Vulnerability For Dummies

A longtime pleasure has been your investigation of the potential for unseen connections between pairs or triads of words.  At times, unseen meanings and relations jump forth at you like little kids in border towns, selling Chiclets gum.  On other occasions, what you supposed was already apparent jostled at you like aggressive bargain hunters at a Filene's basement sale.

The former circumstances bring unalloyed joy and noticeable surge to your writing energy.  The latter tend to produce the result of the butt of your palm as it strikes your forehead.  Both responses are, you believe, integral to the process by which you set words down on notepad or computer screen when you go about composing.

The words responsible for bringing this effect out from the wings and induced to take a bow are vulnerability and risk.  You have for some time been convinced that one of the things that brings a character--your own or someone else's--to a point of interest to you is the vulnerability that character brings to the story in which he or she appears.  Vulnerability equals the risk of being hurt as the result of a venture, a position taken, of neutrality affected, of an attitude.  Vulnerability means the risk of being wrong, making the wrong choice, facing the consequences of making no choice.  Vulnerability is a woman who loves to dance, who has had her feet trod upon a few times too many by partners who are not so nimble.  Yet her love of the dance draws her onward one more time.   It is a risk she takes and in the process of taking it, she endears herself to us.

Vulnerability is openness to being hurt, disappointed, rejected, dumped; it peers over the shoulder of happiness looking for a wedge issue and as such you have seen it and you have witnessed it in those about you.  The salient point in you observation is that even when it takes up residence in a person for whom you have no special fondness or respect, you nevertheless feel a tinge of empathy, however brief.  Poor S.O.B., you think.  About to get it.  Should said poor S.O.B. get too much of it, you are in danger of experiencing schadenfreude, which has an enormous rebound from the satisfaction you felt the S.O.B. deserved to the guilt you experience wishing it upon said S.O.B.

A character who has no vulnerability is difficult to like.  The goddess mother of Achilles understood this well, and left that small part of his body vulnerable so that her son could then go forth to appear in The Iliad and, for that matter, untold legends.  A character without vulnerability is a mockery of the human condition, even insulated from hubris and pomposity; a character who is afraid to love, afraid to take risks, afraid to change his mind, afraid to speak his version of the truth, or any combination of these is someone we can readily identify with because we readers have ourselves experienced all these fears and the unnamed fears of the unknown.  Readers, serious, well-read readers, are part romantics, part cynic; they expect something to go wrong because they are past the age of having learned to read, at which point birthday cakes have been the wrong flavor, cherished pets have died or been returned to the store from which they came, promises broken.  Subsequently, first and only loves have soured, friendships have been for any number of reasons abrogated, life has proved itself to demonstrate the calculus of unfairness.  Thus a reader encountering characters for whom nothing goes wrong will soon lose interest, thinking the suspension of disbelief has been misplaced by the author or the author's editor.

You read in anticipation of something going wrong, especially in the case of individuals who believed everything was just getting good or right or happy.  You wish to see how these individuals handle things going wrong.  Even if you secretly believe Achilles was a schmuck for taking umbrage as he did at the outset of The Iliad, you gradually understand what being a schmuck was under those circumstances, when such lofty stature was reserved for men of royal or military rank, and you could get on board in The Iliad with the comfort that being a schmuck in those days meant something grand and dramatic, possibly even tragic.  Now anyone can be a schmuck and our literature is the poorer for it.  Don't worry:  someone will think ill of you when some of your work appears in print or digitally because, after all, you have quite unintentionally made yourself vulnerable by putting your feelings and visions and leaps of imagination in the public eye.

Without risk the only consequences are regret and rationalization for the failure to take the leap.  With risk there is the great cornucopia of failure waiting, and even a character with a notable resume of failures brings something to the stage, a sense of utter nobility, stubbornness, or foolish, or a delightful combination of all three.  Who could want more in a character?

Where They're Coming from

No character however minor his or her ultimate role in a story, appears on stage without an attitude informed by some earlier event. We may actually see the event taking place without having the slightest notion of its effect on the particular character who happens to be present. If the character is truly minor, it is possible we will not see the event; we may not even know about the event, but the character in question does and performs accordingly--because of it.

Stage-trained actors and, to a lesser extent, film actors know it is not enough merely to appear for their moments in a scene. The immediate now is charged with colliding forces. We may have to deal with individuals in reality who are able to do their job in a workmanlike fashion, but that longtime favorite of yours, that Joe-the Plumber of your blog posts is the mythical pizza delivery person. He or she may have just come from an unfortunate customer during the last delivery, perhaps one who counted out payment for the pizza in pennies. The delivery person may also be an aspiring actor, either practicing various character types or, thinking the person to whom the pizza is being delivered is in some casting position, is showing off with voice, attitude, posture, whatever.

A matters stand now, you are procrastinating in the preparation of a book proposal with a particular revision suggested by your agent, doing so by doing a step beyond taking notes for a short story idea that came fluttering in. Your protagonist, still quite vague to you, has just been ordered away from his brother and sister-in-law's home, indirectly accused of at best being insensitive, at worst a sexual predator, thus you knew the territory in which the thematic arc was taking. You had no idea why you had him walking away, thinking to catch a latte and reconnoiter bus schedules, which baffled you even more because you had to stop and figure out why he does not have a car--everyone in southern California has a car.

This led you to the conclusion that he'd probably had his license revoked, which also brought you closer to the notion that he was in recovery from booze. Then the real gift arrived, the information that even though he was half in the bag when he gave his lectures, no one seemed aware of that fact. Bingo, you discovered he was a PhD. In a flash, you understood that his subject was the Classics because of another arrival of metaphor. By the time the character is out of the first scene, you also know you are going to mess with the time scheme, shifting into the indefinite past, where more of the problems on his plate are delivered. The more you know about where he is and where he was, the more you know about him and are thus able to throw impromptu exploding devices, dramatic style, in his path. You even know the name of the graduate student who was part of The Problem.

True enough, he is the principal narrator; it is his story to the point that it is tentatively named after him, as in "Uncle Charlie," a title that will not bear irony until after the story has been read through. Nevertheless, past, present, and future scenes begin to appear, each triggered by you're having scarcely written two scenes.

The real point is that until you know where a character is coming from--literally and figuratively--you are at a loss to be as specific with his behavior as you might be, losing opportunity for tension, that glucosamine of story. What kind of tension? Remember, Uncle Charlie was banished from his brother and sister-in-law's home because of their belief that he was paying too much and too close attention to their sixteen-year-old daughter, whom you will meet early on and find some assurance that she did not feel threatened by him or made the slightest bit uneasy in his presence. Of course this gives you the third scene in which Uncle Charlie will have picked the coffee shop to patronize in search of his latte, thereupon to be confronted by a barista who, although older, has similar enough features to his niece, that he becomes impressed with the similarity. But the matter can't stop there because you are just reminded of an incident a year or so back when you stopped in the very coffee shop Uncle Charlie is patronizing. A barista whom you found rather attractive but had no memory of ever having seen her before greeted you by asking you if by any chance you had the year before delivered a lecture on William Goldman in Salisbury Cathedral. As it happens, she was correct, prompting you to have the fictional barista at the North Star Coffee Shop ask Charlie if he is in fact Professor Hecht because either her friend or roommate had a class with him a few years back and has retained her class notes to that day. You're still not certain where this is all leading, but this is all material you did not have until Uncle Charlie was out on the street, looking for coffee.

Finding out where your characters are coming from, where they're going, and what their plans are give you the very things you were after when you started thinking about Charlie in the first place, which is story. And the real truth is that you'd had no thought of Charlie as a character in the first place; you were merely doing some background on Ella, his niece, for whom you have plans in yet another venture.

You must lead such an interesting life. Right.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that our characters live more engaging and interesting lives than we writers do. As if this weren't enough, many other persons live more engaging and interesting lives than we do. To be sure, there have been stories in which the protagonist is a writer, but in most of these cases the writer protagonist invariably sets down the notebook, replaces the pen in the pen holder, arises from the typewriter, pushes away from the computer screen to do something confrontational, investigative, physical.

If we do not live entirely in our heads, we spend a good deal of time there. By day's end, we have burned off sufficient calories to balance out the two-thousand-calorie diet. We may even experience the delicious funk of emotional fatigue, so used and shuffled have our emotions been employed during the working day. We may indeed be as righteously tired as our auto mechanic or landscape gardener neighbor, but we were inside, nominally alone, our most severe external obstacles the ambient noises of society, perhaps a cat wanting in or our and somehow terrified of the cat door, perhaps even a bored dog, standing or sitting guard at the cat door, and speaking of doors, the occasional evangelical going from door to door. Again, truth prevailing, our interior obstacles may be every bit as taxing as the automobile mechanic, the produce manager at the neighborhood supermarket, the landscape gardener with a severely allergic client. We may have come face to face with an unpardonable cliche, sprung from our very center of creativity; we may have hit the wall in terms of not knowing what a particular character needs to do next; we may have discovered the presence of two untasted cups of coffee adjacent the one currently in use (for some of us a substitute for the discovery of more than one cigarette burning away on some inappropriate surface).

When we discuss among writer friends the published works of writers we do not know personally, we may find ourselves using such phrases as "Characters bigger than life" or "cleverly implausible behavior," failing to note that characters who are smaller than life are not going to get any one's passport stamped, nor that plausible behavior may easily devolve into the sorts of things we do about the house between writing bursts, things such as excuse trips to the supermarket, by which is meant the sudden "discovery" that we are out of applesauce or paper towels or perhaps even smoked salmon slices, three elements vital to any story or essay. Perhaps there is the notion that in a scant two thousand miles, our vehicle will be due for servicing, thus we must calculate the average number of city miles driven in order to calculate the next time for maintenance. There is also the unbearable noise of the neighbor's lawn blower, the chatter of a dysfunctional family of crows, and the arrival of a perplexed pizza delivery person who has the house number correct but the street wrong, and who insists on telling you, when you tell him the street name, what the principal ingredients of the pizza are.

There is the explosive angst of being driven out of the house to the more hospitable ambiance of your favorite coffee shop, where Writer's Law Number One obtains. In any public gathering place, one particular voice, male or female, will resonate over the others, inspiring you to new, unparalleled dimensions of irritation. That person will speak often and at great length, impinging on your ability to make the most of this change of venue.

It is by no means that you long for the life of a plumber or an accountant or a lawyer; you know just about as much about pipes, balancing check books, and the law as you want to know. Rather it is that you have become used to attributing more functional problems and their solutions to such individuals and have begun in the process to romanticize them. You are too familiar with the problems writers face. It makes perfect sense for you to flee from a perfectly compatible computer with a large external monitor, then rush forth to the coffee shop with a note pad and handful of pens, where you settle in behind a frothy latte and begin to work until you are interrupted by a young woman, ringing cell phone in hand, who asks if you'll be kind enough to keep an eye on her computer until she returns.

Help, help, I'm being held prisoner in a writer's first draft

Front-rank characters come equipped with a built-in booby trap, a trait that guarantees narrative explosions and surprise. The trait, of course, is that each character is utterly convinced he is right. In the extreme example of that loving couple down the street, the Helmers, you have the husband, Torvald, thinking himself a good provider, an excellent family man, a devoted and appreciative husband, a doting father; and you have Nora, the wife, thinking she's doing everything possible to keep the household running smoothly, the children tended to, and appetizing meals set forth for Torvald. That's the surface. Once, when Torvald was quite ill, Nora borrowed a good deal of money that helped pay for treatment that saved his life. In addition to her wifely duties, she has taken jobs to earn back the money to repay the loan, but to protect his pride, she has not allowed him to know this, instead letting him think of her as a child-like creature, forever innocent and naive. This play, which demonstrated the primacy of Nora and the fact that Torvald's love was both conditional and selfish, was a time bomb, arguably an early skirmish in the women's movement, with Nora leaving Torvald and her children with a slam of the door that was heard around the world.

Characters are built on people, carry the inner compass of people, use the same pole stars used by people. When a character believes she is right, she behaves in a particular way; if that way is inauthentic, a travesty on her real beliefs, she'll have to come to terms with her behavior by changing, paying the price for her stubbornness, or in some way reaping the consequences. Her behavior, her sense of rightness, informs the story she tells or, indeed, the stories. Look at Blanche DuBois and her story, and see where it got her.

Look at Budd Schulberg's Terry Molloy, telling his story to his brother, Charlie. I coulda been somebody. I coulda been a contender.

How many persons do you know who tell their stories with a conditional verb tense or a past tense as opposed to a simple present tense? How many individuals do you know who are living in the retrospect of what they once were and may not be any longer. How much of your own stories are set in future and future conditional tenses?

How many individuals do you know who have rather remarkable stories but who lack the means to tell them in ways that would make people want to listen? How many authors have you been personally put off by when you approached their work?

The way out of much of this, of characters and individuals and authors and your own part in the equation is by listening when you have the opportunity. Individuals you admire and think of as raconteurs have traits that invite listening; by attending to their stories you can perhaps learn to identify these traits and make use of them in your own narratives, but of course you must absorb these traits, then make them yours.

A favored pass time of yours is watching actors as they deliver lines, Meryl Streep, for instance, in The French Lieutenant's Woman, and Jeremy Irons in that very film as well as in Brideshead Revisited. The older, shaggier ones as well; Albert Finney in The Dresser and Tom Courtenay in the same play, Ben Kingsley as Feste, the jester in Twelfth Night, Kate Hepburn and Peter O'Toole in The Lion in Winter, Maria Ouspenskaya in Doddsworth: "So, you vant to marry my son?" At first you imitate these worthies, a way of making sure you listened closely enough, but then the game truly begins because even in this you must go beyond mere listening and mere imitation. You must hear clear into the secret places of the characters and the secret places within you where your own characters lurk, sending you writs of habeas corpus: Help, help, I'm being held prisoner and I want to get out.

Do you get along with your characters?

If we were to spend any time with our characters in social activities, we'd make an interesting discovery. We are linked to each of them by a personal chemistry, just as we engage without thinking about it in chemistry relationships with our real-time friends and associates.

One individual I know and would hesitate to call a friend has the same effect on people as the famed individual from the Li'l Abner comic strip who was accompanied wherever he went by a black cloud. This person from real life has the ability to transform the most casual greeting into a litany of illnesses, aches, pains, and past tragedies, including deaths, divorce, rejected manuscripts. There are others whose company I am not swift to invite, because each in his or her own way produces a tingle of reaction I prefer to spend my time distanced from.

Friends and associates are more likely to be individuals who produce a single or combined sense involving such ingredients as trust, curiosity, intimacy, the comfort of shared experiences, support, humor, overlap of interest. While scarcely thinking about the process, I realize I more or less interview friends and associates just as they have in their own way interviewed me. Getting acquainted with students provides and provokes validation or surprise, I am frequently told, "I thought I knew all the quirks and variations among writers, but you stand all that on its end and bring out plain crazy."

It is worth the effort to make a few lists, starting with family members, then with individuals we see as associates or in professional circumstances, then as individuals whose company we seek for the mere chemistry involved. Each of these individuals is assessed in terms of our own perception of the degree and sophistication of the chemistry.

But now, you have a kind of lexicon or template for assigning feelings to the new characters who are after us for the literary equivalent of a green card by means of which they are able to remove themselves from the shadow land of imagination, then into a story, perhaps even a novel, citizenship in an entirely different landscape with entirely different possibilities for a decent life.

Chemistry at Work...or Not

You are smugly ensconced at Peet's, which is crowded. A barista nods at you over those in line, waiting to place orders. Medium nonfat latte, she mouths. You nod and moments later, your order is set on the counter with a wink. You find a tiny space, begin to set out your things, take a tentative sip of coffee, lift up your pen and begin making some notes on a work in progress.

Some time of engrossment and coffee sipping follows before you look up to see two persons standing at the lower counter, where coffee is ground and bagged for home use and where bulk tea is bagged to go. The woman is medium height with long hair the color of a sun-burned lawn, pulled into a bun, thus emphasizing the bony planes of her face. Her posture and her poise impress you to the point where you rate her as attractive.

Standing next to her is a man, perhaps an inch taller, heavy about the middle, his hair running to gray at the temples. You wonder if their placement is the accident of many customers in the same area or if they are together, some form of couple--friends, mates, lovers. He appears to be leaning into her space and she seems aware of the closeness, making no attempt to distance herself. Simultaneously you accept their couple-ness and begin defining their dynamic, the narrative that describes their behavior each to the other, and the need for a third party--you--as the witness and ultimate narrator, for unless one or each is a dramatist, they will not write of their relationship.

Layers of dramatic potential leap forth from them, a complex aura which you read, tempered by your own attitudes, preferences, and needs. They are buying a half pound of coffee beans, ground for espresso. Because you saw her as that most damning adjective, attractive, and him as the even more damned ordinary, you have constructed a near drama. Two characters and an audience, thus of at least three participants, one of whom you hope you know and are indeed at great pains to know.

You have made choices, passed judgments, imagined scenes in which all three appear, not the least of which is the man approaching you the next time you are at Peet's, drinking coffee and writing, telling you to stop writing about his woman, and you explaining either defensively or perhaps patronizingly that she deserves to have someone write about her. But now, ah, at this moment, you look up once again from your notes about them to the reality of them and they are gone, their half pound of coffee freshly ground and ready for such adventures as may befall them in your imagination at a random breakfast or perhaps some mid-afternoon pause for coffee and conversation that leads to drama.

The degree of accuracy or congruence between this couple and the characters you construct from them is unknowable and in this context of no importance. What is important is the chemistry you experienced when you saw them during those brief moments before they went tromping off to other stories and destinies. In the years you have been going to Peet's, you have rarely had this particular chemistry with real persons to the point of taking that next step, of pushing them through the portal of your imagination and into a dynamic that may be completely unrelated to them.

The connective tissue here continues because of the chemistry you experience when you see or think of events, invest them with feelings, write about them as though they were quite real and tangible. Is the chemistry still there in subsequent days when you reread what you have set down. You have taken as many, perhaps even more, liberties as you have with the middle-aged man and woman, standing before the coffee/tea purchase counter at Peet's. You have become a witness to realities not clearly known to you or understood by you.

And you set forth once again.

On Being Introduced to Characters in a Story

What is it that first gets you to caring about a character when you meet for the first time? It has little to do with the description of the character, although that might be off-putting if it is too static. Nor does it have much to do with gender or age or even occupation of the character, particularly since in the past weeks you have read about and in your own work written about a veritable cornucopia of individuals, most of whom you've stayed with long enough to get to know.

Thus it appears to come down to that intangible element you call authorial aura, a reflection of what the author thinks and feels about the character, as well as how that character behaves, literally, which is to say in action, and how that character begins responding to the circumstances into which he or she is thrust by the author.

On a number of occasions you have found yourself attending a gathering or party at which, with the exception of a host or hostess, none of the other attendees are familiar to you. This sense of strangeness is mitigated by the sense that you wouldn't have been invited had someone you like thought you would fit in for some reason or another. Even though it may not seem so to others, you are introverted, causing you to step forth cautiously, looking for a way to merge with the group, communicate, exchange information, contribute to the event. Similarly, you approach characters in a story, even characters from authors such as Louise Erdrich or Jim Harrison, whom past experiences have led you to believe will win your heart.

You are now looking, both in gathering and story, for some kind of chemistry, some measure of attraction that will cause you to hope for schadenfreude events to befall the character, a spilled drink, a dropped canape, a loud growl from within the tummy, a dumb remark. Or you might hope the character will accomplish something particularly brilliant or daring or interesting. Over all, you want people to win, but in order to have that view, there are others you'll want to somehow shoot themselves in the foot. It is likely that you are watching carefully, looking for traces of a character who is independent, takes risks, has opinions. Similarly, you don't want born victims, men and women who think they deserve unrelentingly grim results; no more than you want born optimists who always expect to win or to avoid loss.

He or she can be anyone at any age, stepping up to an event, any event, then letting the devil take the hindmost, but doing so, even forgetting lines, with panache. Ah, this is someone to follow, someone who knows where there is a bottle of ale in the host's refrigerator, or a stash of pinot noir in the other room, or a plate of hors d'oeurves that really resonate. This is the insiders information you seek at a party, the person who can lead you somewhere, possibly even into a story.

Symbols

If you were going to embed in a character a sign or symbol that conveyed to the reader that this individual is not to be trusted, what would that sign or symbol be? Why, of course, it would be the lapel pin American flag.

Too bad you won't be around to see the actual results. Guess that means you'll have to do a story about it to fulfill that serving of curiosity about what is likely to be made when archaeologists of the future discover all those lapel pin American flags.

All you can tell of a politician's agenda when seeing such a pin on his or her lapel is a desire to be reelected. Not wearing such a pin implies one's anti-Americanism or lack of patriotism. Wearing one means a kind of perfervid orthodoxy or a sensitivity to wanting to defuse such criticisms as those that go without conspicuous advertising. If we extend the metaphor a touch, it is of a piece with those who wish to proclaim their religiosity by wearing the cross, the Star of David, the om, the Crescent and the Star, or whatever other sign they chose as proclamation that they have in a sense taken refuge behind the inherent power of a symbol. You do not distrust such persons to the degree that you distrust those who wear the American flag, although now that you think of it, you might be ready to change your mind, or at least look more closely at the image of the wearer that comes through to you.

And isn't that the way the matter devolves for you: Each thing needs to be seen for what it is in and out of context. You are most comfortable, it seems, wearing all your causes and beliefs as though they were pins or symbols or campaign ribbons, but not in such public display. It is helpful for members of the military or of law enforcement to wear designations of their rank, a sort of convenience when it comes to establishing who's in charge. As you know very well, you are not always aware of which mindset or emotional response resident within you is in charge; sometimes a hint is helpful.

Yesterday, on Andrew Sullivan's blog, you saw yet another kind of demarkation in a quote attributed to Bill Clinton on the occasion of his appeal to the late, lamented Edward M. Kennedy for Kennedy's endorsement of Hillary Clinton as POTUS. "A few years ago," Bill Clinton is quoted as having told Ted Kennedy, "a guy like that [Barack Obama] would be getting our coffee." You hope the reference related to Obama's relative newness to big-time politics, but since it could be interpreted as racist, the allegation is one more stroke of tar on Bill Clinton's reputation and an urgent reminder to you of the possibilities for interpretation, misinterpretation, and imputation, through words, deeds, signs.

There is no doubt of the human condition being class oriented and of the signs, symbols, and behavior that serve as markers. You don't need an American flag on your lapel to remind you of your citizenship or the obligations inherent in that citizenship. Nor do you need a medallion or device to remind you of possible religious preferences you might from time to time express. What you need most and seek most are the words and stories that convey dramas where the conundrums and outcomes of interest to you are played out and your own sense of devotion to articles of faith and catechisms and stations of crosses that are illustrations of your own quest for understanding, friendship, and devotion.

Story as The La Brea Tar Pits

Story has become a set of circumstances from which all concerned, characters, reader, and writer are trying to extricate themselves.  Once each is free of these circumstances, the story has been launched with a life of its own.

Characters take first place in the hierarchy of individuals trying to free themselves, somewhat like the larger fish trying to free themselves from the giant nets cast to trap smaller fish.  Their progress in all areas of their involvement with the story are of primary interest to the readers and the writer.  They are living demonstrations of the difference between life, which, in charitable terms, is multifarious, not always structured and, if structured, not according to human terms.

Readers are trapped in story to the extent at least of their identification with the circumstances in which the characters are cast, wanting some of the characters to succeed at the expense of others, recognizing that life may often have entirely other plans.  Readers want to see life as story because doing so offers them chances to get things they wish to have, avoid things they wish to avoid, and rest assured that justice is real and potent as opposed to benign and abstract.

Writers are trapped in story because of the need that drives them in the first place, nudging them to push these manifestations of themselves into tight existential and moral corners.

You may well begin working on a story of longer work with a character whom you conflate with one or more individuals for whom, in real life, you have little or no use.  You may also begin with a type for whom you have no immediate emotional association.  The former type is no problem; it is natural, certainly permissible, to dislike a character at one point in the story.  Readers do so all the time.  The latter is another matter.  You must quickly find details, mannerisms, goals for that character which, by their very nature, will tip the balance within you, causing you to dislike, show disdain, or disagree with that character to the point where you will have to change your attitude.  True enough, as some persons in real life cannot be expected to change, some characters within stories cannot be looked upon to change.  But you can and should be able to change, arriving at the very least in a state of acceptance toward that character you once disliked or thought to be irreparable.

The key to storytelling is your understanding of the story before you and your characters' understanding of the implications of the story in which they swim and flail in their attempts to get free.  So long as your attitude to a character remains constant, you are trapped in the one-dimensional world of cliche and/or outline, of characters behaving as types rather than individuals.

This entire calculus of awareness is, to mangle the metaphor, like multiplication tables which must be memorized to the point of being internalized so that you do not think of them so much as have the correct relationship stored in muscle memory.  The more you commit to memory the awareness of story being a pattern masquerading as a trap, the less often you will need, while in the midst of getting down a solid draft of a story, to do the dramatic equivalent of counting on your fingers.

Repeat after me:  When a story doesn't work, it is because a character you have invented has become an individual you don't know, trapping you inside the inability to get that character more firmly enmeshed in a pattern you know all too well but are not yet willing to claim.

Writes of Passage: the Novel as Statistic

Why would a grown man spend hundreds of hours living and writing a novel that statistically stands no better a chance than being read by five or six hundred readers?  Well.  You already know several answers to that question, one of which is the potential for it being read by ever so many more or even a mid-list quantity more than five or six hundred readers.  

Another answer has to do with said grown man not being  able to help himself, of having experienced consequences previously when he saw fit not to spend the hundreds of hours of living and writing required to write a particular novel, consequences that to say the lease made him feel less comfortable about himself than he normally felt.  You could also ask said grown man if he thought the novel, regardless of how many persons read it or did not read it, would change human behavior.  He would answer yes, but not intending the change to be noticeable in humanity in general but rather within him; the change in human behavior would be resident within him because, after all, he'd come into the novel in the first place making accommodations, listening to the very characters he disliked the most, trying to find some glowing coal of humanity within them he could fan up to a flame that gave off some heat.  He would also be celebrating contrariness in his characters, thus glorifying the difference between them and those who strive only to be invisible through their adherence to tenets, concepts, and beliefs that do not rattle the cages of any cultural zoo or jail.

Such a grown man might well remind you that this was his work beyond the work of keeping himself clothed, fed, and sheltered.  He might remind you that he would have done it anyway, pleased to have the stimuli present that cause him to do this rather than, say, construct models of the Eiffel Tower from toothpicks or fit together pieces of jigsaw puzzles. neither of which, by the way, are all that distinct from writing novels.

There is in the real time interstice between the outer edge of Santa Barbara (Montecito) and Summerland a vast expanse of land at the top of Ortega Ridge that in recent years has been occupied by an organization called Qad (see map above).  You have obliterated the reality of Qad, which specializes in digital and electronic imagery and computer-based systems, instituting instead an upmarket retirement campus called Casa Jocosa, the name a Spanish translation from Edith Wharton's ironic The House of Mirth.  Every time you drive past Qad, you do not see Qad, you see Casa Jocosa, which is the venue for the novel in the works.  You are there, inventing even in off waking moments such conceits as a footpath system named after the Santa Monica Freeway some ninety-five miles to the south in Los Angeles.  You see Thursday night poker games and, only this morning, you saw and are quickly implementing a segment that houses a group of homeless illegal aliens who have tapped into the watering system of the golf course to provide morning showers and shaving water for those illegals as they begin their day, looking for and finding work in nearby Summerland and Carpinteria.  Thus have you with this very conceit altered your own sense of what it is to have a novel in progress, peopled with individuals who represent the demographics of a privileged community and the concept of trickle-down made so famous by a former governor of the state and President of the United States.

This is your world, a world you recognize as no better and no worse than the real world about you; it is a core sampling, a metaphor, a reason for being.  You like to think that more than five or six hundred persons will enjoy reading it, but you never know about such things.  There is an old Buddhist saying:  A sandcastle built far enough away from the shoreline to avoid being toppled by the incoming tide is in danger of being toppled by incoming dogs.

Actually,there is no such Buddhist saying, which you probably suspected.  I made it up, which you probably suspected.

What are you making us for dinner, dear?

Preparation for the day's writing session:

It may well have become a habit to approach the computer with all or a portion of a latte in hand, but this is not the preparation that gets the writing going in any meaningful sense.  Picture instead the setting of your next scene or, if it is to be a beginning scene, picture the place, the setting, including some sensual quality--sight, hearing, temperature, clamminess or humidity--in which the action will take place.  Then decide which characters are to appear and in what order.  Then think about what each wants the scene to lead to.  Then think about what each character has just come from and where the character is going next.  Think how well or how little these characters know one another, thus influencing the degree of intimacy or formality in which they discuss the businesses of life at hand.

Mary comes home from work at six, ravenously hungry.  The day had not gone well, particularly since her boss has told her how bad things are economically and how many faithful employees he has had to let go and how, even though there were some who were more qualified than Mary, he is keeping her on, the elephant in the office growing at about the same rate as Mary's boss's libido.  As if this weren't enough, Mary's husband, Tom, now watching the six o'clock news, beer in hand, informs Mary that the game of the week starts at seven, giving her just a tad under an hour to prepare supper.  Never mind that Tom has been laid off and has been home since about three o'clock, Tom wants to let Mary know that he wants his dinner not to interfere with the broadcast of a football game.  Do we have the basis of a story.

The more we have a sense of who these persons are as they step into the scene, the more likely we are to be able to represent them as individuals in action as opposed to characters being described.  The more we know what they've come from and what they have facing them, the more likely we are to experience empathy of their behalf.  Then it does not matter if we have or have not had that latte with which we approached the computer.

In a larger sense, stories are about such themes as loyalty, honor,devotion, love, dreams, aspirations, and the like, but we get to these matters through our vision of a character responding to a pressure, a tension, a clash of says versus feels.  How are you feeling tonight?  Under easily imagined circumstances, that could be interpreted as a code question for Are you interested in sex tonight?  To which the answer could be, before or after David? To which an answer could come, After because you're funnier without even thinking about it.  How are you feeling tonight takes on any number of meanings which influence and are influenced by the individuals involved.  You go ahead,start without me.  

Where do you think the scene will go?  Where do the characters push it?  Where is the surprise you hadn't seen coming?  What is your protagonist's worst fear (the one that extends beyond the boundaries of the next scene)?  Now we have some direction, some motion that is moving a collection of forces toward a splash of awareness.

 

Why? Because

When we ask as a teacher or reviewer "Whose story is it?" there is often an air of smug authority in our voice, indicating our knowledge of what the question really means as well as the satisfaction of having arrived at so lofty a plateau.

Truth to tell, we believe we are at the head of the line by asking the question in the first place.  Buoyed by this confidence, we go on to ask yet another question, as if to verify our position in the first place.  "Why that particular point of view?"

Often the answers to these two questions have to do directly with something the writer will have read some while ago, something in fact he or she may not have direct memory of until we, in our questioning mode, persist with even more questions to which the story teller, in a storytelling mode, answers.  Thus the power of the question in the first place.  Why did you give the protagonist red hair?  Why does the baby sitter speak with a French accent?  Why can't your attorney character not have a teak desk and not smoke cigars?

Questions from critics cut off more communication between the writer and characters, especially when sometimes the answers are best answered with the single word, "Because."

It is true that some time and effort become necessary; characters do not step forward confident and fully equipped. They must be pampered through a number of conflicts to the point where they are understood, formed, able to take whatever life has to give them within the confines of the story.  But once they have emerged and begun to feel their way into their assigned parts, give them the respect actors pay their favored directors; let them say of you that they were cast against an enormously large group of candidates, encouraged by the mere fact of being selected, and now ready to take on their part with confidence.  When someone in the audience asks why they were chosen, you can close your eyes and hear the appreciation as they respond, "Because the part was absolutely right for me."

Character Type: The Sorcerer's Apprentice

sorcerer's apprentice,the--an overeager aspirant who sets into motion forces he or she cannot control; a beginning or medium-stage student who has reached a stage of impatience and acts to outperform the mentor, discovering too late the need for more learning; a iconic character type who believes things are easier than they appear.

Naivete, hubris, and impatience seem to be the stars by which the sorcerer's apprentice sets his or her course, a course that in one way or another encourages at first blush the belief that the master's secrets have been digested and taken in as muscle memory. Thus the sorcerer's apprentice, whomever he or she may be, sets a glorious magnet of attraction for the writer to use as a character who is bound to produce some significant story line. The inevitable result of the sorcerer's apprentice was well illustrated in the 1941 Walt Disney film, Fantasia; things got out of hand quickly when Mickey Mouse used one of his mentor's charms to enchant a broom to fetch buckets of water that he, Mickey, should have been fetching by hand. Mickey was used to illustrate the Paul Dukas musical suite which in turn was offered as a musical version of the Goethe poem, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," which had earlier incarnations from classical antiquity. Thus also a dynamic twofer: an example of quiting (see) and validation of the iconic pedigree of the character type.

The sorcerer's apprentice trope is, then, often an innocent, as in Graham Greene's The Ugly American, who causes a progression of events other than intended, producing calamitous results. It maybe a bit of a stretch but Greene appears to have done it again in Don Quixote, in which a simple parish priest achieves enhanced status through a mild deception. The moral of the sorcerer's apprentice tale revolves about the consequences of taking the short cuts of convenience, using them as a substitute for learning. One of the unintended benefits for the writer is the self-evaluation that may come from undertaking such a story and recognizing the personal potential for naivete, hubris, and impatience.

If we posit the work of any admirable storyteller, say a Louise Erdrich or a Jim Harrison, as the literary equivalent of the sorcerer, then equate the enthusiasm and inspiration from reading their work with a story of our own, it is natural and understandable to think we have achieved the spells by which we can duplicate their sorcery. Our failure is not in the attempt but in the inability to recognize how much work these sorcerers have put into learning their craft. In that sense, we are all of us apprentices every time we embark on a new project.

Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled MSS

cliché--an overused meaning or rhetorical device; a stock character or dramatic situation that precludes or at least stifles any potential for originality; a form of literary shorthand that presents a person, place, circumstance, or thing in such a commonplace way as to avoid any further need for description or individuation; a deliberate or unconscious statement from the author that all is vanilla.

One of the more persistent cliches is a four-to-five-hundred-word feature composed of as many cliches as possible, demonstrating dramatically how what was once fresh and plangent with originality has become trite and predictable. Another is the easy-as-pie Internet cliche finder. Most cliches were at the time of their origin an highly visual or descriptive trope that became overused because of its clarity but has become through overuse an irritant.

Cliches do not stop as catch phrases, they extend to characters such as the absent-minded academic, the hit-person-for-hire who is kind to animals, the Irish cop, the Jewish pawnbroker or banker, the Italian criminal, the lazy Mexican, the red-neck Southerner, the effeminate male homosexual, the butch female homosexual, the bored housewife, etc.

The acquisitions editor confronted with an engaging story is likely to begin with a higher tolerance to an occasional cliche, growing more alert to these infractions if they persist. Thus the cliche joins the comma splice, indifferent spelling, and questionable usage as mechanical causes for rejection. The dedicated writer makes a search-and-destroy (probable cliche here) anti-cliche mission a part of every revision, starting with word usage then moving to an examination of each character who makes an appearance, finishing with any characters who may be mentioned but not brought on stage, thus coping effectively with the built-in writers' hubris of writing unquestionably cliche-free prose.

The Dramatic Trinity, Conscience, Ego, and Need

ego--the essential nature of a character; how a character acts, think, feels about himself; the part of the character that reacts to and interacts with the world of reality.

The ego is the self, out in the causal world, reacting and interacting, planning, attempting to be effective in personal, professional, artistic, and moral relations. In combination with conscience (see) and needs (see), it is a helpful way to define a character, attributing respective sizes and shapes to each with the total combination representing the entire character. A statistically normal character would have equal triads of each aspect, a warning flag for the writer to look elsewhere for an individual of dramatic interest. Dramatic characters tend to have large ego and extreme needs at the expense of conscience.

Assign a given character a score of 100 points to be divided among this dramatic trinity. A character with an enormous conscience, say a 60 or 80 would accordingly have to give up ego and needs points. How would a large conscience effect the ego of your 20- or 30-point ego, and what would be left over for needs?

Try ranking some of your favorite iconic characters, dividing up their 100 points among the three spheres of individuality, then see how helpful this guideline is when it comes time to assess your own creations.

The Best Schemed Lays

complacency--a feeling of smug sureness and being in control; a dramatic fulcrum for characters who are about to be tipped into the froth of story either by action or inaction; a delineation between characters who believe they have sufficiency to suit their needs and characters who are hungry for change.

When the reader encounters a complacent character, said reader receives the literary equivalent of Blue-Screen-of-Death computer warnings; something earthshaking is about to happen, be it a palace revolt, or the reply to an innocently voiced "Hey, what's for dinner tonight?" being met with a "Get your own damned dinner because I'm outta here for good."

Into the story come those commandos Jealousy, Guilt, and Grief, their faces blackened, their knit watch caps pulled down low, invading and occupying the terrain, driving the circumstances and responses. 

 Complacency is metaphorically the best laid schemes of which Robert Burns wrote, and we know what comes after that, they "gang aft aglay," and do so big time.

Show us a complacent character, F. Scott Fitzgerald might have written in his longish short story, "The Rich Boy," and I'll show you a story in the making. A complacent character is astride his or her high horse, vulnerable to the low-hanging branch. 

 A complacent character might ride that high horse into thinking to make a romantic conquest or achieve a dramatic promotion in professional or academic status, only to be met with the reality of the leveling effects of falling unselfishly in love or being forced to recognize that there are others of equal or perhaps higher qualifications.

Hint: take an interesting male or female character. In one paragraph, establish him or her as being on the cusp of an easy achievement of a relatively significant goal, say chairman of a department or starring role in a stage play of extraordinary range. 

Paragraph two presents the character striding into the crucible. 

Paragraph three presents the enthusiastic response the respective characters are accustomed to experiencing. Paragraph four introduces the surprise of reality: in recognition of the male's good work, the dean is keeping the male character on, serving as a minor assistant to the new department chair; the woman is eagerly recruited to play the role of the maid to the female lead. Now the story progresses.

Additional hint: a universal theme is the awareness that life is not fair. (See, for instance, the last few lines of Shirley Jackson's short story, "The Lottery.") How about a story in which a complacent character (as opposed to a truly competent or talented individual) wins. How about it?

Says Who?

point of view--the character or characters in a story through whose eyes and other senses the reader learns and intuits the dramatic action; the teller of the tale; the biased, human filter through which the dramatic information is transmitted.

The writer achieves a significant part of willing suspension of belief from the reader when dramatic forces cause the reader to forget that the story is emerging directly from the writer and that, in fact, the story is pure artifice. This WSOB is well achieved by artful introduction of one or more characters who are telling the story, ASAP. As in:

"My father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip."

The first sentence would actually fit as a Twitter entry. The second sentence pretty well nails the character and his point of view in place, where it remains, a resoundingly successful example of a writer assuming a persona and that individual's traits and experiences in order to relate the details of his encounters variously with his snarky sister, her jewel of a man-for-husband, with an escaped convict, a cantankerous old lady, and a spoiled-if-beguiling young woman named Estella. So gifted a public speaker was Pip's creator that he could have chosen to tell the story of Great Expectations in his own voice. You could profit from asking yourself why he did not, then consider your answer.

There is often some practical reason for a particular character or set of characters having been chosen to narrate a story, sometimes as simplistic as Ahab's case in his selection to be narrator of Moby-Dick; he was the only one who survived the events of the novel. Mr. Stephens was chosen to narrate The Remains of the Day because of his resume as head butler, but also because of his not getting 'it," which is to say because of his naivete. Thus was the writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, constrained to keep Stevens's naivete in mind at all times and to constantly be aware of the need to render it plausibly.

Who is telling your story, and why?

Benjy Compson was chosen to narrate a portion of The Sound and the Fury because the wiring of his intellectual and reasoning processes were some degrees away from the intellectual and emotional outlook of other POV characters. No doubt about it, at some point during his writing of the story, William Faulkner recalled the Shakespearean line from Macbeth"...it is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing." But Faulkner new the need to have larger fish to fry than the mere perception of Benjy as an idiot; Faulkner wished the reader to compare Benjy's vision of reality with that of the other characters in the novel. Benjy is then by no means a case of a writer thinking, Aha, I'll tell a story from the point of view of an idiot. The novel is a complex comparison of attitudes, sensitivities, and behavior in which Benjy emerges as an ironic symbol of the most admirable sort.

Once again, why have you selected a particular person or combination of persons to relate your narrative? What effect will your choice have on the other characters? What effect will your choice have on the reader?

Order of Awareness, The

order of awareness, the--impressions received by a character upon entering a scene; sensual priority list of a character in a dramatic situation.

Depending on the age, gender, social rank, and purposeful agenda of a given character, that person will tend to notice conditions, surroundings, and individual traits in a ranking related to the type of story being told. A member of Gang X, for instance, on discovering he is out of his turf, is going to be particularly watchful for males who are potential members or allies of Gang Y; a racially prejudiced white male might find himself looking for possible escape routes when he notices an approaching group of young blacks on the same side of a narrow street. A young man out on the prowl for meeting women will, upon entering a bistro or neighborhood tavern, will be struck by the presence of nubile females. A group of women friends, out for dinner and a movie, will be likely to note the bothersome presence of a group of predatory males.

Men or women, already located in a setting, will probably classify newcomers in terms of their gender, height, and clothing, but not necessarily in that order. Knowing your characters will make it easy to have a director's feel for what they notice and when they notice it. Some men, for instance, note the sexual viability of every woman who enters the place, age being a third- or fourth-place factor in that calculus, behind body type, height, and hair color. Women are more likely to note the posture, height, and dress of a new male addition to a room.

What are your characters going to notice first when they enter a room? Decor? Airiness? Number of persons present? Their height? Perhaps their age. How do your characters enter scenes? What are they looking for? What qualities or presences set them ill at ease? How do these responses help define who the character is?

Hint: A character's individual reaction to persons, places, and things speaks directly to who they are and how the reader may expect them to behave. Added hint: an endangered character is more likely to focus directly on the immediate source of danger rather than what tune is playing in the background or what two other characters in the background are arguing about.

Characters are in a sense like the Hubbel Telescope, sent out to gather images of events. Understanding the psychology of each character along with his or her strong and weak points of observation helps to render them as individuals rather than types, and we know what F. Scott Fitzgerald said about characters and types (opening paragraphs of "The Rich Boy.")

Spare me the details

details--one or more portions of a larger vision of a character, a place, system, institution, or thing; a discreet, identifying trait; pieces of a defining trait; traces of emotional elements in a story.

In order to be effective as ingredients in a story, details must have embedded in them a feeling or the power to evoke a feeling. Details are the useful adjectives and adverbs, humming about a narrative like mosquitoes on a summer afternoon, looking for a landing site. Details may also contain facts but they are best presented as though they also bore emotions, which is to say that facts presented only as empirical sources will lead to boredom. Readers want accuracy in their details but when they turn to story, the facts they are after are insights and revelations about human and animal behavior.

There is a relationship between the degree of confidence a writer has and the control with which that writer deploys details, the more confident the less the need for details. The more comfortable with the reach of the story, the less likely the writer will feel the need to defend rather than merely tell the story.

Hint: Avoid laundry lists. Use only those details that relate to the narrative point of view (as opposed to the need for the author to intervene). Each character will have thresholds of awareness, sensitivity, tolerance. A character who is a painter or photographer will have an eye for nuances of light. A musician will be more likely to not details of a voice or sound. A chef might have a nose for the subtle smells and flavors of an atmosphere. A prepubescent child will experience details of time in a different manner than a septuagenarian. As the writer "becomes" and takes on the sensitivity of his own characters, the writer will experience a sense of the right impressions and details for each character. More than any use of physical details in her portrayal of her character Patricia "Paddy" Meehan, author Denise Mina focuses on Paddy's frustrating encounters with diet, the extreme measures she sometimes takes, how she falls off the dietary wagon, and how she dresses, hopeful of effecting a camouflage.

In his novel Brooklyn, Colm Toibin allows his Irish characters a differing set of awareness than his Italian characters, allowing readers of neither ethnicity a richer vision into their respective cultures. He is similarly apt in his depiction of sports fans, and the feel of commercial and domestic settings. In her novel The Shipping News, Annie Proulx uses detail to produce the sense of cold in the Newfoundland setting with stunning effect. More to the point, neither Toibin nor Proulx over detail; each uses excellent choice in the amount and the way the detail is brought into context.

At one time--the 1940s and 50's--writers of the so-called Naturalist inclination thought to define their characters through lists of products they used, types of clothing they wore, specific foods they enjoyed or detested. For all their sincerity and devotion to their approach, their characters stood out for readers in the details of their actions and attitudes.

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.