Thanks for the Memory

Another of life's great conundrums is the one related to your own past experiences, of which you feel comfortably familiar, even to the point of prefacing some observations to friends with the meme, "I've probably told you this before..." The subtext is always memory.

You frequently feel so comfortable with your past that you have become deferential to those about you when discussing it, almost to the point of, "Yeah, I did that." or "I liked it there, too."  Comfort also means you think twice or perhaps even three times about inflicting your past on anyone else until there is a clear, valid opening.

With that set-up in place, your quotients of comfort and deference become challenged when you are reminded of things you did or said in the past that you do not remember.  This is particularly telling since you are reputed to have an extraordinary memory, which is in your own opinion more quirky than extraordinary, evidenced by the fact that you can remember stories of students from your past, or some arcane fact that, while accurate, has no real bearing on anything useful to you.

In a realistic way, when it comes to memory, you are indeed your parents' son.

"Say," your father would muse aloud, "what ever happened to--" at which point your mother would interrupt with an exasperated, "Oh, Jack, he's been dead for ten years," and your father would, with equal exasperation, respond, "Not him, I mean the man who was married to--"  Another sigh.  "He wasn't her first husband, you know."  "Right.  He used to be married to what's-her-name, whose father owned the furniture stores."  "They were lighting fixture stores."  "Not him!  I mean that place where you got the sofa that had mice in it."   They could--and did--go on like that for several minutes, all to your wishing you could get the rhythms, pauses, growing sense of increased impatience, which even then you recognized had nothing to do with each other but rather each with a personal irritation about the way the past has or morphing into something that leaves you wondering which version of it is correct.

Story is such a convenient, human trait.  We are drawn to individuals who tell them well, whether the telling is simply their way of verbalizing an event in which we were present (and now see differently through the telling), making us wish we were there, causing us to fictionalize to the point where we now believe we were there.  We are drawn to individuals whose life appears to us to be a story in progress, with little time for narrative leaps.  Sometimes, in reflective moments, we seek to inject story into portions of our life that seem in retrospect to have been uneventful.  We stand as Yeats stood in his poem,"Among School Children:"

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Any spare change?

growth--the dramatic motion toward change inherent in a character, an institution, a place, or a thing; the need for a front-rank character in a novel to advance or retreat in relation to behavior and understanding.

Growth is accretion or erosion, the consequences of a character's participation in a longform story, the evolution or devolution of an organization or institution; it is tangible movement in a direction the reader will recognize, a movement to which some emotional weight is attached by the character who experiences it. In the longer dramatic narrative, characters have the time and the need to grow; this is, after all what is meant by development.

Characters change, come to realize, or at the very least are held hostage by their circumstances. Institutions change, arguably for the better or worst, depending on the characters involved in the institutions. The mythical town of Pluto, ND, so vivid with promise in the early pages of Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves, devolves toward the end of the novel as a virtual ghost town, while in the same narrative the principal characters age, grow away from or grow into other mind- and heart-sets, while the once thriving Pluto Historical Society, down to two members, disbands.

It is not so much that growth in a longer work must be particularized in detail as it must be recognized with some hint of what is to happen, allowing the reader to imagine (and argue) about the likely results. Shorter works do not have the convention or luxury of recording change; they instead play out on the characters being led to a brink and bade farewell, their intentions not readily known.

As the twenty-first century novel and short story gather traction and personality, it is almost unthinkable that their characters will, as many earlier novels and stories decreed, all live happily ever after but will instead be buffeted with the whims, uncertainties, and multifarious inducements of life as we have come to know it. Modern life has evolved to the unthinkable come to pass. Future life grows into the yet more unthinkable. If we are realistic, there will always be an elephant waiting for us somewhere, be it the living room, the Greyhound Bus station, the supermarket, or the already crowded landscape we like to think of as the soul.

Structure

structure--a process in writing where first the writer then the reader observe, then respond to, the placement of dramatic elements; a systematic arrangement of dramatic events; the order in which key story points are set forth with the expectation that they will reveal the writer's intent.

The decision Wilkie Collins made to deliver elements of the suspense thriller, The Moonstone, included his structural strategy for using multiple point-of-view narration from key cast members. Thus came an introduction to Franklin Blake as narrator, giving us background about the eponymous jewel, also revealing his love for Rachel Verinder, who is to be given the Moonstone on the eve of her birthday. Rachel, we are pretty sure, also is into Franklin Blake. When the fabled gem goes missing and all are shocked by the crime, Franklin Blake still narrating, Rachel turns on him, says she never wants to see him again. Stunned, he asks why. Now it is our turn to be stunned. "Because you stole the Moonstone," she tells him. "I saw you with my own eyes.) End of chapter.

Collins did not have to end the chapter at that point; he could have chosen at her structural approaches, but none would have so effectively created the desired drama Collins wished to present.

F. Scott Fitzgerald experimented fitfully with the narrative of The Great Gatsby until, at length, he stumbled on the decision to demonstrate the events through the eyes of Nick Carraway, a cousin of one of the principals, thus necessitating a change in structure.

Valerie Martin encountered her own structure with her novel, Mary Reilly, in which she rearranged the structure of Robert Louis Stevenson's novella, The Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by recasting the story through the eyes of an immigrant Irish girl who had signed on as Dr. Jekyll's maid and who ultimately found herself vulnerable.

Hint: A useful way of looking at structure in a short story, novel, or play is the positioning of the discovery. In a mystery, one or more bodies should be discovered early on, with scenes engineered to suggest to the reader/viewer the potential for yet additional discoveries. In bedroom farce, the adventurous lover is discovered hiding under the bed or in the closet later in the proceedings.

Seemingly indistinguishable from design, structure may take on a life of its own if, as a concept,it is questioned by the writer during a stage of revision. The question for the writer to pose at that time is: Does the inherent energy of this work cry out for a different emphasis? Depending on the answer to the question, the writer is led by enthusiasm beyond the academic quibble of the difference in meaning between structure and design. The goal is to find the most resonant arrangement of characters, scenes, and issues within a particular story.

dramatic

dramatic--having the inherent suggestion and quality of story; implicit content of elements that produce conflict, interaction, goal search, revelation and reversal; a narrative that contains one or more characters in pursuit of an agenda or embarking on an internal or geographical journey; a quest which will involve reversal, frustration, and competitive exterior forces.

A successful dramatic narrative reflects the goals and intent of characters set against the counterpoint of the writer's personal goals at the time of writing. Thus stories may reflect an attitude of cynicism, pragmatism, sadness, bitterness, expansive optimism, and transcendental anticipation. Differing readerships will be particularly drawn to one of these qualities or perhaps even a combination of them. You might liken the physics concept of water, seeking to find its original level, to the literary concept of story: readers seek to find their target level. One thing all stories have in common is a voice or governing personality. It properly should be the goal of the writer to seek its own level, which becomes the pressures informing the voice, timbre, and intensity of its persona.

On a basic level, to say of a work that it is dramatic is to say of it that it is act-able, performable, readable. On a more nuanced level, to say of a work that it is dramatic implies that the work has skillfully designed ventures of men and women engaged in dealings with the enormous varieties present in life. If these dealings appear piled on or contrived, the landscape in which they appear may be spoken of as melodramatic, exaggerated, even operatic. Thus does balance come into the equation of which dramatic is an integral part.

Chiropractic for MSS

manipulation--an arrangement of dramatic elements to produce an emotional effect in a story; distortion or exaggeration of narrative events; the deliberate bending of perspective and/or time in a story; use of implication and subtlety to engage readers; use of a red herring to alert or divert readers' suspicions.

Writers are the literary equivalent of chiropractors, adjusting, kneading, articulating; they are looking for a design pattern to provide the best posture for a story. A basic approach to such adjusting is to rearrange the time sequence. Mystery writer and teacher Leonard Tourney is an advocate of "a slice of the crime," in which he advocates beginning a narrative with a crime being planned or executed by individuals we will meet later on in the text. James Joyce manipulated temporally in his Finnegan's Wake, beginning the huge, complexity of a novel with the last half of the opening sentence, then, hundreds of pages later, ending with the first half of the sentence. Tim Gautreau's The Missing, narratively acute and suspenseful from the opening line, actually manipulates dramatic convention in the sense of providing a double hit of backstory before the main issue is introduced.

In addition to time manipulation, the writer may perform narrative chiropractic with point of view, choosing first-, second- third-, omniscient, and multiple points of view, and in some cases venture into authorial intrusion to make commentary on the characters and their doings. This last approach is amply demonstrated in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, and William M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair.

Characters, their motives and activities, may be manipulated to the extent of influencing the way other characters and readers will respond to them, and indeed, motives may be manipulated to provoke reader sympathy or antipathy.

Manipulation works best when it does not call attention to itself but seems the most natural presentation. Such control is exemplified in the entire presentation of Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières.

Under no circumstances...

circumstances--conditions motivating or surrounding persons, places, things, and events in story; the status of behavior related to a character, that character's agenda and/or vulnerability, and the likelihood of a predictable behavior manifest in the actions or failure to act in a particular character.

Mysterious or ambiguous circumstances surrounding a character impart an atmosphere of menace and uncertainty. The suspense grows as the circumstances become volatile, leading to the growing apprehension that such a mysterious or ambiguous character will be driven to the point of combustion, whereupon he or she will reveal a true self of incredible awfulness.

Familiar, even predictable circumstances advertise a growing sense that a surprise explosion is building, some unanticipated demonstration that will ruin the stasis, nudge it unceremoniously over the edge into chaos and discomfort.

Thus the mysterious and the familiar combine to frame events and the persons who participate in them, raising suspicions wherever possible. These suspicions translate to tension which, lacking actual suspense, is an excellent glue for holding story together. Readers wonder what new circumstances will bring to the equation of characters, bent on pursuing an agenda, meeting frustration and reversal.

All a protagonist or antagonist needs in order to set a story in motion is to hear the repetition of the familiar mantra "Under no circumstances..."

Readers' Expectations

reader's first expectations, the-- reasons provided the reader by the writer of a story as well as the characters, incidents, and settings depicted within the story that will cause the reader to suspend disbelief; the primary state of the reader's mind when approaching a work of fiction.

Readers know in advance that a story is invented. On some basic level of awareness, the reader enters the transaction with the writer and the text with a conflict of interest in which he wants the text to become a rendition of reality while openly seeking any possible detail that prevents the story from appearing real. 

The invention must seem real in every detail; the characters must be plausible, their goals and plans to achieve these goals must resonate the sanity of conventional logic. Thus the reader notices anomalies, the green-eyed protagonist on page six who suddenly blinks her gray eyes on page nineteen; the subway stop in midtown Manhattan where in fact there is no such subway stop, a rifle or pistol of a particular caliber being afforded a range well beyond its real capacity, the winner of the baseball World Series of a particular year being rendered incorrectly. 

The reader does not object to the green-eyed protagonist on page six installing a pair of shaded contact lenses prior to blinking her now gray eyes on page nineteen, nor does the reader object to a wrongly placed subway stop in an alternate universe novel, possibly even thinking a subway stop at that particular location would be a good idea. Anomalies must be rendered to have a home in plausibility.

Thus the reader's first expectation is to be given sufficient dramatic, emotional, and physical information necessary to overcome the gap between actuality and projected potential. This story could be happening, this story is happening, these characters are real. The more skilled writers in our midst begin by nurturing a firm belief in their vision; if they do not have a vision, they add details in support of one, adding here, removing there until the vision clarifies. 

 They do not try to argue the characters, situations, and locales into being. Least of all do they rely on the sad old tropes: "But it really happened that way," and "But this character is based on a real person." The reader expects the writer to be right enough to dispel any doubt.

It is instructive to consider our individual lie detector, which usually becomes activated when we see attributes piled on a description of an event or quality, or when materials presented as facts cannot be attributed to reliable sources. Readers have lie detectors, but readers are fighting to believe. Their first expectation is to be able to do so.

The more convinced the writer is of the characters and circumstances in his story, the less likely he is to pile on attributes and stage directions and in fact the more likely he is to be taken at face value, right from the start.

A good place to begin engaging this reader expectation is with individuals who are in the midst of doing something that will lead to confrontation or, having already met the confrontation, started to cope with it. For convenient reference, think of Tom Sawyer's "solution" to having to white wash the fence, then set your own characters to work.

Perfect Timing

At most concerts performed in the Western world, the concertmaster arrives on stage with a pre-tuned violin, a particular tuning fork or, in more recent times, an electronic device which sounds the Concert A, the A above middle C, which vibrates at 440 cycles per second. The orchestra then proceeds to tune their instruments on that Concert A,

In many motion pictures involving men in the midst of war, some individual of leadership role makes a count-down with his watch, directing all others to synchronize their watches NOW.

Both rituals are signals: some concentrated and coordinated form of behavior is about to take place.

Scenes in short stories and novels are ultimately concentrated and coordinated as well. Interestingly enough, some concert conductors will set the level of the Concert A at 442 cycles per second when the work to be played might profit from a sense of faster pace. The Concert A may be dropped to a 438, as well to suggest a subtle adjustment to tempo.

The writer is more or less the literary equivalent of the concert conductor, most likely to use length of sentences, choice of words, and details or their lack thereof as adjuncts to tempo, and since the writer also has in the literary tool kit the ability to suspend or compress time, the count-down with a wristwatch is not always employed.

Nevertheless. Timing--pacing, if you will--is an important element in a scene, and a musical composition is a nice analogy to have in mind, if not while constructing the scene, then certainly when revising the scene.

By the time we've finished writing the scene, we have a fair idea of how long in virtual time it covers, how much action, how many exchanges of dialogue, how many reactions, how many pauses are part of the recipe. The one ingredient most likely to be overlooked is the pause. Another way to express this situation is to say that there is never nothing going on, no pace, tempo, action, or movement. Rather there is the coordinated form of characters reacting to their surroundings, to one another, to the unexpected circumstances that emerge between them, complicated, perhaps even inhibited or driven by their individual agendas and their fears of being found out.

These moments of drama are called beats. A character doing something is a beat. A character not doing something produces a beat which is the equivalent of a return volley in tennis, an arcing lob or a forehand smash. A scene begins when characters do something or do not do something. And then someone responds. And then someone reacts. And then...

It is not always necessary to have unrelenting action. Indeed, too much action can cut off the emotional responses of the characters, responses which, according to the rate with which they take place can inform the tenor of the scene. Fast action can remind the reader of those iconic film clips of The Keystone Kops, erupting forth in lock-step idiocy; slow action can project lugubriousness or its first cousin, careful concern.

Some scenes need to have the author removed from them, particularly if the author seems to be embarrassed by the pace, the pauses between words or kisses or looks. One way to look at a scene is to consider it as a complex series of reactions between characters who can't fully grasp what's happening to them and who are trying to accommodate to events as well as possible. They are individuals who are facing examinations, performance reviews, legal trials, declarations of love, desires to perform or not perform, called upon under extreme circumstances, absolutely certain of success or failure, morally certain, morally uncertain, wanting to be somewhere else. They are us and we have put them there because we had to out of curiosity and a wish to know.

Reality Check

In our personal lives we interact with friends, family, associates. If we are of the writing bent or the teaching bent, we interact with students and readers, wanting to exchange with them on yet another level than the level of friend, family, and associate. To these students or readers, we want to convey, to pass along information, to encourage. As well, we want to entertain. There is no expressed or implied hierarchy in the listed order of these things. It is not wrong for instance to want to entertain our students or encourage our readers.

There is yet another level at which we interact, offering many of the things we offer to our friends, family, and associates; in the bargain we add the things we wish to offer our students and readers. This level is, of course, the level of the self. I surely have moments where I wish to entertain myself or encourage myself. There are also moments where I wish to pass along information, moments where I am reminded of the process I go through when I wish to offer a sales person a check or credit card but cannot find my wallet, which is to say I cannot always locate the encouragement or entertainment I hope to offer myself, much less the information.

This laundry list of associations and associates and relationships is multifarious depending on my mood in a given moment and my target of intentions. Whether knowingly or not, I draw on this swath of associations, responses, and agendas while informing the interactions between characters, either in short stories or longer works. This point is a border crossing between countries; it is easier to get into Mexico or Canada than to get out of them and back to the U.S.; the Brits seem to want to know what took me so long in getting there in the first place and at least during the gurgling administration of George W. Bush, they seemed to wonder why I would want to return to such a place.

Going from relations between self and friends, family, associates, and the like to relations among characters is going from arithmetic progression to the exponential--because there are so many of them and relatively so few of me and friends, family, associates. One of the first things I notice when crossing the border is that spoken language becomes different; it is no longer conversational, thus such conversational tropes as I might use need to be harnessed. "How are things going?" innocent enough, needs to be countered with "You're asking how things are going?" Of course I could render that response "You're asking how things are going?"which in fact does add an edge of attitude to the response somewhat different than the mere repetition.

As things stand, the mere repetition, "You're asking how things are going." suggests/infers/implies the respondent being absorbed in another task and the possibility that a request for a progress report about the respondent's mental or physical well-being borders on a distraction if not an imposition.

Or look at it this way. An individual utters another character's name, punctuating it with a question mark. "Marta?" Which may be taken to mean Is that you? or Are you there?

Add one word, an innocent enough word. "Now,Marta." Suddenly an edge is there, possibly impatience. And by adding one more word, "Damn it, Marta," we have seemingly exploded possibilities for dialogue as opposed to conversation. Yet there is more to come. Look at the possibilities of mere repetition. "Marta. Marta. Marta." How quickly such a repetition yanks us by the collar into the dialogue, curious to see what happens next as opposed to hoping the characters will conversationally reveal some dramatic tidbit.

When we are in the dramatic arena, our characters are seeming to converse but are conversing with their emotions instead of their minds, sending us readers signals by which we interpret the dramatic cloud over the arena that is scene. In such cases, silence is not silence but rather the characters playing on what their feelings are whispering to them.

Imagine yourself trying to please someone, say a work-level superior or a teacher. Allow yourself to feel that emotional agenda. Put an identifying sticker on that in order to come back to it when you need one of your characters trying to please another character. Imagine you, trying to please yourself.

Now, shut up and listen. Even the pause or silences are valuable.

Next week--or maybe this week, the tennis game of truth.

Dialog Redux

Dialog is a dramatic force that resides in what is said but not intended, in what is intended but not said. It propels the Sisyphus boulder of story up the hill of expectation, where it pauses, lurches, then begins its downward tumble toward the discovery of damage. It is an attempt to communicate something, either to the person making the utterance, the person to whom it is putatively directed, or some abstraction of audience, perhaps even the gods.

Dialog is the drawings on the cave walls, exquisite evocations of something real, functional, beautiful; in some ways it is recognition and proof of our own existence because someone has uttered our name. But it is not all good news, not by any means; it is a Wagnerian opera when we were expecting Puccini, it is no when we were hoping for yes, it is a broken heart when we were expecting the kite fly of elation, it is the who? when we were hoping to be remembered.

In real life, the life from which we flee or seek to redesign whenever we sit or stand or lie down to write, there is conversation. In the alternate universe of fiction there is dialog, what we might have said had we been our characters, what we might have said had we known more clearly what we were doing. Conversation in fiction becomes a speed bump, a device that causes the story and our sense of it to lurch, jostling us out of our abandon. In fiction, dialog may be contrived to sound like conversation, but when have you seen individuals in story actually rely on such a thin veneer? Thus does conversation in fiction become a betrayal or motive or goal or self by the way it offers up proof of a recognized weakness.

The remarkably apt literary critic, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) recognizes dialog as a duality attempting to organize life, imparting to it the potential of being an agent as a specific aspect of message. This is a position I believe most writers come to accept as they grapple with the duality of dialog and their own attempts to set it into motion with action and intent. We don't have to wait for the Pinter and Miller and Stoppard of today, we can start way back in the day with, say, act one, scene two of Richard III, in which the dialog between he who wishes to become Richard and Anne, rages before us in a fiery clash of agenda and duality.

Dialog is the kindling for story; it should make us aware of the smoulder manifest when individuals--any individuals--gather to debate agenda--any agenda. To get to this place, we need to position ourselves firmly within the sphere of influence of each character who steps onto our stage. We have to become the three bag ladies waiting outside for Macbeth as well as the Rob and Laura Petrie of Macbeth. Anything less is conversation.

Goal Tending

Antigone's goal is to bury her brother.

Her uncle (King Creon) has as his goal the very opposite; the body of Antigone's brother shall remain unburied as a payment for the young lad's disloyalty, a crude but effective reminder that nobody messes with Creon.

But as you have every reason to suspect because the story is named after her, the eponymous heroine's goal is the key to the story and its outcome.

Even though it may seem patently apparent to you from the outset, do not hesitate to ask yourself what is the goal, the prize, the payoff that awaits the person whose story it is. Even so extreme an ending as Jack London's short story, A Loss of Face, pays off with the events the protagonist set in motion, events that begin with the protagonist's death, then increase in intensity to the full, uproarious hoot of triumphant laughter.

All right then; it goes without saying that the first thing you have to know is Whose story is being told? Everyone is running about in the early drafts, wanting the rights to the story, and yes, you might have actually begun thinking it belonged to one or more of the combatants. But you you know better. You know who is the driving force, the one whose behavior (or conspicuous lack thereof) drives the payoff. You know what that person had to do to set the ending in motion. (Hint: Antigone tried to bury her brother again.)

You may be helped enormously in your deliberations, machinations, and dramatic deviousness by knowing what that individual wants, why that individual caused the events of the story in the first place. Dorothy Gale wanted to get home. That was her prize. Paris wanted the most beautiful woman in the world. Forget the fact that she was already married. Paris wanted his prize. the rest was, as they say, The Iliad. What does your character want that he or she should go through the intricacies and potential risks set in the way?

Revenge?

A tangible prize?

Status?

Justice?

Satisfaction?

Understanding.

All these have the potential for being effective prizes the protagonist seeks.

Of course there is no guarantee that having completed The Trials of Hercules or the trials of Perry Mason or any other trials, that the protagonist will continue to feel like a prize winner.

But that is another story, perhaps even the very next one.

Hint: Once you have a clear picture of the prize the protagonist seeks, you have the equivalent of a ten megapixel photo of that character, worth more to you than, say, The Picture of Dorian Gray.