Notions

A plot is an elaborate schematic of events, leading to a conclusion that in infused with some resident emotion such as comfort, satisfaction, disappointment, redemption, dread, revenge achieved, justice done, justice waiting to be done. There are others, of course, including permutations just as in undergraduate courses there are the comparative studies disciplines and the compare-and-contrast essay questions on examinations. All these results produce one form of emotion or another in a degree sufficient to satisfy the reader who has read clear through to the end.

Plotted stories often cause characters to behave in ways that baffle their creators, the bafflement coming from the simple fact that the creator has lost touch with the simple causes why characters really do what they do or do not do what they ought and don't.

Many of us slide into plot-driven stories in our waking, non-writing lives, a term advisedly used in the plural because we so often each of us lead more than one life.

It is no easy thing, going about in a story, wanting something desperately to the point where we have been made a bit tetched in the head over it, wanting something or someone or some condition beyond what our reason tells us it is good to want a something or someone, or some condition. Part of the difficulty comes from the need to focus on being obsessive and at the same time compulsive/ The more forces in real life challenge and frustrate us, the more frustrating our goal or desire becomes, compounding frustration and irritation. We go about wearing our game face all the time, in waking hours, in sleep, and in the dreamless sleep where we are not permitted to see the causes, effects, and consequences.

The kid who is asked what he or she wants and who snaps in retort Nothing, or I don't know! has already been worked over by the system to the point of not daring to remain in touch with the desired goal, which essentially means not having any hope at all. The kid who is still full of hope is in danger of being mocked by chums or elders for such overt optimism. You'll see what your optimism will get you.

Well, here you are, whacking through the weeds of middle age, still optimistic that every story you begin will at some point be brought to a finish, that it will sooner or later find a home wherein it will be published, and from there a modest readership who will in some way or another be affected by it. You can't realistically ask for more than that, but you do; you don't so much want the story to change the world as you want it to change you. You have no tangible idea what you want to be changed, perhaps your temper, although without that you might become too serious and not be able to topple with laughter and ridicule the things that frustrate and enrage you.

You might somewhere harbor notions of changing how others see you, which presents the danger of you wanting to manipulate the outcomes with real persons as opposed to characters. This leaves you the heel of the loaf, metaphor for changing the way you see yourself. would you really want to do that, just as we were getting on so well?

You are left a character in life, following no scripted outcome. The horse you ride is no fine Arab, scarcely even a working quarter-horse. Ah, a hobby horse. Grown man riding the hobby horse of his urgent wish to tell stories. Not, perhaps, the classiest horse in the barn, but one that suits you. You'll take it. Giddyap.

The Ultimate Put-down

Although you have heard and pursued arguments to the contrary, it is your belief that change may possibly be enhanced but never hurried; it wants and takes its own time.  And your change is not someone else's change, your change has its own inner clock.  For all practical matters, you are not aware of change on a daily basis.  You may look at notebooks and journals you began compiling at about age twenty; more convenient is a review of blog entries, as you have done recently to check out the allegations that you wrote of someone from your past as being a deadbeat.  

Risking the sounds of vainglory, you must admit your recent entries, your notes to the various components of your self, comprise a more detailed map of the known universe of you than do your earlier notebooks, a broader set of interests, preoccupations, likes and dislikes.  But no accurate index of change, only the sense that you have over the years become something other than what you were although still a direct relative of that person.

The agent provocateur of these observations came into place because this is the week to review a Golden Oldie, a book that has been published sometime significantly back in the past, for demarcation purposes, at least as far back as the penultimate review, The Canterbury Tales, but at least something published five years ago.

You don't recall the trigger that led you to William Eastlake's 1951 novel, Go In Beauty, only that upon first reading it, you were transfixed.  It had nearly everything you wanted within a book.  It had the Southwest, it had Indians, it had contemporary issues, it had mesas and buttes, it had creation myths and mysticism.  If Navajo were not your favorite native Americans, they were next door to them, some of the Hopi attitudes then bound to rub off.

How easy it was to slip over to Amazon, find a copy from a nearby vendor, and click on the Order tab.  How special to find the envelope in yesterday's mail, slip the pocket knife into the fold, and withdraw a trade paper version in reasonably fine condition.  How easy to slip over to Peet's, order a foamy latte, sit back, and send yourself back to a younger you and to the part of the country you've been itching to revisit for some time now.

In a similar mood, also relying upon Amazon, you ordered a book from the depths of your immersion in noir fiction.  Even the title worked its magic on you:  You Play the Red and the Black Comes Up, which was written by the same man who wrote Lassie, Come Home.

True enough, you have had other such flashes of nostalgia and insight, all of which amply repaid their recall; it was these two that were such abject failures.  Having read and feasted on each earlier, you could scarcely bring yourself to continue reading beyond the first forty or fifty pages as the evolved you, or is it the more cynical you or the more conservative you, or--?

Go In Beauty is the quintessential mantra of Navajo being; an entire culture and religion is built around the joys and comforts of things in harmony.  Rituals are plentiful to cure the un-beauty of people, places, and things.  These are called blessingways and still seem to you a remarkable concept for anyone to have at ready disposal.  Go In Beauty is also a novel that demonstrates to you the things you once found magical and now find tedious, unbelievable, certainly unremarkable.

Quick, find five hundred kind words to say or think or feel about the book.  No problem.  You could start with the obvious love the writer has for the countryside and for the horses and for his acceptance of the multitude of personalities that are crammed into the single individual.  You could point out that he places an abundant burden upon anyone who would say I am a writer.  Easy five hundred words out of those; possibly even many more hundreds of words.  But there are these words now to reflect how much that book meant to you at the time you first read it and how you cannot bring yourself to read farther than the third chapter, words that reflect the considerable burden it has placed on you to spend time understanding, reviewing, revisiting the two entirely differing landscapes you inhabit.

It is an equal crisis when you come upon a work you were dismissive of, aware of your sneering, your condescension, reminding you in addition to the discoveries of change within you of the dismissive, sneering, condescending person who stormed about, wearing your clothing, dining with your friends, attempting intimacy with your girlfriend, using your red Olivetti portable typewriter to weave out stories to which your name was signed.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom at least two high school teachers conspired with you to cause you to dislike back then, would have relished the idea for a story you would now dedicate to him much as Mozart dedicated those six remarkable string quartets to Josef Hayden.  A writer picks up a story, begins reading it, sneers, says "I could have done this better," then sets it down, unfinished, only to be told, "But it was you who wrote it."

Any spare change?

growth--the dramatic motion toward change inherent in a character, an institution, a place, or a thing; the need for a front-rank character in a novel to advance or retreat in relation to behavior and understanding.

Growth is accretion or erosion, the consequences of a character's participation in a longform story, the evolution or devolution of an organization or institution; it is tangible movement in a direction the reader will recognize, a movement to which some emotional weight is attached by the character who experiences it. In the longer dramatic narrative, characters have the time and the need to grow; this is, after all what is meant by development.

Characters change, come to realize, or at the very least are held hostage by their circumstances. Institutions change, arguably for the better or worst, depending on the characters involved in the institutions. The mythical town of Pluto, ND, so vivid with promise in the early pages of Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves, devolves toward the end of the novel as a virtual ghost town, while in the same narrative the principal characters age, grow away from or grow into other mind- and heart-sets, while the once thriving Pluto Historical Society, down to two members, disbands.

It is not so much that growth in a longer work must be particularized in detail as it must be recognized with some hint of what is to happen, allowing the reader to imagine (and argue) about the likely results. Shorter works do not have the convention or luxury of recording change; they instead play out on the characters being led to a brink and bade farewell, their intentions not readily known.

As the twenty-first century novel and short story gather traction and personality, it is almost unthinkable that their characters will, as many earlier novels and stories decreed, all live happily ever after but will instead be buffeted with the whims, uncertainties, and multifarious inducements of life as we have come to know it. Modern life has evolved to the unthinkable come to pass. Future life grows into the yet more unthinkable. If we are realistic, there will always be an elephant waiting for us somewhere, be it the living room, the Greyhound Bus station, the supermarket, or the already crowded landscape we like to think of as the soul.

Catalyst

catalyst--a character, social unit, or organization in a story that causes a change to take place; an event that transfers energy to the point of shifting dramatic inertia from stasis or status quo; a story point that tilts the landscape toward a point of no return.

Characters frequently self-catalyze to get themselves out of a perceived rut; they change jobs,move to different cities, join the Peace Corps, abort or switch romantic relationships, adopt dogs or cats. Characters also accept opportunities which seem to them to be steps advancing toward some long-cherished goal. Catalysts are often neutral but, depending on the nature of the character responding to them, can be seen as Cosmic, Fate-driven, and certainly Golden Opportunities and Lucky Breaks. As such, the character responding to the catalyst will see some guiding hand or throughline in an essentially chaos-filled universe.

A catalyst represents a dramatic unit of energy, which may come from a chance meeting, an unanticipated discovery on Craig's List, or a connection between elements not usually associated. Remember Ishmael, as early as the first paragraph of Moby-Dick, wanting--needing--some catalytic agent: "Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can." Luck of the draw for Ishmael was choosing The Pequod, nevertheless, his wanting a catalyst to change his humors drew him into an adventure of a lifetime.

Many characters have resident within them the first cousin to hidden agenda, the secret desire. When a character becomes aware of a catalyst that could bring about advancement to achieving the secret desire, you'll have created a conflict of wrenching intensity.

Hint: Make a list of ten favored characters in ten favored books. Identify the catalyst that propelled them into action. Now you have a profile of your own favorite types of catalyst which you can enhance by putting one of them to work in your next story. Adventurous sort that you are, you can also reach within yourself as so many fine actors do, where you will identify a catalyst that is contrary to your standard preference. From such adventures come interesting characters, doing interesting--and perhaps scary--things.