Is writing democratic, autocratic, or fugeddaboudit?

The answer to the important question in story, What comes next? is more often than not associated with something one of the major characters wants.  The true decision is whether that something comes now, in the immediate moment or triggered something in the past.  You begin by setting up a scene in which one or more of your principals meet, preferably in some venue that poses maximal discomfort if not threat to each (thus even if it has nothing to do with the story, you'd consider setting a scene in a butcher shop or deli if one of the characters were a vegan).

Remember that each character is coming into the scene having just been somewhere else, the somewhere causing a dandruff of some sort or other to have spread over the shoulders of said character.  Individuals do not merely appear in places, they appear with emotional baggage of having just experienced something that will effect the resident mood.  Characters come into scenes also bearing expectations.  I've got this meeting to attend and I expect to be bored.  My supervisor wants a brief word with me.  I am already under the gun of a deadline and I know that the brief word of my superior never lasts less than an hour.  I have just come from that brief-word meeting to my encounter with you.  How do you expect me to behave?

One of the major purposes of a scene is to advance the story.  

All right, you say, advance it toward what, closure?  Perhaps complication.  Perhaps merely a demonstration that the characters cannot be expected under the best of circumstances to get along well.

They have just come from doing X, where they have experienced Y.  They expect this meeting to produce Z.  Now start writing.  With all these things in mind, do you follow a prearranged script--or do you let them go at it?

Your own take is that working from a script pulls you away from the spontaneous potential for discovery and detail, for the equivalent of Dustin Hoffman pounding on the hood of the car while crossing the street in Midnight Cowboy. Following the script while composing forces you to think, as in making sure you've got everything in you'd hoped.  

Your Place or Mine

decisions-- the outcome of choices of narrative voice, characterization, setting and other dramatic considerations an author must make when composing a story; the courses of action a character in a story must take after being boxed in an emotional corner or when planning a strategy to achieve a goal.

The writer is faced with decisions related to where to put things in, when to leave them out, how to render them, and at what length. Characters are--or should be--driven to the wall in developing and implementing strategies that will lead to achieving some goal, even the survival-oriented goal of seeking a minimum-wage job as a stepping stone to something other. 

The operant word here is other; characters who are comfortable or fulfilled are not Petri dishes for the growth culture of story. Indeed, story only begins when such a character comes face to face with a situation that proves the opposite.

Writers are sometimes overwhelmed with decisions, causing their literary agents and/or publishers no end of concerns. It might be argued with some measure of success that writers who are comfortable with their characters are less likely to get maximum performance from them.  But writers who are uncomfortable with their characters and reach within themselves for extra measures of empathy and restraint are more apt to produce iconic characters (See) who remain in the reader's memory, long after the very details of their particular story are forgotten.

The decisions writer and character must make represent the common denominator between the two.

Hint: Both writer and characters have secrets. Since both are linked by decisions they must make, why not have them exchange secrets. Writers are often accused of betraying the secrets of family, friends, and professional associations. 

 Why not make an even four by having the writer accused of betraying the secrets of his or her characters? And just to play fair, think of ways characters can rat out their creators.

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.

Existentialism in Writing

Things that didn't work out as planned. Missed connections. Rejection slips on seemingly irresistible manuscripts. Unrequited affection. Characters who'd rather appear in someone else's story. Outrageous run-ins with your spell checker. A freight train rumbling through, drowning you out at the precise moment you ask someone significant for something significant. The market being out of Mirror Pond or Blue Heron ale. The same market being out of Wolf Brand chili, thus robbing you of the chance to have Wolf Brand chili with a cold Mirror Pond. Being convinced you are in advanced stages of absent mindedness when in the same twenty-four hour period you misplace your check book, reading glasses, Moleskine notebook, credit card holder, and favored fountain pen. Finding all of these in perfectly logical places. A cat whose origin in your life remains a mystery, bringing a hunting trophy into your work area, therein to perform an autopsy. Your dog seeming to think this is funny. Being asked (volunteered by a superior ) to serve on a committee dealing with a topic in which you have no interest and containing at least one other individual you consider a crashing bore. Final episodes of favored TV series (Homicide, West Wing, The Wire). A book you're reading, falling apart around mid point. A book you're writing, falling apart anywhere. While reading something written several hundred years before you were born, the discovery of an idea you'd just reached and thought to be original. Not getting the meaning of a joke everyone about you considers side-splittingly hillarious. Thinking you're too old or too young for something (anything!). Playing in a pick-up game of baseball and being told by someone half your age, Throw it over here, sir. Pasta in a non-Italian restaurant. Your ongoing attempts to carmelize onions. Your lousy average in preparing hollandaise sauce that does not curdle. You have two pair of reading glasses, Longs Drug specials; always the one with the least scratchy lenses suffers a broken temple.

Disappointments.

The yeast of story, making story rise to fluffy brioche heights.

Disappointments, vulnerability of one or more characters, conflicting agendas, misunderstandings as a consequence of naive narrators expectations (see Middlemarch), blunted ambitions.

Being preternaturally good at something of little or no consequence to you while at the same time attempting to achieve expertise at some ability of consuming consequence to you. Being told to get a real job, to grow up, to act your age, to major in something with a practical application, to save for a rainy day, to carpe diem, to get your act together.

In his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus posited that Sisyphus was in fact a happy man.

The adagio from Mozart's Concerto for Clarinet.

A fence as an instrument to keep things from getting out while simultaneously preventing things from gaining entry.

Having existential qualms as a delivery boy for the Miami Herald when encountering signs on various Miami Beach apartments that announced Restricted Clientele.

Potential violation of federal statutes because of behavior as a temporary mailman caused by the recognition of the name Ray Bradbury on certain thick envelopes from Thrilling Wonder Stories and Planet Stories.

Having a picnic lunch with Christopher Isherwood, prepared by Hindu nuns, midway between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.

Having nightmares while a student at Ida M. Fisher Junior High School in Miami Beach, Florida, in which you would never get back to California.

Having nightmares while a student at John Burroughs Junior High School in Los Angeles about dreadful teachers.

Having qualms.

Making a choice.

Making the choice.