Train Wreck, Dramatic Style

Here it is, getting well on into the eleventh year of the twenty-first century, a number of disasters still raw on the face of the earth.  You think of New Orleans, still hurting and needful; Haiti, crying out in unheard agony; Pakistan immersed, soggy, miserable; the seeping wound in the Gulf of Mexico only just staunched but on this very day a new explosion of a rig.  No wonder an expression much in use is train wreck.  With ample pictures of train wrecks at our disposal we extend the metaphor to include any performance that did not go as planned, resulting in some disaster of language, performance, even intentions.  A train wreck has become short hand for Robert Burns' suggestion that "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men/Gang aft agley/An' leave us nought but grief an' pain/For promised joy..."

You have found unfortunate ways to extend the metaphor, the first of which is in things you read as a reader reading for enjoyment (might need an entire essay on what that has come to mean) or in order to provide editorial support, the other being disasters in your own work, accordion-pleated logic or detail strewn about after having collided with unnecessary description or the heavy hand of authorial intervention.

One of the great causes of literary train wreck is convenience, as in an event coming about in fortunate coincidence so that the star-crossed lovers meet or the grudging rivals meet or someone changes his or her mind in order to allow the story to arrive at some comfortable destination.  Perhaps as well a conversation between two or more characters in which vital information is FedExed to the reader, no signature required.  Hi, John, I've been meaning to talk to you about that business from last week.  You mean the one where we agreed to enter into an unlawful conspiracy against Fred?  No, although that was interesting and we might want to finalize that next week.  I mean the one where we both decided to raise prices we used to charge our clients.  Oh, that one.  Yes, that one.

Another cause is unnecessary description of any noun having the misfortune to appear in the story.  It can be the shape and/or color of the beard on the face of a homeless person the protagonist sees on his way to work every day, or a recitation of the exact number of steps a character requires to get from her desk at work to the photocopying machine in the work room, neither object, the beard or the photocopying machine having role or relevance in the story other than a demonstration of the character's acute awareness of quotidian details, thus demonstrating the sensitivity and regard for order experienced by said character.

Yet another train wreck may be an explanation, offered either by one of the characters to another, which is preferred over the explanation offered by the author, either an eighteenth-century author such as Henry Fielding (of Tom Jones fame) or the twentieth-century author Aldous Huxley, who so enjoyed explanations and descriptions that he became quite good at slipping them in between the more active paragraphs of his longer works and was no slouch at using them in short stories.

The more you think about the potential for train wrecks in the context of writing the more you become convinced that thought is a dangerous enterprise to indulge until you have completed at least an early draft of what you consider the work to be.  Even then you want more to listen to the material than think what you wish it to be.  If you listen carefully, you will learn what it wishes to be rather than the train wreck of what you think it ought to be.  Many promising dramatic ventures are spoiled by sending story and thought along the same track

You felt what?

Time and convention are often the rugs of storytelling, caught in midair by some novel or short story, as they are being yanked from under the concepts and guidelines of the dramatic past.

Because they are so basic, some truths tend to fall between the cracks as you scurry about in your investigations of the provenance and credentials of less obvious, more arcane verities.  It is as though you are drawn away from simple truths wearing sensible shoes by enticing minor ones clad in four-inch pumps.

No surprise that each time you need to remind yourself of one of the most basic truths of all, you come away with a sense of having at last recognized in some permanent way its import, then resolved to control it.  You even have specific approaches to support the control.

The basic truth in question is the recognition that storytelling is an evocative rather than descriptive enterprise.  In apercu, you don't describe how a character feels about a particular situation, you put the character into some form of dramatic action--action verbs rather than thought verbs--which conveys to the reader how the character felt at a particular time or indeed feels right now.  We should know from our own observation as opposed to being told a thing is so by the author, which is to say by you.

A serious culprit in boring dramatic prose is the piled-on depth of description of things, events, responses imputed to characters by a garrulous writer.  The reader who enjoys fiction is the reader who enjoys the work of experiencing the results of the thing the writer enjoys creating.

Converse Conversation

Dialogue is a siren's song leading the story teller into the temptation of trying to find it in the way characters speak as opposed to placing it directly at the roots of how they act.

For some years, you listened carefully, working to capture on the page what you heard out there in such realities as the coffee house, the workplace, even the classroom.  As a consequence, your dialogue reeked of authenticity but conveyed boredom in conversational form.  You in effect gave voice to boredom, thinking it would be interesting if it sounded real but dooming it from the get go for that very reason.

Since those days of conversational characters, over-explained and linear story lines, you have with the fervor of a circuit-riding preacher advocated the view of dialogue in which it is specifically:

not conversation.
not really American English.
not a tool for explaining the story.
not a platform for addressing the reader.
not the author speaking to the reader in any way.

With these embargoes in mind, you have moved closer to the interior of story telling rather than story by description.  You are pleased to be in this position because among other things, you have wanted to be here without being able to articulate the mechanics of why you wished to be here.  It was somewhat like being sympathetic with your need to involuntarily shout ouch or worse, when you hit your thumb with a hammer.

Understanding what characters want is a major step forward; so is what you understand to be subtext, the difference between what a character actually feels while saying what is actually said at the time.  These two elements have moved you closer:  (1) awareness of what the character wants, and (2) the sensitivity to the fact of the character being caught in the bind of having to speak to appearances--the Social Contract, if you will--while feeling indifferent or oblique to it much less in hearty endorsement.

In an exchange with your literary agent yesterday in which she told you of a friend who'd been fired as editor in chief of a publishing house because of his irreverent behavior toward a martinet of a publisher, you were reminded of a similar situation in which you, as editor in chief, were fired because of your relationship with the publisher.  The man who fired you was a significant force behind your learning the inner life of dialogue.  Occasionally one meets such persons in life and while they may seem a puzzling quantity at first, they merit close attention not only in what they say but in ways their behavior speaks to who they are and what they want from others.

As you noted to your agent, "Your friend the late Pockell reminds me of  how I 'left' my ed in chief gig at the scholarly publisher.  The  Publisher was a short, martinet of a man whose behavior taught me much about writing dialogue."  You went on to recall a particularly memorable exchange with him, EHB:

"You didn't tell me you went to Yale."
"Because,"  I said, "I didn't."
"You wear J. Press.  Only men who attended Yale wear J. Press."
"But I didn't attend Yale."
"And you wear striped ties with houndstooth jackets.  You dress Yale."
"An accident.  I have no idea what people wear at Yale."
"How do you rationalize not wearing Brooks Brothers?"
"I don't rationalize it.  I simply don't do it.  With the exception of one shirt, an emergency purchase, I tend not to like Brooks Brothers clothing."
"Odd.  Very odd.  You appear neat in spite of it."
When members of my staff saw us together, they would say loud enough for me to hear it, "Well, there's the long and short of it."

Such exchanges remain in memory and help forge the structural nature of exchanges of dialogue, which is a kind of ladder by which the characters reach higher emotional levels of involvement with the cosmos of story.

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.

Too Much Too Soon

A common story telling disaster, of which you are a sometime unwilling participant, is the desire to let the reader see what is going on, what is at stake, what the prize or contention point is,and what the potential menace is, a sort of Kubler-Ross index before the reader learns of an issue in the first place.

True enough, you intrigue the reader with the sense that two trains are already on the same track or are about to be shunted onto a common course, but this is done by oblique reference. Anything remotely resembling Little did they know, finds repose in the trash bin. The mantra is withhold; don't tell the reader what the reader wants to know until the reader is close to shaking with impatience to find out, which is toward the final paragraphs of a short story, the penultimate chapter of a novel--or later.

Nor is it prudent to take the reader where the reader wants to go. For all practical purposes, once the reader gets where he desires, the story is over. You don't have to believe that, but 1) make a list of your favorite stories that allow such things early on. Short list, right? 2) take a look at a story of yours in which the lead character accomplishes a major goal just as the story is setting out. See any problems? Hear any thunk sounds, like a large souffle dropping its collar right out of the oven? Unless the real story homes in on the consequences of a character accomplishing a major goal, the natives will be getting restless and the readers will be impatient enough to bail on you.

Things accomplished too soon, too easily, too much as if by accident or divine intervention all have the consequence the writer least wants to deal with, the Kubler-Ross index as it applies to the scrap of paper attached to a returned short story, or the Thanks-for-letting-us-see-the-enclosed letter that comes back with the book length manuscript, containing that impersonal-yet-snotty trope, unfortunately it does not suit our needs.

There is no one way to describe what the our needs of that kind of letter intends but you can be sure that some of those needs are for characters who seem to do things neither good for them or you, characters who are too comfortable about the wrong things, not uncomfortable enough about the right things, they are Emma Bovary, looking for a life that is quite beyond her grasp, Captain Ahab too pissed with one creature to realize he is angry with all of Nature, the way a faithful parishioner was after discovering God didn't see fit to grant him what he wished; they are individuals who achieve their heart's desire only to be left wondering, what now, what do I do with this situation I have wrought upon myself?

Bad dialogue, too much description, too many coincidences. Mere moths fluttering about the Coleman lantern during a summer's camp-out compared to the heavy hand of Too much, too soon. Even when we tell ourselves a secret story, we know not to make the payoff to soon or too easy, the better to enjoy the satisfaction of the feeling that emerges at the end, a haunting surprise of satisfaction that comes from a source deeper than the payoff.

The Writer: Flasher or Flash-drive

For the longest time, your own familiarity with tools was focused on jumper cables, those long pairs of wires that end with color-coded claws which allow you to connect the positive and negative aspects of your car battery to similarly polar claws on someone else's battery.  You became aware of this only last week when a forlorn young woman in the Loreto Square parking lot asked if you happened to have a pair.  You did, but they were miles away, in your garage, there because your year-and-a-half-old car has been mercifully free of need.  The jumper cables were a gift from someone who similarly felt the relative age and maintenance history of her car precluded the need for such primitive tools. You have been of a mind to carry the jumper cables about with you, but there is a kind of snobbery that comes with the faith of newness and coherence related to a young car.

Somewhere close-to-hand is a twenty-five-cent piece which works wonders at opening the access to the battery on your MacBook, the battery tube on your wireless keyboard, and the soft underbelly of your wireless mouse.  A Phillips head screw driver, which came with a pack of AA batteries for said keyboard and mouse, also waits service, and although you don't really think of it as a tool, a small, two-blade penknife with wooden side panels accompanies you When some mechanical matter demands its attention with the insistence of a cat wanting to come in or perhaps go out or perhaps both at the same time, most of us have some immediate sense of which tool or combination of tools will help set things right--back to working condition.  

The most important tools for the writer are often ignored, not thought of as tools because of the notion that tools are mechanical, a notion that means all persons who use tools are thus doing mechanical things.

Fact is, writers have tools, entire kits filled with them.  Unlike plumbers who love to brandish wrenches or electricians who are mindful about wearing protective gloves, ours are such things as pace or suspense or even that one tools that seems so foreign to beginners, dialogue.  But most important of all, the ones we keep closest to hand of all, emotions.

With these tools we are able to portray individuals in the various states the reader will have been in at one time or another or in situations the reader fears as imminently forthcoming, things such as death or lack of bravery or purpose under fire or of being alone or of misunderstanding or of causing others to misunderstand.  These tools are hard come by, well beyond the tools we can purchase at Sears, well beyond the ones usually displayed on shelves at Home Improvement or, worse, Wal-Mart.  As many of the masters of the various crafts have had to do, we have served an apprenticeship in which we have taught ourselves how to use these particular tools.  We have watched patiently as students and dedicated beginners have learned how to use these tools, so that their characters no longer recoil in horror or say "Oh, God," every other paragraph, no longer feel the sweat of fear erupt on their forehead or drip down shirt and blouse, who no longer shiver involuntarily nor gasp, but rather act as men, women, and children do when they are in emotion-laden circumstances.

Like any craftsperson with a decent set of tools, we keep them honed and oiled and ready to evoke for the reader what forces may be tugging at a character, not with the notion of describing to the reader how he or she should feel but more importantly how so many mammalian feelings are shared, and thus of the common humanity of which we are all a part.

What's in a Name or Two or Six

laundry list--a detailed list of characters, traits, attributions appended to a story; qualities, personalities, descriptions deployed at great length in a narrative; burdensome details of an individual, scene, or setting.

Laundry lists had their widest use during the times of Realism, where the things a character used or wore or noticed, the every day usage habits of the character, spoke volumes toward their authenticity. The temptation to double-down on adjectives or strenuously purposefully use duets of adverbs is great, particularly when the characters, places, and objects in a story have outstanding traits or features. The temptation to describe a character's movements in small, precise steps, also flares up, particularly if, in a particular scene, the character is performing under the influence of a particularly controlling emotion. The solution is to use as much of the laundry list as possible in the early drafts; this will insure a vivid picture of the individuals and events in which they are engaged. The second part of the solution is to remember the frequent reaction of readers to the amount of information about whales in Moby-Dick, to remember that story is an expression of movement and of characters reacting to one another.

Remember also that story is evocation rather than description.

Simple Solutions to Big Problems

newly wed housewife, the--a fitting trope for the insecure writer; an attitude in which the writer is overly concerned at the paucity of motivational and physical detail for dramatic action.

Think of the newly wed preparing her first meal for company, then try to superimpose the image on the vision of a writer wondering if the intent and details of a story are clear enough in definition. Likely result: a control-freak attitude toward description. The exact moment an activity or intent begins. A Vogue Magazine description of what the characters are wearing. A laundry list of adjectives and adverbs. Perhaps even an instance or two or six of authorial intrusion.

None of these tactics are fatal; F. Scott Fitzgerald employs them with great regularity (Tender Is the Night and The Great Gatsby), the difference being he gives them a dramatic context that has meaning beyond mere description. These tactics give a better sense of the world into which Fitzgerald has invited us to eavesdrop. Look also at the way his dialogue and narrative work, moving you at a comfortable pace from action to action, weighing each scene down with the tang of such emotions as apprehension, suspicion, jealousy, despair, need.

There is no problem with over-describing each action between characters, each setting, each nuance of each exchange of dialogue. This approach helps articulate the inevitability and authenticity of a story. The problem comes with allowing the prompts and attributions to remain when there is sufficient activity and attitude to reflect the drama that is under way.

Hint: cast your narrative and scenes toward the goal of an emotional presence, using verbs chosen for their personality, hinting at implied meanings, picking adverbs with great deliberation, avoiding the temptation to double up on adjectives, eschewing simile and metaphor that distract from the work at hand rather than illustrate it.

Withhold

withhold--a narrative strategy for delaying the presentation of vital dramatic information; a dramatic device for creating tension if not outright suspense in a story by means of causing the reader to wonder about a detail, event, or meaning.

Readers are natural matchmakers; they will speculate on the potential embers of romantic attraction bursting into flames when characters exchange glances or respond edgily to one another, seeing sexual tension everywhere, whether intended by the writer or not. Readers will wonder and make outrageous assumptions. Let them. They will suspect the suspects in a mystery for reasons other than those intended by the writer. Let them.

Writers who read their work in classes or writers' groups will frequently be enjoined to bring the story to a screeching halt by injecting physical descriptions and details of attitudes and beliefs. This is done in the spirit of wanting to be helpful, in pointing out to the writer the need for details that humanize the characters. Trouble is, such details are irrelevant and actual albatrosses until the reader is made curious about them in the first place. The proof of the reading resides in the curiosity itching away at these literal minds who ask for details. Most habitual readers can and will continue reading a story without knowing what color a character's eyes are or what she is wearing. Particularly if the character is involved in some activity such as arguing or asserting her independence or difference of opinion.

Some accomplished writers never describe characters, wanting readers to supply their own vision; their use of description and/or explanation is limited, conveyed by indirection rather than description. Prolific writers often limit their descriptions of characters and of settings to elements that reveal qualities by implication. Denise Mina, for instance, is at greater pains to describe her protagonist Paddy Meehan's attempts at dietary precautions than she is to provide actual references to body configuration, and as a result, when Paddy overindulges, the reader feels a sympathy for her interior climate.

Nor are detailed reasons for a character's behavior likely to impart greater gravity or conviction to a that character's behavior. Often such descriptions are the first things that can be removed in the revision process.

Hint: Make them want it, which they will if it is not presented too soon.

mise en scene: And You Thought You Knew

mise en scene--the visual aspects of a story; descriptions or evocation of a place, a time, and a setting; the positioning and movement (but not physical description of characters) of individuals in a dramatic narrative.

The term has been borrowed from the stage and motion picture set, where it refers to uses and placement of scenery, blocking, and atmosphere. When used critically or editorially to discuss a particular novel or story, it may mask the critic's or editor's desire to make the concept of setting seem more mystical than it ought to be, thus the warning to writers that terms expressed in foreign words or terms (See denouement and deus ex machina) should be made to show their passports at the border: Is there, they might ask, a suitable English language translation?

Mise en scene gives the writer of narrative fiction an opportunity to provide subtext, wherein the setting an/or activities of characters provide an unspoken, unwritten feeling or theme. Consider early on in the first act of Tennesee Williams' play, A Streetcar Named Desire, where the principal character, Blanche DuBois, appears. Had Streetcar been a novel, we might have had some moments of interior monologue, but as the play is mounted, we see Blanche appearing in a brightly lit room, turning down the lights as she appears to be looking for something. Our curiosities aroused, we follow her as she approaches a hidden bottle of whiskey, then takes a bracing pull on it. Not a word has been spoken and yet we have learned things about her.

What would it say, for instance, about two characters who are watching television in their bedroom? What would it say about the same two characters who were watching television in their living room, each seated behind a fold-up tray on which a dinner dish rested? What additional would it say about the same two characters if they were sitting on separate Laz-y Boy chairs which had clear plastic covers on them?

The most effective use of the mise en scene concept can be experienced by remembering the importance of story in the dramatic equation. If mise en scene contributes to a deeper sensory awareness of story, then it is successful.


narrative--a systematic arrangement of dramatic information for the purpose of relating a story; presentation of character-based activities that involve readers to the point where they feel a stake in the outcome; events related with the purpose of keeping the reader alert and concerned.

The term "narrative" is a lazy term, being used generically to mean any story or tale. Narrative in a novel or short story is the sum of interior monologue, description, mise en scene, and action, which leaves only dialogue as non-narrative. A writer's narrative is any fiction intended for print or web media. A writer's voice is the tone with which a story is freighted.

Description: Rhetorical Strategy or Cock-and-Bull Story

description--the salient qualities of a character, place, or thing; the briefest gloss without distracting from story on how an organization or tradition works; relevant details in a story; a series of adjectives, adverbs and evocations that convey personality, sense of place or sense of atmosphere.

When you choose words to describe a character, a locale, an institution, even a room at a Motel 6, they should come from a menu of emotion-friendly words, words that help transport the feeling of being in Character A's presence, the patience needed to overcome the ambient awfulness of Locale B, the fussy bureaucratic wrangling within Institution C, the no-holds-barred torture to the back and neck experienced while sleeping or otherwise on a Motel 6 bed.

And yet.

Words of description are not like the words of political conventions, intent on mobilizing crowds to cut back on thought and open up the spending of rabid emotion. Words of description are like the evocations of champagne, rascally pinot noirs, single malt whiskey, the hoppy promise of a pale ale, the piquancy of a homemade pesto; they lead us to the experience then turn us loose to experience it rather than lock us in the closet with it. If it is important enough to the story to include the breakfast menu at a particular meeting, we should be able to have our impression of each character enhanced by what he or she orders, and how it is eaten.

The best descriptions of a character come from the way he or she does things; a locale has a particular personality that is conveyed by the way things within it appear and behave; organizations reflect the personality of a leader or of individuals trying to imitate said leader; rooms in any given Motel 6 smell like mass-produced disinfectant, cheap furniture, and indifferent pizzas delivered by indifferent drivers who despair of reasonable tips. To inhale the atmosphere of a Motel 6 is to breathe in the pathology of the American dream and perhaps be numbed by the experience.

We should be using description to convey personality; at all costs we should not use description to display our ability as a writer.


cock-and-bull story, a--any narrative or story which on its face becomes of doubtful provenance; a narrative suspected of being contrived, embellished, or a deliberate fabrication; thus a deliberate attempt at deception.

Talking animals have held a significant place in the literature of the ages, seemingly well suited to illustrate fables, satires, and tales. Grendel comes quickly to mind, she of Beowulf and the eponymous novel by John Gardener. Aesop put words into the mouths of animals; so did George Orwell, and Geoffrey Chaucer. Dragons, wolves, unicorns all have had their say, some prescient and others hysterical (see Henny-Penny).

A cock-and-bull story is built in the first place to deceive, divert, or delay. A cock-and-bull story is the dog ate my homework writ large. If the deception has as its purpose an amusing payoff and/or a moral purpose, such as those told by Mark Twain, we are often the better for it, refreshed, our critical senses laundered and hung out to dry in the sunshine of reason and self-examination. If the deception is to tighten the grip of fear and control, the believer becomes in time as much at fault as the perpetrator.

For those of us who are book oriented, it becomes pleasing to think of an anthology, perhaps even a lofty Oxford Companion to the Cock and Bull Story. Imagine the fun and clamor. The anthology is to be divided into two parts; no not Cock and Bull, but rather For Fun and For Real.

The aforementioned Mr. Twain would be a welcomed addition to the fun side, as well as one of his modern embodiments, Kurt Vonnegut.

Imagine the mischief and consternation and competition for inclusion in the For Real side, those men and women who promulgate C & B as though they had come down from the mountain top, bearing an engraved slab of granite:

Phyllis Schlaffly
The Rev. Falwell
The Rev. Robertson
Number Forty-three and his Vice-president
Charles Krauthammer
Ann Coulter
William Krystol
Jean Schmidt (the GOP wingnut rep from Ohio)

and, as the late, lamented Mr. Vonnegut would have said, so it goes.


The cock-and-bull story can be a lovely learning experience, or a one-way ticket to the worst kind of convention of all. My personal belief of it is that it is the forerunner of the tall tale in the grand tradition of the American West. One place to look for its origins is in that remarkable novel about origins and reality, Tristram Shandy,
in which a character says, "It is a story about a Cock and a Bull--and the best of its kind that I have ever heard."

You Can't Exect Me to Believe That

speed bumps--events, descriptions, and reflections that impede the flow of story; a sense of stylistic devices waving their hands for attention during the otherwise orderly progression of a dramatic narrative; the jerky disconnect experienced by readers when writers are not careful about adding backstory, description, and the existential wondering of characters.

The thing to remember at some point in the telling of a story is that the narrative art is evocative, not descriptive; description has its place, usually in small doses, an occasional adjective or adverb, even a clause or entire sentence. There are specific times when the make and caliber of a gun, for example, or the year, model, and color of a car bring clarification to the narrative. A character's height or lack thereof, even some descriptive facial tic become not only necessities but tools in the greater process of evoking that individual's presence. Arrogant? Shy? Assured? Lazy? The overarching intent is to suggest. Ironically enough, some writers who should know better, fail to see the mischievous potential in verbs, relying instead on the adjective and the adverb.

One last pass in revision to "cure" adverbial abuse is a sure way to remove speed bumps.


revelation--a dramatic discovery, experience, or realization that has the power to change the vector of a story.

In a metaphorical way, a story is like a string of fire-crackers, each explosion adding to the collective effect, the individual pop of explosion being a surprise, the final one, the loud, enduring one being the revelation. Often expressed indirectly, through the medium of a front-rank character doing something that becomes a symbolic response, the revelation shows the reader the equivalent of a film or TV close-up reaction shot. In the novels of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, revelations were frequently spelled out in what writer Barnaby Conrad has titled "came-to-realize" moments, "and in that moment, she came to realize that he had been deceiving her all along." From about the 1980s onward, came-to-realize moments were replaced with a more outward display of a character having been struck by the lightning bolt of revelation, imparting less a sense of certainty and resolve, more of a sense of ambiguity tempered with probability. We readers would be certain that Character A knew Character B was wildly attracted to her and had been for some time, at the very least giving her a dramatic power over Character B, but we would not be sure by story's end if Character A were going to do anything about the revelation.

The payoff to Dashiell Hammett's much anthologized short story, "Two Sharp Knives," is an excellent example of how revelation can be used by one character to exploit another and how that exploitation can be used for dramatic effect on the reader.

In the motion picture, The Third Man, directed by Sir Carol Reed, the illusive and amoral Harry Lime has a surprise encounter with his chum, Holly Martens. They meet in the Riessenrad, the large Ferris wheel in the Vienna amusement park, the Prater. Looking down upon people beneath his high vantage point, Lime compares them to dots, then makes the wry, cynical observation that defines him and causes in Martens a revelation that has the effect of a line drawn in the sand between him and Lime, a line of morality over which Martens will not cross. "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

One of the many revelations to be had from reading the stories of Anton Chekhov is his own understanding and portrayal of how revelation affects characters, and how their movements rather than their interior monologue suggest the outcome.


plausibility--the dramatic sense of a character, deed, or event being believable to the reader; a depiction of a character's agenda, motivation, or desire being an appropriate, life-like expression; a quality of realism and trust in a narrative and its denizens that helps the reader maintain a sense of belief.

Just because an event portrayed in a narrative actually happened in reality, that does not automatically grant it a license for plausibility; the writer must naturally believe the event and the characters, he must write about them in a way that renders them as dramatic forces, considering what they want and what they are willing to do to get what they want. A good portion of plausibility is found in vulnerability; when a reader sees a defect or longing in a character, it becomes easier to forget that the character is only a smudge of someone else's imagination.

Been There, Done That, Got Rained on

weather report--descriptions, often found at beginnings of novels and short stories, but also in chapter beginnings, where writers describe weather conditions with such profundity and eclat as to undercut the presence of characters and story; an attempt to convince readers that they are in the presence of an author who truly knows how to write; an authorial attempt to infuse thematic content into a narrative.

Weather can and often does have demonstrable effect on story and the characters within it, but--to use a pathetic fallacy--appreciates a moderate, unhyperbolic hand in the rendering. Storm clouds may indeed gather ominously if they are harbingers of meteorological events; they are not needed to symbolize difficulties in the lives of the characters.

landscape--descriptions of locales, settings, and geographical phenomena which are included in dramatic narrative as evidence that the reader is in the presence of a writer who is familiar with travel writing and/or metaphor. With the advent of Google, Wikipedia, and other Internet search engine-type sources, as well as a flourishing industry in hard copy travel guides, readers are often familiar with most geographical settings, have had numerous occasions to read of the experiences and insights characters have when looking down from an airplane at metropolitan, polar, desert, and ocean vistas.

In similar fashion, many readers have experienced visits to hospitals, motels, hotels, lawyer's offices, super markets, criminal courts, shopping malls, and similar institutions, precluding detailed descriptions. One good reason for detailed description of such places is when the opposite to the expectation of them obtains: "it was a remarkably low-key setting for such a high-price attorney," "for a cheap motel, there was a radiant cleanliness and not a trace of a cockroach."

Writing description about such places, the author is well advised to select one memorable detail that convinces him of the authenticity of the landscape. Even in description of landscape, significant individual detail evokes a sense of the narrator's actual presence in the locale, yet another reminder that evocation trumps description in fiction.

occupation--conveying with plausibility the profession, occupation, artistry, and state of career development in a character. In many novels of mystery or suspense, private investigators or security persons have had some career as sworn police officers, sheriffs, or as federal agents, others still have come to their work with a history in military police. Lawyers have attended various types of law schools and have been admitted to practice in specific locales through the gatekeeper of the bar exam. Hairdressers, barbers, manicurists, and stylists are required to obtain licenses before they can perform in many states. A head chef, interviewing a subordinate, will probably want to see the subordinate's knives and how they are cared for. Before assigning a profession, occupation, artistry, and experience to a character, the writer is well advised to check plausible standards the character must possess before setting the character to work. This understanding may provide the writer with an entire dimension of behavior for the character, having a direct effect on how that character thinks, feels, and behaves. As an exaggerated extreme, imagine a butcher, having gone through apprenticeship and risen through the ranks in a high-profile market chain, developing an aversion to the meat and organs he or she must deal with, to the point of becoming a vegan. For further exaggerated extremes, imagine all minor characters who are service oriented (wait persons, delivery persons, janitorial persons) with walk-on roles in stories as wannabe actors, photographers, painters. Imagine possible conflicts between psychologists (with PhD.D. degree) and psychiatrists (with M.D. degree). Imagine potential rivalry between a psychiatrist with Freudian orientation and a psychiatrist with Jungian orientation. If you needed cosmetic surgery, would you consult a "mere" surgeon or one who was board certified in cosmetic surgery? If your character is a classically trained musician, for whom did she audition and fail to please? If your character is a jazz musician whose instrument is a reed, how did he keep his reeds moist before appearing?

Actors carefully research the working habits of characters they are to portray, often learning such arcane things as how to throw a curve ball in baseball, how to get a tone out of a bag pipe, how to do things as a doctor or nurse would do them; their researches bringing a quality of reality and plausibility to their performance. Writers need to do no less than study the job for the details that will bring the job to the page.

Between a rock and a

There is a time and place for description. Maybe on birthday cakes or thank-you notes. But not so much in books or short stories. Not anymore.

One reason being most of the effective descriptions have already been described by essayists, letter writers, diarists, novelists, penny-a-word pulp writers. (I at one time had a stuttering detective.) Another reason being the more layered meanings and signals sent forth by the world about us and its inhabitants.

Besides.

We're supposed to be story tellers, not fabulists or preachers or, heaven forfend, propagandists. We're supposed to evoke--not describe. We're not supposed to tell the reader how to feel, we're in it to allow them to get their own sense of how a character might feel. So yeah, it's okay to describe something the reader might not otherwise have experienced, or something seemingly ordinary--say a lawyer's office or hospital or school room--that is different from the conventional expectation.

Habitual readers, readers beyond the Look! Look! Look! See Dick! See Jane! See Fido! See Dick and Jane and Fido run and jump! level are drawn to writing that tells direct truths and such truths are demonstrated by irony, the presentation of information that means the opposite of what the speaker intends, or by the subtext of a character feeling one thing and saying another. 

 Evocation is producing a desired emotion by talking away from it or, as Tim O'Bried did in The Things They Carried, by using objective correlative in which we can see how sometimes a cigar might be merely a cigar but other times is represents something quite else.

Sometimes it is no accident that we relate more closely to acquaintances on the Internet than to friends because of the disparity in role playing and the willingness to put material from our lives and feelings into our work. Moments of evocation stand out because they are widows into the feelings of real persons and real characters.

We all read with some expectations, among them the expectation of a particular genre promise, but often unspoken is the expectation that characters will reveal themselves with all their flaws and strengths. We read for this sense of intimacy that may be missing in our own lives or not present in enough substance to satisfy us. 

 We are hunters and gathers, foragers, looking for things beyond food and shelter, looking for traces and firm evidence that there are others who share our feelings and with whom we can talk. It may not be politically correct or conventional or even practical to make imaginary playmates out of other writers' characters, but nevertheless, we do so.

There is something at first disturbing about evoking feelings from one's characters but then the process becomes a jones, we are intrigued by it, then we crave it. Most of our favorite characters have experienced degrees of embarrassment, humiliation, pride, pleasure, satisfaction, grief. Of these, grief of loss and humiliation are difficult to portray head on, but by approaching it sideways, through subtext, through evocation, we are tapping the source that gives us the emotional language we seek. Try saying aloud when there's no one around, lest you feel embarrassed. Try saying, I speak empathy. I write empathy. Sometimes you can as your characters can also do, accomplish more by saying nothing and merely being there for someone, an open presence.

The Genie in the Bottle

One of my favorite phrase/concepts is The Genie in the Bottle.

One of my favorite archetypal stories is about the fisherman who unwittingly hauls in a bottle from which a genie emerges, more or less telling the fisherman to say his prayers or whatever because he is about to get a more furious whacking than the 109th Congress got in the last election.

But why, the fisherman complains. After all, didn't I save your sorry ass from the confines of the bottle?

The genie recites his agenda: After I was imprisoned in that bottle, I vowed that I would grant three wishes to the person who freed me. But after a few hundred years in the bottle, I decided I would only grant my rescuer two wishes. After a time, my generosity shrank and I lowered the offer to one wish. Still no rescue. Accordingly, I vowed to kill the person who turned me loose. I mean, someone has to pay for this.

Thinking fast, the fisherman adopted a plan that began with his shaking his head in disbelief. Come on, he said. You're playing tricks with me. I can't believe a genie of your size and power could fit in such a tiny bottle.

Listen, kid, the genie said, I can pretty much do anything I want.

Again the fisherman shook his head. Tickets for the Springsteen concert, I can see, but not you in that bottle.

Oh, is that so? the genie shouts. Well, watch this! And with a poof, the genie is back in the bottle, whereupon the fisherman slams home the stopper, tosses the bottle overboard, and calls out, So long, schmuck.

By my definition then, the expression genie in the bottle refers to a pent-up force with a resident attitude.

I came to see the genie in the bottle as I looked with some care and interest at two remarkable and wildly diverse Web sites, Ben Huff, a photographer in Fairbanks, AK, and Mrs. Deane, a graphic arts site in the Netherlands.

Why would a writer be consulting such sites? For one thing, each site, Ben Huff and Mrs. Deane, had an identifiable voice. Each had a certain radiant inner power that held me with each successive image. And Ben Huff was able to express in writing some of the essence he was trying to capture. Reading Huff, I returned to Mrs. Deane, and sure enough, gears within me were beginning to mesh. I felt I could begin to articulate what the individuals who are Mrs. Deane were looking for.

The crowning touch was Mrs. Deane offering access to download a symbol, something that looked like an exclamation point that had been hit by lightning, that can be used in text when your intention is to convey irony. I will link to that as soon as I wade through the instructions, which are written in Dutch.

Suddenly I am having a vision of the thing I look for and indeed have looked for in my work: the genie in the bottle. As with so many of the things that relate to creativity, my first glimpse is a feeling--or a series of feelings--which I experience with a gulp, digest quickly, then get to work, trying to capture the image. I work--oh, how I work--trying to get the emotions down on the page, trying to get the explanations and footnotes out. It took me years to be able to articulate the concept to myself that description is for the late nineteenth century and perhaps the first three-quarters of the twentieth, but from there onward, evocation is the goal. Anyone can describe. Well, no; Tom Clancy can't describe. Tom Wolfe thinks he can.

Ben Huff doesn't describe; he evokes. Ditto Mrs. Deane.

What about Shelly? Ah, he looks for the genie in the bottle, that trapped force with an attitude, resident in everything. And then he tries to evoke it.

Don't do the reader's work for him, Shelly rails at his students. Make the reader complicit.

So, were I to have to write an essay, "How I Spent My Spring Break," I would write:

I learned from Ben Huff and Mrs. Deane to look for the genie in the bottle.