There is a thin line between writing for yourself and writing for others. If you are sincere about writing for yourself, there is a sense of urgency straining to get the concept down in enough detail so that the material lives as a vibrant set of notes for you to reconsider at a later time. If you are writing for others there is more likely to be some rhetorical device such as irony or question, beckoning you and a potential reader into the labyrinth created by the collision of ideas. Worst of all, if you are writing to show off, there will be name dropping and stunning flights of vocabulary, each a testament to acquaintances. Thus this warning to yourself: You do not have to convince anyone how many persons or words you know, merely an eagerness to listen, to engage in conversation or argument. Or more briefly, ideas--not fustian.

There is by now a built-in detector of such things that catches you on the second or third pass, surely the fourth. One by one, names of friends are set aside unless their inclusion is a part of some joke, naming, for instance, a grammar school in a short story the James D. Wolfe Elementary school, which sounds sincere and real enough; after all, you attended the john Hancock grammar school in Los Angeles and the John Howland grammar school in Providence, RI; your junior high schools were named after an educator, Ida M. Fisher, in Miami Beach, and a naturalist, John Burroughs, in Los Angeles. Why wouldn't James D. Wolfe hold up, even if he is in real life the creator and head writer of Laugh-In? But naming a grammar school after a friend brings the school to life, just as naming a seller of Chinese replica wrist watches Conrad Burnaby amuses you no end because in real life Barnaby Conrad knowingly wears a Rolex replica he bought for five dollars on a trip to China.

It is difficult to tell for sure how some of your friends get into your stories; perhaps the guiding principal is mischief and fun. The momentum does not stop with this definition. Mischief and fun quickly translate into attitude and voice, which are essential ingredients so far as you are concerned. You are fairly certain to use USC as the venue for a novel you are toying with after the current one has had its way with you, and the only invention will be the name of the department in which the main action takes place, a name that will be influenced by your attitudes and experiences. It seems appropriate to you somehow to have the department quartered in the Doheney Library, which is real enough, and which was funded in some measure from profits realized from The 1922-23 Teapot Dome oil scandal. This fact and your awareness of it prompted you to be invited to meet with a dean at the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences to defend you thesis that all the buildings at USC are named for crooks. The Dean quite properly named at least two that are not, but you were able to counter with two more that are.

Names, attitude, and voice impart nuances the writer wishes to convey. Plots matter, story matters, but the voice behind the intent matters even more. Even were you to research a topic so thoroughly that you could be said to know it, another writer could use the same incidents from real life to convey an entirely opposite attitude and yet another writer could use them to provide a yet more apposite vision.

If location is everything, voice and attitude are trump cards.

Coming to Terms

An email note yesterday from former student and then faculty chum Chris Meeks set you to thinking because Meeks used the magical word "disappeared." This was the second time in about a week when the word issued forth, the last time coming from Erich Van Lowe, yet another former student who'd found his way through the morass of Hollywood and some category fiction ventures in New York to the faculty. Got you to thinking about the larger concept of The University, particularly a large one, composed as so many large universities are, of colleges within. Although you have at various times worked in such diverse landscapes as newspapers, auction houses, luggage repair, and publishing, the one landscape that truly impressed you is the landscape of the institute of learning. You have variously taught at Antioch, Westmount, UCSB, SBCC (adult ed), and of course, USC, suitably impressed by the bureaucracies of each to the point of forming attitudes about The University in much the same way as you have formed attitudes about other politically endowed institutions, which is to say with the curious admixture of respect for the good that can be wrought and enormous contempt for the displays of hypocrisy, as colorful and popmpous as those occasions when faculty parade about in their regalia, struggling to keep in step while at the same time trying to avoid tripping on the hem of the robe.

It is difficult for you to say which of the institutions where you have and/or still teach have offended your sensitivities most: Westmont, with its professed evangelism and smugness, fits nicely with your outrage against much connected with religion; UCSB, with its fragmented political sensitivities, speaks with eloquence to the political outrage; SBCC, with it's troglodyte bureaucracy, represents in splendid measure the sense one gets of being in rural France rather then in a learning experience. USC is best represented by a campus map with at least one notable error on it and the assessment of a parking kiosk guard that the maps will be used until there are no more of them because "It's no easy thing for a university to change a thing that doesn't work."

No wonder, with so much attitude radiating from you like UV rays looking for a vagrant skin to sunburn, that ENK has observed your passion for writing about the university. No wonder, indeed, that of your story, "The Deconstruction of Professor Erskine," in which said professor found challenging taunts left in his campus mail box, the late John Milton said, "I wish you'd have gone even farther."

Well.

With what is beginning to take shape, you are seeing a combination of colleges transposed to approximately 35th and Figueroa, Los Angeles, CA. It will be called The University, and it will be in serious rivalry with the University toward the west, which you have indeed attended and have an attitude to as well thanks to the small-mindedness on your part of resentment at never having been solicited to teach there. It will be called UCLA.

Back to The University, locus of your teaching activities for these thirty-odd and indeed thirty odd years. Your old self, your character come to life to the point of having been a writer with not merely a fictional list of titles but a character with an actual list of titles, is Lew Lessing. He first appeared in a short story, on his way to becoming your alter ego. Now he, as in fact a number of your students have done, is an adjunct at The University. You are thinking the story to begin with Lew's discovery of a missing grad student. As you were enlisted to do when Cubby Selby was in his death throes, Lew will be called upon to take over classes for Rex Rothenberg (Kenneth Rexroth), who has gone missing.

Thus do you leave Sisyphus's boulder, shoved to the top of the hill while Sisyphus takes a moment to wipe his brow from the exertion.

Attitudes along the Margins

attitude--an emotional presence often coupled with a state of mind, resident in a writer and, subsequently, in characters, serving as a pole star for the writer and actor; the resident timbre of a story or portion of a story; the prevalent trait or personality in a story or character.

Attitude is like style; it happens as a result of choices made by the writer and, subsequently, by characters, reflecting an overall view of the circumstances in which characters find themselves, their approaches to coping with these circumstances, their regard for one another, and ultimately for themselves. Writers such as Jane Austen (1775-1817) and William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63) showed their attitudes toward individual characters and the classes they represented through a narrative voice that was openly admiring, critical, or patronizing, yet each was able to engage readers without making the readers feel they were a target. In more recent years, W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) seemed to follow this path, using his narrative skills to take the reader into his confidence, the better to reveal the spectrum of human foibles to them through the prisms of his short stories and novels.

Attitude emerges from the writer's feelings and beliefs about a subject, whether the topic is political, sexual, or philosophy. One of the first things the reader notices in discovering attitude is the overall tone of presentation, followed by the behavior and relative flexibility or lack thereof among the characters. In some of his work, D. H. Lawrence emerges as if a schoolboy seated in the front row, waving his hand to get the teacher's eye because he, Lawrence, is so enthused by the information he wishes to present. Particularly in his short stories, Lawrence was so assured of his technique that his voice was more restrained, allowing the characters to step closer to the front of the stage.

A writer's preparation for executing a story could well begin with the writer checking in on the resident emotions that push the events of the story to the surface of the imagination. Begin with the notion that the story, however long or short, is like the toothpaste in a tube. The strength of the squeeze is directly related to the amount of toothpaste that comes forth. Attitude resides in the writer's grip: I'll show them, or This will amuse you, or I can't believe people still think this way, or I didn't realize what a good thing I had until I lost it, or...


marginal--a fictional or critical condition resident in a character or concept; a necessary condition of a person or idea to convey the distance from mainstream; the distance from the statistical mean occupied by a character or concept.

Marginal characters are highly provocative of story; they may take on agendas that will further remove them from the mainstream or nurse some desire to move closer to it; they may provoke envy or discomfort among those in the mainstream. Marginal ideas are equally fecund; ideas seen as conventional wisdom become threats or shibboleths to be accordingly shunned or promulgated. Many of the characters of literary and genre fiction began as marginal; some gravitated to the ironic conclusion of mainstream, others continued to enhance their marginality. A diverse array of historical and contemporary fiction address the existential condition of marginality, The Swiss Family Robinson, for instance or Robinson Crusoe serving to represent enforced separations from the mainstream, The Lord of the Flies represents quite another result as mainstream characters shift away from their societal armature. The political satire Catch-22 could be seen as an ironic triumph of the marginal man, and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit could be seen as another commentary altogether on marginality.

Start with a character who is out of the mainstream, say a high school student whose parents have moved her to a new city where she has to start making new friends. There is a group of students who attract her, but they are tight-knit, jealous of their status. Add to the calculus a member of the in-group who is drawn to the outsider. Result: story under way.

One of the more productive dramatic clashes is the formula of the marginal wanting to become mainstream and the mainstream envying the constraint-free status of the marginal.

Aristotle Sent Me

emotion--the mood, temperament, attitude, or disposition exhibited singularly or in combination by one or more characters in a narrative drama; a major force propelling the actions of a particular character; a resident setting or mood of a scene in a story; a dramatic catalyst that causes characters to behave as they do.

Characters are walking tool kits of emotion, using them or being driven by them to behave as they do. As a contrast between characters and real-life individuals, the individual is guided in behavior by emotions and/or their absence, occasionally becoming preoccupied, then driven, thus making the necessary transition from real-life individual to character. Being in some way driven, obsessed, or compulsive is the transformative energy needed by a character to earn his keep in a story.

Characters are commonly identified according to their goals and needs; the thoughtful writer has taken this calculus one step farther by identifying the goals and needs as the comet, the attendant emotions as trails of the comet.


short story--a dramatic narrative, conventionally (but not necessarily) advanced in scenes, taking an individual from a point of awareness of a goal or problem through some attempt at striving for the goal or engaging the problem to the point of awareness of the consequences of the success or failure of the venture; may be rendered in first, second,third, and omniscient points of view.

By its name, the short story intends a word length less than a novel, which is by convention thought to be at least 50,000 words. Short stories under 1000 words are usually given some designation such as short-short, flash fiction, or sudden fiction,delineating them further from the short story, sometimes, as in the case of under 100 words, making them more a whim or affectation. Conventional short stories run from about 2500 words to about 10000, some of these parameters determined by the availability of space in magazines and journals.

Thanks to a review written by Edgar Allen Poe on the occasion of the publication of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales, (which Poe quite admired), the short story was accepted as a single-narrator vehicle, its focus on a single issue or situation. The ending was almost invariably a thematic equivalent of the recapitulation of a concerto. Then came Chekhov (1860-1904), who bade farewell to the elbow-in-the-ribs nudge of moral and philosophical resolution, and Joyce (1882-1941)who used the epiphany or relevant emerging awareness of a character to further the short story along into the twentieth century, where such significant voices as John Cheever, John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Louise Erdrich, Tom Boyle,Alice Munro, Annie Proulx, and Joyce Carol Oates rushed the short story into its more elastic and plastic incarnation.

Because of these and other worthies, it is now possible to devise a short story that has more than one featured narrator, that moves about in chronology, refuses to be pinned down in terms of its did-they-or-didn't-they ending, and takes place over a large span of time. Still these standards have to obtain: The reader must care in some way about the narrator or have a stake in what happens or does not happen to the narrator; the characters in a short story should each be distinguishable from the others; someone has to have a goal; if there is no actual prize, nevertheless the reader should be able to conceive of an appropriate one; the element of surprise ought to be found somewhere in the calculus--not merely a trick or surprise ending but rather someone doing or not doing something that becomes a surprise or, perhaps, some surprise rendition of format.


unities--a set of three classical conditions for drama, derived from Aristotle's Poetics: a play should have one significant action; it should represent only one place; it should take place in the time span of a day.

A few critics have tried to tie the can of actual time to the play, intending that the events portrayed on stage be equal to elapsed time in reality.

Aristotle, who has made some significant contributions to such diverse things as scientific classification, logic, and the physics of the dramatic experience, has nevertheless been gone since 322 BCE, allowing room for the growth and development of story constructs. Even as far back--form our point of view--as Shakespeare's time, the unities were being disregarded, played with fast and loose. One of the delights of story is its ability to include vast shifts of time, some even generational.

Hint: the unities are good things to know about, particularly when reading or considering works from the distant past, but they cannot and should not hinder a writer's experiments with time, place, theme, or any other aspect of telling a story.

Three Ways of Not Looking at a Rejection Slip

voice--the sound made by a narrative text when being read; the pitch and timbre of the author's emotional tone; an intended or revealed-through-betrayal attitude resident in text; the DNA of an author's agenda.

An author seeks and is said to have found voice when a clear, resident tone beyond style and content can be found in all the material that writer produces.

Virtuoso musicians are recognized by the voice with which they produce tone either through an instrument or in vocal rendition. Actors convey voice through their movements, manipulation of time, or projection of attitude. In similar fashion, writers express voice, which hints at attitude and the degree of emotional involvement with the matter at hand. Voice begins to appear then gradually deepen in a writer in direct proportion to the writer's honesty in dealing with interests, passions, and philosophy. The writer who has found voice has recognized vital interior forces and concerns.

Voice may be discovered in accidental, unplanned encounters where the writer dramatizes specific personal concerns that seem at first to merely appear out of nowhere. It is the direct result of passions. Voice is the result of caring for someone or something, or recognizing a portion of the writing self as though it were a long lost friend or relative.

Readers need not agree with a writer’s particular passions or politics to recognize the qualities of that writer’s voice.
Often conflated or confused with style, voice is the personality of the writer resident in text. It can be instructive and rewarding to read aloud from one’s own work as well as the work of others. It can be instructive to note that the great jazz musician Sidney Bechet was proficient on the clarinet, but his taking up the soprano saxophone secured his distinctive voice and led to his remarkable discoveries over his active years as a musician.

Although there is no substitute for story, voice is a major vehicle for expression in all narrative.


defensiveness--a quality variously apologetic or insistent, often found in novels and short stories, emblematic of the author's need to explain or justify actions, attitudes, or events portrayed; an often unnecessary footnote-as-text used to justify a behavioral or moral position taken by the author or one or more characters.

Defensiveness begins with a writer's response to critical reaction, said response often rendered as "But it really happened that way," then extending to lengthy explanations in support of what should not have required defense. This quality may be seen as the literary equivalent of a youngster trapped in a fib or lie, extending the flawed trope with even more extensive justification. It is "The dog ate my homework" writ large.

Frequently the product of a mountain goat leap of logic in the motivation or behavior of a character, defensiveness becomes a good argument for less being more. The more logic is attached to a behavior or condition, the more likely the reader is to question it. The best approach for explaining or inserting behavior attributions: Let the characters do it. The reader is less likely to question the behavior of Character A if Character B questions it first. Thus Character A didn't trust Character B carries more weight than the author telling the reader how A was trying to convince B of his trustworthiness.

Reminder: A story is a procession of events and interactions, not an argument or harangue.


event--an occurrence (off stage or on) in a narrative. An action or series of actions involving specific characters in specific situations, meant to be interpreted by the characters themselves and, of course, by readers. (Thus, by being called upon for interpretation, the reader is made an active participant in the transaction of story.)

It is no more fanciful to see electricity as a series of electrons, moving past an arbitrary point at a particular speed and density than it is to see dramatic narrative--story--as a series of events as they move past the reader's point of awareness.

Electricity is in fact measured by the rate at which electrons flow, including the resistance against which they move. Story is a set of experiences in terms of the number of events, the pace at which they proceed, and the resistance against them. As the scene is the basic unit of drama, the event is the basic unit of scene.

A Twofer

expectations--the results each character foresees when venturing into a new scene, a guiding compass as the character is being borne along on the stream of narrative within scenes or connecting them. A character without expectations in a scene is the equivalent of the scenic backdrops found at tourist attractions, where one inserts one's head and is photographed as a comic memento.

Every character wants something; this is the passport to cross the border from joke or anecdote or vignette into the landscape of story. Accordingly, imagine the tourist character equipped with a fanny-pack right out of the L.L. Bean catalog. Along with that character's desire, rolled neatly and resting on top of history/backstory, attitude, and feelings about the other characters in the story is expectations. That character expects the next scene to be an occasion of achievement, boredom, surprise, humiliation, frustration, severe reversal, sexual opportunity, inspiration, or challenge. These will be delivered in such a way and by appropriate characters to send the story forward, leaving as emotional residue an identifiable counterpoint. Expectations are the qualities that give dimension and life to story, allowing the character to do what characters are intended to do--react. The character need not use all the tools in the fanny-pack in every scene, except for expectations and the personal sense of having been in or lived through some situation or encounter before entering the present scene. Without these two possessions, the character is sure to be turned back at the border.

willing suspension of disbelief, the--a term coined by critic-poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge to account for the inertia of skeptical disbelief a writer must overcome in a reader in order to have his narrative accepted as real. With so many books being published and so many sources apparent for short stories, readers are daring writers to be more convincing, at pain of not pursuing a story to its conclusion. Sophisticated readers have come a long way from the early days of the novel and short story; they know the characters are inventions of the author. But they also know that a skillful writer can make them forget this fact, empathize with fictional beings, root for their favorites, and experience severe distress when their favorite characters experience reversals.

The trick here is to make the reader forget that the characters on the page are inventions. One way to do this is to quickly present characters in their attempts to solve the problems and reversals of fortune with which they are afflicted. Another way to accomplish this goal is to show characters setting off on a quest, a perilous journey, or a new venture in which they will become at accelerated risk. Yet another approach is to endow the character with some physical or emotional flaw which they must struggle to overcome. Johnny Tremaine, the young, eponymous apprentice to Paul Revere, experiences an accident early on; molten silver is spilled on his hand, permanently fusing his thumb to his palm. In Tracy Chevalier’s novel, The Girl with the Pearl Ear Ring, a young peasant girl is forced to take a job as a maid when her artisan father is blinded by an exploding kiln.

Every short story and novel, regardless of how fantastic or quotidian, has to cope with this problem: Does the reader believe implicitly in the characters and situations? Step One in this remarkable alchemy from the dross of initial concept to the gold of finished work begins with the writer believing in the characters. From there, the author must portray characters behaving in ways that are feasible to them so that the reader not only does not question them and what they do but as well begins hoping none of the obstacles are too big to be overcome. Thus by indirection, the key to overcoming disbelief is vulnerability; no matter what the characters are vulnerable to--greed, love, fear, confusion, ambition--that vulnerability becomes a wedge that lifts the fence of plausibility, often just enough to allow the reader to crawl through.

Things That Go Bump in the Night--and Daytime, Too

In a sense extending well beyond metaphor and hyperbole, we share membership in the chiropractic, massage-related manipulation of reality, stretching, kneading, pounding it to fit our will. So focused and intense is our desire that we want others to see reality as we see it, going so far as to contrive ways to make our version, our interpretation the most trustworthy, dramatic and, as a result, the most desirable reality of all.

Those of us who become writers of story are willing to undergo the initiation by fire of the Aristotle Poetics, which, as Moby-Dick does with whales, tells us more about story than we want to know. After all, Aristotle, by all accounts a control freak who probably color-coded his togas, was merely setting forth and describing the various forms while Ahab was motivated by sincerely felt grievances. Each individual had a universe, a particular reality. What shapes those realities is the difference between chiropractic and massage, the difference between Texas chili and bean stew, the difference between barbecue and backyard grilling. My own observation that neither of these pairs of opposites is wrong takes into account that there are fierce forces on either side of the argument, infusing the discipline of story telling with some kind of predisposition, some attitude or agenda.

If you approach story with too much agenda or ardor, the resulting reality will be propaganda, which reduces itself under the light of investigation to a desire to control by fear. If you approach story with too much attempt at balance and logic, the result will seem like cafeteria food, largely overcooked and under seasoned.

It can be instructive to listen to writers of nonfiction, including academics, as they discuss the concepts for their works. Some of the works, logic- or intellect-bred, have within them the ability to excite because they are expanding on previously unmade connections or relationships, while others seem to be propelled because of an awareness that the thrust or thesis of the work has general merit as well as specific merit for a specific group of readers. In comparison, writers of fiction reveal as their starting engine a sense of injustice, a desire to pick out a target then pursue the target, often with such results in mind as revenge or humor or an exposure of some other individual's or group's communal concept of reality.

Each of us who offers forth a fictional landscape is also offering an idiosyncratic universe where certain behavior or its lack, certain morality or its lack, certain expectations or their lack step forth from the shadowy world of the quotidian,reminding us for the millionth time how vulnerable we are, our own universe sent out to play, put in orbit where surely it will collide with other orbiting universes.

We are often vulnerable to collision, even more so to delusion. The person who bumps into us and possibly even causes an irritation if not an injury is merely enacting his own delusion, which, if it differs from ours, defines his index of sanity as compared to ours. In some cases this deluded vulnerability explains why so many of us depend for our sense of happiness and identity on the outcome of a sports event or why our interest in celebrities trumps our interest in self or immediate friends. Celebrities, we appear to be saying, represent what we wish to become--and would if we had the ten or twenty thousand spare hours with which to perfect some ability resident even now within us.

We are equally vulnerable to the sophistry that my universe is better than yours, can beat yours, knows more, is more green or prudent or spiritual or artistic or any other denominator you wish to use to maintain the sense of separateness.

When we write, we articulate and send our universe into orbit. When we read, we are kin to those spectator particles lurking in the linear accelerators, speeding toward a collision with another particle, a collision from which we will have been changed and energized, ready to move forth in orbit again for the next bumpy ride and its resulting collision.