Agenda

On any given day you tend to awaken with a primary goal of securing coffee in some drinkable form.  Then down the list to that wide variant so familiar to the life of the freelance writer.  Shall it be a class to teach, an appointment with an editorial client, perhaps a meeting with a group of fellows or girls or fellows and girls?  Perhaps even some chore or other, some element that must be reckoned with, prepared for, driven or walked to.

Sometimes such logistics have played merry hell with your day book and your more formal list of things to do on your Google home page, making you aware, painfully aware, of the length of time you will need to get through, yes, endure, before there is a space of blank, a symbol and metaphor for the freedom to address a grander list of things under priority that have little or nothing to do with the earlier list (although this freedom may draw on the things you encounter when performing the activities on your earlier list).

This list is your true agenda.  Although this agenda may vary from day to day, for reasons which vary, it is a recognition of a muscle memory acquired over the years since your early teens, its roots going even farther back.  This muscle memory and agenda habit are so engrained that even a day of procrastinating instead of writing is a day better spent than doing something else of the earlier list and wishing you were writing.  You do, of course, procrastinate, either by reading, doing online crossword puzzles, drinking more coffee, re-watching The Wire, checking political activity on political blogs, and "researching," a euphemism for looking up arcana on Google as though a serious contestant in some intellectual Jeopardy rerun.   Sometimes your procrastination calls forth speculations of how your day would go if you were able to spend more time on your agenda rather than time away from it doing such things as you have already listed.

Your agenda for today was (1) working on a short story to be called Uncle Charlie and (2) doing more reading and research on a book you wish to write to be called Obsidian:  The Cutting Edge, a work of nonfiction completely out of your normal range of interest except that for the past few months you have begun to think about the enormous effect it has had throughout the ages, what a useful tool it is, what a gorgeous mineral, and how it feels to heft.  It does not hurt that a world-class archaeologist has offered to write an introduction for it, suggest sources for you, and read your early drafts.

This would have been, along with normal procrastination, a wonderfully normal day in August with only one time out for coffee with a client.  The order of agenda was dealt a serious blow, however, upon receipt of notes from your literary agent on one of the chapters in a novel that enthuses the breath in normal cadence from you and turns it into something more resembling a pant achieved at having negotiated a steep hill in the midst of a run.  The things the agent liked, suggested, and questioned yanked you back into the novel to the point where it began talking to you, specifically slipping a note from a long silent character who now wants to reappear, which fact gives you a surge of adrenaline because any number of characters in this venture have already established agendas and they are clamoring to be heard.

It is comforting to be through with the early agendas and alert to the messages these muscle-memory projects slip metaphorically under your door, eager to be acted upon.  

A Letter to a Young, Middle-Aged, or Geezer Writer XVI

Every time a character sets foot into a scene you have created, he or she comes armed with two essentials, agenda and expectations.  A character who enters a scene without either is a runaway from a writing group, incompletely formed, neither to be trusted nor endured.  Like you, the character thus waiting in the wings to go on has awareness of whence he or she has just come, what happened there, and under what circumstances.

Agenda is the character's goal, the one he or she strives before our eyes and by implication to achieve.  This agenda may well be inarticulate even as the character works or perhaps lurches toward achievement of it.

Expectation relates to the character's attitude while pursuing the agenda and is thus more time sensitive.  Each time a character enters a new scene, that character brings some tangible measure of the expectation that something will happen or, if there is to be a surprise, of some planned event not happening.  Looked at functionally, each scene becomes each character's anticipation of what will happen next, working in tandem with the reader's curiosity to see in fact what does happen.  A character can, for instance, dread going home for the holidays to a family gathering only to have such dread overwritten by the intense wonder of bonding and good fellowship, a theoretical outcome to be sure, but one following another dramatic certainty I commend to your attention:  Although the reader has expectations, they should be delayed as long as possible if they are ever in fact met.  Or to put it another way, don't take the reader where the reader wants to go because once the reader gets there, the story is over.

We all of us conspire with the characters against the reader in this last sense, hopeful of keeping the reader with us by constantly yanking the rug, table cloth, bed sheet, or any other similar length of metaphoric material from under him.  We conspire against out characters by blunting or misdirecting their expectations.  A character whose fantasies and wishes are met is not going to seem worthy of our interest, not for long.  Interestingly enough, a character who seems to have everything emerges as a character who is about to experience some comeuppance.  And that comeuppance had better not be too late an arrival at the party.

There is no sense investing our characters with these tools if they are not used, which is to say it is a good idea to know what their overarching goal is.  Doesn't hurt a bit to have an idea how far they're willing to go to achieve their goal nor to see how their expectations are faring as they wait to do whatever it is you have planned for them, where ever it is you planned on having them do it.  Nice touch if you can arrange a scene in which they interpret things to mean they're on the cusp of achieving their agenda or, conversely, that they are so far away from their goal as to be rendered inchoate with frustration.

Happy campers only work in commercials; unhappy campers are always on the cusp of entering a new scene with a new story.

Learning not merely how to write but when to write it

In a meeting with a student yesterday, you were handed your own reading copy of a manuscript that turned out to be exactly what you asked for: the first draft, the very first draft of the first scene of a short story. As you read through it, one minor suggestion quickly arose--reverse the order of the first two sentences. A mere editorial enhancement. Reading farther along, you felt yourself gripped by a growing sense of unease that had nothing whatsoever to do with the student, who after all truly did give you exactly what you'd asked. Rather the sense of discomfort spreading just below the enjoyment level of your medium latte was a strike of lightning hitting you, particularly the you of the past, directly in the middle of your attitude.

Unfortunately for you, there was a time when you conflated energy for writing with first-draft performance. If you messed up with a word or sentence, you merely struck it out and substituted right there on the spot. This effectively meant first draft was the only draft. You took great refuge in the thought that being a lousy speller meant you had to go through the first draft to clean up spelling errors. Even novels were produced this way, thought out for their form then written as quickly as you could, then shipped off to whoever would have them. You felt a kinship with one of your heroes, Fitzgerald. You couldn't spell, either, and you had a great affinity for such potables as scotch, bourbon, vodka, and a wide range of liqueurs such as Benedictine, strega, amaretto, and anything with a licorice aftertaste. Mornings after, you consulted the ramos gin fizz, which often meant you had to be in San Francisco because where better to get the ramos gin fizz than the Buena Vista at Sunday morning breakfast.

So much for all that.

What the student had done, you noticed, was a nearly pitch-perfect map or chart of the emotions of the protagonist of the tale, line by line. You were able to see beyond the literalness and excess of the lines of text into the perfectly placed responses the character was experiencing as the scene progressed. The student was so successful in this that you wondered, still smarting from the lightening strike who had taught whom.

You are quite fond of saying (and sincere in the saying of it) "Don't think during the first draft. Get down what comes out. The thinking comes in subsequent drafts."

You are also quite fond of saying that however much fun the first draft is, revision is even more so because it is in this process of entering the story that your own awareness of feelings, subtexts, and intentions come forth or need to be made to come forth. As you were imparting this theory of yours yesterday, it metastasized into an overt strategy, representing yet another nuance of your theory about the ways in which drama inheres in the developing story.

It helps also to have been reading the splendid novel, Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, in which the characters' agendas so deftly and convincingly define them.

The Triggers of Intent

Story is an uneasy gathering of individuals, each of whom has a finger curled about a trigger. The trigger may or may not be in sight.

Story comes to life like a cheetah or panther on Animal Planet, with a rumble of hunger in its belly, and a scent of prey in the vicinity. If it is more cheetah-like in nature, it must move quickly; although it can run at great speeds, it is internally reminded that overheating can be fatal to it. The panther, although sleek and lithe, is not as fast and can consequently range farther.

By inference, story becomes a predator, stalking the areas of human awareness where beasts, monsters, and other humans lurk as they go about their agenda. By inference and direct action, story becomes every bit as focused as the cheetah and the panther; characters with exaggerated focus tend to find places in story as protagonists or antagonists.

From its early days before there was such a thing as a written language, much less a SASE, story has undergone change, evolving to something highly questionable because it is not always so readily recognizable. One of the things that has not changed all that much is one of the conditions governing its very existence: determinism.

Determinism is the default condition of story, it is a world where events, consequences, and responses occur either as the results of earlier actions or a conspicuous lack of action. Although we approach story through an entry portal called Beginning, that aperature is not the only place for the narrative to begin (witness The Iliad). Nor is it possible to say without fear of contradiction that story ends when the text does.

By its very nature, story removes ancillary, non-causal event from the narrative of life, which pursues and seeks to contain random chance with varying degrees of success. Whatever the genre, whatever the focus audience, story injects the triggers of intent into its narrative of purpose.

Story leans toward an orientation known as causal determinism because of the orientation's kinship to predictability. The reader of story comes alerted to the potential for future contingency, which is fueled by the clashes of intent and self-justification developing among the characters. Story without some form of future, implied or expressed, becomes suspect, earning such names as vignette, slice-of-life, sketch. Story without some implication, however bare, of the past emerges as a premature child emerges into the world, its auto-immune system compromised to some degree, its future hanging in the balance.

How much does it take?

Today you are in the process of talking about a character who appears desperately to want something, starting with Dorothy Gale, who desperately wants to get out of Oz and back to Kansas, then moving along to, of all individuals, Brer Fox, who in his search for supper has focused on Brer Rabbit. This is story-telling stuff right out of the Aristotle Poetics, a character desperate for achievement of a goal driving the story forth. In a blinding flash of recognition, you are so convinced that the Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit story comes right out of Aristotle that you forget the connection between Brer Fox and Wile E. Coyote, forgetting even to mention him as your selection for the patron saint of characters. There is such a splendid balance between the character who wants a particular prize, no matter what it is, the antagonist or individual standing in the way of the character achieving goal, and the humiliation available to fall on the goal seeker lest he fail in his task. Look at the stature Brer Rabbit gains merely by surviving. Look at the seeming invincibility Road Runner has. Look at the effect failure has on Wile E. Coyote and Brer Fox; each becomes more determined, more focused and thus more likely to appear undignified. How do your non-animal characters react in such triangles? Do they become more determined and, in the process, do they lose by degree any semblance of dignity?

There is a thin line between humiliation and mere undignified performance. Too much of the latter produces a measure of the former. How then to remove in slow plausible degree from an author his or her dignity? Start by having that character reassess the nature of focus and purpose. I will get up a half hour earlier and write before I do anything else. I will get up forty-five minutes earlier, I will get up an hour earlier. Seemingly, these are small enough increments, but in aggregate, they begin to undercut any trace of dignity the character may posses. When the character begins gambling with appearances, the risk is dignity, the result inevitably humiliation.

It is useful to keep these shifting boundaries in mind as you pursue the routine of a character bent on pursuing an agenda to the point where the pursuit begins to trump the results.

Something happens and somebody changes

Something happens, then somebody changes. Not too shabby a way of looking at long form fiction. For the shorter version, you could say at a bit more length, something happens and someone considers the possibilities. In both long and short forms, something clearly must happen so that the event and the relative awareness of the event become part of the theme of the narrative. Something happens, although we're not quite sure what, but it is enough to cause Gregor Samsa to undergo a remarkable metamorphosis.

Things are in a rapid state of flux most days, but some of us are too caught up in routines and custom to notice, leaving us vulnerable to the more sudden revelation, the epiphany, if you will, of the short story. He did not realize he was (1) growing older (2) more set in his ways (3) more conservative (4) more desperate (5) more frightened (6) more out of touch with reality and so he (1) ran off with his secretary (2) forbade his daughter to do something she very much wanted to do (3) considered suicide (4)suspected his wife of something (anything) (5) bought a sports car (6) broke off a long-standing relationship with someone.

The conventional wisdom holds favorably for enhanced performance coming as the result of practice. Not bad logic, but by the very nature of that logic, standing up and sitting down can in addition to producing a regal sense of posture bring about arthritis.

We do not ordinarily appreciate characters who seem to have been content with their lot in life, accepting their status as though it were the product of a fast-food stand, making do, exuding a happy-go-lucky aura and following popular culture as though it were directions on a Google map. For us to appreciate such a person, that individual will need to suffer some devastating loss and not respond with a mere shrug, to experience some milestone birthday, say forty or fifty or sixty or seventy and say, No more; to have been given a death sentence and consequently decided to "go out" following the script of some heretofore unrecognized agenda.

The effects of change on the individual character remind you of the crumbs you find on your shirt front after trying to wrestle through one of those croissants sold at Peet's, your preferred coffee venue. You would think that a place with such superb coffee would attempt a match-up with a provider of at least adequate pastry, but the aura of story hovers over this pairing, of nearly every imaginable pairing; story spreads outward from the discovery of a splendid thing and the consequences of that discovery. A scant two miles south of Peet's is Raynaud's Bakery in the Loreto Plaza. Their French toast is a joy to behold, their brioche are fluffy and yeasty, their quiche and even their tuna salad or Salade Nicoise are choice, but the consequence is that their coffee is of a level with Starbuck's. When you set forth for French toast or for your usual medium latte, respectively, you are not going for breakfast nor for coffee; you are going for story and its consequences.

On Language

Sometimes--until you begin writing dialogue--you take language for granted, accepting it for the almost incredible medium by which members of the same and differing species communicate, not even questioning your ability to use it to inform the communication between you and the characters you create. In some lofty moments of spontaneity, you watch the screen in a state of being greatly impressed with yourself for having caught so much meaning in so few words.

You, who used to despair that you would ever achieve a metaphor or simile of any worth, who were openly envious of Raymond Chandler for the way these figures of speech seemed to appear as though from the reflex of need, now watch your own metaphor much as a tenement housewife would watch the clothing she put out on the clothesline, fearful of the neighbor's reactions to the very items of laundry and to any real or imagined defects in the way she did her laundry.

Language allows us to discover, to inform, to leave messages, to make choices, to warn. It reveals as much about us as we hope to convey to others, at once betraying our status in a relationship, our pretensions, our defensiveness, our social ranking, our attitudes, our agendas.

The more you think about language, the more it takes on a shape and purpose of its own, as though it were a leviathan whose size and function is incomprehensible to us. Language makes you realize how difficult it is at times to set your feelings down with a satisfying degree of accuracy. Language is the space in between "I had a good time" and "The world suddenly seemed to open with a dazzle of opportunity and learning." Language is a dazzle of opportunities, the trail of crumbs set in the forrest by the witch for Hansel and Gretel.

As you do on occasion by replaying in your mind some favored music, some theme from Ravel, some Gershwin invention that speaks out to you as though you'd been lifelong friends, you replay a line of dialogue, a phrase or sentence leading a story deeper into the forrest or incrementally out of it, you stop in mid stream, stunned by the implication of using language. You are near breathless because of the enormity of choice to be made, because of the hush that surrounds you as language waits for you to make up your mind, to choose a word.

Two of the geniuses of music you have discovered, Mozart and Beethoven, worked in wildly differing ways, Beethoven's notes seeming to come more slowly and deliberately, Mozart's with the ease of turning on a spigot which would allow melody and idea to flow forth. Each made uncounted choices, each has left a legacy of work that seems to proceed from one note to the only possible next note.

When language is working well for you, you don't have to go back and remove things, qualifiers, hesitations, defenses. When it is significantly working well for you, you are able to come back to it and read it with a kind of shiver of wonderment, the wonderment being Who wrote this? I am impressed.

From time to time you find yourself becoming evangelical when you tell your students (and yourself) the best practice is to write the way you think and think the way you write. And do each without hesitation.

Cue, Not to Be Confused with Billiards

There is a moment of excited limbo when you, as an actor, are standing somewhere in the wings, waiting to go on, the delicious process of drainage at work, removing from you all the motives and responses of the you of birth and growth, allowing you to become filled with the you of character, aware of an agenda and expectations, When you are writing fiction, this particular sense is best seen as a cup of coffee with an exponent sign hovering above it because it is often impossible to gauge just how intense and exciting this feeling of being about-to-go-on is. There are occasional moments in real life when you feel such a moment, say in that brief second before you open the door to a classroom, or when you are about to join friends, or indeed when you are about to enter a shard of time that will be all yours, without interruption, to do what you will as the whim takes you. Perhaps Sally will be there, sleeping or watching some focus of stimulation, but perhaps you will be entirely alone, ready to walk-on into an adventure.

Your most vivid memory of such about-to moments goes well back into the 60s when, for a time, you were an extra, working at CBS TV Studios on Fairfax Avenue near Beverly, not yet at the stage of being given lines to deliver, more often than not being a part of a background. You forget the actual drama of the incident because the incident was its own drama. You were an extra in a Playhouse 90 production, a ninety-minute drama in which you had a number of appearances, all of which required you to move quickly from one set to another, often through narrow, poorly lit aisle-ways. The incident began when you made a wrong turn, from which everything about you was a disconnect. You were hopelessly lost. In the rehearsals, you'd judged the amount of time you needed to get from one set to another, thereupon to become a passenger in an elevator or a group of individuals leaving a courtroom, or an individual seated at a bar, staring longingly at the splendid actress, Kim Hunter. But you were lost and the inner clock was ticking. You made what you hoped was a turn that would get you out of terra incognita and into some familiarity, but instead, you came face to face with an icon. Standing there, moodily watching the progress of the story on a monitor was the great stone face of all time, the silent film icon, Buster Keaton. "Don't worry, kid," he told you. "We all get lost once in a while." You hesitated, wanting to convey your respect and admiration. "No time for that, kid," he said. "Keep looking for your way. The cue is everything."

You have been lost more than once, sometimes in search of the cue, wondering if you would ever learn it.

Standing in the limbo before entering your scene is daunting; if you think about what you are doing, it could easily be an invitation to stage fright and that awful sense of being out there before an audience with neither cue nor clue. Watching the recent film Up in the Air, you did not at first relate to the growing feeling of discomfort when George Clooney, in character, stood before a seminar and began inviting his audience to see a backpack. The feeling of discomfort reached its acme when he paused before another-but-similar audience, his own disconnect between cues tugging at him. The way his and your careers have gone, it is unlikely that you will ever meet him as and in the context of your meeting with Buster Keaton, but seeing the film was a lovely redux of what has become a way of life and of looking at events.

Keep looking for your way.

Smile when you find it.

Are peak experiences on sale at Wal-Mart?

Just as we do in real-time life, characters must arrive at work every day with expectations.  They may brown bag it to save money, they may dress casually on Friday, but they must have some goal driving them forth, some agenda beeping away like the monitors on hospital TV dramas that intensify to suggest crisis.  The agenda is many ways defines the character.  How could we not feel a measure of sympathy and identification for the parent who wanted children to advance according to their talents?  How could we fail to experience a squeeze of identification for the hard-working immigrant who wants to bring the rest of his family along?  Doesn't our heart go out to the young artist who seeks beyond fame and recognition the achievement of special, intense skills and the empathy with which to give those skills an entire perspective?

The roommate of expectation is reversal, an intimacy college dorm mates experience well into their post graduation years.  Expectation and reversal are borrowed like shirts, sweaters and dresses.  The relationship is intimate because one follows the other, in real-time life and in story.  It is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Burns had it right with "The best laid schemes of mice and men..."  They play off one another like the old vaudevillian teams, building plot twists via response at every turn.  Felix leaves a Post-it note on the refrigerator,signing it merely with his initials.  FU.  Felix Unger.  Oscar, big blustery sort that he is, sees the FU and explodes.

Persons who manage to achieve or seem to achieve everything they want are bigger than life and more boring than life.  It is not so much schadenfreude that makes us want some pigeon to come home to poop if not roost; we have all experienced loss and disappointment that wrenched from us something we thought we had or could have.  It is what we do in consequence of the reversal that sets us apart.  Similarly, it defines our characters.

If we had truly wanted what was denied us or taken from us, we would be making plans to get it back or replace it or go after something even more intense, leaving the door open for act two finale of regaining what was lost, then paving the way for act three, discovering that the goal wasn't worth the price paid for it.  Sound familiar?

Timeshares in Inevitability

Once you're aware that each character in a story has a separate and distinct reality, you're ready to enter the frightening landscape of inevitability, which is, after all, the guiding force in drama.

First you have to get through a few outer doors, beginning with suspense and its reputation for being the fuel that powers story.  Suspense posits a critical interruption of agendas, of plans under way or about to start.  Menace is often a stowaway to the interruption, either threatened or actual, the remaining questions being where, when, and what the afflicted characters will do next.

Tension is the next barrier, a tricky one to get over because it is a tangible byproduct of characters having differing realities.  The moment two or more individuals spend any time together, each of them begins to question, however under the radar the questioning, the reality of the other.

Inevitability arrives in a longer story early in act two, where characters begin to sense opposition, disagreement, and a measure of what each judges to be self-interest in the other. You can see the classic pull between wanting the freedom of aloneness and openness of choice fighting with the urge to form friendships or romantic associations.  A tentative compromise is sent forth, either to be accepted, ignored, or rebuffed.  Thus does tension begin, slouching toward the Bethlehem of suspense, fulfilling the inherent promise of inevitability.

Those who came before us spoke of inevitability as Fate or the will of whatever gods were accepting earmarks or outright tributes.  Some of us still hold those beliefs.  Whatever.  The evidence is there before us in story after story, whether a play, novel, or short form:  place two characters in the same setting and they speak to the story at hand, they respond in some way that creates at the very least a fabric of tension.  They do what persons in real life often don't--they respond and speak that sublime dramatic language of dialogue.

Ah, the misbegotten scenes of the learning curve, in which characters chatted, expounded on theory and philosophy, missed the nightly showers of subtext and agenda in the dramatic skies.  Ah, the moments when the author in us, eager to be in command, wrested control from the characters, individuals whose goals we barely knew, all but holding up posters explaining the motivations that should have spoken for themselves.

But with time, we came to realize.  It was, you might say, inevitable.

Would you buy a used car from your narrator?

Sometimes, when the telephone rings and you answer it, instead of waiting for some kind of gated-community security assurance from the answering machine, you are greeted by a complete stranger who introduces with some vague job description.  "With the Sheriff's Department," or "From a Research and Marketing Division," or even the more prosaic, "This call may be monitored by quality control to see that you are being given courteous service."  This introduction is invariably followed by an inquiry, ambiguous enough to allow interpretation of How is your health today? or How is your attitude today?  The question is the casual-sounding How are you, today?  To which you, with increasing frequency, reply, "When someone I don't know calls to ask how I am, I suspect they are reading from a script and either want money or want to sell me something?

What are the qualities and characteristics of a narrative voice that arouse such varying responses as suspicion, reliability, boredom,hostility?

Setting aside the obvious answer that differing stimuli transmit these responses variously, we repeat the question, looking for the lowest possible common denominator of "tells," signs by which we judge the intent and integrity of a narrative source.

In our mind, we compose lists of selling voices, starting with the now iconic used car sales person, the telephone solicitor, the telephone sales person, the religious enthusiast wanting to "sell" or promote a particular path to either salvation, redemption, or outright merging with the godhead; the politician, he who warns of dire consequences, or the recruiter in some cause.  All these have apparent motives which will be revealed if we hear the narrator out, which makes us cynical in a way we have rarely been cynical:  their entire pitch is predicated on our agreeing to something because we are bored and want to get rid of them.

There are more subtle voices, although it is often debatable how subtle their intent, that carry hidden political agendas secretly reeking of elitism, protectionism, racism, and perhaps verging upon delusion.

Would we buy a used car from our own narrator?  Indeed, why did we chose this particular narrator or narrative form?  At first blush, the multiple point of view appears to be the most democratic and reliable since it allows us to take sides in our emotional assessment of the story, but this is not always a possible point of view, particularly in a short story.  Yeah, yeah; William Trevor manages it in a short story, but A) he is William Trevor and B) he has a track record of being empathetic to all his characters, even the ones with malign intent.

Look at the results of the narrator in Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier, who starts things off with a rousing assertion, "This is the saddest story I ever heard," then, as the novel unfolds, appears not to have seen what was happening under his very nose.  In short, is anyone reliable or, for that matter, trustworthy?

Much as these questions may be interpreted to cut off narration entirely, it is floated forth as a greater indication that the narrator must have a personality, a motive for telling the story, an intent, and even an agenda.  Your own agenda in asking these questions is to help you arrive at the intent of the narration of a story you are living with quite a bit these days and which is reaching the point of wanting to be set down on paper--but through what filter?

chaos

chaos--a dramatic condition in which there is no apparent order; a character behaving without a plan or design; a multifarious state of being in which there is no seeming thread that connects individuals or events.

Chaos is the world without story, its purpose random and unstructured. The writer enters the landscape of chaos, imposes a structure or plan, then steps back to watch the characters as they respond to attempts at design. Chaos is also the world without specific individuals being assigned starring roles; as it continues to unfold, the condition of chaos levels the playing field of agenda so that all agendas are of equal importance. When beginning a story, the writer chooses a landscape, which may be pure invention or fantasy or extrapolated speculative fiction but which nevertheless becomes a tangible place for the reader. The writer then adds characters, whose goals help define their prominence and focus.

Story, plot, design--they are all a purposeful rearranging of furniture, the feng shui equivalent of drama, allowing some procession or orbit of event, the totality of which eases the passage of energy from the beginning point to the resolution. Chaos appears at first to be all the distractions a character or group of characters may face, but as the reader grows interested in the characters, chaos morphs into "things that could go wrong," which is a sort of reverse feng shui, a negative energy that arrives in unanticipated increments.

Chaos is a series of laundry list events, awaiting the writer's hand to organize them in some form.

The Secret-Sharer

secret desire--a dream, plan, or agenda held in absolute confidence by a character; a wished-for outcome with a romantic, career-based, or otherwise political outcome nourished by an individual in a story.

When pushed to extremes, many individuals will readily confess to being indifferent lovers or bad drivers; they will do so well before admitting their secret desire to anyone, making a strong argument that true power over an individual is not related to sexual prowess or financial position but rather to knowledge of another's secret desire. This secret desire may very well be sexual or financial in nature. It may also be the ability to perform well at a sport or in a particular art. The secret here is, in fact the secret. Most individuals who wish to act or dance or sculpt or play the B-flat Selmer saxophone are upfront and open about their wishes, but a person who indulges in secret the desire to sing or dance or write or sculpt is setting forth at the very limit of vulnerability. That person would be mortified to have his agenda known, preferring to continue the fantasy life or the secret desire or preferring the risk of leading a double life in which working toward that secret desire had provided enough inner security for the dreamer to go public.

The argument is provocative: Every character has in addition to stated goals and agendas a secret desire. Let us, through the magic of projection (which is what many secret desires are in the first place, suppose a number of men whose secret desire it was to have a sexual relationship with a current public figure female entertainer, an equal number of women similarly attracted to the notion of a sexual relationship with a current public figure male entertainer. So far, nothing out of the ordinary, so let's inject the beginnings of combustion positing a male character who is having a sexual relationship with a current public figure female entertainer. He is in effect experiencing the wildest dreams and fantasies of a number of other males. Now we have to wonder who this man has a fantasy desire with or, alternately, what his secret desire is. The same turnabout works with a woman who is in a sexual relationship with a much desired male figure.

The intriguing question arises, What would your characters do if someone discovered the very secret desire held by another person? To add a note of irony and complication into the equation, suppose Character A's security has been breeched; someone now knows her tightly held secret desire. Character A is aware of this breech. What does she do to protect herself? And then there is this related scenario: Character A's security has been hacked. Someone knows her secret. But the someone who knows doesn't care, isn't the slightest bit impressed. What does Character A do and how does she do it, the goal being to keep the progression of events an arguable dramatic format--a story?

Luis Alberto Urrea's 2009 novel, Into the Beautiful North, posits Nayeli,a nineteen-year-old who works at a taco shop in a remote Mexican village, who dreams of her father, who has gone northward, to Los Yunites, you know, the United States, there to make a better living and a better life. But her dreams are not deep enough or secret enough to be the yeast for a novel. Accordingly, into this calculus, Urrea adds a realization that most of the men in this small village have gone northward, and now a group of drug dealers have noticed the lack of men, moving now to take over the village. We're almost there because, one night, when Nayeli is at el cine, watching a subtitled re-run of El Magnifico Siete, The Magnificent Seven, her secret desire metastasizes to the point where she must do something about it. Nayeli's secret desire is to sneak into Los Yunites, find her father and six other Mexican males whom she will entice to return to Mexico, where they will, ala El Magnifico Siete, take on the nasty drug dealers.

Having one's secret desire made public is one way to get a story going, possibly, as in Joe Orton's play, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, lead to the ending. Even fear of discovery will prompt behavior. You don't have to let the cat out of the bag or the genie out of the bottle, but the array of combustive and original story vectors await writers who know this buried secret of all their characters. Doesn't hurt if they know where to dig.

M-i-c-k-e-y M-o-u-s-e, Mickey Mouse, Mickey Mouse...

Mickey Mouse endings--an ending to a short story or novel in which justice triumphs with a loud tap of the gavel and the characters act as though they'd just been awarded E tickets to Disneyland; exaggerated all's-well-that-ends-well conclusions, prognoses, or payoffs.

True enough, not all stories require endings in which characters are being led to the gallows or guillotine or even seen rolling up their sleeve for a fatal injection. Many stories build to conclusions that by their very nature transmit touchy-feely emotions and are to be relished as, say, a frothy cappuccino would be relished or a bottle of Sierra Nevada pale ale. Mickey Mouse endings connote a mindless move toward propagandist tropes which pay homage to cultural decorations. Such endings relegate the protagonists of a story to the equivalent of the figures atop wedding cakes, a doughy, sugar-laced concoction colored with vegetable dye.

It is no accident that the iconic nice-guy figure from the second generation of comics in America has devolved into an adjective for types of music, books, and ad hoc events suggestive of music heard while riding in elevators or while waiting on hold for customer support from large organizations with whom we deal and have frequent issues. In a terrible celebration of wholesome excess, Mickey Mouse endings have become associated with the controlling imperatives of the company that owns him via copyright and registered trademark, a formulaic vision of the human condition, fostering a subtext of cynicism bordering on outright antipathy.

Much about endings of stories can be learned from reading the short stories of Anton Chekhov and James Joyce, adding to this accretion of wisdom the dead-pan wryness of Mark Twain, leavening the mixture with the individual writer's own special view on what it takes to make a go of life in the twenty-first or, for that matter, any century.

Yet more is to be learned from comparing the rules of behavior surrounding Mickey Mouse and his ensemble crew with the rules and regulations governing yet another figure from the animation world, Wile E. Coyote. From the former "bible," the writer can glean little more than ways to produce Mickey Mouse endings. From the latter, the writer can glean a workable recipe of humor, irony, and a GPS of the human agenda.

Venture

venture--a deliberate undertaking or plan; the action taken by characters based on a decision to proceed with an idea, opinion, or agenda; going forth with an agenda as goal, against possible risk; an action thought to provide some profitable outcome.

Some characters venture opinions or advice to others, the risk being they may be disagreed with or outright shouted down. Some characters venture forth, perhaps tentatively, perhaps even foolishly, hopeful of achieving an inertia or momentum that will carry them farther along the path to a goal.

One example of the venture-gone-wrong is the discovery by Llewellyn Moss of the botched drug deal in No Country for Old Men. Had Moss read the circumstances as he did, then left the money and the local, leaving the principals and perhaps the law to deal with the situation, there would have been no story. Seeing the results, as evidenced by a number of dead secondary players and the money, Moss undertakes a venture of his own, which in turn pushes the story beyond the tipping point and on into inevitability.

Yet another venture is the one organized by the character Sonny in the film story,Dog Day Afternoon. Sonny and two friends venture forth to rob a bank. One of his two accomplices experiences a combination of cold feet and enlarged conscience, and the venture is accordingly pushed beyond the tipping point.

Another venture still, young Romeo Montague decides to crash a party given by the Capulets, a family engaged in a feud with the Montagues. We all know how that venture payed out; thirty-six hours later both Romeo and Juliet are dead.

Ventures do not have to be doomed from the start; whether they are romance, adventure, or fanciful speculation, they may close on a theme reflecting the positive joys of making plans, then setting forth to accomplish them.

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.

Not Adverse to a Little Conflict

adversary--a front-rank character whose agenda and/or interests directly conflicts with that of another front-rank character; an opponent in a story.

Just as characters with goals provide the catalyst for story, so too are stories propelled by individuals adverse to their goals and intentions. Often resting between these two sides is The Prize, the status or power or reward striven for by each. Cowboys and Indians, Indians and the cavalry, Earthlings and Extraterrestrials, cattle ranchers and sheep ranchers,rural and urban, the youthful and the elderly,laborers and management; all these and additional pairings have the potential for good relationships, which is splendid in real life but rather dull in fiction. Readers enjoy the potentials for rivalry; they expect rivalry blossomed into adversarial relationship when they pick up a story.

Even if the primary character is going up against a philosophical or social clash, both sides of the argument must be rendered with a human representative. Walter Scott's Ivanhoe presented the clash of cultures between the Saxons and their invaders, the Normans, which was indeed adversarial enough, but Scott appropriately heeded the need to have representatives of each opposing force on stage, if only to glower at one another. If the clash involves addiction, the adverse position--failure to quit the addiction--must be demonstrated. If the clash involves two or more contestants of notable analytic, artistic, or even athletic ability, the adversarial position must be represented as some competition among candidates for a position, say surgery resident, tenure track professor of history, artistic endowment recipient. If the clash involves Man and Nature, both sides must have representatives, easier to demonstrate in the adversarial relationship between Capt. Ahab and The Great White Whale, but not how, even there, Melville left a human survivor, Ishmael, to tell the story of the clash and to interpret its outcome. When encounters between individuals and a particular culture or zeitgeist are concerned, it is less problematic to have characters representing the opposing forces.

The most effective way to produce an adversary for a front-rank character is to produce a character who is at least one way has an admirable ability. The more effective and seemingly invincible the adversary, the greater the likelihood of the protagonist's ultimate victory seem convincing and satisfying. It will appear to the reader that the deck has been stacked if one of the contestants is, however skilled, evil personified while the other is Sir Galahad writ large.


family--a group of consanguineous individuals; a single- or multi-generational unit of relatives; a non-consanguineous group who have some connective association such as an alumni group, members of a religious group, longtime members of the same work group, a heterosexual or homosexual group who have formed live-in partnerships.

A family may be whatever a group of individuals define the group's boundaries. To have legal validity, a group must meet state, tribal, or national conditions, which immediately becomes story material given the arbitrary nature of conditions. Families are, for better or worse, gatherings of individuals who know one another's strengths and weaknesses, who may know secrets or be blind to their potential. Family is a Petri dish for story, the mold of agenda, intent, control, and tradition proliferating at every gathering of the clan. Happy families may be all alike, if one could only find them somewhere within every family is an unhappiness that influences behavior and tradition, dictates who from the outside may enter, and what the consequences are of undesirables trying to marry their way in. Even families that affect a patina of happiness and closeness have somewhere within their history an attitude that leads to a substantial story.

Goal-oriented Charactrers, Loitering with Intent

goal--a desired achievement or destination for a character; an ability, excellence of performance, or arrival at status desired and striven for by a participant in a story; recognition or reward for performance.

Goals cover a wide variety of targets, a reminder that their very existence imparts attitudes and judgments about those who strive; in story, they are particularly visible in their absence. Characters need goals to gain admission into the terrain of story; a character who wants nothing or who says he has everything he wants needs to either reconsider or get used to an undramatic life. In Walter Tevis' The Hustler, Fast Eddie Felson set for his goal being acknowledged as the best pool hustler in America. Eric Stoner wants to be the best draw poker player in Richard Jessup's novel, The Cincinnati Kid. Becky Sharp wanted to rise up the social ranks in William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair; Dorothy Gale wants to get home in L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz. All of these goals completely recognizable, primal in their nature.

A character with a goal is a character that readers can root for or against, either option being a method for drawing the reader into the story and its outcome. The reader may be overwhelmed by Ahab's goal of revenge upon the whale, but certainly the implications of Ahab's vendetta propel the reader deeper into the murky consequences of Moby-Dick. Similarly, the reader of Les Miserable is drawn along by Inspector Jaivert's obsessive goal of returning Jean Valjean to prison, while Caspar Gutman's goal of securing the alleged riches of the statue in The Maltese Falcon sets a swirl and eddy of consequences that cause murder, duplicity, and betrayal.

Goal is the capstone of story. What do the characters want? What are they willing to do to get what they want?


intent--dramatic inertia; a character's plan to perform or not perform a specific act; the desire or need to do or not do a specific thing.

All characters come on stage with some form of intent, which is either abetted, challenged, ignored, misunderstood, shunted/deflected, producing a spectrum of possible responses which will either become apparent or submerged in subtext. Without intent, the character's dramatic purpose is left undefined. One character may intend staying at a party only for a few moments, another may come with the intent of seeing another character, yet another may intend to ask a particular favor of a particular person known to be attending the party.

What happens if the character's intentions are blunted or overcome or perhaps shift because of some surprise or reversal? For the writer, knowing a character's intent in a particular scene or situation is similar to broadcasting an aura about that individual, an aura that contacts and collides with the intentions of other characters.

See agenda.

Four Play

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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


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

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

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

I Don't Have to Live This Way

agenda--what a character wants; an achievement, goal, or status that propels the character's behavior throughout the arc of the story in which the character is involved. As the story develops, the reader and perhaps other characters in the story gain an understanding of what the individual with agenda is willing to do in order to realize his goal. Agenda is much like the magnetized cards substituting for keys at hotels and motels; without them, the character doesn't get entry into a scene much less the story. Even minor characters have agendas. Major or minor in status, each character has a strong sense of entitlement to the agenda and is impacted by the hoped-for result of achieving it. Simply put, agenda is the armature about which character is wrapped.
Before considering such details as physical appearance or relationship to other characters, a writer will do well to consider the why and wherefore of the agenda that character carries, then perhaps the writer can consider the relative importance of what that character was doing before making appearances in various scenes, then the expectations that character had in entering the scene. Next would come the character's relationship (if any) with the theme of the story and/or the other characters. Then the writer may consider physical attributes.
A postal service worker, taxi driver, or deliverer of a pizza or take-out Chinese, more or less faceless, throw-away characters, nevertheless preserve the vital atmosphere of plausible reality if they are allotted agenda. Thus the mail delivery person has the agenda of wanting assurance that the recipient gets the intended letter, the taxi driver has perhaps a political agenda or wants an agent for his screenplay, the pizza delivery person is an actor awaiting discovery by a casting director. The extra line or dialogue or gesture provided by such individuals is another layer of reality painted onto the story.
Regardless of whether the story is genre or literary, agenda is an essential ingredient. By checking agenda, the reader is drawn in to a greater understanding of the intent and scope of the story, the writer is given clues for the ending, and the characters are given clues for idiosyncratic behavior that yanks them, kicking and screaming, from the comfortable shadow land of cliche.
Some characters of necessity hide their agendas, their behavior carefully controlled to conceal their overarching intent. Thus one of the more useful tests applied to persons in reality and characters in story: Does this individual's behavior hint at a hidden agenda? The result of behavior intended to conceal an agenda is an entire layer of irony. (Imagine the delicious irony in a character hoping to conceal an agenda with a range of behavior that ultimately convinces him of the wrongness of his agenda and the moral correctness of his subterfuge.)
One of the many reasons for the popularity of the mystery or suspense story is the opportunity for the reader to match wits with the author, the detectives, and the cast of characters in the examination of agenda (motive).
Agenda in fiction does not have to be any more rational than it is in real life. Ahab had intellectual reasons for wanting revenge on the whale, but seeing his tortured physical appearance was enough to suggest validity to his quest.