Follow that cab!

The opportunity for spicing up a narrative that has fallen like a souffle right out of the oven comes bursting forth in the nature of a character suddenly being aware he is being followed, this trope a frequent participant in a mystery or novel of suspense. With careful shepherding, a character being followed can produces five or six pages. In the hands of an old pro mystery writer, it can even become a running theme, involving the tailers--those who follow--being themselves tailed.

If your character is a woman, the awareness settles in that she is being stalked, which is more true to reality than the being followed trope, but nevertheless is to be approached with extreme caution; both approaches are signal flares that the narrative is in trouble, wanting some help to bail it out of its cliche-generating circumstances.

Causing a character to be followed or stalked becomes the writer's first-stage response that something is necessary to heat up the tension to the point where it might possibly qualify as suspense. In a story you did for The Eureka Review, you had a character being set upon by a mugger who was interested in what most muggers are after, actual cash or something that can be sold/pawned for the going street price. You knew there was a soft spot in the narrative and so the response set in. The person being mugged had been forced to attend a therapy group by his department chair at the university, which gave you the next step--the mugger was in the same therapy group. But this was not quite enough. The victim had been on his way to The Wine Cask to purchase a bottle to take to a first date with a lady who very much interested him. The mugger discovers the victim's purpose, then peels off a few twenties from his wad, gives it to the victim, suggests an appropriate pinot noir, then goes on his way. All of this ties in with the theme of the story because the object of the victim's passion is also in the same therapy group, having been given the probationary option of group therapy because of a previous conviction for shop lifting. Of course on the first date, she--the object of the victim's affection--leads him into a store, where she begins asking him his opinion of certain items. It began as a story you have begun a number of times, attempting to show the more absurd sides of university faculty life, but as the stakes and individual vulnerabilities grow higher, the story invariably moves away from campus and into more personalized and vulnerable territory yet.

A device to create tension and suspense must do more than create a frail atmosphere of tension, it must put the characters a step or two over some limit they have set for themselves, a limit the reader sees ultimately, but which you see first with the racing heart of excitement and mischief.

Trick of the Eye

Even though you stress the word "relevant" in your fondness for details in a story, and in the bargain regard some of the early pulp novels as being worthy of elevation to the literature status, you recognize in yourself a certain long-windedness that persists even when, in the direct context of conversation, you can see the eyes of your companions glazing over. What you seek to do in such circumstances is what you also seek to do when you write, which is, literally, to unglaze them with narrative voice.

It may come as a surprise then when you admit to a fondness for the brief, terse, poetic-in-its concision, miniature. No, you do not mean the short-short, the flash fiction, even some of those arbitrary word length stories with the clock set at, say, fifty-five words or perhaps one hundred. Those are of little interest to you, the literary equivalent of mosquitoes or persistent flies. You mean a paragraph or perhaps two or three, such as in the frequent editorial page columns of Verlyn Klinkenborg. You mean writers who are able within a few paragraphs to make you feel as though you've known the characters all your life, writers who cause you to feel your shirt sticking to your body regardless of the temperature outside for they have created an inner temperature that causes you to reel in the humidity.

Your first thought for today's entry in the on-going saga of your blog was what you considered a clever-but-doable one: You would within one paragraph express your feelings about concise, miniature portraits wherein the elements jumped forth like the fresh fruits or recently bagged fowl or even the pot of flowers so prized by the still-life painter. You even thought to title the essay Trompe l'oeil, trick of the eye for such paintings are remarkable visuals of the synecdoche, the entire represented by a few or perhaps only one of its parts, as in the long arm of the law.

You also confess to a certain fondness for the sudden need to cut a previously commissioned work by as much as twenty-five percent. When you were reviewing books for Swindell at the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, you were given fairly generous word lengths which, on a few occasions, needed to be made less generous, which gave you the idea of experimenting with future work. You would write as long as possible then cut to some seemingly impossible word length. When you did it, you almost always learned how effective such an exercise was in getting you to focus on the most important point you wished to make as soon as possible. No wonder that your grades at UCLA began to rise meteorically right after you signed on to work the Associated Press night office; you simply wrote your examination blue books as though they were AP stories, meaning you had to stop to consider a lead before you began writing.

Life is different now in the specific sense that you have the leisure to write a first draft, perhaps even a second draft, in some cases even a third before you begin thinking about the movement of furniture, the arranging of paragraphs into optimal dramatic order. Life is also different in that this approach has meant that things will take longer, which in its turn means you will perforce be spending more time on a specific project. Yes, this, too, has a caboose to be tacked onto it; this state of events means you are spending more time each day writing something, whether it is an email to a friend agreeing where and when to meet for coffee or a cover letter for a book proposal or the opening statement of a book proposal.

Now remember, you were, as you let the bee-swarm of sleep wear away this morning, going to get all this down in one paragraph:

When you were younger, late teens to mid-twenties, even while your prolificness impressed you, you realized it was not enough because there were so many things going on about you and it was necessary to get at them all, somewhat like Nabokov,ranging about with a net for scooping up lepidoptra for further study. Now you have come to recognize that although you are interested in things you aren't even aware of being interested in, you need to consider priorities because things take time to evolve. Even a story, which you are pleased to have dropped a Nabokovian net over in order to bring it home for study, requires time to fledge, its own form and finish coming from a deliberate consideration of its special parts. Even though it is your idea and your vision, your proprietary rights begin and end with your observation and your feelings about what you see.

Chance, Choice, Consequence

Chance has a limited role in fiction; too much of it suggests a heavy authorial hand, manipulating outcomes that seem increasingly unlikely. If closure is achieved through too many coincidences, the role of the protagonist has been undercut. After all, a protagonist is the protagonist in the first place because the burden rests or falls on his or her shoulders, and he or she is supposed to be the architect and engine of the outcome. An amicus curiae brief comes from fantasy and fantastic adventures in which magic plays such a large part. Even in these, the protagonist is supposed to figure how to use the magic to outwit the antagonistic forces. The best you can say for chance as a tool is that it can cause some remarkable complications, those pesky, mischievous events and missed connections that get the protagonist in deeper troubles, somewhat of a piece with afflicting Sisyphus with athlete's foot by way of making his eternal task not only boring but itchy.

In real life, chance has a greater opportunity to upstage events because while there may be a temporary throughline such as a drought or a famine or a misguided election in, say, Massachusetts, there are also cycles, changes, and the monotonous locked step of mere presence in which things happen each as an independent contractor. Thus trees and flowers volunteer because seeds were blown or caught in a dog's fur, or perhaps momentarily trapped in some unsuspecting trouser cuff. Equally, in real life, a slab of a hillside may dissolve in a rain storm to reveal artifacts enough to make an archaeologist's career.

Oliver La Farge, the anthropologist, once wrote a short story about a rather scuzzy academic who was always seeming to stumble upon magnificent finds from the distant past. But we knew better; this academic was guided to these finds by supernatural agencies. Thus was fun made of scientific method and by implication the lifting to respect of the ways and beliefs of our elders.

Choice is another matter. This is so because of the recognition of the number of choices we make every waking moment and, often enough, during the dreaming parts of sleep. Choice ultimately yields consequence, a circumstance well known to us because of the number of consequences we face every waking moment and, yes, during the dreaming parts of sleep. We chose to do something or opt out or dither. Each produces a litany of consequences, some of which may be totally unanticipated and indeed not justified. This leads us to confront another Cosmic Truth: Consequences do not have to be justified. They simply are. Much in the manner of Chance, in which a given segment of time is merely a window through which we can see the passing parade of events.

And here, the two come together; chance meets choice. We gaze out the window and see a procession of events, or perhaps no event at all, merely a tree, some shrubs, even a flower or two. Now a bird lands on a branch of the tree and begins looking about. We become curious and in a way invest in the bird. Now comes into the picture a cat, whereupon we, who have nothing against cats, nevertheless have some understanding of the nature of cats. Some among us may already visualize a mere pile of feathers instead of the bird. And of course the more we learn of the bird, its mockingbird-edness or its blue jay essence, the more vivid that pile of feathers becomes. As we switch our attention to the cat, depending on our individual preferences, its very coloration, say tiger-stripe or marmalade, add to its potential for bringing about that pile of feathers. We are caught up in choice and consequence. Do we rap sharply on the window, thus to frighten the bird away? Do we dither? After having frightened the bird off, do we, from a consequential guilt, invite the cat in for a snack?

Story is in some part the experience the viewer brings to the artifice of the writer; it always has some consequence associated with it, somewhat like the tin cans we used to tie to the fenders of automobiles when we were mischievous kids. As we grew older, we eschewed the tin can for a handful of gravel or perhaps two or three loose bolts or nuts, just enough to fit inside the hub cap we'd have carefully pried off with the bottle-opener blade of our pocket knife. The unsuspecting driver, after moving a scant few feet, would hear this inner serenade, stop, get out, look, shake head, return to car, ad infinitum, a monument to the practical joke nature young boys have to evolve through in order to have even a shot at the consequences of being grown up.

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?

A Table for Two

The driving force in narrative is curiosity.
Reader and characters proceed to peer beyond what will happen, into the territory of what information will be revealed in the unfolding of an event.

Two individuals are having a conversation somewhere--or so the reader thinks at first blush.  Each of the two characters has come into the scene bearing the baggage of explosive previous encounters.  They have come to THIS place because it is neutral, with no associations for either of them.  They have brought with them the gifts of a resolve to be patient with one another, each purposeful in the intent to let the other finish thoughts, sentences, ideas.

We don't know the names, gender, ages, social rank of either and yet look at how much we already know about them.  The "Go-ahead" card is down on the table; each is determined to let the other go ahead and/or finish what is to be said.

We can begin to wrap other relevant data about the armatures of these two, data that will find its way with a snow-shoes-through-a-mine-field purpose and caution, learning more about each of the characters and feeling the tangible emotional climate as they proceed.

So long as we have been triggered toward suspicion, we can suspect they will once again escalate toward combustion because they have done so in the past.  WE may also feel the mounting tension because timing and pace have become important factors in the meeting.  

Though neither has an abundance of time, each is constrained by the be patient rule. Whatever the subject of conversation, we sense the control and deliberation being exercised to the point where it becomes a tangible tension.  

The subject may never be directly articulated, as with the conversation between the couple in the Hemingway story, "Hills Like White Elephants."  The subject at hand may also be--writer's choice--carefully spelled out to the point where the reader will wonder, What is it with these two? because there is a subtext shimmering there over the conversation like the ghost of a former lover.  

We may, of course, set off with a conclusion already in mind.  They are heading to combustion, perhaps to the point of not speaking again for some weeks or months to come--perhaps not ever again.  Having opted for this approach, we can set the conversation in motion with an agenda or agreed-upon result:  Did you bring the papers for me to sign?  

What a lovely, evocative line.  "Of course I brought the papers for you to sign.  That was the entire purpose of this meeting, wasn't it?"  What a lovely lagniappe to tack onto this simple sentence:  "What do you take me for?"  And now, the attitude-tinged response.  "Well."  Or, if you are the sort who prizes greater clarity:  "Well, I thought..."

The thing has evolved; we want to know.  Reader and writer, we want to know.  Let's start with the first thing we want to know:
"What's that supposed to mean?"

There is absolutely nothing unusual in this conversation, yet it carries agenda and implication crackling between the two characters much in the manner of the electricity between Richard and Anne in Richard III, Act One, Scene Two.

What will they do?  When and how will they do it?

We still know precious little about them.  Does it say anywhere that they are analogs of two trains, speeding toward one another on the same track?  So long as the conversation is on the table, a tension begins to grow until none of us, reader, writer, or characters can endure it.  And this is the point where we begin looking closely for the optimal point in the text to end the scene, a deed that may mean leaving out a line or an exchange that has become memorable with the texture of wit, but this is not about wit; it is about two unnamed individuals of indeterminate age, gender, and moral clarity, meeting to exchange dialogue.  

We barely know enough about either to determine who they are or what they want and what they might do to us.  They could be man and woman, woman and woman, man and man.  They could be former lovers, present-time lovers, parent and child.  The choice is entirely ours.  

We have set them loose to work their way across the whiteness of page, of computer screen, of the stage of the mind.  They are nameless but they are armed with two weapons that may pierce us to the quick, drama and dialogue.

What's in a mnemonic?

There are times when you will go around the block sentence- or paragraph-wise to avoid using the word "that."  Having found your way back to the stream of narrative, you will again interrupt yourself when, horror of horrors, you not only use "that," you have done so twice within a paragraph.  In the bargain, you have used "and" as a connective, a habit you picked up back in the day when you were doing your best to imitate the rhythm and style of Ernest Hemingway, even though you had already had face-to-face contact with the man, consequently determining your wish to move as far away from his influences upon you as possible.  For some reason not readily available to your memory, you go to great lengths to avoid beginning a paragraph with the word "one," as in "One of the easiest ways to begin a paragraph..."  

You still wince when you find yourself using the word "accordingly" as a lever to move into some form of logical or emotional conclusion, and are only slightly less discomfited by the discovery that you have used "thus" instead of "accordingly."

Sometimes, when reviewing a page or two of narrative, it seems to you that the "that's" and "ands" and "accordingly's" and "thus's" stick out like the quills of a pissed-off porcupine, your habit words coming back to haunt you as they are not likely to haunt anyone else.  You have other plans for your prose, plans that involve it assuming the personality and intent of a particular character, plans that involve a sense of rhythm, timbre, and not to forget logic.  Your plans also include a sense of emotional layering, the wrapping of a coil about an armature, the gradual build-up of the intensity of a feeling.

True enough, you look to your favorite writers to see how they accomplish such things, but the most grating pain of all is the discovery that you have imitated rather than pushed forth on your own to try to set the desired effect(s) in motion.  Making too much of a thing about originality is in a real sense flinging the doors open to invite the voices of criticism and reproach to speak up while you're trying to compose; if you obsess about originality, you are not writing, you are thinking, you are wearing the colors of self-consciousness, flaunting them at a black-tie dinner, the effect being See how different I am as opposed to See how it is.

These are some of the reasons for keeping thought away from your intent of composition for the most part, investing your characters with a strong measure of intent, then turning them loose on the page or, if the work is nonfiction, defining a purposeful direction where your inquiry and logic are to tread before allowing your uninhibited narrative self off the leash to romp forth.  It may rankle when a reader finds a comparison between you and some other observer of the human condition, but the comparison will have a compliment rather than an instance of spotting imitation.  You can find a way to live with compliment but it is much more difficult to live with imitation.

Test-driving Sentences

From time to time you are tempted to plunk yourself into a sentence, take it out for a test drive, then cruise about with it to see where it takes you, a ride you undertake whether in an essay, review, short story, or, in most recent days, something  you see growing its way into a novel.  Even when you are not consciously tempted to pursue the meander of a long sentence, you discover, in the retrospect of revision, that you have done so, noticing to your horror that your sentence has overflowed its levees and wreaked on the work at hand the same kind of damage Katrina visited upon New Orleans.  Guillaume Doane, erstwhile managing editor of the weekly at which your book review is expected no later than Sunday night, once emailed you to ask if you were really comfortable with a seventy-four word sentence.  Aghast, you revisited the offense, pared it down to three manageable sentences.

This tendency to the long sentence is one of your dualities, another being the spectrum between your dead-on, serious-to-the-point-of-boring sentence and your mischief-inducing sentence.  As far back as high school, a teacher suggested middle-of-the-road to you, but middle-of-the-road is not you; you would rather risk the boredom that comes from overly serious composition and the outrage of the mischief inducement, playing them one against the other in some narrative counterpoint.

Your great pal, Barnaby Conrad, introduced an exercise at his Santa Barbara Writers' Conference workshops, the five-hundred-word sentence.  The results are nearly always staggering, the most notable being Fannie Flagg's product which, as she describes it in her wonderful lilt, not only won the nonfiction prize the year she tried it, as well it stayed with her and would not let go until she had fleshed it out to where it became Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-Stop Cafe.  

There was a time when you were still thinking journalism was the money market of your writing career and you were with Associated Press, where an intensive study had been undertaken, the results eagerly broadcast to all AP employees:  the optimal length of a news story sentence is seventeen words.  Beyond that, reader interest declines in direct proportion to excess words.  Ah, what a period will do for readability.  Dover,England.  (AP)  Nobody tried to swim the English Channel today.  Maybe tomorrow.  

Mischief and formulae, yet another point of duality

You are firm in your belief that a sentence, however long or brief, must contain clear information or implication or both, the operant word there being clear, as in clarity.  That said, you throw the caution of word length to the winds.  Short is good; long is good, but boring is unacceptable.

Would you buy a used car from your narrator?

Sometimes, when the telephone rings and you answer it, instead of waiting for some kind of gated-community security assurance from the answering machine, you are greeted by a complete stranger who introduces with some vague job description.  "With the Sheriff's Department," or "From a Research and Marketing Division," or even the more prosaic, "This call may be monitored by quality control to see that you are being given courteous service."  This introduction is invariably followed by an inquiry, ambiguous enough to allow interpretation of How is your health today? or How is your attitude today?  The question is the casual-sounding How are you, today?  To which you, with increasing frequency, reply, "When someone I don't know calls to ask how I am, I suspect they are reading from a script and either want money or want to sell me something?

What are the qualities and characteristics of a narrative voice that arouse such varying responses as suspicion, reliability, boredom,hostility?

Setting aside the obvious answer that differing stimuli transmit these responses variously, we repeat the question, looking for the lowest possible common denominator of "tells," signs by which we judge the intent and integrity of a narrative source.

In our mind, we compose lists of selling voices, starting with the now iconic used car sales person, the telephone solicitor, the telephone sales person, the religious enthusiast wanting to "sell" or promote a particular path to either salvation, redemption, or outright merging with the godhead; the politician, he who warns of dire consequences, or the recruiter in some cause.  All these have apparent motives which will be revealed if we hear the narrator out, which makes us cynical in a way we have rarely been cynical:  their entire pitch is predicated on our agreeing to something because we are bored and want to get rid of them.

There are more subtle voices, although it is often debatable how subtle their intent, that carry hidden political agendas secretly reeking of elitism, protectionism, racism, and perhaps verging upon delusion.

Would we buy a used car from our own narrator?  Indeed, why did we chose this particular narrator or narrative form?  At first blush, the multiple point of view appears to be the most democratic and reliable since it allows us to take sides in our emotional assessment of the story, but this is not always a possible point of view, particularly in a short story.  Yeah, yeah; William Trevor manages it in a short story, but A) he is William Trevor and B) he has a track record of being empathetic to all his characters, even the ones with malign intent.

Look at the results of the narrator in Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier, who starts things off with a rousing assertion, "This is the saddest story I ever heard," then, as the novel unfolds, appears not to have seen what was happening under his very nose.  In short, is anyone reliable or, for that matter, trustworthy?

Much as these questions may be interpreted to cut off narration entirely, it is floated forth as a greater indication that the narrator must have a personality, a motive for telling the story, an intent, and even an agenda.  Your own agenda in asking these questions is to help you arrive at the intent of the narration of a story you are living with quite a bit these days and which is reaching the point of wanting to be set down on paper--but through what filter?

journey

journey, the novel of--a longform narrative in which one or more characters embark on a trip involving a quest; an extended story involving running away from or returning to a locale, or visiting a previously unknown terrain; a longed-for visit to a particular site; may also be a picaresque wander year.

In formulaic terms, the novel of journey represents a long travel that produces some form of resolution and, if not resolution, some discovery or awareness, thus you can see thematic and symbolic interpretations being drawn to the form like ornaments to a Christmas tree. One of the most venerable tales of journey focus on Odysseus, returning to his homeland of Ithaca after having fought in the Trojan War, a journey in which the protagonist encounters and deals with a full ensemble cast of gods, goddesses, monsters, mere mortals, and mortal temptations. Geoffrey Chaucer's reputation as a storyteller rests heavily on his framework tale of a group of pilgrims on their way to the Canterbury Cathedral, telling stories to pass the time. Jack Kerouac set out on a journey, a road journey, ostensibly to capture the warp and weft of the American experience, in the process finding the four-lane paved highway of his voice and crystallized sensitivity. In The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family, over their heads in debt, their Oklahoma land awash in the dregs of the Dust Bowl storms and drought, set off on a journey to the land of milk and honey, or at least opportunity. Gus McRae and Woodrow Call, bored in their retirement as Texas Rangers, undertake a cattle drive from Texas to Montana, but first they have to steal the cattle in order to have the cattle drive, thus a brief venture south into Mexico to literally rustle up a herd, then Lonesome Dove can begin in earnest. John Haskell's 2005 novel, American Purgatorio, begins with a man whose wife inexplicably disappears while they have stopped at a gas station, then leads to a journey in which the husband tries to find the missing Annie.

Perhaps this quote will resonate with some recognition: "I am looking for the man who shot and killed my father, Frank Ross, in front of the Monarch boardinghouse. The man's name is Tom Chaney. They say he is over in the Indian Territory and I
need somebody to go after him." The speaker is fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross, the principal in Charles Portis's journey-within-a-novel, True Grit.

The journey novel is by its very nature a metaphor, the object of which is more or less in the hands of the writer. In 1494, Sebastian Brant published such a metaphor, called The Ship of Fools. Some five hundred years later, (1962)Katherine Anne Porter published her own version of The Ship of Fools, arguably less metaphoric in the overt sense, but nevertheless giving pause for reflection. Porter's Ship had an ensemble cast moving from Germany to Mexico at the outset of World War II. Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist is yet another of the potential ways for the novel of the journey to provide a means of transportation to a destination that by its very nature is electric with surprise and provocative aftertaste.

The Dystopia

dystopia, novels of--narratives in which the ills of society are exaggerated for thematic effect; cautionary tales demonstrating social, moral, economic, sexual, and religious agendas allowed to run wild.

In the story-telling sense, utopias--stories of perfection and accord--are not really stories because they lack the major dramatic ingredient of conflict. Thus grace is boring, the fall from grace and its consequences a magnet for interest. If everyone gets along, is his brother's keeper, does not covet, etc, the reader will have little reason to continue because, redemption being precluded, there is no big finale to anticipate. If, however, a protagonist, say Ray Bradbury's Guy Montag from Fahrenheit 451, has a gut feeling that there is something wrong about what he is doing, the reader begins to see the inevitability of Montag going up against something quite larger than himself, forced to deal with it.

Seen as a paradigm of a dystopia that cautioned against the consequences of war, The Iliad's most seemly character is Hector. His tragic fate elevates him to a role model for the conflicted protagonist. It was a dumb war to begin with, started when Hector's brother, Paris, made off with his prize from having judged a beauty contest. Hector's wife, Andromache, pleads with him to abandon the war they will surely lose, reminding him that were things to continue, she'd probably be taken as a prize of war and their son, Astyanax, would be killed. As devoted to his wife and son as Hector is, even though he agrees with her assessment, he knows he could not face life, even a life in exile, were he to turn from battle. Nor is Hector naive or insensitive. He well foresees the consequences, but feels obliged to continue, nevertheless.

The backstory conditions of the dystopia--See Brave New World, Logan's Run,1984, The Handmaid's Tale--is the unthinkable come to pass. The present-time narrative of the dystopia sets a protagonist with whom the reader can identify in motion to cope with it.

In its own idiosyncratic and memorable ways, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is welcomed company in the genre of dystopic fiction, offering forth its modern-day Hector in the form of the bombardier Yossarian. For all her bombast and philosophical sturm und drang, Ayn Rand easily is awarded membership in the Dystopia Society, primarily with Atlas Shrugged and its driven protagonist, Dagny Taggart, but not to forget Howard Roark of The Fountainhead. And not to forget the preternaturally bright Alex, protagonist of Anthony Burgess's enduring dystopia, Clockwork Orange.

Hints: There are seeds of dystopia in every satire, just as there are seeds of satire in every dystopia. If you were to look closely at Tess of the Durbervilles, Jude, the Obscure, and The Mayor of Casterbridge, you could find cause to think of Hardy as a writer of dystopian fiction. Hardy (1840-1928) was a close contemporary of another dabbler in the dystopic, Mark Twain (1835-1910).The 1950-90 science fiction era is larded with dystopic visions, one of many reasons why that genre became literature.

Critical reading

critical reading--the observant way a writer reads fiction; a focused gleaning of technical and emotional tools the reader may use to strengthen his own work; the things a writer looks at and for when reading the works of other writers.

Even when it becomes apparent to the writer who is reading for more than the transportation of enjoyment and enlightenment that a particular story or novel is a disappointment, there is still value to be had. The writer-reader should pause to delineate specific complaints: Is the story line too simplistic? Are the movements of the characters predictable? Do the motives feel appropriate? Does the dialogue crackle with the intensity of complex individuals? Are there distractions?

Reading the work of another becomes an exercise at the level of revising one's own work. Are there unnecessary elements? Are the elements arranged properly? Do the characters aspire to an attain connection with the reader? Could I have done this more expeditiously, and if so how, and if not, what have I learned?

The writer-reader becomes anxious at first to determine if the narrative voice is agreeable, then goes on to wonder what the story is about. What, the writer-reader asks, is the goal of the story? What are the resident emotions? What are this author's strengths? Weaknesses? Then come the heaviest questions: Do I care? What made me care or not care? If I did care, when did I begin caring? If I did not care,what could have made me? What could I have done to make this story matter more. What special use does this writer make of the senses?

The writer as reader then goes on to ask some of the questions a literary critic might ask. What is the theme? What social, moral, and political issues does the writer appear to be engaging? But even these questions and their answers have story telling at their heart; it is well and good for a writer to observe ways Jane Austen used the dialogue and behavior of her characters to make fun of then contemporary social structure, but to gain technique from these observations, the reader must be able to experience the prejudices and humiliations of the characters. This awareness comes from the readers' need to appreciate on an emotional level the sense of social condition and obligation of the characters, then to observe how these behaviors are demonstrated in the text.

A simple approach to employ while reading the works of other writers is to imagine yourself being cast in the role of one or more characters in a particular novel or story, noting the chemistry and constraints of each character for all the other characters. Another informative approach is to use marking pens to note places where a character's agenda, whatever it might be, finds expression in narrative description, dramatic action behavior, and/or in dialogue.

Tradition

tradition--a system of customs, rituals, practices; a long-standing literary apparatus for passing myth, history, and cultural beliefs from one generation to the next; a genre or platform for presenting story or coded cultural lessons and information.

Story is carefully arranged dramatic information, arranged to have maximum effect on the hearer and then, as language became written, then printed, to have the added effect of being transcendental. Quite a daunting gulp to lay on a writer, nevertheless it is so; story is the dramatized version of traditional information and social behavior options. People tell stories to instruct; people read stories to learn or to be transported to places and situations they have not themselves experienced.

Story in the aggregate is a record of evolved cultural tradition. Many stories that frightened us in our childhood amuse us in our adulthood or dotage. Story is the process by which tradition undergoes evolution, both in content and form. Just as music may be placed in time by an assessment of its tonality, story may be a reflection of cultural growth by close observation of the traditions it extends and perhaps even breaks. Short stories have evolved more radically than novels, but such novels as Annie Proulx's The Shipping News have stretched the traditions of style, place, and internal rhythm; novels such as John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men have stretched the traditions of theme, place, and the moody sense of life's purpose.

Tim O'Brien broke a number of narrative traditions in The Things They (the they being U.S. servicemen in Viet Nam) Carried, while Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler broke the traditions of place, motive, language, and construction in the novel of mystery and suspense.

Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones broke the tradition and convention in which a principal character could not, once dead, be the narrator of a long form story. Susy Salmon, protagonist of Bones is dead by the second paragraph.

It is no guarantee, but a story that somehow pushes the envelope of tradition to the breaking point is more likely to be remembered. That said, story construction is of paramount importance; so are characters, motives, point of view, and voice. When they are altered merely for the sake of alteration, nothing is gained or served. When traditions fall in the service of providing a memorable story, reader, writer, and characters are served.

The Time Machine

time sequence--the temporal arc of a story or novel; the chronological order of events in a narrative; the arrangement of narrative events to effect the most dramatic result.

Time plays an important role in a story or novel. How long between events? How long has this--whatever this is--been going on? How long before he gets the idea? How long before she asks him if they have a future together? How much times does a Harlen Coben protagonist have before being discovered rifling the files in an office he has no authority to be in? The pacing or beats per minute is another way to measure the way theme and plot establish themselves within the reader's sensibility, helping the reader to remember bits of information as they come forth, We realize also the contrivance behind such manipulation, resenting it if we do not find it.

The skilled writer knows ways to manipulate time, showing an event in progress, exhuming an event from the past, switching away from a character who actually or metaphorically be hanging from the side of a cliff. Nor is it necessary to remain with a time line, instead juggling the various scenes and confrontations like the dealer in three-card monte.

Example of a relatively brief time line, Romeo and Juliet. In more modern times, James Grady's 1974 novel, The Six Days of the Condor, was successful enough to have evolved into a movie in which the time line was cut in half to The Three Days of the Condor. William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson's novel, Logan's Run, had a time-line imposed by population explosion: When a character reached the age of thirty, along came the Sandmen to put the character to sleep, as in the final sleep. Somewhere along the way between the penultimate draft and the draft submitted to the publisher, Nolan and Johnson decided to cut back on the arc of character life from thirty to twenty-one.

The Iliad begins with the story already having been set in action some seven years previously. Tim Gautreaux's 2009 novel, The Missing, takes place largely in the late 1920s but begins in the final days of World War I, then flashes back to an earlier time yet before delivering the reader back to the time the protagonist, Sam Simoneaux, returns from his experiences in World War I France to his job in New Orleans, where the main action sets forth.

Time in story is meant to be manipulated, is asking to be manipulated. Time may be compressed in narrative, frozen within the boundaries of a scene, projected into the future with a cheery "And they all lived happily ever after."

Some stories are about lost or stolen time, others are about travels in time, others yet are about waiting to grow up or trying to forestall the age process, while an entire sub-genre exists in which the focus is on the extent to which characters will go to deny the effects of time. Peter Pan did not wish to grow up, but even more worth further study and consideration is the character Jo Stoyte, from Aldous Huxley's engaging satire, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Stoyte, a Hollywood millionaire, at first wants merely not to grow older, but this desire morphs into his not wanting to die

Your Place or Mine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outlines, Outliers, Messengers, Massagers

outline--a template or design for a dramatic narrative; a scene-by-scene breakdown of an intended story; a thematic riff intended to lead the writer through the development and orchestration of a concept through its conceptual stage into viable story; the first step in a process that is completed with revision.

Some writers will not consider beginning work on the text of a story without some form of road map which guides them in varying degree of detail through the development and enhancement of a story. Other writers will argue that such an approach precludes surprise, an essential ingredient not only to the reader but as well to the writer. The late, prolific suspense and thriller writer, Dennis Lynds (aka John Crowe, Michael Collins, Carl Dekker) developed a mid-range outline in which he sketched a situation in which a character became engaged in a fast-growing complication, "wrote" his character to the edge of the complication, then stopped writing to expand the outline to cover the next forty or fifty pages before returning to text. Lynds did this until the final resolution, at which point he began revision, looking first for anomalies in the plot/motivation structure.

The jury is expected to be out for some indeterminate time on the outline or no outline question. There is no evidence to show that working with an outline makes the work easier or if, indeed, writers who outline are more prolific than those who do not.

Hint: How many of your last five stories (of any length) were written from outline? What does your answer to this question tell you?

Added hint: Try outlining in some detail your next novel, keeping opinionated notes about your progress as you proceed with writing text. What does this tell you?

Yet another hint: Try outlining a novel by using three x five index cards, one for each proposed scene, using as few as one or two sentences to describe the intended scene.

The major points to be made here: (1) an outline is not a sine qua non of a story or novel (2) there is nothing "wrong" with you if you chose to outline (3) there is nothing "wrong" with you if you do not chose to outline, and (4) the decision to outline or not is one of the choices you will have to make on your journey toward becoming a writer.


messenger--a character who physically brings news on stage (into the narrative); an individual who by example becomes a recognizable symptom that could befall a front-rank character.

Ever since the days in which authors not only could but were expected to directly address the reader, a persistent opposition to the practice has evolved. Henry Fielding's picaresque romp,Tom Jones (1749), and Laurence Sterne's rollicking Tristram Shandy (1759) led the way toward the authorial aside, a technique that may be yet employed today, provided it is done with an inventive purpose--otherwise editors will thank you for thinking of them and wish you good luck elsewhere. Enter the messenger, appropriately dressed for work in your story, bearing some message, intent, or example of behavior thought to be of contextual interest to the reader.

Messengers are of primary importance in contemporary fiction because the reader may still have his doubts about the author, but if the reader has gone beyond the first five or six paragraphs of a short story or the first chapter of a novel, the reader arguably believes the characters more than he believes the author.

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.

In the Beginning

beginnings--places where story becomes dramatic; moments of narrative inertia; onsets of events that assume dramatic form.

The longer the story the greater the likelihood that it will have more than one optimal beginning point, thus the beginnings you see on stories that resonate for you have involved deliberation and choice on the part of their writer. The same choice and deliberation are owed your own beginnings. Ideally, beginnings are places where action is already in motion, where action is about to begin, where a choice has just been made, or where a character is confronted by discovery or event that knocks him or her from everyday routine.

Readers are less likely to care about a story that introduces itself with backstory or some other form of explanation or footnote. Example: You are at a gathering--a party, or, if you insist, a soiree--when, of a sudden, an individual you do not know by name approaches you, telling you with convincing sincerity and sobriety, "Please help me. I've got to get out of here. There are two people in the next room who are after me."

Your mind is already filled with such questions as Who are you? and Why me? Both these questions will and should be answered, but if this is to be the beginning of a story, now is not the moment for the details. We want more convincing details that force the issue, which happens to be the issue of the beset individual's actions, convincing you, perhaps even against your will, to become involved, caught up in an ever slippy slope of dramatic event.

The Scottish writer, Ali Smith, has it down perfectly in her story, "The Child," where a protagonist who is never named is using her lunch break to buy her "weekly stuff" in a supermarket. Shopping carts in Scotland and England are called trolleys. "I left my trolley by the vegetables and went to find bouquet garni for the soup. But when I came back to the vegetables again, I couldn't find my trolley. It seemed to have been moved." In its place was someone else's shopping cart, with a child sitting in the little child seat. This is all in the first paragraph.

By the second paragraph, the narrator realizes it is her shopping cart; events persist to the point where everyone in the market thinks the child is hers. So completely have we tumbled into the events of the story that we do not question the narrator's resolve to take the child to the nearest police department; much less do we question the fact that the child has now begun to speak, delivering in the manner of a second- or third-rate stand-up comic a stream of racist and sexist commentary.

Even though we do not know her name or where she works or what she does or if in fact she is in a romantic relationship, we share with Smith's narrator a sense of being caught up in a swirl of event that demands a solution.

Beginnings yank us into situations that need coping; they lead us onto the path where we search for some kind of conclusion or, at the very least, a settlement.

Interior Monologue

interior monologue--the soliloquy/conversation a character has while engaged in a dramatic narrative; relevant sensory and thought process from which readers may adduce and deduce a character's intent, motivation and, if necessary, doubt; a supplement to narrative from any point-of-view character, simultaneously advancing story and developing the reader's familiarity with the narrator.

Unless the design of a story allows or calls for the intervention of authorial comment, all narrative is seen as originating with the point-of-view character. Thus "John was waiting at the mailbox for at least a half hour before the mailman arrived," while yet simple narrative,becomes translated by the reader to extend beyond mere stage directions, spilling over to reflect John's eagerness to get what he anticipates will be included in today's delivery. To add an intensifier of interior monologue to the narrative, the writer might render, "Was today the day it would arrive, John wondered." And to nail it all down with dialogue, John might well greet the mailman with the spoken observation, "You're running late today."

Interior monologue is thought process; in order to be successfully dramatic, it must be made to seem action based. The best way to accomplish this step is to tie the can of consequence to the tail of the thought. Would she ever get here, he wondered. Would she recognize him after all this time?

A handy tip for the writer: Consider all narrative as originating from the particular character of point-of-view focus, using his or her vocabulary, biases, blind spots, range of sensory awareness. If that character is a particularly thoughtful person, the door is open for that character to think consequence-related thoughts. Would this work? Would she truly see the intended affection in his gift of daisies, or would she turn out to draw the line at roses? The hell with it. He liked daisies. If she couldn't see the beauty in them, what future was there in a relationship with her?


pace--the momentum with which a story progresses; the cadence in which dramatic beats appear for the characters and readers to respond.

Remember, dramatic writing is the result of characters reacting to stimuli. Even a character on stage alone is responding to past events, making plans for future ones--perhaps even by playing a waiting or delaying game. Stories that move at too slow a pace will make the reader impatient for something to happen. Stories that move too quickly take on a jerky, frenetic quality that turns moments of potential poignancy or suspense into farce. Comedy is tragedy sped up.


one character on stage alone--a condition where a single character reviews past relevant dramatic events prior to making a choice; a moment where one character waits for one or more associates; a dramatic cross-roads where a character lays out plans for a future event as a means of foreshadowing the event and its consequences.

Characters in film, TV, or stage dramas have recourse to the device of voice-over, in which the audience can hear them "thinking" aloud. The danger here is that the thoughts will seem to be reader feeder (See), "thought" for the convenience of the audience, undercutting the realism of more literary work in which characters do not do favors for the audience so much as they are propelled by their own agendas.

A film, TV, or stage actor is often an exquisitely tuned instrument, able to convey feelings and impressions with mere gestures, inflections of posture; characters are not necessarily so well-tuned and must be nudged, even prodded by the weight of events. A character left alone for too long has only one way out--in thought, which leads to one of the great cliches of written story: "She began to wonder how it had all begun, how she'd let herself get into this mess..."

One of the safer ways for a character to be alone comes when the character is somewhere he or she should not be, a situation enhanced by the accelerated risk of discovery. "What are you doing here? You're not supposed to be here."

Shakespeare addressed the problem by keeping his soliloquies short, bringing them in at about thirty seconds, when another character came on stage. In arguably one of his most famous soliloquies, Hamlet is considering a serious act with a serious consequence, his friends Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern on stage at a distance all the while.The inner committee, comprised of representatives who claim to be legitimatge aspects of your personhood, often reminds you of a publisher's editorial committee, looking for excuses to reject, wanting to keep losses down, willing to gamble on established projects from established producers rather more than being willing to take chances.

Yes, they are that way; it is a necessary condition. You are thus freequently whipsawed by your committee, all for being of an anarchistic nature, your goal being to keep at your composing until you have learned at least one tangible thing.

The N Word

Narrative is as slippery a word as a politician's promise at a fund raiser. Often used as a synonym for story, it is more associated with fiction than nonfiction, is sometimes used as a sly dig to suggest that a reporter or scholar is indulging more in story telling than in research or reportage. Speaking of a writer's narrative voice implies fiction--how that writer tells a story--or fiction morphed into myth or legend rather than straightforward accounting of event.

Sometimes when leading up to a revelation that the material under discussion is not yet a fully developed story, I'll use the word narrative, by which I mean a progression of events, before springing the trap door of what elements could morph this narrative into a full-fledged story. Treating the student like an author in such cases produces positive results in the sense of allowing the student to believe he'd known that all along. Treating an author like a student usually brings forth some form of stubbornness, which does no good at all for the story.

Narrative is some selected personality, apprehended in the act of relating dramatic events; it has a perspective, a point of view, an attitude, all of which should be manifest as the reader reads. Narrative may be you as author provided you have taken some steps to articulate what your perspective and agenda may be. In other words, there is no way of avoiding the responsibility of taking some side or stand. Neutrality is at best a Platonic ideal, but in drama it is an albatross the weight of which quickly makes itself felt as the need for explanation and fair presentation standards emerge. And they surely will.

Look at it this way, narrative is the macrocosm, the universe of the story, however brief or expansive, expressed in some pattern selected to produce the senses of tension, risk, and consequence. Suspense is very much the glue holding dramatic events together. When the time comes for greater specificity, switch to dialogue.

Some historical eras produced politically charged concepts of narrative that did for narrative what corsets and bustles did for women at various times or skin-tight pants did for men at other times--they caused constraint, certainly made sitting and standing more a discomfort than before. In one dramatic example, narrative was thought to need more realistic detail, a thought that resulted in entire laundry lists of clothing, medicines, nostrums, and utensil invading the orderly progression of story across the pages. Other times required of characters that their inner consciousness be brought to account, bringing forth paragraph after paragraph of internal monologue. English majors, who should by no know better, have their heads filled with these details and some in their midst are even able to recite the names of the various theories--modern, post-modern, Marxist, neo-Marxist, Feminist, et alia--some even to the point of being accorded merit raises in pay.

Applying the razor of William of Occam to the matter, narrative is a vehicle by which story is advanced to effect a dramatic result. The result is variously called closure, ending, resolution, and prismatic spread. But don't be fooled by definitions that state or imply such conditions as should or ought. Out on the street, narrative is the stuff that carries story without dropping the reader.

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.