In That Event

An event is an inertial change from one state to another, from inactive, say, to active. Event may also be an accelerated progression of inertia. Story is a linked strand of dramatic events, influenced by characters who are trying to cope with them.

A character is portrayed watering a garden with a hose. No story, not yet. Another character, perhaps an adult, perhaps a child, perhaps a dog or cat, perhaps a bumble bee, enters the scene. Still no story. Now the other character says or does something that causes the character with the hose to drop said hose. Story on the way. The hose begins to behave as dropped hoses will behave when dropped, even to the point of spraying character or characters, causing some kind of event. The tipping point is at hand. Story is waiting for someone to sign for the package.

If another character, at a distance from the splashing hose but close in some degree to the faucet, turns off the hose, we witnesses are reminded of the concept of deus ex machina, a god in a machine, performing an act to end the story. Accordingly, we feel cheated and any sense of story has its metaphoric rug yanked from underneath it.

If the other character, the one closer to the faucet, howls with mirth at the attempts of others to regain control of the spraying hose, the delay increasing the degree of wetness to which the original holder of the hose is subjected, viable story is reintroduced and ratified. Still howling with laughter, the one closer to the faucet finally moves to it, then turns off the water. This event or inertial change is enhanced by the original holder of the hose saying, "You sure took your damn time." Story is alive and well, thank you, and thank as well the sequence of related events for making it so.

However opaque and character-driven the sequence of events may seem to be, they nevertheless contain the dramatic genome, the DNA of story. Watching the events from the point of view of the original holder of the hose or the individual closest to the source of water, we have a picture of something at stake. In this case it is the relative dryness or dignity of the original holder of the hose. (Not a bad definition of dignity: relative dryness in a potentially wet circumstance.) It may also be the point of view of the individual closer to the water source, who may even relish the moment of seeing the holder of the hose having lost control and thus being splattered with water. (Thus the basis of humor: a loss of control or illusion of dignity, coupled with attempts to regain control.)

When we speak of a linked strand of events, we look for overall intent of the strand. Story is recognizable as such as its elements are recognized. We recognize chickens and turkeys because of their defining characteristics, all the while knowing from general configuration that each is some sort of fowl. In a restaurant, particularly those of a more up-market or eclectic bent, we are often surprised and amused by the presentation of a dish, thrilled or not by the way our Thanksgiving turkey dinner is served up, thinking perhaps that at a less ostentatious restaurant, a less expensive restaurant, we'd be on the receiving end of the same turkey and trimmings, the bill anywhere from twenty-five percent to fifty percent less than the presentation we see before us.

Some stories are traditional Thanksgiving turkey dinners, others repackage the presentation while using the same elements in another form. When presented by the late alto saxophonist, Charlie Parker, the traditional Back Home in Indiana becomes the be-bop standard, Donna Lee, a repackaging of the chord changes. Similarly, the standard What Is This Thing Called Love, as presented by the pianist Tad Dameron becomes Hot House. Same chords, presented however with a different tempo and tonic notes.

Events in the dramatic sense are linked strands of notes, leading to some emotional payoff. There is more leeway in a longer dramatic work for what appears to be digression but which on later consideration is still relevant event. In classical music, soloists were encouraged to digress from the text with an individualized statement, a cadenza. But the cadenza was like a footnote on the text, a relevant expression of commentary on the existing theme. In jazz, members of the ensemble are called on to improvise on the original statement. In all dramatic art, the improvisation is the equivalent of a Talmudic argument on a stated proposition. Thus do Modigliani's elongated necks and Giacometti's extenuated sculpting provide thematic variations, thus does the opening clarinet cadenza in Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue play on the sour-sounding modalities of the Klezmer music Gershwin heard as a youngster on the lower East Side.

With more a sense of structure than convention, present time in dramatic narrative trumps past time. As readers and writers, we more or less agree that all characters appear on stage (or the page or computer screen) bearing baggage from the past. Often we become curious to see or experience relevant moments from a character's past, moments or events we recognize as having a direct effect on what the character will do now. Accordingly we are willing to accept without complaint a sixty-forty balance, sixty percent of the story being in present time, forty relying on events from the past. Anything beyond that seems to our contemporary senses a speed bump, an attention getter. Why not start the story elsewhere if so much was in the past?

We do have the ability to slow or speed time; we also have the ability to chose the moment when the accretion of event begins. This moment is not always realized in early drafts nor, for some of us, is much else except the blazing light of truth that helps us scour the combination crime scene and archaeological dig we have articulated when we begin investigating events and assessing motives to the individuals whose artifacts are embedded within them.

All That Glitters Is Not Told

Narrative, when it is not used as a generic term to suggest a story or tale as it progresses along its arc, is meant to imply the landscape or setting where a particular story takes place. It is also meant as descriptions of characters, things, physical locales, and the actions characters take or do not take, and the way these actions are performed or not performed. Narrative is anything but dialog or interior monologue. Conventional wisdom for long- and short-form fiction holds narrative as being sketchy or macrocosm; if you want the filmic equivalent of a close-up, you inject dialog, which narrows the aperture with an attendant increase in depth of field.

Current conventional wisdom has narrative undergoing its own Darwinian progression, principally from the point of view of the author to the point of view of one or more characters.

Charles Dickens, notable among others, has taken first-person point of view to a point in Great Expectations where we certainly need to look to that work for inspiration and energy. A close pal of Dickens, Wilkie Collins, gave us another milestone for the multiple point of view novel, particularly in The Moonstone. Yet another Dickens contemporary, Anthony Trollope, gave an added template for multiple point of view in The Way We Live Now. All three novels are up and running, which is to say in print after almost a hundred fifty years.

In addition to the three novels being compelling reads, they obviate the questions: Whose point of view determines the narration? Is the author's point of view relevant any more?

Taking the last question first, the only author in recent fiction who took over the narrative was Somerset Maugham. But even his use of it speaks to the fact that the author has to either assume a role in the story or assign it to one or more of the characters. To put it another way, if you want a say in your story, write yourself in as a character and give that character your lines. Otherwise you do what most skilled actors do; you butt out and create the character. (Parenthetically, most skilled actors report a greater difficulty in "getting" a character similar in temperment to themselves. This is because they can't readily separate themselves from the characters. True enough, even if you're a strict vegan, there is still a Hannibal Lecters facet within you.)

Narrative reflects the vocabulary (emotional and verbal) of the person at bat, including her degree of sophistication, inner urgencies, fears, biases. You could all do quite nicely portraying Carly Fiorina or Sarah Palin, even though you went door-to-door campaigning for Hillary. You could portray such right-wing extremists as Dan Rowan and Dick Martin even though your heart flops for Obama. You can do this because you recognize the importance of the story being embedded within the characters, individuals who will release vital information in emotional (dramatic) situations, or who will indeed create dramatic situations in order to release the information they swore they would carry to the grave with them. (Writers and actors do not in their professional lives betray people, they betray emotions. What they do in their public life is another matter.)

Narrative reflects the character at bat, the one to whom the dramatic details occur, the one who reports on them, reliably or not, to the reader. If you pick the right character, that individual will give you clues about his or her reliability, take on reality, sense of self, trusting you to get him or her down on paper "accurately."

So okay, you're now the narrator of a story about a art exhibit at a major museum. You are the major art critic for a major newspaper or art journal. You have worked your way up the ladder with slow, patient precision to the point where your opinions are respected. About a month ago, you were less than professional, having had one or two too many flutes of champagne at a museum opening. You met someone you'd been flirting with for some time, and she'd been just as interested and so, after the opening, you and she, shall we say exchanged genetic information. You don't know what possessed you to do so but you told her your secret. To the extent that you often conflate or confuse shades of green and gray and blue, you are color blind.

"I don't think I've ever slept with a color-blind man," she says.

You of course regret your indiscretion. Trying to defuse it, you say, "Truth to tell, neither have I."

She laughs and a part of you thinks it's no big deal, except that there it is, out. A color-blind art critic. Someone knows your secret. Can you trust her? Even more interesting, can you trust yourself with her because she is the only person you've told about this defect of yours.

The narrator--narrators if it's a longer story--see the events. They become prisms through which the reader sees the bent light of their reality.

When you put out a casting call for a character, one of the things you should know about that person is how observant, articulate, quick on the feet, distractable, honest that person is.

Noh Man's Land

For some time now, I have been obsessed with the effect Wile E. Coyote has had on fiction. Tomorrow, I'm going to turn that scraggly, scruffy, obsessive fellow loose on my class in genre fiction, where I will invoke Wile E. as the epitome of front rank character, by which I mean someone at the upper level of hierarchy, someone whose story it is because, scruffy, obsessive or merely a nebbish, the sympathies of the reader are ultimately with him.

It is a leap from The Roadrunner Cartoons and the Coyote to The Iliad and Hector, but the root-for quality holds in both places: We want the Coyote to win, which my possibly mean we hope he gets The Road Runner, but more to the point, we want Wile E. Coyote not to be humiliated, because we know in advance that he will indeed be humiliated; once again he will be had. We wish Hector didn't have to die in battle because he is not only the sanest of all characters in the throes of that dumb war, incited by his dumb brother Paris, he is the most human and the most humane; he is one of the more evolved, self-realizing characters in the entire epic.

Wile E. Coyote is driven, no, obsessed, making him goal oriented to a faretheewell. He has no choice but to scheme, connive, and conspire against--beep beep--the Roadrunner. Hector pretty well suspects he will be killed in battle, his young son Andromache killed, his wife put into slavery, and yet we understand the social and ethical constraints that force him into battle so that he can die a brave death and be remembered all these years after the fact as a man who had and rejected a sane choice because the society of which he was a prominent part was in so many ways insane.

We know that there are more practical if less dramatic ways of making a living than being a pool hustler, but in The Hustler, Fast Eddie Felson wants to be the best pool hustler in America and because of what he goes through to be the best, once again we are pulled along in the slipstream of his career obsession.

Even though we may not like the person, we like the notion of someone wanting something to the exclusion of other, more rational things. There are a number of reasons why we like this notion, only one of which may be tied to our own sense of having no such goal of which to obsess ourselves.

Wile E. Coyote is not a splendid fellow. Look him up. Doing so, you will see the extent to which his creators went to set forth the rules which he and his opposing force, The Road Runner, must observe, making The Looney Tunes Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote as ritualized and mannered as a Noh play. These rules are as mannered and formal as, say, the martial art of Akido, and they produce the genius of the cartoon series by having etched in our memory the frequent sight of Wile E. Coyote so perfervid in his chase of The Road Runner that he overruns the boundary of a mesa or escarpment and finds himself launched in the air, paws flailing at the absolute airless nothingness underneath him. This is the very emotional place for a character to be, boundaries overrun, no safety net in sight, helplessly vulnerable because of his obsession.

Wile E. Coyote, the Patron Saint of characters.

Wile E. Coyote. My man.

May the Farce Be with You

Physicists have been identifying and measuring subatomic particles for some time now, looking for predictable behavior they can catalog with the same detail and certainty Aristotle employed in his examination of drama, narrative, and verse in Poetics.

It is comforting to learn how matter behaves; it is inspiring to predict how animals and people will behave, then achieve some measure of accuracy in our predictions. So far,we have tried a number of diagnostic tools on humans, including religion, political science, and psychology,but these disciplines, while helpful to a degree, leave much to be desired. Just as quantum physicists search for a unified field theory that will provide acceptable answers to any questions, we look for a way to understand ourselves in ways that will help us face existential problems that beset us.

The scientist has had frequent recourse to accelerators, devices that speed particles to unbelievable magnitude, then cause them to collide with one another or with some rough analog of flypaper, on which they become imprisoned and vulnerable to change.

The artist has another approach. In writing, the accelerator is recognized as a poem, a short story, a novel, perhaps even an essay, because essay means a test or trial,, doesn't it? And that begins to sound almost like a hypothesis, which most grant-writing scientists appreciate. If my hypothesis is correct, they say in the application, then we will have learned X, which we dearly need to know, curious species that we are.

In the linear accelerator of story, we take two or more elements known as characters and find ways to speed them up, cause them to collide, then note the results. Sometimes the speeding device is comedy, which is humor in a big hurry. We can make almost anything seem comic if we speed it up. If we enhance the vibratory rate of tragedy, we often get humor, which helps prove out that humor is dramatic in nature because tragedy is much more tragic if the dramatic elements of Poetics are in place.

Farce comes from forcing dramatic events to the point where the reader begins to understand that the people involved in this drama have surrendered any pretense at being taken seriously, but they still think they're at war.

I have spoken of story as being life inside a crucible, which wasn't a bad observation for its time, but life inside a linear accelerator has more of an edge. Understanding the way things work, even human behavior, requires an edge, which means the writer has to apply more then heat to the crucible; the writer needs to force the issue to the point where there is no going back.

When there is no going back, there is is a rush to get the collision out of the way, the victims pulled from the wreckage, and the results cataloged, so that the reader can see that these characters are no different than we who apply the kinds of force to ourselves and others that come from our own unique periodic table of elements, our chemistry, if you will, our valence.

If a reader is not made to anticipate a collision, that reader will go to a place where a significant collision can not only be anticipated, it can be found, the wreckage strewn about the landscape with an energetic and irreverent abandon.