A Table for Two

The driving force in narrative is curiosity.
Reader and characters proceed to peer beyond what will happen, into the territory of what information will be revealed in the unfolding of an event.

Two individuals are having a conversation somewhere--or so the reader thinks at first blush.  Each of the two characters has come into the scene bearing the baggage of explosive previous encounters.  They have come to THIS place because it is neutral, with no associations for either of them.  They have brought with them the gifts of a resolve to be patient with one another, each purposeful in the intent to let the other finish thoughts, sentences, ideas.

We don't know the names, gender, ages, social rank of either and yet look at how much we already know about them.  The "Go-ahead" card is down on the table; each is determined to let the other go ahead and/or finish what is to be said.

We can begin to wrap other relevant data about the armatures of these two, data that will find its way with a snow-shoes-through-a-mine-field purpose and caution, learning more about each of the characters and feeling the tangible emotional climate as they proceed.

So long as we have been triggered toward suspicion, we can suspect they will once again escalate toward combustion because they have done so in the past.  WE may also feel the mounting tension because timing and pace have become important factors in the meeting.  

Though neither has an abundance of time, each is constrained by the be patient rule. Whatever the subject of conversation, we sense the control and deliberation being exercised to the point where it becomes a tangible tension.  

The subject may never be directly articulated, as with the conversation between the couple in the Hemingway story, "Hills Like White Elephants."  The subject at hand may also be--writer's choice--carefully spelled out to the point where the reader will wonder, What is it with these two? because there is a subtext shimmering there over the conversation like the ghost of a former lover.  

We may, of course, set off with a conclusion already in mind.  They are heading to combustion, perhaps to the point of not speaking again for some weeks or months to come--perhaps not ever again.  Having opted for this approach, we can set the conversation in motion with an agenda or agreed-upon result:  Did you bring the papers for me to sign?  

What a lovely, evocative line.  "Of course I brought the papers for you to sign.  That was the entire purpose of this meeting, wasn't it?"  What a lovely lagniappe to tack onto this simple sentence:  "What do you take me for?"  And now, the attitude-tinged response.  "Well."  Or, if you are the sort who prizes greater clarity:  "Well, I thought..."

The thing has evolved; we want to know.  Reader and writer, we want to know.  Let's start with the first thing we want to know:
"What's that supposed to mean?"

There is absolutely nothing unusual in this conversation, yet it carries agenda and implication crackling between the two characters much in the manner of the electricity between Richard and Anne in Richard III, Act One, Scene Two.

What will they do?  When and how will they do it?

We still know precious little about them.  Does it say anywhere that they are analogs of two trains, speeding toward one another on the same track?  So long as the conversation is on the table, a tension begins to grow until none of us, reader, writer, or characters can endure it.  And this is the point where we begin looking closely for the optimal point in the text to end the scene, a deed that may mean leaving out a line or an exchange that has become memorable with the texture of wit, but this is not about wit; it is about two unnamed individuals of indeterminate age, gender, and moral clarity, meeting to exchange dialogue.  

We barely know enough about either to determine who they are or what they want and what they might do to us.  They could be man and woman, woman and woman, man and man.  They could be former lovers, present-time lovers, parent and child.  The choice is entirely ours.  

We have set them loose to work their way across the whiteness of page, of computer screen, of the stage of the mind.  They are nameless but they are armed with two weapons that may pierce us to the quick, drama and dialogue.

Another fine mess...

combustion--the point in a short story or novel where dramatic elements collide with sufficient force to provoke action leading to a conclusion; the aggregation of forces prior to denouement; the literal and figurative boiling over of story.

A useful metaphor: story is a crucible into which such elements as characters and their agendas, opposing forces, surprise, reversal, and shifts of power have been added and the heat of plot inertia is applied. The pressure becomes so great that the story combusts, explodes, boils over, leaving the characters to clean up the mess, which is to say effect some kind of resolution, however permanent or temporary.

Most stories, longform or short, have combustion points; those that do not can profit from them. An excellent example of the combustion point in a short story occurs in Tobias Wolff's "Bullet in the Brain," where Anders has already been introduced as the point of view through whom the story is told, the bank robber is introduced, and the animosity between Anders and the bank robber set in motion. One combustion point comes when the bank robber fires a gun. A combustion point in a longer work occurs in the film, The Third Man, written by Graham Greene. The combustion point is viewable on You Tube (Third Man/Ferris wheel scene). Holly Martens, the protagonist, meets his old friend Harry Lime in a gondola car of a large Ferris wheel in the Vienna amusement park and Lime delivers his now iconic disquisition on the Swiss and the cuckoo clock. As a result of this cynical observation from Lime, a line is drawn in the moral sand between the two friends.

Each combustion introduces the element of change into the respective stories cited here, nudging each to its unique conclusion. The chemistry becomes: combustion causes change which forces outcome.

Hint: Aggravate, drive, tease, torment the characters to a point where one or more of them moves beyond what he or she appears able to take, causing the behavior that will make some things irrevocable, sweeping safer options off the table. Characters who are always in control ultimately tire the reader. Characters who appear to have breaking points concern the reader. Characters who either discover or are driven to an interior place they did not know they had become permanent residents in the readers' mind.

You Owe It to Yourself

obligation--a duty felt by a character to perform; a debt to be repaid under specific circumstances; acknowledgment of a favor given and the subsequent expectation that an act of similar consequence will balance the account.

Obligations may be established between individuals and groups such as banks, clans, or families; they may apply to complete strangers as well as friends or relatives. In fiction, obligations may be real or imagined, tugging at the conscience and patience of the parties involved. Often felt as duties "owed" an older generation by a younger one, obligations literally have the power to disrupt lives, cause rebellious behavior, and produce the abrupt consequences of impatience and anarchy.

A character's hackles may be seen to rise when he is told, "It is your duty..." The building blocks of duty and, often, guilt become building blocks to story as yet another basic element of story is moved into place, the element of resentment.

The cloud of obligation has hovered over the human species throughout its development; in many cases survival of a prehistoric band or clan depended on it. A traveler accepting hospitality at the home of a friend or someone recommended by a friend was obligated to return the hospitality if the circumstances were reversed. Tradition placed heavy weights on the obligation of hospitality; if you accepted a person's hospitality, that individual became responsible for your welfare, a circumstantial crucible that could and undoubtedly did provide unexpected story elements.

It can be argued with some thought of success that a country in possession of the knowledge of nuclear fission has the obligation to use that knowledge to enhance the prospect of comfortable and peaceful living among the nations. An individual with knowledge of a crime has an obligation to take action to the point where justice will be served.

All the various narrative genera may be seen as reflecting obligations. Mystery readers, for example, expect challenging puzzles, thus the obligation of the mystery writer to make the mystery as intriguing as possible without removing it from the sphere of plausibility. It becomes the writer's obligation to provide elements a reader of that genre has come to expect, additional obligations include providing those elements with imagination and originality. It may even be argued that at some point a writer is obligated to interest as many readers as possible.

A 1972 play by Neil Simon, The Sunshine Boys, becomes an instructive example of the explosive relationship between obligation and resentment. Al Lewis and Willy Clark are a one-time vaudeville team who worked together on stage for forty years, during the course of which they attracted a large, loyal following. Trouble is, they grew to hate one another, spoke only when on stage during a performance. Clark, the stubborn one, resented Lewis' decision to break up the act and retire from show business. Now he has to make it on his own, doing commercials for a potato chip maker. The story begins with a television network inviting the team to reunite for a special tribute to the history of comedy. Neil Simon has caught with his superb rendition of the feuding team the combustive chemistry between the two characters, helping us see the potential for placing obligation and resentment in motion as the embodiment of two cantankerous old performers.

Obligations are like visiting relatives; they drop in unannounced, stay too long, often leave a mess. And they are always "away" should you ever need a place to stay. You could smolder with resentment or use the list of personally felt obligations as a laundry list for story opportunities.

I Have Said It Thrice

"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.
"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true."
The Hunting of the Snark
Lewis Carroll


Being the person I am, tidal in nature, certainly as mercurial as my September birth would indicate astrologically, I would nevertheless try to give as concrete, earth-bound answer as I could were you to ask me if I knew where, at a given moment, I was. High probability of an I-don't know answer, equally high chance of exact coordinates or some similar sense of exactitude. Almost no chance you'd get an it-all-depends answer. Travel with me has certain risks involved. If you are the sort who insists on knowing your destination and arrival time in advance, whether the travel is automotive, ambulatory,or in such literary excursions as essay or story, we are probably going to experience certain friction.

I am most likely to stop and ask for directions if involved in a story, proportionately less likely if engaged in an essay, bordering on surly if forced in real life to ask. Previously involved closely in the lives of three Blue Tick Hounds (the second-best nose in dogdom), and currently partnered with Sally, a compact mix of Aussie Cattle Dog and Aussie Shepherd, I have come to recognize the ease with which scent hounds become distracted, drawn off task as they say, by an interesting smell. My own life has become a fond imitation, drawing me off the lesser scents to the scents less traveled.

Accordingly, I have been drawn off scent by such recent distractions as denouement and roman a clef, finding myself drawn even farther afield by blog chum Marta's meme for willing suspension of belief, our collective token tossed into the collection bin at the phantom toll booth we have come to think of as story.

In the real sense, story is an impossible construct, a hopeless and helpless bystander to the formulas of quantum physics, those no-nonsense depictions of how things behave in the universe, how they combine or not, how they influence or do not, where they go, how much they weigh, and what they'll do if cornered. From observation, we know a certain amount about how our species and others will behave in many situations, but not all situations. The quantum persons are working on articulating how it all began, a seemingly impossible story to articulate, which makes the comparison between story and physics formula lass tenuous than it might seem.

Story is a systematic accumulation of cultural and mythic data, personified, placed in the laboratory beaker of the imagination, and subjected to the heat of conflict, tension, suspense, and agenda. The storyteller applies enough heat to cause combustion, then reports the results. My chum and collaborator Digby Wolfe visualizes the dramatic big bang as a riddle:


"The core [or plot ] of the riddle should be cleverness – hiding that which is in plain sight.

The tension of your riddle should come from the conflict between what happens as opposed to what seems to have happened."

We begin the process of buying into the riddle--suspending disbelief--when the individuals involved become human enough and vulnerable enough to cause us to feel--repeat, feel--concern for them, to become curious, even worried about what will happen to them. Rational, scientific, practical as we are, we want to push the boundaries of physical behavior on their behalf, extending our own wish to supplement with magic our impatient desire to cause things to happen or to withstand impending events on our own behalf.

And there it goes; we're in. To a degree, we're more than in; we're in love, we're smart, we're powerful. In the accelerated process of identification with characters and rooting for them, we experience the sensual thrill of running, swimming, moving briskly and efficiently through more than air and water; we move instead through obstacles, limitations, problems, physical and mental conundrums.

Only one problem: we have to give our fantasy legs, make it seem do-able, bring the miracle from the macro to the micro, and the starting point, the big bang for this process is to feel the inherent life and possibility of our fantasy with such clarity that we are able for just enough time to see the miracle in everything.

Making a Scene

The scene is the basic unit of story. To see this unit properly, visualize a pellucid container, a laboratory retort, a British ale glass, a water glass. Into it are poured such elements as character, landscape, ambition, suspense, reversal, surprise. Others, to be sure. Depends on you and, of course, the story. Depending on the length and intent of the story, a number of containers will be required to accomplish the emotional and intellectual dramatic ambition. The material--if any--between these containers in short stories and novels is a particular form of narrative we'll look at later. This same between-the-containers information in stage plays is called stage directions; in the teleplay and screenplay, this narrative information is director's notes and actor cues.

Starting with the first empty container, we have the introduction of certain dramatic and narrative information. Individuals appear on stage, at the very least bearing some form of expectation or anticipation. They expect something to happen, they are warned of an impending event of consequence, they are already awaiting a particular event--or they are expecting things to go on as they have in the past.

In the opening scene of Waiting for Godot, Estragon and Vladimir are already present, doing something. Through their conversation, which features the line, "Nothing to be done," we are introduced to one of the major themes of the story, the added fact that they are where they are because they are waiting for a character named Godot, supplemented with visual and verbal information about the personality of each of the two men. We also begin to harbor the suspicion that Godot, whomever he may be, will never arrive, causing us to speculate on our own about who or what Godot really is and what the significance of his non arrival may be.

Speculation is a necessary quality in opening scenes because the moment the reader/viewer begins to speculate, at that moment the reader/viewer is invested in the story, has some stake in its outcome, perhaps even begins to root for the agenda of one character over the agenda of another.

We are pulled immediately into the opening of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations with the information that the first person narrator as a youngster, couldn't pronounce his name, Phillip Pirrip, and so called himself Pip. This confession reminds many of us of our own early difficulties with language and the resulting linguistic train wrecks. In short order, Pip tells us he is an orphan, living with his sister, an overbearing nag. Pip is given to visiting the graves of his parents. Nice kid, we think, starting to feel sorry for him, already imagining a life of humdrum tedium for him. On one particular visit to his parents' tombstones, a growling, horrific man, his leg in a prisoner's chains, grabs him, threatens him, makes demands of him.

Whether it is the play, Waiting for Godot, or the novel Great Expectations, we have been given dramatic information that remains with us in each subsequent scene, information that directly influences our emotional response and reception of the scenes to come. The aggregate effect of the dramatic information is called throughline or story arc.

Beginning and subsequent scenes contain at least the following elements:

Characters
Setting, the locale or landscape in which a scene is set
Beats, or events
Tempo, the pacing with which characters say or perform the beats
Blocking, the positions characters occupy during the course of a scene
Dialogue, what the characters say to one another
Subtext, the result of what characters say as opposed to what they truly feel

Scenes may contain other information relevant to the story, conditions such as reversal of an agenda, the discovery of new information, shifts of allegiance, moral choices to be made, and surprise.

Scenes in short stories are more likely to run in chronological order, but such movement is not a convention to be strictly observed. In longer works, novels, stage or screenplays, the order of scenes may shift from present to past in order to provide backstory. In longer works with multiple points of view, a shift in time or chronology can be useful in provoking a sense of suspense. While shifting focus to another time, character, or both, a part of the reader's mind remains with an unresolved situation that took place earlier.

Wherever it is set, a scene is an arena, making the analogy between scene and lab retort apt. Compounds and substances are put into the retort which is then set on a flame. The elements of a scene are introduced in anticipation of the heat from internal and external circumstances raising the temperature to a combustion point. Scenes are accordingly heated by circumstances to the goal of producing combustion. Persons and circumstances respond to the heat of pressure or opposition or frustration or grief or seduction or some prize being offered. The ultimate goal of any scene is the presence of a recognizable emotion. The dramatic means of achieving the emotion is by applying enough pressure, heat, intensity, or frustration to cause there to be some eruption which disturbs or accelerates the growing momentum that passes from scene to scene.

In Macbeth, the audience gets an early taste of where things are going when, returning home, Macbeth is hailed by the three witches as the forthcoming Thane of Cawdor. Scene by scene, Macbeth buys into the scenario by which he will actually become Cawdor. One important point in the play comes when, seeing King Malcolm being delivered his dinner by a servant, Macbeth begins riffing on the theme of last supper, quickly equating what he is about to do to Malcolm with the martyrdom of Christ. Thus conscience is introduced into the crucible, the heat of conscience is applied, and before our eyes, Macbeth weakens, combusts, cannot go through with his planned murder.

The final scene in a story, novel, or drama is the ultimate combustion, the unthinkable come to pass, its result an emotion that becomes the key signature of the work. Scenes are microcosms of an orchestrated macrocosm, where the whole--the-result--becomes greater than the sum of its parts. The payoff of a scene is the awareness of a snowflake or two, landing on your head. The payoff of the short story, novel, or drama is being hit with a snowball.

To see this analogy come to brilliant life, read Robertson Davies' Fifth Business, where the narrator tells of ducking a snowball thrown at him by a schoolmate. The snowball hits a passing woman, well into pregnancy. As a consequence, she delivers prematurely, causing the narrator a life of guilt and recrimination. It is not merely that Davies was such an accomplished storyteller, his opening scene serves as a role model for scenes and snowballs everywhere.