Boundary: Where No Good Character Fears to Tread

A boundary is a demarcation of limit or extent; it is the edge of a terrain, landscape, attitude, or principal. In dramatic narrative, boundary is a limit of behavior a character sets for himself or which is imposed either by other characters, conventions, ethics, legal principals, or a combination of these. Significantly, boundary in story represents the terrain beyond which a character resolves not to venture, but of course there would be no story if he or she remained true to his/her word.

Boundary represents the grown-up version of a child being limited to a specific yard or block or neighborhood which must not be transgressed without parental approval or guidance of some sort. Boundary may be physical, moral/ethical; it is often the place where story begins, with a character having just defied boundary limitations in action that represents breech of authority, faith, convention, or ethic. In such cases, a significant layer of the story is the dramatic consequences the character faces, particularly as pangs of conscience or lack of such pangs have influential effect on the subsequent behavior of the character.

Some of the more basic instances of boundaries being ignored would involve a young girl of a particular religious faith sneaking off to date a boy of another, proscribed, faith, a sort of Romeo-Juliet situation in the making; perhaps of an individual resorting to shoplifting or some behavior coming under the general heading of white-collar crime. A more sophisticated violation of boundary would be an occasion in which an individual of either gender required a form of heart surgery in which one or more valves needed replacement. Make the patient an orthodox practitioner of Judaism or the Muslim faith and factor in the replaced valve coming from a pig, thus transgressing boundaries in a significant way. What are the consequences? Would the individual be banished from synagogue or mosque? How would the individual self-esteem hold up? What would such a person then do that the same person would never consider before the scientific intervention?

The mere mention of the word boundary opens wide the portals of story potential: an individual who is seen beyond his or her boundary may be seen variously as an adventurer, a fool, or someone who is hopelessly lost; an individual who strays from the boundaries of convention in which he was raised may be seen as a rebel or a lost sheep. A boundary in fiction is set up or already exists to be trespassed upon or stepped over or completely obliterated; it is a challenge of culture, type, convention--anything that restricts behavior, knowledge/understanding.

If we begin with two characters--your personal argument for openers--then add conflicting agendas and social or moral boundaries, story is bound to happen; the twenty-first century equivalent of the free-range chicken.

Revising Reality

Reality, through no fault of its own, is being revised to a fault.  Much of the revision comes from those who need and/or want to be told what reality represents.  A lesser quantity of the revision comes from artists, who define themselves by the act of defining reality.

The more the artist has defined an individual reality, the closer that artist comes to being a true individual.  From the moment the artist has begun this definition, vision begins to bud and ultimately blossom, and faith is pushed away from center stage.  Vision is informed by characters and their inherent ideas, bringing on stage (or easel or page) contrary visions, the better to confront, challenge, and inspire revision.

We all of us exist in some stage of revision, be it an upward or downward path.  The former induces growth to the point where ideas and visions emerge freshly into the reality, colliding in much the same manner as particles in a nuclear accelerator, producing in the wake of the collision new elements--fresh connections--that invite pursuit.  The latter induces entropy and/or surrender to orthodoxy of some faith, -ism, or conventional vision.

Convention, if not the overt enemy of the artistic inquiry, is the ballast, helping to keep inquiry from raising too high. Convention is the manner by which we attempt to bring reality under control.  The moment we presume to control reality, the more we give up our individuality.  Convention is to be abandoned with a what if? purpose in mind.  If this convention is abandoned, then this product or result will be the product.  If convention is overly maintained, protected, seen as an end, it will repeat itself into parody which means a good many unsuspecting victims will be harmed by the seemingly insurmountable forces of stasis and status quo.

Tempting as it may be, repetition leads to the self-parody of us making fun of ourselves by determining, as some of the Romans who aspired to godhood did, that more of the same is not only acceptable, it is desirable.  Because we can guarantee the outcome of heating water to 212 Fahrenheit degrees as sea level, it is not a license to be content with other guaranteed outcomes.

The Vital Lie

vital lie--a cultural convention or moral absolute one or more front-rank characters in a story believes to be true, then comes to realize is bogus; an ethical principal or position taken by an antagonist in opposition to a protagonist; the moral license for politically motivated behavior.

The vital lie in fiction is the attitudinal and entitled platform of characters who represent a mindset and way of life that appears to withhold acceptance to the protagonist and his or her associates. The lie may begin with characters from the privileged classes referring to working-class individuals as "good country people," signifying a surface respect that barely masks a patronizing sneer. It may just as well have its origins in the envy-riddled contempt with which the working classes regard the affluent.

To dramatize the vital lie, the writer needs to determine the pole star of a representative character, then construct a plausible path for the character to have followed in order to arrive there.

The vital lie is the elephant in the living room, the thing that is seen but not acknowledge; it is variously gender prejudice, racial prejudice, class prejudice. It is story in the making.

Every culture has at least one. Like humor, the vital lie always has a target

Convention Wisdom

convention--an agreement among publishers and readers for mechanical usage such as punctuation; an accepted common wisdom relative to acceptable norms and understandings.

The convention for eating peas generally suggests the use of a fork or perhaps chopsticks--but not a knife. The convention for point of view in a short story was first-person or third person, shifting to include omniscient after the significant contribution of William Trevor in that area. The convention for verb tense in fiction was based on the calculus of past tense representing present moment, with past perfect indicating completed past action, and the imperfect tense--used to, or would--being action occasionally but not habitually done in the past. These conventions apply to Indo-European languages and are not in immediate danger of changing or shifting, but along about the time Bobbie Ann Mason's short story, "Shiloh, appeared in the New Yorker, a convention was developing that allowed Ms. Mason and any other writer who chose, to use the present tense--Fred gets up--to indicate events supposedly taking place before our eyes.

After reading works first written or published in earlier centuries, it is possible to determine the zeitgeist of that century, the use and organization of language being a literary dipstick used to measure the oil. For those who experience difficulties with the conventions of other centuries, say the fourteenth, it is possible to secure a modern--twentieth or twenty-first-century--recasting of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, rendering them in modern convention.

For some time, the conventional wisdom was that the three things not to be written about, particularly with humorous intent, were sex, religion, and politics. In the twenty-first century, it has become nearly impossible to write about politics without mentioning sex and religion; there are clear-cut politics in discussions of religion and sex, there are at the very least gender politics in discussions of sex, but just as often there are religious connotations. Just ask D. H. Lawrence.

Convention has become the elephant in the literary living room; if a particular convention is taken on merely for the sake of being contentious, the result is apt to become polemical, evangelical, or screed, and we all know how these sound. If the taking on of a convention makes for a more illuminated story, the result is apt to become inspirational. Unfortunately, there is too much of the former. In mitigation, the writer has humor.

conventional wisdom

publishers' conventional wisdom--an idiosyncratic sense of knowing what the reading public wants and how to reach it; a series of reasons publishers give for taking on some projects and not others; reasons mainstream publishers give for removing mention of oral sex from YA novels; rationale behind enormous advances given on celebrity titles.

Publishers have their individual conventional wisdom, which is their pole star. Similarly, writers have their individual conventional wisdom. This is as it should be. Occasionally the two overlap and a partnership is formed. This is precisely as it should be. Neither should adjust his conventional wisdom to conform to the other; what happens should be of a sincere feeling of chemistry or, better yet, the remarkable symbiosis achieved when particles in a nuclear accelerator crash into one another and produce a reaction.

Hint: It is one thing for a writer to research a publisher so that the odds of colliding particles is enhanced, but it is yet another for a writer to alter or diminish his own conventional wisdom to suit a conventional wisdom of a particular publisher that is entirely supposition. One of the reasons Kenneth Millar (aka Ross Macdonald) submitted his Lew Archer private eye novels to the publisher Alfred Knopf was because, at the time, Knopf had no mystery list. The best conventional wisdom to follow is this: The more unlike others you are, the more likely you are to find a readership. It may not happen as soon as you wish; it may not happen at all, but you knew that all along and, somehow, the knowledge of it fueled your work.

Planetude

science fiction novel, the--longform narrative extrapolating on a hard science or special science theme; a novel in which the major thematic problem and its solution relate directly to scientific observation; a novel in which laws governing the property of elements, forces, and species are extended to produce a moral problem and its solution.

The common denominator of science fiction is plausibility, demonstrated when the reader, writer, and characters accept the reality of the concepts that are inherent to the final result of the story. Accordingly, the science fiction reader has no difficulty accepting the speculative reality of Ray Bradbury's (1920--)Fahrenheit 451, which features a repressive society bound up in book burning; nor does it fail to see the issues raised about prolonging the human life span from Aldous Huxley's (1894-1963)After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, nor indeed the issues of morality and prejudice raised in Robert Heinlein's (1907-88) Stranger in a Strange Land, predicated on the journey through earth of a human born on the planet Mars. These titles represent the broad spectrum of subject matter inherent within the genre, which, like other genera, has morphed its way from plot-driven entertainments to character-driven and issue-driven literature. Theodore Sturgeon's (1918--1985) success d'estime, More Than Human, probed the boundaries of the human condition, positing relations among humans that were symbiotic. In one of the few notable cases where a writer's work benefited from screen writing, Leigh Brackett, who began her career writing pulp sci-fi stories, morphed into a hardboiled mystery writer, from which genre she brought an edgier, noirish type of character into her prolific output of science fiction.

Although few if any critics have seen the work of Richard Powers (1957--), particularly his 2006 novel, The Echo Maker, as science fiction, but thanks to its relentless probing of the meaning of individual identity and the self, it could well be shelved among the more literate and literary works of science fiction.

The true meaning of humor--the sad truth revealed--is a frequent theme in science fiction, particularly as articulated by anthropologist-turned sci-fi writer Chad Oliver, by Alfred Bester, and Frederic Brown.

Science fiction bears a close relationship to much mainstream fiction, in that each begins with a what-if premise, which is then pushed beyond accepted limitations. The writer who is curious about science fiction may discover commentary about it in which it is spoken of as speculative fiction. Philip Roth (1933--), for instance, is rarely thought of as a science fiction writer, and yet his The Plot Against America speculates an alternate universe theme in which Charles Lindberg became president of the United States.

Orbituary

elliptical orbit--a story path veering off from the circular orbit of the conventional narrative; the oval-shaped path of a story, implying a movement away from tight plotting while still appearing to revolve about a recognizable theme.

Conventional short stories and novels tend to follow the structure of the domino theory.  Events are arranged in close enough proximity to cause one dramatic event (a robbery, for example)to trigger another (unanticipated complication for the robber: get-away car stalls, flat tire, traffic jam).  Any one or all of which triggers the arrival of an investigative agency responding not to the robbery but the stalled car, which triggers the appearance of the investigative agency responding to the robbery, which triggers a bureaucratic confusion in which the robbers escape, etc.

As stories and novels evolve beyond the conventional plot formation, the behavior of the characters involved becomes more notional, producing surprise and variations on reader expectations. 

 The writer's role in such stories is to provoke questions rather than to insist upon or even suggest answers. Thus do those frequent passengers, ambiguity and subtext, hitch rides on the traveling sphere, pulling the circular orbit slightly off course and into an ellipse.

Let Poe's "A Cask of Amontillado" represent the uniformly circular orbit or domino theory short story, with James Thurber's more recent trope on the same kind of revenge theme represent the tendency to veer off slightly, and Tobias Wolff's "Bullet in the Brain" represent the elliptical nature of the latest evolutionary step in the decidedly elliptical orbit of the short story.

With this in mind, the question to the writer becomes: What new thing can you do for story while still keeping it a story?

A Whale of a Story

whale, the great (aka Moby-Dick)--a tangible, forceful adversary; a dramatic partner to the protagonist in story landscape; a presence eventually discernible as having an agenda opposing the protagonist.

Cruising along at mid-level in the sea of dramatic convention, surfacing on occasion for a gulp of air much as the whale does in real life, there is the convention of the worthy opponent, the man, woman, or child who not only believes utterly in the rightness of his or her position but who radiates the embodiment of that stand. It is the very strength of conviction within this opponent that drives the story toward its eventual combustion. Therefore it must be respected rather than demonized. In creating such a dramatic presence, the writer is clearly investigating opposing forces within his or her own sense of conviction and justice. It would be foolish to suggest that the great whale had a personal vendetta against Ahab or any crew member of the Pequod, but it is not so foolish to ask the reader-who-wants-to write, the writer within, as it were, to imagine the preparation need to prepare for portraying the role of the whale in a dramatized version of Moby-Dick. What does the whale want? The very question suggests parody, but that absurdity is mitigated by the further question: What does the whale represent? The whale represents forces of Nature, which is a start to the answer. The whale wants to survive, another answer. The whale has been witness to and present at events counter to its desire to survive.

In similar fashion that borders on risk of absurdity, it is instructive to think through the agendas and goals of the adversary, whether they be forces of Nature or teen-agers wanting to borrow the family car. This introspection is not for the purpose of finding the irrational in the dramatic partner. Rational partners don't make for drama, they make for moot court proceedings. Rational as he was, Sherlock Holmes could not have stood up dramatically without Dr. Watson. Although not an adversary in terms of plot goals, Watson represents a behavioral and social force antithetical to Holmes, just as Dr. Wilson represents antithetical behavior to the fictional Dr. Gregory House.

Let the great hulking whale represent a literary totem, representing the duality of partnership and adversary. A partner represents someone with whom the protagonist can confide, share, explore survival strategy. An adversary represents a threat to the protagonist's agenda in significant enough measure to cause the reader concern for the outcome of the story. Remember as well: the protagonist has caused some level of threat to the adversary--otherwise the adversary would not behave in such a gradually accelerating pattern of opposition.

The collision between protagonist and adversary can come suddenly, with no warning, in spite of preparations; the consequences may be highly physical as in plot-driven narrative or of more internal, morality-sensitive issues as in the character-driven story. Although a significant dramatic convention exists to turn the protagonist into a Cassandra, who is fated to see the future exactly but no one believes her, the consequences of a protagonist alone with no confidantes triggers the risky business of the protagonist having no place to go but interior monologue.

Think whale. Think partner. Think confidante. Then, without even having to think about it, you will be introducing layer upon layer of dramatic intensity.

When, toward the end of what can easily be considered to be the travails of Jane Eyre, the eponymous narrator says of Mr. Rochester, "Reader, I married him." and Rudyard Kipling says in his Just-So Stories, "Dearly beloved," each was breaking a rule set in place with some firmness from about the Nineteenth Century onward. For different reasons, each was addressing the reader, breaking the so-called wall between author and reader in which the author did not recognize the presence of the reader.

In each of the cited cases, the lapse served to enhance my already intense pleasure in the material, my place within it as eavesdropper. Even now, as I write this, there is a distinct pleasure rampant within me at the thought of eavesdropping because it--that process--is so vital to the sense of how I read and write fiction. A conversation between two characters may well advance the story and reveal things about the participants, but it also provides me with the delicious sense of having overheard something that passed between two individuals who have life and agenda and secrets and fantasies and ambitions and--what else? I am in on some one's secret or some one's life; I may, if I persist, get more--

In real life, there is more of a gray no-person's land between eavesdropping and mere overhearing. Standing in line at the supermarket check-out stand , I hear bits of conversation which I may take in or block out as suits my whim. Waiting in line at a theater affords similar opportunities, cruising the aisles of a gallery provide even more. People talk, and who is to say when or where the best and most intriguing snippets of conversation emerge. My note pads and Moleskines are filled with actual conversations that went somewhere before they ebbed back into going nowhere, which is where conversations in real life ultimately go, the refuse heap of undramatic intent. Fact still remains, I ran the best 10-K of my career eavesdropping on two young ladies who were discussing various adventures on various dates. Fact also remains that Nancy Simon, Neil's remarkable daughter, once brought such a story into Saturday workshop, based on something she'd overheard at the Russian Tea Room, wherein a girl at a nearby table was telling her date, "So, this is the place where guys bring girls to break up with them," and the guy responded, "By the way, I think we should consider the possibility of, you know, seeing other people." Nancy's date had heard the same conversation and responded to her, "Yeah, I guess it's a tradition, taking them somewhere nice so maybe they'll think twice about crying." A conversation that quickly moved toward, "You know, you're the kind that would cry in a situation like that." I thought The Threpenny Review, which turned out to be just right.

There are numerous ways for and reasons to break that wall between reader and characters. I was more than fascinated by a production of Jack Gelber's play, The Connection, in San Francisco, when during the break between acts, the actors mingled among the audience, trying to hustle money from them, giving credence to the belief that these characters were actual users with big time Joneses. Some years later, as the co-producer and writer and actor of mystery dinner plays, I'd do in character to audiences what I'd hesitate to do in real life, including lifting shrimp from their hors d'oeurves plate and getting away with it, and in another instance trying to borrow a twenty from someone in the audience because the producer was a cheapskate.

Rules and conventions.

At the time of the Globe Theater, women characters were played by boys. Twelfth Night is a splendid example of a boy portraying a girl, Viola, who portrays a boy,Cesario. That convention was a given in the day. Look how Larry Gelbart used that very convention to the same kind of advantage with Dustin Hoffman portraying Tootsie.

Some rules and conventions to be looked upon with rousing suspicion:

Show, don't tell.

Only write from your own experience.

If there is a shotgun on the wall, it must go off during the arc of the story.

Don't use flashbacks.

If a character is left-handed, we should be shown some reason for it.

Plant your clues early so that they may be dug up at the right time.

Every story must have a theme.

Short stories should only have one point of view.

Shoot the sheriff in the first paragraph.

Don't have a story in which characters have the same or similar-sounding names.

Don't tell jokes in novels or short stories.

There are more to be sure and each one can and should be taken down from its perch on the roost of Convention, defeathered, and eaten for a snack. Every one of these rules has been broken with panache and professional eclat by Joe Wambaugh among others they will be broken again.

Read Mark Twain's informative How to Tell a Story, not only for his wit and instruction but for the answer to whom among the others will break the rules next.

Rule of Writer's Thumb: If it sounds logical, don't do it.

The Ten Commandments of Blogging

1. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's blog. Sure, everyone else's blog appears to have nicer type faces, amazing graphic inventions, and an imaginative set of divisions. Their desk is probably neater than yours. People will read your blog for the content.

2. Thou shalt not raise hell nor rant. Blogs are marketplaces for ideas, museum walls for verbal or graphic images of the interior reaches of your creative process. You want to rant, flame, and bash--go listen to Rush Whatsisname.

3. Thou shalt not post entries defending or castigating yourself for not having blogged. Bloggers have enough issues with their own posting performance without wanting to read about your ennui, anomie, or hectic life; they look to you as you should look to you, in good faith and interest. You want self pity--go watch streaming videos of George W. Bush's press conferences.

4. Thou shalt give credit to whom credit is due. It is legitimate and instructive to quote, attribute, ratify, or take issue with an idea expressed on another site, provided you give credit to the author. Internet technology makes it possible for artists to be ripped off; the blogging world can be a source of the culture of morality in which the artist gets credit for the work. Plagiarism sucks

5. Thou shalt not ask another blog site to link to you. It is lovely to be popular; the whirring sound of clicks on the counter you have installed on your web site can be hypnotic, but do not ask. You can link; you can even tell the linkee that you have done so. Period. It stops there.

6. Thou shalt keep relevant thy responses and comments posted on other blogs . Even one- or two-word responses are Kosher, so long as they remain clearly identifiable as an expression of agreement, support, and/or disagreement. Opaqueness doesn't get it. Cuteness doesn't get it. Trashing commentary is of a piece with tagging the Mona Lisa; it is an advertisement for Rush Whatsisname, and you don't want to do that, do you?

7. Thou shalt not make anonymous comments/responses on other sites. That speaketh for itself. You want people to think you're a nut case or a coward? If it's worth posting, it's worth owning.

8. Thou shalt spell check thy blog before posting. Language changes, sometimes even spelling and punctuation conventions change; sometimes the heat of enthusiasm gets one typing fast, but a spell check speaks to the dignity and integrity of the intent.

9. Thou shall avoid sarcasm. Sarcasm and its first cousin, irony, are complex emotions, requiring the kinds of revisiting and revision to bring off with success that are not inherent in the spontaneity and improvisational freedoms of the blog.

10. Thou shalt not celebrate numbers. No welcoming the hundred thousandth visitor to your blog, no opening the champagne over the hundredth or five hundredth or thousandth posting. Let the celebration come from content of the blog post rather than from mere numbers. Indulge and enjoy the miracle of having a site, posting to it, and giving it your best thoughts and feelings about tangible things.