Ritual

A ritual is patterned, coded behavior performed in expectation of producing a desired result,say rain or a bountiful hunt.  It may also be an offering to a deity.  Ritual may also be performed as an educational venture, its purpose to impart and maintain cultural values.

The most significant ritual associated with writing is the application of words to a medium such as paper, or digitally on a screen, or verbally in some voice-recognition program that stores the results.  From this ritualistic behavior, all fiction, nonfiction, and poetry come into life, carrying with them the associated mystery and magic implicit and explicit in their creation.

Those who write on a regular basis--at least six times a week--are apt to attach ritual of some behavioral sort to the process, notwithstanding the transfer of the process to muscle memory, where indeed no thought is required.  They simply write.  Your own rituals for engaging the activity include a variety of ventures frequently involving coffee and reading of periodicals; on other occasions music of idiosyncratic choice.  These and undoubtedly more occult behavior patterns not readily apparent to you are more or less regular launching pads but do not require the rigorous attention to detail needed by someone more compulsive or obsessive as you.  The very presence of all the qualifiers in your observations of this paragraph serve to reassure you that you could and do begin working where ever you happen to be, at any time after you have had some measure of coffee, and that you adhere to no particular device to get started.  

The true portal to putting words on a page is an emotion or combination of emotions, producing an image somewhere within your psychic frame.  You enter that door, bursting in on a rush of feeling, hoping to either describe or dramatize the array of feelings.  It is much of a piece with the first kiss of someone you would not mind becoming a lover to, inviting, promising, evoking an intense wish for detail and familiarity.  This is an apt but dangerous metaphor; how many times in either situation have you gone beyond that first kiss, then quickly reached the What-have-I-got-my-self-into? stage.

Discoveries, if they are to retain any significance, are fraught with consequence; thus do you require some part of the ritual to get you in for at least a page worth of words and directions; thus do the rituals that get you writing require your entry cue to be some form of vulnerability to some form of awareness or consequence.

Consequentially

All relevant dramatic activity is rooted in consequences, which in turn is linked to event.  Even in the opening scenes, characters appear as a consequence of backstory activity and planning.  Consequence is the result--singular or plural--of behavior or its specific absence; it is the metaphoric rock being dropped into a pond, the ripples being broadcast upward, outward, downward.  Or, of course, a conspicuous rock that is hefted, then not dropped into the pond.  We may be just as pleased or disturbed by an event not taking place as we are affected by its performance.

Consequence begets more activity--individuals being motivated by or responding to or hit by yet another metaphor--falling bricks.  These have been dislodged by previous activity or its lack, an effective illustration of how story runs on the fuel or energy provided by the introduction of consequence.

The most minor characters and their most nuanced front-rank counterparts define themselves by the manner in which they act or withdraw from action, setting forth the ripples, helping us anticipate the consequences in terms of how other characters will respond to what they have said, done or dithered at.

The consequences of characters doing nothing, neither reacting nor initiating some form of gambit in search of a winning agenda, are in delightful irony transferred to the reader, whose revenge is the act of setting the book down or, as Dorothy Parker put it, "This is not a book to be set aside lightly; it should be hurled across the room with great force."  The characters themselves may be propped up by the author via endless philosophical conversations, by lavish smorgasbords of description, or narrative disquisitions of backstory, but without the lurk and menace and promise for misadventure of consequences, they will fall as though they were another metaphor yet, the house of cards.

In order to make readers care about characters, you need to make the consequences of their behavior nudge them into the approaching traffic of vulnerability, where every step becomes a hazard.

Letter to a Young, Middle-Aged, or Geezer Writer vii

At some point in your pursuit of recognition as a teller of tales, relator of stories, revealer of invented gossip, you will become aware of consequences.  You have probably become aware of them already when family, friends, and strangers, on hearing the path you have chosen, will ask you the question, "What have you published? as though that were the defining moment as opposed to the activities you perform, somewhat like asking a musician, "Ah, what notes have you played?"

The consequences of having work out in circulation, however humble the venue, regardless of whether the medium is paper or some electronics-supporting screen, will cause the work to become a target for a response or, alas, no response whatsoever.  Your own responses to these consequences will provide you with the opportunity for untold hours of philosophizing about the human condition and quite possibly motivating factors which in their turn will invigorate subsequent behavior from you.

One of the consequences--unseen at the time--of Herman Melville having written Moby-Dick was the direct push it gave to being a customs inspector, a career he had considerably less interest in than being a story teller.  You might say Melville was pushed into inspecting customs by the excruciating consequences of which all writers are in dread.  When I mentioned philosophizing a while back, did you think I'd forget to return to that important matter?  Would you, for instance, rationalize having had to spend large chunks of your life as a customs inspector a worthwhile trade for having written a book which would not become popular in your lifetime?  Could you, in effect, take the long view? The point here is that the mere act of writing will set into consequential result a series of behavior patterns over which, however much you control and revise your work, you have no control over.

The further point is to wonder if the characters you create come far enough off the page to have some of your readers join you in wondering if they have set enough consequences in motion, within and without their own boundaries.

What makes us care?  We care if the risk is significant enough, the consequences extensive enough, the reward something we can get our teeth into.

Many, er, Happy Returns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Price

No matter what they tell you during the early stages of your growing acquaintance, your characters ultimately want to know how much this is going to cost, what the price will be for them to achieve or attain or otherwise grab hold of the thing they want, the thing that causes the story to come into being in the first place.

Perhaps one of the characters has thrown caution to the proverbial winds in an attempt to secure something of particular importance. Suppose the character has been successful, at which point you can ask if the character has or will acquire buyer's remorse. The Price and The Consequence are literary first cousins, a fact made abundantly clear to the reader if the character who got something or some one has been paying the price for some time and is in fact grumbling about it.

In back of every story and every front-rank character within the story, the price is some kind of issue; it was either worth it or it was discovered to be not worth the cost. Many longer stories are about the cumulative effect of a price being paid until, as many auto or home owners find themselves in the current financial downturn floundering in that condition euphemistically called "under water," where the amount due is more than the car or home is worth. The owner sees the position, decides to cut losses. Or not.

What price does a character pay for speaking up when silence would have done or, opposite, not speaking up and having to pay that price. In Budd Schulberg's memorable screenplay, On the Waterfront, Terry Molloy has discovered the price to be paid for allowing himself to trust his older brother, Charlie, when it came to "managing" his professional career as a prize fighter. I could have been somebody. I could have been a contender.

There is within any story, however oblique, a prize as seen by someone to the point where behavior is changed, perhaps even moral guidelines are moved or completely obliterated. Your vision of that prize and your understanding of the character's relationship to it helps in large measure to determine how you feel about the character, defines the ways you identify with that character or not.

Characters who have achieved some sort of prize, who have willingly paid a price to achieve or acquire or attain a status may be looked upon with bewilderment or bemusement by other characters who still have not achieved their goals or who have set their goals high enough to cause other characters and many readers concern.

Is it worth it? your character asks. Was it worthwhile? Did I pay too high a price? Do I undervalue the thing I got because I did not pay enough.

Look at it this way: At any point in a character's life, the character may endure significant introspection, wondering if arriving at this particular moment was worth all the effort necessary to do so. At any point in the construction of any kind of creative manuscript, the writer may similarly wonder if arriving at this particular condition of the draft in progress was worth all the effort necessary to produce it and as well wonder if the work needs more effort in any of a dozen possible areas.

What price will you pay for writing or, similarly, not writing a particular story that presents itself to you? What costs have you paid in the past for not spending enough time with a story or from having spent too much time working at it?

"Them" as a Social Force

The last time you became angry enough to do something you ordinarily wouldn't came when, in the process of bending to access the contents of the lowest shelf in a cabinet, hopeful of finding a missing saute pan, you rose abruptly enough to bump your head on the edge of an opened cabinet door. The damage inflicted required some days to mend to the point where you could successfully shower without noticing the break in skin continuity. The saute pan, having been flung with great force, might never be quite the same.

You did not need this head-banging incident to remind you of the potential for explosive anger response, much like the impatient genie in the bottle, waiting to be set free. And yet you very well did need the reminder, which in its way links you to brother and sister Homo sapiens.

Each time someone in your immediate vision or in some report you have read acts out on anger, you are reminded of the bond you share with so many of your species, seeing them in some of their performances as something that is no stranger to you in potential. Even strange cultists and political nut cases haunt you as being a reminder of what you could become were you not in some more severe process of editorial guidance. Since your own view of yourself calls out anger as a motivating force, you readily admit not only to its presence within you but of having to put forth considerable effort toward the goal of managing it.

When you speak these days of managing anger, in essence you mean acknowledging its presence, sometimes with a mere nod of recognition, as though you were of two different social strata in a large high school, then looking for a way to laugh the anger back into the shadowy sidelines where you believe it belongs. In that sense, anger is like fire; it can be a useful tool, providing energy and focus, or it can become destructive in the extreme. You can often control your anger with humor, but it is unlikely you will be able to laugh off fire. Thus the damaging effects of anger, a person-centered energy, and fire, a sometimes-neutral-but-often-man-made energy are noted along with the need to be aware of their inflammatory potential.

When you are angry enough to act out, you are no longer the steady, more ordinary you. As you act out, you begin a precarious journey that moves you away from everyday behavior. Anger is not the only path away from everyday behavior; any concentrated pursuit or study is yet another. The more a person pursues his or her craft or discipline, the more pronounced that person's individuality becomes; he or she is actively stepping away from mainstream behavior, thought, modes of execution. The reason for this is simple enough: the more we enter our discipline, the more we acquire individuality of voice and the muscle memory required to implement that voice.

There were times when you strove to achieve uniformity, which is to say a greater connection to acceptable paradigms of behavior, intelligence, response, social characteristics, and even empathy. That didn't work either in your social dealings or in your attempts to achieve greater reach and skill with your writing, your intellectual range, your thinking processes, and your opinions, all of which inhere in your voice and your vision.

You can mercifully see connections between your appetites, goals, behavior, and visions and those of others, yet you tip over toward being more like you than most statistical N samplings variously described as "Them." You are a part of "Them" but you are also the drop of water who recognizes his relationship to the ocean.

Your best chances are with you being you. The consequences may just be all the things you long for.

Shouting? Of course I'm shouting.

Anger is such a lovely emotion for introduction into a dramatic narrative. As persons in real life have discovered, anger may be expressed in any number of ways. These ways not only help define the character who is behaving in anger, the ways also help determine the nature and outcome of a story.

A bright star in the constellation of Western literature, The Iliad literally begins with someone being pissed off. "The wrath of Achilles..." and we are off and running because of the politics behind why Achilles was angered, what he did in response, and the consequences, ending with the fall of Troy and enough clanking of swords, fiery oaths, visitations from the gods to have emblazoned an unforgettable image into our mind. But some years later, along comes another writer, David Malouf, of whom we are arguably more certain than we are of the supposed author of The Iliad. Mr. Malouf has taken us more or less behind the scenes, caused Achilles' anger to stand before us once again in a way that helps us experience it more deeply yet. In a real sense, Malouf has tied the consequences of Achilles' grief and anger to the axle of a chariot, much as he so purposefully tied the body of the recently killed Hector. Then he has shown us the effects on Hector's parents, King Priam and Queen Hecuba, leading to the moment when Priam tells Hecuba of his plan for allowing their son to be given a proper burial. No really new plot twists here at all, so why the fuss? The fuss is because in Malouf's latest novel, Ransom, he has demonstrated not only Achilles' anger, as well his grief and the downstream grief of Hector's parents, his wife and son; he has shown the gods and goddesses in play to the point where we can understand on a visceral level what it was like in and about Troy during those days of the siege and fall. We even come away with an enhanced understanding of what chance is, what it means to characters, and what it means to the gods and goddesses.

A little anger goes a long way, thus it needn't be piled on needlessly, even when its intent is to build a grudge of epic proportions. One of the mischievous joys of anger allowed to run rampant in Huckleberry Finn is made manifest when Huck bumbles by chance into the Shepherdson-Grangeford feud, the precise crux of which no one can remember.

In real life as in Huck Finn, sometimes the parties involved in a display of anger cannot recall the precipitating factor, the very inability possibly arousing yet another wave of anger. It is good to have at the ready a personal anger index which we can from time to time consult, putting such infractions as the person who cuts in front of us on the freeway a one, someone who betrays us an eight or nine, someone who betrays us and taunts about it a ten.

Once not too long ago, during an acting workshop, your response to a situation was to demonstrate a good deal of anger, which you did by sending a chair into a long parabolic arc. Later, in discussing the scene, someone asked if you had perhaps overdone, overreacted. Oh, no, you reassured. That character had a great deal of pent-up anger.

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.

Something happens and somebody changes

Something happens, then somebody changes. Not too shabby a way of looking at long form fiction. For the shorter version, you could say at a bit more length, something happens and someone considers the possibilities. In both long and short forms, something clearly must happen so that the event and the relative awareness of the event become part of the theme of the narrative. Something happens, although we're not quite sure what, but it is enough to cause Gregor Samsa to undergo a remarkable metamorphosis.

Things are in a rapid state of flux most days, but some of us are too caught up in routines and custom to notice, leaving us vulnerable to the more sudden revelation, the epiphany, if you will, of the short story. He did not realize he was (1) growing older (2) more set in his ways (3) more conservative (4) more desperate (5) more frightened (6) more out of touch with reality and so he (1) ran off with his secretary (2) forbade his daughter to do something she very much wanted to do (3) considered suicide (4)suspected his wife of something (anything) (5) bought a sports car (6) broke off a long-standing relationship with someone.

The conventional wisdom holds favorably for enhanced performance coming as the result of practice. Not bad logic, but by the very nature of that logic, standing up and sitting down can in addition to producing a regal sense of posture bring about arthritis.

We do not ordinarily appreciate characters who seem to have been content with their lot in life, accepting their status as though it were the product of a fast-food stand, making do, exuding a happy-go-lucky aura and following popular culture as though it were directions on a Google map. For us to appreciate such a person, that individual will need to suffer some devastating loss and not respond with a mere shrug, to experience some milestone birthday, say forty or fifty or sixty or seventy and say, No more; to have been given a death sentence and consequently decided to "go out" following the script of some heretofore unrecognized agenda.

The effects of change on the individual character remind you of the crumbs you find on your shirt front after trying to wrestle through one of those croissants sold at Peet's, your preferred coffee venue. You would think that a place with such superb coffee would attempt a match-up with a provider of at least adequate pastry, but the aura of story hovers over this pairing, of nearly every imaginable pairing; story spreads outward from the discovery of a splendid thing and the consequences of that discovery. A scant two miles south of Peet's is Raynaud's Bakery in the Loreto Plaza. Their French toast is a joy to behold, their brioche are fluffy and yeasty, their quiche and even their tuna salad or Salade Nicoise are choice, but the consequence is that their coffee is of a level with Starbuck's. When you set forth for French toast or for your usual medium latte, respectively, you are not going for breakfast nor for coffee; you are going for story and its consequences.

Noir

Even though French is not your language, you know enough of it to recognize noir when you see it, which is largely at funerals. You can also rationalize logical jumps from noir being black in French to a wave of French film critics calling dark, murky, moody, gloomy films by the appellation noir. If the critics had been Mexican or Spanish, we'd be talking cinema negro.

Little or no wonder that noir would bleed over to extend its coverage to the stories and novels that had their genesis in the late '50s and '60's, gathering momentum in the paperback novels of the time. In particular, Gold Medal Novels carried forth the noir sensitivity, allowing characters who did not fit well into the more traditional dreams of post-war prosperity to nevertheless dream a kind of noir version of the American Dream.

Gold Medal Novels were the extensions of the pulp magazines, particularly such rousing venues as Black Mask, Dime Detective, and Flynn's Detective Stories, where plot meant good guys struggling against the rigged game of privilege and influence. An unfortunate choice of a remantic partner invariably led to pressures that induced extraordinary risk, which in turn was guaranteed to produce consequences. Noir became the inexorable voice of consequences getting out of hand.

Combustion. The center that cannot hold. Things going awry. The Sorcerer's Apprentice with a loaded gun. These conditions and qualities became standards by which a segment of the reading public judged the stories, then stayed with them and were to some extent the same standards they saw in their own life.

Although many of these stories--magazine and paperback originals--spoke to you, they did not entirely satisfy you to the point where you remained faithful and did not stray. They reminded you in their way of a high school girlfriend whom you liked well enough and, appropriately, she liked you, although neither of you knew quite why. Perhaps your fondness for noir was because writers you admired found homes for their works therein; perhaps it was the lure of on-the-job training, perhaps it was an affinity for the voice inherent. Many of your friends who wrote noir were by no means lacking in humor. Maybe it was because, as Donald MacCampbell told you when he was your agent, noir is a kind of joke gone bad. Later, when you, as editor, signed MacCampbell for his Don't Step on It, It Might Be a Writer, he reminded you how noirish it was for a writer to be editing his agent.

No Country for Old Men is certainly noir; it begins with a drug deal gone bad, something only as steady a hand as McCarthy could bring off so convincingly in these recent years. Perhaps the notion of a joke gone bad is your portal into the dark world, and perhaps MacCampbell, were he still among the living, would think it had taken you a long time to get the picture.

Chance, Choice, Consequence

Chance has a limited role in fiction; too much of it suggests a heavy authorial hand, manipulating outcomes that seem increasingly unlikely. If closure is achieved through too many coincidences, the role of the protagonist has been undercut. After all, a protagonist is the protagonist in the first place because the burden rests or falls on his or her shoulders, and he or she is supposed to be the architect and engine of the outcome. An amicus curiae brief comes from fantasy and fantastic adventures in which magic plays such a large part. Even in these, the protagonist is supposed to figure how to use the magic to outwit the antagonistic forces. The best you can say for chance as a tool is that it can cause some remarkable complications, those pesky, mischievous events and missed connections that get the protagonist in deeper troubles, somewhat of a piece with afflicting Sisyphus with athlete's foot by way of making his eternal task not only boring but itchy.

In real life, chance has a greater opportunity to upstage events because while there may be a temporary throughline such as a drought or a famine or a misguided election in, say, Massachusetts, there are also cycles, changes, and the monotonous locked step of mere presence in which things happen each as an independent contractor. Thus trees and flowers volunteer because seeds were blown or caught in a dog's fur, or perhaps momentarily trapped in some unsuspecting trouser cuff. Equally, in real life, a slab of a hillside may dissolve in a rain storm to reveal artifacts enough to make an archaeologist's career.

Oliver La Farge, the anthropologist, once wrote a short story about a rather scuzzy academic who was always seeming to stumble upon magnificent finds from the distant past. But we knew better; this academic was guided to these finds by supernatural agencies. Thus was fun made of scientific method and by implication the lifting to respect of the ways and beliefs of our elders.

Choice is another matter. This is so because of the recognition of the number of choices we make every waking moment and, often enough, during the dreaming parts of sleep. Choice ultimately yields consequence, a circumstance well known to us because of the number of consequences we face every waking moment and, yes, during the dreaming parts of sleep. We chose to do something or opt out or dither. Each produces a litany of consequences, some of which may be totally unanticipated and indeed not justified. This leads us to confront another Cosmic Truth: Consequences do not have to be justified. They simply are. Much in the manner of Chance, in which a given segment of time is merely a window through which we can see the passing parade of events.

And here, the two come together; chance meets choice. We gaze out the window and see a procession of events, or perhaps no event at all, merely a tree, some shrubs, even a flower or two. Now a bird lands on a branch of the tree and begins looking about. We become curious and in a way invest in the bird. Now comes into the picture a cat, whereupon we, who have nothing against cats, nevertheless have some understanding of the nature of cats. Some among us may already visualize a mere pile of feathers instead of the bird. And of course the more we learn of the bird, its mockingbird-edness or its blue jay essence, the more vivid that pile of feathers becomes. As we switch our attention to the cat, depending on our individual preferences, its very coloration, say tiger-stripe or marmalade, add to its potential for bringing about that pile of feathers. We are caught up in choice and consequence. Do we rap sharply on the window, thus to frighten the bird away? Do we dither? After having frightened the bird off, do we, from a consequential guilt, invite the cat in for a snack?

Story is in some part the experience the viewer brings to the artifice of the writer; it always has some consequence associated with it, somewhat like the tin cans we used to tie to the fenders of automobiles when we were mischievous kids. As we grew older, we eschewed the tin can for a handful of gravel or perhaps two or three loose bolts or nuts, just enough to fit inside the hub cap we'd have carefully pried off with the bottle-opener blade of our pocket knife. The unsuspecting driver, after moving a scant few feet, would hear this inner serenade, stop, get out, look, shake head, return to car, ad infinitum, a monument to the practical joke nature young boys have to evolve through in order to have even a shot at the consequences of being grown up.

Secrets

It may well be that you have written your way into a  awareness if not outright discovery for the thing you had been searching, much as Lewis and Clark had searched for a Northwest Passage.  Ambiguity and irony have occupied your thoughts for some while; so too has the notion of constructing a biography of each character before beginning a story (particularly a longer one).  

You began one particular story, "Dog Star," with the notion that there was a character of some financial success as an actor, who had bought his way into a second home, a get-away home, in Santa Barbara, and subsequently fallen in with a group of breakfast regulars at a bakery/coffee shop where you were a breakfast regular with a group of regulars.  You did not want the character to be you; instead, you chose an actor of your acquaintance who more or less filled the basic qualifications for what you have come to think of as armature status, the bare condition about which you would wrap traits, qualities, and past history to form your own dramatic Golem, who would then go forth to deal with story.  All you needed was the extra edge to give your character enough dimension for you to be able to turn him loose, whereupon he would behave and all you'd need to do was write about the things he did, thought, and, importantly, felt.  In this case, the character, John Millain, had a dog whose very presence made the story.  Millain's breakfast regulars tolerated him because of his dog, whom they all greatly admired.  They did not dislike Millain, nor did they fail to recognize what he was in professional life, but on matter of taste, his dog was his ticket to the morning breakfast table and subsequent conversation.

You, as writer, knew something the protagonist did not know. You knew a secret.

At one time, the considerable shadow of Ernest Hemingway fell over you to the extent of you being completely caught in the need to hear the music of his prose, the better to refract that music into your own.  As a result, your own prose may have sounded interesting, but its content lacked the bite and vision you sought.  How, you wondered, could any man who so clearly saw the value of Twain, be of no value to you.  And so you went after him instead of Twain.  Water under the proverb now; the one thing from H. that remains, the one construct that allows you to venture forth to be you rather than a stylistic copyist, is his notion that you start by putting everything in, then gradually reduce it, removing more than you think safe, so that characters are talking and thinking about things in such a way that the reader is able to see them.  With this in mind, you have evolved your own approach, and think about H. only when Conrad discusses him in relationship to his abysmal knowledge of bullfighting and of those who found the bull ring the easel for their art.  Sometimes, you think of H. when you have occasion to remember his son, Gregory, your classmate for a time, and for Gregory's sharing word from him in re things you had written in parody and or admiration of him, or when Gregory showed you letters from him revealing what an egotistical, cold-hearted individual he was.

At the moment, you are in the process of inventing secrets for the characters who inhabit a novel with the word secrets in its title, wondering if by some fortunate misfortune, you began with the formula reversed.  All characters (and indeed all people) have secrets.  When we talk about making reductions in cooking, we consider reducing a sauce or gravy or juice or marinade or some combination of these to a basic liquid essence.  In writing, the reduction is the secret, what she or he holds tight to the bosom, fearful of discovery, fearful of the consequences of discovery, fearful the cover-up will be penetrated.  Secrets.  Fear.  Vulnerability.

The secret may have to do with a slight or more deliberate forging of one's resume, thus one was employed or inducted or invited or romantically involved.  The secret may also involve a hidden dream, an aspiration, an attraction for another person, an aching wish to become a particular sort of person.

We all of us live with our secrets; they are our companions with whom we conspire in the belief that the conspiracy is unnoticed by others.  Our behavior is affected by our secrets; we sometimes use them as bartering chips with loved ones, the equivalent in its way of having the name of a loved one tattooed on a portion of one's body.  What great misadventures erupt when the relationship dissolves, when the shared secret that was once a bartering chip becomes a ransom note.

The discovery/awareness has directly to do with secrets.  Even now, you are compiling a curriculum vitae for a character who is nominally an academic and is now apparently retired.  You have even compiled a list of his publications.  One of his secrets is that all his publications except one are self-published.  Aha, what does that tell you about him?  Another of his secrets is that he wishes more than anything for recognition as a poet (but has a tin ear for dialogue and music).  Yet another is that although he makes reference to his income from royalties and his university pension, the bulk of his income is from a chain of pizza restaurants throughout the Tri-Counties area.  Now you know him.  Or think you do.  What about his second wife, some twenty-five years his junior, and her secret, and her ambition to be a fine art painter?

When you think about it, you suppose your focus on the bedrock concept of secrets could be reduced to yet another concoction:  Nothing is what it seems.  For the moment, the happy, happy moment, you believe you can live with that.  And write about it.

Pairs of Opposites

There are two underlying reasons for story:

1.  to report events

2.  to discover the meaning of events, their causes, and their consequences.

When we report events,our focus is on the accuracy and detail, the remembered nuance or spoken words that simultaneously ratify and justify the reporting of events in the first place.

When we write to discover meanings, we engage in the act of replaying imagined scenes and confrontations that take place between arguing aspects of our writing self, setting forth emotional evidence and potsherds from which we seek, much in the manner of archaeologists, to recreate some basic meanings and intents that will be useful to us in our goal of survival and evolution.

As a boy,I was much given to the daily radio serials.  These were adventures of those envied persons of nearly my age or, even better, the purpose and wandering of adults who, although they had no clue of my own existence, seemed to me to radiate concern for my being.  From them I learned that story was always a door to adventure and discovery, sometimes not very pleasant discovery but nevertheless understanding.  From them I extracted reference points, ways of interpreting risk and consequence.  The sponsors of these stories would from time to time make some seemingly remarkable prize available.  For mere box tops and a dime or quarter, I was able to purchase decoders, badges, rings, booklets, templates by which I could render secrets of my own into code and discern the coded messages they from time to time would issue forth.  Never mind that as a boy I was hard pressed to come forth with anything significant and consequential enough to render into code.  Much less did I have anyone with whom I could exchange coded messages.  There were secrets which I could use as tickets of admission to the worlds of secrets of my own.

Some times as I sat, eagerly at the end of a Lone Ranger or Green Hornet episode, taking down the numbers my decoders would translate, I was at a state I would only come to identify years later, perhaps just after the implications and goals of hormonal change had registered within me.  Although certainly charged with the subtext of sexual awareness and dynamic, the eagerness and anticipation I was experiencing then was the awareness of a story about to be born. 

The messages from Captain Midnight and Little Orphan Annie and The Lone Ranger were all of a type:  Remember to clean your room.  Hang your clothes up after you have finished wearing them.  Be polite to your parents and teachers.  Share things with your friends.  There were no clues about how to attract girls or where to go for adventures of your own or even who to believe.  I was left with the sense of betrayal that invariably morphs into the realization that I would have to discover these things on my own.  Not only that, I would have to be wary of individuals who continued to offer me information every bit as earthshaking as Captain Midnight and The Lone Ranger as guidelines for success in any area I wished to be successful in.

We write to record and to investigate.  As it stands now, I do remember to clean my room, although this does not always motivate me to do the actual cleaning.  I sometimes hang up clothing after the occasion for wearing has passed.  I am sometimes polite to parent and teacher figures, and although I am more likely to share political views and opinions of particular books and authors, I am not at all adverse to picking up a tab, extending an invitation, calling to check in to see how things are going.  With some regularity, I even eat from all the basic food groups.  I'm not sure if any of this has contributed to my writing-reporting-investigating skills, and in many ways, I'm still looking for coded messages from the Cosmos or, if you will, the Universe, hopeful I will have adequate means at hand to unlock their meaning.

I did not!

disclaimer--a dramatic action, statement, or combination of the two intended to distance a character from real or imagined consequences; an agreement such as a pre-nuptual, in which rights, obligations, and promises to perform are enumerated.

The basic dramatic disclaimer is "I did not." Followed by a response of "You did so," we have the beginning of a story in two scant lines. Close on the heels of the former is the even shorter introduction to story, "I already did" or the equally provocative, "I already was." Not to forget "I thought you knew."

Disclaimers get characters into trouble they seek to avoid by disclaiming in the first place, opening the dramatic stage for guest appearances from the likes of denial, stubbornness, misrepresentation, and outright lies, moving the narrative into a downward spiral of considerable complexity.

One of the more common disclaimers, offered as a defense, is "I only meant it as humor," which is to say in real terms, "I did or said it in the first place as an attempt to embarrass, humiliate, or ridicule. A close ally: "It was only a joke" has the intended meaning I didn't really mean it.

Disclaimers appear as warnings of potential side-effects on many medications, presenting in their wake the question of whether the cure or relief, with its inherent possibilities of mischief, are worth the risk of the side-effects. This is a good warning for writers who use disclaimers such as, Any coincidence between persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

My heart's not in it

internal conflict--a battle between two or more opposing forces within an individual, a culture, or a society; choices a character makes that impact his behavior in a story; the agony of moral choice written large as dramatic issue.

The key word in an internal conflict is but, which translates as "except for the fact;" but is the tin can tied as a prank to the rear bumper of a car, it is the conditional divide between the two warring forces that tug at the character. But is the fulcrum, the contingency with which the afflicted character lives. Sound dramatic principle dictates an internal conflict step forth in front rank characters, Mark Anthony the soldier and Mark Anthony the lover. Similarly there is Cleopatra struggling through the emotions of the lover and the duties and responsibility of the queen.

A protagonist may be a natural leader, except that he freezes in arguments; a scientist may be devoted to the pursuit of her research but feels compromised for once having managed the outcome of one of her more significant studies. Huckleberry Finn may admire and respect the runaway slave, Jim, but feels his conscience being conflicted because, after all, Jim was his master's property and Huck has effectively helped Jim escape from his rightful owner.

The conflict may be essentially internal,particularly in the short story, but it will have an effect on the way significant characters behave and in the way the reader feels.

What Is This Thing Called, Love?

inevitability--the story-governing certainty that something will go wrong; a presentiment that circumstances surrounding one or more characters will worsen; the likelihood that a character who is given a menu of choices will select the one most probable course for disaster.

Fred has decided to attend a ten-year reunion of his college graduating class. Still smarting from the painful break-up of his marriage, Fred is thinking the reunion might be a place to reenter the relationship market. By the time the evening is over, Fred has been given four email addresses of former classmates, all of whom he considers attractive, all of whom have hinted their willingness to let him take her home. They are all attractive, each in a different way. They are all bright, each according to her particular interests. Aroused and lonely, Fred makes his choice. Most readers will recognize the landmine Fred will have stepped on as a consequence of his choice. Most readers will know that the one Fred chose will be afflicted with a rusted-out Honda and have at home a cat with a urinary infection. Moreover, she will cry loudly at unexpected times, and want to know from Fred why people cannot learn to be more respectful to one another. Not that any of these qualities are of themselves disastrous, but to Fred, they are complications he does not think he needs. As such inevitability goes, Fred will have subsequent contact with the other three former classmates who signaled their availability, finding each in her own way borderline remarkable. But the added inevitability is that Fred is drawn to his first choice and is last seen advancing to her apartment with a large container of rust remover and a copy of Cat Care For Dummies.

Inevitability makes no distinction in gender. Nicole, herself still uneasy from a painful break-up with a man who was compulsive to the point of arguing with her about the only proper way to allow toilet paper to spool, has gone to the same reunion as Fred. She has urged herself to go, thinking the experience will be good for her, even though she knows in advance that she will leave that night with the one man in the entire gathering who will be the most disastrous. Indeed, the individual Nicole chooses can't wait to get her to his place in order to show her his collection of breakfast cereal boxes, including his prized Wheaties box with the still florid image of Duke Snyder smiling forth. The evening ends with her moodily watching him as he pours bowls of corn flakes for both of them.

Although inevitability takes human psychology well into consideration, dealing as it does with such tropes as victims, compulsions, ego, avocations, and the very nature of individual identity, inevitability is causality and consequence writ large. It is the dramatic distillation of forces observed in reality but often buried under an array of distracting signs and misinterpreted biological responses to stimuli. All it takes to trigger in the reader the awareness of inevitability is for one character to ask another, "You'll wait for me, right? We'll be married as soon as I finish grad school." Not to mention one of the most famous of all story tropes, the all-purpose, one-size-fits-all "Is this safe?" which could relate to robbing a bank, a sexual encounter, crossing the street in the middle of a block, risking savings on a business venture. Yet another inevitability catcher: "I'll be right back," and not to forget: "I'll call you."

Why, oh why did Colm Toibin's character Tony, so deeply in love with Eilish in Brooklyn, plead with her to marry him in a secret civil ceremony before returning to Ireland for a funeral? Why, he did it to add considerable depth to both characters, and to introduce the worm of inevitability into the apple. Who among Toibin's readers did not suspect that Eilish would experience a heavy pang of temptation while away from Tony.

Inevitability is like the black keys and the white keys on the piano; the composer knows which to designate and when to produce the most plangent results.

Risk

risk--the potential for and probability of an unwanted outcome from a venture; the chances a character takes when acting or purposefully not acting on a decision; the possibility of a character having enhanced vulnerability as a consequence of a prior act.

The major defining trait of a character in story is agenda (See also goal, purpose); close on the heels of agenda comes the risk the character will endure in order to accomplish the goal. Faintness of heart may hang over a character, posing a threat not only of failure but of shutting the story down. A character who acts in spite of the faintness of heart is keeping the story and his hopes alive. Readers want to root for a character who has been pushed by circumstances to risk all in favor of the stated or implied goal. Think Gatsby for a few moments. Think Ishmael, signing on the Pequod if he'd known in advance of Ahab's agenda. Think of Dorothy Gale taking on the chores assigned her by the Wizard if she'd known his humbug status in advance.

An integral element of story is the epidemic sense of things going wrong to the point where the characters are often waiting for the next round of things that do go wrong, followed by the existential question, What next? Equally integral to story is the drive and willingness of characters to take risks in such story atmosphere.

If the risks in a given story are not of sufficient weight or consequence, the reader will come to realize soon enough that the story is in essence a matter of shooting fish in a barrel.

Conscience

conscience--a societal barometer consulted with varying degrees of frequency by characters in pursuit of their daily agenda; a mediating device between "want" or "desire" and "ought I?" or "Is this ethical?"; a behavior fulcrum.

Conscience plays a major role in fiction, its very composition an effective analysis of a character, particularly when compared to that character's sense of self and that character's needs. If conscience is seen as a societal lens through which social and ethical behavior may be judged,the reader will automatically form opinions about where a character is placed on an ethical scale, much in the manner of charting the growth in height of a young person with pencil marks on some communal wall.

Readers are given frequent opportunity to assess characters and consequently form judgments about them based on the character's conscience-based responses to previous actions. At the end of chapter one of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, the reader has seen the immediate consequences of a severe trial of conscience to Michael Henchard. To call the response guilt is to put it in mild terms. A good deal of the arc of Henchard's response to that first-chapter lapse will cause many readers to root for him and his apparent redress of the enormous occasion of guilt, but Hardy piles more travail on Henchard, bringing him face to face with yet another moral quandary. Thus does the human attribute of conscience appear in the novel, almost as though it were a person itself, seeking another quality that may differ among an array of readers: atonement, redress, revenge. Thus does endowing a character with a large conscience or, arguably, no conscience at all, set the stage for drama. Every bit as compelling as the first chapter in the Hardy novel is the payoff scene in Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms, when the full force of what she has in her need for love done to her husband and stepson leaves its mark on Abbie Putnam's conscience.

Of a piece with the full-frame sensor on the Canon EOS 5D single-lens reflex, the conscience is also a receptor site, taking in intent, fantasy, consequences, implications; it may deliver a response of guilt or self-justification. Even with murderous and vengeful intent full upon him, Hamlet cannot bring himself to kill his intended target, King Claudius, not at this particular moment because he is at prayer. Macbeth, having made the decision to murder King Malcolm, momentarily relents when he sees a servant carrying a tray with a meal to Malcolm. Macbeth's conscience calls out to him in a sense with the reminder that this tray carries what will be Malcolm's last meal, from which trope he is reminded of the Last Supper, which to say the least puts a damper on his ambitions.

Conscience causes some men and women to refuse participation in armed conflict; as well it motivates their behavior relative to birth control and eating products derived from animals. Conscience makes its appearance in ways that may also add a note of wry off-the-wall humor, as in Frank Pierson's opera buffa, Dog Day Afternoon, which begins with three men deciding to rob the bank at 450 Avenue P, Brooklyn. No sooner are Sonny, Sal, and Stevie in the bank, guns drawn, shouting instructions to startled customers and bank employees, than Stevie decides he can't go through with his part, whereupon he leaves.

Back to Hamlet for a moment because of his observation that "conscience doth make cowards of us all," a reminder that many fear to act on their agendas for fear of the ransom gilt will require of the hostage. It becomes a fair question for the writer to ask of all his characters, How little or how much conscience does this character have? To which can be added, And what effect does that have on the character?

Dear Editor: The Dog Ate My Revision

hard luck story--a narrative of misfortune offered to secure the hearer's sympathy and possible financial contribution; an offered excuse as in The dog ate my homework; a narrative offered as mitigation for any non-performance.

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

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

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



Ishmael's was a hard luck story in that he signed on the Pequod with no other thought to get away from the depressing nature of life on shore, only to find life at sea a cluster of disaster in which he was lucky to escape with his life. Heathcliff and Cathy saw the chemistry of their mutual attraction torn into a hard luck story in Wuthering Heights, and the unnamed protagonist/narrator of Rebecca saw her dreams of a romantic future turn into a hard luck story, ditto Charles Ryder for being pulled into the swirl and eddy of the Marchmain family in Brideshead Revisited, and while still on the subject of Evelyn Waugh, look at the hard luck story he contrived for the hapless protagonist of the haunting short story, "The Man Who Loved Dickens."


deus ex machina--a too convenient solution for a dramatic problem; a way of removing an obstacle that seems to have come from an independent, even unrelated source such as mere chance or accident.

Originally a device in ancient Greek drama at a time when gods were thought to have a hand in determining the outcomes of human affairs, the name now evokes the presence of any dramatic resolution that creaks and groans its way to a mechanical-seeming outcome. Indeed, in some performances, characters representing gods were lowered onto the stage by means of a basket-and-winch device.

Hint: in ancient Greek drama, competition and jealousies among gods and goddesses was assumed, thus even at that level, personality and motive informed godly activities. In modern stories, personalities, differing agendas, and cultural squabbles produce the best mechanisms for initiating and resolving plot complications.

Further hint: it is acceptable for obstacles to grow larger, complexities to grow more intense by accident, but their resolutions must be more convincing in their engineering. Think as endings or resolutions as mediated settlements.

I Can't Decide; You Decide for Me

decision--the result of a choice being made; an outcome arrived at either by logical deliberation,intuitive reach, or emotional propulsion; a character's solution to the need for choice.

Go on with a relationship (criminal, professional, religious,romantic) or end it; opt in or out, accept or reject; ignore or notice; deal with or let slide. Characters in dramatic narratives are constantly faced with such forks in the road; they've learned from experience that dithering only worsens their situation, thus they, unlike their real life counterparts, struggle with the choice. After some deliberation, they pursue a course of action. The equation in fiction is: decision triggers choice, choice triggers action, and of course action triggers consequence. One instructive example has the word choice in its title, William Styron's Sophie's Choice. Lack of action, you may argue, also triggers consequence, but the effect of those consequences is often cerebral. Unless you can cause your cerebral consequences such as guilt, remorse, or denial to trigger specific actions, your characters will begin dithering before you on the page, awaiting some directorial input from you. Dithering characters often wander into the dangerous verges of stopping the story dead in its tracks with such internal wonderment as Where had it all begun? or, worse, How had she let herself get in this situation.

The key to dramatic writing is to bring characters to the awareness of a decision point, from which position they will make decisions as their nature directs them, from which point they will become aware of consequences. This stream of events was true in Don Quixote, in Hedda Gabler, in Lonesome Dove, and in Lush Life, accordingly spanning dramatic writing from at least the late sixteenth century to the very present.


frustration--an emotional response to the blocking of an agenda or goal; a sense of the lack of power to perform a motivated behavior; a triggering device for aggression or passive-aggressive behavior.

Characters in fiction frequently find themselves with frustration as a pole star, alternately inflicting it and being victim to its consequences. Given the very nature of dramatic writing, frustration is a key component, the leavening agent in story, motivating protagonists to take steps to slough through its quicksand-like impediment and as well motivating antagonists to step up their behavior.

If a story line appears to be faltering, add more frustration in the form of reversal or surprise. Keep the goal to which the main character aspires in sight but just beyond reach. An out-of-sight goal may be forgotten or trumped; a goal within reach may be moved or shattered or stolen.

As an illustration of the far-reaching effects and landing sites of frustration, consider the universal desire to be understood, then recall the comedies and tragedies in which two individuals, believing they have the same goal in mind, begin to act upon that belief, only to encounter the reefs and shoals of awareness that they have completely misunderstood one another. Thus dramatic irony, the bedfellow of frustration.