The Payoff

Every--repeat, every--dramatic narrative concludes with an action or presentation of the verge of an impending action, either of which tips the scales in a result that produces an emotional effect.  You feel the thunk of it in your gut, as you often do after reading a short story by Deborah Eisenberg or Louise Erdrich, or William Trevor.  You know something has happened or will happen to persons you know, now that you think about it, as well as you knew your high school chums and even, yes, even some of your university chums.

You know and you have some concern because none of these writers is likely to be translated into Hallmark cards; rather each of them depicts plausible endings, momentary conclusions in on-going lives--because each of their characters has a life off the page, so far as you are concerned.  You would be more likely to call one of them and say hey, let's meet for a coffee or drinks than you would high school classmates or university chums.  Not that you have anything against these, to be sure, but rather you are impressed at how close you get to individuals who are dredged up from the imaginations of these superb writers, dipped in a bit of batter, then tossed on the page to get crinkly done.

In the longer form fiction, the emotional effect is articulated in greater detail, a killer is brought to justice, separated lovers reunite, the bond between then different and more durable; a deadlocked jury finally reaches a verdict, a tyrant recognizes the error of his ways then vows to change his ways.  Shorter fiction has a less conclusive effect, often deliberately vague as a reflection of how inconclusive and episodic mush of life is.  In a true sense, the short story makes life seem less a series of episodes.

Over the lifespan of long and short forms, beginnings have undergone more significant change than middles or endings, being more disposed now to begin in medias res than in their eighteenth or nineteenth century forbears.  The notable example of The Iliad, composed more or less in the year 850 BCE, comes to mind as an exception to the tendency, along with the wonder more writers did not see the potential for such beginnings.  Middles have more or less gone their own way, allowing variously for shifts in narrative voice, jumps ahead or to the rear in story line, and introductions of subplots or themes.  Endings have grown more tentative, as if in direct relation to the complexity of life, the Balkanization of states, institutions, organizations.  Nevertheless, we do want some sense that a story has come to as much of an end as it can get without appearing to tack on another story.  Many stories thus end with a significant death, not particularly the death of a front rank character as, say Charles Ryder, the narrator of Brideshead Revisited, but of Lord Marchmain, a distant second-tier personage.  Doesn't hurt that Ryder's marriage has come to an end, either; there is a sense of the vital events having taken place, the chips fallen where they did.  And of course with Gatsby dead, there is nothing left but a brief valedictory from Nick Carraway, the narrator.  Even though it is a bit much to put The Sun Also Rises in the same shelf as Brideshead and Gatsby, there is to be sure that requisite emotional thump when Jake Barnes, reflecting on Bret Ashley's subjunctive scenario, gives her famous soliloquy.  And not to forget James Joyce's major work, Ulysses, which does belong in the same shelf; Molly's soliloquy leaves us with a gut wrench.

Payoff is what we read for.  It is emotional information melded with an opening of the senses, an awareness of some part of life.  Payoff is what we work at and hope for in life; it is what we read for when we read; it is the private dance Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire do in our minds when we set forth to get a story down, perhaps to be performed as the Homeric tales were, perhaps as a joke to be told among a group of friends, perhaps as a poem or short story or long-form work that would not leave us alone until we got it in a way we thought was right.  Now we can close our eyes and see our words and their effects, come to life like Rogers and Astaire, endlessly lithe, supple, beautiful, radiating the sense that whatever happens in life or story, there is music and dance to take us up and cast us as lithe, supple, and beautiful as they.

Many, er, Happy Returns

As the mousy, anonymous narrator of Rebecca did with the fabled Manderly estate on the Cornish coast, I sometimes dream I return to Los Angeles again. Being in L.A. these days, awake or asleep, opens a complicated drop-down menu of awareness choices, alternately joyous, sad, conflicted, extensively aware of the consequences of change.

Returns of any sort at all are a chancy business; returns to a place of one's birth and youth are particularly fraught. Such returns remind you that you have left a portion of your life there, frozen in time in the manner of your image jelled in an old photo, while the rest of you, the you afterwards, has grown toward dreams of yourself in another venue, possibly even as another person.

Return invariably connotes doing something again, something experienced earlier at least once; it is taking books back to the library, giving a complement to someone who has complemented you, doing a favor for a person who has gifted you with some considerate behavior. You may return affection, travel the reverse direction of a journey undertaken earlier, reply in some manner to a tennis ball sent in your direction, or send an unacceptable meal to the kitchen whence it originated. In similar fashion, you may purchase a notice to be sent back to you after a letter you originated had been delivered to its intended receiver, and you might also send an unwanted communication back to its origin.

Going back to a place may be a part of a happy pattern such as a repeated visit to a restaurant, coffee shop, or theater, your expectations comfortable and positive at each iteration. Conversely, there are places and things for which return becomes fraught with a complexity of discomfort and a sense of disconnection.

The act of returning to a place after an absence rushes you toward this jarring sensation of disconnect. By your absence, you are out of the rhythm of the place you vacated, your psyche vibrant of the other place or places you might have spent your time. Much as you may have been loved, cherished, respected where you were before you left it, the shadow of otherness, alienness, and foreignness have been stamped on your visa, perhaps in subtle degree but not so subtle as to fool all the border guards, Some of them will spot the otherness you have accrued by your act of absence. The ever widening gyre does not stop spinning there; should you return to your new turf, someone there will note the way you have picked up the trace of an accent or some other mannerism from home.

Thomas Wolfe reminded us that You Can't Go Home Again, not without collision with consequences. But in greater truth the consequences and their traces follow you where ever you venture. A return becomes a cosmic tattoo, needled into the skin of your psyche. In the proper light, the right persons will see the patterns and bar codes; they will scan you, read you, get you, whereupon they will return such empathy and creative force as you and they are able to emit and you will both think of this condition as the beginning of love.

The return of a planet or heavenly body to a particular point in its orbit becomes a symbol for a new beginning. Sisyphus, urging his rock to the top of its hill, thinks this is the start of another effort or, perhaps, the end of an older one. When migrating birds or swarming insects or foraging herds return to a familiar place, they commemorate the click of gears in a life cycle. In days before the computer, touch applied to the return key on a typewriter sent the carriage mechanism slamming with satisfying alacrity back to a beginning position whence an entire line of keystrokes awaited their own particular fate.

Return is adventure, consequence, and discovery, waiting to happen.

In the Beginning

beginnings--places where story becomes dramatic; moments of narrative inertia; onsets of events that assume dramatic form.

The longer the story the greater the likelihood that it will have more than one optimal beginning point, thus the beginnings you see on stories that resonate for you have involved deliberation and choice on the part of their writer. The same choice and deliberation are owed your own beginnings. Ideally, beginnings are places where action is already in motion, where action is about to begin, where a choice has just been made, or where a character is confronted by discovery or event that knocks him or her from everyday routine.

Readers are less likely to care about a story that introduces itself with backstory or some other form of explanation or footnote. Example: You are at a gathering--a party, or, if you insist, a soiree--when, of a sudden, an individual you do not know by name approaches you, telling you with convincing sincerity and sobriety, "Please help me. I've got to get out of here. There are two people in the next room who are after me."

Your mind is already filled with such questions as Who are you? and Why me? Both these questions will and should be answered, but if this is to be the beginning of a story, now is not the moment for the details. We want more convincing details that force the issue, which happens to be the issue of the beset individual's actions, convincing you, perhaps even against your will, to become involved, caught up in an ever slippy slope of dramatic event.

The Scottish writer, Ali Smith, has it down perfectly in her story, "The Child," where a protagonist who is never named is using her lunch break to buy her "weekly stuff" in a supermarket. Shopping carts in Scotland and England are called trolleys. "I left my trolley by the vegetables and went to find bouquet garni for the soup. But when I came back to the vegetables again, I couldn't find my trolley. It seemed to have been moved." In its place was someone else's shopping cart, with a child sitting in the little child seat. This is all in the first paragraph.

By the second paragraph, the narrator realizes it is her shopping cart; events persist to the point where everyone in the market thinks the child is hers. So completely have we tumbled into the events of the story that we do not question the narrator's resolve to take the child to the nearest police department; much less do we question the fact that the child has now begun to speak, delivering in the manner of a second- or third-rate stand-up comic a stream of racist and sexist commentary.

Even though we do not know her name or where she works or what she does or if in fact she is in a romantic relationship, we share with Smith's narrator a sense of being caught up in a swirl of event that demands a solution.

Beginnings yank us into situations that need coping; they lead us onto the path where we search for some kind of conclusion or, at the very least, a settlement.

The Opening Pages of a Hard-Luck Story

opening pages--the first three or four pages of a novel manuscript, usually the first page of a short story manuscript; the opening velocity of a story; archaic references: hook, narrative hook.

Before a novel or short story has any hope of finding its way into book, electronic, or periodical publication, it must pass the watchful eye of the literary agent and/or the acquisition editor. To accomplish this goal, the narrative must present an interesting character in a situation of confrontation, danger, discovery, or emotional quandary of significant enough degree to trigger some measure of concern. The writer who refuses to consider this calculus or who feels unable to execute it is at high risk of receiving a note declining the manuscript on the grounds that the reader had not been sufficiently made to care.

As observed by such plot-driven writers as Louis L'Amour, Frank Gruber, and Elmore Leonard, many novels and short stories, sent forth into the world as eagerly as hand-waving students wanting to impress their teacher with their knowledge of the right answer, do not always begin at the right place. Ideally, the opening pages plunk a character into a spot where the character is physically vulnerable--sometimes emotionally vulnerable as well. The opening pages also include some implicit agreement that the character will get back up and try again.

Often the true opening pages of a story are buried within backstory or other explanations which come forth more as unwanted-but-necessary descriptions rather than emotion-based circumstances. The net result is to present the reader with text book narrative rather than dramatic engagement. 

 The solution is often found in the revision process, wherein the true opening pages present themselves. How are these pages to be recognized? They are spare on description and backstory, sparer still on auxiliary verbs such as had, which yank the chronology from the present to the past.

Wherever opening pages are in the story's chronology, they are more effective if they appear to be happening in the immediate present. If they actually took place, say, ten or twelve years earlier, the reader will quickly adopt to the manipulation of the time frame. No convention requires fiction to be in strict chronology; chiropractic adjustments to chronology add to the senses of tension, suspense, and reality.


hard-luck story--a narrative which intends through its telling to evoke sympathy and compassion for the teller; a story in which one or more characters collide with an ever worsening pattern of setback and misfortune.


All stories have some kind of end-game goal, some intended effect on the hearer/reader. Is it laughter? Perhaps the author's intent is education, or irony, or reversal. Perhaps the narrative is offered in self-defense, or the adjunct of self-defense, excuse. As long as we're dwelling on the conditional perhaps, might be the intent of a story is to make the teller sound modest--moi?--or resourceful.

Surely one of the more plentiful among dramatic narratives is the hard-luck story or its close relative, the sob story. The purpose is to evoke or elicit sympathy for the teller, both in the nature of troubles piled on and in the way the load is borne by the forces of Nature and natural disaster.

You could say--and probably will, once you think about it--that The Book of Job is the classic hard-luck story, not only because of the trials visited upon Job but as well because of the capricious nature of the way the visitation was set in motion. Job happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, when those polar representations of The Cosmic Forces got into a bragging and betting mood.

In more modern times, you could argue that an archetypal hard-luck story is found in a heavy contributor to Republican politics, being given a chance to go hunting with the forty-third Vice President of the United States. We all know how that turned out. That poor man will be known throughout history as the man who went bird hunting with the Veep. In Texas, where the incident took place, Republican school children will be allowed to stay home from school on the anniversary of that day, and boys with aggressive cases of facial zits will be able to say, "I went dove hunting with Dick Cheney."


You could also, if you wanted, put the majority of Americans of voting age as players in a hard-luck story because it was our hard luck to have at the helm of the ship of state a man more like Captain Ahab than the President of the United States, although there are those who would disagree with my literary analogy, reminding me of Mary Shelley's archetypal Frankenstein as the more appropriate fit. Dr. Frankenstein represents the force behind the Vice President of the United States, a man who once was more benign than he now is, having created a monster who has attached some seven hundred fifty signing statements to bills acted into law by the Congress. Mrs. Shelley's point was a moral one, in which hubris could create a monster.

It's our hard luck story that the forty-third President of the United States, with graduate work in hubris, was in over his head and the best we could think to do in the name of conventional wisdom was to wait his term of office out.

We will nationally remain at the wrong end of a hard-luck story as long as we continue to accept our status as victim.  

Revision.1

revision--a systematic review and examination of raw thematic material; a process of searching for the optimal form and deployment of a story (also applies to nonfiction). A final and emphatic editorial vision of a project, reflecting as nearly as possible a unified editorial tone, vibrant characters with uneasy choices, and a satisfying, plausible resolution.

Writers have been advised for some time by instructors, literary agents, and editors to revise a recently completed work. Often those same instructors, literary agents, and editors have an inchoate vision of what they mean by the term "revision," adding an entire layer of confusion to a process than can be a joy.

Thus three important revision rules for writers at the outset: (1) Unless a literary agent or editor offers a specific quid pro quo offer to represent or publish the work if specified revisions are made, their suggestions are worthless; (2) Unless the instructor, literary agent, or editor cannot articulate a specific list of revisions --change the point of view, change the verb tense from past to present, remove fifty percent of the physical description, etc--their suggestions are not nearly as valuable as rereading the material yourself; (3) If the revision suggestions from the instructor, literary agent, or editor do not resonate as appropriate, ignore them.

These basic questions follow for the individual essaying the revision:

1. Is the work complete? A significant way to determine this is to set the work aside for between one day and a week, then return to read it afresh, hopeful of not discovering any "How could I have forgotten that?" moments. Accordingly put in any forgotten that.

2. Does it begin in the right place? Always a tricky call, especially if the present opening circumstances were the cause for the work congealing as an idea to pursue. Reread the work specifically for another place where there is a greater sense of opening velocity and character involvement. Stories need not be set in strict chronology; a perfect place for the beginning may be the penultimate or even final scene. Remember beginnings are not places where much in the way of background is set forth; beginnings are more likely to be eighty percent movement and twenty percent description. Quirky, interesting people doing quirky interesting things make the most engaging beginnings.

3. Does the reader have someone to root for? Sure, the manuscript has a protagonist, but is the protagonist invested enough in his or her agenda to make readers want to become emotionally involved as the characters tread their paths? American readers for instance, would not seem likely fans of Mr. Stevens, the protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. After all, what's the big deal about wanting to be a butler? But of course, Mr. Stevens didn't want to be an ordinary butler. And who among us could root for Fast Eddie Felson, a kid who wanted to be a pool hustler? Not just any pool hustler. Thinking about the dramatic strengths of Carrie Bradshaw and her ultimate goals, we begin to get an interesting perspective on both sides of the coin as it were, rooting for her in Sex in the City and rooting as well for the eponymous Pamela to retain her chastity in her own dramatic venture.

4. Does it end in the right place? Does it,we must ask, end by explaining itself too strenuously or defensively? Does it bury emotional effect in a welter of logical details to the point of producing anticlimax? And since we're on a questioning jag, does the ending take the reader well beyond closure? Do the characters and situations have life off the page? Does the current ending foreclose on that delicious sense of aftertaste that appears after the last page has been turned and a final effect appears? Does it usurp reader participation by not allowing the reader to get a word or thought in edgewise, thanks to the control-freak nature of the author?

5. Not forgetting that some types of stories require descriptions of places, clothing, food, local customs and politics, is this story too descriptive, too heavy handed with theme and atmosphere?

6. Is the story told in the most effective point of view? Could someone have told it better? Think about it In this case better relates to more tension, more suspense, more irony, more naivete. Ah, naivete as in a naive narrator instead of a worldly or trustworthy one, which takes us back to Mr. Stevens in The Remains of the Day, and makes us question the benefits of a trustworthy narrator. Doctors and lawyers frequently complain that they cannot trust their respective patients and clients; should readers be able to trust narrators?

7. Is there a better narrative effect to be had than the present one; is it perhaps too literal? Could the narrative be enhanced with an edgier voice?

These last questions are of particular importance because the answers to them will have a direct effect on the first item in the next installment: Dialogue--the things characters say to attack stasis.

In the Beginning

There is a piece of constructive wisdom in television drama that calls for the thrust of the story to be made apparent before the director's credit rolls. Or else. Or else the viewer will click the channel selector to something more promising. In actual time elapsed, the director's credit rolls about ninety seconds in, at most two minutes. This means the intent in television drama is to inform the reader whose story this is, what it's about, and what the risks are.

By virtue of formatting conventions, the short story writer gets about a hundred words of text on the opening page and at most another two fifty on the second page to get the reader to sign on. A novel may proceed at a more leisurely pace, perhaps three or four pages of text.

These three standards are all subject to the laws of contemporary convention; they may change over time as, indeed, they have changed on their way to becoming what they are now. Take a novel of Thomas Hardy, since he is generally acknowledged to have been the rider of the cusp between the nineteenth century and the twentieth. Most of Hardy's novels begin with one or more characters walking down a road somewhere in the westernmost part of England, say Devon. We are treated to a description of the countryside, the narrow roads, the stone walls, the thatched-roof cottages. Then we are presented some sense of what the characters are doing out on such a road, either prefaced or followed by a thorough physical description of the individuals so that even were you to have skipped some of the description, you'd nevertheless be able to recognize the characters should you encounter them in your neighborhood pub or your local school or theater. Only then would you find some clue about what irked, intrigued, or preyed upon one or more of the characters. You do ultimately find out what the story is in Hardy's novels; in The Mayor of Casterbridge, you find out in so memorable way that it has seldom been duplicated. Depending on when if ever you read The Mayor, the opening may still be with you, holding you by the throat in a tighter grip even than Charles Dickens' grip employed in Great Expectations.

In many contemporary novels and short stories, enough care is accorded the characters that the reader begins to suspect something of consequence will happen soon enough to cause the kinds of curiosity associated with suspense, while in others, some intriguing set of circumstances appears to be in play from the very beginning. Tobial Wolff's remarkable short story, Bullet in the Brain, seems to encompass both these approaches with a maximum of economy and dramatic force. It is yet another tribute to Wolff's skills that he has us investing in a character unlikeable at the outset; only toward the very end does he give us clues that Anders, the protagonist, was at an earlier time a nice person

Modern stories and memorable stories from past times begin with a momentum suggesting a decision will be needed, an impasse reached, an alternative given, a consequence to be dealt with. It is not a spoiler to use Marilynne Robinson's remarkable novel, Housekeeping, as a prime example of this opening velocity. Ruth, the young narrator, and her younger sister are withdrawn from their school and small town, thanks to their mother having cast out their father. They are moved to another small town to live with their grandmother, whereupon their grandfather is killed in a spectacular train wreck and their mother becomes a suicide. There is enough velocity there to last for the entire novel, but author Robinson continues to pile it on. Remarkably, Housekeeping is not an operatic melodrama; it is many other things, most of them arguably literary in nature, where melodrama is supplanted by ambiguity.

Opening velocity is a matter of choice, a moment in the orbit of a story where too much background or explanation become the equivalent of albatrosses, weighing the story down instead of helping it take off. Action or volition rather than introspection are the Swiss Army knives and Leatherman tools of the narrative opening, the goal being to get the reader invested in the character by means of being invested in the character's actions. Time enough later on to slow the story down for background material and physical description.

Accomplished writers rarely find the optimal place for beginning in early drafts, choosing other methods for beginning the actual setting down of words, methods such as starting with characters in the middle of an argument, with characters pointedly trying not to argue with one another, with characters misunderstanding one another. Some accomplished writers begin with weather reports or scenic descriptions of the landscape; others still begin with descriptions of the characters or some thematic statement relative to the story; in any case, most begin with the goal of writing long then cutting short, setting down everything they can think of, then purposefully cutting it back, mindful of the weight each word carries.

If there is such a thing as the five-thousand-word short story, as many books on writing technique suggest, a significant approach might be to get down ten thousand words on a particular story, then remove five thousand of those words.

For some years, Barnaby Conrad gave an intriguing exercise in his workshop at the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference: Write a five-hundred-word sentence--any five-hundred-word sentence. Not all that many years back, one of the students in Conrad's workshop was a former newspaper reporter, Fanny Flagg, whose approach to the five-hundred-word sentence made her recall an incident from her childhood, which she called prophetically, "Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-Stop Cafe."

Whatever it takes to get it going. Then come back to look for the place where the events begin gathering a momentum. Find the spot where it is impossible to insert explanations, adjectives, adverbs, and weather reports. That's the place. Right there.

Roberts' Rules of Ardor

1. There is no right moment to begin a story or, if necessary, a novel. This goes beyond such propaganda as waiting or not waiting for inspiration. Beginning a story is the beginning of enthusiasm, even more it is the beginning of a friendship because by the time you've finished with the story or the novel, you will have come to share strengths and weaknesses with it, its and yours. There might be times in the process where neither of you is speaking to the other. Tempers flare. It may not care what you're doing for it; you may well not care what it is doing for you. Stories may be embarked upon at any time. One proof of this is a test that may be made by as simple a move as picking up at a time of only mild enthusiasm a story by an author you like.

2. You will undoubtedly have heard some rule of thumb about the amount of revision necessary to get the story or novel in shape, the particular rule of thumb being stuck in at the behest of an editor who likes numbers or because of your own sense of guilt that the story seemed to tell itself and was accordingly too easy. Revision is a structured process, its goal being to effect the most telling portrayal of the feelings set loose by the work at hand.

3. It is fun to seem contrary and bemoan how difficult writing is. It may have been difficult to learn the tools, and occasionally a story will require more thought, more trial and error. The fact is that you may have been sold a bill of goods by a used story salesperson, the bill of goods being that writing stories is difficult. You will then assume that writing is hard work, odious work, work that is no fun. If you began with the sentiment that writing was fun, you will begin to feel more justified in shifting your attitude when friends and teachers and professionals ask you when you're going to write something serious.

4. Writers who are perpetually miserable are likely to write stories about persons, places, and events where misery is a salient feature. Ask yourself if there is some embarrassment about having fun while you work. Be sure to change your ways if you ever catch yourself singing in the shower.

5. Does it make you some kind of creep if you enjoy writing stories about characters who are feeling miserable?

6. Revision is, as noted previously, a structured investigation to determine if you are telling the story at the correct pace, in the correct point of view, and whether significant emotions are being raised and discoveries being made.

7. Revision is making decisions about which of several alternatives you find most interesting and illustrative of your dramatic goal.

8. Ending a story or novel means not sticking around trying to tack on arguments or footnotes or, for that matter, introducing a digression that will result in anticlimax.

9. Ending a story is analogous to not being the last guest to leave a party. It is better to leave early than stay too late.

10. When readers tell you they want more details about your characters, they are confessing their interest in the characters.

11. When you revise, you carefully check each line and word of dialog to make sure it carries its weight and does not become talky or conversational.

12. One sure way of knowing you've completed your revision is the realization that only you will recognize the new things you're putting in or taking out.

The Point of No Return

Beginnings are neither easy nor natural, sometimes remaining unrecognized until they are well under way. Even then, beginnings are often recounted in retrospect, often sad retrospect, as in, If I had only known, or Little did I recognize then. Beginnings confound us nearly as much as endings. We often aren't sure where or when a thing begins until we decide where it ends, allowing us to scroll back to the literary equivalent of a Big Bang. Yogi Berra may well have observed that it isn't over until it's over, but had he been more observant, he'd have also recognized that we need a sign from on high that the ending really is over, allowing us to scramble back through the parking lot, looking for the lost keys of the beginning.

Being born is one beginning, promising in the sense of now being on stage, collecting coordination and memories. My own earliest memories come from a time when my family was driven by economic need from the Santa Monica, California of my birth to a distant suburb, Burbank, and a Mediterranean-style home on Providencia Street, which must have placed me in or about age three, where I remember being locked (probably by my own hand) in a bathroom with a corrugated glass pane in the door. Some time later I recall being taken by my older sister next door to see some baby alligators in the wash basin of our neighbors, the Browns. The Browns also had a dog named Silver with whom I had a relationship of sorts in that once Silver bit me and I in turn bit him.

Beginnings are not always where you expect them; in dramatic fiction, they are determined by the nature of the story and are every bit as important to get fine tuned as it is important to establish who or whom among the dramatis personae is/are relaying the story to the reader. Endings are not always where you expect them, either, meaning you either go on too long and thus risk the distraction of anticlimax or the quite different risk of stopping too soon, risking the reception of the narrative as a shaggy dog story.

Thus observed, with perils from both ends as it were, story in general is a risky business, particularly for those of us who follow the character-driven story as opposed to the compulsively orchestrated plot-driven story. And so we approach a given story with the sense that there is some safety in the middle part of the narrative arc, which in many ways is like the spare room or garage in which things are piled helter-skelter, waiting for use or, worse, waiting for guests to arrive, which occasions a need to clear our a sleeping space, which very need occasions some calamitous discovery such as the bed or sofa having an exposed spring or stain the size and shape of the former Soviet Socialist Union.

Okay, there is no place in story to go for safety, no soft spot, no lee cove or haven. Add to this menacing landscape of beginning, middle, and ending, there is the pulsing sense that a story need not be scrolled forth in chronology. If anything, a story told in strict chronology needs some added touch of suspense or characterization or moral quandary to leaven the unremarkable time frame.

I am mindful of these lurking menaces by a tart email from Digby Wolfe, reminding me it is time--another sort of time--to get on with the book we have been threatening for some time now, The DNA of Story. "I believe the middle is the minefield," he writes. "That's where the real danger lies--the matter of choice, where one may or may not safely tread, when in fact safety is the detonating word for the real menace:predictability..."

Our assignments are made. He will begin with middles and I with a dissection of the basic dramatic unit, the scene, which has beginning and middle and ending.

In the process, I am reminded of a time some years back, when The Writer was still quartered in Boston, and its remarkable editor, Sylvia Burack, approached me to do a piece on middles, which I could possibly still be grappling with to this very day had I not had the good bad fortune to watch that iconic film, The High and the Mighty, on television. The story is quintessential disaster film, wrapped in an ensemble cast, all of whom are caught on a flight between Los Angeles and Honolulu, where things go wrong. Seriously wrong. Engines catch fire. Storms approach. One of the flight crew--the pilot--has a heart attack. As one disaster after another is announced, we are delivered the dramatic equivalent of a one-two punch. The flight engineer announces that the fuel supply is in trouble, the radio man chimes in with the storm being up-graded, which will require greater fuel use. And now, the navigator with his announcement. We've reached the point of no return.

I was up immediately, reaching for my note pad, my reliable Moleskine. PONR, I printed. The middle is the point of no return; the story cannot end, the characters are committed to a course of action that will produce consequences. We cannot guess what those will be yet and indeed may change our minds as we proceed, but given the archetype, the plane cannot return to safety of the LAX airport; it must forge ahead. Not to worry, John Wayne was the copilot and he'll overcome his own issues to bring us safely under the storm and into Honolulu.

The reader needs to see the PONR to be invested fully in it. Check out Antigone, for instance, if you find this trope of mine is too modern. Check out Shakespeare and Ben Johnson, check out Middlemarch and even the short stories in this year's New Yorker.

It is instructive to see the more successful--by which I mean the more enduring--stories arriving somewhere at that Point, which throws facts and circumstances and surprise together, effecting and affecting the beginning and the middle. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, the PONR comes almost exactly in the middle, a stirring circumstance in which two of the principals, Dick Diver, the young psychiatrist, and Nichole Warren, his patient, are caught in a rain downpour while strolling in downtown Vienna, and in a matter of moments, to quote from Dick Diver's point of view, "he knew that from now on, her troubles were his." Were they ever!

There is a splendid PONR in Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, and an equally moving one in Huck Finn.

I shall direct Digby to these vagrant lines, curious to see if indeed we now have two chapters. On with the dialectic.