Metaphor

Metaphor is a mischievous but useful way of connecting two or more things in a relationship they might not have had otherwise. Not only that, metaphor brings us a step or more away from language that is merely descriptive, linear, instructional; closer to the way things appear to us in reality. And how is that accomplished? Metaphor, the marriage broker or eHarmony of language, causes us to consider ideas and concepts in context with the life about it, blurring the world of Reality to the point where it becomes a constant shimmer of ambiguity, mystery, and intrigue.

No wonder we inject metaphor and digression into our stories. If they were meant to be pure reportage, metaphor and digression would be the first two things the metaphorical editor with the metaphorical green eye shade would strike out of the copy, and the third ambiguity would be the true nature of the human being which is at least a duality. No, not the duality of God and Man, rather the duality in which each of us is also its double or reverse, the one who wants for a thing to be so that he or she appears to dither but is instead measuring the potential outcome against the ideal goal.

There is an entire dimension of metaphor in the waking life of Reality and in the dream life of reality, but you have had such awareness in you made suspect by years of teachers, jobs, and instruction books that warn you off, holding forth the simple clarity of the declarative sentence, achieved without unnecessary adjective or adverb as a paradigm to be observed. While it is possible to visualize such a world and write of it, you find yourself not using all the tools in the writer's toolkit, rendering your world dependent on event that proceeds step by ponderous step in the present tense, the present moment, with little or no possibility of association or comparison. You would be apt to get the same meaning from a text each time you reread it. There could be no possibility for ambiguity or metaphor in a text that was essentially recipe instead of evocation.

The anarchists in your life were the teachers who injected poetry into your life, the middle school teacher who sent you scurrying to read the poetry of Gabriella Mistral, and the apologetic man who knew of your eagerness to get on with "real" writing allowed that you might find more to relish in Geoffrey Chaucer than in Ernest Hemingway, but asked you at least to compare and contrast the music in the styles of each. The same mild man once suggested there was more to be had in evocation than description. You were not even one and twenty at the time, no use to talk to you. It was the experience that counted, to the point where you saw yourself as wanting to be the rodeo rider of language, tossing a lariat over it, hog-tieing it, wrenching it to the ground, free of any sense of the interior of your own self or of the reader.

Now it is, of course, different to the point where you can see the process beginning to emerge before you; you are more of a kite flyer than a bull rider, the ambiguity more descriptive than the clarity, the metaphor poking its head above ground like a curious gopher, seeking a midnight snack, waiting for its opportunity.

Two great WTFs of story

Ambiguity and uncertainty are the eighteen-wheel trucks of story, shaking all the other elements in their slipstream. You think not? Have a look at the outcome of your favorites in the novel or short form. You see any guarantees of certainty? Wiggle room abounds even in plot-driven stuff. And this is as it ought to be; we're all hard-wired to root for the underdog; our secret ballots are already mailed in, marked for the long shot. We want privilege and certainty to get either an outright comeuppance or at least an A-ticket on the rides of humiliation.

The former, ambiguity, says nothing is as it seems, a corollary we bring in from classes in Reality; the latter, uncertainty, says we're not always sure about how the things that are supposed to work out will in fact work out. Ambiguity. Rick is a good guy and all, but that's not a warranty that he'll be able to shrug off the latest offer of a bribe. "Don't assume I'm crooked," Samuel Spade tells us in The Maltese Falcon. How are we supposed to react when we've just learned that he's not only been messing around with his partner's wife, she mistakenly believes Spade killed Miles Archer so that he could be with her all the way. Maybe that's a bit of a stretch, a hard-edged example, but how many of us are pellucid, the light of honesty and openness radiating through us.

The latter, uncertainty, allows us to wonder who in our midst or in the ensemble of any cast of characters will break from patter, having taken all he or she could, wanting to make a statement or perhaps a break with the past. You can still read Theodore White's first volume in his Making of the President series and believe Adlai Stevenson is going to best Dwight Eisenhower. You can watch a rerun of the famed Orson Welles film, The Third Man, and think Anna Schmidt is going to walk off arm in arm with Holly Martins instead of walking right on past him. Dream on. Life is filled with enough uncertainties to make us recognize it when we see it in fiction.

We in fact love to argue about the way an event might have ended other than the way it ended, if--for instance--Al Gore had won the Bush v. Gore decision and the Florida votes would have continued to be counted. No trillion-dollar tab for Afghanistan and Iraq. No outrageous list of dead servicepersons and civilians. No neocon revisionist history memes and tropes being played out in VFW and American Legion halls all across the country. We might have been somebody, a contender instead of a punch drunk palooka.

Robert Burns nailed it:

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,

Gang aft agley,

An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,

For promis'd joy!

Things--particularly things that can't go wrong, say oil rig things--can and do go wrong, and even though they can do considerable damage in reality when they do, there is no gainsaying that things in story go the wrongest of all.

Seven Ways of Looking at an Ambiguity

Last night I dreamed I went to UCLA again. It seemed to me I stood midway between Royce Hall and the Library, amazed at finding myself there. Unlike the protagonist's experience in Rebecca, I found no gates closed against me, no ominous chains or locks, only a mild and not unpleasant drizzle as I purposefully moved toward the library and the sprawl of steps leading to the main entrance. From that point, it was over to the western banister, a large concrete slab near which chums often met between classes and at which place many of us left books, notebooks, even temporarily unworn jackets or sweaters, a sort of large, informal substitute for a bank of hall lockers. There were present at the steps a group of younger men, all clad in suits and ties. They did not seem to know me nor I them, giving me the sense that some form of closure with them and the venue, itself, had been achieved, a closure that could not be sorted out at the moment because, approaching me was a young woman who apparently had been expecting me and although I did not recognize her as a specific individual I nevertheless felt pleased to see. I strode toward her and the dream ended.

There are two psychotherapists in my Woodside writing workshop, one Jungian psychiatrist, making him perforce an M.D., the other a psychologist who is also an educator and multifarious writer, currently about to publish a book about the uses of LSD. Each of the two have a similar take on dreaming, more or less boiled down to one of five or six episodes a night of events during which the individual dreamer resolves or edits waking hour conflicts. Each of them was discussing these dream sessions in his own context, leaving me to wonder aloud of patients of Freudian psychiatrists have Freudian dreams, patients of Jungian analysts accordingly have Jungian archetypal dreams, patients of more eclectic therapists having eclectic dreams, and those of us not in any special mode of dialogue or, perhaps, past patients in a dialogue, having random dreams. We concluded affably that the psychiatrist/therapist is a partner in the transaction, his or her encouragements, even sub-vocal grunts being a part of an invitation to "have" a particular format of dream.

Not too long back, after mentioning the details of one of your dreams in a classroom setting, one of your students offered a Zen interpretation which seemed entirely plausible. In general, it is difficult to dismiss dreams as having no contextual value nor indeed precluding their predictive or warning or omen potentials given the vast outreach possibilities of the brain as a processing organ.

You don't think you'll be spending too much time ferreting out meaning from your UCLA dream or the sense of closure it gave you, rather content to interpret it as a fanciful construction implying you'd finished--dare you say come to terms with--your classroom aspects of learning and were more likely now to achieve learning in the library.

You'd give a pretty to know who or what or both the young woman was, what she wanted, and what was in store. But you suppose that will be the subject of one or more dreams to come. The question is whether you will remember the answers that will occur, which very question leads you back to the subject you raised yesterday of resident attitude and motivation for writing.

Ambiguity is as much a presence in life as loss; it may be redundant to say you live with loss and ambiguity but nevertheless, redundancy earns its keep here. The things you believe you know, the experiences you believe you have had, the observations you have made with varying degrees of intensity are all subject to the revision of your waking memory, your sleeping dreams, and the contrary impressions of individuals who claimed to be present at the same time or place. You may love some of these individuals deeply, consider some not worth the time it takes to hear their views, or regret having any cause for further dealings, but all of these bring into play alternate views of the reality you carry about.

Much of what you write and write about is an attempt to deal with ambiguity, have a dialogue with it. A dialogue you will remember and it will remember. One of the lovely ironies inherent in ambiguity is that the more you invite readers in to your reality, using deliberate techniques that allow them to see their certainties in your narrative, the more you are using the tool of ambiguity.

It's 11 o'clock. Do your characters know where you are?

Once you begin asking questions of your characters, probing their identity, goals, and artfully concealed agendas, they will meet your gaze of enquiry head on, eye contact assured, then proceed to lie their way out of your scrutiny, wanting to go forth undetected. It is not only you they are retreating from; they rarely appreciate the greater knowledge of what they are about.

You, for your own part in the equation of creator-character, understand their plight, perhaps sympathize and, ultimately, empathize. Too much awareness of a sudden is a burden for them as well as for you. In some demonstration of transcendentalism, they seem to know they are entitled to at least disability parking passes in your stories. And you? You are also aware that you download your own concerns, fears, fantasies on their shoulders as a means of keeping you from exposing too much of yourself all at once.

Scientists working in labs have the stress mouse, an otherwise healthy, functional rodent who has been injected with some extraordinary ingredient, say cancer, or surgically altered from the norm to provide a particular behavior. You have characters whom you alter or inject before observing within the landscape of a controlled experiment. Here is Fred; you have made him a kleptomaniac to see how he behaves. Your goal, you reassure yourself, is to compile a record of your time, which extends roughly from the moment you approached Mrs. DeAngelo, your fourth grade teacher, after she had in desperation read to the class on a rainy, recess-abridged afternoon, the first chapter of Huckleberry Finn, asking her if a person could actually make a living by writing such stories, to the moment at hand wherein you write this. Of course the parameters also include any additional time you manage to eke out of the System.

Questions for you and your characters:

You, first: Is your true purpose really to compile a record of your time on this planet?

Now, for them: Are you really where you want to be? Is there some other specific or as yet unarticulated other place you'd rather be than where you are at the moment?

If the locale is specific and you would rather be elsewhere, what chemistry about it draws you there, makes you feel you'd be happy there, perhaps even happier than you are now? Doesn't this trope open wide a door you barely allow to open more than a mere crack lest you expose yourself?

Suppose the place your characters would rather be is situational rather than geographic, such as married as opposed to not married or in a relationship with someone as opposed to merely wishing to be in a relationship with that person, or being a journalist rather than being a teacher and yes, being a teacher rather than being a journalist?

It is a great mountain goat leap, but what about merely wanting some quiet pied a terre wherein you could write without interruption as opposed to having to write amidst family clamor or the cross-currents of conversation at Peet's? True enough, there is focus when you are "in" a story or idea or even when you are reading the work of another. But you have to ask yourself if there isn't some unarticulated help in having the "other" choice seem such a lure that it transports you from what and whom and where you are to the "place" where you are creator without explanation.

The Four Horses of the Writers' Apocalypse

Here's a write-in vote for ambiguity, which in a neat sort of dramatic justice, allows equal opportunity for the finger of justice to be wagged pointedly at any one of us.  Fond as I am of satire and toppling ignorance and pretentiousness from the table, my fondness is enhanced by the vulnerability of knowing I may very well be hoist by my own petard, trampled by my own righteous indignation, exposed naked in ignorance.  Innocence is only a half blush; ignorance is the full Cleveland.

There are numerous ways to take on a subject with the intent of bringing it down, preferably in flames?  Ridicule is, after all, a valuable tool, the major instrument, in fact, in the surgical procedure called humor.  Ridicule is achieved by demonstrating an individual, an institution, a concept, or a system in progress, then applying the blow torch of exaggeration.  At what point does the exaggeration move the ridicule from satire to parody or, even more severe, farce?  At what point does satire retire into the darkness, allowing parody to take over?

Exaggeration has such a delicate balance.  You have, for a specific instance, a thesis that the one work considered Evelyn Waugh's greatest triumph, Brideshead Revisited, is a satire.  Certainly his other work shows an authorial sense of moral high ground as it attacks character types and attitudes.  Moral purpose is a major factor in satire, and so pompous and attitude-oriented was Waugh in his lifetime that he appeared to be satirizing himself as much as he took on social mores and standards of ethical behavior, to say nothing about his perfervid religious beliefs.  You have concluded that the movement of Charles Ryder's agnosticism, drifting inexorably toward Catholicism, paralleled with Lord Marchmain's ambiguous last-minute "conversion" demonstrate Waugh's own vision of how a set of characters as individuals and en famile can be led to an exaggerated quest for salvation.  Thus was Waugh using plausibility to suggest his ultimate disdain and dramatize the exaggeration to the point where the characters may feel they have behaved well but some readers may conclude differently.

Satire requires this delicate balance.  Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" had just the proper amount of exaggeration to trigger the fear and revulsion aspect in enough readers to cause them to experience outrage:  How dare Swift suggest such a contemptible thing?  The splendid satirist Stephen Colbert works the same way, actually enlisting the support of the very targets of his barb.

As cohorts in this wicked conspiracy, satire and ambiguity lead us off the commonly trod pathway into the thicket of our own pretensions and prejudices, where we may trip over the snaggle of ego.  Neither satire nor ambiguity intend to leave the reader/victim in the dark but rather to allow the reader/victim to unsuspectingly slip head within noose, led by the cohorts of plausibility and outraged belief.

It is said that we few, we precious few, we band of others have little practical use in the world beyond the academy.  In fact, we are even suspected of having limited use within the academy.  How, we are asked, are we able to use such tools as ambiguity, satire, plausibility, and the ability to transmit outrage in service of earning our keep?  

The answer is clear enough:  We make our living from the loose change found under the metaphoric cushions of the metaphoric sofas and chairs in which they sit, waiting to lecture us on practicality.

Werner Heisenberg: Clueless or Just Uncertain?

When looking at behavior through the lens of quantum physics, it is helpful to keep in mind that the major thrust of examination is matter, which is expressed as particle for the purpose of investigating properties such as form,intensity, and location.  

There is an expressed duality in matter, which can present itself as wave or particle, a fact that more or less made the day for a physicist named Werner Heisenberg, of uncertainty fame.  Through the Heisenberg uncertainty principal, we are able to say, quantum physics style, that a watched pot does boil faster.  Heisenberg demonstrated that position and momentum, two properties of matter, cannot be known simultaneously to arbitrary precision.  In fact, the more one property is known, the less certain can we be of the other.

When looking at story through the lens of a vital dramatic quality such as, say,ambiguity, we have the duality of character and plot, which is to say the two elements cannot be known simultaneously to a certainty that the character produces or determines plot or the plot determines the behavior of the character.

Since we are on the subjects of ambiguity and duality, each of which I introduced as essential to the quantum physics of story, I posit that these conditions are to one another as character is to plot and, indeed, as wave is to particle.  

I wish to present a scenario in which a character says and or does something that will lead most readers to conclude the character is, arbitrarily, happy or, just as arbitrarily, unhappy.  The more the behavior of the character is tracked in terms of action, the greater the potential for a not insignificant portion of the audience to interpret the emotional outcome differently than my intention.  (We will not dwell for any time on the But-it-really-happened-that-way defense because the writer who does so is presenting evidence that the narrative is not drama but rather biography or journalism.)

Story has to present a duality, not so much for the democracy/bureaucracy of free choice as for the ambiguity resident in event, which is after all the staple of story.  Enough event and you have the basic unit of story, which is the scene.
Quantum mechanics presents a particle as being able to be represented in a mathematical formula that will indicate more or less where it can be found or in what state, an ambiguity that has to be reckoned with in a measurable way.  

Story also has propositions or proposals, but these thrive on the duality of possible interpretation and the ambiguity of intent triggered in the beholder.  I am, the protagonist says in story.  You are what? the duality asks.  I am vulnerable.  How is that to be measured and why should we care?  

That is to be measured by the degree to which you realize you are vulnerable, the degree to which this makes us aware of our own vulnerability, and the plan(s) you have devised or need to devise to extricate yourself, as well as what overall effect this will have on you.

The agony of moral choice which the protagonist in a character-driven drama is driven to make is one way of charting, quantum mechanics style.  How instructive would it be to graph out Henry Tudor (aka VIII), Thomas Moore, and Cromwell as each pursued the quantum mechanics of his agenda.

It All Depends

contingency--an event that has potential for occurring; a possibility without being a definite certainty; something liable to take place as a consequence of a previous action.

The behavior of a character in a story is contingent on 1) that character's reaction to another character, 2) one or more events in a character's past, 3) a character pursuing an agenda, 4) a character suffering a reversal. Contingency is the excitement of story, mixed with ambiguity and plot design to create a simultaneous atmosphere of causality and uncertainty in any given narrative. A splendid example of contingency in operation is Iris Murdoch's first novel, Under the Net, the net in the title mischievously referring to the net of language and the potentials therein for misunderstanding. One of the lead characters, Jake Donaghue, is writer who has just written a novel, The Silencer, from which comes this contingency-describing quote, "All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net." Many of Jake's actions ironically reflect his being driven from place to place by his inability to interpret facts and choices presented through the reactions of other characters.

Some modern critics have made names for themselves by linking closure with contingency, a useful way for a writer of stories to link the payoff of a story with the writer's personal take on the zeitgeist or ambiance of a historical time. For examples of this useful equation at work, consider Thomas Pyncheon's huge romp of a historical venture, Mason & Dixon, Joan Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted, and Philip Roth's American Pastoral, each of which has a historical overview against which characters are driven to choices that are defined by contemporary forces.

It may also be argued that science fiction and the subgenre of fantasy dealing with alternate universes are providing a contingency for readers as well as for the characters. Contingency ranks high as a forceful factor in the writer's mind because it allows the writer to simultaneously deal with the structured necessity of drama and the seemingly anomalous plausible surprise offered by the very ways and means contingency is used. Although tightly plotted, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy provides contingencies that further define the various characters and their goals, bringing the tension of impending crisis into collision with delightful surprise in the crucible of dramatic event.

In the framework of contingency, Moby-Dick reflects a search for the nineteenth-century American psyche, and in Mark Twain's often neglected Pudd'nhead Wilson, the author literally and figuratively reverses black and white.

Hint: the message of contingency is to keep presenting characters with junctures, points at which they will have to make choices. These points of choice are where the contingency-based story begins.

Anton Chekhov @ Mt. Rushmore.com

Chekhovian--similar to or evocative of the thrust of the plays and short stories of Anton Chekhov; materials linked by an underground or less visible causality than conventional drama; seemingly ambiguous narratives, informed by the emphasis on subtext and internal responses of a character; stories decidedly lacking the appearance of being plot-driven.

Chekhov is best known among writers for his assertion that a gun appearing conspicuously in Act 1 must be pointed and fired by Act 3, opening the door for discussions about foreshadowing and causality. It may also be regarded as a framework in which characters use the tools at hand. Many of Chekhov's stories deal with the inability of characters to communicate with one another until a) it is too late, b) a sudden insight emerges, and possibly c) the elephant in the living room becomes through previous events visible to one or more characters. This last possibility links James Joyce to Chekhov, just as Beethoven's fondness for Mozart linked those two in an apostolic succession that began with the admiration of each for Haydn.

Chekhov is apostolic and his major plays and later short stories invite investigation, particularly for such techniques as interior monologue, internal conflicts, and subtext. His work has inspired twentieth- and twenty-first century actors as well as writers, inspiring them to find non-verbal ways of expressing emotions and intent. If there were to be a literary equivalent of Mt. Rushmore, Chekhov would certainly qualify as an image along with Franz Kafka, and George Orwell, and with some debate, Miguel Cervantes. The names of all four have become adjectival forms in the literary language, Chekhovian associated with ambiguity, Kafkaesque with apparent conspiracy theory or dead-pan satire, Orwellian implying Big-Brother supervision, and Quixotic suggesting extravagant romanticism and idealism.

Hint: Major things to be learned from Chekhov: 1) let the reader work at the story to adduce its meaning, 2) give the reader sufficient but not extensive tools.

Under no circumstances...

circumstances--conditions motivating or surrounding persons, places, things, and events in story; the status of behavior related to a character, that character's agenda and/or vulnerability, and the likelihood of a predictable behavior manifest in the actions or failure to act in a particular character.

Mysterious or ambiguous circumstances surrounding a character impart an atmosphere of menace and uncertainty. The suspense grows as the circumstances become volatile, leading to the growing apprehension that such a mysterious or ambiguous character will be driven to the point of combustion, whereupon he or she will reveal a true self of incredible awfulness.

Familiar, even predictable circumstances advertise a growing sense that a surprise explosion is building, some unanticipated demonstration that will ruin the stasis, nudge it unceremoniously over the edge into chaos and discomfort.

Thus the mysterious and the familiar combine to frame events and the persons who participate in them, raising suspicions wherever possible. These suspicions translate to tension which, lacking actual suspense, is an excellent glue for holding story together. Readers wonder what new circumstances will bring to the equation of characters, bent on pursuing an agenda, meeting frustration and reversal.

All a protagonist or antagonist needs in order to set a story in motion is to hear the repetition of the familiar mantra "Under no circumstances..."

Ambiguity

ambiguity--an essential ingredient in character-driven fiction in which intent and outcome are left purposefully vague; motives and subtexts which may be interpreted variously by a given group of readers; a quality of meaning in dramatic writing where the reader is allowed some say in the interpretation.

Was the Billy Budd of the eponymous novella a naive narrator or, to use contemporary PC tropes, intellectually challenged?  Surely Herman Melville had had enough seafaring experience to open the possibility of the unspoken subtext of a sexual hang-up by Clagett over Billy, but did he intend the reader to infer a sexual conflict between the two characters?  

Was the governess of The Turn of the Screw seeing the ghosts of Miss Jessel and her lover, Peter Quint? Or was she merely delusional, and if that were the case, how does that explain the fact that the governess's young charges, Flora and Miles, may have been seeing the ghostly appearances?  You might also ask, as some readers and critics have asked, if the most recent governess had frightened Miles to death.

Was Spencer Brydon merely delusional in "The Jolly Corner," or was he in fact being confronted with a ghost.  In even more mischievous fact, Has Brydon dies at the end of the story, whereupon, because the story continues for a bit, was he experiencing a moment in the afterlife from which point he could look back at his earthly self, just as he had in fact done at the beginning of the story when returning to his old family home?

Did Jane Eyre actually hear or sense Rochester as he called to her across the moors in his moments of need and peril, or was her awareness merely the intuitive process of a woman hopelessly in love with Rochester?

Did Hamlet actually see his father's ghost on the battlements of Elsinore Castle or was Shakespeare merely anticipating the arrival of Sigmund Freud?

It is a lovely feeling to have readers arguing over the plausibility and possibility of events in one's work, to know that readers have taken one's work away with them, off the page, after the work had been completed.  One such way to achieve this status is through the process of ambiguity.  Call it Chekhovian if you wish, the process involves not spelling things out too clearly, not explaining too much, removing from one's work the same sorts of details humans are likely to remove.

Call it ambiguity.  It is a friendly, welcoming country with no officious border guards or entry restrictions, although it does have a suspicious nature when it comes to the excess baggage of explanation and no sense of humor.

Ambiguity: The definite maybe

ambiguity--a vagueness of meaning or outcome; uncertain attributions of meaning and/or quality; dramatic conditions in which the intent of characters and consequential resolutions are uncertain.

Ambiguity hovers over much twenty-first century short fiction and, to a slightly lesser extent, the novel in much the same way the June marine layer visits the California Coast of an evening. Everyone in the neighborhood is aware of a presence, often a thick, gloomy presence, other times merely dense enough to obfuscate immediate details. Truth is, things--details--can and do gt lost in there, leaving the reader to speculate. Thus one of the unspoken goals of modern fiction--keeping the reader closely enough involved to speculate on the ways things could turn out and, later, on the way things actually did turn out.

One recurrent theme in short and longform fiction is the possibility of mischief in the interpretation of one character of the intent or behavior of another. Another recurrent theme is the fact that long-term relationships are just as vulnerable to this mischief as the exchanges of information among recently introduced characters.

A significant existential question of the human condition has always been: "But what does it mean?" The modern writer asks that question with some frequency, invariably in italics to emphasize the implied intensity. This is not a carte blanche for the writer to steer away from definitions or from resolutions, but rather a nudge to remind the writer of the irony inherent in overemphasis; the more characters insist on openness and clarity, the more suspicious they become. A useful trope to help the twenty-first-century writer grasp the importance of ambiguity in a story is found in the character who asks, possibly of the Fates, possibly of him or herself, "But what do I mean?"

Some helpful guidelines may be found on a first-come--first-served basis in the stories of William Trevor, Alice Munro, Charles d'Ambrosio, Tobias Wolff, Francine Prose, Lorrie Moore. As much as it is possible for characters to know who they are and what they want, the characters of these writers have some answers. Not to forget that the reasons for liking characters have become increasingly more--well, ambiguous.

A Bubble or Two off Plumb

elliptical--an oval orbit rather than a circular one; a lengthening of or deviation from a conventional path taken by a formulaic novel or short story; behavior of one or more characters that is plausibly off orbit.

A character, scene, situation, or story may vary from the predictable. So far as endings are concerned, the adjective named after the renowned Russian short story writer and dramatist, Anton Chekhov, tells it all: Chekhov enjoyed and used elliptical endings in which the terms of the resolution were neither certain nor spelled out. It wasn't so much a matter of the good causes losing out to the bad ones as it was a blurring of the lines between good and bad, between happy and unhappy, fulfilled and unfulfilled.

In an elliptical story, a reader can come to the ending, there to experience feelings of dissatisfaction or frustration, but these feelings would be reflective of what the characters were feeling at the moment of conclusion. See the ending of James Joyce's short story, "Araby." See also "A Painful Case" and "A Little Cloud." None of the fifteen stories in the collection, Dubliners, is particularly circular in orbit nor, like many of the Chekhov stories, do they push a reader to a conclusion but rather let the events speak to the individual reader.

William Sidney Porter, writing as O. Henry, is one of the least elliptical of storytellers, relying on a formulaic ending framed on some reversal of logic or morality for its payoff. Such stories of his as "The Gift of the Magii," charming and warming in their intent, contain no hint of the ambiguity resident in the elliptical story or in the elliptical motive of a character such as, say, Bartleby in Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener."

A twenty-first century writer interested in a more uniform orbit and less ambiguity in his or her work would do well to compare stories of Joyce, and that other iconic Irish writer, William Trevor,with such commercially oriented short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald as "Bernice Bobs Her Hair." Modern readers are less forgiving of being led by the author toward a conclusion than readers of genre magazines. Even then, modern readers expect an eliptical approach such as found in the works of Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, and Raymond Carver.

You Can't Exect Me to Believe That

speed bumps--events, descriptions, and reflections that impede the flow of story; a sense of stylistic devices waving their hands for attention during the otherwise orderly progression of a dramatic narrative; the jerky disconnect experienced by readers when writers are not careful about adding backstory, description, and the existential wondering of characters.

The thing to remember at some point in the telling of a story is that the narrative art is evocative, not descriptive; description has its place, usually in small doses, an occasional adjective or adverb, even a clause or entire sentence. There are specific times when the make and caliber of a gun, for example, or the year, model, and color of a car bring clarification to the narrative. A character's height or lack thereof, even some descriptive facial tic become not only necessities but tools in the greater process of evoking that individual's presence. Arrogant? Shy? Assured? Lazy? The overarching intent is to suggest. Ironically enough, some writers who should know better, fail to see the mischievous potential in verbs, relying instead on the adjective and the adverb.

One last pass in revision to "cure" adverbial abuse is a sure way to remove speed bumps.


revelation--a dramatic discovery, experience, or realization that has the power to change the vector of a story.

In a metaphorical way, a story is like a string of fire-crackers, each explosion adding to the collective effect, the individual pop of explosion being a surprise, the final one, the loud, enduring one being the revelation. Often expressed indirectly, through the medium of a front-rank character doing something that becomes a symbolic response, the revelation shows the reader the equivalent of a film or TV close-up reaction shot. In the novels of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, revelations were frequently spelled out in what writer Barnaby Conrad has titled "came-to-realize" moments, "and in that moment, she came to realize that he had been deceiving her all along." From about the 1980s onward, came-to-realize moments were replaced with a more outward display of a character having been struck by the lightning bolt of revelation, imparting less a sense of certainty and resolve, more of a sense of ambiguity tempered with probability. We readers would be certain that Character A knew Character B was wildly attracted to her and had been for some time, at the very least giving her a dramatic power over Character B, but we would not be sure by story's end if Character A were going to do anything about the revelation.

The payoff to Dashiell Hammett's much anthologized short story, "Two Sharp Knives," is an excellent example of how revelation can be used by one character to exploit another and how that exploitation can be used for dramatic effect on the reader.

In the motion picture, The Third Man, directed by Sir Carol Reed, the illusive and amoral Harry Lime has a surprise encounter with his chum, Holly Martens. They meet in the Riessenrad, the large Ferris wheel in the Vienna amusement park, the Prater. Looking down upon people beneath his high vantage point, Lime compares them to dots, then makes the wry, cynical observation that defines him and causes in Martens a revelation that has the effect of a line drawn in the sand between him and Lime, a line of morality over which Martens will not cross. "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

One of the many revelations to be had from reading the stories of Anton Chekhov is his own understanding and portrayal of how revelation affects characters, and how their movements rather than their interior monologue suggest the outcome.


plausibility--the dramatic sense of a character, deed, or event being believable to the reader; a depiction of a character's agenda, motivation, or desire being an appropriate, life-like expression; a quality of realism and trust in a narrative and its denizens that helps the reader maintain a sense of belief.

Just because an event portrayed in a narrative actually happened in reality, that does not automatically grant it a license for plausibility; the writer must naturally believe the event and the characters, he must write about them in a way that renders them as dramatic forces, considering what they want and what they are willing to do to get what they want. A good portion of plausibility is found in vulnerability; when a reader sees a defect or longing in a character, it becomes easier to forget that the character is only a smudge of someone else's imagination.

Funny You Say That: Irony in America

Irony is the stage manager in most human drama. It is the genome of crossed purposes, misinterpretation, and expressions of feelings other than those actually felt. It is someone saying, I'm doing all right but conveying that the individual is doing anything but all right.

In its way irony in literature and drama means a conspiracy between the reader and the writer, directed against one or more characters.

Yossarian, the main dramatic focus in Joe Heller's remarkable Catch-22, discovers early on the irony of the system against him, by which men in the armed forces are kept in combat because, having served the requisite combat time, they want to go home, which is a sign of sanity, which means they are fit for more combat.

In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen begins with the ironic, "It is a truth universally recognized that a young man in possession of a good fortune must be in search of a wife." Righe, except it is no such thing; a wealthy young man is looking--well. let's say he's looking, but not necessarily for a wife.

It is considered irony when two persons believe they understand each other but in fact do not, leading to the drama of discovery. It is definitely irony when a person says something which will be interpreted by its opposite degree, thus I couldn't agree with you more becomes, You've got to be kidding!

One of the many great exercises actors use as a part of their training is to express emotion about something without mentioning the something by name, thus a character in a shaky romantic relationship might go on at some length about how poorly constructed new cars are, how they don't hold together the way they used to, how tenuous everything is.

If controlled, used carefully without too much piling on of effect, irony is a perfect tool for social commentary. I hate to tell you this, properly used becomes I couldn't wait to be the first to give you this lousy news, You could have fooled me becomes I knew it all the time. Of course I knew it all the time could easily become You could have fooled me.

When irony is not used with restraint, when it is overdone, it becomes sarcasm, which by all accounts is the most difficult emotional tone to convey, which should serve as a warning not to overdo irony.

Funny you should say that.

Irony is often spoken of as a capstone of American writing, but this can be an understatement (which in itself is a form of irony) and thus irony is a major essential of dramatic writing, reaching out to hold hands with ambiguity, which is simply not telling or explaining too much (so that irony, like quantum physics, can get to work on your story).

Funny you should say that, too.

So then, is irony funny?

Depends on who's point of view you're taking.

Una Voce Poco Fa

There are two basic ways to dramatize ambiguity, particularly at the ending of a scene, chapter, story, or novel.

Write the scene, chapter, story, or novel with as much relevant detail as possible, doing your best to demonstrate the intention of each character involved. Approach said scene, chapter, story, or novel as an editor, cutting a newspaper story (by trimming it from the last paragraph upward. As you do so, you will be removing first the authorial presence and then the literal qualities resident within the narrator, continuing to prune until the point where you believe it is impossible to prune beyond. Then do so--cut one more paragraph than you believe you possibly can. This has the effect of bringing the reader, sensing some kind of ending is about to arrive, into a sharper, more serious focus, which is exactly what you wish. Now the reader does what the reader will do under any circumstances, and so you had better get used to it (unless you fancy yourself an Emily Dickinson). One of the values of ambiguity is to allow the reader to do what the reader will do under most circumstances whether you admire it or not. Get used to it. Even if you are more literal than you intended, some readers will embed your narrative with themes, metaphor, and subtext you never intended. If some of these readers happen to be on your tenure committee--well, never mind that, but do consider that the best way to see The Reader is as an active rather than passive voice, which means some work should be had from the reader. We do this by ending scenes, chapters, stories, and novels in precisely those places where the reader cannot help but draw conclusions, Writers want readers to take chances, to make assumptions, to be led down the garden path. (A reader would rather be wrong than right because a reader who has guessed correctly much of the time has demonstrated himself or herself to be suspicious, cynical, and distrustful. A reader who is correct in most assumptions relating to the characters is on the cusp of being bored. A reader who outguesses you will not come back for more. A known devious writer who plots as well as, say Harlen Coben on one side of the coin or Jim Harrison on the other side will keep you awake and worried, which is where you want to be.

The second approach to ambiguity is to have one or more of the essential characters doing something symbolic such as running to catch a train, standing on Fifth Avenue at five in the p.m., trying to hail a taxi, bursting into the office of a superior and demanding a raise, asking out for a date someone believed to be utterly not attractable, or spending the character's last money on an enormous bouquet of flowers. And ending right there.

Mind you, we as writer should know what we intend. We are not engaged in a contest of cryptography we are investing our senses in the anarchy and absurdity of a world where we cannot always control events but in which we nevertheless hope for the best possible outcome. It will sound bleak, noir, cynical to say that outcomes don't matter because they are largely blunted or co-opted or denied in real life, but such bleakness, noirishness, and cynicism are links to the potential of miracle and magic, two elements that in real life drama translate to a moment or two of pure happiness, the time frame by which we have become used to evaluating our times of pleasure, and the scenarios we use to scheme for more.

It is perfectly logical for us to read with the hope and anticipation of understanding, but as we pursue the text for meaning and identity, it becomes clearer to us that we have arrived in the land of ambiguity without a passport. For a moment the straits seem dire, but then laughter takes hold. It is the laughter of relief that the castaways in the text are characters--perhaps even characters of our own devising. But they are not us.

Where Will It All End?

Among the many technical and emotional joys to be found reading and rereading Richard Price's earlier novel, Clockers, and his most recent, Lush Life, there is the tacit agreement that the good guys don't always win, the bad guys don't always lose. The surprise comes not so much from seeing justice triumphing as an abstract condition but rather to see how much justice will be done at a particular time and how much is held over for later.

Short stories used to be more perfervid in their allocation of justice. Lately they have become more advocates for a force almost as forceful as justice. I speak of ambiguity.

We have moved, I observe, from living dangerously to living ambiguously. Living ambiguously may be more dangerous than living dangerously because of the uncertainty, the tension of wondering when things will become more dangerous--all this rather than the creeping boredom of ceaseless danger.

I believe there are reasons why short stories end on more ambiguous notes than, say, A Cask of Amontillado or An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, or even To Build a Fire. We have grown as a result of those stories, grown more cynical and sophisticated. As they did with so any other things of style and technique, the short stories of Ernest Hemingway added to the ambiguity syndrome, particularly some of the Nick Adams stories, say Big Two-Hearted River, or Hills Like White Elephants. In more recent years, in this century, the ambiguity is more deliberate than ambiguity merely for the sake of not being specific it is put in place to draw the reader artfully into visualizing a conclusion. Often this conclusion is a bundle of emotion, as well-orhestrated and sensual as a bouquet of flowers.

Do not, therefore, do the reader's work for him. Show the reader the direction you have in mind, then end with a good shove. To my mind and senses, the best ending seems at first blush a bit abrupt. You mean, That's it? Then, like an Altoid aftertaste, the other shoe drops and the ambiguity coalesces--off the page.

They all lived happily ever after is more ambiguous than it sounds because it raises questions that at the present time make you
question such things as what happiness is, and because of certain liberties taken with logic and semantics by a former president of the United States, oh, you know, that one, William Jefferson Clinton, it is fair to ask how long you mean when you say ever after.

I remember still the instant wisdom I got some years back when Barry Spacks called to invite me to one of his classes at UCSB to hear a presentation by an author he knew I admired greatly. I asked Bobbie Ann Mason to talk about why she'd seen fit to end her remarkable and memorable story, Shiloh, at what seemed to be an up-in-the-air moment. It was her answer that helped me forge my vision about ambiguity. "I ended it there," she said, "because that's where all the energy ran out."

I found it impossible to let that remark fade down the hallways of my memory, and I have thought long and hard since about where to end a story, and learned from countless attempts at trying to tack endings onto stories I did not realize were already done, the defensive sound staying on too long brings to the story.

Mark Twain actually said, "Put all your eggs in one basket--and watch that basket." I'm taking liberties by suggesting Bobbie Ann Mason's contribution as being, "Put all the available energy into a story situation--and watch that energy."

Random Notes on a Theme of Narrative Reliability

1. Not the start because who can say where such things really begin, rather the rallying point for a close look at narrative authority and reliability came from having finished for review J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year.

2. Several pages in, Coetzee reminds us of Barthes and Foucault, architects of deconstructionist critical theory, doing away with the author and drawing us toward the text as the be all and end all, reminding us of Diderot and Sterne.

3. I'm especially sensitive to Sterne and Tristram Shandy, which informs in tone a portion of my in progress Exit, Pursued by a Bear. I admire Dennis Diderot for his encyclopedia constructions, which inform my in the works Writer's Tool Kit, a kid of cross-referenced irreverence that speaks to construction and attitude.

4. Coetze literally tells three stories at once, all on the same page, each layer or level separated by a horizontal line. Thus we hear informal opinions on such things as politics, literature, music, the rule of law, morality, which we readers understand as being the very Strong Opinions one of the characters in the book (who bears certain similarities to Coetzee) was engaged to write by a German publisher. The middle section of the page relate to the author's relationship with a stunningly attractive woman he has hired to be his secretary, and the bottom section is the ongoing relationship between the secretary and her braggart, self-made-man live in boyfriend.

5. The writer is called Senor C and has won a slew of awards; he also has enough money that the secretary's boyfriend, an investment counsellor, is interested in appropriating.

6. Although Coetzee, a Nobel Laureate, has migrated to Adelaide, in south central Australia, this small ensemble cast lives in a high-rise on Sydney's ocean front.

7. Is this novel a roman a clef? Is it a complete fantasy?

8. Doesn't matter. What matters is that it kicks format for a field goal, blurring lines between real and invention, making the invention seem plausible, making the plausible seem somehow like the very confessions tortuously wrung from prisoners of war that Coetzee so firmly resents .

9. How much has the concept of a reliable narrator shifted since the tail end of last century? What constitutes reliability in 2008?

10. The kinds of novels and stories that provoke the most thought are the ones that stray in one way or another from conventional narrative format.

11. Used to be, the most significant ingredient to be found in fiction was suspense, and if you could not manufacture suspense, you were obliged to infuse the next best thing which was tension, and we all know that racial, political, artistic, and sexual tensions are powerful primary causes.

12. Now the ingredient is ambiguity, which can be made to contain tension and perhaps even suspense.

13. What do identities mean? What are motives? What is reality? We had at one point to memorize the names of the Nine Muses. 2008 we can replace them with the nine ambiguities.

14. I think I will be spending more time with Coetzee, especially this one, and looking for ways to tear Exit, Pursued by a Bear farther away from the satire I'd intended and more into a moral ambiguity that seems to be hanging about like the coastal fogs or marine layers that sit off shore here during June and July.

15. I wanted to get this down before it got away.

A Tall Story (or Tale)

A tall story has two aspects, both having to do with plausibility. In the first case, there is enough plausibility present to introduce the worm of ambiguity into the apple; the story does not on its face seem preposterous and, indeed, contains just enough substance to see the reader/hearer through the border of cynicism. The second aspect of the tall story introduces the concept of the surreal, a literary red flag indicating the vast hyperbole of the information.

Each version has a long tradition of use, the latter seeming more appropriate for the fable (See Aesop, but also George Orwell's Animal Farm, and that abomination from Richard Adams, Watership Down.) The former seems the more literary of the two; ambiguity is a major tool in the fiction writer's tool kit, allowing the author the greater opportunity to cause the reader to step into the story and take sides.

Once again I call upon Mark Twain to represent a taxonomic outcropping in the rich lode that comprises story. His venture, "The Cardiff Giant," originally appearing in the Virginia City (NV) Territorial-Enterpriseis a splendid example of devious intent, offering itself as an intriguing news story at first blush, then doing a quick change into the costume of a joke perpetrated on the reader. In the simplest of terms, Twain wrote of the discovery of a petrified body having been discovered in some mining excavations at the Comstock Lode. While speculating on the age of the petrified remains and describing it, Twain casually mentioned the fingers of the left hand of the discovery being splayed. Then he went on to speculate on the overall height, casually dropping the information that the right hand of the body was similarly splayed. After another paragraph or so, Twain reported that the extended thumb of the left hand was joined to the decedent's nose, followed by a bit more speculation before dropping the bombshell that the thumb of the right hand had been discovered joined to the little finger of the left hand. Voila! Twain had just delivered a one-two punch of a tall story, in which a petrified relic human of the distant past was preserved in stone, thumbing his nose at us.

My own favorite version of a tall story takes place in my favorite coffee-drinking venue, Peet's, on upper State Street in Santa Barbara. Because of the crush of early morning customers, eager for their first coffee fix of the day, a man and woman, known to each other by the regularity of their visits to Peet's each day, are forced to share a table. In an attempt at conversation, the man asks the woman why she appears to be shaking her head. "Just getting a start on the day," the woman said. "In my job, I see an extraordinary number of assholes every day."

The man nods soberly. "Me, too," he confesses.

Pleased at the possibility of shared pain, the woman enthuses, "Really? I'm in sales at Saks Fifth Avenue. What do you do?"

"I," the man confesses, "am a proctologist."

A tall tale is the favorite tool in many a writer's kit, furnishing a chance to make fresh inroads in the understanding of the self and, accordingly, of the entire human condition. If a scene is the basic unit of drama--it is!--then it should be clear to the observer that the individual is the basic unit of the scene and, further, that an individual, either with a quest for understanding some aspect of what it all means or, conversely, with the utter conviction of already understanding all of the human condition that needs to be known, is the basic target for the teller of the tall story.

My lifetime experience with horses is limited to a period in my early teens when I rode them with some persistence, and a time in my later teens and early twenties when I became interested in the relative speed of horses to the point where I was willing to put my money up as a defining venture. Nevertheless, Mr. Twain's essay within Roughing It, "I decide to buy a horse," puts me squarely into the recall of every time I've bought a car, and of every salesman from whom I bought said car. Twain's used-horse salesman has become an archetype,and the story, which was probably based on a real incident, has been bumped up into tallness to just the right degree to keep it orbiting around the planet of immortality.

Some tall tales, mostly from politicians, remind us to be on the eternal vigil lest we discover, in the final analysis, that the information presented as facts are really the hands of The Petrified Man, thumbing their nose at us.