Tales offered than one on The Wire. Having succeeded, you could use The Canterbury Tales to bring in The Wire for comparison, which is certainly something you'd enjoy doing. But this gives you more than a buzz; it gives you a high. Why not a third course, combining the two? The Academic Senate is a potential reason why. But the thought of it won't go away, each frame-tale explains and explores the other; each is social in the intense, pulsing presence memorable story defines . These are the kinds of connections that come from writing story; this, too, is worth talking about in the class room.

Here I come, worthy or not: Notes on the Worthy Opponent

worthy opponent--a character whose personal and/or organizational interests run antithetical to the protagonist of a novel or short story; an individual of significant enough stature to insure a sense of fear in the reader that the protagonist will either lose outright or have to relinquish some of the prize.

The concept of shooting fish in a barrel comes to mind when considering the dynamics of the worthy opponent. It would take a poor shot indeed to miss hitting at least one fish thus constrained. By extension, an antagonist who is made to seem evil for its own sake or merely contrary for the sake of being contrary prove no real threat to the protagonist or the reader, leaving additional metaphors such as paper tiger or tempest in a teapot to hover over the story.

An ideal opponent for a protagonist in a story is a person in his or her own way every bit bigger than life than the protagonist, a person of steely desire and purpose, equipped with such tools as a brilliant sense of humor, an obvious intelligence, adaptability, charm, and that great catch-all, people skills.

The goal is to provide the worthy opponent with enough clout that the outcome of the story is in doubt to the very end. A plausible opponent is one who might, in a mystery, outwit the detective; win the heart of the protagonist in a romance; supply superior magic in a fantasy; have a grittier social/existential problem than the protagonist in a YA novel; have loftier motives than the protagonist in a science fiction novel. There is no genre in which an unworthy opponent would be more welcomed than one with some interesting, intriguing dimension.

We may begin historically with Achilles and Hector in The Iliad, where it is still possible to root for Hector against the anointed hero, Achilles; then we can move to a trope in which a personified Nature presents a worthy opponent, first as the whale in Moby-Dick, then as the marlin in The Old Man and the Sea. To be sure, there is Dr. Moriarty, standing against Sherlock Holmes, emphasizing the common denominator here--a worthy opponent plausibly stands between the protagonist and the protagonist's goals.

In the original Star Trek TV series, the Romulan commander tells Capt. Kirk, "I regret that we meet in this way. You and I are of a kind. In a different reality, I could have called you friend." In the TV drama, The Wire, Omar Little was heard to observe, "A man got to have a code." Little had such a code, lived by it, and in tropes reminiscent of Greek tragedy, died by it. Another splendid example of worthiness in opponents also appeared in The Wire, where the characters of Avon Barksdale and Russell "Stringer" Bell were school chums, then loving partners in a flourishing Baltimore drug trade before a clash of philosophy led each to action that betrayed the other.

One of the dividing lines between the worthy opponent and the mere opponent is fairness. The worthy opponent plays fair, in large measure because he is confident of his abilities and his cause, thus he is "allowed" to play fair. The mere opponent uses any means at his disposal to win. A helpful recipe for creating the WA: give him or her ten percent more in some relevant, thematic ability than you give the protagonist. Heat to boiling, then serve.

Four Thought

irony--a condition created when a character says one thing while feeling an opposing urge; a deliberate, emphatic expression made by a character in the explicit belief that the recipient will conclude the exact opposite meaning; any lurking space between what is said and what is meant.

Irony is the stage manager for most human drama; it is the genome of crossed purposes, misinterpretation, and expressions of things being taken as other than what we intended. The marvelous prank letter inflicted on Malvolio in Twelfth Night demonstrates irony in a never-to-be-forgotten manner. Through a ruse, Malvolio, the steward of the attractive young Countess Olivia, is led to believe Countess Olivia has a romantic interest in him. When Malvolio appears before Olivia, dressed as the prank letter suggested, the disconnect plays forth, with irony taking the winning hand, one on which the writer double downs when Olivia finds herself drawn to a handsome young man, Cesario, who has undertaken the job of commending to her the interest of Orsino. But of course the reader will already know the irony of Cesario not really being Cesario, but rather Viola, who wishes nothing more than the affections of Orsino. Irony truly trumps in this exemplary drama.

As its inherent condition of a person, place, or thing being opposite to our expectations makes itself known, irony causes us to understand that we are in a rigged game, a drama called Life in which we are now cast in a Road Runner cartoon, then informed by the director that we have been cast as Wile E. Coyote.

Omar Little--a front-rank character in the HBO novel-for-television, The Wire; a gritty, magnetic character who is openly gay, whose major source of income is robbery, a man who has in fact killed in defense of his beliefs, Omar Little never robs from people who are not directly involved in the drug trade, has a strict code of ethics which follows it, emerges as one of the few uncorrupted characters in the mise en scene, remains likable, admirable throughout his tenure in the sixty-episode series. When presented with moral quandaries, Little can be seen considering them as a prelude to determining his course of action. His senses of humor and irony are manifest; he is the only front-rank character who does not use profanity nor does he in any way suffer from not doing so. On occasion, Omar Little's purposeful focus is reminiscent of Wile E. Coyote, although Little is more likely to use irony instead of becoming its victim; Little and Coyote represent polarities in character force that merit study. Omar Little is a reminder that dignity is a major factor to consider in the creation of character.

Where would they rather be?--a question to ask of characters before introducing them into any scene. It is quite possible for them to want to be in the current scene, agendas and ambitions burning brightly or fearful of potential consequences. Also it is likely they would prefer to be elsewhere, doing things other than those required of them in the instant moment.

The answer to the question informs what the character thinks, says, does, keeps the character on track moment to moment. The action or overwhelming needs of a scene may mercifully prevent the writer from listing too much detail about the character, but nevertheless will influence the choice of words used in rendering the character and the pace with which the character performs.

It is important to realize that the character's preference does not operate on a right-wrong basis but rather on an opportunity-providing basis. The waiter working the dinner shift may want instead to be attending an acting class or, better still, be a character in a performance, providing the temptation for that waiter to behave at the present task of serving cheap or expensive meals to pensioners or CEOs in ways that produce a chemistry to the scene and perhaps even a consequence.

backpack--the tools, history, emotions, and baggage a character carries when setting forth into a new scene. Characters may or may not behave like tourists in a new setting, craning their necks to look at the sights or, contrarily, being blase to a fault. An actor may show up for a performance, thinking he knew his lines, but this time, in this scene, there is doubt. A housewife may return home from grocery shopping, thinking she has three hours of free time to work on a short story before her son returns from school, then notices her husband's car in the driveway. Or an ambulance. An actor leaves her afternoon AA meeting to attend a cast party at which she knows there will be several bottles of champagne.

Trouble

A part of you, the part that attempts to manage and direct things to give you the best shot at plying and enhancing your craft, has gone to great lengths to keep you busy, jealous of your time away from your work. This managerial aspect of you knows that the busy person has the best chance of getting things done; it also understands that leisure time is an enemy in which your thought processes engage in that dialectic between supreme confidence and equally supreme self-doubt. The effect of such dialectic is often the kidnapping or neglect of writing time, all because of The Trouble.

You know you are in Trouble if:

1. someone else's Moleskine, for whatever reason, looks more interesting than yours.

2. you discover that a casual acquaintance, not even a writer, is not only a fan of "The Wire," but has noticed in it an entire dimension you completely missed.

3. an individual you admire, in a quite casual way, pulls the rug from under a book you'd read and thought to be significant.

4. a beginning writer whose work you think shows some promise is approached by a publication you've been trying to get into for some time and is extended an assignment.

5. a complete stranger approaches you, begins talking about your unique approach to writing, then begins to make references which convince you the stranger has confused you with a writer whose work elicits no sympathy or empathy in you.

6. an accomplished writer recalls a remark you made at a party where you may have had too much or too little wine, then attributes that remark as the inertia for a new venture which you deplore.

7. someone asks you to give advice to a friend or relative who is as embarrassed as you are by the transaction.

8. someone of still-emerging talent is significantly successful in the execution of an idea or concept you'd bailed on for lack of interest.

9. someone in the investment or financial sector wants to help you provide a greater sense of security for you so that you can take even greater risks in your work.

10. a stranger or casual acquaintance tells you he or she has quit a secure career path to follow your example.

These are all scenarios that cause you to wax and wane, to argue in debates where you may have little or no standing, which is to say, these and other similar situations cause you to indulge the kind of thinking where there is no tangible product or plan. You are alternately fluffing a pillow and wondering if there are enough feathers in the pillow to make it worth fluffing in the first place.

There is some satisfaction in the notion of a possible scenario about supposition # 1 supra. Suppose, you posit, you were to arrange a one- or two-week swap of your Moleskine for that of a local friend or a blog friend. What inspirations would you glean from the laundry lists, complaints, and observations of another? What glorious satellites would you induce in orbit about you? What great values of industry and organization would you inherit?

Ah, you have reached the point in life where ideas do not need a seventeen mile linear accelerator to cause them to smash into one another, therein to produce the subatomic particles of story. You have learned not to think until it is time to undertake revision, that lovely conflation of the Twelve-step Program with editorial pragmatism. A fierce moral inventory.

You can almost see the personal ad in The New York Review of Books or The London Times Literary Supplement. Calif. writer ISO interesting, note-taking writer with Moleskine at least half-filled, for long or short term swap.

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.