Risk

Individuals who appear in stories have, as we've noted, expectations. They also have something to lose. Michael Henchard, in arguably one of the most powerful opening chapters in all of English-language literature (The Mayor of Casterbridge) had his wife and daughter to lose, indeed did lose them, providing traction for the rest of the novel and a profound change in him.

Some characters have only their pride, self-esteem, sense of direction, sense of proportion, good judgment to lose (in varying degrees). Others have quite literally their life, their career, their reputation. Others still have at risk their morality, their virtue,their sense of adventure, their ability to inspire trust, their will to live.

The more a character has at risk, the more she or he has options, which lead to decisions to be made. Placing a character in such a position makes the character step forth with more interest than someone merely along for the ride, a window dressing, a convenience.

Regardless of where the needle points on a given individual's moral compass, that person compels interest in direct proportion to not only the choice to be made but the time frame in which it must be made. Thus two time-worn-but-effective enhancements: It's now or never, and You're either with us or against us.

We tend to ally ourselves as readers with characters in terms of the risks they take, how they take these risks, and what consequences await them if the risks taken do not pay off. There are actual courses given in MBA programs relating to risk management, allowing some of us a delicious sense of complex response to fictional individuals who risk business losses, lead organizations into disaster, then emerge with enormous buy-out or exit bonuses. There are individuals who risk personal resources on inventions or artistic creations. There are yet other individuals who risk their personal freedom on ventures in which the prevalent law is breached or entirely broken.

Most of us who have lived past a certain age have taken a number of risks with varying results which we bear in some degree after the fact. I, for instance, still bear the residual anger of the wife of one of my oldest friends for saying no to chemotherapy when she had particularly urged. From time to time she reminds me with some pointed remark about how I played the luck card. Her doing so is an indication of her regard for me and her fear for my survival. Risks are choices with consequences, a reminder of the causal nature of story. If there are no consequences in a story, the events are merely episodic, a stream of vignettes with perhaps a thematic throughline, but only perhaps. Even in its modern, post-modern, and post-postmodern forms, story is still somewhat a domino theory in which one element, someone's goal, triggers something else, which triggers something else. Macbeth, coming home, runs into the three witches, spouting Republican propaganda, which leads him to wonder, hmmm, should I go whack King Malcolm and accede to the throne? Hamlet encounters the ghost who gives him the Republican line about whacking his uncle, and thus buys into a revenge throughline. Henry V sends his cabinet forth to come up with a reason to invade France. And so these stories go, one domino at a time. If Lear had not decided to retire, divide his estate among his daughters, one of whom was the governor of Alaska, there'd be no story. Dominoes. Consequences of tilting events. Risks taken in anticipation of a prize. McCain choosing Palin as a running mate, the act of which provides a roar of distraction from the tangible campaign programs of Barack Obama. A risk taken and, for the moment, being effective.

Narrative without risk is not story, not yet. It needs the catalyst of risk to propel the simmering energy.

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Sally wanted to appear on this post, offering concessions such as not sneaking out through a breach in the back fence and going forth to hoorah and harass the Cudahy's. It is a risk I will have to take.

Great Expectations

Characters enter a scene with expectations.

Readers pick up a book with expectations.

Writers write with expectations stories that have expectations expressed and implied residing within.

Without expectation, there can be no story.

Peoples once referred to as Hunters and Gatherers, now regarded as Foragers, position themselves in strategic places, anticipating the arrival of a herd of some sort or other, or possibly one huge woolly mammoth.

Humans evolved to have expectations. The sophistication of a particular culture or society may be measured by the complexity (or naivete) of expectations.

Expectation is the dramatic equivalent of tinder, which is useful to light a fire under the crucible of story, piling on more expectation until the crucible boils over.

Another high-burning dramatic tinder is misunderstanding. Throw some misunderstanding on the fire, then step back. Characters do not like to be misunderstood they like to think they are making themselves perfectly clear. When readers begin to discern that characters, wanting to be understood--Am I making myself clear?--are in fact muddying the waters, making in fact cowboy coffee of the waters, they begin to have expectations.

The expectations are that there will be conflict.

All you have to do now is make the conflict interesting.

Readers have expectations that conflict will be interesting.

In real life, conflict, even conflict based on misunderstanding, is often boring. Think of how many persons who disagree with you seem boring.

In real life, when you were an editor on the rise, an author announced himself to the receptionist as having a manuscript you would surely want to publish. When you learned his name, you understood that this was no idle boast here was an author with some name recognition, hoping to get an out-of-print title back into print. He had reasonable expectations that you would want to publish this book, giving it new life and no doubt giving him a few months worth of trouble-free living where rent was concerned. The moment you heard the man's name, you had expectations of what the title would be. You also had every expectation that you would not want to publish this book.

Some remarkable things happened in the lobby of that publishing company, which is no longer a publishing company and may well be seeing better days as a purveyor of automobile parts. Yet another adventure was enacted in that lobby when a psychiatrist questioned your sanity because you did not want to publish a book he assured you--correctly--that his book would sell a million copies in hardcover. Your answer for each author was the same. "It is a question of taste. I don't want to publish that book."

The author of the first book was Lajos Egri; the title of his book was and still is The Art of Dramatic Writing. The author of the second book was Arthur Janov, Ph.D.. His book was and is The Primal Scream.

This leads us to one kind of ending, the kind informed by another important element in human behavior and thus in dramatic behavior. The element is consequences. The consequences of my not contracting either book are multifarious, may lead you to have any of a number of opinions of me, for instance. Henceforth, years after the fact, you may well come to think of me as the man who could have published The Art of Dramatic Writing and The Primal Scream, but didn't. The consequences also involved the direction publishing either book would have on my employer.

Expectation. Misunderstanding. Consequences. What more could a narrative ask?

Beats

1. Just as police are often injured when they respond to domestic violence calls, the writer needs to be careful about jumping in too precipitously when the characters progress beyond the name-calling stage.

2. An anthology composed of family meal and/or wedding scenes. Think about it.

3. A clock in the background, ticking off critical time, if used with care, adds a precious note of tension and vulnerability. Early in your publishing career, this was brought home when your company did the paperback version of James Grady's novel about the moral ambiguity of the CIA, The Six Days of the Condor, in which an operative is through no fault of his own caught between rival government factions. We're pretty sure they both want him killed. The lesson to be learned was that the movie people thought six days was too long to let Robert Redford dodge about; they changed the title to The Three Days of the Condor.

4. I knew I wasn't going to get Logan's Run even though I'd done a number of books for one of the two writers, and liked the idea, even though they started out with the concept that because of population explosion and ecological disasters, people were not allowed to live past age thirty. By this time I'd learned a few things and suggested they cut the age down to twenty-one. They both looked at me as if what does he know and in many ways they were right. But somewhere along the way, the age was cut back to twenty-one and within a year one of the two writers was driving a Porsche and the other was still a horse's ass, neither factor being relevant to the way the twenty-one-year age limit spoke to readers.

5. I suspect that I could have used Google to track down his name but as a matter of pride, I spent nearly three weeks trying to remember it on my own. I'd after all read a novel and two collections of his poems. Apparently he began talking to me again later this afternoon. Albert Goldbarth. I could have tried poet U of Kansas. I could have even tried Who Whispered Behind Me, because I knew that, but when you play with memory, there are issues on the table you don't even know about not to mention the ones you do, as in how accurate was the thing you remember in the first place?

6. Speaking of which a character I don't know is telling me that his kids are giving him the pitch about moving him to an assisted living facility, and he has assured me that the business with leaving the gas on under the kettle was not his fault. I don't know enough about him to know whether or not to trust him. He says his name is Phil.

7. It is helpful to eavesdrop on conversations--particularly arguments--between characters you are thinking of signing on.

8. Jerry, a classmate and pal of Lew,one of my ongoing characters, showed up this year as the vegan equivalent of the disabled person who does not need to be in a wheel chair. I think there may be a story brewing because I never thought of him as a vegan and he always seemed pretty trustworthy.

9. Lew, who is normally trustworthy, went to great lengths to steal Jerry's dog, concoct an elaborate plan to disguise the dog, and raise her as his own. But conscience got the better of Lew.

10. At one point in real life, I assisted two Hindu nuns in an elaborate plot to kidnap a dog we suspected of being ill-treated by a wealthy Bengali couple living in Pacific Palisades. The dog's name was Lulu.

11. A beat is a dramatic event that sometimes may be a long pause; everyone connected with it knows it has consequences.

12. Consequences are things that are said, felt, or done as a result of something having been said felt, or done earlier.

13. Without consequences, there is no story.

14. Rae has reached the point of being tired of coming home from work to discover her boyfriend, Harmon, curled up asleep on her new futon with his ex, Meredith.

15. Sometimes, particularly with Sally napping away on her pad, it is difficult to maneuver through my study without getting enmeshed in a good deal of behavior I am trying to understand.